Betamax in the North Sea

People talk about North Sea oil now like it’s a sort of patriotic buried treasure. Just drill a few more holes, wave a Union Jack at an offshore platform and suddenly Britain is immune from global energy markets, Vladimir Putin and the price of diesel at Tesco. Nigel Farage says it. Kemi Badenoch says it. Plenty of people on Facebook say it as well, usually underneath a dramatic sunset photo of an oil rig, as though it’s HMS Victory rather than a lump of industrial plumbing sticking out of cold water.

Except that isn’t how any of this works.

Even if we approved a brand new North Sea field tomorrow, there’s a fair chance I’ll be dead before the thing is producing meaningful quantities. These projects are measured in decades, not in the sort of timescale politicians operate on between reshuffles, leadership contests and emergency interviews outside No.10 pretending they fully support somebody they were privately denouncing three days earlier.

And when it finally does come online, the oil doesn’t arrive in a little tanker labelled FOR BRITISH USE ONLY. It gets sold into global markets because that’s how oil works. Britain already exports oil while importing oil at the same time. Which sounds faintly absurd until you realise different refineries need different grades of crude and the whole thing operates like a giant international swap shop connected by pipelines and lawyers.

What’s often left out of the political shouting is that the government has not actually ordered the North Sea to be filled with concrete and handed back to the haddock. Existing fields are continuing. Existing licences are continuing and in some cases being extended. Production is still happening. Previously approved developments are still proceeding.

Which is probably the sensible middle ground. You keep extracting from infrastructure that already exists while gradually transitioning the wider energy system, rather than pretending Britain can become carbon neutral by next Tuesday or, alternatively, that the entire global energy transition is a conspiracy invented by people who’ve never had to phone British Gas while standing next to a boiler making a noise like a cement mixer full of cutlery.

What interests me more is the strange overlap between what politicians say is happening and what they’re simultaneously asking taxpayers to fund.

We’re increasingly being asked to use public money, tax breaks, underwriting and regulatory guarantees to support exploration for a product politicians simultaneously insist we must eventually stop using. And this is happening during a cost of living crisis, collapsing local government finances, crumbling infrastructure and public services still trying to recover after years of austerity and underinvestment.

Councils are effectively going bankrupt. NHS waiting lists have finally started coming down again under Labour after reaching extraordinary levels, but that recovery requires sustained spending, not billions diverted into cushioning commercial fossil fuel risk. Schools are still holding cake sales to buy equipment. Around here half the potholes are now familiar enough that I instinctively steer round them without consciously thinking about it, like old tree stumps.

Yet somehow we’re also supposed to believe there’s endless public money available to reduce uncertainty for multinational energy firms exploring for hydrocarbons that may not meaningfully come online for another decade.

That’s where it all starts becoming faintly surreal.

It’s rather like the government announcing in 1984 that the future clearly belongs to compact discs and digital technology, but in the meantime taxpayers should probably underwrite a massive new Betamax factory in Sunderland just to be safe. Not because Betamax was useless. In some ways it was technically better. But history was already drifting elsewhere and everyone knew it, even if they didn’t entirely know how quickly.

And before somebody says “Ah, but we still need oil and gas”, yes, obviously we do. I’m sitting in a house full of plastics, wiring, transport systems and chemical products largely derived from hydrocarbons. My car contains enough oil-derived material to start a small diplomatic incident. Modern civilisation is not going to continue purely through moral superiority and positive thinking.

But that’s different from pretending every new North Sea licence is some kind of Churchillian act of national salvation.

Then there’s the tax argument.

The industry likes to talk about risk when prices are low and profits when prices are high. Governments are encouraged to offer investment allowances, tax relief, decommissioning support and regulatory certainty because otherwise the economics become unattractive. In other words, the taxpayer helps cushion the downside.

But if the field turns out to be wildly profitable after all, we are suddenly informed this is a triumph of private enterprise and entrepreneurial brilliance.

Quite the arrangement, really.

And that’s before we get to the really awkward bit.

Supporters often talk as though future North Sea production will shower the Treasury with tax receipts for decades. But that depends on strong long-term fossil fuel demand and on squeezing ever more value from a basin that has already been declining for years. Yet at the same time, government policy is explicitly aimed at reducing hydrocarbon dependence through electrification, renewables, insulation, EVs and changes to electricity pricing.

So which is it?

Are we building an economy designed to consume less oil and gas over time, or are we underwriting new exploration on the assumption we’ll still be consuming enough of it to generate large future tax revenues from a mature and declining basin?

Because those two things sit in rather uncomfortable tension with each other.

Meanwhile the government is also trying to redesign the electricity market so renewable power is no longer tied so tightly to volatile gas prices. At the moment gas often still sets the wholesale electricity price even when renewables are generating much of the power more cheaply. Which is why windy days can still coincide with bills that make people stare silently at the smart meter as though it has personally betrayed them.

So the long-term direction is already fairly obvious. More renewables, more storage, more electrification, more grid balancing, and gradually less dependence on gas setting the overall price.

And when that transition succeeds, when electricity genuinely becomes cheaper and less exposed to global gas shocks, there’s a fair chance that some of the very politicians currently warning that the transition is too fast will eventually start asking why previous governments didn’t move faster.

Why are we still exposed to international gas prices?

Why didn’t Britain secure cheaper domestic electricity earlier?

Why are British businesses paying more than competitors abroad?

Because political memory has a remarkable habit of resetting itself the moment somebody crosses the floor into opposition.

Of course the job of an opposition is to oppose. Nobody expects Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage to pop up saying “actually, fair enough, carry on”. That would be a fairly short political career. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to escape the feeling that modern opposition politics is turning into little more than knee-jerk contradiction. Government says something and opposition instinctively lunges in the opposite direction before anyone’s had time to check whether it actually makes sense.

You’d still hope there might be some remaining connection to logic, engineering reality and basic economic sanity somewhere in the process, rather than everything collapsing into whichever slogan currently fits on a Facebook graphic next to a flaming oil rig.

