The Majority of Britain at Three in the Morning

I have spent a mildly depressing amount of time lately reading the comment sections under various GB News stories. Not because I particularly enjoy it, you understand. It is a bit like examining pond water under a microscope. Fascinating in a scientific sense, but you would not want to drink it.

After a while certain patterns emerge.

The typical commenter appears convinced that he represents “the majority of the British people”. This is interesting, because the same majority seems to appear simultaneously under every article on every website, all absolutely certain they speak for the nation. It is rather like discovering that Britain consists entirely of people typing angrily under news stories at three in the morning.

Evidence is not a major feature of these exchanges. Assertions, however, are extremely popular. The Prime Minister is a traitor. Net Zero is destroying civilisation. Britain must stand shoulder to shoulder with America in whatever conflict happens to be trending that week. None of this is accompanied by numbers, data or even the faintest whiff of curiosity about how any of it actually works. But the confidence is magnificent.

There is also a touching faith in the idea that international alliances function like friendships at school. Britain must be a “faithful ally”. Apparently this means doing whatever Washington wants without asking awkward questions such as what the plan is, what the objective might be, or whether it will end the same way the last several Middle Eastern adventures ended. The strategic analysis here is roughly on a par with a Labrador deciding which tennis ball to chase.

The energy debate is equally revealing. Britain, we are told, produces only about 1 per cent of global emissions and therefore should do absolutely nothing about them. This argument has a certain internal logic if one imagines the world composed entirely of countries each producing 1 per cent and each deciding it is someone else’s problem.

The more interesting contradiction appears when war enters the conversation. Many of the same voices who object loudly to immigration also advocate enthusiastically for military interventions in precisely the regions that historically produce large numbers of refugees. One might gently point out that wars have a habit of moving people around. But this link does not seem to register. Apparently refugees are simply generated by moral weakness rather than artillery.

What ties all this together is not really policy. It is identity.

The comments read less like a debate about strategy or economics and more like declarations of belonging. Who are the good people. Who are the traitors. Who is “on our side”. Once politics is framed that way, consistency becomes optional. Loyalty is what matters.

And this, of course, is where the populists come in.

Figures such as Nigel Farage have an almost perfect instinct for this environment. He does not need to resolve contradictions or produce detailed policy frameworks. All he needs to do is echo the emotional narrative already circulating in the comment sections. The people versus the elites. The nation betrayed. Common sense against experts. It is politically very effective because it feels like recognition. The audience hears its own frustrations reflected back at it.

The clever part is that it converts grievance into a permanent political engine. The movement does not need to solve problems. In some ways it is better if the problems remain unsolved, because the outrage is the fuel.

Meanwhile, somewhere quietly in the background, the rest of the world is building enormous power grids, electrifying industry, manufacturing batteries and solar panels, and generally getting on with the business of shaping the next phase of the global economy.

But none of that shows up much in the comment section.

They are still busy announcing that they represent the majority of Britain. At three in the morning. On a Tuesday. While eating crisps.

The Domestic Whips Office

Kitty has no need of a Whips Office. She dispensed with that sort of administrative clutter the moment she realised humans will police themselves if you keep them permanently unsure whether they are being rewarded or managed.

The Whips exist because MPs possess that inconvenient habit of thinking they have agency. They need persuading, cajoling, threatening, bribing, flattered in corridors, and occasionally reminded that a “career conversation” can happen very suddenly. Kitty faces no such weakness in her system. She controls the one resource we actually care about - affection on tap, issued selectively, and withdrawn without notice.

She turns up, settles beside you, and purrs like a press release. It feels warm, benign, almost democratic. You assume you’ve been granted access because you are valued. You begin stroking her, congratulating yourself on the harmonious settlement you’ve achieved between species. This is the fatal moment: you mistake access for authority. Kitty watches you do it with the detached patience of someone letting you walk into a constitutional error of your own making.

