IT is a scene to send a drip of ice cold sweat down the stiffest spine. A young woman attends the place her former classmate perished. She reaches down to place flowers on the ground – only for a hand to thrust out of the soil and grab her.
Toby Young might lay claim to a similar Carrie-style nightmare, only in his case the hand is clutching a mobile phone, or an iPad, or an old copy of The Spectator; any one of a number of items in which the journalist made comments now coming back to haunt him.
For those unfamiliar with Mr Young, he is one of those aspects of life which exist on the margins, like wasps. For 99% of the time one need pay no heed, but now and again they are the cause of some unpleasantness.
This time, it is his appointment to the Office for Students, a new regulatory body set up by the government to uphold standards in universities, which is causing a row. As its remit does not include Scotland, this might have been of little interest, bar confirming Westminster’s place as one of the world’s smallest villages. Mr Young, a ex-colleague of  Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, was appointed by Jo Johnson, the Universities Minister, and Boris’s brother. Ho hum.
The Young tale is more noteworthy in showing the extent to which no-one can now escape their published past. In his case, some of the comments were made in printed articles or books, traditional published forms. But like millions of others he also shared his opinions on the internet. 
Quite the viewpoints they were, too, the kind of stuff that makes you want to put your brain through a car wash after reading. Working class students? “Stains” said the Oxford graduate. Access for disabled pupils? “Schools have got to be ‘inclusive’ these days. That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library … and a special educational needs department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy.”
As for women, Mr Young’s musings are straight out of Confessions of a Window Cleaner (“Serious cleavage behind Ed Miliband’s head” was his comment while watching PMQs), and worse. One could not possibly repeat his comment about a US television host for fear of any children or skittery horses being in the vicinity. A piece he wrote for The Spectator was headlined “Confessions of a Porn Addict”. Enough to say that far from being the sort of person who should sit in judgment on others, Mr Young has all the awareness and sensitivity of a blocked toilet.
Expressing regret for his "sophomoric" remarks, he has asked to be judged on his actions, among them the setting up of a “free” (independent but state funded) school in London, and “not on silly things I’ve tweeted or written in my 30-year career as a journalist”. The Foreign Secretary agrees, calling the row “ridiculous” and saying his old mucker was an “ideal man” for the job.
Mr Young is not the first, and will not be the last, to land a job only to find himself trapped in a web of ill-judged postings. Pre-internet generations had it easier. If they did something stupid it was likely to be witnessed by a few people before time washed away the traces. In the internet age should there not be a statute of limitations on past behaviour? A way of wiping the slate clean after contrition has been expressed?
There are several problems with that. First, it may not be possible. Mr Young has now deleted 40,000 tweets but because of retweeting, screen grabs, and the like, his mistakes live on. Second, who gets to do the censoring and is this in the public interest? Following from that, who is to say that internet history is not as good a way of judging a person as exams passed or personal references?
Just as there is an age of criminal responsibility there could be one of internet responsibility. Stupid things said and done before the age of 16, say, or 18, might be regarded with more leniency.
But Mr Young does not fit into that category. Now 54, he was in his late Forties when most of the offensive tweets were sent. And he is not being judged on a few  recent postings. He called working class students “stains” in a 1988 book.
As his career shows, Mr Young is one lucky, well-connected chap, the son of a Labour peer no less. His latest appointment, announced on New Year’s Day, might have passed unnoticed if not for the internet, the platform he once exploited for his own ends, biting him in the karma.
We await the return of the Commons next week to find out what the country’s second woman PM thinks of the row. Or if you would care to put your thoughts in a tweet, Mrs May, we’re all eyes.

THE New Year’s resolution not to buy any more books until I had read the ones on the shelves was holding good until news of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury broke. The first, no-holds barred look into the hollow soul of the Trump presidency? Haud me back.
As is often the case, the small stuff is as telling as the headline grabbing material. Take, for example, Woolf on the president’s reaction to moving into the White House. “He imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s – nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.”)
There is more burger-related news. According to Wolff, whose book has been condemned by the President as “full of lies”, the Elvis of politics likes to be tucked up in bed with a cheeseburger by 6.30pm. Perhaps he inherited his early to bed habits from his Lewis-born mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, or maybe he is, as the book so often suggests, a toddler trapped in the body of a man.

A COUPLE of tales to file under B for be careful what you write about.
Last week, I was singing the praises of Yaktrax for enabling me to skip along icy pavements like a mountain goat, only to promptly leave the office without said snow shoes. Luckily, I had given a pair as a present (the queen of generosity, eh?) and pinched them back. Thus I was able to stride up to a group of pensioners stranded in an ice-bound supermarket car park.
“Hello,” I boomed, like the world’s most rubbish superhero. “I’ve got snow shoes on, can I help?” I don’t recall, but my arms were probably akimbo.
Unfortunately, or rather fortunately for her, the woman who had fallen was back on her feet. We parted, chuckling, at how a shop that was making millions couldn’t throw some grit on the ground.
I also tempted fate by writing about accidental shoplifting, caused by forgetting to put an item through a self-service checkout. The next day I almost walked out of a shop without paying for The Herald. 
Wouldn’t that be embarrassing if it ever got out?