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I’m not making this up: last week the BBC News at Ten covered the distressing worry that budget cuts mean fewer free school meals will now be available to children in need, complete with the observation that for many of the poorest children, a free school lunch represents their one square scoff of the day.

This was immediately followed by the news that it was now 100 days to the start of the Olympics.

Now I know I’m a killjoy, but I have to tell you that my fervent prayer is that the London Olympics collapses around the ears of Lord Coe and his chums in a shambolic fiasco, as a sort of judgment from above on the inanity of wasting tens of billions of pounds on a global advertising exercise at a time when we are told we can’t afford free school meals for needy children.

In fact, I notice one of the newspapers has started referring to it as a taxpayer-funded advertising opportunity for some of the world’s most suspect companies; and it’s certainly lending the word ‘legacy’ a new lease of life as a euphemism for ‘debt’.

I think I may become French.

Over there, at least, they seem to be turning away from the blind acceptance that only crippling cuts can save us and looking for another way – the way that says by investing in making our lives better we can employ, work, improve our way out of misery. Having said that, only 28 per cent of them are doing that. 26 per cent of them still vote for little Nicholas Sarkozy and a fifth of them voted for a fascist.

So perhaps I could become a Yorkshire Muslim and vote for George Galloway.

Now in truth I would sooner thrust red-hot needles under my toenails than vote for George Galloway, and anybody who saw his filleting on Question Time last week by David Aaronovitch may be tempted to think the same.

But what you can’t do is discount the fact that a candidate of the far left has persuaded a large majority of an area’s electorate to vote for him by arguing against British military involvement abroad, by arguing against draconian cuts that throw people out of work and into hardship, and by arguing for social inclusion.

Maybe if more palatable – sorry, that’s rude; more widely liked – characters argued so persuasively in the same way, the left may get more candidates elected. For example, the news last week covered the sad death of Jack Ashley, the Labour MP who campaigned all his life for equal rights for people with difficulties, such as his own deafness. Jack was of the left, but was widely loved and admired. See, it is possible.

Anyway, we have more running races, less school meals. Unless your school is one of that imbecile Michael Gove’s academies or free schools, in which case there’s all the food you could possibly want so long as you like junk and have lots of change.

As Jamie Oliver pointed out this week, Gove’s beloved opt-out schools, the ones that have no obligation even to appoint trained staff, do not have to abide by legal minimum nutritional standards. So, of course, they’re selling vending machine space in the corridors and crisps and fizzy drinks are back on the timetable. Oliver, rightly, is furious. Gove and his business chums will not give a hoot, of course: free schools and a free market mean children with arses the size of Belgium – good for junk food sales, good for clothing material sales, good for TV and sofa sales, good for medicine sales. It’s win-win, unless you have any principles, of course.

Talking of principles, here’s the wonderful Mark Steel’s take on the argument about tax relief on charitable donations:

“The only thing unfair about the current debate is this system should apply to everyone, not just the rich. To start with, there could be a trial for a few items such as pork pies. When you buy a packet, you should have the choice of paying for them, or giving the money to a charity of your choice instead. Then, when the pork pie companies complain that this leaves them short of funds, everyone can go berserk and say, ‘Rob the charities would you, you heartless bastards’?”

Numbers adds up 

A big thank you to good old Brother Numbers, fittingly enough, for clocking what yours truly had missed – to whit, that last week’s blog was number 52, thereby marking our first birthday together. Why weren’t any of the rest of you paying the blindest bit of attention? Eh?

Apart from the occasional article here and there over the past 12 months, and most of that in the shape of publicity work for others, this also marks the longest time I have been away from newspapers since I was 14.

I thought I would miss ink terribly; it turns out that I don’t. I won’t say fings ain’t what they used to be (though they certainly ain’t), for fear of sounding like a grumpy old man. Again.  I will say fings are very different now. For example, I cannot for a moment imagine that any of the editors for whom I worked  in my youth would have sent me to write anything about the likes of the C list celebrities who dominate the pages of the red-tops and the middle-market papers, even, distressingly, some of the qualities these days. Peaches Geldof, anybody?

And I cannot for a moment imagine that any of the editors for whom I worked in my youth would have tolerated for a moment young reporters without at least a rudimentary command of the basics of the English language. They would of been like well pissed about it. LOL. By the end of my career I was editing copy from people who really, truly, honestly, could not write. Now it’s a couple of years later…. Well.

So here’s where I rest now, and bless you all, every brother and sister of you, for sticking with it for a year. Especially those of you, my friends, who’ve posted your comments and made me and others laugh. That’s all this is for, really: for a debate and a laugh. Like newspapers used to be.

It’s an exchange of ideas, of course, no matter how much the Brother Who Must Not Be Named insists he’s writing this for me.

In that spirit of a free – free, I say – exchange of ideas, I share Brother Yardie’s very beautiful thought on life, as expressed to one of our number whose times have been, shall we say, full of incident:

“You’re not so much a mere mortal shuffling across the stage as a mere mortal running across the stage with your trousers round your ankles…”