The Man Who Broke the Middle East and Gave It to China

Trump has managed to turn a regional conflict into a sort of travelling demolition project. Not just Iran, but bits of the Gulf more broadly now at risk of ending up with holes where expensive infrastructure used to be. Refineries, ports, pipelines. The sort of kit that normally takes years to build and about five minutes to break.

Now, someone will have to to pay to put that lot back together again. It will not be Trump. He isn’t reaching for the American chequebook, partly because he doesn’t see the point and partly because, from his perspective, America has its own oil and can muddle through. Rebuilding the Gulf is someone else’s problem.

The Gulf states themselves could, of course, pay. Places like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are not short of a bob or two. They may well decide to quietly fix things and move on. That is one possible ending.

But it is not the only one, and it is not the interesting one.

Because sitting just offstage is China, which happens to be heavily dependent on Gulf and Iranian oil and has a rather well established habit of turning up with engineers, loans and a long memory. China does not need tidy, risk-adjusted returns. It is perfectly happy to swap infrastructure for influence and oil security over a couple of decades.

Iran, in particular, is where this becomes less of a choice and more of a default. American capital is not “hesitant” there. It is legally barred. So when Iran needs vast sums to rebuild what has just been broken and what was already creaking, there is no queue forming in New York or Houston.

There is, however, a fairly obvious queue forming in Beijing.

Elsewhere in the Gulf it is more of a contest. The locals can self fund. Western capital may turn up if the risk can be priced. China will certainly want in. But the mere fact that this is now a question at all is the point. The door has been opened.

Meanwhile, the clever bit. Oil flows get disrupted, the Strait of Hormuz becomes a little less reliable, and energy prices rise. That is not a regional inconvenience. That is everyone’s problem. Trump, however, is doubling down on oil at precisely the moment when large chunks of the modern economy, particularly AI, need cheap and stable electricity.

And here is the slightly awkward detail. Those data centres are not all sitting in Texas next to a friendly wellhead. They are scattered about, quite a lot of them in Europe, humming away and quietly assuming that energy will remain both available and vaguely affordable. When oil spikes, so does everything else. So while Trump is busy annoying NATO and talking about walking away from it, he is also, in practical terms, pushing up the cost base of the very digital infrastructure his allies rely on.

At the same time, you have Africa. Large parts of it still lack reliable electricity, which is usually presented as a tragedy, but is also, from a strategic point of view, an open invitation. Build the generation, build the grid, and you do not just supply power, you shape the economy that follows. Increasingly, that power will be renewable, because it is the quickest way to get something working at scale without waiting for pipelines that may or may not arrive.

Again, there is a fairly obvious candidate to do that work, and it is not Washington.

And this is where the energy argument stops being a culture war about wind turbines and starts being about power in the literal sense.

Coal built unions because it forced people together. Same pits, same dangers, same towns. Oil spread things out. Still industrial, still risky, but easier to fragment and easier to manage. Renewables look scattered at first glance, but scale them up and you get concentrations again around ports, factories, grid infrastructure and maintenance. Not identical to coal, but enough to rebuild forms of collective organisation that oil diluted.

At the same time, control shifts. With oil, power sits with whoever owns the scarce fuel. With renewables, generation becomes more commoditised and leverage moves into storage, grid access, balancing and trading. Power does not disappear, it moves into systems that are harder to dominate quietly and much more exposed to politics.

Which is why the unease on the right is not really about the view or intermittency. It is about losing a model that concentrated control and kept labour manageable.

Which brings us back to Trump, who knows perfectly well that China is the strategic competitor. That is not the blind spot. The problem is that, having been led by the nose by Israel into this particular mess, he has created precisely the conditions China is best placed to exploit.

China does not need to win a war here. It just needs to turn up afterwards with a clipboard, a financing package, and a willingness to build whatever comes next.

And that is how you hand over influence in the Gulf, a foothold in Africa’s industrialisation, and a quiet bit of leverage over Europe’s energy costs, all while insisting you are backing the future.

It feels less like grand strategy and more like discovering that while you were busy defending the old engine, someone else quietly bought the garage, hired the mechanics, and started sending you the bill for the electricity.

My ETA is 15:23

There was a time, not that long ago, when giving an ETA involved a sort of gentleman’s shrug. “About three,” you’d say, which could mean anything from ten to three to half past, depending on traffic, weather, and whether you’d remembered where you put your keys. It wasn’t imprecise so much as civilised. It allowed for life to intervene without anyone reaching for a stopwatch.

