What is NATO?

It is quite a thing to watch Trump complain that NATO “wasn’t there”, as if the last twenty years can be quietly mislaid like a set of car keys.

NATO invoked Article 5 after 9/11 and spent years alongside the United States in Afghanistan. That is not a debatable point. It is the central fact of the alliance in the modern era. Yet we are invited to ignore it and pivot instead to Greenland, which turns out to be the real grievance.

At which point the argument stops being wrong and starts being confused. Greenland belongs to Denmark, Denmark is in NATO, and Article 6 makes it perfectly clear that the alliance is about external threats, not helping one member acquire bits of another.

What is being presented, in effect, is NATO rewritten to suit the complaint. A treaty that behaves differently, applies differently, and obliges allies in ways it never has. Then, when the real one refuses to play along, it is accused of failure.

It is like insisting Pride and Prejudice is about a scientist creating a monster, and then criticising it for not having enough electricity and laboratory equipment. You are not analysing the book. You are confusing it with Frankenstein.

The difficulty is that this only works if nobody opens the cover. A single, basic, journalistic question would do. Which part of Article 5 was not honoured, and where does Article 6 support this idea about Greenland?

There is a long pause after that, because there is no clean answer.

Instead, we carry on as if this is a serious disagreement about policy rather than a basic mix-up about what NATO is. The alliance has not changed. The text has not changed. What has changed is the willingness to pretend that words mean something else when it is politically convenient.

A Law, Not a Metaphor

Israel has passed a law introducing a mandatory death penalty for certain terrorism offences, to be applied in military courts and, in principle, carried out within 90 days. That is the story. It is serious enough on its own without anyone reaching for historical fancy dress five seconds later.

Yet almost immediately the conversation drifts. Someone declares it proof of some grand historical parallel, someone else counters with a different one, and before long we are arguing about the 1940s instead of the rather pressing question of what has just been passed by the Knesset.

The fallback comparison tends to be the French Resistance, which has a comforting air of moral clarity about it. Brave resistance, clear villains, tidy conclusions. The sort of thing that makes a messy present feel more manageable.

But it only works if you ignore most of the detail. The French Resistance largely targeted infrastructure and occupying forces. Civilian attacks were contentious then and remain so now. Modern conflicts are not nearly so obliging. Rockets into towns, bombings, reprisals, and the familiar cycle that follows. One side calls it resistance, the other calls it terrorism, and both can produce examples that complicate the story.

Meanwhile, the law itself is doing its quiet, inconvenient work. It is framed around specific offences, not ethnicity written into statute. But it operates in a system where those prosecuted are overwhelmingly Palestinian, which is where the charge of discrimination arises. It has been passed, but it will be challenged. And it marks a sharp break from a country that has, in practice, avoided using the death penalty for decades.

Those are the points that matter. Capital punishment, due process, the structure of military courts, and whether the law will be applied evenly or not. You can make a strong case on any of those without borrowing a narrative from another time.

Because once you drop the analogies, you are left with the harder question. Not who this reminds you of, but whether it is justifiable, how it will be used, and who will actually end up on the receiving end.

Less dramatic, perhaps. But rather more to the point.

The Bipolar Defence

This all feels a bit familiar. On one side you have Kanye West popping up again to explain that the last lot of unpleasant nonsense wasn’t really him, just a self-diagnosed medical episode. On the other, Donald Trump has managed to get himself into a war with Iran and is now explaining it in a way that seems to change depending on which sentence you catch.

You can almost see where this is heading. A press conference at some point, a bit of throat clearing, and then something along the lines of the bombing being a mood swing that got a bit out of hand. Once you clock the pattern, it’s hard not to keep seeing it.

West says something appalling, walks it back, then does it again a few weeks later and carries on filling venues. Trump says the war is basically done, then authorises something else, then says talks are going well, then hints they might not be. It isn’t so much a plan as things happening and explanations arriving afterwards.

Consistency hasn’t just gone missing. It’s been shown the door. No forwarding address.

The Iran situation has that feel you get when something mechanical isn’t quite right but you keep driving anyway and turn the radio up to drown it out. The explanation shifts depending on the day. One briefing leans on nuclear risk, the next on stability, then something vaguer about sending a signal. You listen to it and think, that sounds fine on its own, but it doesn’t quite join up with what was said yesterday.

