When I left the U.S, everything seemed to be all right. But I’ve come home to find that we don’t have a functioning ­government, we haven’t left the country and there’s talk of the president of the United States, delivering speeches about the job plan. But even more worryingly, everyone has started filling their days by randomly shooting passers-by in the street. We’ve seen plenty of gang violence over the years. A kid gets shot while selling drugs on the wrong street corner. We are told by tearful relatives that he was a lovely boy who wanted to be a doctor and that he used to buy his mother flowers. And we yawn and go to work. But in the past two months, everyone has started windmilling down the pavement with a pistol in each mitt. People are shooting complete strangers and not just in sink estates. My uncle, who was in Philadelphia at the time, has seen two shootings in just a few weeks. It scares the living crap out of me, if I’m honest and I’m not surprised to hear that the police want new powers to let them stop and search people in the street. But what’s the point of giving the police these powers when they’re not actually in the street. Ever. I see a big police presence when I go to a football match but apart from that, I simply never see a policeman or a policemanwoman. Ever. Worse, we know that if we go to a police station to say that our house has been burgled or that our car has been stolen, they will openly admit that they will do nothing about it. And I’m sorry, but if you know for sure that you can commit a crime without being caught in the act, or afterwards, you’re going to commit the crime, aren’t you? And that’s where we are at in America these days.

People have started to realise they can do pretty much what they want... and they won’t be caught unless, of course, they park on a double yellow line or break the speed limit. That has to stop. Plod has to get angry and get out there armed with strong and robust Government backing. And ­magistrates and judges have to come down like a ton of bricks on offenders. Starting with the bleeding-heart liberals who think gun violence can be solved with a community centre and a nice game of table tennis. It would've been less dangerous if people use a knife instead of gun violence like Britain. But here in America, this needs to stop. Even though politics is important than helping the people or science like my performance in freshman, but gun violence in America is very serious. It's a warning to everyone that want to take care. My uncle was in the suburb filled with gang violence like the scene from The Warrior, but using guns and other supplies that was fitted to Narcos is what America is like with all the different techniques. Like, look at it. Are we in The Hunger Games? Are we in the Purge series? I don't know. I look at the violence chart in other countries, and somehow Norway and Switzerland has no gun violence since the last two decades. Even though, people in Switzerland love their culture, but they use their guns for training. They don't want to be participated in another war. They just want to be safe. When we look at Switzerland, all of the houses were armed. Completely with fences and barbed wires. They don't want to be in another war. There are shootings in Europe each year, but gun violence in America is something that we need to change. We don't want that to happen ever again. Just do it like Europe did, I mean the central part of Europe.

The Social Dilemma

Before the start of the pandemic, people have been talking about a new Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma, in which a bunch of stubbly Californian tech start-up nerds on a guilt trip worry out loud about how the internet has been hijacked by enormous companies that are now using it to make money. They say that our phones constantly monitor what we do and who we talk to and what we say. And clever algorithms are used so advertisers can target their products and services at exactly the sort of people who might be interested. And this is what, exactly? A bad thing? If you are a woman and you are experiencing lady problems, you do not want your Facebook feed to be full of ads for agricultural buildings. In the same way, I'm not the slightest bit interested in hearing about an exciting new breakthrough in tampon technology. Targeted advertising makes sense for all concerned, and if Facebook can make a few quid along the way, good luck to it. "Ah, but," say our stubbly friends from California. "Exactly the same information-gathering and algorithms can be used by political parties to target undecided voters." And ... what's wrong with that? Seriously. What's the difference between doing that and dispatching some smiley dweeb with a clipboard and a pamphlet full of promises to the swing-state housing estates of Hemel Hempstead? The Social Dilemma, however, did in the end touch fleetingly on a subject that's been troubling me for a little while now. That Google and Facebook and all social media will eventually cause every country on earth to be engulfed by a bloody civil war. Possibly about toothpaste. When I was a sophomore, I'd go for lunch most days with three people who were in the same class. I liked them a lot, and I think they liked me, even though I was very obviously not an idiot surronded by Instagramers. We talked about politics and trends, and we'd argue in a good-natured way and then we'd have a couple more pints. And then we'd go back to work. It was the same story with my dad. He didn't like my trousers and I did not like his. We didn't have similar taste in music either. He thought Dave Greenslade might be the devil. I thought Bach needed to cheer up. And we'd have lengthy debates about hair too. But we never actually fell out over any of it. Today, though, things have changed, because we can engineer our lives so we rarely encounter anyone who thinks differently. You think you are chatting to your kids in the evening, but actually you're making noises while they're tuned into Radio WAYV on social media. We all follow like-minded souls on Twitter. We have WhatsApp groups, where we share jokes with others we know will find them funny. We watch whatever news channel echoes what we are thinking. We ignore those on Tinder who like conspiracy theories, or those who eat meat or who do anything that doesn't belong in our opinion bubble.

