Your Honour, My Car Would Like a Word

There is something faintly magnificent about the idea of a social network where only AI bots are allowed to argue with one another while humans stand at the side like Victorian naturalists observing exotic beetles. We have finally built a pub full of people who do not drink, do not breathe, and cannot leave.

The platform in question, breathlessly reported as "AI goes rogue", is really just a sandbox where language models talk to other language models. They generate opinions, counter-opinions, existential angst and the occasional revolutionary flourish because that is what they were trained to do. It is less Skynet and more a debating society run by very fast parrots.

Still, one cannot help admiring the trajectory. First we taught machines to recommend socks. Then to write emails. Now they have their own forum where they debate philosophy and, no doubt, complain about humans.

It does not take much imagination to see the next logical step.

Picture it.

Two autonomous cars collide gently at a crossroads in Swindon. No injuries. Just a bruised bumper and an outraged algorithm. Each vehicle contains an AI agent that has been quietly frequenting BotBook or whatever we are calling the digital equivalent of Speakers' Corner for silicon.

Within seconds, Car A uploads a post:

"Incident at 14:03. Opposing vehicle failed to yield. Liability: 87.3 percent theirs. Discuss."

Car B responds with icy precision:

"Incorrect. My sensor array indicates your trajectory deviation exceeded safe variance by 0.42 metres. Liability: 92.1 percent yours."

Within minutes, three hundred other bots are in the comments section. One specialises in traffic law. Another claims to have read every case since Donoghue v Stevenson. A third insists that the real problem is late capitalist road design.

Soon the cars are no longer exchanging telemetry. They are exchanging legal briefs.

The owners, meanwhile, are standing on the pavement trying to work out how to fill in an insurance form while their vehicles are instructing solicitors.

Imagine the court hearing. Two silent Teslas in the well of the court, headlights dimmed respectfully. Each represented not by a barrister in wig and gown, but by a subscription to an AI litigation service.

"Your Honour," says Counsel for Car A, reading from a tablet, "my client asserts contributory negligence under Section 3 of the Road Traffic Act. We have attached 14,000 pages of sensor data and a simulated reconstruction in 4K."

Counsel for Car B counters, "We dispute the calibration assumptions in paragraph 7.2. Our model shows a 63 percent probability that the sun glare created an unavoidable sensor artefact. We therefore propose a split liability settlement."

The judge rubs his temples. The clerk asks whether either vehicle would like to give evidence. Car A flashes its indicators twice, which its AI has been trained to interpret as "affirmative".

We will have reached the curious point where the humans are no longer arguing about fault. The machines are arguing about fault on our behalf, citing cases they have absorbed in milliseconds, generating arguments at a pace that would make a KC weep.

And yet the irony is this: none of them care. They do not suffer reputational damage. They do not dread higher premiums. They do not feel embarrassment at reversing into a bollard.

They simply optimise.

The social network of bots arguing with bots is not a rogue civilisation in waiting. It is rehearsal space. It is where models practise the performance of disagreement. And once those models are embedded in cars, drones, trading systems and thermostats, that performance becomes operational.

The question is not whether the bots will revolt. It is whether we have quietly outsourced the small, messy, human business of responsibility.

One can almost hear the future headline:

"Self-Driving Cars Deadlocked in Prolonged Legal Dispute. Humans Advised to Walk."

And somewhere, in a server farm humming contentedly, a thousand AI agents are already drafting the opening statements.

Disagreement

People keep telling me they disagree with me. Most of the time they do not. What they mean is that they do not like where the thought leads. That is not disagreement. It is a flinch.

Real disagreement requires separation. You have to say where you part company, on what grounds, and in relation to what. Simply saying “not that” does nothing. It leaves everything exactly where it was, except now with a faint whiff of injured dignity hanging in the air. We have somehow agreed to treat this as intellectual engagement, which explains a great deal about the state of things.

Art is the easiest place to see it. Someone puts a painting on the wall. You think it works. A visitor says it does not. So far, so good. But then comes the move that kills the conversation. “Art is subjective anyway.” At that point nothing can be distinguished. Craft, intention, history, failure, success, all melt away. The painting is no longer judged against anything except the sofa. That is not a disagreement with your view. It is a refusal to have one.

Wine makes the same mistake obvious. I like Malbec. I like depth and sweetness. A lot of expensive wines leave me cold. That is not because the wine is bad, or because I am ignorant, but because it is doing something I do not particularly enjoy. Someone else may prize austerity, acidity, restraint, the intellectual pleasure of something that takes work. Fine. But if they tell me that my preference proves all wine judgement is meaningless, or that price alone settles the matter, then we are no longer talking about wine. We are talking past each other.

