Thegods always seem to find a way to punish us

start changing some attitudes out there – don’t honk at us, give us a wave! recognised for. Sisyphus, as every schoolboy no longer knows, was condemned by the gods to push a rock up a hill in hell. When he reached the top the rock rolled back down and he had to start again. This went on for ever. Shifting firewood feels similar.

Six cubic metres of firewood arrived by truck at the top of my drive. From there it needed to go another thirty yards to the woodshed. To help it on its way I had only a wheelbarrow and some former muscles. Trump to misery as clearly as if the gods had spoken.

Trump yearns to be loved, to be admired. Praise is the fuel he runs on. But his stupidity and vanity have trapped him in a job that is utterly beyond him. And everyone can see it. He is despised throughout the world. And worse, mocked. He cannot open a newspaper, turn on the television, without finding himself ridiculed. The world isn’t laughing behind his back. It’s laughing in front of his back. A recent survey revealed that the three words Americans associated most with Trump were idiot, incompetent and liar. For a narcissist such knowledge is torture.

And there is no one who can make this better. Toadies suck up to him. Everyone else shuns him or mocks him. So he wakes every morning in a froth of impotent solitary rage and he vents it on Twitter in words of ever more desperate self-justification. By doing so he only makes things worse, becomes more transparently absurd.

An added cruelty is that he’s nigglingly aware of his own shortcomings but can admit them only by trying to pin them on to

The ancient gods knew about the jaws of justice. Trump’s ‘torture’ is proof of that.