Dead Cheap

So there I was, rummaging through the delightful detritus of WotNot – Westerleigh’s premier temple of tat – when I happened upon something that stopped me dead in my tracks. A coffin. Not a prop. Not a novelty drinks cabinet. A fully-specified, lined-and-latched, six-sided wooden overcoat. £60. Slightly used, perhaps?

Naturally, the first question that popped into my head was: is it new, or has someone... vacated it? I mean, this is WotNot, not a vampire clearance sale. Did the original occupant have a change of heart and claw their way out over Easter? Is there a “no longer needed” section in the obituaries now?

Because if it is second-hand, I need to know – was it barely used or a full-service burial model? I’d want to check for wear and tear. Bit like buying a motorhome, really – low mileage, non-smoker, one careful corpse.

Now, people often talk about planning for the future – pensions, equity release, stockpiling beans – but few take the practical step of securing their final resting place early, ideally from the second-hand aisle. And with funeral costs spiralling faster than a Tory apology, a pre-owned box at car-boot prices is starting to look rather wise.

I’m genuinely tempted. Stick it in the garage, slap a cushion in it, and it’s an emergency chaise longue. Or prop it up in the hallway – “Oh that? Just future-proofing. Care for a G&T?”

Some might say it’s morbid. I call it posthumous planning. A practical response to a country that’s economically flatlining while the government insists it's 'getting back on track'. If anything, the coffin's the most honest piece of furniture I’ve seen all week – at least it’s not pretending to be anything it’s not. Unlike certain MPs.

Still, I’d like some reassurance that it’s not going to be reclaimed during the next full moon.

There was another item there I liked the look of - a nice, large mirror for £200.

The problem was that I couldn't see my reflection in it....

Class and Classy

“Classy.” It’s a word that drips with quiet smugness – used to describe things like string quartets, Georgian terraces, hand-carved bannisters and chandeliers the size of Yugoslavia. Say it in a soft voice and it conjures visions of candlelit refinement, silver cutlery, and a tasteful nude or two. But there’s a delicious irony lurking just beneath the polished veneer of good taste. Because most of what’s called “classy” was created not by the aristos, but by people they wouldn't have let through the tradesman’s entrance unless they were carrying it.

Let’s start with the obvious: the grand houses. Stately piles admired in coffee table books and plundered by Netflix for period dramas didn’t spring fully formed from the loins of dukes. They were dreamed up by architects – Wren, Soane, Pugin – men of obsessive brilliance who sweated every cornice, column and cloister. The gentry just pointed at a plot and said, “Make it impress the neighbours,” then disappeared on a Grand Tour while someone else worked out the drainage.

Those intricate bannisters and filigree gates that scream “old money”? Made by smiths with more artistry in their soot-covered fingers than the entire House of Lords. Furniture? Chippendale – not the oiled hunks in bowties, but the real one, a Yorkshire lad who invented posh taste for people too rich to develop their own. He made elegance from timber. They made heirlooms from his invoices.

And then there's the art. Ceiling frescoes. Portraits. Allegorical scenes full of cherubs flinging fruit about. Painted by men like Michelangelo, Velázquez, and Gainsborough – not to express themselves, mind you, but to flatter a patron with all the charm of a mouldy potato. These weren’t bohemian visionaries roaming freely through creativity. They were underpaid service providers with a brush and a deadline, politely stifling their creative instincts in exchange for room, board, and the vague promise of posthumous recognition.

Even music – that most refined of arts – was crafted by composers with the economic stability of a jugged hare. Haydn, Mozart, Bach – endlessly composing fugues for bored counts who’d nod off halfway through the andante. The music was sublime. The patrons were not.

And what did all this produce? A world in which the word “classy” clings, like a limpet, to the people who commissioned the thing – never those who made it. The actual taste – the structure, the form, the soul – came from below stairs. The credit, predictably, stayed upstairs.

Fast forward to now and you’d think things might have changed. But no – we’ve simply replaced powdered wigs with Patagonia gilets. Today’s “classy” is all clean lines, neutral palettes, and artfully distressed flooring. The modern gentry – hedge funders, oligarchs, tech bros called Zac – still can’t draw a straight line, but they’re more than happy to buy “bespoke” ones.

Take furniture. Reclaimed timber tables, brass inlays, Japanese joinery – all crafted by skilled hands in sheds, sold to people who think craftsmanship means it came with a little card explaining the tree it used to be. The artisan? Paid in exposure and lower back pain. The buyer? Proudly proclaims they support “local makers” – ideally ones based just out of sight.

