Who's the Daddy: From Radiohead to Agadoo

How else do you explain this? Trump loses, the Yorkshire Ripper dies, Dominic Cummings gets potted and a Covid-19 vaccine looks like it’s on the way. After months of relentless death, destruction and misery, that’s four major plot twists in this dystopian nightmare of a year that nobody saw coming.

Even the mood music’s lifted. Since March we’ve had Radiohead’s Burn The Witch on a constant loop, but in the last week or so they’ve changed the record to Agadoo.

It’s fair to say 2020 hasn’t thrown up many chuckles. I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the last time I laughed. And for someone who is contractually obliged to write a newspaper column which contains a maximum of one funny joke per week, that’s a pretty serious admission to make.

Anyway, it looks like I picked the wrong week to give up drinking, but after becoming life-threateningly refreshed on cheap champagne the Saturday before last after the networks called it for Biden, it’s probably for the best.

Let’s hope this jamboree of hoopla isn’t just the eye of the storm, the bit in the horror movie where you think the monster’s dead, only for it to claw its way out of the grave for the terrifying finale.

This is 2020 after all. After the year we’ve had it’s not beyond the realms of fantasy for murmurations of starlings to go rogue and swoop out of the sky to peck out our eyeballs like in that Alfred Hitchcock film about birds, the title of which escapes me.

Never has sitting on your sofa all weekend been considered so heroic. Before Covid, if you kept yourself to yourself and lived a quiet life, some people might suggest the authorities checked your hard drive.

Anyway, daughter #1’s Lockdown 21st birthday passed off without serious incident on Tuesday. There’s only so much trouble you can get up to in your own house in November 2020, if you don’t want half a dozen bored, exasperated coppers turning up and handing out fines to gaggles of drunk, giggly students.