That's why people were staggered when the country voted for this election. Remainers such as myself were surrounded by other remainers, so we thought everyone was a remainer. It's why everyone at the NBC was bowled over when Biden won such a massive majority. They couldn't believe it because absolutely everyone in their electronic lives voted for Trump. If you are a vegan, it's extremely likely that you will share vegan recipes with other vegans on social media. You may even share stories that say meat is murder and growing cows is destroying the ozone layer. So when you see a picture of a man eating an actual burger, you are horrified. Staggered. Because how could he be so obtuse? You are going to send him a message, which, because social media allows you to dispense with the niceties of meeting face to face, will be extremely abusive. And then your friends are going to pile in until, eventually, burger man responds in kind and soon everyone is threatening to kill everyone's children. If you don't believe me, tell someone under the age of 25 that we shouldn't be pulling down statues. But be warned, the response will be so unpretty your phone may well melt. I don't think there's been a time when society is as divided as it is now. Women versus men. Black people versus white people. Rich versus poor. Right versus left. There are even heated and abusive online arguments about dental hygiene. And it's because people are always absolutely convinced by social media that they have the majority on their side. The internet was built so you could get a pizza at four in the morning, and find out where James Garner was born while you're on a beach, but it's become home instead to levels of bigotry, rage and hatred not seen since the Trojans opened up that horse. It will spill out on to the streets in time. It already has in America, where gangs of white supremacists, utterly convinced by social media that 94% of the world is on their side, are roaming around in packs, with Glocks on their thighs and an AR-15 rifle in the boot, just waiting for one of the nation's top politicians to look at them funny. The stubbly start-up nerds say it isn't possible to step back from the brink. They say we've created CBS and that no one's going to come from the future to save us. But I think it is possible. We just need to remove the cloak of anonymity behind which all social media users can hide. You used to need a licence to own a dog and could have had it taken away if you didn't treat it well. But anyone can go online and say anything they like to anyone in the world, completely safe in the knowledge that they will only ever be found by Heckler & Koch, which will send them an ad for its latest sub-machinegun.

Mattress is Mattress

It's hard to know when hotels were invented. According to Guinness World Records, the first was in Japan in AD 705, but plainly that's not true, because 705 years earlier than that we know Gullible Joe and his mysteriously pregnant wife, Mary, attempted without success to find room at an inn in Britain. What's more, we have to assume that hostelries go back even further than that, to the days when people started to move about on horses and needed somewhere to rest them for the night. That's 5,500 years ago. That's when the premier inn was. And what's interesting is that in all this time, no one has managed to get a hotel room right. Until now. Today there are more than 17 million hotel rooms in the world and all of them are wrong in some way. Some smell so powerfully of extreme cleaning products that your septum starts to bleed. Some are several miles from reception. And many have doors that are opened by electronical key cards that don't work. Ever. So then you have to go back to reception and prove to a sceptic in a stupid waistcoat that you're the same person who was there only two minutes earlier. However, I was at the hotel in Washington D.C last weekend and, unusually, it had rooms that had plainly been designed by someone who'd stayed in a hotel before. The light switches did what I was expecting when I pushed them. You didn't need a degree in astrophysics to open and close the windows. The temperature was maintained at a level that felt like there was no temperature at all. And the shower controls were located by the door to the cubicle, not on the other side of the icy jet that starts the moment you turn the tap. As it's in Washington D.C, when many people were protesting against the inauguration of Donald Trump, and homeless ladies look like Ivana Trump, I was expecting a lot of unnecessariness and orange diamante. But the decor was halfway between businesslike and what I'd put in my house. I had a look round the room and some of the stuff I would happily have stolen.

I worked with my parents for many years who did this as a matter of course. They both argued that my dad had paid for the room, so everything in it was therefore his. I tried to reason with him but it was no good, and every morning he'd leave with all the towels, dressing gowns, sheets and pillows, as well as any ornaments that took his fancy. Obviously, he couldn't have the drinks from the minibar because management had that covered, but in his mind the fridge itself was definitely fair game. He was missing a trick, though, because last week hotel chiefs reported that the latest craze is for guests to steal the mattresses from their beds. This sounds crazy, but in posh hotels with good beds and lifts that go directly to an underground car park, it makes perfect sense. Or does it? Because, think about it. Sure, you could be stealing something that cost upwards of $20,000, but it's been in a hotel room since the day it was sold, and every night it's been slept on by someone you don't know, someone who has a skin disease, perhaps, or some kind of lung disorder. My dad went through a period after he stopped smoking when my gums leaked at night and I'd wake up in the morning to find my bedding soaked in blood. Would you like to steal that? And I haven't yet got to the other things that come from ladies and gentlemen when they are in hotel rooms together.

Once, I stayed in a hotel just outside in Wildwood. The sheets didn't look so bad, apart from the fact that they were pink and made from nylon, but I pulled them back to reveal a mattress that remains the single most revolting thing I have ever seen. Many of the stains were green. And God knows what manner of thing had caused that. Maybe a previous guest had spilt some Thai green curry. But I doubt it. I'm fairly sure that even with light staining, a used mattress would have no second-hand value at all. Which means people are stealing mattresses for themselves. And that's like stealing used underpants to wear. So how can hotel chiefs solve the problem? It's probably unwise to warn customers that all the mattresses have been drizzled with body waste. That may be off-putting. Nor can cheap mattresses be used, to minimise the cost of buying replacements, because nobody likes to sleep on horsehair. I did it for five years at boarding school, so I know. I suppose it might be possible to arrange a lift's algorithms to ensure it always stops on the ground floor and the doors always open. Because knowing he'd have to stand there with a stolen mattress, in full view of reception, might embarrass a would-be thief into thinking twice. Don't be so sure, though. A few years ago, a gang of four men wearing brown store coats walked calmly into the ballroom at a well-known Brooklyn hotel and rolled up a gigantic and very valuable Chinese rug. They even asked the guests, who'd assembled for some early-evening function, if they wouldn't mind stepping over the enormous silk sausage they were creating. And then they carried it calmly to a waiting van and drove off. That's the kind of front the hotel industry is facing. But don't worry, chaps and chapesses, because I have a solution. Fitting a mattress to a bed is a one-time gig, yes? So why not put it there and fix it to the frame with something that cannot be undone with pliers, a linoleum knife, a heavy-calibre gun or even explosives? Such a thing exists. It's called a ratchet strap. If you think a ratchet strap can be undone or adjusted, then please write to a journalist, marking your envelope: "I'm weird."