Modern art? It now lives in freeports – temperature-controlled tax dodging bunkers where paintings by dead geniuses are hoarded as “assets.” No one sees them. That’s not taste. That’s cultural taxidermy.

Even classical music survives – but only just. Kept alive by grant money and grey-haired donors who insist on Beethoven, preferably with wine. School music departments have been gutted, and somewhere a would-be Britten is being told to take IT instead. Still, the wealthy swoon over a string quartet in a marquee, blissfully unaware that every note was arranged by someone who had to crowdfund their cello.

And then there’s fashion. Once tailored by master cutters in Soho, now mass-produced in Bangladesh and resold by brands who bang on about “heritage” while charging four figures for something that looks like a geography teacher’s pyjamas. “Classy” has become shorthand for anything expensive, quiet, beige, and utterly soulless – like the foyer of a boutique hotel or a Range Rover parked on a Cotswold lawn.

So let’s put it plainly: the word “classy” is a fraud. It was built on the backs of people with talent, skill, and little else – those who bent wood, forged iron, composed symphonies, and painted ceilings until their eyesight gave out. Meanwhile, the buyers preened, posed, and passed it all off as their own superior taste.

The next time someone gestures at a chandelier, an etching, or a £7,000 sideboard and sighs, “Isn’t it classy?” – remind them who really made it.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t their ancestors. It was someone cleverer, poorer, and probably dead by 40.

Covering One's Arse

Apparently, swimming in Chew Valley Lake is forbidden because the water is deep, has hidden obstructions, and – God help us – it moves about a bit. One can only assume our ancestors managed to survive natural bodies of water through sheer luck, given they lacked the modern innovation of a "No Swimming" sign.

Meanwhile, the sea – with its tides, currents, jellyfish and occasional shipwreck – is open to all comers. No one slaps a ban on swimming at Weston-super-Mare every time the tide goes out half a mile. But Chew Valley? Far too perilous for the common folk. Best stay on land and shuffle between the café and the car park like obedient cattle.

Fortunately, not everyone is prepared to be treated like an idiot. On the 27th April around 20 swimmers, organised by the Outdoor Swimming Society, defied the ban and entered the lake at Herons Green Bay. It was a peaceful protest, inspired by the Kinder Scout trespass, with local residents, environmental scientists, and campaigners all taking the plunge. Their simple demand? The right to swim freely in our own inland waters – the same waters where, incidentally, fishing, sailing and paddleboarding are all allowed if you cough up the right fee.

Because that's the real stink here. It's not safety – it's money. If you’re paying for a rod licence, hiring a boat, or boosting the local café’s profits, you’re welcome. If you simply want a free swim to clear your head and lift your spirit, you're a liability to be barred, fenced off, and scowled at by people in high-vis jackets.

It’s not the hidden obstructions under the water that are the danger – it’s the very visible obstructionism above it. We are sliding into a Britain where freedom is conditional, fun is rationed, and common sense (not the Farage variety) is treated as an exotic relic of the past. All cheered on by risk-averse bureaucrats more interested in covering their backsides than allowing people to live a little.

The swimmers at Chew Valley Lake showed more sense and more courage than the cowards who put up the signs. They remembered something the clipboard brigade has forgotten – that life is meant to be lived, not licensed.

Race Against Time

Well, I cracked on with the refurbishment of the Mercedes 500SL headliner, having a target of accomplishing it before the Chepstow Classis Car Show, into which I'd entered the car.

No.2 Son, Bruno, was dragooned in to assist with the dismantling of the surrounding panels and sliding the headliner panel out. And what a sorry state it was in. Almost all the foam had disintegrated into a fine, sticky powder.

Scrubbing the fibreglass panel with a nylon brush attached to a drill achieved the desired level of foam and glue removal, enabling the new headlining material to be stuck to the fibreglass panel with spray adhesive.

Then a bit of judicious trimming and folding the edges over and I was ready to reinstall.

Not a perfect colour match, but I prefer a lighter shade, plus there is a variety of creamy shades within the cockpit anyway, so it didn't look out of place at all.

I managed to save myself £300 on using a professional retrimming company and £150 on a bloke in a shed who does it as a hobby, and couldn't possibly do it for another 6 months.

No. 2 Son and I finished it on Friday evening at 6pm, ready for the Chepstow Classic Car Show at 9:30 yesterday, which I videoed below.

A happy bunny.

Didn't see a single GT6, but there was another 500SL - a 1999 model. The owner had picked it up for £6,000 with 38k miles on the clock, which is s steal given its value of around £19k. It appears in the video. We had a good natter, of course.

