VEGAN sausage rolls, eh. Judging by the reaction of some folk online yesterday, they seem to be quite clearly a harbinger of the apocalypse.

The outrage over this even made the very normal, reasonable and calm Piers Morgan lose the plot. So much so he claimed he had just ordered a large, “real meat” sausage roll from the room service in his hotel. There’s only one loser in this scenario and it’s definitely the lonely old man, foaming at the mouth eating a sausage roll in his wee hotel room.

My favourite perfectly calm and logical reaction to the new sausage roll was some young guy in England travelling to a Greggs, queuing, ordering one and handing over real money for it before filming himself walking outside and putting it in a bin. That’ll really show they pesky vegans, mate.

I do wonder if the vegan sausage roll is a propaganda tool designed to deflect our attention away from the fact that our government, which appears to be loosely held together with Blu Tack, Pritt Stick and bits of old chewing gum, is coming apart.

I like to imagine (well I don’t like to imagine it as such, as she actually gives me nightmares) Theresa May sitting with a wee bag full of Scrabble tiles with nouns written on them. She sticks one of her lizard hands in, while ignoring her Brexit responsibilities, rummages about and pulls out that week’s distraction. “Drones,” she says, her forked tongue flickering in and out. “That’ll do. Could bring an entire airport to its knees with a drone. Cancel a few flights, leave a few thousand passengers stranded. Next week we’ll arrest some poor souls for it, ruin their lives for a laugh then say there may not even have been any drones at all! Genius.”

Then she beckons in an intern and tells them to get some quotes from the printers for ration books. She dips her scaly hand back into the pouch, pulls out a tile reading “sausage rolls” and smiles. “Poor people like sausage rolls.” Her brow is furrowed and menacing now. “Vegan ones will really upset those plebs. Let’s start the new year off with a bang.”

Meanwhile, ScotRail have carried over into 2019 their unwavering dedication to banter. Commuters headed back to work this week, grudgingly paid the increased fare for their tickets only to be greeted with yet more delayed and cancelled trains. ScotRail is essentially the Alfredo Morelos of the transport world; raking in a fortune to just have a laugh and noise people up.

My favourite news story of this year so far, it’s early days but it’s going to be hard to top, comes from Australia. Someone was walking by a house in Perth when they heard the occupant scream, ‘WHY DON’T YOU DIE?!’ Followed by the wails of a toddler. The passer-by phoned the polis in a panic and multiple units were dispatched to the house. Flashing lights, armed officers, sirens, everything.

A now-deleted Twitter post from the polis in Perth revealed what had actually happened inside the house; no infanticide or anything like that – the occupant had simply been trying to kill a spider. The tweet from the polis added that he had a “serious fear” of spiders. Fair play to the big man. He still reacted calmer to a potentially deadly spider in his home than Piers Morgan would have to finding a rogue vegan sausage roll.

There’s not many things I enjoy more than a really interesting crime story in the news. Heists and robberies especially. When that cash machine went missing at T in the Park a few years back I was in my element. A whole cash machine just being lifted right out of the festival? How? Plus the culprits have never been caught and I really can’t help but admire their audacity.

That story is one of my favourites of all time but was almost topped when footage from earlier in 2018 started doing the rounds of someone using a digger to break into a Lidl in Dublin so they could steal the safe. About as subtle as, well, using a digger to break into a supermarket.

But genuinely both of these heists were topped for me this week in Rome. A van, delivering pensions to be distributed in the town of Matera, was travelling along the road when it was blocked in by two lorries. What happened next is, to me, the most damning evidence that the world we live in is just a computer simulation ran by some wee alien guy in his maw’s spare room who’s seen too many action films. Two diggers tore into the van and just absolutely ripped it apart to get to the money inside. If you seen that happen in some film starring The Rock, you’d be like that, “Nah, that’s just ridiculous, as if that would ever happen.”

2019 isn’t even a week old and it’s already shaping up to be the most ridiculous year ever.