With 99% of the votes counted and the totals being 51.4% for, 48.6% against, the Turks elected to become a dictatorship.

Like other recent close tallies, I've the feeling this won't end well for the average citizen's belief of what democracy is.

The Trumps flew to Florida on Friday, in separate jets. It's looking as though they'll miss the annual Easter Egg Roll, a 138-year-old tradition, will be somewhat curtailed in scope. A shame.

From the second article:

"Since 1878, the Easter Egg Roll has always been coordinated by the first lady. Seeing as how Mrs. Trump not only lives 200 miles away from the White House, but has yet to bother putting together an official staff, this year’s event, like Trump’s numbers in the popular vote, is expected to underperform bigly."

(The writer's emphasis.)

Is anyone taking bets it'll be recorded as the most successful event ever? Forget tradition, tradition is not for those looking to the future! Forget history, history is tor those who would read books. Books, books are for…

No.

I had intended to write about the passing at 117 of the world's oldest person, Emma Morano, but my attention spa…

Yeah. It's very unlikely there's anyone else alive born in the 1800s, the nineteenth century, the end of the Victorian era. Imagine the social, the technological change she'll have seen living through the entire 20th century. I simply cannot imagine the personal losses she'll have endured; every family member…

I'm having a profound moment here, not an epiphany as there's something quite logical about the effect of extreme age on statistics. No, mine is a sense of missing something.

There's a scene in one of the Lord of the Rings movies which brought to life something I'd never really considered in depth. The specific scene, though powerful, is unimportant here; what is is something seen in old, grand churches: statues side-by-side above stone tombs, once lovers, creators of life, holders of shared dreams, together forever in stone, mourned by fewer and fewer and then none as the passage of time takes those who once knew…

Yeah, sure it's a privileged few afforded such a luxury in death. The common man gets nothing likely to last even tens of years. The despots, the landowners, the moneyed classes of our history: immortalised.

Will the Trump era be looked back on with anything approaching warmth, a sense of a shared timespan, a belief of having achieved something?

Can I place a bet?

Incidentally, I have a bragging-rights-only wager with @texrat (Twitter), that the White House Press Secretary will last only until late August 2017. Randall thought he'd be gone roughly by the end of March. Not roughly, I think I mean approximately. Perhaps; I'm still suffused by Schadenfreude.

I subscribed to the online editions of The Washington Post. Yes it's a US news company! At USD$19 for an entire year it was an easy decision. I live in the UK but haven't yet done the same for any other UK news organisation, apart from giving a few pounds to The Guardian (paywall-free.) Incidentally, both 'newspapers' are running very similar headlines today, very encouraging.

Yeah, sure I pay an annual Licence Fee to the BBC and read their news, watch their telly, but the reporting is often infuriatingly bland and airs weeks past the time I've already seen it elsewhere.

Where was I? Yes, one of the reasons I subscribed to the Washington Post was reporter David Fahrenthold's tenacious examination of Donald Trump's assertions that the President-to-be gave away millions to charity. What is certain is the majority of charitable donations were falsely recorded and that the work won Mr Fahrenthold a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. And the reporting of his humanity, non-superhero ordinariness, in connection with that glitter gun.

I'm conscious of drawing from perhaps a greater breadth of sources than most other people when formulating my position on often complex ideas. And often simple ideas. Last year I asked around and gratefully received suggestions for people and media companies from which I could draw a wide range of opinions. With hindsight I bit off more than I could comfortably chew and had to step away from the process.

I can't say I'm much wiser now but the perspectives I've gained have led me to a more balanced approach than you'd know by reading some of last year's blog posts, e.g. 'Regrexit' and 'Chainsaws'.

In public at least.

The Washington Post subscription includes (from the welcome email):

• Unlimited access to washingtonpost.com from any device.
• Unlimited access to our entire suite of mobile apps for iOS, Android and Fire Tablet.
• The Optimist, a weekly email newsletter highlighting positive stories.
• Post Most, a weekday email newsletter with a rundown of popular stories.
• Shared digital access for an additional user.

(My emphasis above.)

Do they have any idea how inappropriate 'Optimist' will be for me‽

Joking aside I remember Martyn Lewis, a national UK news anchor saying he wanted to insert one 'feel-good' story into every bulletin. His rationale being that there's too much depressing news. At the time I agreed; now though it's entirely the wrong message to send to ordinary people. Given the magnitude of the worldwide change we're living through, I believe it's important to focus on the bad stuff.

There's one big problem with my current reasoning: if you make reporting so detailed that people don't want to watch they'll go to where the grass is greener, airbrushed, astroturfed… Yeah. Fairness, balance.

And finally, here's a link to a web page with a photo of a squirrel with big nuts:

• http://www.fark.com/farq/about/

For the avoidance of doubt as to my motives here at the end, Fark.com is my all-time favourite news-related site; the comment pages there are awesome. Awesome in a mainly US-centric, rounded but occasionally very unbalanced, good way. I pay them to remove ads.