None of this means the transition is easy. Far from it. There are massive engineering, storage and infrastructure problems still to solve. Move too fast and you risk deindustrialisation, energy insecurity and a public backlash the first winter the lights flicker or heating bills spike again. Move too slowly and you pour billions into infrastructure which may become economically obsolete before it has properly paid for itself.

That’s the real argument underneath all the slogans. Not the pantomime version where one side wants us all living in caves eating moss while the other thinks a drilling licence issued in 2026 will somehow stop Britain participating in international energy markets.

And underpinning all this is the modern political habit of privatising upside while socialising risk. If these fields are such obvious commercial goldmines, why does the industry keep needing tax incentives, underwriting and favourable regulatory treatment? Genuine no-brainer investments usually don’t require the taxpayer standing behind them holding the financial smelling salts.

Still, none of this fits neatly onto a Facebook meme. Most people just want the lights to come on, the bills to stop behaving like ransom demands, and the heating to work without feeling they’ve entered a geopolitical hostage negotiation every time they touch the thermostat.

Though admittedly it would still make a magnificent Betamax training video.

The Faff-to-Coffee Ratio

There comes a point in every middle-aged man's life when he must ask himself an important question. Am I making coffee, or have I accidentally become an unpaid maintenance engineer for a small Italian pressure vessel?

Ironically, I had started from the opposite direction. Years ago I owned one of the older Original Nespresso pod machines. Small, simple, compact, perfectly capable of producing a decent espresso at the press of a button. Needless to say, once I became Serious About Coffee, the little Nespresso machine was dispatched to the charity shop, presumably to sit briefly beside a bread maker and a George Foreman grill before being purchased for £7.50 by somebody far wiser than myself.

Because, naturally, I graduated to a Gaggia Classic. A proper espresso machine, I told myself. Real coffee. Real crema. Real craftsmanship. The sort of machine spoken about reverently by men on internet forums called things like "Bean Torque UK", where people discuss burr geometry with the intensity normally reserved for discussing cylinder head porting.

And to be fair, when the planets aligned, it produced magnificent coffee. Unfortunately, the planets had to align.

The grinder setting had to be adjusted according to humidity, atmospheric pressure and apparently the migratory habits of swallows over Tuscany. The beans had to be exactly the right freshness. Too old and the crema vanished. Too fresh and the machine reacted as though someone had filled the portafilter with expanding foam insulation.

Then came tamping pressure. Twenty pounds, said one expert. Thirty pounds, said another. One man insisted he tamped "by feel", which is espresso enthusiast code for "I have absolutely no idea but would like this to sound mystical."

Every morning became a sequence of tiny negotiations with machinery. Grind. Tamp. Lock in. Start extraction. Watch either black tar dribble out at geological speed or pale brown dishwater erupt like a breached hydrant. Remove the portafilter and discover the puck had somehow achieved the structural integrity of damp compost. Wipe surfaces. Flush things. Empty things. Clean things.

Meanwhile, somewhere nearby, a Nespresso owner had pressed one button and wandered off to read the news while their machine quietly got on with the business of making coffee instead of demanding participation in an apprenticeship scheme.

The thing that finally broke me was not actually the coffee itself. It was the fact I gradually stopped bothering. The faff-to-reward ratio had drifted so badly out of calibration that making a coffee began to feel like preparing a steam locomotive for service. One does not casually think, "I fancy a quick espresso," when the process involves enough preparation to launch a small marine diesel.

So I found myself quietly migrating to tea instead, which struck me as faintly ridiculous. Here I was, owning a respected Italian espresso machine, fresh beans, proper grinder, tamper and all the paraphernalia of artisanal coffee seriousness, yet drinking Yorkshire Tea because it involved little more than locating a kettle and remaining conscious. At that point I accepted something had gone wrong.

Naturally, I looked at Nespresso machines. But here modern capitalism revealed its usual little ambush. The newer Vertuo machines use entirely different pods, which are still under patent protection and therefore cost accordingly. One is effectively renting coffee from Nestle under a small aluminium feudal system.

Worse still, they mostly produce lungos and giant mugs of frothy brown optimism aimed at people who think "coffee shop style" means drinking nearly a pint of caffeinated bathwater while wandering around a retail park.

That was not what I wanted at all. I wanted espresso. Small, concentrated little cups of coffee with enough aggression to suggest an argument had recently taken place in Naples. Which meant it had to be one of the older Original pod machines.

So I decided to buy a small older-generation Nespresso machine. A red one, ideally. Partly because I wanted the older pod system and partly because I have now reached the age where I can look at a domestic appliance and think, "that might become collectible eventually."

This is not entirely irrational. The older machines are compact, mechanically simple and use what has effectively become the standardised pod system now the patents have expired. They already have the faint whiff of old Braun equipment or early iPods about them, from that brief period when manufacturers still assumed products should simply work properly for years.

The older pods are now made by everybody. Aldi. Lidl. Starbucks. Half the European coffee industry. The patents expired and civilisation immediately improved. Coffee pods became like printer ink should have become years ago - boringly interchangeable.

At this point, however, the supposedly simple process of buying a coffee machine began turning into a procurement exercise worthy of the Ministry of Defence.

The first one I bought on eBay was perfect. Red. Original pod system. Excellent condition. I paid promptly, naturally, at which point the seller mysteriously withdrew it. One strongly suspects a late-night Google search had occurred, followed by the dawning realisation that they might possibly have underpriced it by fifty pounds.

I fully expect it to reappear shortly described as:

"RARE RETRO COLLECTIBLE ORIGINAL NESPRESSO MACHINE"

with the words "sought after", "investment opportunity" and possibly "future classic" somewhere in the listing, as though I had attempted to purchase a limited-edition Ferrari rather than a glorified coffee pump.

Still, I found another one. £35 plus £5 postage. Entirely reasonable, I thought, especially as even second-hand ones now seem to hover around the £80-£90 mark if they are clean, boxed or in one of the more desirable colours. Apparently we have now reached the stage where elderly coffee pod machines are developing collector psychology.

