'Fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy night.” So snarled the incomparable Bette Davis in the 1950 classic, All About Eve. A cautionary tale of vaulting ambition, insidious power grabs, and Machiavellian machinations, in a story dominated by the amoral antics of a scheming arriviste. Hang on that sounds familiar. Wait… can it be it’s the sequel! All About Don - where once was stylish snarl, now is thudding idiocy.

“It’s a disaster, Col!, “the end of the world as we know it. And I don’t feel fine.” So goes the tidal wave of panic that washes up on the shore of news right now. Second by second. And it’s understandable. All bets are off. All previous expectations are null and void. And any idea of certainty has been shown the door – no, shown the window, where it has ejected itself from a great height, having slipped on a roller skate ‘accidentally’ left there.

Enough has been written about this stuff, so I am not going to dwell on the ‘whys’, ‘hows’ and ‘d’you think it mights’. The new idiocracy has feathered quite a few nests of quite a few newspaper columnists – it’s the magic porridge pot of satirical takes, shroud-waving, and pearl-clutching. Even lefties practise disaster capitalism. Don’t know what they pay per word at the Guardian, but Monbiot, Hyde et al must be quids in.

The same might be said about me of course – given I’m knocking out a screed of words about all this shizz - which would turn this into real self-skewering. Except, except… I do it for fun. At least until the Editor stages an intervention. So far, so good on that front. But I digress. Truth is – ah, the truth, remember that? – while I think it’s admirable to get angry about injustice, inequality, and the sheer gall of this one-man wrecking ball, you end up being owned by it all.

Which is to say, your mood, your thoughts, your very saline tears even, the more you allow them to be controlled by the news cycle, the more they become mere page boys in the Hall of the Orange Fool. Index-linked to one man’s death spiral. Worse still, they become grooms of the stool even dealing with the daily excrement. And while it is reasonable to say, “Well of course we worry, his actions will have a profound affect on us citizens of the world,” there’s a limit.

What your own particular limit is will depend on your reserves of tolerance, resilience, and a kind of thrawn positivity. I’m very short of the latter. Always have been. Not so much a ‘glass half-empty or half-full’ person as a ‘glass in my face’ person. Yep, physician heal thyself eh? But while picking the shards out of a morning the other week, a pertinent thought occurred to me…

Maybe, by leaning into the existential horror we can endure whatever comes our way with a smile. A manic smile. The smile of knowing however much crap they come out with, if we metaphorically smear ourselves in it and run naked and screaming towards ‘the guns’, it will be out-horror their horror. So, here are ways of channelling your horror to deal with these troubling times. NB. It’s satire, not an invitation to plunge headlong into misery or illegality.

1. All jobbies to be re-named ‘Donalds’

Lavatorial matters are never pleasant. Especially if you’re routinely getting leathered to forget all this crap; the morning after can be an ‘experience’, I can tell you. But I’ve given these brown lows a silver lining by referring to all defecation as ‘going for a Donald’ (Donald Trump = ‘dump’). Yep, as the world goes down the pan, so the reason for our ruin does too. Every single fricking day.

2. Invite Trump for a state visit to… Summerisle

All the principled sniffing about Trump’s state visit. Meh. You’ll tie yourself in knots. We’ve invited the Chinese Premier over and I didn’t see any signs calling him a ‘c*nt’. Reminder: China locks up dissidents, persecutes minorities, and is an authoritarian basket case. Instead, see it as an opportunity. Send Trump to ‘Summerisle’. By seaplane. And let ‘God’s will’ be done.

3. American ‘golf tourists’ to be sequestered on Bass Rock

In ye olde days, naughty people – aka anyone deemed undesirable - were locked up on Bass Rock. Nowadays it’s a bird toilet. That’s unfair. What I meant was, it’s a protective haven for birdlife. But there is A LOT of guano on there. Maybe, we sell it as a luxury resort to the Yanks who come to ‘do’ East Lothian’s Golf Coast. Welcome to your VIP lodgings, brad!!!!

4. Trump’s voice to be overdubbed with Donald Duck’s

Remember when the UK gov thought they’d end the Troubles by having actors voice the words of Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and other Irish Republicans? That’ll learn ‘em. It didn’t work. Negotiation, compromise and diplomacy did. Funny, that. But I think it would undermine the narcissist Trump if we put his every utterance through a ‘Donald Duck’ filter.

All the time. ■