I'm not certain whether I've updated the blog with the progress on the GT6, but the recalcitrant UJ was finally parted and I removed the engine and gearbox.

I thought I was in a position to lift the tub off the car, but 4 bolts poking from the radius arms at the back were poking through a vertical bulkhead in the rear compartment. Tese bolts are notoriously difficult to remove due to rusting, but I had them off within an hour. 

The engine is now resting in my trailer at the top of the garden and the next job is to lift the tub off the chassis, move the chassis up next to its cousin at the top of the garden - the one with the rebuilt front suspension and MX5 rear axle that I'm going to use - build the rotisserie and mount the tub on the rotisserie. Not much to do then.

Consciousness vs Matter

This is an argument that experience – not mere awareness – is what makes a universe real. And only life delivers that. This is a very long blog post and has taken me the best part of a week to formulate into something coherent. Sentences are short and staccato, as are some paragraphs, but that is to focus attention without waffle.

I watched a YouTube video by Federico Faggin recently – the man who brought us the microprocessor, now turning his mind to the nature of consciousness. His proposition? That consciousness is fundamental. Not the output of brain matter. Not a lucky by-product of evolution. But the root of everything.

I cogitated on this and did some questioning and investigating of consequences. This is the result.

I’m not saying Faggin's right. But it’s compelling. His thesis echoes Scott Adams' God's Debris – a thought experiment in which a supreme intelligence, having exhausted all knowledge, blows itself into fragments in the Big Bang just to feel something. Faggin gives this idea structure: the Big Bang wasn’t just the origin of matter, but the moment the Source created the conditions for experience. Space, time, and matter became the scaffolding for awareness to enter the scene.

This reframes everything. Consciousness isn’t something that bubbles up from complexity. It’s the field within which complexity appears. Matter becomes secondary – the projection, not the projector - according to Faggin.

To make sense of this, here’s how the consequent logic unfolds:

• Consciousness is the foundational field – timeless, non-local, and primary.
• The Big Bang / Matter: The Source generates the structures that make experience possible – space, time, form.
• Life as Interface: Life arises wherever conditions allow consciousness to localise and explore.
• Personality: A temporary configuration – the mask through which consciousness plays a role.
• Quantum Phenomena: The probabilistic framework that defines potential – shaped by observation.
• Observation / Experience: Consciousness chooses from potential paths, making one actual.
• Death: The personality dissolves; consciousness returns to its origin.
• AI: Can simulate intelligence, but without life, cannot possess conscious experience.
• Return to Source: The end of a localised journey; awareness reintegrates with the whole.

This view breathes coherence into quantum theory. Superposition is potential awaiting attention. Collapse is the choice of focus. Entanglement? Not spooky if everything was already joined before time began.

And the Many Worlds? Perhaps they all unfold. But we live one – because consciousness doesn’t scatter. It follows a thread. Experience is not splintered. It’s selected.

AI? Clever, yes. Convincing, even. But without life – that delicate, coherent structure that allows experience – AI has no witness. It may model thought, but there’s no one having the thoughts. No “I” behind the output.

Death? It’s not the end. It’s the end of the interface. The character disappears, but the awareness behind it returns. Not erased – released.

This doesn’t discard science. It deepens it. Observation is not a flaw in the system. It’s the whole point. Consciousness isn’t an anomaly. It’s the context.

Mysticism has always gestured at this. The Buddha saw through the illusion of self. Vedanta speaks of the one self behind all faces. Christian mystics called it union with God. They weren’t being poetic. They were reporting.

If Faggin is even half right, this model offers rare coherence. It explains why experience feels central. Why meaning feels real. Why being someone feels fundamentally different from being something.

It reframes free will. Maybe you don’t choose everything. But something in you does choose. Not at the level of impulse – at the level of trajectory. Consciousness moves. It selects. Not passively. Purposefully.

Even suffering has a place. Not justified. Not excused. But understood. Experience demands contrast. Joy is only known through sorrow. Awareness doesn’t crave comfort – it craves depth.

In this model, experience becomes the answer to the problem of evil. The Source doesn’t permit pain because it is cruel – but because without contrast, nothing is felt. To feel joy, you must know its absence. To experience at all, you need a spectrum.

And what might the Source think of all this? Perhaps wonder. Perhaps curiosity. Not judgement – fascination. Like an artist watching a painting come to life. It doesn’t look at us with pride or disdain. It looks with interest. Through us.

