The “auditing” phenomenon is one of the more polarising endeavours that modern social media - we’re looking at you, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok - has facilitated.

“Amateur” videographers/vloggers (video bloggers) visit a variety of locations with the intention of shining a light on sites, organisations and practices, with whatever they encounter documented for subsequent - or often live - publishing.

So, last week, it happened. Well, it was certainly announced last week that Mohamed “The Egyptian King” Salah had signed on to play for Liverpool Football Club for another two years.

And be paid an eyewateringly large amount of money over those two years.

Woo-hoo.

I know that’s not a song - rather, we can sing about “the b*stard in the black” or claim “the referee’s a w*nker” - but some recent procrastination resulted in discovering that the footballer Juan Carlos Pérez López - known as “Juankar” - has actually turned out in an all-black kit for Málaga in 2018-19. When I realised that wondrous fact, I was quick to poetically announce it to the brilliant Martin Le Roy, who, to his credit, chose sparing my blushes and feigning being impressed at my find over correcting my embarrassing error.

Generally, I’m not one to defend football referees against accusations of being b*stards or w*nkers. Their arrogance and self-importance has been a scourge on the game for decades, especially some of the most successful ones. Their abuse of their power has led to far too many miscarriages of justice in pivotal games, and aside from a temporary demotion to lower level matches, their crimes go unpunished.

I’ll show my working, of course.

Close to a decade ago, a shift in my circumstances led me to, after a long hiatus, return to soap operas. Not how I refer to the dramas of my existence, you’ll understand, but the long-running episodic drama series which are the mainstay staples of television programming.

In the light of YouTube, Netflix and podcasts, to name but three challengers traditional entertainment media faces, the likes of Coronation Street, Hollyoaks, Neighbours, Home and Away and EastEnders (I never really got on with Emmerdale) seem almost ridiculous in their dated approach to catering for our needs, but somehow they still demand my intention. Perhaps it is so I can keep an eye on what passes as normal human behaviour to the normal humans so alien to me that make up the viewership. No, not for the first time, I don’t have to be alerted to the irony.

I sometimes struggle with the storylines, and will abandon even my sporadic viewing until a specific plotline runs its course or, so I’m sure it can’t be resurrected, at least one of the characters involved is killed off. Largely, however, and to varying extents across examples, soaps are informative mirrors to society, and progressive. There’s the banal and the misrepresentative, sure, but soaps educate and enlighten as a matter of procedural policy.

Here we go again. Donald Trump, two years into his presidency, is due another (state) visit to the UK. Sickening, right? At one point, due to The Donald facing threat after threat to his position from inauguration to now, some said Angela Merkel had become, in effect, LotFW, but she ain’t the boss of me - God bless Brexit, eh? - and neither is Trump, thankfully. Oh, do monarchs have a claim to that? Anyway…

No one thought Trump would make it into the White House. Well, no one except me (listen in from 6m45s). But he made it in, and he’s lasting, to an extent. So what does this tell us about this planet? Well, assuming the majority of people reading this reside in the UK, imagine Alan “Lord” Sugar - to most media commentators a far more palatable human being than Trump - becoming UK Prime Minister. More palatable or not, Sugar is still an odious f*cking toad, so the idea remains entirely abhorrent, but the main parallelling point endures: Alan Sugar - like Trump, a businessman, a straight-talker, an a*sehole - sits in the faux-boardroom hotseat of The Apprentice, the BBC’s UK version of the show that propelled Trump to power.

This article’s in two parts. The first part involves this dual-national - UK and enduringly EU (French) whatever happens - bemoaning the leave vote. The second part, well, we’ll get there…

So what happened in 2016? A bus? Seriously? Who believes a politician at the best of times? And look at what politicians were for Brexit. Granted, David Cameron and George Osborne were on the remain side, and they’re utterly horrid, but the bus didn’t actually tell a lie, it just ignored the fact that the suggestion of funding the NHS with (some of) the £350million (gross) that goes to the EU each week could not be backed with any power to see it through. That’d have to be a policy decision and Cameron and Osborne were then in power, and singing from a different hymn sheet entirely.