And yes, before anybody says it, I know perfectly well I could probably find one in a charity shop for £6.99 if I were prepared to wait long enough. I am, after all, an inveterate charity shop searcher myself. But I am an opportunist, not a dedicated analyst. If I happen to be passing and spot something interesting, excellent. What I am not prepared to do is spend six months conducting a coordinated sweep of every hospice shop in Gloucestershire like a retired antiques dealer searching for Napoleonic silverware.

This is the eternal fantasy of the charity shop enthusiast. The belief that somewhere, just over the horizon, there exists a pristine bargain waiting patiently beside a bread maker and a fondue set from 1987.

People speak of charity shop finds with the same hushed reverence medieval explorers once reserved for the Holy Grail.

"Oh yes, my neighbour found a Dualit toaster for three pounds."

Did he indeed. Fascinating. And how many cumulative hours of his remaining lifespan did he spend standing in slightly damp-smelling shops full of jigsaw puzzles and ornamental dolphins before this miracle occurred?

At some point one has to place a value on simply getting on with one's life.

Besides, charity shops now function as accidental museums of abandoned consumer optimism. Entire aisles dedicated to failed lifestyle transitions. Juicers from the Great Smoothie Era. Bread makers bought during carbohydrate enthusiasm. Exercise equipment abandoned roughly twelve minutes after New Year.

Bean-to-cup coffee machines increasingly appear there as well, which does not surprise me in the slightest. People are already abandoning the newer Vertuo pod machines in favour of bean-to-cup systems, the wisdom of which I deeply question. Bean-to-cup machines strike me as office photocopiers that happen to dispense cappuccino. They contain grinders, pumps, brew groups, drainage systems, seals, sensors and enough hidden damp organic matter to support independent fungal civilisation.

For the first year owners rave about them. By year three they are Googling things like "Krups error 8 brew unit jammed after cleaning cycle" while holding a proprietary lubricating grease syringe and wondering why making coffee now resembles servicing a stern tube bearing.

The first morning with the little red Nespresso machine was deeply unsettling. No grinder noise rattling through the kitchen before anyone else was fully awake. No weighing beans like a cocaine dealer checking inventory. No tamping. No puck analysis. No staring at extraction times while pretending I could taste "notes of dark cherry and cedar". I pressed a button and coffee appeared.

And it was perfectly good. Not the sort of espresso that causes bearded men on YouTube to close their eyes and whisper about mouthfeel, but entirely drinkable and produced without requiring me to partially dismantle the kitchen before breakfast.

The Gaggia may well be a design classic, sitting there on the worktop all polished stainless steel and artisanal intent, but I am no longer convinced it is the technological classic people imagine. In many ways it feels like a beautifully executed attempt to emulate a commercial espresso bar machine in cut-down domestic form.

The problem is that commercial espresso machines live in a completely different universe. They are permanently hot, massively thermally stable, continuously in use and operated by people making coffee all day long. The Gaggia attempts to compress that world into something small enough to sit beside a toaster and a fruit bowl while still expecting the owner to perform a small calibration exercise before breakfast.

In that sense, the Gaggia increasingly strikes me as the Apple of coffee machines. Beautifully designed. Aspirational. Pleasing to own. Associated with craftsmanship and identity almost as much as functionality.

The older Original Nespresso system, meanwhile, is more like Microsoft. Less romantic perhaps, but standardised, ubiquitous, practical and perfectly adequate for huge numbers of people. Once the patents expired and Aldi, Lidl and half the supermarket sector piled in, the whole thing quietly became the default ecosystem for ordinary domestic espresso.

And somehow, despite all the ritual and engineering theatre, I increasingly suspect the little Original Nespresso machine succeeds better at the thing most people actually want: producing a quick, reliable espresso in an ordinary kitchen before full consciousness has properly arrived.

At this point, espresso enthusiasts will already be composing lengthy replies involving pressure curves. Coffee enthusiasts will insist the Gaggia produces superior espresso and, under ideal conditions, they are probably right. But ideal conditions turn out to involve the sort of preparation and maintenance normally associated with restoring vintage motorcycles or keeping tropical fish alive.

Beyond a certain point, the pursuit of perfect coffee becomes indistinguishable from owning a classic motorcycle. A large part of the hobby consists of persuading yourself that maintenance is character-building.

Coffee forums increasingly resemble support groups for men who have spent £900 optimising a drink they consume in seven minutes while standing in their underpants, before wiping coffee grounds off the worktop for the third time that morning.

The Nespresso, meanwhile, simply gets on with it. Which, irritatingly, may be the more important technological achievement.

The final humiliation came when I tried an Aldi compatible pod and discovered it was perfectly decent. That was the moment the whole elaborate edifice collapsed. Years of discussions about grind consistency and extraction ratios, defeated by a German discount supermarket capsule costing roughly the same as a washer from Screwfix.

The Gaggia went on the market and returned me £224.44 - the value of half a dozen Nespresso machines or one moderately alarming GT6 invoice. There is something wonderfully middle-aged about liquidating artisanal coffee equipment in order to fund obscure Triumph parts manufactured by a man in Shropshire who only communicates via forums and accepts payment methods that sound faintly unofficial.

Honestly, that feels like a better allocation of engineering effort. The little red pod machine sits there quietly producing perfectly respectable espresso in under thirty seconds, while the proceeds from the Gaggia can instead disappear into the GT6 project, where complexity at least produces something visible and irrationally beautiful rather than merely caffeine.

Tomorrow morning I shall press a button like a civilised human being and spend the saved time searching online for rear suspension components I absolutely do not need yet but will almost certainly buy anyway.

The End of Appetite, and Possibly Populism

For years I had a perfectly workable arrangement with my body.

I would overeat steadily and then occasionally apologise to it with a 5:2 diet. This worked astonishingly well for quite a long time, largely because human metabolism is a badly managed compromise held together with caffeine and denial.

Then, about a year ago, the arrangement stopped working.

Part of the problem was my knees. I had gradually stopped taking regular exercise because they started objecting to the whole concept with increasing hostility. Then came the meniscal injury, which rather settled the matter. There is nothing quite like damaging a knee to make you realise how many parts of ordinary life involve quietly bending it.