Then comes the enforcement action. Not a tantrum, not rage, not emotion in any human sense. A swift bite, or a scratch placed with surgical precision. Not catastrophic, just enough to restore the correct order of things. The genius is that the threshold is unpublished and may change at any time. That is not a flaw. That is the mechanism. You will never be quite sure when “a bit more” becomes “too much”, so you stay alert, anxious, attentive, compliant.

There are always signals, of course, and over time you become trained to read them. A tail flick. A ripple along the back. A slight stiffening. The head turning towards your hand. These are not warnings offered as a courtesy. They are the early stages of a policy shift. You adapt instantly, because you have learned that Kitty’s governance is not accountable to your feelings, only to her comfort and her sense of control.

And here’s the punchline: it works. There is no whipping operation because there is no need for one. The compliance is internalised. You stop before you should. You negotiate with your own impulses. You manage yourself. You do it all willingly, because when she does choose to grant favour, even briefly, it feels like a privilege rather than a right.

This is how real power operates. Not with paperwork and committees, but with intermittent reward, credible threat, and a small furry executive who can end the session whenever she likes, while keeping her approval ratings inexplicably high.

Cheltenham

I was looking at the coverage of Cheltenham this week and had one of those slightly melancholy moments where you realise something familiar has quietly turned into something else.

Cheltenham used to be a racing festival. That was the point of it. Owners, trainers, punters and enthusiasts went because it was where the best National Hunt horses met. The betting was lively, the Guinness flowed, and everyone accepted that by the fourth race half the crowd would be cheerfully legless. But the horses were the centre of gravity. Everything else orbited around them.

Now the horses feel almost incidental.

Watch the television coverage and the camera keeps drifting away from the track to film groups of lads in novelty suits chanting at each other while carrying four pints each. There are pop up bars everywhere, hospitality villages the size of small counties, and betting firms pumping out offers every five minutes. Women appear in outfits that are too tight and too high, tottering on improbable heels, with teeny hats perched precariously on the back of their heads as if gravity has been temporarily suspended for the sake of fashion. It has the atmosphere of a corporate hospitality expo that happens to have a few racehorses passing by in the background.

None of this happened by accident. Racecourses discovered some time ago that a serious racing fan buying a ticket and placing a few bets is a perfectly decent customer, but a stag party drinking champagne in a hospitality marquee is a vastly better one. The arithmetic is obvious. Once the accountants have seen the numbers the direction of travel is pretty much guaranteed.

So Cheltenham gradually expanded the bars, expanded the hospitality, expanded the capacity and leaned hard into the idea of the festival experience. The result is that the meeting now resembles a four day alcohol and gambling carnival with occasional interruptions for racing.

The strange thing is that the racing itself is probably stronger than ever. The Irish yards arrive mob handed with extraordinary horses, the competition at the top end is fierce, and some of the races are genuinely historic contests. But if you dropped a new visitor into the middle of the grandstand and asked them what the event was about, horses would not be their first guess.

It is all rather hideous, really. A tweedy sporting occasion has quietly mutated into something closer to a travelling beer festival with a betting app attached.

The bookmakers will be delighted, the hospitality tents will be full, and the accountants at the Jockey Club will be nodding approvingly at the revenue figures.

Meanwhile somewhere out on the course a rather magnificent horse will be jumping the last fence in front of a crowd that is mostly looking down at its phone checking the odds for the next race.

Most Useless Tool

I was trying to work out what the most useless tool in my workshop is, which is a surprisingly difficult question, because the competition is fierce and the standards are high.

The obvious candidate is the 3D printer. When I bought it, I had visions of calmly recreating all the irreplaceable plastic components for the GT6. The brittle heater vents, the cracked cable guides, the obscure little clips that Triumph produced in 1972 and nobody has seen since. The logic was impeccable. Scan the part, tidy it up, print it, refit it. Industrial self sufficiency from the comfort of a slightly cold garage in Gloucestershire.

Naturally, it did not work.