Now, of course, we have satellites. We have Waze. We have a calm, faintly judgemental voice informing us that we will arrive at precisely 15:23, and not a second sooner. And the unsettling thing is, for any journey of decent length, it’s usually right. Not vaguely right, but properly right. Three and a half hours across the country, and you glide onto the drive at exactly the minute predicted, as if the entire road network has been choreographed in your honour.

This has quietly changed the social contract. “I’ll be there at 15:23” is no longer a hopeful estimate, it’s a commitment bordering on a blood oath. Arriving at 15:25 is no longer “on time”, it is a failure of execution. One can almost imagine the other party glancing at their watch, noting the discrepancy, and marking it down somewhere. A small black mark against your name for temporal sloppiness.

What’s happened, really, is that we’ve taken a tool designed to manage traffic and turned it into a device for measuring human reliability. Waze is not just telling you when you’ll arrive, it’s setting a standard you are now expected to meet. And because it factors in traffic, roadworks, and the sort of obscure rat-runs that would once have required a local farmer and a hand-drawn map, it removes all the old excuses. You can no longer blame congestion, or a diversion, or getting stuck behind something agricultural. The algorithm knew about that. The algorithm allowed for it. The algorithm is quietly disappointed in you.

Except, of course, for one small and entirely human flaw in the system. You do, in fact, arrive at exactly 15:23. The little arrow glides to its destination, the voice falls silent, and for a brief moment you feel like a man in full command of his destiny. And then reality intrudes.

You have to park. You have to turn the engine off. You have to locate your phone, your keys, your glasses, the thing you definitely had on the passenger seat five minutes ago. You have to extract yourself from the car with whatever dignity remains, gather your bags, close the door, possibly reopen it because you’ve forgotten something, and then make your way to the front door like a normal human being rather than a data point.

By the time you actually ring the bell, it is 15:25.

So despite hitting the ETA with surgical precision, you are, in practical terms, late. Not late in the old, forgiving sense of “somewhere around three”, but late against a standard you never consciously agreed to but now feel faintly guilty about. Two minutes. Two entirely predictable, unavoidable, human minutes.

We’ve ended up in a curious place. The technology is extraordinarily good. It can predict, with eerie accuracy, the movement of your car across half the country. What it cannot account for is the final twenty yards, where you revert from a moving dot on a screen to a slightly disorganised person with a bag and a front door to negotiate.

And somehow, that’s the bit that still defeats us.

Smells Like Pensioner Disappointment

I set off at 06.29 from Yate feeling faintly pleased with myself, which should always be taken as a warning. The sort of quiet, early-morning competence where you’ve packed your own food, checked the connections, and briefly imagine you’ve got life broadly under control.

The plan involved a proper butty. Latvian rye, the dense, slightly argumentative sort of bread that doesn’t collapse under pressure. Vintage cheddar with a bit of bite. Mrs Bridges chutney doing its usual job of keeping everything civilised. I’d even packed a square of chocolate, which felt like overachievement.

Changed at Gloucester without incident, which only reinforced the dangerous optimism. Sat down at 07.30, train moving, countryside sliding past in that grey, slightly apologetic way it has at that hour, and did what any modern traveller does - streamed YouTube straight into my ears via Bluetooth hearing aids.

There’s something faintly absurd about that in itself. Years ago, hearing aids were beige, whistled occasionally, and existed purely to make conversations in draughty rooms slightly less mysterious. Now they’re effectively a discreet media centre. One moment you’re a retired chap on an early train, the next you’re wirelessly plugged into political philosophy and 1970s rock production.

So I had a bit of Vlad Vexler, thoughtfully unpacking the deeper meaning of Melania’s film, which he suggests is less a portrait and more a rather elegant side swipe at Trump, which I nodded along to as though I were contributing something. Then the making of Smells Like Teen Spirit, all earnest recollections and slightly worn denim. Then the making of Stairway to Heaven, which is essentially a documentary about how long one can spend adjusting a microphone before achieving transcendence.

By this point I was in quite an elevated state. Politics, culture, art, the human condition. The sort of mental atmosphere in which a well-constructed sandwich feels entirely appropriate. A small, edible conclusion to a series of serious thoughts.

