Leaving Brussels and heading home...

Breakfast in the hotel was fine, not the best, but not the worst either. I started with scrambled egg, mushrooms and one tiny sausage and followed up with a bowl of Coco Pops (I haven't had them for ages). Add a couple of paper cups of tea (I chose the paper mugs because they were bigger than the tiny cups) and a small pastry plus some yoghurt and another bowl of Coco Pops. You might think I was being greedy on the breakfast cereal, but I wasn't, the bowls were about the size of a teacup. I was tempted to have another pastry, but resisted, and soon, having checked out, found myself crossing town in a taxi.

6th floor, NH Hotel Brussels Grand Place...

Around midday I headed back to the Grand Place as I wanted to take a look at a watch, which I now intend to buy (it's better than the Sekonda Midnight Blue). But I didn't buy it, I just looked at it longingly and then continued to wander about looking for somewhere to eat lunch, until I realised that time was running out and I ought to be heading for Brussels Midi station instead and the 1456 Eurostar to London. I walked back to the hotel, feeling, it has to be said, a little weary and depressed having awoken around 0300hrs and not falling back to sleep. In fact, I  got up around 0430ish, or just before 0500hrs, and really need to sleep. The taxi meandered through heavy traffic, but got me there in time to have 'lunch' at a Pret a Manger on the station concourse (ham baguette, two bananas, cookie and tea). I sat outside the store watching people running around catching trains here, there and everywhere and eventually, of course, it was my turn to head for the barriers and, being an international train, the faff of security.

The ride home in seat 81, coach 13 was pleasant and I did fall asleep. Soon we were in the tunnel, crossing under the English Channel, and by just gone 1600hrs I was back at King's Cross St Pancras, annoyed that Hatchard's the bookstore had disappeared. I made my way to the London Underground, jumped on a southbound train to London Bridge where I jumped out and bought an inner tube for my bike from Evans Cycles. My weekly short rides around the block were brought to an abrupt halt on Wednesday morning when I discovered a rear-wheel puncture.

I got home to an empty house and decided to fix the puncture before anybody else turned up. This I did and then I sat and watched television. There's a General Election on 12 December, the first winter election for around 100 years. There's also been a fire on a train in Pakistan, England's rugby team plays in the World Cup Final this coming Saturday against South Africa, and Donald Trump is interfering with the English election by suggesting to Nigel Farage on his LBC radio show that he do a deal with Boris Johnson. Can you honestly think of two people less qualified to run the country as Farage and Johnson? I can't. In all honesty, while I know there's a lot of right wing press against him, I think I'll vote for Corbyn and set the cat among the pigeons for the next five years. Who cares if he taxes my back garden and lets in loads of immigtants, they're coming in anyway and that, my friends, is the irony of Brexit. A lot of people voted Brexit because of immigration and don't kid me they were frightened of Spanish accountants, they thought it would get rid of the bhurkas and all those nasty foreigners from Somalia and Eritrea with different skin colours to ours, those 'fuzzy wuzzies', but the racists were wrong and they were conned. Non-EU migrants are coming in droves and there's been no let-up by the Government. They reckon our population will hit 70 million in the not-too-distant future and I'm waiting for the bigoted Brexiteers to realise they've been conned and hopefully, in the North East, that moment of realisation will come shortly after Nissan has moved elsewhere and they're all out of work. "But how did you vote in the referendum, Mr Unemployed and On Benefits? Oh, you voted Brexit did you? Well, you only have yourself to blame!"

The weather is looking very poorly and I'm expecting some abort texts this weekend. There's rain setting in and that means no riding. Why I bothered fixing the puncture I'll never know. I hope we do get out, but normally if there's rain it's in the morning and that's when we go cycling.

Three years ago.

Thoughts on Brexit and 'The Donald' in the White House...

There are now two things that bug me constantly; it's as if there are two nasty-looking vultures sitting on a fence behind me at any one time, reminding me of the situation. Occasionally, they might fly off, but not for long; they return often and sit smugly on their perch. The vultures in question represent two big political decisions made, not by governments, but by people – the citizens of the United Kingdom and America. One of those decisions was the UK's vote on 23 June to leave the European Union, to me a very bad decision. I'm living with it, of course, like a lot of people, but it nags at me, mainly because I feel that we, the people, were conned by the likes of Farage, Gove and, of course, that blundering buffoon Boris Johnson, and now we're going to pay the price: a plummeting pound being just one of a number of problems the country now faces as we lurch towards the triggering of Article 50, supposedly next March.