The printer itself sits there with the faint air of moral superiority common to machines that know they are underused. So I bought a 3D scanner, because clearly the problem was insufficient technology. The scanner does its job beautifully. It scans objects and produces files. Files which exist in theory, but not in Windows 10. Windows does not merely refuse to open them, or complain about them, or sulk quietly in the corner. It denies their existence entirely. According to Windows, the files are not there. They have never been there. They are rumours, malicious gossip, whispered by unreliable peripherals.

This creates an unusual situation in which I possess a scanner that produces invisible objects, and a printer that faithfully prints anything except the things I actually need. It will happily produce small plastic figurines designed by Japanese enthusiasts with too much time and emotional resilience. It will not produce a heater cable retaining clip for a 1970s Triumph.

This is the curse of modern tools. They promise sovereignty and deliver dependency. Every solution arrives attached to three new problems, two software updates, and a forum populated entirely by people called Darren who insist it is working perfectly for them.

Still, I remain optimistic, because the 3D printer is not without rivals.

The plasma cutter, for example, was acquired with similar optimism. In principle, it slices through steel with surgical precision. In practice, it produces edges that resemble a roadmap of the Camargue, all estuaries and unexplained deviations, as though the electrons briefly lost interest and wandered off to look at flamingos. What emerges is recognisably metal, and recognisably cut, but not in any way that suggests intent or competence.

Then there is the rivnut tool, purchased last summer during a surge of absolute certainty that the future would be full of rivnuts. Rivnuts would be everywhere. Rivnuts would solve problems I did not yet have. Rivnuts represented preparedness, foresight, and engineering maturity. Since then, it has sat in its case, pristine and faintly accusatory, like a dinner jacket in the wardrobe of a man who no longer goes anywhere formal. I occasionally open the case to remind myself that I own it, then close it again before it can ask difficult questions.

There is also the ultrasonic cleaner, which vibrates enthusiastically but appears to have no measurable effect on anything larger than a teaspoon. And a torque wrench so sensitive to interpretation that it feels more like a philosophical instrument than a mechanical one.

Yet none of these quite match the quiet futility of the 3D printer. It sits there, a monument to possibility, capable of producing anything at all, except the one small plastic part I actually need.

I expect I will buy more tools. This is the nature of workshop logic. The next purchase will definitely solve everything. It always does, briefly, until it joins the others, waiting patiently for the day I finally discover what it is supposed to have been for.

The Tuesday Afternoon Energy Apocalypse

Reading the comments under Daily Mail articles about energy is always an interesting exercise. You start with the article itself, which in this case was a mildly alarming piece about Britain having “two days of gas”, and then descend into the comments where the real drama unfolds.

Within about half a dozen posts we had already reached treason.

Apparently not drilling every last square inch of the North Sea is now “an act of treason”. That is quite a promotion for what is, in reality, a policy disagreement about declining offshore reserves. One half expects the next step will involve hanging Ed Miliband from the nearest wind turbine.

Another reader announced that Norway is “laughing as they drain our oil and sell it back to us”. This is a remarkable achievement considering the North Sea has been divided into national sectors for decades and Norwegian platforms are, somewhat inconveniently for the theory, sitting in Norwegian waters. If they are secretly siphoning British oil sideways through the seabed, it is the most discreet feat of engineering since the Channel Tunnel.

Then there is the gas panic itself. According to the comments, Britain will run out of energy sometime on Tuesday afternoon because we only have two days of gas. This would come as a surprise to the operators of the pipelines bringing gas from Norway, the LNG terminals receiving tankers from the United States, and the North Sea platforms that are still producing gas every day.

The UK system largely runs on a just-in-time supply model. Gas flows continuously from several directions rather than sitting in vast underground caverns waiting to be used. The “two days” figure refers only to storage capacity, not the total gas available to the country. But explaining that tends to spoil the end-of-the-world atmosphere.

At the moment there is another wrinkle that rarely gets mentioned in the comments. Because of the war in the Middle East, LNG cargoes from Qatar are not currently reaching Europe. Oddly enough, the lights have not gone out. Gas is still arriving from the North Sea, still flowing through pipelines from Norway, and still coming in on tankers from the United States and other suppliers. That is precisely why the system was designed with multiple sources.