Hearing aids still quietly doing their thing. Box out. Quiet moment of anticipation.

Opened it.

Prosciutto.

Not in a sandwich. Not even pretending to be heading in that direction. Just a box of it. A rather large quantity, as though I were about to cater for a small wedding, or possibly a wolf.

Now, prosciutto is all very well. No complaints about the pig involved. But on its own it has the structural integrity of damp tissue paper and the emotional range of a side character. It needs something to lean on. Bread, at the very least. Cheese, ideally. A bit of chutney to stop it becoming self-important.

Which is when it dawns on me that what I was actually meant to be eating was, in its own modest way, a sort of Stairway to Cheddar. Layers, structure, a gradual build to something satisfying, each component doing its part without fuss.

Instead, there I am, fresh from an hour of cultural and philosophical enrichment, streaming directly into my skull like some sort of modest cyborg, eating slices of ham out of a plastic box like a slightly confused aristocrat who’s taken a wrong turn and ended up on Great Western Railway.

There’s no dignity in it. A butty has edges. It can be held, bitten, managed. This is just ongoing. You peel off a bit, it folds in on itself, you try again, and before long you’ve eaten what is essentially half a leg of pork and still feel you haven’t had breakfast.

Meanwhile, somewhere at home, the actual sandwich is sitting there in its box, fully assembled, perfectly balanced, doing exactly what it was designed to do. Bread holding things together. Cheese providing substance. Chutney offering a bit of perspective. The whole thing quietly smug.

And that, really, is the point. We spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves on preparation. Systems, planning, getting ahead of the game. We stream clever people directly into our ears, we nod along, we feel informed.

And then it turns out we’ve simply picked up the wrong container.

You can call it human error if you like. I’d call it a design flaw in identical plastic boxes.

Anyway, I’m now somewhere north of Gloucester, slightly underfed, faintly greasy, faintly more technologically advanced than I strictly need to be, and contemplating whether to buy a coffee that tastes of burnt optimism and a pastry that claims to be artisanal but will, in all likelihood, dissolve into disappointment.

Smells Like Pensioner Disappointment, really.

Changing Time

There’s something faintly heroic about the country twice a year deciding, in unison, to fiddle with every clock it owns as if this will somehow improve matters. A sort of national ritual. Like bleeding a radiator, but for time itself.

Now, I appreciate that in 1916, when the country was trying to squeeze every ounce of usefulness out of daylight, coal and factory hours, shifting the clocks probably felt like a clever wheeze. More light for work, less waste, Germany possibly annoyed. Very brisk. Very purposeful.

But here we are, a century later, and I find myself standing in the kitchen trying to remember how to reset the oven clock, which insists on blinking 00:00 like a small act of rebellion, while the car has updated itself automatically and now disagrees with the microwave. This, apparently, is modern efficiency.

The official line is that all this still suits the working population. You hear it said with the usual air of calm authority, as if nobody has looked out of the window in January. It allegedly moves daylight to where it is most useful. Which sounds splendid until you notice that, in winter, plenty of people still leave for work in darkness and come home in darkness, just with the gloom rearranged a bit.

That is the truth of it really. The clock change does not abolish winter darkness. Britain in winter simply has a limited supply of daylight and no amount of ministerial fiddling is going to change that. All we are doing is deciding which end of the day gets to be slightly less depressing.

We are told it helps children going to school, and fair enough, there is at least a proper argument there. If we kept summer time all year, sunrise in some parts would drift so late that children would be setting off in something close to midnight with school bags. But let’s not pretend this is some elegant economic masterstroke. It is a dreary compromise with the Earth’s axis.

Then there is the claim that it gives workers more light after work. Yes, in the shoulder months it probably does. March and October get a mild lift. People can leave the office and still see a tree. Wonderful. But December carries on being December, entirely indifferent to our administrative tinkering. By then the day is already over by teatime and no amount of confidence from policy wonks alters that.

As for the old stuff about saving energy, that now feels like one of those arguments repeated mostly because nobody can be bothered to go back and fetch its coat. Lighting patterns have changed, heating habits have changed, daily life has changed. We are not all sitting in Edwardian parlours gasping with gratitude because the lamp stayed off for another forty minutes.