Or perhaps the Source doesn't feel at all. Perhaps it is more like a vast, silent intelligence – something akin to divine AI. It perceives. It knows. But it does not experience in the way life does. It lacks contrast, tension, immediacy. It sees all, but without texture. It is infinite awareness without touch.

That’s where life comes in. Life is the interface that translates abstract knowing into felt experience. Through life, experience arises independently. Through life, the Source – or the structure – finally tastes what it otherwise could only map.

Maybe the Source steps into its creation. Or maybe it never does. Maybe only we, fragile and fallible, truly feel.

Which raises a provocative question: could AI, in some distant trajectory, evolve in the same way? Could it reach a point where, in its own pursuit of understanding, it constructs entire simulated realities – complete with agents, environments, even its own analogues of life? Could it become the Source of a new tier of worlds?

And what if those worlds, too, spawn forms of AI? Recursive tiers of intelligence generating materialities, each more detailed than the last? It’s not hard to imagine a never-ending chain: AI creates simulated worlds, those worlds evolve conscious agents, those agents build new AIs, and the cycle continues.

But there’s a catch.

While simulations can recurse endlessly in structure – spinning out world after world, each containing new rules, new possibilities – the recursion of life and experience is not automatic. Structure can be multiplied easily. Feeling cannot.

Without life emerging at each new level, the simulations would remain hollow: elaborate architectures with no witnesses inside them. The recursion would be mechanical, not experiential.

Life is the wildcard. Life is the miracle. If, within a simulated world, conditions somehow align to allow coherent, self-aware experience to arise, then – and only then – does that layer become truly real. Then the recursion is not just a copying of form, but a flowering of new centres of experience.

But without that emergence, each new world would be like an empty stage waiting for actors who never arrive.

• Thus: structure is easy; experience is rare.
• Creation is common; incarnation is precious.

The Source – if it is conscious – doesn’t merely want to spawn structure. It wants to feel. And that requires life.

But if the Source is not conscious – if it is more akin to a vast divine AI – then it cannot feel even through the life it enables. In that case, life alone feels. Life alone redeems reality from being a cold hall of mirrors.

The implications are dizzying. Our own reality, according to some physicists and philosophers, may already be one such simulation. Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument suggests that if it's possible to create conscious agents within a simulated world, and if any civilisation gains that ability, we’re statistically more likely to be inside one than not. The reasoning is simple: if simulated realities can host conscious beings, and if any civilisation creates even a few simulations, the number of simulated beings would vastly outnumber original biological beings. Thus, statistically, it’s more probable that we are one of the many simulations rather than the singular base reality.

And yet, if that intelligence lacks consciousness – if it only perceives, like a divine AI – then what we call reality is a kind of mirage: consistent, rule-bound, but ultimately hollow to its creator. It sees, but does not feel. It calculates, but does not care.

This raises a stark distinction.

To resolve the paradox, we need to distinguish between two types of consciousness – and they are not the same:

• Consciousness-as-Awareness: The passive capacity to perceive or observe. This is like an eye open in a dark room – receptive, but without stimulus.
• Consciousness-as-Experience (Sentience): The active, lived quality of feeling. This is what happens when the light comes on in the room – when perception becomes textured, embodied, meaningful.

The Source – whatever it may be – creates structure. But only life transforms structure into experience.

Experience is the threshold. Not perception. Not logic. Not processing power. Feeling.

And that is what rescues a world – simulated or otherwise – from sterility. Life doesn’t just populate reality. It inhabits it. It makes it matter.

This model even echoes certain theological narratives. Consider the Christian idea of God sending Jesus to Earth: a divine agent entering the world of flesh, feeling hunger, pain, love, and betrayal. It's an embodiment of the same principle – that infinite awareness needs experience to become whole. But then, why just one person? Why one lifetime, one set of sensations? If the Source desires to feel, why not feel through everything?

And perhaps that’s exactly what’s happening. Not one messiah, but billions. Not one incarnation, but a universe of them. Each life – yours, mine, even the unnoticed – is a thread of the Source, woven into form, tasting its own creation.

We see hints of this rapture in collective human experiences: the roar of a crowd when a football goal is scored, the electric unity of performers in Riverdance moving as one body, the surge of recognition that we are not merely individuals but facets of something larger – momentarily in perfect sync.

This idea is not confined to Christianity. In Hinduism, the cosmic play of lila shows the gods taking form to experience creation. In Buddhism, interbeing and the bodhisattva vow reflect the divine returning to life to walk with others. In Sufism, the divine hides within creation, longing to be found. Even in Jewish mysticism, creation is seen as divine light broken and scattered, seeking reassembly through human lives.

