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Toffs are like jackals: always quick to sniff out new carrion. I remember a few years back one florid aristo boasting what obscene amounts of money he was saving on his heating bills thanks to a brilliant new government scheme to incentivise wood-burning. ‘Probably no use to you —your house isn’t big enough,’ he said, pityingly. Then he went on to tell me about the solar array on his estate. ‘Makes perfect sense if you’ve got a few acres spare.’ But I haven’t told you the worst of it. The worst was that my friend felt really virtuous. Some might say that here was another well-heeled scrounger with a massive sense of entitlement raking in tens of thousands in subsidies for sitting on his fat arse.

The only time I ever saw a wolf in the wild, a small one, I was so frightened that I closed my eyes. It was a useful insight into the depths of my own cowardice. Every day, with each new story about the exciting breakthroughs we’re making in genetic engineering, I feel that same shameful urge to shut my eyes. Far faster than anybody thought, we’re working out the genes responsible for all manner of traits in all creatures great and small. Far more easily than anyone expected, we’ve moved from standard gene therapies to figuring out how to actually edit our own DNA, to ferret around inside living cells, snipping out duff genes and replacing them. Until recently it was mostly mice at (or under) the cutting edge of this new technology.

It was International Women’s Day on Wednesday of this last week. The Guardian had enjoined its readers to send in reports of what they had done to advance the struggle, or how they had been in some way oppressed by men — perhaps raped, or talked to as if they were stupid, or looked at a little coldly when they squirted breast milk over fellow diners at The Ivy. I tried to think of something I had done for the cause but came up short, sad to say. So instead I tried to show solidarity by spending a substantial amount of International Women’s Day looking at a photograph of Emma Watson’s tits. The actress is a radical feminist campaigner and has even been given some kind of role at the United Nations to advance the cause of female liberation across the globe.

I’m cheering up about Brexit. The moaning has to stop. Why be downhearted and edgy when you’re confident of your argument? Leavers: you’re all wrong. I’m not totally sure — one never can be — and certainly I could be mistaken: and one day we’ll know. Meanwhile I place my confidence in the judgment of those in British politics I most admire, people like Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten, John Major, Ruth Davidson and Kenneth Clarke; and, sticking to my guns and with a merry two fingers up to the lot of you, I leave you Brexit types to the snarling din emanating from your Brexit cave. Chins up, Leaver trolls — you won — remember? It’s all going to be fabulous — remember? Why the cross faces?

The latest and perhaps most damaging accusation to be levelled at Donald Trump is that he likes his steaks well-done and accompanied with tomato ketchup. He was seen ordering exactly this dish last week. It would not surprise me if he also had a side order of battered onion rings. I do not know if the person who cooked the steak was an immigrant and, this being the case, added a gobbet of alien phlegm to the griddle. If so, Trump didn’t seem to mind. He chomped away, dipping bits of incinerated meat in his ketchup, quite unconcerned that over here in Blighty a new sneerfest was rapidly getting underway. ‘The man’s a monster,’ someone tweeted. ‘He eats like my toddler and acts like him too,’ some dappy woman commented. You give your toddler steak?

Boy is planning his gap year. Every few hours he rings from school to give me a progress report. ‘I’m allowing three days for Denver. Is that long enough?’ ‘We-e-ll, it’s pretty key in On the Road. Maybe five?’ ‘And I’m definitely stopping for a day in Farmington.’ ‘Where?’ ‘It’s where the Horace Walpole library is.’ ‘Oh, of course. Silly me.’ Actually, I don’t much mind where he goes so long as it’s nowhere near where I went for my gap year: Africa. I love Africa.

We all think pretty highly of ourselves these days, free from old-fashioned ideas about sin. We’re good people. And yet… I read in a letter in a local newspaper recently a description of an event in the writer’s own home which shows that we might also be becoming monsters. The letter-writer, Jane, was a lady in her late fifties who cared at home for a husband, Fred, with terminal brain cancer. As Jane’s letter explained, Fred had fallen recently on to the bathroom floor, and as she was unable to lift him, she telephoned for help. Seven medics arrived and rushed to the scene. All seven then stalled. Though Fred was not obese, though there were seven of them, they told Jane that they were not allowed to help him up.