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Our willingness to allow our little minds to be focused on the inconsequential never ceases to amaze me.

This morning, we are urged to concentrate on a few powerless members of the pointless House of Lords, who may or may not have promised journalists, who were out to trap them, that they might just lobby on behalf of an organisation, or enable lobbying or meetings on behalf of an organisation, in return for money.

These allegations are neither surprising nor important. It’s the House of Lords, for goodness’ sake!  People are there because they grovelled before the right people, or because they believe in God, or because they were born in anachronistic beds. What do we expect or want from the House of Lords?

But huffing and puffing will nevertheless now take place. The Man In The Street will deliver judgment, that “they’re all a bunch of crooks”. The rules will be endlessly discussed and a few pointless, powerless peers of whom nobody has ever heard may or may not be consigned to politics’ dustbin. Nick Clegg, God save us, will talk about a top to toe reform of the political establishment, maybe one designed to prevent politicians breaking promises…

Meanwhile…. For one example, is anybody doing anything about the MPs in the House of Commons who have links to the pharmaceutical industries – you know, the MPs who have voted through changes to the NHS that further enable private enterprise to falsely storm the barricades that once kept drugs affordable? No, of course not, because that would be difficult and time-consuming and require action. Much simpler to harass a few useless peers.

Of course, problems in the NHS are all the fault of GPs. Lazy so-and-sos. They don’t work hard enough, do they?

Meanwhile, bureaucracy, top-heavy organisation, target culture, cold winters, government cuts making people sick and malnourished and therefore unhealthy, focus groups, rich lawyers drawing up new commissioning agreements, previously efficient co-operatives like KernowDoc being disbanded in favour of the politicians’ friends in the private sector monopoly that is Serco, the pharmaceutical industry, understaffing, overstaffing, private enterprise ‘selling’ care like it’s a commodity – anybody want to think about any of those things or a thousand more? No. Thought not. It’s the GPs. Because that’s very, very easy and requires us to do nothing other than grumble.

This morning, we are urged to rejoice that Labour will end winter fuel payments to top-rated tax-payers, saving us all £100 million. This is a piffling sum of money and, more to the point, a tellingly lazy option for a headline-driven party which consistently refuses to show strength of purpose or policy or commitment to any form of meaningful change. Where opposition to injustice that’s actually hurting people is required, we have a Labour party with no spine whatsoever that fobs us off with easy, meaningless ‘policies’ like this. But nevertheless, huffing and puffing will now take place.

Meanwhile… arms are arriving in Syria where thousands more will die horribly – but that’s not only far more difficult an issue, it also concerns foreigners with skin coloured different to ours, so let’s not bother with that, eh?

At the weekend, we were permitted to watch some very rich women take off their clothes and tell us this was in aid of female empowerment: ‘Chime for Change’ featured various scantily-clad pop stars barking out rough simulations of ‘hits’, led by the grandmother of them all, Madonna. She’s led the way in convincing us that getting naked to sell her wares is in some way an empowerment of women’s rights; the younger generation followed suit in this banal tritefest. Jessie J ‘performed’ Price Tag, which is to say a band tried to cover up her toneless howling while a really brilliant pop song, created only with the aid of studios and technology, was murdered to death by somebody in skin-tight trousers and a cut-off top, using a cliché about women’s power to flog her records.

Meanwhile, equal pay and equal opportunity remain an issue, there are still professions in which women are barred from progress because of their sex, column inches are filled with debate about what Royal princesses choose to wear, and male commentators are allowed to vent their bathetic spleen on the subject of rape. And quite, quite unbelievably, you could read this in the Western Morning News today:

“Beauties hoping to be crowned Miss England basked in the glorious Torbay sunshine when they took part in a swimwear photo call on board a luxury yacht. Twelve bikini-clad Misses from Newcastle to Wiltshire, London to Manchester, Oxfordshire and South Yorkshire, lounged on the top deck of the luxury yacht…” The paper’s website offered pictures and a video.

Good grief. Good grief.

I could go on. I usually do, after all. But today is a writing day. After a week of a half-term holiday in which Management, a teacher, has worked six days out of seven, and therefore yours truly has been kept from the keyboard by the demands of kids at home, today is a writing day.

First, though, I must clean up after breakfast and put today’s washing on and hang it out. Then I need to nip into town for the animals’ flea treatment. Then I need to take Fraser Minor Major’s bicycle in for a service so he can take part in a school cycling event. I’d better water the polytunnel, seeing as we’ll have a hosepipe ban by the end of the week thanks to the first dry spell we’ve had for more than a sodding year. Oh. Must remember to cook. Ah, and it’s cleaning day for the burner today. And the kids need collecting at 3.15pm. So I’d best get on. It’s a writing day.