That mattered more than I first admitted to myself. Exercise had been quietly propping up the entire arrangement. Once that disappeared, the weight began creeping upward in the stealthy manner peculiar to middle age. One kilogram here, another there, all delivered with the sort of persistence usually associated with direct debits and dry rot.

The irritating thing was that the old tricks still felt as though they ought to work. One fasting day would produce a gratifying dip. Then the next week the weight would come back carrying reinforcements. It was like negotiating with the EU if the EU were made entirely of toast and cheese.

What finally nudged me toward action was a colleague at work. He had been seriously overweight. Not pleasantly portly. Not “built for comfort”. Genuinely huge. The sort of man who appeared to arrive in rooms a few seconds before the rest of him. He went on one of these courses and the transformation was extraordinary. Within months he had gone from looking like a human beachball to a positively svelte human being. Not gaunt or unhealthy. Just suddenly normal sized, as though somebody had quietly adjusted the aspect ratio.

And the odd thing was that he did not seem permanently miserable, which had always been my assumption about major weight loss. He was not sitting there chewing lettuce while staring longingly at a passing pork pie. He simply seemed less driven by food.

Like most people, I had quietly regarded people using Mounjaro as cheats. There is a faintly Calvinist streak in British thinking about weight. If you are overweight, you are expected to suffer nobly while eating celery and staring mournfully at other people's chips. Any solution that does not involve suffering is viewed with suspicion.

But the more I looked into how Mounjaro actually works, the less convincing the “cheating” argument became. It does not magically dissolve fat while you recline on a chaise longue eating Battenberg cake. What it mainly seems to do is reduce the constant food noise and make you feel fuller sooner, so you naturally eat smaller portions. In other words, you are still dieting. You are simply not conducting the process while your brain spends every waking hour screaming about toast.

In that sense it is perhaps less like cheating and more like finally being allowed to play the game without somebody continually shaking the table.

My colleague rather punctured that view. He summed the whole thing up by saying the weight loss had probably saved him £10,000 for a back operation his excess weight was making increasingly likely. That rather reframed it from “cheating” into “preventing your skeleton from filing a grievance.”

And of course it does not stop there. Excess weight sits quietly in the background aggravating half the chronic conditions of modern life. Diabetes, heart disease, blood pressure, sleep apnoea, joint degeneration, fatty liver disease. We often talk about obesity as though it were mainly cosmetic, when in reality it behaves more like a slow systems-engineering failure affecting multiple components simultaneously.

Frankly, he had a point. If I manage to lose 25kg, there is a reasonable chance my knees may improve too. My displaced sacroiliac joint might also stop behaving like a badly aligned shipping container every time I stand up awkwardly. Quite a lot of what we politely call ageing is really just the physics of carrying excess mass around on components that were not designed for it.

Hayley, being a PhD biochemist and therefore professionally qualified to explain why one biscuit becomes a complete digestive policy failure, suggested Mounjaro. After some thought, I enrolled on the year long course with the aim of losing 25kg, partly for health reasons and partly because I would quite like to fit into things without sounding like an elderly deckchair opening.

It is not cheap. The full course will cost me around a grand, which initially felt faintly outrageous. Then I realised I shall probably save half of it simply by no longer wandering into kitchens and emerging twenty minutes later with toast, cheese, biscuits and a vague sense of personal disappointment. By the end of the year the national snack industry may be issuing a profits warning.

Now, I had assumed the interesting part would be the appetite suppression. That is what all the headlines focus on. People eating three peas and then gazing wistfully at a single almond as though it were an excessive indulgence.

But something else happened almost immediately.

I started forgetting to vape.

Not in the usual sense. I already misplace phones, keys, wallets and occasionally entire lines of thought. My organisational system resembles a ship's chandlery after a minor explosion. But this was different.

Normally, if I get into the car, the vape appears in short order. It is practically part of the ignition sequence. Seatbelt, mirrors, engine, nicotine. The brain has welded the whole routine together into one seamless behavioural loop. The other day I drove for over twenty minutes before I even thought about it, which is unusual enough that I actually noticed it.

And it turns out this may not be imagination at all. Researchers are increasingly finding that GLP-1 drugs appear to affect the brain's reward and craving systems, not merely appetite. Studies are now looking at reductions in alcohol use, nicotine craving, gambling behaviour and even compulsive shopping. Early clinical trials involving semaglutide have shown measurable reductions in alcohol craving and heavy drinking, while observational studies have suggested reduced addiction and relapse rates across substances including nicotine and alcohol.

In other words, these drugs may not simply make people less hungry. They may make people less haunted by urges. Once you start thinking about it, the same reward mechanisms seem to crop up everywhere in modern life. Social media outrage. Doomscrolling. Online gambling. Endless tribal political rage. The modern economy increasingly appears to run on finding ways to keep the human brain in a permanent state of anticipatory stimulation.

Some people do not merely support populist politics. They consume it compulsively. Every day requires some fresh emotional reward: another betrayal, some new conspiracy, another reason civilisation is apparently ending by Thursday. The outrage itself becomes rewarding. One does occasionally wonder whether these drugs could accidentally end up treating that too.

Imagine it. A man logs onto Facebook intending to type “THIS COUNTRY IS FINISHED”, then halfway through loses interest, makes a cup of tea, and quietly reads an Office for Budget Responsibility report instead. The entire populist movement might collapse by teatime.

What seems to be happening with these drugs is not simply appetite suppression. They appear to reduce what psychologists call salience. In plain English, the brain stops waving little flags saying, “This. Pay attention to this. You want this now.”

Food loses some of its magnetic pull. Apparently so can nicotine. In my case, the vape has not become unpleasant. It has simply become oddly unimportant. And that is fascinating because I already use very low nicotine liquid, which means a fair amount of vaping was probably no longer chemical dependency in the classic sense. It was habit, ritual, tiny background rewards stitched invisibly through the day while driving, making tea, typing, or muttering about politicians.

The vape was less a nicotine delivery device and more a punctuation mark. Now the punctuation appears to be fading.

What strikes me is how different this feels from the old anti-smoking campaigns. Those always seemed based on the assumption that human beings are rational creatures who merely require another photograph of a diseased lung before immediately abandoning decades of conditioned behaviour. Meanwhile millions carried on standing outside pubs in the rain saying, “Terrible habit this,” before lighting another one.

