BACTERIA news, and the civilised world is in a frothing ferment over fears that a post-Brexit UK-US trade deal will see decent ratepayers forced to eat chlorinated chicken.

Under this barbaric practice, the edible birds are washed in chlorine after they are deid. This cock-eyed cleansing was banned by the European Union in 1997, leading many observers to conclude that there can’t be much wrong with it.

To clarify: it’s not that consuming chlorine is bad for you. In America, they drink it by the pint. The problem lies in the somewhat hypothetical supposition that, with the chlorine being applied at the end of the rearing and slaughtering jolliness, chicken growers won’t bother about hygiene until then.

Top Americans point out that chlorine is used on vegetables by EU farmers, but as vegetables are reared on muck and poop anyway that isn’t much of an argument.

According to the BBC, a controversial news organisation, tests in America found the food-poisoning bacteria campylobacter in 30 per cent of chicken carcasses, rising to 58 per cent in meat reserved for rubbish like nuggets.

However, a significant strain of opinion in the controversial western superpower says, “Never did me any harm”, as evidenced in popular American dishes such as Cajun Salmonella and Bacillus Alaska.

In a surprise development, Americans suffer more from food poisoning than do Great Britons but, to be fair, that might just reflect the fact that they eat more food.

Americans don’t come any topper than the Duchess of Sussex, who waded into the row this week, saying how “badly wrong the US food systems are”. However, Woody Johnson, the US ambassador to the UK, said that fears over his country’s farming practices were “inflammatory and misleading”.

Impartial British observers – are there any other kind? – noted that, as with a columnist called Rab, you can’t take an ambassador called Woody seriously.

Suspicions have arisen that he is actually a folk singer moonlighting as an ambassador to make ends meet, just as I am supermarket shelf-stacker earning money on the side by writing influential and authoritative commentaries.

In all of this, it must be said that the poor chickens can’t even get a word in. It cannot be assumed that they don’t give a cluck. Indeed, I can speak authoritatively on their behalf as, a couple of years ago, I looked after six chickens at a homestead in East Lothian.

I will own that they are not the most amusing of pets. They cannot grasp the concept of fetching a stick and will not give you a paw. Their own standards of hygiene are poor, pooping willy-nilly, and they are always on edge, fearing irrationally that everything wants to eat them.

On the other hand, having come to know them, I did not think I could eat them. At the time, I didn’t eat meat anyway, as I was a pescatarian, which is the word for somebody who takes the pisces.

Now that I have become a flexitarian, I do eat chicken occasionally, though only if it is free-range and has been washed in Fairy Liquid with fabric softener.

The whole vexing business of UK-US trade deals has been caused by Brexit. It’s a premise of Vexit that, once we escape the stranglehold of Brussels, we’ll be free to trade with other countries, of which there are several in the world.

America and some other countries are quite a long way off, so the food will presumably have to spend months on boats, wherein one must presume it will be refrigerated. Is salmonella best fresh or frozen? That’s a question for another day.

NO one can accuse Sir Ranulph Fiennes of being chicken, chlorinated or otherwise. He has explored some right wild places and, while I do not approve of exploring (I wouldn’t mind if they did it in the privacy of their own home or at least quietly, but they always have to brag about it), I do admire a chap who can rough it.

Thus, whenever he visits yonder London, Sir Ranulph sleeps in his old Ford Mondeo rather than forking out for a hotel. He parks in the empty spaces of posh areas, because the oligarchs who live there are often abroad, carrying out muggings and so forth.

Alas, while he’s raised many millions for charity, this Fiennes fellow hasn’t made much for himself from mountaineering, for which you cannot charge spectators but have to earn loot by writing books aboot it.

He also gives lectures about how he got from A to B which, in his next adventure, will be a walk across the seabed from Robben Island to Cape Town in South Africa. Breathing is arguably quite important underwater, and he’ll have apparatus to enable this.

He’s also expected to encounter sharks, but these are likely to give him a wide berth, on the grounds that he is clearly loopy.

SOON, it seems, everyone will be short of cash, in the sense of readies. We are moving towards the cashless society, following in the footsteps of Sweden, officially recognised by the United Nations as the world’s maddest country.

Folk are getting into a fankle because they believe that doing away with cash will compromise our independence and let the banks control our lives. No change, so to say, there then.

Although I hardly use cash myself, other than down the pub (and I’ve never been there for ages) or bribing the bouncers at Herald Towers to let me in, I’m not sure I care for virtual, electronic money. Lord knows, I’ve lost countless photos and music albums when changing computer to make me believe now that it’s safer to have printed pictures and proper CDs.

Besides, I like the feeling you get when holding the folding stuff. Makes you feel like a man of substance, as distinct from a man whose wallet is full of nothing and whose worldly wealth is out there in the ether with that irritating minus sign always in front of it.