Add your slogan here

Brexit, however, was overshadowed by the American public's decision to vote in Donald Trump as its 45th President of the United States, although the reason behind both Brexit and Trump's success at the ballot box was disillusionment. A lot of people refer to those who voted for Trump and who wanted out of Europe as 'the great unwashed', but while some might load the phrase with derision, others argue that 'establishment politics' – on both the left and right – has ignored the welfare and the wishes of huge swathes of people who today find themselves jobless or living on the breadline and without any true political representation. They are, in fact, a growing under-class of people – in the UK referred to as the white working classes who, in the EU vote and the race to the White House, have finally woken up and had their say.

In many ways, it is unfortunate that the far right has proved to be their 'saviour' and fed them with half-truths and downright lies; you just have to look at the claims of Farage and Johnson and Gove to see that they were conned and will, ultimately, pay the economic price.

More worrying still, however, is the notable swing to the right that global politics appears to be taking, epitomised by Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and an increasingly more right wing Tory party in the UK.

My problem with right wing politics is that it chooses to focus negatively on the vulnerable and the minorities and it blames the problems of society on specific groups, normally in an effort to deflect attention away from the real causes of strife (bankers and corporate greed). In Hitler's Europe it was the Jews who were blamed and then carted off to concentration camps. In Donald Trump's 'brave new world' it's Mexicans and Muslims, and in the world of the 'Brexiteer', it's foreigners in general 'coming over here and stealing all our jobs'.

The end result is that we find ourselves living in a society that's moving backwards. In the case of Tory Britain, a society reverting back to the 19th Century with many homeless people on the streets of London unable to afford the extortionate rents charged by their unscrupulous, right wing landlords; and, if Jeremy Hunt gets his way, increasingly ill and infirm people unable to pay for their healthcare.

Why is it, I wonder, that Republican Americans want to rid their country of Obamacare? You would have thought that giving greater access to healthcare that doesn't leave individuals penniless and on the streets was a good thing, but no, it's bad according to right wing politicians. Why is it that the Tories in the UK want to dismantle the NHS and hand lucrative contracts to people like Richard Branson? There is, of course, just one word that answers these questions: greed. And that's when we get down to the nitty gritty of the political systems around the world: they're divided along the lines of the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' and the greed of the former who have no intention of spreading the wealth generated, but instead want to keep it for themselves. Look no further than at Philip Green for all the evidence you'll ever need, but there are many others.

And so we are now entering a phase of uncertainty with Donald Trump, a right wing businessman, leading the American people and, no doubt, applying his business 'principles' to the way he governs his country and, dare I say, the way he approaches the world. Trump's blatant racism during his campaign for the White House – his views about Mexicans and Muslims and women – and everything we have seen over the past however long it's been since he was named Republican presidential candidate, does not bode well.

After Brexit in the UK there was a rise in racially-motivated attacks as some 'Brexiteers' felt that their vote to leave the European Union (a vote against immigration in their eyes) meant that they could mistreat those of a different skin colour or those with an Eastern European accent. Fair game, they thought, as the vote to leave the EU had, they believed, 'legitimised' such behaviour. I would be very surprised if we don't see similar attacks in the USA where, of course, there are more guns freely available to crazy as well as sensible people, meaning the end result might be more serious.

But perhaps it is unfair, and indeed, foolhardy of me to sit at my desk voicing my anti-Trump rhetoric. Perhaps I should be a little more careful what I say because, ultimately, what do I know other than what I've read in British newspapers or listened to on British radio, or watched on television? And we all know that the media has it's own agenda.

