There was a time when Tony Blair’s voice was part of the background noise of this country. But since he spotted the danger ahead and deftly handed Gordon Brown the reins of the chariot of state as it hurtled towards the abyss, we have heard barely a squeak.

But where is he now, at a time when he should once again be strutting his stuff on the world stage? With a fresh, tragic crisis in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there is no sound from the Representative of the “Quartet” of interested parties – UN, EU, Russia and the US – a post to which Blair was appointed in June 2007, and in which he has not achieved any perceptible initiatives.

There is a curious and pleasing irony in the European Court of Human Rights’ decision in favour of the Sheffield Two, who have fought the British police through all domestic courts to have details of their DNA profiles removed from a national criminal register. The ruling as been almost universally applauded here, not least by those sections of the British public – the UKIP, the BNP and Tories of Little England tendencies – who most deplore the concept of “Europe” and indeed “Human Rights”.

Today was one of those days when provincial newspaper readers suffer from News Famine. None of the nationals on sale in South Shropshire knew that Obama had won, and they weren’t taking any chances on prognostication. For, despite his significant lead in the opinion polls, many commentators had been airing the view that when it came to that lonely moment in the polling booth, a lot of white folk would find they just couldn’t cast their vote for a black leader.

I have been fairly sure for a couple of months that they were wrong, as it became more clear that blackness was one of the least important of Obama’s characteristics.

In autumn 2005, just before the annual Tory Party Conference, Screws editor Andy Coulson ran a front page splash…

TOP TORY, COKE AND THE HOOKER

Illustrated with pictures of angel-faced Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, it claimed that eleven years before, while he was at Oxford, the then flawless Osborne was said, without any convincing corroboration, to have been watched by ‘dominatrix’ hooker, Natalie Rowe, snorting a line of coke. Her boyfriend, an unnamed friend of Osborne’s had gone on to become an addict, the report alleged.

Thank God for JS Bach and Glenn Gould, who sometimes, between them, seem to make more sense of the World than anyone – especially perhaps during the metamorphoses from ‘surgical patient’ to ‘well man’ in which I’m now listening to them.

Like many who have lain in a hospital bed for a few weeks, anticipating then recovering from the incision of a surgeon’s knife, I have found the sojourn rich in reflective material.

But relax; this is not a preamble to a self-indulgent exposé of those personal and abstract thoughts that appear so much richer in semi-delirium than they ever do on the page.

More immediate and practical topics also arose.