Capitalising on doomsday being pushed back (for now)

SET my alarm for 7am this morning even though I didn’t have to get up until 8am.

- CERI GOULD

Why? So I could have the pleasure of turning it off and cwtching back in.If I hadn’t woken myself up to the insistent score of Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus then that hour would have slipped past unnoticed and the 8am alarm would have arrived with its whiny “you really need to get up now”.

Theme for the column? Have you guessed it? My intention to make the most of things.

Hot on the heels of the fake alarm came a WhatsApp from a friend: “Now the world’s not ending. Drink? Walk?”

The end is not nigh? What did I miss?

Of course, while I slept, the deadline by which Trump had threatened to end civilisation, one bomb and one all-CAPS warning at a time, had come and gone.

I check the news. He decided instead on PEACE. Rather Long-term PEACE - because long-term has a capital now, don’t you know.

“This will be a double-sided CEASEFIRE!” he wrote on his Truth Social site, which I noticed for the first time, describes a repost of a post as a “retruth”. A retruth. I’m just going to leave that there. Creepy, right?

And for those of us brought up on Blue Peter and its quickly put-together models made out of toilet rolls and cereal packets, Trump's phrase surely reminded us of the one used by the Blue Peter presenters.

They were forever using “double-sided sticky-tape for speed”.

Trump was using double-sided CEASEFIRE for EXPEDiency. (See what I did there?)

And thank heavens for that.