There was a line the other day about “longer term outcomes”. You hear that sort of thing in meetings when nobody wants to say how long something is actually going to drag on. It’s not a reassuring phrase. Meanwhile, everything is apparently going well. Or nearly finished. Or just getting going. Depends who you catch and when. Feels less like updates and more like people trying to keep up with whatever just happened.

And yet none of it seems to matter much. The rallies carry on. The audiences are still there. The contradictions don’t really stick. They just sort of get folded in.

That is the bit that nags.

You end up coming back to the same question, or something like it. Is this deliberate, is it just how they operate, or is it something else entirely? West has an answer ready to hand. Trump doesn’t, although you wouldn’t completely rule out him trying it if things got awkward enough.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that the Strait of Hormuz situation was a manic phase. We’ll be releasing a statement shortly, possibly with a soundtrack.”

The difference is scale, really. One of them trashes sponsorship deals. The other moves oil prices, drags allies along behind him and leaves a trail that doesn’t disappear when the news cycle moves on. So it isn’t really about personality. It’s what happens when that sort of behaviour sits somewhere it can do actual damage. And you do start to wonder how long the two can be kept separate. Because if erratic behaviour plus a loyal following is enough to keep the show on the road, there’s a certain logic to leaning into it.

Though I suspect the apology tour becomes a bit more complicated once tankers stop moving and the petrol price creeps up to the point where even a short trip starts to feel like something you ought to think about first.

I sense one of Baldrick's Cunning Plan......

The Death of Stalin

Trump is starting to run things like "The Death of Stalin", and meanwhile the Iran war has begun to follow the same script.

Not in scale or consequence. People are dying, oil markets are twitching, and everyone involved is trying to sound more certain than they really are. But in tone, in sequencing, in that faintly absurd sense that nobody is quite sure what the plan is today, let alone tomorrow.

One day the war is “nearing completion”. A few days later it needs escalation. Then there are talks. Then an ultimatum about the Strait of Hormuz. Then a suggestion of taking Iran’s oil. Then a hint of withdrawal. Then back to threats of hitting infrastructure.

It is less a strategy than a sequence of moods.

In the film, they are all trying to interpret Stalin’s last instruction, except the instruction keeps changing depending on who last spoke. Here, the objective appears to move in real time. First it is nuclear capability, then regime change, then freedom of navigation, then something involving oil revenue, then all of them at once.

You can almost picture the room. Someone says “we’re nearly done”, everyone nods. Someone else says “we need to hit harder”, the nodding continues. A third suggests talks, and suddenly everyone recalls they were always in favour of diplomacy. It’s not disagreement, it’s synchronised improvisation.

Meanwhile, reality carries on regardless. The Strait is still disrupted, prices are still edging about, and allies are looking on with the sort of expression usually reserved for a driver who insists he knows a shortcut while heading steadily into a ditch.

And like any good farce, there is a growing gap between what is said and what is happening. Victory is declared while the conflict expands. Deadlines are issued, missed, and replaced with slightly more urgent deadlines. The story advances, but not in a straight line.

The risk is not that it becomes comic. It is that it becomes incoherent.

Wars, rather inconveniently, reward consistency. They require clear objectives, stable signalling, and a chain of decisions that add up to something. If instead you get a rolling series of reactions, filtered through personality and timing, you end up with exactly what we are starting to see: movement without direction.

Which is very entertaining in a film. Less so when tankers stop moving and people start getting shot at.

Constitutional Crisis

Trump has managed to turn geopolitics into a farce, but back home we are doing something arguably more British, which is having a mild constitutional crisis over marmalade.

Not the price of energy, not housing, not whether we are drifting into a trade cul de sac. Marmalade. A jar of orange preserve has somehow been promoted to the front line of national sovereignty, as if Paddington is about to be stopped at Dover and asked to declare his sandwiches.

The claim, breathlessly repeated, is that "they" are renaming marmalade. That this is the thin end of the wedge. Today marmalade, tomorrow the Magna Carta, presumably by teatime.