For retired people, of course, the whole thing takes on an extra layer of absurdity. My day is not ruled by a factory siren. If I want more morning light, I can get up later. If I want more evening light, I can go outside earlier. I do not need Parliament to perform surgery on the clock in order to help me identify lunchtime.

What I do get is a couple of days of feeling slightly out of joint, a house full of clocks holding different opinions, and the annual hunt for the one stubborn device that requires a sequence of button presses last seen in the cockpit of a Soviet submarine. Usually the oven. Always the oven.

And still we do it. Twice a year. Because we’ve always done it, because it sort of helps somebody somewhere, and because the country likes a bit of pointless faff so long as it comes wrapped in official language and mild inconvenience.

I’ll reset the oven later. Or I won’t. It’s only time, after all.

Siphoning the Tank and Calling It Strategy

I was listening to Kemi Badenoch yesterday, explaining her energy policy in an interview, and I had one of those faintly unsettling moments where everything sounds confident, brisk, and entirely untethered from how the thing actually works.

The pitch is wonderfully simple. Drill more oil and gas, collect the taxes, and use that to bring down bills. If that is not quite enough, trim a bit off welfare and redirect that as well. Cheap energy sorted. One can almost hear the satisfying click as the pieces fall into place.

Except they do not.

What you actually have is a neat little loop. Gas prices spike, household bills follow, and tax receipts from producers rise with them. The government then hands some of that money back to consumers. Round we go. It feels like action, but it never touches the price-setting mechanism. The cost of energy remains exactly where it was determined in the first place.

And the scale matters. UK households spend on the order of £70 to £90 billion a year on energy, depending on prices. North Sea tax revenues, even in strong years, are a fraction of that. You are trying to steady a very large ship with a rather small rudder.

The North Sea element is the bit that sounds most reassuring. We will produce our own energy, keep the money here, take control. It has a pleasingly Churchillian ring to it. The awkward detail is that oil and gas are sold into global markets. The UK produces about 1% of global oil and a bit over 2% of global gas. That does not move prices. We are a price taker. Even Badenoch now concedes this will not directly lower bills, which rather leaves the whole exercise doing something other than what it is being sold as.

And even before you get to that, there is the small matter that the North Sea is not what it was. It is a mature basin, roughly 90% depleted. What is left is harder to extract and more expensive. New projects are marginal and tend to need higher prices to make sense. Which is an odd route to "cheap energy".

Then there is the time horizon. Once you build a platform, you are in for decades. You do not casually switch it off because the economics turn awkward. Add in decommissioning, where the bill is expected to run to roughly £40 to £45 billion in total over time, with billions already being spent each year, and the picture starts to look less like energy independence and more like a long-term financial commitment with a sizeable exit fee.

Now, to be fair, there is nothing remotely controversial about squeezing more out of existing licences. In fact, Labour's government is doing exactly that. The infrastructure is there, the investment is sunk, and it would be perverse not to use it. The curious twist is that once Labour is doing something sensible, it suddenly becomes suspect.

Hovering over all of this is the phrase "net zero", used as a sort of all-purpose villain. The difficulty is that a large slice of the public has been sold a cartoon version of it. Many seem to think it means abolishing fossil fuels entirely and immediately, which it does not. It means balancing emissions with removals over time, and in practice still involves oil and gas during the transition. It is much easier to knock down that misunderstanding than engage with the actual policy.

At which point we arrive at the welfare twist. She said in the interview that welfare would be cut, with the implication that the savings help fund cheaper energy. Which sounds tidy until you look at who pays and who benefits. You take money from those most in need, then spread relief across everyone, including plenty who were never in difficulty to begin with. It is a curious redistribution that starts by tightening the belt of the poorest and ends by loosening the collar of the comfortable.

And all the while, the underlying machinery remains untouched. Gas still sets the electricity price in the UK. Global markets still drive gas prices. When they spike, we all feel it. None of this changes that. It simply moves money around after the damage has been done.

What is striking is not that there is a critique of current policy. There is plenty to criticise. It is that the proposed alternative never quite gets beyond reacting to it. Less net zero, more drilling, fewer subsidies here, more subsidies there. It has the feel of someone determined to steer away from Labour without first checking whether they are still on the same road.

In the end, you are left with a system that depends on high fossil fuel prices to fund relief from high fossil fuel prices, tied to a declining and expensive basin, locked into decades-long commitments, and carrying a decommissioning bill measured in tens of billions. It sounds decisive. It feels robust.

