And finally ...

MY dad was once interrupted by the police while burying our dog Trudy in the grounds of a local church. “What the f*** you playing at, mate?” they apparently enquired.

I don’t know what my dad was playing at either. He had little faith in anything beyond his next ciggie, making Richard Dawkins look like Billy Graham. Yet, he loved that dog – and like most of us in our agnostic clouds of fuzzy logic, my dad perhaps thought “well, just in case”.

So did old Trudy’s immortal soul ascend to Heaven? Well, despite never biting anyone, giving a paw for treats and always eating her dinner, no.

Yet, one Scottish medium, “psychic barber” Gordon Smith – the UK’s “most accurate”, apparently – claims my dad’s near-arrest was not in vain.

He believes Trudy has simply entered another room in the great cosmic house of trans-dimensional planes. Not only that, Gordon claims that he could perhaps even make contact with her. “Because I’m used to having animals around me it feels natural when a deceased pet comes into contact,” he is quoted as saying.

Gordon recently sold out his rather wittily-named “Best of Both Worlds” show at Glasgow’s Pavilion. “For entertainment purposes”, stated the poster – which, admirably, also makes an effort to clarify to his predominantly elderly, perhaps Brexit-inclined audience, that it was the EU to blame for his demotion to mere “entertainer”.