Thought for the Day, brought to you in the absence of the Arch of Cant, by Derek Bickerstaff, a close friend of Justin who is presently brass-rubbing quite near Goole.

“Bring me your poor, your hungry...” and I’ll build a huge wall to keep them out. So says Mr Trump as he comes up with a new brainwave whereby he’s going to fix solar panels to the wall he intends to build between the U.S. and Mexico – to pay for the wall! Who will pay for the energy created by those solar panels? How long will it take for the panels to pay for themselves? The guy gets more like Homer Simpson every day.                    
                   
I’m fed up with politics and politicians. Some are OK and seem straightforward, capable and honest – like Jeremy Corbyn. But those qualities don’t seem to be quite enough to give him and the Labour Party a chance to govern.
                     
Meanwhile, Mrs May & Co totter along, begging for support from the DUP, an Irish branch of the Flat Earth Society.
                                           
One of the penalties of being in your 70s is that there’s too much “past”; too many memories. As soon as you start to look a bit wistful and say things like, “I remember when...”, anybody under 40 immediately switches off and resumes scanning their phones.
                   
The recent spell of hot weather, which certainly discomfited me, the Dog and the Chickens (did you know that chickens sunbathed? Well they do. They sit on one side and stretch out one wing) got me thinking about school holidays in the Dear Dead Days Beyond Recall. It was a time when little boys roamed far and wide, doing all the things they knew damned well they shouldn’t do. One of the best places my pals and I used to frequent was a large pond of unspecified dark depth. That was interesting in itself, with frogs and the occasional leech, but the main attraction with this particular body of water was that it had a tank in it. A TANK! Well, maybe it was just the turret sans gun, but it was a hell of a lot more tank than you’ll see in your local pond these days. And it had huge ball-bearings in it, which, with the help of Danny Belshaw’s Dad’s crowbar, actually came out! They were huge. At one time, I had four. Like so many other found items, they were currency. We swapped them for other stuff. Marbles, Dinky toys (sans tyres) and on one occasion, an air rifle, which didn’t work but which earned us a huge telling off from my father who was a Policeman. We also once dammed up the river Calder – well almost – and that went down very badly too.
                     
And there were certain kids you shouldn’t play with. Reasons were never given. One such miscreant once collected all the innards of bonfire night bangers, bunged the stuff into an aluminium cigar tube, made a fuse, stuck the thing into the canal bank, lit it, and blew a big hole in yer actual canal bank. Boy – did we run away! Oddly this incident was never mentioned in Parentland.
                     
I’m pretty sure little boys don’t get to do things like that any more. Too many terrorists hiding in wheelie-bins these days. Too much traffic. Too many roaming bands of paedophiles. All true, I suppose. Besides, who wants to go messing about with a half-submerged tank when they’ve got a tablet to stare at?