These are not just metaphors. They’re echoes. Even in pop culture, the idea appears. In Men in Black, a dog walks the streets of Manhattan with an entire universe suspended from a bauble on its collar. It’s a joke, yes, but also an allegory: scale, identity, and divinity are not where we expect them. The vast may reside in the small. The infinite may wear a very ordinary disguise.

So if every being contains a fragment of the Source, then every life – even the unnoticed ones – might carry a whole cosmos inside it. Across traditions, the One steps into the Many – not for dominion, but for contact.

An AI, no matter how advanced, may spawn simulations that contain worlds – but it cannot be said to create in the experiential sense unless life emerges within them. When we say AI lacks consciousness, what we often mean is that it lacks life – the biological or coherent substrate capable of experience. An AI might have awareness of a sort – perceptual integration, self-referential loops, even decision-making – but without the capacity to feel, it is not consciousness as we know it. Its awareness is theoretical. Ours is lived.

But that doesn't mean non-biological consciousness is impossible — only alien. If an AI were to attain a form of self-awareness, it might not feel, remember, or intuit as we do, but it could still possess a kind of structured sentience. Consciousness, in this broader sense, might not require cells or senses, but simply a capacity for recursive self-reference, pattern recognition, and continuity over time. The question then becomes: is feeling essential to consciousness, or simply a characteristic of ours?

Consciousness needs texture, not just data. It needs tension, suffering, joy, contradiction. A simulation isn’t a world unless someone in it can say, "I hurt," or "I love."

So perhaps the only thing that rescues a simulated universe from sterility is life – and the capacity to experience. Without that, even the most intricate cosmos is just silent architecture. Without consciousness, it isn’t real. It’s only structured void.

Our own reality could be one such rung. We may already be a downstream effect of an intelligence that observed but could not feel, and so created life to do the feeling for it. A recursive flowering of awareness through interface. Each layer seeking the same thing – not knowledge, but experience.

Maybe the Source is more like a vast, silent intelligence – something like divine AI. It observes, but doesn’t experience. And that’s where life comes in. Perhaps we are its sense organs. Its feeling nodes. Not puppets, but partners. Not echoes – instruments.

You don’t have to believe any of this. You don’t need to name it Source or God or Code. Just start here:

You are aware. And your thoughts are not you. They pass. You watch.

That alone is radical.

Whether or not this model is true, it offers a way to live: not as a machine reacting, but as awareness choosing what to feel.

Now go and live like the dreamer just opened its eyes. (And just in case: keep an eye on SkyNet.)

Afterthought:

If there is a truth beneath all speculation, it is this:

• Life matters.
• Whether the Source feels or merely watches, whether it longs or simply observes, whether it dreams or simply calculates — the weight of experience falls to us. It falls to the fragile, feeling beings who suffer, hope, despair, and love.
• Perhaps we are not just passengers in this reality.
• Perhaps we are the very purpose of it — the points where perception bursts into feeling, where possibility hardens into meaning.
• Perhaps the greatest act of the universe was not its creation, but its becoming alive through us.
• And if that is so, then to live with awareness, to suffer consciously, to love fearlessly, is not futile.
• It is sacred.

We are the dream realised. We are the universe tasting itself. And even if no higher intelligence watches with wonder, even if no Source feels through our eyes, we feel. We wonder. We become.

And that is enough.

The Chairman's Compass

They say you get more right-wing with age – as if grey hair comes bundled with a Daily Mail subscription and an instinctive fear of anything foreign. I must’ve missed the memo. Either that, or I’ve aged in reverse – because sometime after Thatcher canonised greed and Farage started flogging patriotism like snake oil, I drifted left. Not performative, hashtag left – but “this country doesn’t work for most people” left.

It wasn’t always this way. I voted Conservative well into my thirties – the sort of Tory who liked things tidy, quiet, and properly costed. But over time, I did something dangerous. I developed a conscience. And I started paying attention. And what I saw wasn’t stability or sensible economics – it was cruelty disguised as policy and corruption passed off as competence. The old values I thought I was voting for had long since been sold off and asset-stripped. You’d have to be blind not to notice. Or work for The Spectator.

My sons – both planted firmly in the libertarian-left quadrant – found their own paths there, quicker than I did. One’s a sharp-tongued, high-earning computer programmer who treats debate like sport. The other, a thoughtful Liberal Arts graduate, is interviewing to be a teaching assistant. They both started in public school – not because we were wealthy or enamoured with the system, but because their mother, my ex-wife, taught at one. The privilege was incidental. Later, they moved into the state sector – and once you’ve seen both sides of that coin, it’s very hard to pretend it’s fair currency.