And of course the whole thing is blamed on Net Zero, which apparently now controls everything from energy policy to the weather. Meanwhile the only part of my own household energy supply whose price has not risen by a single penny is the solar panels on the roof. The electricity they produce today costs exactly the same as it did the day they were installed, which is to say absolutely nothing. Sunlight has so far proved remarkably resistant to international crises.

What makes the whole debate slightly surreal is that Britain does still produce oil and gas from the North Sea. Roughly half our gas demand is met domestically, and Norway supplies much of the rest via pipeline. The real difference between the two countries is not that they are stealing our oil. It is what each country did with the money.

Norway saved its oil income in a sovereign wealth fund that now contains well over a trillion dollars. Britain, by contrast, treated the windfall rather like a generous Christmas bonus. It went straight into the Treasury and helped fund tax cuts, public spending and the rather expensive process of managing the industrial upheavals of the 1980s. Perfectly understandable decisions at the time perhaps, but not quite the same as quietly parking the money for future generations.

But that is a slightly more complicated story than the comments section prefers. It is much easier to picture Norwegians cackling on offshore rigs while secretly sucking British oil through a straw beneath the seabed.

Meanwhile the sun continues to rise every morning and, rather annoyingly for the fossil fuel purists, it keeps generating electricity on my roof for free. Which does rather take the edge off the national energy catastrophe that, according to the comments, is due to arrive sometime on Tuesday afternoon.

The Temples of Money Have Become Cafes

There was a time when banks looked like banks. They did not merely occupy buildings, they inhabited temples. Granite columns, pediments carved with Roman seriousness, brass doors so heavy they implied money itself was trying to escape and had to be physically restrained. You did not so much enter as present yourself. Inside, clerks moved paper with ritual care, like priests handling sacred relics, and if you asked for your own money, they regarded you with mild suspicion, as if you were attempting to reclaim something that had, frankly, found a better home.

Southport’s Lord Street had them in abundance. As a boy, I remember their facades projecting permanence and quiet authority. These were institutions that assumed they would outlast empires, and quite possibly intended to. They were not chasing engagement or optimising customer journeys. They were simply there, solid and immovable, radiating the quiet confidence of organisations that knew exactly where your money was, and intended to keep it there.

Now, of course, one of them sells cocktails to people wearing plastic tiaras on a Thursday night.

Another has become a bookshop, which feels symbolically appropriate, as both industries once dealt in hard truths and now operate largely in the realm of narrative.

A third has become a cafe, where people conduct their entire financial lives on a slab of glass while drinking coffee that costs more than the quarterly interest on their savings.

Frome, meanwhile, appears to have accidentally preserved its banks in a tight cluster, like financial Pompeii. Within fifty yards stand five of these neoclassical relics, their columns intact, their proportions still quietly magnificent. Yet their afterlives have taken divergent and faintly humiliating paths. One has become a Cafe Nero, dispensing cappuccinos beneath a pediment designed to inspire confidence in imperial commerce. Another has reverted to a Building Society, which feels less like a resurrection and more like a respectable retirement, the architectural equivalent of an old colonel tending roses and occasionally muttering about discipline.

A third stands derelict, its boarded windows and silent portico giving the impression it is still waiting for someone to return from lunch in 1994. The vault is almost certainly still down there, empty and patient, guarding nothing but dust and the faint memory of solvency.

The remaining buildings linger in various stages of commercial reincarnation, their columns lending unearned gravitas to whatever enterprise happens to occupy them. They were built to project stability, permanence, and consequence. Now they project free WiFi and traybakes.

Banks, of course, have not disappeared. They have simply retreated into the invisible. They live inside our phones now, silent and intangible, moving numbers from one place to another while occasionally declining transactions for reasons known only to themselves and possibly the Archbishop of Canterbury. The physical bank has become an inconvenience to its own existence, like a fossilised limb from an earlier evolutionary stage, occasionally visible but functionally irrelevant.

