IN a week where negativity seems to rule can I just give a bit of credit where it is due.

I’ve been going to Specsavers in town for a few years now because my glasses are always spot on from there and the staff are always pleasant, helpful, and on hand to tell you which glasses frames look really nice on you and which make you look like a deranged Nana Mouskouri.

So thank you. I look forward to picking up my new specs. And having the hearing test because I’ve decided I should maybe have one.

Me and the OH have started impatiently barking at each other ‘WHATDIDYOUSAY?’ (though I personally think he mumbles and he’s got the problem if either of us does).

The years of listening to heavy rock music at volume maybe have taken their toll. But also – is there any other way to listen to it?

I did an event at the Holiday Inn at the weekend and it was smashing to be back in such familiar territory with the wonderful Ann Kelly who runs a tight ship and her band of staff, a few of whom have been there for so many years. It’s a lovely place.

Also, cracking soup and Eton Mess folks. I should have been at the BAFTAS but they’d booked me first and the event was so full of wonderful people, I didn’t feel the disappointment of missing out – yes, that good.

It did make me think back to years ago and the old Brooklands, did you ever go? What a weird and wonderful place it was.

I remember my first time there thinking: ‘Is this really what everyone is raving about?’ It didn’t look much, but there was a strange magic in the air.

On the bar: not bowls of nuts and crisps, but pork crackling curls bigger than my handbag, chicken legs.

And large tables were needed, even for just two, because of the ‘sides’: a massive dish of deep-fried courgettes, half of Ireland in potatoes and if parmesan was needed, you didn’t have a waiter sprinkling a teaspoon over your meal, they left you a huge bowl of it and a ladle to apply at leisure.

I remember a waitress cutting a piece of cake for me from the sweet trolley that was weightier than my backside.

It was a place like no other. Time brings inevitable change but we were lucky to have once had it in our midst and be able to savour the memories.

I wasn’t going to mention politics, but it’s all-encompassing isn’t it? Many accusations that people have got their local and national politics mixed up.

Maybe a few have, but I think many haven’t and knew exactly what they were doing by voting as they did.

A voting slip is power and maybe a consuming hate for central government turned people into a red-mist-eyed Daenerys Targaryen in the voting booths, seeing only that moment in front of them to make the statement of all statements – and, like her, nothing beyond it.

That would suggest the arrogance of Starmer and his cabinet, their U-turns and broken promises, messing the pensioners about, betraying the ordinary working people who put them in power is ultimately what brought down their own stable local governments, irrevocably tainted by the reputation of the ‘mothership’.

And that is why so many good, experienced people are now out of their jobs. My theory may be wrong but I don’t think it is. And now carnage is the result. God help us all.