The reality is rather less stirring. The EU has relaxed its definition so that "marmalade" can cover a wider range of fruit preserves. The horror. To cope with this outbreak of definitional flexibility, British producers may have to say "orange marmalade" or "citrus marmalade" on the label. One imagines shoppers collapsing in confusion, wandering the aisles muttering, "But what is this citrus substance?"

The slightly awkward detail, which has been quietly left in the airing cupboard, is that we did this in the first place. In the 1970s, Britain insisted that marmalade should mean citrus only. We drew a line in the sugary sand and told Europe, quite firmly, that marmalade was not to be trifled with. It was one of those moments of national clarity, up there with decimalisation and flared trousers.

And just to make it all a bit more absurd, the word itself is not even British. "Marmalade" comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a quince paste made from marmelo - quince. In other words, the original marmalade was not orange at all, but a sort of firm quince jelly eaten in slices. We imported the word, changed the meaning, enforced it on Europe, and are now affronted that Europe has stopped following our instructions quite so obediently.

And yet the reaction has been predictably operatic. You can almost hear the violins as commentators speak of heritage, tradition, and the quiet dignity of the breakfast table, as though a jar of marmalade were the last line of defence against continental chaos.

Meanwhile, in the real world, most jars already say "Seville orange marmalade", because producers quite like telling you what is in them. This has not, to date, triggered social collapse.

What makes this oddly revealing is how neatly it fits the pattern. A small, technical adjustment becomes a cultural grievance. A labelling tweak is inflated into an existential threat. And the fact that we wrote the original rule ourselves is treated as an inconvenient footnote, rather than the entire story.

It is a bit like insisting your classic car must only ever run on a particular grade of fuel, arguing about it for decades, and then becoming furious when the rest of the garage shrugs and says, "Fine, use what you like."

So here we are. A country that once ran a global empire now reduced to arguing about the wording on a breakfast spread we defined ourselves half a century ago.

Still, I suppose it is progress of a sort. At least this time, the argument is unlikely to end in a referendum. Or, more worryingly, it might.

A Few Buckets of Water and Somehow a Mind

There’s something faintly absurd about the whole business when you stop and lay it out properly. You take a person, with all the usual baggage - opinions, memories, small grudges that have outlived their usefulness - and reduce them to their constituent parts, and what you are left with is mostly water, a fair bit of carbon, some gases, and a scattering of minerals you would normally associate with soil, fertiliser, or the inside of a cheap battery. 

Spread that out on a table and no one, however imaginative, is going to point at it and say “ah yes, there’s a mind in there somewhere”. They’d more likely wonder what went wrong in the lab, or whether you’d misunderstood the instructions.

And yet we are told, quite calmly, that somewhere in that arrangement is consciousness. Not as a metaphor, but as a literal claim. The thing doing the thinking, remembering, deciding whether to put the kettle on now or in five minutes, is supposedly an emergent property of that unpromising collection of ingredients. 

There is no special component you can isolate. No discreet lump of awareness you can hold up between finger and thumb. It is the same basic set of elements you would find in a puddle or a potato, just organised in a rather more fussy way, with better plumbing. And yet we keep peering at it as if, given enough patience, someone will eventually point to a particular bit and say “that’s the consciousness, that bit there”.

It starts to feel a bit like the Monty Python sketch where Mrs Scum is asked, “What great opponent of Cartesian dualism resists the reduction of psychological phenomena to a physical state and maintains there is no point of connection between the extended and the unextended?” and, after a moment’s hesitation, says “Henri Bergson?” and is told she’s absolutely right. The whole thing only works because the question sounds as though it must have a precise, authoritative answer, when in reality it’s doing most of the muddling itself.

And that is more or less what we are doing here. We are treating consciousness as if it ought to be one more entry on the list, somewhere between iron and iodine, waiting to be identified, when it may simply not be that kind of thing at all.

This is usually the point where the explanation starts sounding very confident and slightly hand-wavy at the same time. The comparison you will often hear is mechanical. Take an engine apart, lay all the pieces on the garage floor, and you will not find “motion” in any individual component. Perfectly true, and reassuringly solid. Pistons just sit there, crankshafts just sit there, and a wiring loom looks like something you regret starting. Put it all together again, add fuel, timing and compression, and motion appears. No mystery, just a system doing what it’s supposed to do.