The last time I entered an actual bank branch, the staff looked faintly surprised, like park wardens spotting a species believed extinct.

“Can I help you?” they asked, cautiously.

I almost apologised for existing in person.

And so the columns remain, stoic and faintly embarrassed, standing guard over cappuccino machines, estate agents, and boarded windows. Monuments to a time when money required buildings, and buildings required presence. The banks have not fallen. They have simply evaporated, leaving behind their stone shells, while the real business has slipped quietly away into the invisible machinery of code, where it can no longer be admired, questioned, or understood, but can still, with impeccable timing, charge you £3 for the privilege of having once been overdrawn in 1987.

It’ll All Be Over by Christmas (Again)

Everyone likes a quick war. Politicians especially. A brisk little campaign, a few triumphant press conferences, some flags behind the podium, and everyone home in time for Christmas. It is a recurring fantasy of modern politics, rather like the belief that tax cuts always pay for themselves or that the next technological miracle will fix the electricity grid.

Donald Trump declaring he does not need Britain in a war that has already been won sits neatly in that tradition. Apparently the conflict is finished. Victory achieved. No allies required. One imagines someone somewhere is still firing things, but that is presumably just a formality.

History is full of these moments of premature triumph. In 1914 European leaders confidently assured their populations the war would be over by Christmas. They were correct in the sense that there was indeed a Christmas that year. Unfortunately the war carried on through four more of them while Europe industrialised the process of killing young men in muddy fields.

More recently Vladimir Putin appears to have thought Ukraine would be subdued in a matter of weeks. Russian units reportedly carried parade uniforms in their kit for the anticipated victory march in Kyiv. Several years on the war is still grinding away and the parade uniforms remain, one assumes, folded neatly in a warehouse somewhere next to a depressing collection of destroyed armour.

The pattern is familiar because the mistake is familiar. The first phase of a war is usually the easy bit. Armies advance, governments fall, maps get redrawn on television graphics. The hard part begins afterwards when the defeated side declines to accept the script and starts fighting back in awkward and unpredictable ways. Iraq in 2003 was “won” in about three weeks. The unpleasant business that followed lasted years and cost rather more than the original celebration suggested.

Which makes Trump’s remark less a piece of military analysis and more a familiar bit of political theatre. It sounds decisive. It sounds strong. It has the comforting simplicity of a boxing match where someone has already been knocked out.

There is also the small matter of how alliances actually work. If you genuinely want allies in a conflict, there is usually a bit of groundwork involved. Decades of it, in fact. Cooperation, shared intelligence, joint planning, bases, training exercises, and the occasional polite effort not to insult them in public. The United States has historically been extremely good at this. NATO did not appear out of thin air. Neither did the Five Eyes intelligence network or the dense web of military cooperation with countries like Britain.

Trump’s approach has tended to be rather different. Allies are freeloaders. NATO is a protection racket. Trade wars with partners are a useful negotiating tactic. The general tone is that alliances are rather like golf club memberships that should be cancelled if the annual fee looks a bit high.

Which makes the current complaint faintly comic. If you spend years telling your allies they are unnecessary, unreliable, or ripping you off, you should not be terribly shocked if they appear slightly less eager when the shooting starts. Allies are not something you summon like room service. His transactional view of diplomacy has worked against him - spectacularly.

Still, declaring victory early does have its advantages. It saves the awkward business of planning the next phase, the one where the war inconveniently refuses to behave like a press release.

And if events later suggest the war was not quite finished after all, there will always be another press conference explaining that victory had technically already happened and reality simply failed to notice.

The Job That Ate the Dictionary

Portfolio Scope:

"The CIMO leads the organisation’s impact and movement portfolio. This means catalising systems transformation beyond businesses’ adoption of core products - orchestrating movement building and collective action, strategic partnerships and fundraising, brand and communications leadership, policy and advocacy, and programmes that demonstrate systemic change. By combining external influence with internal narrative, the CIMO ensures the organisation shows up in the world as both a credible standards organisation and a catalyst for economic transformation that creates the conditions for an economy that works for people and the planet."