I have an American pal, an ex-military man, and he quite rightly puts me and others straight when it comes to Trump's victory. He questions why we find Trump's success so terrible and scary and awful when we don't live in the USA and have no idea what it's been like for the average American under eight years of Obama. All we see, of course, is a 'cool' president who is on speaking terms with Beyonce and Jay Z. But my pal tells me, in all seriousness, that millions of people are out of work, that Obama's foreign policy has been terrible, especially the deal with Iran. He says that Obamacare doesn't work and that people can't afford it. He also reminds me that the Americans didn't criticise our decision to leave the European Union. "Did we say you're crazy? No, it's your country and we respected your vote." Fair comment.

And, as he rightly pointed out, if the Americans had stayed out of the Second World War we, the British, would be speaking German – ironically, I'm in Germany as I pen this addendum to my article and, oddly, I'm feeling a little ashamed that I can't speak German, as I was saying to a taxi driver just 30 minutes ago.

"We have made our voice heard. Try respecting our voice," says my pal, which is all well and good, but, like over here when we had the Brexit vote, there were many people who didn't want out of the European Union who are still smarting from the result. In America too there are people who do live in the USA, but feel that Trump as president is nothing short of an American tragedy. One of those people is David Remnick, whose article, An American Tragedy, was published in the New Yorker on 9 November.

Remnick doesn't mix his words. "The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump's shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy."

But let's try and look on the bright side and see the positives of the situation rather than moan, like the true Brits we are. The Americans, it has to be said, are much more positive and upbeat about life. Is there an upside to a Trump presidency? Well, if he can somehow move away from some of the vitriolic comments he spouted during the election campaign, if he can unify the country and govern, as he says, for all Americans, if he can establish a more cordial relationship with the Russians and in the process maintain world peace and if he can 'Make America Great Again', then hats off to him. All we can do is wait and see.

No cycling, but there's plenty going on in the world...

It's Saturday morning. The weather is fine but I'm not on the bike. It's almost 0900hrs and normally I would be in Westerham drinking tea and munching biscuits, but I'm not. I'm sitting in my living room, at the table, writing. I'm not ill; that was last week, but I am feeling a little stuffed up, a little chesty, that's all. I'm not cycling purely because I had to take somebody somewhere and I think, shortly, I'll be taking other people to somewhere else. So no riding today, although I'm planning on being back in the saddle tomorrow (Sunday).

There comes a time with cycling when I find that we're all slacking a little bit. Suddenly, I notice that we're only going once a week and I feel something needs to be done before we stop going altogether, not that anything drastic like that would ever happen. In many ways, of late, I've been the chief culprit: giving people early morning lifts, having a cold, things must change.

So, with no cycling comes a boring post. You might have noticed recently how I've been a little angry about the Brexit vote. Well, I'm getting over it, just, although I notice that Leadsom – one of two women fighting to be Prime Minister following David Cameron's lily-livered decision to step down – has been shooting off about how she's the best bet for PM because she's got kids. Well, the fact that Teresa May, the favourite for the job, hasn't got any children – and clearly had trouble getting to the point where she realised she wasn't going to have any – escaped Leadsom's mind. Look, she's a banker and a Brexit banker too, she's not the woman for the job. May was a 'remainer' and while some say that's not a good qualification for the job (as she's got to negotiate our exit from the EU) the fact remains that May is a proper politician, not some jumped up banker (let's not forget that bankers are THE problem, not immigrants). Bankers are why we have austerity. So why have Leadsom in charge? Let her get back to looking after her children.

In a sense, of course, the country is rudderless. While we have a PM, he's keeping his head down, so the sooner the leadership contest is done and dusted, the better.

The British political system is in state of upheaval at the moment. Not only is there no real PM in charge of the country, we've got an opposition party that is falling apart. Half of the shadow cabinet – probably more – has resigned, the leader of the opposition should resign, but is staying put despite being urged to go by many leading figures of the Labour party, but he's hanging on. My view is he will never be the Prime Minister so he might as well go now and save the country from more Tories.

Leadsom – she's a banker so no way!

And then, of course, there's 'Brexit'. As I mentioned earlier, it's all dying down a little bit as people get used to the idea that we're coming out of the EU. Oddly, going back to Leadsom for a minute, she said in an interview with the Times newspaper that she would make a good PM because she has kids. She spoke about how she'd be looking out for her kids and I found myself thinking that she can't care that much about them or she would have voted to remain in the EU and not 'leave', but there you have it. To continue briefly with this digression, I think it's obvious that I'm all for Teresa May. I don't know why, I like her, she has a bird-like face, she's been on Desert Island Discs, her dad was a vicar for heaven's sake. What's not to like? Leadsom = banker. Not to be trusted.