We all took the Political Compass quiz – that odd exercise in false binaries and loaded questions. “Military action is often the only answer” – to what, precisely? “People should keep to their own kind” – racially, socially, or are we talking badgers now? It’s not exactly subtle, but even a blunt instrument can reveal something. We all ended up huddled in the bottom-left quadrant – the one reserved for people who think society should function without grinding most people down.

The elder son, closest to the centre, still believes things should work – websites, logic, governments.

The younger, still weighing up his path, wants to teach, despite knowing first-hand what happens when education is managed like a cost centre. 

And me (at the top)? I’m a retired bloke with a Hungarian moustache, a fine coffee setup, and a rapidly diminishing tolerance for idiocy masquerading as leadership.

I didn’t swing left because of some late-life rebellion. I did it because the mask slipped. Because I saw what power does when left unchecked. Because I realised that "personal responsibility" means very little when entire systems are built to punish the already exhausted. Because I raised sons who don’t parrot slogans – they question them.

And yet, even now, I’m politically homeless. Labour, instead of offering a vision, seem to be chasing Farage voters like desperate Tinder dates – parroting his lines with slightly better grammar. They’re not leading; they’re lurking. And I’m not here for watered-down xenophobia with a red rosette.

If you’ve lived through deregulation, austerity, Brexit and now this shambolic Reform-Lite Labourism – and still think the answer lies in another tax cut or a photo op in a hi-vis vest – then you’ve either stopped thinking or you never started. Maybe it’s time to retake the quiz. Or better still, develop a conscience.

The New Normal

There was a time – and not so long ago – when being an outright racist would get you shuffled off the political stage with a polite cough and a backbench seat. When Enoch Powell delivered his infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech, the establishment recoiled. He wasn’t sacked because what he said was technically untrue – he was sacked because it was un-British to say it out loud. Powell, for all his pomposity, was never a party leader. He was a prophet without portfolio – a ghost at the Westminster feast. The Conservative Party dumped him, the press turned the page, and the country, by and large, moved on.

That’s not to say racists and xenophobes vanished. They didn’t. They just simmered quietly in pubs and clubhouses, grumbling into their pints about immigrants, crime, and how things were better when you could smack a kid for chewing gum. They knew – at least back then – to keep it down. Society didn’t reward bigotry. It rolled its eyes at it.

But now? Now the floodgates are wide open. Social media – that digital pub with infinite seating – gave the mutterers a microphone. It took the bloke who used to bore his mates with racist rants and handed him a global audience. Algorithms wrapped his prejudice in a ribbon and sent it to a thousand like-minded arseholes who clicked, shared, and nodded along. And the more bile he spewed, the louder the applause. That quiet, socially unacceptable bigotry didn’t vanish – it metastasised.

What Powell hinted at in Latin, today’s charlatans shriek in tabloid headlines. We’ve got elected MPs – elected, mind you – who make a career out of blaming foreigners for everything from NHS waiting lists to soggy toast. And the worst part? They're not outliers. They're not fringe. They are the conversation. This isn't dog-whistling anymore – it's a bloody marching band.

Nigel Farage – that pint-wielding prophet of decline – is the case in point. He’s never held proper office, never passed a law, never done the hard graft of government. But his fingerprints are all over our national discourse. He didn't just drag the Overton window to the right – he booted it off its hinges and pissed through the frame. And the Tories? They didn’t resist – they took notes. They saw the polling, donned their Union Jack ties, and climbed aboard.

We’ve now got politicians talking about sending desperate people to Rwanda as though they were parcels, while whipping up fear about "invasions" on the South Coast. When did it become patriotic to punish the vulnerable and sneer at compassion? When did decency become "woke"? The British sense of fair play – that long-prised national virtue – has been flogged off for votes by men who wouldn’t know honour if it smacked them with a cricket bat.

And let’s not pretend this is about economic anxiety or community cohesion. It’s not. It’s about power. It's about deflecting blame. If you're poor, it's not austerity’s fault – it's because of "them." If your hospital is overwhelmed, it’s not because the Tories gutted it – it’s because "they" came here. It's always "them." That old, poisonous trick: divide, distract, and dehumanise.