But these new drugs may be approaching the problem from an entirely different direction. Instead of lecturing the conscious mind, they appear to be quietly fiddling with the machinery underneath it. The urge itself becomes less noisy.

It is rather unsettling when you notice it happening in real time. You realise you have not thought about food for hours. Or vaping. Or snacking. Not because you are heroically resisting temptation, but because temptation seems to have wandered off to bother somebody else.

Frankly, if pharmaceutical companies accidentally stumble into treatments for obesity, nicotine addiction, alcoholism, compulsive behaviour and political doomscrolling all at once, it will rank as one of the most extraordinary cases of unintended consequences in modern medicine.

Had my third weekly injection on Sunday. A tiny pinprick in the stomach, which still feels faintly absurd given that it is apparently capable of renegotiating decades of biological programming more effectively than every article beginning with "Ten Simple Fat Loss Tips" ever written by a man called Tyler on LinkedIn.

I've already lost 2.5kg, which is apparently extremely good going for the starter 2.5mg dose. Better than predicted, according to the cheerful little App that accompanies the drug and presumably reports directly to a Californian data centre monitoring my relationship with potatoes.

On the basis of this, Hay, who is a PhD biochemist and therefore irritatingly qualified to have opinions on receptor agonists and metabolic pathways, is keeping me on the 2.5mg dose for the second month. Her argument is that I am clearly responding well already and therefore do not need the standard pharmaceutical escalator ride upwards through the increasingly expensive dosages.

The manufacturers, naturally, are very keen on the ramp-up model. Funny that.

To be fair, there is genuine clinical logic behind increasing the dose. Higher doses do tend to produce greater average weight loss. But there is also a respectable argument for staying at the lowest effective dose while it continues to work, rather than charging enthusiastically upwards simply because a flowchart says so. Particularly when the higher doses introduce an increased chance of turning every meal into a tense diplomatic negotiation with your own digestive system.

So far I have had none of the legendary side effects. No exploding botty. No constipation. No sulphurous belching like a Victorian sewer outlet. My sole side effect has been one entirely deserved episode of nausea after attempting to tackle a baked potato alongside dinner, despite already suspecting beforehand that this was a profoundly optimistic decision.

That seems to be how the drug works. It does not scream at you. It simply sits quietly in the background like a disappointed Edwardian butler saying, "Really, sir? A potato as well?"

Portion sizes have visibly decreased, along with the desire to graze endlessly between meals. There is also something rather odd happening psychologically. Food is starting to move from being a form of low-level entertainment to being merely... food. Which I realise sounds how thin people have apparently experienced existence all along. The smug bastards.

Watch this space. Carefully though, as I might disappear completely.

Beaulieu

After driving past Beaulieu for years and vaguely filing it under "place full of old people looking at teaspoons", we finally went last weekend while staying in the New Forest in the motorhome.

Over thirty quid each to get in, which initially produces the sort of involuntary facial expression normally associated with unexpected dental work. But I have to admit, it was worth it. An additional benefit of Gift Aiding the fee is that you can return to the National Motor Museum for free within a year.

The National Motor Museum alone justified the trip, and that is before the house, gardens and the strange realisation that Beaulieu is what happens when an aristocratic family decides not to embalm itself for public consumption.

That is the key difference. Most stately homes now feel as though the owners popped out in 1893 to buy a pheasant and never returned. Everything preserved behind ropes by curators speaking in reverential tones about occasional tables. The whole place pickled in aspic.

Beaulieu feels lived in.

Not "lived in" in the sense of muddy Labradors and an unpaid gas bill, obviously. More that the family still appear to regard the house as theirs rather than as a museum exhibit temporarily entrusted to them by a committee in sensible shoes.

Rooms evolve because somebody fancied changing them. One bedroom looked like a circus tent designed during a mildly unhinged lunch break. Another was entirely motoring themed, complete with vintage car wallpaper and enough motoring memorabilia to suggest somebody in the family casually keeps Bugattis in the shrubbery. Another resembled the sort of room where a wealthy Edwardian botanist might quietly poison rivals with exotic orchids.

None of it had the dead hand of heritage curation on it.

And oddly enough, that feels more historically authentic.

Aristocrats were forever ripping bits out and modernising things anyway. Georgians wrecked Tudor interiors. Victorians covered everything in wallpaper and sorrow. Every generation altered the place to suit itself. The National Trust merely freezes houses at whichever date the committee happened to prefer.

The Montagus also deserve credit for realising, earlier than most aristocratic families, that the answer to catastrophic post-war estate economics was not surrender, but monetisation. "People seem to like old cars. Let us charge them."

And fair play to them, it worked.

The Montagus themselves occupy that interesting layer of the aristocracy where the title is respectable rather than earth-shatteringly grand, but the family connections spread everywhere. Earls, dukes, politicians, military figures, royalty-adjacent people who probably all know which fork to use for pheasant. The British aristocracy was essentially centuries of strategic mergers conducted through shooting parties and daughters called Arabella. What Beaulieu perhaps demonstrates better than some grander houses is that adaptability mattered more than rank. Quite a few loftier families ended up selling paintings, silver and roof lead to survive. The Montagus put racing cars in a museum, opened the gates and carried on living there.

The motor museum itself is superb because it still feels enthusiast driven rather than corporate. There was the extraordinary Volkswagen XL1 looking like somebody in the 1930s imagined the future and then accidentally got it right. Tiny frontal area, enclosed rear wheels and the sort of obsessive streamlining that makes modern SUVs look faintly ridiculous. It apparently managed around 300mpg in ideal conditions, which is both deeply impressive and slightly annoying because it demonstrates that the car industry could pursue radical efficiency when it really wants to.

Nearby sat Donald Campbell's Bluebird CN7, looking less like a car and more like an artillery shell designed by an aerodynamic cult. The whole land speed record era now seems gloriously insane. Britain once looked at gas turbines and deserts and concluded that the obvious thing to do was strap a man inside and see what happened.