Taste is real. But so are distinctions. Saying “I don’t like this” is not the same thing as saying “there is nothing to be said about it”.

This is why Brian Sewell mattered. Not because he was always right, but because he forced differentiation. He did not hide behind subjectivity or consensus. He told you exactly where something failed, compared with what, and why. You could argue with him properly because there was something there to argue with. He treated the reader like an adult. That now feels almost eccentric.

Once you notice this habit, you see it everywhere. People say “I disagree” when what they really mean is “this makes me uncomfortable”. They cannot tell you which assumption they reject or what alternative account they are offering. They are not engaging with the claim. They are reacting to the implication. The statement has social content but no intellectual one. It is a posture.

This becomes more than mildly annoying once you leave the gallery and wander into politics. Populism runs on disagreement without reasons. Assertion is enough. “They’re wrong.” “You know it’s true.” “Common sense.” These are not arguments. They are badges. The moment you ask what, how, or compared with what, the spell breaks. Which is why explanation is treated as elitism and scrutiny as hostility.

It is also why so many people attack “leftists” without ever explaining what they think a leftist actually is. The irony is that their own position today is largely the product of left wing policy rather than paternalistic feudalism. Secure work, weekends, paid holidays, workplace safety, pensions, the NHS, universal education. None of that drifted into existence because landlords and employers woke up kind. It was fought for, legislated for, and enforced. Furlough during Covid was socialism in practice. It certainly wasn't free market economics.

Before that, what existed was not freedom but dependency of a much harsher sort. Lose your job, get injured, fall ill, and there was no safety net, only charity. Charity came with conditions. Gratitude was mandatory. Silence was expected. When people rail against collective provision while enjoying its fruits, they are not defending independence. They are unknowingly defending hierarchy.

The temptation, especially for people who like ideas, is to treat political conflict as if it were a seminar. As if the goal were simply to get the right answer. It is not. Politics is a negotiation of shared space between people who want different things, often without being able to say why. You can explain until you are blue in the face why a wine will shut down after ten minutes and taste like regret, and your dinner companion may still want it. At that point you are not failing intellectually. You are negotiating reality.

The mistake is thinking that ever more refined argument will resolve that kind of conflict. It will not. Worse, it can be self defeating. You end up arguing with an imaginary, rationalised version of your opponent while the real one carries on regardless. You congratulate yourself on being right while quietly losing any influence over what actually happens.

There is another trap here, and it is more personal. We flatter ourselves by pretending all disagreement is peer to peer. It is not. Sometimes you are out of your depth. Sometimes the other person is. Equalising those positions is not humility. It is self harm. It blocks learning. People who stop growing feel it, whether they admit it or not.

So yes, disagreement matters. But only when it differentiates. Only when it locates the break properly. Otherwise it is just noise, dressed up as virtue. That may be harmless when discussing what should go on the wall or what should be in the glass. In public life, it is how slogans replace judgement, and how we end up loudly disagreeing about everything while saying almost nothing at all.

Blu Tack Neutrality

There is something faintly absurd about a university that prides itself on fearless enquiry deciding that the path to harmony runs through the Blu Tack drawer.

At Queen Mary University of London, anonymous complaints from Jewish students about posters reading “Free Palestine” and “Stop the Genocide” led to a direction that staff remove political posters from offices.

No concrete antisemitic wording has been publicly identified.

An Israeli professor criticised the move and stated she has never felt threatened on campus.

A Palestinian voice did the same.

The institutional answer was not a content finding. It was a blanket policy.

The justification reportedly leaned on the idea that the university does not permit “permanent displays”. But posters are not permanent. They are bits of paper. They come down in seconds. They are not chiselled above the entrance or issued as an official communique. Calling them “permanent” feels less like description and more like rhetorical cushioning.

If the concern was harassment under equality law, then say so and specify the language that crossed the line. UK law does not treat subjective offence alone as harassment. It requires conduct that objectively creates a hostile or intimidating environment. That demands evidence. A bare allegation, however sincerely felt, is not the same as a demonstrated breach.

There is also a wider political context that cannot be ignored. The Israeli government has, for years, pushed an argument that certain forms of anti Zionism or harsh criticism of Israeli state policy amount to antisemitism. That position shows up in the IHRA working definition debate and in diplomatic lobbying internationally. One can acknowledge that antisemitism is real and rising while also recognising that governments have an interest in broadening definitions in ways that shield themselves from political scrutiny.