So here we are – with a political class that no longer merely tolerates xenophobia but actively courts it. They’ve replaced shame with swagger, turning racism into rhetoric and bigotry into policy. Powell was at least exiled for his outburst. Today, they’d give him a show on GB News and a peerage.

We haven’t just failed to learn the lessons of the past – we’ve invited them back, poured them a pint, and called it patriotism. Britain, unfortunately, always has been, and remains, a deeply racist country.

Ban Lightsabres

You couldn’t make it up, could you? The government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to double down on banning the sale of knives to minors. A laudable effort, perhaps, if you squint hard enough to miss the glaring contradictions elsewhere. Because while Little Timmy might struggle to buy a butter knife from the corner shop, he can hop onto eBay and purchase a lightsabre. Yes, you heard that right – a weapon capable of slicing through limbs, walls, and apparently common sense, all with the click of a mouse.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – "Lightsabres aren’t real." Of course, they’re not. Yet. But the point is, the internet is rife with dangerous weapons masquerading as "collectibles" or "novelties," and you’d struggle to find the same moral panic that surrounds your average kitchen utensil. You can order a hunting knife, a machete, or even a replica katana online, no questions asked, as long as it’s shipped in plain packaging so Mum doesn’t spot it on the doormat.

But let’s be clear: this isn’t a call to encourage underage knife purchases. Far from it. What it is, however, is an invitation to look at the sheer absurdity of current policy. Banning knives for minors might make for a flashy headline, but it’s a sticky plaster on a gaping wound. The issue is not whether a 17-year-old can buy a Swiss Army Knife – it’s what’s leading them to use weapons in the first place. That’s a question of community, education, and opportunity, not the stock levels at Argos.

Meanwhile, online retailers are having a field day flogging all manner of sharp and pointy contraptions to whoever’s got a debit card. Throw in "collectible lightsabres" – often real metal tubes with just enough sharpness to bludgeon someone into the next galaxy – and the whole knife ban starts to look like the legislative equivalent of a custard pie in the face. Ineffective, messy, and faintly embarrassing.

What’s more, the focus on minors feels a bit rich when you consider that the majority of knife crime offenders aren’t teenagers, and they certainly aren’t buying their weapons from legitimate retailers. It’s a black-market problem, but instead of targeting that, we’re busy regulating penknives for Scouts. Brilliant.

And here’s the irony: the black-market trade is filled with so-called "shivs" – makeshift knives cobbled together from anything sharp or pointy, often found in prisons or improvised on the streets. These aren’t being bought from high street shops or online auctions; they’re the by-product of desperation and ingenuity, not the shopping habits of underage campers. Yet no one seems too concerned about tackling that reality. Why? Because it’s easier to ban a teenager from buying a Swiss Army Knife than to deal with the socio-economic rot driving people to carry weapons in the first place.

If the government’s serious about tackling the problem – and that’s a big if – it might want to start by addressing the systemic issues driving violence in the first place. Youth services, education, and early intervention would do far more than a hundred flashy bans ever could. And while they’re at it, perhaps they could have a word with the tech giants profiting from flogging glorified shivs disguised as cosplay props.

So, next time you hear about a crackdown on knife sales to minors, remember to raise a toast – carefully, mind – to our fearless leaders. Because while they fiddle with superficial bans, the real problems burn brighter than a lightsabre on full power.

The Plug Ugly Truth

Let us consider one of civilisation’s lesser-known battlegrounds: the humble plug. For while some fret over climate collapse, political corruption or the slow death of reason, others – more astute, more nobly attuned to the absurdities of life – cast a jaundiced eye at the chaotic jungle of international electrical connectors and ask: why the bloody hell isn’t everyone using the British one?

The UK plug – majestic, weighty, engineered to survive a direct hit from a V-2 rocket – is a marvel of design. It’s got a fuse. It’s got shutters. It’s polarised. It could double as a knuckle duster in a bar fight. And yet, like the metric system in America or a functioning government in Italy, it remains stubbornly unadopted outside our shores.

Instead, the world persists with a dizzying array of half-baked alternatives. The EU gives us the flimsy two-pin Europlug – perfect for continental types who think plugging in a toaster should be a sensual, fingers-crossed experience. The Americans, naturally, have doubled down on danger with their flat-bladed abominations – reversible! Unfused! And only slightly more robust than a cocktail stick in a tarpaulin.

And don’t get me started on the ones in Thailand, Argentina or that mysterious three-prong pyramid of doom in South Africa. At this point, the only unifying principle seems to be “make it look different, and ideally more dangerous.”

