Dirty Diary

Better still, he's done it in a form even the new American President will be able to understand as he tears another page out of the Paris Agreement on climate change to use instead of loo roll – a Ladybird book.

Admittedly recent Ladybird titles have included guides to Hipsters, Students, Dads and The Zombie Apocalypse but, while that last title is somewhat relevant where the new man in Washington is concerned, this is something different, one of a series of Ladybird Expert titles which include serious books on Evolution and Quantum Physics. Gaun yerself, son. I mean Your Right Royal Highnessness.

The new book runs to 5000 words and 48 pages in all, and has been written by HRH in conjunction with Tony Juniper, formerly head of Friends Of The Earth, and the British Antarctic Survey's dudette-in-chief Dr Emily Shuckburgh, a polar scientist and all-round brainiac. Other experts have given it the once-over too and it has even been peer-reviewed – which has nothing to do with that bunch of titled layabouts who pooter around the House of Lords tearoom in ermine baffies and everything to do with people who know what they're actually talking about.

Rumours that further titles in the Ladybird Expert series will see HRH tackle the history of the flat white, how to talk to trees and why the SFA thought it was a good idea to let Rod Stewart do the Scottish Cup draw could not be verified at the time of writing. But I'm sure Buzzfeed will print them anyway.

LET me get this right. According to various health studies and nanny state encyclicals published recently, toast that’s the colour toast is supposed to be is bad for you because it raises the risk of cancer. And roast potatoes that are the colour roast potatoes are supposed to be are bad for you because they raise the risk of cancer. And turmeric, previously deemed a superfood, has few if any of the health benefits ascribed to it and is therefore not so good for you that it’s able to lower the risk of cancer. And even if you stop eating toast and roast potatoes and figure out what to do with all that turmeric you’ve stockpiled, it won’t make any difference because even worrying about the risk of cancer is bad for you. Guess why: because it raises the risk of cancer.

If you want the science behind all this it has to do with curcumin (found in turmeric and “a waste of time” according to one expert), acrylamides (found in spades in spuds) and something called the Maillard Reaction (which is what turns the toast and the roast potatoes that Trumpian bronze colour). The words of warning, meanwhile, come from the Journal Of Medicinal Chemistry, a joint study by the University of Edinburgh and University College London, and the Food Standards Agency.

Do you ever think the scientists should just shut up? Me too. Keep calm and carry on with the Sunday fry-up, I say.

I KNOW The Doomsday Clock sounds like the title of the next Metallica album but it isn't. It's actually a clock, albeit a symbolic one. It was dreamed up in 1947 by a publication called the Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists, which is what Robert Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project boys liked to kick back with when they weren't designing ways to cook everyone in their own skins. A bit like The Daily Prophet in Harry Potter, only without the moving pictures.

Anyway, the idea behind The Doomsday Clock is that it lets scientists move a symbolic big hand towards or away from a symbolic midnight to tell us how close we are to a decidedly un-symbolic doomsday. Or, as sunny co-founder Eugene Rabinowitch once put it, to map “basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age”. Yikes.

Now the bad news. The latest Bulletin has just been published and, as of last Thursday, we're at two and a half minutes to midnight, 30 seconds closer than last year and the second closest point we've reached in the last 70 years. Yes, even closer than when Craig Levein took over as Scotland manager.

If you needed another reason to be nostalgic for 1991 besides Cher's The Shoop Shoop Song, then here it is: back then we were a whopping 17 minutes away from annihilation, thanks to the end of the Cold War and a series of arms limitation accords which saw deep cuts made to the world's nuclear arsenals. In 2016, however, the situation “darkened” says the Bulletin, with nuclear weapons and climate change remaining “existential threats”, and “wavering public confidence in the democratic institutions” and “strident nationalism” adding to the problems.

And no, this is not a wind-up. Boom boom.

HOPEFULLY Theresa May learned how to pronounce the word "quaich" before she presented teetotaller Donald Trump with one during their strange little chinwag last week.

And hopefully she did better than ignorant Newsnight reporter Nicholas Watt, who had a couple of stabs at pronunciation on Wednesday night's programme and then, worrying perhaps that he'd just insulted presenter Emily Maitlis in Gaelic, opted for “quake”, which I suppose is close enough.

Mind you, it's not the oddest gift that British prime ministers and their American counterparts have traded. George Bush gave Gordon Brown a fur-trimmed leather bomber jacket – never seen him wearing it, have you? – and President Obama gave Broon a bunch of DVDs, among them Star Wars, Raging Bull and Psycho. Meanwhile the one gift President Trump does actually seem to want, the PM is not minded to give him: Nigel Farage, who The Donald would like to see posted to Washington as British ambassador to the US. Suits me, as long as they use the right stamps and don't put a return address. We really don't need him back.

PS: Rumours that Vladimir Putin is going to present President Trump with a gift-wrapped Edward Snowdon could not be verified at the time of publication. But, again, Buzzfeed will probably print them anyway.