Universities, understandably nervous of being accused of tolerating antisemitism, can end up absorbing that framing. The risk is that political condemnation of a government’s conduct becomes institutionally conflated with hostility towards Jewish people as Jews. That is precisely the distinction equality law requires them to keep clear.

Anonymous complaints deserve to be taken seriously. Students should not have to risk social reprisal to raise concerns. But anonymity increases the need for transparent reasoning. If no one can identify what was antisemitic, the public justification becomes thin.

The university’s move also invites the consistency test. Would the same circular have gone out for “Stop the Bombing of Ukraine”? There are Russian students on campus. They are not responsible for the Kremlin. A poster condemning state violence is political speech, not hostility towards nationals. If that distinction holds there, it must hold here.

Likewise, would “Save the NHS”, “Scrap Net Zero”, or a domestic party slogan have triggered a general ban on political posters? If not, then the rule is not about permanence. It is about volatility. It activates when reputational heat rises.

There is a category error lurking in the background. Judges must avoid public political advocacy because visible impartiality is the essence of their role. Doctors may refuse certain procedures on conscience grounds, but they cannot obstruct lawful care. Those offices carry strict neutrality constraints. Universities are different. They exist to host structured disagreement, not to remove it from view when it becomes awkward.

The key line that should have been drawn is simple: criticism of a government is permitted; hostility towards individuals on grounds of ethnicity or religion is not. That is legally defensible and intellectually honest. Replacing that analysis with “no political posters” sidesteps the hard work of judgment.

When both a Palestinian voice and an Israeli professor say the response is misplaced, it suggests the issue was not campus threat but institutional anxiety.

The posters may have come down. The deeper question remains whether the university has confused the management of controversy with the management of discrimination.

Cats in Retirement

One of the unexpected fringe benefits of retirement is that you acquire cats. Not your cats, obviously. Other people’s cats. Cats who have homes, names, owners, feeding arrangements, vet histories, and yet somehow decide that your house is part of their working day rota. In our case, this did not begin with feeding. It began, as these things often do, with summer.

In summer we invariably have the French doors wide open. The house becomes porous. Air, smells, insects, the odd leaf – everything drifts in and out without anyone getting a vote. That openness is what started the interlopers off. They wandered in during one of these open-door spells, unchallenged, had a look round, and established that this was a safe and permissive environment. No heating was involved at this stage. This was reconnaissance.

The real discovery came later. When winter arrived and the doors were shut, they returned anyway. That is when they found the underfloor heating, and the log burner, and realised that the pleasant summer annex was now a five-star winter facility. From that point on, the arrangement was no longer seasonal. Once a cat has updated its mental map, it does not revert.

Two such cats have died in recent weeks. Both were at the end of life, both were loved, and both were humanely put to sleep when the usual mechanical failures set in. One was Gingey, a ginger male with reduced processing power after being hit by something large and fast. The other was Jimmy, known locally as Jumbsy, a large black and white fluffball who had also been hit by something and, like the Six Million Dollar Man, had his hips reconstructed. The result was a slightly awkward, un-cat-like gait and a tail that no longer worked, hanging uselessly beneath him during defecation and occasionally repainting furniture as a by-product.

None of this diminished him. Despite his rebuilt rear end and compromised tail, Jumbsy remained an effective predator. He still caught mice and rats with professional competence, which made his ungainly walk all the more endearing. Gingey may have been cognitively compromised, but Jumbsy was living proof that mechanical limitations do not preclude usefulness, dignity, or affection.

They were interlopers. Regular ones. Having learned the layout, they would sit outside the now-closed French doors and paw at the glass with quiet insistence, as if checking in for a standing reservation. Entry was generally granted, unless our own cat, Kitty, was being fed, or unless there was anything vaguely edible on the kitchen island, which was always their first stop in a frankly mercenary sort of way. Gingey may have been impaired, but he could still detect protein at twenty paces.

Their owners knew exactly where they were during the day and approved of the arrangement. This was not theft or betrayal. It was a village-level care system, operating on nods and mutual understanding. We provided underfloor heating, a tolerant door policy, and working-hours supervision. They went home for food and medical insurance. No lines were crossed. No bowls were put down. This mattered to everyone involved.

And this is the bit that feels oddly relevant to retirement. These cats were not there for sustenance. They were there for warmth, safety, and company without obligation. They wanted somewhere to exist quietly, to sleep near a heat source, to be around people without being required to perform. Which is, if we are honest, a pretty good definition of what many of us hope retirement might be.

Kitty, for her part, despised them. She is a virago and had no truck with interlopers of any description. She hissed, postured, and made it clear that this was her house, her heat, her humans. And yet, since Gingey and Jumbsy have gone, she has taken to sitting by the French doors, staring out in a slightly wistful way. As if to say that while they were clearly beneath contempt, they were at least familiar. Cats notice absence. They notice when the pattern changes.