I occasionally read job adverts for entertainment. Not because I am looking for work, you understand. More because every so often you stumble across a masterpiece of modern language, the kind where each sentence appears to mean something until you actually try to translate it into English.

This one begins by announcing responsibility for an “impact and movement portfolio”. I confess that at this point I pictured a sort of leather briefcase containing several carefully organised movements. Perhaps climate in the left pocket, economic transformation in the right, and a spare systemic change tucked under the flap in case the first two misfire.

The successful applicant will apparently “catalise systems transformation”. Now catalysts are very useful things in chemistry, but they normally work because someone has built a reactor, assembled the chemicals and applied some heat. Here the catalytic process appears to involve strategic partnerships, internal narrative and the organisation “showing up in the world”, which sounds less like chemistry and more like a motivational poster in a co working space.

Then comes the job scope. Brand leadership, communications, fundraising, policy, advocacy, partnerships and programmes demonstrating systemic change. In most places that would describe half the executive team. Here it is rolled together into one heroic figure who will presumably stride through the corridors each morning transforming entire economic systems before coffee.

My favourite line is the bit about “combining external influence with internal narrative”. In ordinary language that means making sure the story the organisation tells about itself matches the story it tells everyone else. Which, when you strip away the incense and chanting, is more or less what every marketing department has done since the invention of the leaflet.

The whole thing has a faintly theatrical feel to it. One imagines a meeting where someone says, “What we really need is someone to run partnerships and communications,” and another person replies, “Yes, but could we frame that as catalising global systems transformation?” After which everyone nods thoughtfully and reaches for the oat milk lattes.

Of course there probably is a real job buried somewhere under all this. Most likely it involves raising money, talking to politicians, managing some NGOs and ensuring the organisation appears in enough conferences and press releases to remain visible. Perfectly respectable work, if described plainly.

But that would never do. You cannot advertise for someone to run partnerships and communications when you could instead recruit a Chief Impact and Movement Officer responsible for redesigning the global economy.

Still, it does make one wonder what the Monday morning briefing looks like.

“Right then. Before lunch we’ll catalise systemic economic transformation. After that we’ll orchestrate a bit of collective action. And if there’s time before tea, we’ll make sure the organisation shows up in the world.”

Blair or Starmer - Choose Your Villain

For years the British right has enjoyed the convenience of having two very reliable villains. Tony Blair is the war criminal who lied Britain into Iraq and should apparently never again be trusted with anything more dangerous than a paperclip. Keir Starmer, meanwhile, is widely described as the most hated Prime Minister in history, presiding over national decline at a speed that suggests the country may sink into the sea before teatime.

Normally this arrangement works perfectly well. Blair represents the reckless interventionism of the past. Starmer represents the allegedly hopeless leadership of the present. The script is simple and everyone knows which lines to deliver.

Unfortunately the current argument about Iran has rather carelessly put the two men on opposite sides of the same question. Blair has emerged to say that Britain should have been more robust in backing Trump’s action and showing solidarity with Washington, a view shared by most on the right of British politics. Starmer has taken a more cautious line, supporting allies but avoiding the sort of enthusiastic war talk that tends to age badly once the shooting starts.

This leaves the right with a small but awkward choice. If they want Britain loudly backing Trump’s war, then they find themselves agreeing with Tony Blair, the man they normally introduce as a war criminal whenever Iraq is mentioned. If they want restraint and caution, then they are suddenly rather close to Keir Starmer, the supposedly disastrous Prime Minister they spend most of their time denouncing.

So they must now decide whether to support Blair or support Starmer. One involves backing the man they still blame for Iraq. The other involves admitting that the most hated Prime Minister in living memory might have the steadier instinct when someone in Washington starts reaching for the missiles.

