Diary – 7 June 2018

I know some people are fretting about Brexit, and others about the drive-by violence the President is doing to the US constitution, but what preoccupies me and the nation’s allotment-holders at the moment is news that the RHS is warning of a ‘bumper year for slugs’. The slimy little bastards not only ate every single lettuce seedling I planted last year, but they have taken to invading my kitchen in the night and dying extravagantly, and in a way that makes a stain, on hard-to-clean surfaces. The RHS is currently conducting trials on five different alleged slug repellents — copper tape, horticultural grit, pine bark, wool pellets and broken eggshells — to see if any of them actually works. You’d think someone would have done this already, slugs not being a new thing. The results will probably come too late for me: I’m going to crack and scatter chemical-blue slug pellets all over my allotment and around my fridge by the end of the week.

But if some good comes out of the trials let me know. It may not be too late to resolve the Northern Irish border problem with a row of eggshells; or go to Washington and put a line of wool pellets between the executive and the judiciary.

Speaking of The Donald, I’ve been enjoying John Niven’s forthcoming novel Kill’ Em All, which sees the return of his magnetically loathsome antihero Steven Stelfox, a Simon Cowellesque former music industry A&R man. Stelfox is energised by the Trump era, and he makes the interesting claim that POTUS would have thrived in the record industry. He understands the two key principles: never ever alienate your core fanbase; and it is impossible to underestimate the tastes of the public.