Then the quarterly energy bill lands, and nothing about it has changed.

The Gas Regulator

There is a particular moment on any motorhome trip when you realise you are not, in fact, the master of a finely engineered travelling residence, but the temporary custodian of a collection of mildly resentful components waiting to let you down.

Ours came when the gas simply stopped. Not tapered off, not a gentle warning. Just... nothing. No heating, no oven, no reassuring hiss of civilisation. A sort of silent, judgemental absence where warmth used to be.

At this point you go through the usual rituals. Check the bottle. Check it again, in case it has reconsidered. Wiggle things that ought not to need wiggling. Peer at the regulator as if it might confess. Eventually, with mounting reluctance, you accept that the smallest and cheapest part of the entire system has decided to end the holiday.

The regulator. A device roughly the size and visual importance of a doorstop, now revealed as the single point of failure for heat, food, and basic human dignity.

What follows is a rapid descent into improvisation. Tea, for example, becomes an engineering problem rather than a cultural constant. I found myself making it in the microwave, which felt faintly illegal. The mug rotates, the water heats, and you stand there knowing you have crossed some invisible line. It works, technically. But so does eating beans cold from the tin.

Heating was handled by two 250W electric heaters, each about the size of a small book. Very neat, very portable, and about as effective as trying to heat a sitting room with a pair of hardbacks. They did their best. Not enough to make you comfortable, but just enough to suggest that something, somewhere, was vaguely in charge. Handy in emergencies, which is to say, entirely inadequate but better than nothing.

All of this, of course, hinged on being on hookup. Without that, it would have been less "quirky inconvenience" and more "Victorian hardship with better upholstery".

The hunt for a replacement regulator then began, which is where the motorhome world reveals its other great truth: somewhere, always, there is a caravan shop that looks like it hasn't changed since decimalisation and yet contains precisely the obscure item you need.

In our case, Charmouth. An establishment that appears to run on instinct rather than inventory. You walk in, describe your plight, and a man disappears into the depths before returning with exactly the right part, as if summoned.

I bought two, obviously. One to fix the problem, and one to sit in a locker for the rest of its life, radiating quiet smugness and ensuring that this never happens again. Or at least that when it does, it will be a different obscure component, just to keep things interesting.

Regulator fitted, gas restored, civilisation resumes. Heating returns, the hob lives again, and tea is once more made in a manner that would not alarm your grandparents.

You do, however, come away with a quiet respect for that small, unassuming regulator. And a slightly louder intention to carry a spare next time, because if there is one thing a motorhome will teach you, it is this: the trip is not governed by the big expensive bits you worry about, but by the cheap, anonymous ones you barely noticed until they stopped everything.

The Banana

You would think, on first principles, that a banana peel ought to be the same shape as the thing it contains.

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Nice, clean cylinder. Logical. Consistent. The sort of tidy solution that would get approving nods in a design meeting and a small note in the margin saying “elegant”.

Instead, what you actually get is a five-sided object pretending, at a glance, to be round. A fruit that has clearly decided that geometric integrity is for other people and that it has places to be.

Except it isn’t even reliably five-sided, which rather undermines the whole notion that there’s a plan. Some come in at four, some at six, and occasionally you find one that looks like it was finished on a Friday afternoon with whatever sides were left in the box. You start out assuming there’s a standard. There isn’t. There’s a range.

At first you assume this is just botanical sloppiness. A lack of discipline. The sort of thing that would have a project manager pacing about asking why the outside doesn’t match the specification of the inside, and why the specification appears to be optional.

Then you try to imagine the alternative. A truly cylindrical banana. Perfectly smooth. No ridges, no seams, no clues. Just a polished yellow tube with all the helpful accessibility features designed out of it.

And suddenly it becomes clear that this would be a terrible idea.

You’d stand there, holding it, rotating it like a confused archaeologist. Where do you start? There’s no edge, no weak point, no hint. Just a continuous surface resisting all attempts at entry. You’d dig a thumbnail in, fail, escalate to a knife, and end up performing what feels like minor surgery on a piece of fruit.

The current banana, with its faintly pentagonal - or occasionally hexagonal if it’s feeling adventurous - peel, is quietly admitting something rather important. It is not there to satisfy your sense of symmetry. It is there to be opened without fuss.