Then there was the Brough Superior combination, all polished alloy and beautifully engineered menace, parked as though Lawrence of Arabia might return at any moment demanding fresh oil and a cigarette. Alongside it sat wonderfully improbable early motorcycles and motorised contraptions from the dawn of powered transport, including one tiny post-WWI scooter-like device that prompted Hayley to observe, "That'll never catch on."

That is the joy of museums like this. They quietly remind you that humans are utterly hopeless at predicting which technologies will transform society. Every revolution initially looks faintly ridiculous. Cars looked absurd beside horses. Early motorcycles resembled bicycles suffering a mechanical incident. The first scooters looked like mobility aids for adventurous vicars.

And then there was the SOE exhibition.

Wonderful British understatement everywhere. The Special Operations Executive studying methods of "ungentlemanly warfare".

Not evil warfare. Not horrifying warfare. Merely slightly bad manners.

One section described "subversive, corrupting propaganda" as though somebody had distributed rude jazz records at a church fete.

Meanwhile these people were blowing up railways, running sabotage operations and dropping agents into occupied Europe.

And of course Beaulieu itself was involved in wartime training. Which somehow feels perfectly British. Medieval abbey, stately home, racing cars, espionage training, tea shop.

The whole place has personality, which is increasingly rare. So many attractions now feel focus-grouped into sterile blandness. Beaulieu still feels as though actual enthusiasts and mildly eccentric aristocrats are involved somewhere in the machinery.

Mind you, there were omissions.

No Triumph GT6.

No Mercedes R129 500SL.

Frankly, I can only assume they are embarrassed by displaying perfection publicly.

The above photos is of an Aerial Square Four chopper. Unheard of! Perhaps I should loan them by restomod GT6 when complete.

Dual Use BBQ Technology

Hay and I were looking through the Aldi leaflet when we spotted it. 

A wooden barbecue for children.

Hay looked at it for a moment and said: “Well, I suppose it’s single use.”

I replied:

“No, dual use. It makes the charcoal for the adult version.”

And that really is the perfect summary of modern barbecue culture. Spend £400 on a giant outdoor cooking station with shelves, hooks, gauges and wheels, only to produce six burnt sausages while standing in drizzle saying:

“It’s the charcoal that gives the flavour.”

Aldi have simply cut out the middleman. Straight from barbecue to fuel. Efficient German thinking.

The Great Labour Brexit Tiptoe

One of the more amusing aspects of Labour’s leadership manoeuvring is watching politicians suddenly rediscover the political sensitivity of Brexit the moment Reform appears over the horizon.

Andy Burnham previously said quite openly that he hoped Britain would rejoin the EU in his lifetime. Entirely respectable position. Perfectly arguable. Yet now, as a possible by-election and leadership contest loom, the volume appears to have been turned down to the level of a nervous man trying not to wake the dog.

Streeting has a related but different problem. He is more openly comfortable with the idea that Britain’s future lies back closer to Europe, possibly much closer. That may be economically sensible, but as a national leader facing Reform it is a gift-wrapped attack line. They would brand him the “rejoin by stealth” candidate before he had finished choosing the wallpaper in Number 10.

And therein lies the problem Labour still has with Brexit.

Most of the leadership contenders probably know, privately, that Brexit has economically underperformed the promises made for it. The difficulty is that openly saying so outside metropolitan Labour circles still carries political risk because Brexit stopped being merely an economic argument years ago. For many voters it became cultural identity, tribal loyalty and emotional inheritance.

So Labour ends up performing this curious dance: quietly edging toward closer EU alignment, carefully avoiding the word “rejoin”, while simultaneously pretending the subject itself has not become the largest unspoken issue in British politics.

The irony is that Starmer’s position is probably the most honest politically. Closer alignment where useful, no rejoin push unless there is a clear democratic majority for it. In other words: recognising reality without trying to restart the Brexit civil war every Thursday afternoon.

Meanwhile some of the challengers appear to be discovering that principles sound rather different once Reform UK starts measuring the curtains in your target constituency.

Driftwood Capitalism

There is something magnificently British about the beach huts at Mudeford Sand Spit.

Not the huts themselves. They are basically glorified sheds with ambitions. It is the fact that we have collectively agreed that a timber structure roughly the size of a garden office for somebody called Simon in middle management should now cost somewhere between £300,000 and £400,000.

I stood there looking at one the other day. Grey cladding. Little porthole window. Solar panel on the roof. Decking. A kayak shoved underneath as if to say, "No honestly, we are outdoors people." There was a sign outside from Denisons announcing this tiny coastal Versailles was for sale.

For the price of a substantial house in many parts of Britain.

And you do not even own the land.

That is the bit I particularly admire. Somewhere along the line, somebody managed to create a market where people spend the GDP of a medium sized village on a wooden hut standing on sand they are effectively renting from the council. It is the property equivalent of paying £18 for a sandwich described as "deconstructed".

Naturally, once I discovered the price, I became slightly obsessed. I started peering more closely at the details like a man inspecting an Aston Martin at a classic car show. "Hmm yes, nice bifolds. Decent decking. Ah, solar panel. Very wise."

And the annoying thing is, I do slightly get it.

The location is glorious. You wake up with the sea a few yards away, make coffee looking out across the water, wander about in shorts carrying a paddleboard while quietly ignoring the fact that the hut probably contains more technology than my first flat.

That is the real commodity being sold now. Not huts. Not cladding. Not even beach access.

The performance of simplicity.

You see it everywhere. Shepherd huts with underfloor heating. Farmhouse kitchens containing enough electronics to launch a weather satellite. Tiny homes costing more than the large homes people used to complain about. Modern life has somehow ended up with wealthy people spending fortunes to simulate being slightly poor but in a tasteful way.

These beach huts are merely the coastal version.

And the truly ridiculous thing is that if somebody handed me one tomorrow, I would be absolutely delighted. Within about three days I would be referring to it as "the hut" in casual conversation, as though I were some retired admiral. "We may go down to the hut this weekend if the weather behaves."

Then, inevitably, reality would creep in.

I would find myself lying awake worrying about salt corrosion, wind uplift on the roof, insurance exclusions, whether the council licence was transferable, and why the solar regulator was flashing amber again.

