HAS Sean Penn written the worst celebrity novel ever published? It's a question those critics still in therapy after reviewing Morrissey's 2015 effort probably hoped they'd never have to answer. But answer they must, and answer they have.

The work in question is titled Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. The really vicious critiques have come on social media and I'll turn to them presently. But first to what Donald Trump would call MSM. Trump features in the novel, by the way, and is the recipient of this chilling message from Penn's protagonist, Bob Honey: “You are not simply a president in need of impeachment, you are a man in need of an intervention. We are not simply a people in need of an intervention, we are a nation in need of an assassin.”

The Huffington Post's Claire Fallon certainly didn't pull her punches. In a review headlined Sean Penn The Novelist Must Be Stopped she called the novel “garbage” and “an exercise in ass-showing”, and its author “a craggy white man with an unearned sense of intellectual superiority and a well-thumbed thesaurus”. She added: “When I say that Bob Honey is reminiscent of a fever dream, I mean that it’s nonsensical, unpleasant and left me sweaty with mingled horror and confusion.”

The New York Times was no kinder. Critic Jeff Giles called the book “a riddle wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in crazy” and said it “induces something like Stockholm syndrome – you admire the novel just because you're surviving it”.

On social media, the knives were really out. “Exhibit 1 in a trial for murder of the English language,” wrote one Twitter user. “Remember when Joey uses a thesaurus to write a recommendation letter in Friends?” asked another. “This is the literary equivalent of sitting on the toilet with crippling diarrhea [sic], furiously masturbating while maintaining constant eye contact with yourself in a mirror,” opined a third. Ouch. Literally.

But there was special opprobrium reserved for the six page poem on the theme of #MeToo which Penn includes as a sort of epilogue. One Twitter user called Cher (not that one, as she herself points out) said everything there was to say with a simple meme. It shows an empty room – an indication, she said, of the number of people who wanted to read a poem about #MeToo by Sean Penn.

CHIP SHOP DREAMS

TAKE courage, Remainers, there may be hope after all. More than that, there may be evidence that Brexit won't be the political, cultural, economic and societal car crash that 99% of sane commentators foresee (no, I never thought I'd write those words either).

It comes courtesy of Young's Seafood, a company best known for being Grimsby Town FC's shirt sponsor but which also makes fish fingers, breaded scampi and the culinary bricolage that is the Smoked Haddock, Cheddar And Mozarella Fishcake.

In what seems to me a direct result of the UK taking back control of its own waters – if not imminently, then as soon as the EU decides we can leave the Common Fisheries Policy – the company is hiring. So there you go. Brexit = jobs, just like they said.

Actually make that job, because the position in question is for a Chief Chip Shop Taster to run the rule over the company's Chip Shop range. Duties include “Living and breathing the love of the chippy” (easy for me), “Being enthusiastic and excited about perfecting the Young’s Chip Shop products” (if I must) and “Tasting the Young’s Chip Shop products and providing honest and objective feedback” (does that include the Smoked Haddock, Cheddar And Mozarella Fishcake?).

You have to apply online via the Young's website and tell them, in 200 words, why you should have the job. Better still, tell them why I should have it. Either way, this is exactly the sort of thing Michael Gove was talking about when he said Brexit would bring us “a sea of opportunities”. Isn't it?

NYET VLADIVOSTOK

SAY all you like about the Russian government's tolerance for vote-rigging, its awful human rights record, the lying and dissembling of its office holders, its reckless policy of conquest, its involvement in overseas assassinations, its injurious use of cyber warfare – at least it put the issue of which US consulate to close to a Eurovision-style public vote. This as part of the tit-for-tat expulsions following the Skripal poisoning affair, of course.

And it wasn't just the Russian public that was allowed to decide. Thanks to social media, the vote was thrown wide open, so when I cast mine via the Twitter feed of the Russian Embassy in Washington, I opted for the consulate in Vladivostok. Well, I felt sorry for it: it was languishing in the third place at the time with only 18% of the vote, while St Petersburg was way out ahead with 47%.

But as is often the case where Russian elections are concerned – certainly ones which have a certain V Putin on the ballot paper – I needn't have bothered. As the most high profile of the three, it was always going to be the St Petersburg consulate which would close.

On the subject of Eurovision, have you heard the Russian entry for next month's competition? It's even worse than ours. My £100 in bitcoin is on Ukraine's Melovin for his song Under The Ladder – despite the fate-tempting title, I think he'll be lucky on the night – and on Norway's Alexander Rybak. Mind you, if he ends up with nul points, as several of his compatriots have in previous competitions, he's going to have egg in his face: his entry is called That's How You Write A Song.

DEVIL IN THE DETAIL

MARK Twain once said: “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company”. But anyone who opts for the second might have trouble finding it, if Pope Francis is to be believed.

In an interview published in La Repubblica last week, the Pontiff appeared to deny the existence of the fire and brimstone place, telling the paper's 93-year-old founder Eugenio Scalfari that “those who do not repent and cannot be forgiven disappear. A hell doesn’t exist, the disappearance of sinning souls exists.”

Crash! That was the sound of two thousand years of Christian doctrine being over-turned. Thump! That was sales of Dante's Inferno going through the floor faster than the Facebook share price. Meh! That was AC/DC's Highway To Hell album losing some of its devilish lustre.

Hang on a minute, says the Vatican. Pope Francis didn't actually say that. And even if he did you can't prove it because this was a private meeting not an interview and there's no recording. And it issued a statement to that effect, pointing out that the “literal words pronounced by the pope are not quoted” and that as Scalfari's article was a “reconstruction” then “no quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father”.

Got that? Loud and clear. Still, it gives us something to chew on this Easter Sunday that isn't a chocolate egg or a Smoked Haddock, Cheddar And Mozarella Fishcake.