I know someone who's better screwed together than I and she's read, er… (thinks) yeah, I'd best get this back on track before the list of people who are better-screwed-together than I grows beyond my ego's comfort zone!

Anyway, she's been reading Christopher Browning's 'Ordinary Men'; it's an examination of the motivations of, in simplistic terms, a WWII Nazi-run extermination squad.

Not an easy read, by her account, not by any means. It got me thinking again of what minimal set of events would precipitate a decline into times in which our society could condone such events. You've had only to look casually at the TV in recent years to find programmes about 'Doomsday Preppers', disease-created zombies or worse, the shutdown of the electricity grid, aliens intent on extracting all our planet's resources before moving on to the next mining proposition…

Go on then, what, practically, could sow the seeds of our society's destruction?

Our reliance on complex but easily-interrupted food distribution chains, the effect of social media on the ability of looters to congregate on and to lay waste to city centres, the notion that terrorists could strike anywhere even with the complete absence of coherent attack strategies, the transmission of disease across international and across species boundaries, the emboldening of xenophobes as government administrations move towards embracing nativism-inspired lawmaking?

Yeah, fragile. So what can we do?

Nothing, apart from conform to normal societal rules and hope that like the winds of change, it'll all blow over us without too much damage. And that's the problem, as vested interest has the rules change, the moral compass becomes destabilised. Has anyone from any other previous era, outside of wartime, had the rules change literally overnight?

Maybe.

I've read (and watched 2 versions of) Orwell's 1984, read and listened to Orwell's Animal Farm, experienced the dread of imagining the speed of onset of a technological catastrophe during The Terminator series, read Asimov's Foundation series and felt a hope inspired by knowledge there may just be a shadowy organisation skilled in manipulating populations and then crushed as one man with abnormal skills brings it all crashing down… Then there's the similarities between 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead, and Shaun of the Dead; the gulf between the dystopian Star Wars and the utopian Star Trek; the time between the first screening of 'Metropolis' through The Twilight Zone's 'To Serve Man', to the present day's fascination with superhero movies. I'd best not mention 'The Matrix'. Do you remember Bird Flu, note that colds and flu last forever these days, and at any one time, someone you know could easily be carrying an antibiotic-resistant strain of some superbug that'll mean a few days off work, or death (whichever is the least benign?) And finally, during a recent bout of flooding in the northwest of England the entire nation's production of pink sandwich and custard cream biscuits stopped. Ok, really finally: when a major UK retailer decided the post-Brexit-announcement price rises after the consequent fall in the value of the GB Pound could not be passed directly on to the customer so the supplier's profit margin must take the hit; thus iconic products temporarily disappeared from shelves as people panic-bought – no Marmite!

Having an active imagination at a time like this isn't helpful.

There'll be a better way of summing up what follows than the title I chose, but it'll do. I'm referring to the monologue Andrew Neil delivered a couple of nights ago, a bunch of words strung together to invoke national pride on our past, and which was subsequently described as, well, read the article here:

"'Churchillian!' Viewers hail Andrew Neil's INCREDIBLE monologue on Westminster attack". (from The Daily Express newspaper, 2017-03-24.)

Meaningless.

I happen to like Andrew Neil. His no-nonsense approach to interviewing sits well with me. His sarcasm, always it seems tinged with an impish glee upon finding a politician wanting, fits my needs far better than the always-annoyed Jeremy Paxman ever did, he doesn't needlessly interrupt his guests as they're answering his questions as does Andrew Marr. But his monologues irritate me. They always go on a bit too long, and always keep me from why I watch his late-night programme: to learn what's going on in the world of politics.

Before I continue, I haven't watched this edition of his show, I'm relying on the Daily Telegraph's editors to show me a full picture of what transpired on the night. Yeah…

The key phrases from Mr Neil are:

"Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with? This is the country that stood up alone to the might of the Luftwaffe, air force of the greatest evil mankind has ever known. If you think we’re going to be cowed by some pathetic, Poundland terrorist in an estate car with a knife, then you’re as delusional as you are malevolent."

Fine words that would have made sense in an era vastly-different from the one in which we live, an era in which it was easy to spot the source of terror, the evil across a tiny stretch of water known as the English Channel.

Fine words which conveniently ignore the fact that this isn't the 1940's.

During those times, and in general terms only, the only loose parallel I can make is that of an entire nation aspiring to impose its ideologies upon the rest of the world. That as-opposed to taking over other nations by armed might and controlling them by repressive regimes; something the British would conveniently ignore. When their politics failed to spread much beyond the German border, war became inevitable, at which point other alliances were built, sides taken.

It was a war propelled by the industrial might of nations, their armed forces' skills honed by regional conflicts outside, initially at least, Germany's borders. It was a war of technological superiority, of a rapid development of new instruments of war applied effectively against adversaries who didn't expect another conflict, especially with the smug, humiliating victory of The War To End All Wars.