Because nothing destroys the illusion of carefree coastal living faster than discovering your £375,000 shed has damp.

Tyre Repair

There is, it turns out, a great deal of misplaced faith in modern tyre repair. My son’s motorbike, for example, has become a sort of travelling demonstration unit for plug kits. Every few weeks another puncture appears, another rubbery insertion is made, and off he goes again with the quiet optimism of a man who has decided that physics is more of a suggestion than a rule.

Meanwhile, I find myself driving a borrowed car from work while hunting down an engine for the Galaxy. A mundane enough arrangement, until I notice that one of the tyres contains a roofing nail. Not had contained, you understand. Contains. Present tense. Embedded with the self-assurance of something that has no intention of going anywhere.

It has been in there so long that the huge nailhead has worn off.

Now, any sensible person would expect this to result in a slow but steady loss of pressure, followed by inconvenience and mild expense. Instead, nothing happens. Weeks pass. Then months. The tyre remains as firm as a Treasury forecast before contact with reality. No hiss, no warning light, not even the decency of a gradual decline. The nail, it seems, is doing a better job of sealing the tyre than the entire aftermarket ecosystem of plugs, foams and earnest YouTube tutorials.

This does rather undermine the official line. We are told that a puncture is a delicate matter requiring approved interventions, preferably involving branded kits and a sense of urgency. Yet here is a crude length of roofing hardware outperforming the lot of them simply by staying put and minding its own business. One begins to wonder whether the industry has slightly overcomplicated the problem.

There is, of course, a limit to this line of thought. A roofing nail is not a maintenance strategy. It is, at best, an accidental success story with a distinctly finite shelf life. Sooner or later it will shift, or corrode, or simply decide it has done enough public service. At that point the laws of mechanics will reassert themselves, likely at an inconvenient moment and with some enthusiasm.

Still, it is hard not to admire the thing. In a world of increasingly elaborate solutions, it has delivered quiet competence without fuss, instruction manual or QR code. I will, reluctantly, have the tyre properly repaired. But I do so knowing that, for a brief period, the most effective piece of tyre technology at my disposal was a roofing nail.

The Politics of Instant Gratification and the Arithmetic of Reality

People keep talking about replacing Keir Starmer as though Britain is a football club trapped in a disappointing mid-table season and all we need is a fresh face in the dugout shouting a bit more enthusiastically from the touchline.

That rather assumes the problem is motivational. That Britain is basically sound underneath, but lacking vibes.

Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham have both been making leadership noises, although in the modern Labour Party this takes the form of saying things like, "I fully support the Prime Minister," while standing next to a petrol can and a box of matches. Streeting has at least started edging towards saying aloud what much of business quietly concluded some time ago: Brexit was economically catastrophic.

Burnham's line is more emotional. Labour must reconnect. Labour must feel more like the party of working people. Labour must show visible change.

All true, in a sense.

The trouble is that visible change generally requires actual change underneath it. Politics eventually collides with arithmetic. You can only emotionally engage people with empty wallets for so long before they notice the emotional engagement appears to have cost £9.80 for a loaf of bread and a packet of ham.

This is the trap.

Starmer, for all his faults, may actually understand the trap better than his critics. Britain is not recovering from a normal cyclical downturn. It is trying to recover from Brexit friction, underinvestment, collapsing infrastructure, local authority exhaustion, NHS backlogs, housing shortages, productivity stagnation and the Liz Truss experiment in discovering whether pension funds could be set on fire remotely.

None of this repairs quickly.

Streeting and Burnham seem to think Labour's problem is substantially communicative. Starmer thinks the problem is structural. I increasingly suspect Starmer is closer to reality, however emotionally unsatisfying that may be.

And there is another possibility. Some of the things Streeting and Burnham are hinting at may materialise anyway over the next few weeks and months, not because they are leadership challengers, but because Labour itself may gradually pivot in that direction. Closer European cooperation, more visible regional investment, a more emotionally literate presentation, perhaps even a slightly less frightened tone about Brexit itself. The argument may ultimately turn out to be less about destination than tempo and political packaging.

Because what exactly is the alternative?

They cannot borrow recklessly. The bond markets already demonstrated, during the Truss period, that they are perfectly capable of introducing Britain to gravity at speed. The era of pretending interest rates do not matter has ended rather abruptly.

They can tax the wealthy more heavily, which is probably the most Labour-ish option available, and in moderation there is a perfectly respectable argument for it. Britain taxes work heavily while often treating accumulated wealth with the sort of tender respect usually reserved for Faberge eggs.

But there are risks there too. Capital is mobile. Wealthy people become astonishingly international the moment someone mentions capital gains tax. Men who have not knowingly eaten foreign food since 1987 suddenly start discussing residency options in Monaco with surprising urgency.

The other option is raiding the vulnerable, which is politically poisonous for Labour and economically marginal anyway.

So that leaves growth.

And Starmer appears to have concluded, correctly in my view, that the only realistic medium-term growth route is gradual re-alignment with Europe while trying not to restart the Brexit psychodrama. Hence the oddly cautious approach. Veterinary agreements. Regulatory cooperation. Security partnerships. Quiet friction reduction.

It infuriates committed Remainers because it feels timid.

But Starmer probably understands something many activists still do not. Britain has a remarkable tendency to avoid admitting error cleanly. We do not reverse course dramatically. We shuffle backwards while insisting we are boldly moving forwards. We are a nation that will drive thirty miles in the wrong direction rather than admit we missed the turning.

More importantly, he probably understands that openly campaigning for EU re-entry now would unleash a right wing press torrent capable of dominating the national conversation for years. And unlike many people on the centre left like to pretend, that torrent matters. Not because newspapers hypnotise the public like a 1950s science fiction film, but because repetition shapes atmosphere. It shapes what feels patriotic, suspect, normal or taboo.

Britain spent years marinating in headlines equating Europe with surrender, humiliation and foreign control. That leaves a residue.

So Starmer's strategy appears to be to get Britain quietly into a position where much closer European integration becomes economically obvious and emotionally less explosive before anyone openly uses the word "rejoin". Even getting to that position is dangerous. Declaring it openly now would probably be political suicide.