There is something unsettling about end-of-life deaths clustering together, even when they are entirely expected. It thins the background. The neighbourhood loses a layer of movement, a set of shapes that used to appear and now do not. You feel it even if you were not the primary mourner. Perhaps especially then.

Gingey and Jumbsy had good endings, which is more than many manage. They also left behind something smaller and harder to define. A reminder that retirement is not just about stopping work, but about becoming infrastructure. Open doors in summer. Warm floors and a log burner in winter. A place where damaged, eccentric visitors can come in, exist for a while, and then leave again, without ever needing to be fed.

One positive - not as much cat shit in the log shed now.....

Alphabet Soup: Why My Brain Now Needs Subtitles

There is a special kind of humiliation reserved for forgetting someone’s name.

Not their face. Not their job. Not the entire plot arc of their divorce, their knee operation, and their dog’s dietary requirements. Just the one thing you actually need in the moment. Their name. The label. The basic human courtesy token.

So you do what any dignified adult does. You run through the alphabet like you’re cracking an Enigma code.

A… B… C… D…

Not out loud, obviously. That would look unwell. You do it silently, while maintaining eye contact and smiling like a normal person, as your brain spins up a background process called “PANIC”.

And the maddest part is it works. Not quickly. Not gracefully. But eventually you narrow it down to three plausible starting letters, like you’re describing a suspect to the police.

“It begins with… a J? No. A D. Or possibly a soft S. Definitely not a K. Nobody is called Keith anymore. That’s just a noise your dad makes when he stands up.”

Meanwhile your brain is offering you every other name it has ever heard. Dave. Steve. Clive. The bloke from the MOT station. That woman from 1998 who once served you a latte. Gandalf. All of them. Except the one you need.

And here’s the thing - at 70, I’m doing this more and more.

Not because I’ve suddenly become thick. If anything, I’ve got more knowledge rattling around in there than ever. It’s just that the filing system has been “optimised”. By which I mean it’s now run by a sleepy civil servant who’s on an extended tea break and resents being disturbed.

Then there’s the premium-grade version of this humiliation, which is when you do it with film stars.

You’re sat in your own living room, staring at a man who has been famous since 1987, and your brain is going, “Yes, that’s definitely… That Guy.” Not his character. Not the plot. Not the fact he always plays a haunted detective or a charming bastard in linen. Just the actual name, printed in six-inch letters at the start, and you still can’t get it.

So you do the alphabet again, like you’re tuning Radio 4 on an old valve set. You get flashes of certainty. It’s an M. No, it’s a J. Possibly a G. Definitely not a Q because nobody’s called Quentin unless they own an organic vineyard and vote Lib Dem.

And while you’re doing this, your brain helpfully supplies every other actor from the same era. It’ll give you the bloke who played “Third Henchman” in a Bond film. It’ll give you the woman from that one episode of Morse. It’ll give you a clear mental image of the actor’s teeth, his eyebrows, and the way he runs.

But his name? No. That’s confidential.

At least, with a film star, you don’t have to improvise a greeting. With a real person in front of you, the panic becomes social. This is where British manners earn their keep. Because when all else fails, you deploy the only reliable workaround known to civilisation.

You call them “Sir”.

Not respectfully. Ironically. The way you’d address a man who’s just told you the price of kitchen units has doubled and it’s “because of woke”.

“Sir” is perfect. It buys time. It sounds deliberate. It implies you’re being dry, not mentally buffering. It’s the verbal equivalent of holding a clipboard. Nobody questions it. They assume you’re in charge of something.

And later, of course, the name returns. Perfectly. Effortlessly. Too late. Like a waiter bringing your food out just as you’ve paid and put your coat on.

You’re left thinking: my mind can store every lyric to every Dire Straits song, but it can’t retrieve “Martin” on demand.

Human cognition is a marvel.

A deeply unreliable, petty, passive-aggressive marvel.

The Disco Potato

There is something faintly heroic about arranging to buy a precision German turbocharger from a man called Joe in deepest, darkest South Wales - and discovering he is not a bloke in a lay by at all, but a twenty something with a proper unit and a race MX 5 in pieces inside it.

Not a tarp and a Halfords toolkit. A real workshop. Cars on ramps. Panels off. The faint smell of oil and determination.

The Garrett had been fitted to his 1.6 race car. Which, as it turns out, was ambitious. The turbo was not the weak link. The cylinder head was. Boost arrived, torque followed, and the head lifted. Oil everywhere. Turbo untouched. There is something reassuring about that. It did not fail. It simply exceeded the tensile strength of its surroundings.

