The 10-year challenge is catnip to narcissists. Speaking of which ...

Monday

Take your pick. Either Gillette must be struggling to believe their luck or their marketing bods have done a brilliant job creating a backlash to their new advert to send it viral. I’ve watched it several times now and I’m still struggling to see what all the fuss is about. It’s basically just a slick sales pitch in which men are shown they can learn how to behave decently towards women and not bully each other, providing they shave regularly and don’t grow beards. Hardly controversial you would have thought, but it’s enough to have sent some rightwing organisations and Piers Morgan into a meltdown. For someone who has built a career out of saying the outrageous, Morgan has turned out to be a bit of a snowflake himself. He immediately announced he was boycotting all Gillette products because the advert was an affront to masculinity. Men should be allowed to be real men. Gillette must be gutted to lose his business. But it makes you wonder what kind of advert would make Morgan happy. Perhaps one where a man lies in bed while his wife gets the children up, before going to the bathroom where he farts loudly while shaving. He smiles, because that’s the best a man can get.

Tuesday

One of the side-effects of getting older I had never anticipated is that significant anniversaries now come around with ever greater frequency, making almost every year a landmark in some way or other. Today while filling in a form, my wife and I suddenly realised we had been living in the same house for 25 years. Far longer than I have ever lived anywhere else, longer than our grownup son has been alive. By the time I was his age, my parents had moved house four times. Nor can I really ever imagine moving, other than to one of the care homes that keep sending me mailshots. Give it another 20 years and their persistence might pay off. But the unexpected anniversary has made us wonder if it was about time we had a house-warming party. Something we never got round to when we first moved in, partly because the house was in a bit of a state but mainly because we are instinctively lazy. And by the time the house was done up a bit, we didn’t really fancy inviting friends round to mess it up. Besides we had two children who were more than capable of doing that by themselves. We did once have a party of sorts to celebrate our 51st birthdays – we had both been too depressed to do anything a year earlier for a joint 50th – but we now reckon it might be time to have another. All the stars are aligned. Not just the 25th anniversary but the fact that the house is back to looking almost as tatty as when we moved in. Largely thanks to the kids and the dog. Our friends can consider they have been put on notice. All we need to screw things up is a second referendum or a general election.

Wednesday

The BBC has been criticised for continuing with its live coverage of the FA Cup third round replay between Southampton and Derby on BBC One and relegating the prime minister’s statement outside Downing Street to BBC Two. In Westminster we thought we’d all had enough of Theresa May earlier in the day during the damp squib of a no-confidence debate which everyone knew she was going to win. Her own opening speech had been a dismal, passionless affair in which she appeared to be making a good case for why she should resign and it was telling that the most passionate speaker in her defence was Michael Gove. And even he found time to take the piss out of her by describing her as “inspirational”. Once the no-confidence vote had been won, May made a short statement in the Commons, declaring she would be happy to engage in talks with the leaders of other parties. But only if they were happy to talk to her about the things she wanted to talk about: mostly about what kind of deal she could get for the DUP to continue to keep her in a job. It wasn’t the most enticing of invitations. So when the lobby heard May was going to make a Downing Street statement at 10pm there was a mini-panic. Could it be she was going to do something dramatic, such as offering Corbyn a general election later in the year in return for Labour backing her deal? Er … no. Of course not. This was Theresa May. All she did was repeat what she had said earlier about talking to people about why she wasn’t going to listen to them. The Beeb made exactly the right call. Enough was enough.

Thursday

On the subject of anniversaries … There is a new fad doing the rounds of the internet called the “10-year challenge” in which people post photos of themselves as they are now and how they looked in 2009. The subtext to this is that everyone is supposed to marvel at how amazing you looked 10 years ago and/or how devastatingly wonderful you have now become in a more mature kind of way. It is obviously catnip for many narcissists and though I bow to no one in my narcissism – a few politicians excepted – it may not surprise you to know I won’t be joining in. Largely because there are no photos of me from 2009 or 2019 in which I don’t look either hideously moronic or just hideous. I’ve even had people email to say they enjoy my writing, but could I do something about the byline picture? I’ve had to explain that – much as I wish it were otherwise and struggle to accept it myself – I really do look like that and that it is far worse for me than it is for them. I also think the 10-year challenge is inherently flawed and a more interesting exercise would be to upload photos from every year as that way everyone can tell when things went really pear-shaped. My friends Simon and Olivia have patented the concept of “having the year”. Rather than ageing gradually, they reckon most people look pretty much the same to the outside world for years on end. Then there comes a time when you haven’t seen them for a while when you suddenly realise they have aged 10 years almost overnight. Think about it. You know it’s true.

Friday

On the bus to work, when I’m not worrying about what potentially life-changing disaster the government has got lined up for the rest of the day, I often keep myself entertained trying to work out who has been the worst prime minister of the past 150 years. And it always comes down to the same two people. Theresa May or David Cameron. You might have thought that by now May would be edging it: after all, it takes a special kind of genius to trigger article 50 without having a clue what you want to do next, to call a snap election to give you a minority government, to impose unnecessary red lines on your Brexit negotiations, to be found in contempt of parliament, to lose a vote on your budget, to go down to the worst ever defeat in the Commons and still lack the basic skills to articulate whether you have a policy or not. But even after all this, Dave still gets the nod, both for his ideological pursuit of austerity and the thoughtless, casual way in which he has split the country for decades to come by calling a referendum that only a small minority of his own party wanted. I suspect he knows it, too. Though he breezes around giving a pretty good impression of someone in denial, recent photos of him on holiday in Costa Rica capture a man who is tormented by his failure. That’s why he has found it so hard to complete his memoirs in his £25K shed. He’s reached the point in his story where all his energies are directed at avoiding the unavoidable damning conclusion on himself.

Digested week, digested: Yet again, nothing has changed. As we were.