Which means Labour is trying to edge Britain back towards Europe without saying, "You remember that thing everyone screamed about for a decade? It turned out to be economically idiotic."

The deeper problem is that much of the electorate still wants emotionally satisfying politics. Reform offers exactly that. It offers catharsis. It offers blame. It offers simple answers to complex decline. What it does not offer is a workable growth model for a medium-sized trading nation sitting beside the largest market on Earth while deliberately complicating trade with it.

But emotionally satisfying politics has already brought Britain Brexit, Johnson and Truss. We have had years of national therapy sessions disguised as economic policy.

And now voters are demanding instant repair from the people clearing up the debris.

That is why I increasingly suspect Starmer's dullness is partly deliberate. He may genuinely believe Britain needs a prolonged reintroduction to boring reality. Stable finances. Slow institutional repair. Incremental growth. Reduced friction with Europe. Functional government. No giant patriotic moonshots involving exploding pension funds.

The irony is that he may be strategically right and still lose.

Because electorates rarely reward delayed competence. Especially electorates accustomed to political sugar rushes and emotionally satisfying nonsense. Structural decline accumulated over years cannot be reversed in eighteen months, particularly when many of the same voters helped create the underlying conditions in the first place.

The man quietly rebuilding the foundations is always less exciting than the man promising a rooftop infinity pool by Thursday.

Still, foundations matter. Particularly after years spent removing load-bearing walls because Nigel Farage said the damp was caused by Brussels.

From £75 Seats to a £1400 Idea.

I have done a perfectly sensible thing. I have bought two tan Mazda MX-5 seats for a Triumph GT6, on the entirely rational basis that I am about to add more power to a lightweight car that was originally designed in an era when “head restraint” was more of a philosophical position than a physical object.

This is how these decisions unfold.

The GT6, lovely though it is, comes with seats that belong to a time when a brisk rear-end shunt was considered character building. They are low, charming, and about as useful for neck support as a folded newspaper. Now, if you are planning to potter about with the original straight six and a gentle right foot, you can probably live with that.

If, however, you have the faint intention of introducing a turbocharged Mazda engine into the equation, you start to think that perhaps your cervical spine deserves a bit more consideration.

At this point, there are two routes.

Route one is to keep the original seats and fit headrests. This sounds simple, until you look at the structure and realise that what you are really proposing is a small fabrication project involving brackets, reinforcements, and a level of confidence that your handiwork will behave sensibly in an accident. There is a moment where you find yourself thinking, “I could just weld something here,” and then, quite rightly, you pause and make a cup of tea instead.

Route two is to find seats that already have proper headrests built in, designed by people who have thought about such things professionally and would quite like to avoid being sued.

Enter Recaro.

Recaro seats are, without question, the correct answer if money is no object. They look right, they feel right, and they carry with them a sort of quiet authority, as if they have been fitted to cars that do serious things at speed. Unfortunately, they also cost the sort of money that makes you briefly reconsider whether your neck is, in fact, that important.

You start browsing. You find a set. You look at the price. You assume it is for the pair. It is not. It is for one seat. Without trimming. You close the tab and go back to your tea.

Which is how you arrive at the MX-5.

MX-5 seats are the great compromise of the automotive world. They are plentiful, reasonably priced, and crucially, they come with integrated headrests that have been tested in the real world by people who would prefer not to suffer whiplash. They are also, with a bit of imagination, adaptable enough to sit in something older without causing immediate offence.

So you buy a pair. Tan, as it happens, which is a perfectly respectable colour in isolation but entirely unsuited to a car that is destined to be Aston Martin California Sage. The plastic bits, naturally, are black, just to ensure that nothing matches anything else.

They cost £75 for the pair. Which feels like a triumph, right up to the point you remember that you are about to spend something approaching £1400 having them retrimmed. Not because anyone is taking the mickey, but because this is no longer a straightforward retrim. It’s a slightly specialised job, and the seats themselves need a bit of persuasion. The bases will have to be resculpted so that one’s bonce doesn’t bounce off the roof every time the road undulates or enthusiasm gets the better of one. By the time foam, shaping and proper trimming are factored in, the arithmetic becomes less heroic, but it still feels like a bargain, and that is the important thing.

And this is where the project takes on a life of its own. Because now you are not just fitting seats. You are designing an interior. The tan will go. It has to. It’s been replaced, in theory at least, with something that began life as “mint” and has since been argued over to the point where it is now “light, warm, greyed sage pretending to be mint”, which is not a phrase anyone sensible would use, but here we are.

There will be dark green stitching, because apparently that’s what gives it “definition”, although one has to be careful not to get carried away or it starts looking like a motorbike jacket. There will be piping, but only on the seat edges, because we are exercising restraint. The headrests, having justified their existence on safety grounds, are now expected to sit quietly and not draw attention to themselves.

The black plastic will be painted. Of course it will. In dark green, satin finish, properly prepared, because leaving it black would be to admit that these seats once belonged to a different car, and we cannot have that.

At some point, you stand back and realise that you have taken a pragmatic decision about headrests and turned it into a full-scale aesthetic doctrine involving colour theory, material hierarchy, and the moral limits of piping.

And, in a moment of either modern efficiency or mild folly, I even had ChatGPT render the whole plan into a mock-up, just to see what it might look like before committing several hundred pounds’ worth of leather to something that, at this stage, exists largely in my head. Which is reassuring, right up to the point you remember that it’s very good at making things look plausible and can hallucinate.

And yet, there is a certain logic to it.

The original problem was simple: a lightweight car, more power, and a desire not to have one’s head flicked backwards every time things get a bit lively, or worse, when they stop being lively rather suddenly. Everything since then has been an attempt to solve that problem without ending up with something that looks as though it was assembled from whatever was cheapest on eBay that week.

Will it work? Almost certainly. Will anyone else notice the precise shade of sage, the restraint shown on the headrests, or the careful decision to paint the plastic? Probably not. But they might look in, pause for a moment, and think, “That looks right.” Which, given where this started, will probably do.