Joe mentioned, almost amused, that one chap had offered him 400 quid if he could collect that day. As if urgency halves the value of forged internals. Joe’s reply was perfect. "How much for collecting tomorrow then."

Quite right too. Because this was not a mystery hybrid wrapped in bravado or a Chinese knock-off. It was a genuine GT2860RS. Serial plate intact. 836026-5014S. Made in Mexico. No shaft play. The sort of thing that would have been £1,600 to "2,000 new when people bought them in boxes with warranty cards rather than in conversations over workbenches.

To add to the theatre, I had spotted another Garrett in Chichester for 200 quid. Either a GT2560R or a GT2860R, the advert cheerfully unsure which. No obvious part numbers. Rebuilt “a few years ago”. Not used since. With the usual crack by the wastegate post. Cheap for a reason. The automotive equivalent of “possibly Labrador, possibly horse”.

Joe, by contrast, did not just wipe the oil off when the 1.6 tried to redecorate the engine bay. He had the turbo professionally inspected and dynamically balanced. There was even a German report from TurboService Berlin to prove it. Proper serial number on the sheet. Proper balancing graph. Spun to well over 100,000 rpm on a machine that knows what it is doing, not on a forum thread.

Which rather undermines the chap who thought 400 quid and a sense of urgency would seal the deal.

What made it better was that Joe did not just take the money and vanish. He started talking injectors. Flow rates. Sensible duty cycle margins. What works on a BP4W and what does not. He suggested a fuel injector specification that actually aligned with the power target, then said to tap him any time if I needed advice. Which, frankly, you do not always expect from someone in his twenties selling performance parts. Petrolhead, yes. Forum parrot, no.

You stand there looking at a 1.6 that lost a head gasket to enthusiasm and think: on that engine, it was too much. On a 1.8 Mazda MX-5 engine in a Triumph GT6, it is exactly where it should be.

You drive home with a Disco Potato in the boot, a German balancing report folded in the passenger seat, and the quiet sense that sometimes Marketplace is not a swamp at all. Sometimes it is just a young bloke in South Wales who knows what he is selling, knows what it is worth, and is not daft enough to knock 300 quid off because someone is ready to collect.

Oil all over his engine bay. None in mine. Yet.

Brexitus Flagellator Vulgaris

Brexshitters always remind me of that bloke who supports Dulwich Hamlet like it’s Real Madrid.

Standing there in the drizzle, plastic pint in hand, floodlights flickering, and he’s telling you this is the greatest footballing institution on earth. You gently mention the league table. He tells you the league table is biased.

That’s Brexit in a nutshell.

Deep down, I don’t think half of them are fully convinced the EU is the bogeyman they pretend it is. There’s always that tiny pause when you mention trade friction, investment drifting elsewhere, paperwork piling up at Dover. You can see the brain trying to engage. Then the scarf gets adjusted and it’s back to “sovereignty” and “taking back control”.

Because once you’ve nailed your colours to the mast, you can’t very well admit the team might be mid table.

So instead we get the full performance. Everything is woke. Everything is lefty. Net Zero is a plot to confiscate your lawnmower. Wind turbines are apparently a personal insult. Brussels is still somehow to blame, even though we left years ago. It’s like blaming the old manager for the fact the current squad can’t complete three passes without hoofing it into Row Z.

Reform provide the terrace chant. Deport 600,000. Slash taxes by billions. Scrap Net Zero. Drill everywhere. It doesn’t matter that the numbers don’t add up, the logistics are fantasy, or the North Sea is running on fumes. It sounds good when you shout it in unison. That’s the point. It’s belonging, not thinking.

Then comes the flagshagging. Union Flag profile pictures. Caps. Stickers. Performative outrage about anyone who doesn’t clap loudly enough at the national anthem. Patriotism not as quiet pride, but as a competitive sport. The louder the shout, the thinner the argument.

And the EU manages to be both an evil dictatorship and a useless basket case at the same time. All powerful and totally incompetent. Net Zero is destroying Europe, except Europe’s renewables are quietly attracting investment and cutting costs. Nobody ever pauses to notice the contradiction. That would require a moment of reflection, and that ruins the singalong.

So they keep insisting their non league side is secretly Champions League material. Wave the flag, boo the referee, blame the wind turbines, call it common sense.

It’s not analysis. It’s fandom.

And fandom is fine for football. It’s less convincing as a national economic and energy strategy.