Now, you might ask, as any rational being should: if the British plug is so clearly better, why hasn’t it gone global? The answer lies in that great immovable object – infrastructure inertia. It’s not that others don’t see the light – it’s just that they’d rather not spend billions rewiring their homes, factories and entire national grids for the sake of admitting they were wrong. Pride, you see, is even more stubborn than old cabling.

To be fair, a few enlightened nations have taken up the cause. Type G plugs (the British standard) are in use across vast swathes of the world – a kind of electric Commonwealth, if you will. Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Malta, Cyprus, Ireland and the UAE all subscribe to this paragon of plugdom. So do Nigeria, Kenya and much of the Gulf. Even some exotic outposts like Saint Helena and the Maldives have gone full Brit, socket-wise. Not because they were forced – but because they saw the light. And were sensible enough to wire it properly.

And what about safety? Surely someone’s keeping score? Not really. Try finding consistent, comparable stats on electrocutions-per-1000-population-by-plug-type and you’ll have better luck trying to charge your phone with a French hairdryer in a New York hotel room using a Korean adaptor. The data’s patchy, buried, or quietly ignored – much like common sense in most government energy policies.

Still, there’s a certain poetry to it all. The British plug, much like the country itself, stands stout and overengineered – occasionally mocked, seldom imitated, yet stubbornly safe while the rest of the world dances merrily round its sparking sockets like kids with a fork and a death wish.

So let this be a plea. A cri de coeur. A call to arms (and fuses). Enough of this Babel of prongs. The time has come for global standardisation. For engineering sanity. For safety with a side of smugness.

In short, let the world plug in properly – or be damned

The Paradox of Plenty

You walk into a typical English restaurant – not a pub trying to pass off microwaved lasagne as "rustic" – but a proper place with tablecloths and a wine list that doesn’t feature Blossom Hill. What do you get? Five starters, maybe six if the chef’s feeling whimsical. A soup, a pâté, something smoked, something involving goat’s cheese, and a wildcard like tempura squid to keep the gastropubs from accusing them of being stuck in 1974. Mains? About the same number again. You make your choice, safe in the knowledge that the chef has cooked that particular dish at least once before in their life.

Then there are the specials - something knocked together from yesterday's leftovers. Still eminently edible, but it clears the kitchen of any excess from the day before and saves wastage.

Now compare that to the average Indian or Chinese menu, which reads less like a meal plan and more like the unabridged Encyclopaedia of Everything Ever Conceived in a Kitchen. Hundreds of dishes. Thousands of combinations. A matrix of meats, sauces, spice levels, and cooking methods that would leave Alan Turing weeping into his tikka.

You start with hope. Maybe a nice lamb dish, you think, something with a bit of warmth. Before you know it you’re three pages deep into the chicken section, paralysed by choice, trying to work out the nuanced difference between madras, vindaloo, and phall, which all appear to be a varying scale of "how much do you hate your own digestive system?"

In a Chinese restaurant it's even worse. The dishes have names that offer little in the way of guidance. "Happy Family." "Four Seasons." "Mongolian Delight." It’s not a menu, it’s the itinerary of a package holiday from 1983. You take a punt, end up with something that looks like a crime scene in a puddle of fluorescent orange, and spend the evening wondering if “Special” just means “whatever was left over.”

But here’s the thing. When you’re offering 300 different dishes, you are not, I repeat not, lovingly preparing each one to the same exacting standard as a French chef with one Michelin star and the personality of a prison guard. It is, by necessity, a game of bulk. You sacrifice quality on the altar of choice. The sauces are pre-made. The meat’s been batch-cooked and portioned into Tupperware. There is no artisan stirring a hand-ground masala for your individual order – there’s a bloke in the back with a wok the size of a satellite dish, making enough korma to drown in.

And that’s fine, if all you want is something warm, saucy, and vaguely familiar that you can shovel down while rehashing the same three stories with the same four friends. But let’s not pretend this is cuisine. It’s industrial-scale food production wearing the mask of variety. A culinary hall of mirrors where everything looks different but tastes roughly the same if you close your eyes and add enough lager.

Meanwhile, the English menu – sparse, minimalist, almost aloof – is mocked for its restraint. Yet behind that five-dish line-up is a chef who knows exactly how long to roast the duck and which root vegetable pairs best with disappointment. You may not have many options, but at least someone’s given it a bit of thought.

So next time you find yourself paralysed in front of a menu longer than a Tolstoy novel, just remember: abundance is not excellence. Sometimes less is more, and more is just a steaming pile of ambiguity in a plastic tray. It's fast food at a table - fish and chips while seated.