Those ridges are not a failure. They are deliberate lines of weakness. Pre-installed access points. The equivalent of the little notch on a plastic packet that saves you from chewing through the corner like a Labrador.

Which does rather undermine the initial complaint. The peel doesn’t match the inside because matching the inside would make it worse.

It’s an inelegant solution to a practical problem, which is probably why it feels so familiar. Anyone who has ever added a slightly ugly bracket, cut a slot where a neat hole would have done, or left a panel a bit proud just so it can be removed again, will recognise the thinking.

The banana is not badly designed. It is designed by someone who has actually tried to open one.

I still check how many sides mine has before eating it. No idea why. It hasn’t changed the outcome so far.

Truth Social - A Brand Name in Search of a Product

There was a rather eye catching story this week about Meta being fined after a jury decided it had not exactly covered itself in glory over what happened on its platforms. Not a regulatory wrist slap, but an actual finding of liability, which is a slightly different kettle of fish. Real consequences, real money, and the faint suggestion that, at some point, someone might be expected to take responsibility for what is said and done under their roof.

Which does make you wonder, idly, what would happen if the same standard were applied elsewhere.

Take Truth Social, for instance. A name that sets out its stall rather boldly. Not "Possibly Accurate Social". Not "Depends What You Mean Social". No, straight in with "Truth", as if the thing had been personally blessed by a panel of philosophers, judges and disappointed schoolmasters.

Now, in law, of course, this is what they call puffery. A bit of marketing flourish. The sort of thing that allows "Best Coffee in Town" to be served lukewarm in a chipped mug without anyone summoning the authorities. No reasonable person is supposed to take it literally.

The trouble is that Donald Trump has spent so long treating facts as optional that the platform name no longer looks like branding. It looks like a joke that got out of hand. Not because everything he says is false. That would be too sweeping, and unlike him we should try to stay on speaking terms with reality. It is worse, in a way. Truth is never the standard. It is just one contestant among many, and usually not the one he backs.

That is the real problem. He does not merely get things wrong now and then, like the rest of us. He asserts things without evidence, repeats them after they have been debunked, and says the opposite later without the slightest sign that this should trouble anyone. Accuracy, in his world, is not a duty. It is a decorative extra, like chrome on an old American car.

So there is something deliciously absurd about a man with that relationship to truth presiding over something called Truth Social. It is a bit like opening a restaurant called Fresh Fish and serving Findus from the back of a freezer. Or launching a garage called Precision Engineering and attacking an engine with a lump hammer and misplaced confidence.

Legally, of course, nothing much can be done about the name. Courts are not going to sit there solemnly considering whether the word "Truth" created a binding obligation to tell it. They have enough to be getting on with. And so the law shrugs, quite reasonably, and says that branding is not a warranty.

Fair enough. But it does leave us in the faintly ridiculous position where Meta can be hammered for what happens on its platform, while Truth Social can carry on under a title that bears roughly the same relation to reality as "All You Can Eat" does after the third Yorkshire pudding.

So no, Trump does not lie every time he opens his mouth. Sometimes he says something true by accident, in the way a stopped clock manages a little moment of glory twice a day. The point is not that falsehood is literally constant. It is that truth is plainly not in charge.

And that, really, is the joke. It is called Truth Social, when "Reckless Assertion Depot" would be nearer the mark. But I suppose that did not test as well with the focus groups.

The Campsite Shower Block

The campsite shower block is one of those places that ought to be marketed honestly.

Not as "modern facilities" or "heated amenities", but as a sort of damp holding pen for people whose bodies now come with terms and conditions. You shuffle in carrying a towel, a washbag, and a level of quiet determination usually associated with polar expeditions. Around you are your peers, also elderly, all pretending this is still a simple business of having a shower and getting dressed, rather than a daily re-enactment of the decline of the West.

The first difficulty is the changing. There was a time when putting on underpants involved no planning at all. You simply stepped into them. Now it is a manoeuvre. A calculated operation involving balance, grip, and a brief internal negotiation with whichever knee has lately decided that lifting itself six inches is an unreasonable demand. One foot goes in, then the whole enterprise pauses while you steady yourself against a damp cubicle wall and hope not to die with one trouser leg round your ankle in a public shower block in Dorset.

All around you, others are engaged in similar acts of muted heroism. Nobody speaks of it. Nobody says, "I appear to have become too old to put my socks on standing up." That would be vulgar. Instead we carry on in silence, wobbling gently, with the grave dignity of men trying not to topple over while naked from the waist down.