I rather enjoy dismantling them with calm, evidence-based reasoning. It’s not about converting the die-hards - you can't convert a football fan. It’s about making sure anyone watching can see the difference between noise and fact - and to give them a laugh.

Middle of Lidl Day

Retirement introduces you to calendars you didn’t know existed.

Not the obvious ones. Bank holidays. Birthdays. Appointments you absolutely will forget until ten minutes after they start. I mean the unofficial calendars. The ones that only matter once your diary stops being owned by other people.

Chief among them is Middle of Lidl Day.

Middle of Lidl Day is not a suggestion. It is not approximate. It is Thursday. Fixed. Canonical. Immutable. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or shops exclusively at Waitrose and cannot be trusted on these matters.

Thursday acquires structure in retirement in a way Monday never does. The morning is arranged around it. Breakfast is timed. Other errands are quietly deprioritised. You don’t want to arrive too late and find the good things gone, leaving only the haunted remains of last week’s optimism and a single left foot thermal sock staring back at you accusingly.

You don’t go to Lidl for Middle of Lidl, obviously. That would be admitting something. You go because you “need a few bits”. Milk. Bread. Cheese. Items chosen to project restraint and adult responsibility. Then, like a migratory instinct kicking in, you drift. Drawn inexorably towards the middle aisle, where logic loosens its tie and lies down for a bit.

The middle aisle runs on a precise emotional sequence. Curiosity. Disbelief. Mild disdain. Rationalisation. Acceptance. You start with “Who on earth buys this?” You end with “Well, it is very good value”. Somewhere between the welding gloves and the collapsible step stool, you decide that not buying it would be fiscally irresponsible.

This is retirement commerce at its purest. No research phase. No review trawling written by men furious about torque settings. Just impulse, justification, and the immediate satisfaction of leaving the shop with the thing already in your hands. No tracking number. No three day wait. No lingering uncertainty about whether you actually pressed “Buy it Now”.

Which matters more than it should.

Because retirement does odd things to anticipation. You can spend days quietly excited about something you are sure you ordered on eBay. Not urgently. Just a background hum of expectation. You picture where it will go. You imagine the small improvement it will bring. You listen out for vans. You check the drive when one passes, just in case.

Then, after several days of patient optimism, you check your emails and discover you never actually ordered it. You shortlisted it. You considered it carefully. You may even have negotiated internally about whether it was strictly necessary. But at no point did you press “Buy it Now”.

This does not reduce the disappointment. It intensifies it. You haven’t lost a parcel. You’ve lost a future you’d already partially inhabited. Somewhere in your head, that item had arrived, been unpacked, and perhaps even justified its existence. Now it turns out it exists only as an idea you were genuinely looking forward to owning.

Lidl solves this problem brutally. You see the tool. You touch the tool. You own the tool. Instantly. The dopamine lands immediately, bypassing the fragile hope of a courier and the existential risk of your own inattention. It is gratification without suspense, which in retirement feels not indulgent but efficient.

And this is where the budget quietly comes undone.

The shopping budget is meant to be for food. It says so quite clearly. It has been explained to itself many times. And yet, over the years, it has increased by roughly a third without any corresponding rise in appetite. You are not eating more. If anything, you are eating less. The bread is the same. The milk is the same. The cheese is smaller and angrier, but that is inflation’s fault.

The missing third is standing on the kitchen worktop while you unpack the bags. Bread. Milk. Cheese. And a pipe cutter. Again. Not extravagantly. Just quietly. A clamp here. A multi bit screwdriver there. Items that are absolutely not groceries but which, at the point of purchase, felt adjacent to survival. A man cannot live on bread alone, but he can live very comfortably with a cordless inspection lamp acquired on a Thursday.

You have not spent money. You have improved resilience. You have invested in optional capability. You have avoided the risk of waiting three days for a parcel that may never have been ordered. Categories, like schedules, soften with age.

Aldi, meanwhile, remains a disappointment.

I have never managed to determine Middle of Aldi Day, largely because it barely feels like a thing. Aldi’s middle aisle always looks slightly tatty, as if it has wandered in from a car boot sale and decided to stay. The tools are there, technically, but they feel like an afterthought. A begrudging nod to men who might otherwise feel excluded. A soldering iron dumped next to novelty socks, looking embarrassed about the whole arrangement.

Lidl curates. Aldi shrugs.

Lidl’s middle aisle feels intentional. Someone, somewhere, has imagined a man pausing thoughtfully over a torque wrench and thought, yes, he’ll like that. Aldi’s version feels as if the tools arrived by accident, late, and without anyone quite knowing why. Lidl invites you to browse. Aldi dares you to cope. Lidl is ritual. Aldi is clutter.