It is not an easy dilemma if your political worldview depends on both men being wrong about everything at all times. The simplest solution will probably be to ignore the contradiction entirely and continue shouting at both of them anyway. Consistency has never been the strong suit of political commentary.

The Joss Stick Conspiracy

There exists in Britain a quiet conspiracy, conducted not by shadowy men in dark suits, but by cheerful middle-aged women in floaty scarves who say things like “energy” with a straight face. It concerns joss sticks.

Joss sticks, we are assured, come in endless varieties. Sandalwood. Dragon’s Blood. Himalayan Moonflower. Tibetan Cedar. Japanese Plum Blossom Whisper. Each promises a unique sensory journey, an olfactory pilgrimage across continents and centuries. Yet light one, any one, and within seconds the room fills with exactly the same smell. Not similar. Not related. Identical.

It is the smell of a 1978 student bedsit that has not seen fresh air since the Winter of Discontent.

This smell transcends geography, culture, and common sense. You can buy joss sticks in a National Trust gift shop beneath an oil painting of an admiral, or in a dimly lit shop in Glastonbury staffed by someone called Rowan who has opinions about ley lines. It makes no difference. The moment flame meets stick, they all revert to the Universal Joss Stick Smell. It is as if somewhere in the world there is a single enormous factory labelled “Incense”, producing one batch in 1963, and everything since has simply been relabelled with increasing levels of optimism.

What fascinates me is the language. No other consumer product enjoys such creative freedom with the truth. Imagine if other industries behaved like this. You buy a bottle of wine labelled “Tuscan Reserve”, and it tastes exactly like Tesco cooking sherry. You purchase an Aston Martin, and under the bonnet is a lawnmower engine. Yet with joss sticks, the fiction persists unchallenged. People light “Sacred Himalayan Pine”, inhale deeply, and nod thoughtfully, as if detecting notes of altitude and yak.

They are detecting notes of burning dust.

I once conducted an experiment, entirely in the interests of science. I purchased three different varieties. One was “Ancient Temple Sandalwood”, one was “Mystic Forest Rain”, and the third was “Celestial Amber”. I lit them in separate rooms, left them for ten minutes, and returned blind. I could not distinguish between them. The only measurable variable was the rate at which they made the house smell like a charity shop in 1985.

Even the marketing imagery betrays the truth. The packaging shows waterfalls, monks, misty mountains, and abstract swirls of enlightenment. None shows what actually happens, which is a thin column of smoke drifting lazily toward the nearest smoke alarm while the cat eyes it with suspicion. There is never an image of a man standing in his kitchen waving a tea towel at the ceiling sensor while muttering that he was promised “tranquillity”.

The appeal, I suspect, lies not in the smell itself, but in the idea of the smell. Lighting a joss stick suggests intention. One is not merely sitting in a chair. One is centring oneself. One is cultivating atmosphere. One is, briefly, the sort of person who might own linen trousers. The fact that the smell is indistinguishable from every other joss stick ever made is beside the point. It is the ritual that matters. Humans are endlessly vulnerable to ritual. We will pay extra for anything that implies we are improving ourselves, even when all evidence suggests we are just making the curtains smell faintly of smoke.

There is also a strange persistence to the aroma. It does not leave politely. It lingers. It seeps into upholstery, books, and clothing, merging eventually with the permanent background scent of the house. Weeks later, you will pick up a jumper and detect a faint ghost of “Mystic Forest Rain”, which still smells exactly like “Ancient Temple Sandalwood”, which itself smelled exactly like “Celestial Amber”.

In the end, I suspect the manufacturers know perfectly well that the variations are imaginary. The names are there to reassure the buyer that they are making a meaningful choice, when in fact they are simply selecting which label will accompany the same small stick of scented inevitability.

I still have the remaining sticks, untouched in their decorative boxes, waiting for some future moment of optimism when I again believe that “Sacred Moon Lotus” might smell different. It will not. It will smell like every other joss stick, and I will stand there, holding the match, wondering why I ever thought otherwise, while opening the window to let the enlightenment out.