And then, of course, there's upheaval of a different kind. Since the Brexit vote was announced there has been a marked increase in the number of racist attacks in the UK as those who believed the Brexit vote gave them carte blanche to tell foreigners to 'piss of back to their own country' and 'stop nicking all our jobs' decided to make their feelings known. For a lot of people, immigration was the big issue in the EU referendum and while it would be unfair to say that all Brexiters are racists – they're not – so-called 'Brexit' did provide those with racist tendencies (I doubt if any racists voted to remain in the EU) with a kind of mandate to up the racist ante a little bit.

What is slightly worrying is the spate of resignations that followed the EU referendum result. First Cameron sloped off, rather than stay and keep the country on course, thus triggering the leadership election. Then there was Boris Johnson – once the leadership contest was underway he stepped down having been shafted by Orville lookalike Gove who himself has been knocked out of the leadership contest. Then there was Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP. He said he wanted his life back. In my opinion, all of these people have one thing in common: they all fucked up the country and then buggered off and the last one will be Leadsom. She'll lose the leadership contest and crawl back under her stone.

No mention of resignations would be complete without mentioning Roy Hodgson, the manager of the England team at Euro 2016. He was managing a typically rubbish English football team and it goes without saying that the team lost and was sent packing. Immediately after they left the pitch, Hodsgon resigned his post. Leave voters say "Let's Make Great Britain Great Again", well, my view is that they won't make it great again, it's impossible. If you're outside of the UK, the best way to get an impression of what this country is all about is to watch an episode of Eastenders and/or a football match involving the England team – together they sum up what this country is all about. Oh, and throw in Britain's Got Talent too, another example of how it is IMPOSSIBLE to make Great Britain great again.

Teresa May should be the new Prime Minister

Meanwhile, in America, more racist attacks, this time policemen shooting black people and then black people shooting white policemen (five dead before the gunman was killed by some kind of robot). You reap what you you sow, remember that. Policemen shooting black people is common 'over there' and it's not good, but it's common – and it all ties in with the swing to the right that appears to be happening on both sides of the Atlantic. Over there it's 'let's make America great again' while over here it's been 'let's make Great Britain great again'.

Nationalism, incidentally, is the most dangerous thing there is and that's what this is all about. The reason it is happening is because our politicians have been too arrogant for their own good. They haven't been listening to the people, preferring instead to pander to big business and the banking community and ignoring the wishes of the people. That's why we're out of Europe – the masses have spoken – and it's a similar story in the USA. In the beginning Trump was a rank outsider, but I said it back then and I'll say it again, he WILL be the next US president. Where politics is concerned I've always felt that if I think about the worst thing that can possibly happen, it will happen. And sure enough, we're out of the EU and, I believe, Trump will be the leader of the free world. It's a bad place to be, but because our politicians simply aren't very good – nobody trusts them and they have no idea of how ordinary people live their lives – we're in this mess.

Micah Johnson – you reap what you sow

Trust in politicians is at an all-time low in the UK and it's a distrust that goes back to the invasion of Iraq and the likes of Tony Blair and Jack Straw, the two eternal villains of the piece. They lied to Parliament and the public, took us into an illegal war and didn't have an exit plan other than to simply up sticks and leave the Iraqis to get on with it – a bit like Cameron, Johnson, Gove, Farage and all those who figured they could take us out of the EU and then simply walk away.

This week saw the publication of the Chilcott Report – the long-awaited Chilcott Report. Basically, Lord Chilcott told us what we already knew, but it was good to see Blair squirming in front of the media and, on Channel Four News, to see Jack Straw apologising to camera. What next? Who knows? But one thing is for certain: nobody will end up in jail.

And now the sun is shining, it's just gone 1000hrs and I'm still sitting at the table writing this post. Next up? A trip to London to pick up a tent, a muddy tent that went to Glastonbury a few weeks ago. All I can say is that there will be a ride tomorrow.