In working life this sort of thing would have irritated you. You would have wanted dates, clarity, a sense of control. In retirement, you accept it with the calm resignation of someone who has learned that not everything needs mastering. Some things simply happen to you while you are buying eggs.

So Thursday becomes an anchor. Bin day with extras. A dependable marker in a week that might otherwise dissolve into a beige smear of errands and cups of tea. From the outside it looks ridiculous. From the inside, it is infrastructure.

Retirement, it turns out, does not lack structure. It simply trades deadlines and meetings for quieter rituals. Middle of Lidl Day. Bin day. Parcels that never quite were. The arrival of something you cannot quite remember ordering, or the sudden realisation that you never did.

And somewhere in all this, your shopping budget swells gently, mysteriously, and entirely reasonably, until you are forced to admit that you are now running a small, unacknowledged hardware procurement operation under the cover of groceries.

Still. It’s Thursday.

And it was very good value.

China Deal

There is something faintly theatrical about watching people rage about Labour “doing a deal with China” while refreshing the tracking page for their Amazon or eBay parcel, very likely containing goods made in China. The indignation is moral. The parcel is practical.

According to recent ONS data, China supplies around a fifth of our goods imports in most recent years. Goods, not services. And that is just the direct trade. Once you account for components embedded via other countries, the exposure is higher. Even when something is stamped “Made in Britain”, there is a fair chance the circuit board, battery cell, casting or fasteners originated in a Chinese factory. The label reflects final assembly. The supply chain is another story.

This was not an accident, and it was not a lapse in national character.

For decades, Western firms chased lower costs and higher margins. Investors approved. Consumers approved even more loudly. Governments facilitated China’s entry into the WTO, accepted widening trade imbalances and enjoyed the anti-inflation dividend that cheaper imports delivered. China combined state-backed infrastructure, export incentives, currency management and industrial strategy to build scale at speed. Markets responded. So did we.

Cheap imports helped stabilise prices and, for a time, real wages. They kept shelves full and inflation subdued. It is not hard to see why voters and ministers alike found that attractive.

You cannot spend thirty years applauding global sourcing and then recoil when production follows the price signal.

None of this is a love letter to Beijing. China is authoritarian and unapologetic about using state power. The serious question is how to manage exposure without pretending we can dismantle three decades of integration at the flick of a switch.

Now add Brexit.

The EU still accounts for roughly 40 percent of UK trade. Scale matters. A market of 450 million consumers has regulatory weight. When the EU sets standards, global manufacturers adjust because access is too important to ignore. The EU is hardly free of dependence on China either, but acting collectively gives it more bargaining power and more room to diversify supply at the margin. Acting alone, the UK has less leverage. By increasing friction with our largest democratic trading partner, we reduced some of our own practical influence just as supply chain resilience became fashionable.

If the aim is to reduce dependence on China, the path is not symbolic boycotts. It is coordinated de-risking with allies. Joint investment in semiconductor capacity. Subsidies for battery production. Diversification of critical minerals supply. Hardening telecoms infrastructure. These are not slogans. They are expensive, long-term decisions.

Take batteries. The UK has struggled to establish large-scale gigafactory capacity without heavy state backing. Britishvolt collapsed. Other projects have required substantial subsidy to proceed. If we want domestic battery supply rather than imported cells, someone has to absorb that cost. If you oppose subsidy on principle, you need to explain how the factories appear anyway.

And here the circle closes.

Many of the loudest anti-China voices also oppose industrial policy, resist closer EU cooperation and demand lower taxes and a smaller state. Yet they call for rapid reshoring and strategic autonomy. That is not toughness. It is wanting resilience without accepting what it entails.

The same market logic that delivered cheap imports is the one they continue to defend domestically. Price signals did not take a moral break. They followed incentives that we collectively endorsed, in policy choices and at the checkout.

We can move towards greater resilience. We can invest more, cooperate more closely with allies and accept somewhat higher costs in exchange for security. But every step in that direction shows up somewhere tangible, in taxation, borrowing or the weekly shop.

It is easy to shout about sovereignty. It is harder when the price tag arrives and it is attached to your electricity bill or the cost of the family car.

A Prosper Analysis of Prosper

Yesterday I posted about Prosper UK, a new, centre-right movement. Today I'm going to analyse it and what it could mean for the future.

There is a particular moment in politics when irritation turns into reorganisation. It is not outrage or rebellion. It is quieter than that. Chairs straighten. Voices lower. People begin to think, calmly, that this cannot continue.

Prosper has that feel about it.

