Dirty Diary

My favourite suggestion was the one that would replace all the seagulls with flying squirrels, though few further details were given as to how it would be achieved, who’d pay for it and what the post-Brexit implications would be. As for the best of the rest of the Reddit suggestions, I present them in no particular order and, as no self-respecting list these days works in units of 10, there’s only seven. But if you have a pair of scissors handy you can “vote” them up and down as you like, Reddit-style. Just mind your fingers.

1/ “Ban golf umbrellas anywhere that isn't a golf course” [Actually I'd extend that to golf courses as well, to discourage the popularity of the sport. We're going to have to build executive homes on all that green space sometime. Better sooner than later]

2/ “Make tagging punishable by official caning” [This is a reference to graffiti and to the practice of public punishment, considered unfashionable is most countries these days though not Saudi Arabia]

3/ “Put up a H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D style sign on Salisbury Crags” [Excellent idea. H-O-L-Y-R-O-O-D would be appropriate given how beautiful, handsome and A-listy are our elected representatives these days, not to mention shallow and venal]

4/ “Hand out free Vitamin D tablets and SAD lights” [crucial, especially between the start of January and the end of December]

5/ “Make Arthur's Seat a proper volcano again. It was a terrible idea to let it go extinct in the first place” [Again, this would need to be costed. But it would make the Beltane Fire Festival go with a bang]

6/ “Raze Pilton, Drylaw, Sighthill and Granton” [To make room for more replacement golf courses, presumably, though a considerable source of young football talent would dry up]

7/ “Drain the Edinburgh Council swamp” [This one may have crept in from the Donald Trump subreddit]

POP culture thrives on fanaticism. I mean where would Daniel O'Donnell be without the legion of middle-aged admirers whose ardour and £10 fan club membership fees long ago put him into the pantheon of greats? Exactly.

But if you think mania started with the Beatles, think again: the phrase Burnomania was coined in 1811 by a Reverend Dr William Peebles of Newton-on-Ayr as a snide description of the hullabaloo which was already descending on the memory of Robert Burns, 15 years cold by then. As Dundee-based historian Professor Christopher Whatley outlines in his new book, Immortal Memory, for most of the rest of the century, Burnomania was a potent force which could bring tens of thousands of tartan-bedecked patriots out onto the streets of Scotland's cities, as it did in 1859 during nationwide centenary celebrations. Granted, Rollermania did much the same a century later – but I don't see many seagulls perching on statues of Les McKeown these days.

URI Geller once told me that on the afternoon of June 15, 1996, he was in a helicopter flying over Wembley Stadium.

Anyone reading in a kilt, a pair of pretend-y Timberlands and a replica Scotland football top will know this as the day Paul Gascoigne scored that goal and Gary McAllister missed that penalty as England beat Scotland two-nil in the Euro 96 competition. The way Geller told it, it was all his doing.

I took it with a pinch of salt at the time – you would, wouldn't you? – and for most of the rest of the last two decades I've only ever thought about the Israeli psychic when I've bent a teaspoon trying to get the smoked paprika open.

But last week's release by the CIA of 13 million pages of declassified documents covering the years between 1940 and 1990 have made me revisit things. Maybe Geller had something after all. He has long claimed he was employed by various intelligence agencies and that his work as an entertainer was just cover. Now we can see that the CIA gave at least some credence to his powers: over eight days in August 1973 he was tested by them, with the agency concluding finally that he “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner”.

He did this partly through a series of drawings which tallied remarkably with the ones made by other people (and at one point a computer) who were in separate rooms or even separate cities. Among the drawings are a bunch of grapes, a firecracker, a drum and a seagull (or is it a flying squirrel?).

By the way, the document cache is searchable online and, believe it or not, there is actually some mention of flying squirrels: in a 1972 memo from Vietnam in which one George A Carver Jr writes to someone called Sid asking for help fixing his camera so he can photograph the ones that come to his bird feeder at night. Of course it could be code for something else entirely.

SO as argument continues to rage over whether “bigly” is a word, the man who tried to convince us it is has finally settled into the White House and all over the world people are doing what people do at this point in the US political cycle – they're taking down wax effigies of one president and replacing them with another.

In Paris, at the city's Grevin Museum, veteran sculptor Eric Saint Chaffray has used real human hair on the one he has made. He even has some tonsorial advice for the new president. “He has very long hair, and it's done in a sort of wave,” he says. “I think he spends a lot of time on his hair every day, and he may need a simpler style once he takes office.”

In London, the Madame Tussauds Trump was unveiled on Wednesday. Among those who worked on him was Sophie Cadgington, whose job title is hair inserter. Her Trump's hair consists of “yellow and golden tones” she says, though the colour of his perma-tanned skin is less easy to nail. Somewhere between teak and camel, I'd say, with a bit of posh paint-maker Farrow and Ball's Dead Salmon mixed in for good measure.

Actually they'd both have done well to just copy the magisterial description writer Marc Singer came up with in his celebrated New Yorker profile. Singer described Trump as “a bloated bloviator in a navy suit and bright, primary-coloured necktie, with a laboriously tended pumpkin-pink coif that grew nowhere in nature”. Lovely.

At the Madrid unveiling, finally, El Donaldo was upstaged by a naked feminist protestor who jumped up and grabbed him by the cojones, her back daubed with the slogan: “Grab patriarchy by the balls.”

“If they want to do this they should do it directly to him,” sniffed an unamused museum spokesman.

Now that I'd like to see.