The difficulty is that consciousness is not quite so well behaved. We can describe the parts - neurons firing, signals passing, chemistry quietly getting on with things - and we can map the activity in impressive detail. But the moment you ask how that turns into the experience of being you, the explanation starts to lose a bit of grip. 

It is rather like being given a complete account of how every component in the engine works, and then being told that “driving to Tesco” simply appears if you assemble things correctly. You can see that something is happening, but the step from mechanism to experience is doing more heavy lifting than anyone is entirely comfortable admitting.

So we are left in the slightly comic position of knowing exactly what we are made of, and not really knowing how it adds up to the fact that we are here noticing it. A bag of water, some carbon, a pinch of metals, and a constant fizz of electrical activity, all of which, taken separately, are about as conscious as a garden shed. Put together in the right way, however, and you get Shakespeare, bad tempers in traffic, and a firm view on whether the milk goes in before or after the tea.

And we carry on as if this is all perfectly straightforward. Which it plainly isn’t, but then again, neither is getting the shopping in from the car without making two trips, and we seem to manage that most days.

The Molar That Did a Lap

I had always assumed that if a part of me ever made a bid for independence, it would at least have the decency to announce itself. A twinge, a wobble, a bit of drama. Not so. One moment I was enjoying a piece of belly pork crackling, the next I was unknowingly down a molar and none the wiser. It had simply snapped off, resigned its post, and slipped quietly into the system like a civil servant taking early retirement.

The tooth in question had history. Root canal, heavily filled, the sort of dental engineering project that keeps a practice solvent. In hindsight, it was less a tooth and more a ceramic plug with nostalgic ambitions. Still, it had held the line for years, only to be defeated by pork. There is a lesson in that somewhere, probably about British cuisine and structural limits.

The truly impressive part is what followed. I carried on with my day, blissfully unaware that I had swallowed a component of my own face. No choking, no alarm, just a missing tooth and a vague sense, later, that something felt different. It was only when I did the standard tongue inventory that the gap became apparent, like discovering a tile missing from the roof after the storm has passed.

Now, most people would assume that was the end of it. Tooth gone, dentist appointment pending, life moves on. But no. A few days later, Hay spots something at the bottom of the toilet bowl that had declined to be flushed. There it was. My missing molar. Having completed a full and, one assumes, not especially pleasant circuit of the digestive system, it had returned to civilisation.

There is something faintly admirable about that. Teeth, it turns out, are not easily broken in spirit. Digestive acids, mechanical processing, the general indignity of the journey, and none of it made the slightest difference. It emerged intact, like a seasoned traveller stepping off a long-haul flight, slightly dishevelled but fundamentally unchanged.

And now, at least, I have a better idea of the timing of my gastrointestinal transit. It is oddly reassuring to have empirical data, even if the methodology would struggle to pass an ethics committee.

Naturally, I saw an opportunity. My mother once had earrings made from my baby teeth, which I had always regarded as a slightly unnerving but culturally defensible Dutch tradition. So I asked Hay, quite reasonably I thought, whether she fancied a brooch made from this one. A keepsake. A conversation piece. Something to pass down the generations with a suitably vague explanation.

The reaction suggested I had misjudged the room.

Apparently there is a line, and it sits somewhere between “sentimental childhood relic” and “tooth that has seen things”. Baby teeth are charming. They arrive clean, depart ceremonially, and can be mounted without too much soul-searching. An adult molar that has survived both pork crackling and the gastrointestinal tract carries a certain narrative weight that not everyone wishes to pin to their lapel.

So the tooth now sits, retired properly this time, awaiting its final disposition. I am left with a dental appointment and a slightly altered view of my own internal logistics. If nothing else, it has demonstrated that the body is a remarkably efficient transport system, even when handling loose parts.

Still, one cannot help thinking that if bits of me are going to start doing laps unannounced, a little notice would be appreciated. A memo, perhaps. Something along the lines of “molar departing, expected return in three to five days”. It would save a great deal of confusion, and possibly prevent future discussions about jewellery that nobody, quite understandably, wants to wear

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.