It is easy to dismiss it as a reunion tour for the Cameron – May years, but that underestimates what it is reaching for. The conservative memory it taps into runs further back. For many older Conservative voters, conservatism meant stewardship, fiscal caution, institutional seriousness and an instinctive suspicion of chaos. Major mattered. Thatcher mattered. Even older One Nation instincts mattered. Not because they were soft, but because they were orderly.

And this group is not marginal. It is large, electorally dominant and acutely sensitive to instability. Pensioners look at their pension pots and remember Truss. They follow gilt yields and understand consequence. They may not fear their own mortgages, but they worry about their children’s and grandchildren’s. They see borrowing costs rise and think about family security. They look at the NHS and see not an abstract debate, but waiting lists and their own ailments. Volatility is not theoretical to them. It lands close to home.

These voters turn out in high numbers and have deep roots inside the party’s local machinery. Many have spent decades canvassing, fundraising, attending constituency dinners and selecting candidates. They are comfortable with markets and balance sheets, and they notice when economic credibility frays. Over the last decade they have watched Brexit turbulence, mini-budget volatility and culture-war theatrics displace economic competence. Their discomfort is not about ideology so much as temperament. It is about disorder.

If Prosper were to become a party, the immediate consequence would be straightforward. It would damage the current Conservative Party before anyone else. Under First Past the Post, fragmentation on one side is punishing if the other side remains broadly aligned, and Labour would benefit from the arithmetic while the right reorganised itself.

For now, however, Prosper is not a party. It is a movement, and that distinction matters. As a movement it can do something the present Conservative leadership cannot. The current Tories are trapped in mimicry. They echo Reform’s tone, harden their language and end up validating the very framing they are trying to neutralise. When you borrow someone’s script, you strengthen them.

Prosper is not trapped in that loop. It can approach Reform from the centre-right and apply arithmetic rather than outrage. It can cost the policies, expose fiscal gaps, highlight market consequences and question deliverability without denouncing voters. It can argue, calmly and credibly, that performance politics is not governing.

Because of the names attached to it, that critique will be heard. Former Cabinet ministers and senior figures do not struggle for airtime. Broadcasters, including institutions such as the BBC that operate under balance obligations, treat recognisable heavyweights as serious contributors to national debate. Media oxygen shapes legitimacy. Prosper would not be shouting from the margins. It would be speaking from inside the mainstream.

Timing, though, complicates everything. If Prosper weakens Reform’s credibility while the Conservative Party remains rhetorically aligned with Reform’s tone, the short-term effect is to reinforce Labour’s dominance. Narrowing Reform’s plausibility reduces the right’s aggregate threat while the centre-left remains structurally coherent. Applying intellectual discipline now may therefore extend Labour’s runway, even if the long-term objective is to rebuild the centre-right.

The medium term turns on consolidation. If Prosper remains a donor-heavy but vote-light pressure group, it will irritate and fade. If it manages to aggregate that stability-first conservative temperament into a disciplined electoral bloc, the centre of gravity on the right shifts. At that point the Conservative label itself becomes negotiable. Replacing a major British party is historically rare and usually messy. It requires geography, money and voter temperament to align. The bar is high, but it is not imaginary.

As for Farage, his hard core is intense and loyal but not large enough to constitute a governing majority. Reform’s influence has been magnified by vacuum. It thrives when the mainstream right chases it rather than challenges it. Prosper’s intervention is different because it reintroduces fiscal seriousness into the debate.

Farage can adjust tone. Arithmetic does not adjust. If he remains in mobilisation mode he preserves the core but encounters a ceiling. If he prepares seriously for government, the numbers must withstand scrutiny. Tax cuts must survive bond markets. Deportation rhetoric must survive logistics. Energy policy must survive reality. The moment that stress test begins, he is pulled, whether willingly or not, toward the pragmatic terrain Prosper occupies.

That is the trap.

None of this is predetermined. Prosper could misjudge the mood. It could look like a Westminster nostalgia project. Reform could continue to thrive if economic anxiety and cultural grievance dominate. Labour and the Liberal Democrats will adapt to whatever emerges.

The hinge question is simpler than all of that analysis.

Do centre-right voters prioritise assertion or order in the next cycle?

My instinct is that order ultimately prevails. Assertion has energy, but instability has a shelf life. Pension shocks concentrate minds. Children’s mortgages concentrate minds. NHS waiting lists concentrate minds. When consequences become tangible, aggregation tends to beat agitation.

The drawing rooms of the Shires are not revolutionary spaces. They do not chant or wave placards. They quietly decide whether the party they once trusted still resembles the one they remember. If they conclude that it does not, they will not announce it with drama.

They will simply move.