You know what it`s like.   You wake up one morning and face an increasingly weird and unreal world and you wonder whether you have woken up in Alice`s wonderland.  Well, I woke up this morning (thank goodness - at my age I`m truly grateful for that) and I look out and it`s cold, frosty, dark and pretty miserable.  I turn on the television and I am immediately assaulted by a kind of trial by media which shouts at me, argues all the time and seems a million miles away from Lord Reith and his three commandments about informing, educating and entertaining.

And then I realise that it`s election day and I face the prospect (some might call it a civic duty) to toddle up the road to the village hall and cast my vote one way or another.   Now here in our deepest Kent enclave, they don`t bother to count the votes, they just weigh them, as it has been a conservative stronghold ever since elections first began, so whichever way I might vote it won`t make the slightest difference to the outcome here.

But as I gaze through the looking glass at the broader picture, the national scene, it confirms that I might be in that fabled wonderland after all.  There seems to be a choice nationally between the fat controller or a mischievous imp with Alice herself bringing up the rear, waiting in the wings to see if she can, after all, pull the strings and fashion the country`s future in her image.   There are, of course, other minor characters to flesh out the cast list - there`s a mad hatter, a queen bee, a monster raving loony and so on.   But whatever the outcome of this election, it is likely to perpetuate the notion that we are living in  some kind of parallel universe where nothing is what it seems, where nothing is true anymore and where despair - or at least resignation - are near neighbours.

So I`ll toddle up the road, cast my vote and sit back and wait to see what happens, although I suspect that once again my senses will be assaulted by the baying media and by politicians who will either be over the moon or sick as parrots.  It`s not a happy prospect.

And all that comes after some truly sad news in recent days - the passing of Bob Willis, Marie Fredriksson and David Bellamy.  Those untimely losses coupled with the beatification of Greta Thunberg as `Person of the Year` just add to the sense of unreality

Beam me up Scotty..............................