And then there's the media. During the Second World War the British were lucky to read or hear about major events within days, even if the British government deemed it acceptable that ordinary citizens knew what was going on. The newspapers were censored; the radio was mostly censored, save for the enemy's propaganda broadcasts; the newsreels shown in cinemas showed only British propaganda. No satellite-fed coverage, no 24 hour telly, no social media gossip-spreading, no instant messaging.

People all over the world listened to what Mr Churchill said, and believed it. They listened to what Mr Hitler said and believed it. There was nothing else.

'Intelligence' is a word often derided nowadays when a terror attack happens. The futility of the security services monitoring everything for that 'just in case' scenario was shown up nicely by the events of mid-last week; a man simply not monitored for links to terror plunges a nation into crisis.

But how was it during WWII? Well, the British successfully created fake airfields filled with fake aircraft, and the high-level (or fast low-level) reconnaissance flights provided compelling evidence that the enemy strategists were fooled. Fields of fake tanks and other fake armoured vehicles at other times had the same effect. Surveillance technology was simply ineffective against what might now be termed laughable subterfuge. Maps were often hopelessly out-of-date; even the things we take for granted now: accurate digital mapping, aerial and pseudo-3D street-level walkthroughs were the stuff of next-millennial science fiction.

Nowadays it's well established that the industrial might of a nation can be trivially assessed by picking up a phone and Googling for statistics. Seventy years ago it was guesswork, all of it. If the enemy had known how close Britain's Air Force was to running out of aeroplanes and the means of manufacturing more, this world may have been a vastly different place. Intelligence failed. Perhaps it'd be kinder to say the British resolve triumphed, because that's what we want to believe.

In short what we're facing now is utterly unlike anything we've experienced previously.

I say 'we' conveniently ignoring the millions in the Middle East who must deal with this kind of hell on a daily basis.

It's not the threat of a nation clad impeccably and riding iron steeds, no. It's the threat of the ordinary man or woman or child radicalised by the unending and implacable hatred of those who simply don't care about anyone but those with whom with imagined special relationships are key. It's the threat that each and every one of them needs only a knife and a car to commit unspeakable acts. It's the knowledge that anyone can kill or maim or destroy using the most basic of tools, the knowledge that just because someone looks different or doesn't look different they can achieve the same ends.

I intended to close with the sarcastic 'Aren't we lucky to live now?', intending to show that ignorance was indeed bliss 70 years ago. Not knowing how perpetually close to defeat Britain was helped morale immensely. Not knowing that the rationing of basic foodstuffs and household essentials would last far beyond the end of the war, it helped too.

I'll instead close with this blog post from 2016, 'Nice' which refers to my near-identical post from 2015. If I'd started blogging earlier there'd be others pointing out the folly of allowing ignorance to fester, of allowing jingoistic nationalism to grow unchallenged.

As is usual I've not proof-read this knee-jerk reaction.

The doorbell was rung a few minutes ago: 2 guys, one introduced both as security consultants. I said 'no thanks, I'm not interested', and moved to shut the door, and here's where the depressingly-predictable thing occurred…

Yes, as the pattern usually unfolds, he actually asked me, and condescendingly of course: "Do you know what we're selling?" His exact words.

Um… I'm no rocket scientist but he had a few brochures fanned out in his hand, he'd introduced his profession, they both had impressive ID cards on lanyards, so I hazarded a guess, a wild stab at "Well, you're security consultants, is it alarms? It's alarms."

He seemed surprised.

Cold callers expect their cheery welcome to be reciprocated. This one didn't even try.

We've had someone purporting to be registered by the local authority asking, after my "yes" to "are you a family man?", how many children I have and what their ages are, and where they go to school and…. She was surprised, visibly offended that I said "it's none of your business, if you want the data get the authority to write to me for it." The best bit, my wife told me she'd called earlier that day, had been rebuffed then too.

Others who introduce themselves by "We're not selling anything…" are annoyed by my Captain Obvious "Yes you are, what are you selling?"

Double glazing salesmen, given a sniff at a replacement window but told to wait a few months as we couldn't afford it that close to Christmas, getting their telephone sales department to ring not even 5 minutes after departing. He put the phone down on me as I was explaining how unimpressed I was.

I could go on but what would it achieve?

Catharsis.

Ahhh…

New Year's Resolutions kept: none, though the subtleties of the choices made leave me a modicum of wriggle room.

• Picking at my thumbnails at the traffic lights on the way to work: Fail. I should go a different way.
• Reducing sugars in my tea at home: Technically a great success. The fact that I've not drunk tea at home during 2017 cheapens this a bit; the fact it's been all chai since Christmas means I'm floundering, adrift, rudderless here.
• Eating more healthily: Yes. More nuts, oats, er… healthy foods and in moderation too; less bread, biscuits/cookies. I take a cholesterol-reducing drink daily. The 16" kebab pizza last weekend was atypical.
• Exercising: Fail. I walk a bit, nowhere near enough to qualify as a person who walks.
• The thing that shall not be mentioned in polite society: Yup, still doing that.