James Mitchinson

By their very nature, song lyrics do not carry the same meaning for you as they do for me. Nor will they necessarily mean the same to me tomorrow as they do today. At its point of creation, art is imbued with context and circumstance, personality and character - all of which are immutably so, yet none of which can be present in others’ appreciation of the art. So, think of the following as my Oasis experience, not yours, as I attempt to paint a picture of what the brothers Gallagher meant to me and to people like me, back then…

By their very nature, song lyrics do not carry the same meaning for you as they do for me. Nor will they necessarily mean the same to me tomorrow as they do today. At its point of creation, art is imbued with context and circumstance, personality and character - all of which are immutably so, yet none of which can be present in others’ appreciation of the art. So, think of the following as my Oasis experience, not yours, as I attempt to paint a picture of what the brothers Gallagher meant to me and to people like me, back then…

There are occasions when the words that trip off the keyboard - my own words - make me roll my own eyes. This, I already know, is one of those occasions. So … here goes: Tory MP Esther McVey has compared Sir Keir Starmer’s determination to further reduce the harmful and anti-social effects of smoking on both smokers and second-hand recipients of said smoke, to the Holocaust, where six million Jews were systematically executed by the murderous Nazi regime.

If you move about very much at all, particularly along the nation’s arterial motorway routes, chances are you will have passed one or two gargantuan, shiny-new grey-blue Amazon factories and thought something like: bloody hell, that’s massive, I wonder what actually goes on in there?

Like me, you will have woken to the news that Donald Trump - a man who refused to accept the outcome of the democratic process when Joe Biden took the White House from him previously resulted in a deadly assault on Capitol Hill, bringing about the most disturbing undermining of American values in modern times.

We need to talk about Hull, or, more specifically, Hull and The Humber.

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Before I get going in earnest, a confession: the following musings of this mad man represent a triangulation; an opinion formed through reading - how novel! A venn diagram of views: a nudge by the columnist I’ve always wanted to be, The Times’ Giles Coren, and the columnist we’re privileged to have on the books of The Yorkshire Post, Daxa Patel. A scholar is only as good as his (or her) sourcing, after all.

First and foremost: happy new year to you all. I do hope that you all managed at least a little happy downtime with your loved ones, and that you are keeping well in these freezing temperatures.

Irked by the interference of ill-informed billionaire Elon Musk, for his own political ends, I was moved to ask our Westminster Correspondent Ralph Blackburn to examine further the child grooming gang scandal that ripped Rotherham - and Britain - apart.