You might think there was little to connect the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, the Glastonbury music festival and conflicting opinions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but I beg to differ. Permit me to elucidate.

Picture the scene: it is January 2029 and the 48th US president, a Democrat, is in the Oval Office, having achieved a comfortable win over Republican candidate J.D. Vance in the November 2028 election.

One Saturday evening in March 1988, in my office at the Northern Ireland newspaper that I edited at the time, I was sitting with my news editor watching the TV news.

One morning in early June 1967, when I was 14, I took the bus to school having read in the newspaper over breakfast that Egypt, Syria and Jordan were at war with Israel.

There is a scene in the hysterically funny 2009 movie “In the Loop” in which the bellicose US military attache Lt. Gen. George Miller, played by the late James Gandolfini, accosts Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed British government spin doctor played by the Scottish actor Peter Capaldi.

I have a friend in London who is irredeemably posh and takes great delight in mocking football fans, who he deems to be classless oiks — including me, and we’re supposed to be friends.

There is much angst among the Western liberal cognoscenti over the “peace agreement” with Russia currently being foisted on the Ukrainian people by the Trump administration in Washington, chiefly on the ground that it is less a peace agreement and more a capitulation.

Greater economic minds than mine (it’s not a high bar, to be honest) have generated a tsunami of words in the past week on the subject of what Donald Trump called “Liberation Day,” so it need not detain us for long today.

To my astonishment, I discovered last week that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced in The Beatles by a lookalike Scottish orphan called Billy Shears, who has been masquerading as the legendary musician ever since.