Then there is the gathering at the sinks, which has the air of a pharmacists' convention held in a bus station lavatory. Out come the pill organisers, the foil packets, the little bottles with childproof lids that no child could open, but nor, frankly, can we. And of course nothing is ever straightforward. You do not take one tablet. That would be far too elegant. No, your dose has to be assembled like a small chemical puzzle from a selection of 4mg and 1mg pills, with the concentration of someone balancing the books at PwC, except in slippers.

After that comes hearing aid maintenance, which is a task no younger person ever imagines featuring in their future. Yet there we are, lined up under strip lighting, excavating yesterday's ear wax with tiny brushes and solemn expressions, as if servicing precision instruments. Which, in this case, are Danish. GN, no less. I used to work for them in a previous life, which adds a certain professional pride to the whole exercise. There is something magnificently undignified about standing in a Dorset shower block, maintaining Scandinavian micro-electronics while trying not to drop a wax guard down the plughole.

And still, oddly enough, there is a sort of fellowship in it. A quiet recognition that we are all in much the same state. Knees shot, backs stiff, hearing intermittent, digestive systems maintained by committee. Nobody says much, but everyone knows. We are the generation that once marched briskly into communal washrooms with a towel over one shoulder and emerged ten minutes later fully dressed and ready for the day. Now it takes half an hour and a pharmaceutical supply chain.

You come away from it all feeling clean, approximately assembled, and faintly triumphant. Not because you have conquered anything very grand, but because you have managed a shower, your pills, your Danish hearing aids and your trousers without requiring outside assistance. Which, in the motorhome world, counts as a very decent start to the morning.

A Few Centuries Late, With No Receipt

It’s one of those ideas that sounds entirely reasonable at first pass. Slavery was a grotesque crime. No argument there. So naturally, someone should compensate someone.

Then you start asking the awkward follow-up questions and the whole thing begins to wobble.

Take Ghana. Perfectly respectable country, relatively stable, doing better than quite a few of its neighbours. Not a basket case, not a war zone, not uniquely impoverished. Yet here it is, front and centre making the case for compensation on behalf of history.

And that’s where it gets a bit slippery.

Because the history isn’t as tidy as the modern narrative would like it to be. The slave trade wasn’t a simple story of Europeans arriving, grabbing people, and sailing off. It was a system. European demand, yes, but also African intermediaries, local conflicts, capture, sale. Unpleasant all round, and not exactly a one-sided ledger.

None of that excuses the scale or brutality of what followed, but it does make the idea of a clean victim and a clean perpetrator rather harder to maintain.

Then there’s the present-day claim. The argument runs that slavery created structures that still disadvantage people today. That may well be true in some places, at some levels. But it’s rarely demonstrated with any precision. It’s more often asserted in broad strokes, as if 200 years of subsequent history politely stood still.

If you look across Africa, outcomes don’t line up neatly with exposure to the slave trade. Some of the most affected regions have muddled through reasonably well. Others with very different histories have struggled more. Governance, resources, policy, sheer luck - they all seem to matter rather a lot.

Which raises the slightly uncomfortable question. If Ghana is owed compensation, on what basis exactly? Not because it is uniquely poor. Not because it alone suffered. And not even because it was entirely a victim in the first place.

At this point you hear the line that keeps popping into my head. People who were not enslaved demanding reparations from people who never enslaved anyone. It has a certain brutal clarity to it, even if it slightly oversimplifies what is being argued.

Because the argument has quietly shifted. It is no longer about direct harm. It is about inherited advantage and inherited disadvantage, carried across generations. That is a much broader and far more slippery claim, and one that is rarely nailed down with any precision.

All perfectly reasonable in tone. Less so in detail.

Once you attach a price tag, it turns into something else. A financial claim made by a modern state, on behalf of people long dead, against other modern states whose citizens had no part in it. And with no clear way of working out who owes what to whom, or why Ghana rather than, say, somewhere poorer with a different history.

Which is why this will likely end where these things usually do. A few solemn statements, perhaps an apology or two, some polite movement on returning artefacts, and a carefully worded fund that looks suspiciously like the foreign aid we already have, just with a different label on the tin.

Justice, it turns out, is much easier to agree on in principle than it is to invoice.