PREPARE FOR LIFT-OFF AND A DODGY FLIGHT

Increasingly what defines our lives lies in the execution of stuff. A great recipe badly cooked and carelessly served is a disaster. An ordinary recipe beautiful cooked and lovingly served is a triumph.

We are living in a world of change, innovation and contradiction, a world where nothing is quite as it seems, where long held assumptions about civil rights, equality and being nice to each other were just taken for granted.

Let’s consider gastroenterology and the state of chronic constipation. That’s how the EU bureaucratic has felt for some time as has the US dominated by its MBAs, Silicon Valley and its Financiers. Enter the two best laxatives known to humanity - Donald Trump and an elixir called Brexit.

Here’s how Dave Barry a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald described his own laxative moment:
“On the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavour. Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-litre plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a litre is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind - like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.

The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humour, state that after you drink it, 'a loose, watery bowel movement may result.' This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof you may experience contact with the ground.

MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but: have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another litre of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.”

In political terms that is what we’ve just started to go through.

In years to come we’ll describe not draining the swamp but emptying the body of its waste so we can start to behave sensibly again. Neither Trump nor Theresa are permanent fixtures - they are watery movements and they’ll pass on quite soon.

Am I unduly optimistic? We are - I suggest- going through a curious phase as this cartoon suggests. Time to use these laxative tools and then get back to down to earth again