Part Numbers

Some people take up crosswords. Others tinker with model railways. Me? I play the increasingly Kafkaesque game of “Guess That Bracket” on a Mazda BP4W engine – a game involving rust, swearing, and multiple false leads courtesy of the internet’s collective misidentification skills.

Let’s start with the bracket bolted to the block – the silver painted thing to the right of centre - a hulking steel lump that looked as though it had wandered in from a bridge-building project. I knew it wasn’t the alloy PAS/A/C support bracket listed under every part number from here to Hiroshima. No, this one was forged by the gods of power steering and air con, back when belts were serious business. Only thing is, I’m not using PAS (at 800-900 kg the GT6 doesn't need PAS), and any air con in my build will be electric – not bolted to the side like a Victorian pump house. So out it came.

But not without a fight.

Of course, the final bolt was buried behind a sleeve, because Mazda are masters of putting fixings in places only accessible to dislocated wrists or divine intervention. I eventually had to mutilate a 14mm ring spanner and prevailed, probably aided by some obscure Norse deity of rusted Japanese hardware.

As it transpired, the sleeve must have been pressed in after the bracket had been bolted to the block, but I didn't know that, not that I could have pressed it out anyway, as I don't have the necessary tool (note to self - get another tool).

That left the EGR system (Exhaust Gas Return) – a wheezy, sooty spaghetti of pipework designed to please late-'90s emissions legislation. Not needed here. I’ve no plans to submit this engine to the DVLA as a BP4W, nor is the EGR relevant if it’s going into a vehicle of a certain age. The MOT doesn’t care, provided there’s no smoke and no lights on the dash. So into the scrap box it went to join the bracket, possibly to be reborn as a supermarket trolley in Swindon.

With the PAS and A/C gone, I’m left with a crank pulley that looks like it’s moonlighting as a ship’s capstan. Half of it serves no purpose now, so I’m getting a custom aluminium one machined – lighter, better balanced, and not designed to haul unnecessary belts. If the price is right, I might even have a couple of hundred knocked up and flog them on eBay. Enthusiasts of a similar persuasion could use them to rid their engines of that surplus ironmongery that Mazda thought essential in 1999, but are surplus to requirements on a restomod. 

Lightening your crank pulley doesn’t change measured BHP or torque, as the standard equation reflects steady-state output only. But according to Newton’s second law of rotation, reducing the pulley’s moment of inertia means the same torque produces faster angular acceleration. So while peak power stays the same, the engine revs more eagerly and feels more responsive.

Some people do yoga. I delete emissions systems and fabricate new pulleys. We all have our coping mechanisms. But you're never too old to learn.

Now, I’ve rebuilt several MGB engines before – a simple, agricultural lump that practically strips itself out of sympathy. This BP4W? Different beast entirely. Fuel injection. Cam sensors. The sort of thing Lucas would’ve described as witchcraft. But the payoff in performance will be worth it.

I decided to test-fit the engine to the old chassis – not the one I’ll use, it’s down the garden and I didn’t fancy lugging it to the house. With the front end chopped off the old chassis, dropping the engine in was surprisingly civilised. Having the tub still on it helped – gave me a good idea of how much reshaping the scuttle needs. Looks like I’ll need to get the grinder and welder out to create a 4–6 inch recess that will need strengthening around the edges.. 

One mistake – should’ve mounted the coil packs first. They’re more prominent than I thought, and it’s always the bit you leave till last that gets in the way of everything else.

Still, fitting a slimmed-down crank pulley will give me bags of clearance over the anti-roll bar. Only snag? I can’t run an automatic gearbox – no accessory pulley means nowhere to drive the pump. Not that it matters. The purists would say any British sportscar with an auto box is heresy. They’re probably right. Having the gearbox attached might have proved helpful in tilting the engine sufficiently to get it under the firewall scuttle, but it was only a first fitment.

The term firewall on a GT6 or Spitfire is misleading when the transmission tunnel covering the gearbox is made from cardboard. It's like calling a tea towel a blast shield. The term firewall conjures up images of aircraft-grade insulation and bulkheads capable of withstanding napalm – not something that will merrily combust the moment it sniffs hot oil. Realistically, it’s the difference between getting away singed and being flambéed in your footwell. I shall be making something out of carbon fibre, I think, as the aesthetics of the original design are somewhat Spartan, and I need accoutrements. 

So the plan continues. The engine gets lighter. The bay gets simpler. And the brackets, slowly, one by one, get correctly identified. Eventually. And refurbished as necessary. It no longer looks, as a friend commented recently (yes you, Pete), like it was dredged from the bottom of a lake.

I also want to put a removable crossmember under the gearbox. The logic is that I can drop the box for a future clutch replacement without having to hoik the entire engine out. Given the need for torsional strengthening, it will require some careful thought as to how I accomplish it - high-tensile steel and bolts.

The Education of a Rock Cadet

I was fourteen when I joined HMS Conway – not the legendary ship moored mid-river, long since wrecked by the time I arrived, but the shore-based version, set in the dripping, mossy grandeur of Plas Newydd on the Menai Strait. The ship had gone down; the spirit of discipline and damp socks had not.

They called it a naval school, a place to mould boys into men. What it actually did was lock a load of adolescents in a Welsh estate and hope that a mix of brass polish, cold showers, and shouted instructions might somehow produce an officer class. But something else snuck in. Something that didn’t march in time or salute properly. Something called music.

It started with Led Zeppelin I. Someone – clearly a visionary or future court-martial candidate – had brought in the vinyl. As Bonham’s bass drum thundered through a battered Dansette, everything changed. Page’s guitar howled like an animal in the hold. Plant shrieked like a man being chased by the gods. I stopped dreaming of epaulettes and started dreaming of Les Pauls and denim.

Then came King Crimson, with Schizoid Man arriving like a jazz-fuelled panic attack wearing a cape. Black Sabbath staggered in from the Midlands with riffs so heavy they could dent bulkheads. And then… Fill Your Head with Rock. A CBS double LP so wildly eclectic it felt like it had been compiled during a séance. Moondog, mumbling rhythms from another planet. Steppenwolf, spraying petrol and power chords. The Flock, playing violins like they'd accidentally snorted their sheet music.

But just as we were adjusting to this glorious chaos, something else landed – Space Oddity.

Bowie’s voice floated through the dorm like a spectral telegram from the future. “Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do…” It didn’t crash in like Zeppelin or stalk you like Sabbath – it haunted you. For three minutes, we were no longer in the converted drawing rooms of a Georgian mansion with damp trousers and parade drill. We were in space – untethered, alone, and strangely content.

And then – because clearly someone on the staff had given up entirely – they showed us Easy Rider one film night.

Imagine it. A bunch of uniformed teenagers, stuck in a military-lite regime, being shown a film about drug-running bikers, LSD in graveyards, and giving two fingers to The Man. We were supposed to take it as a warning. Instead, we took notes. Peter Fonda didn’t just ride a chopper – he rode out of the system. It hit us like a punch and a prophecy. Someone had accidentally broadcast a message of total defiance – and we received it loud and clear.

And yet, in the middle of this cultural feast, I lost my copy of Fill Your Head with Rock. Whether it vanished in a room inspection, was 'borrowed' by someone with a dodgy moral compass, or was simply sacrificed to the great vinyl gods of misadventure, I’ll never know. I’ve owned houses, businesses, even a certain degree of wisdom – but that missing album? That one still stings.

And no – I’ve got no interest in Glasto. Haven’t had for years. I look at the line-up and it’s like reading a list of pharmaceuticals or IKEA furniture. Bands I’ve never heard of playing music I can’t hum. It’s not even annoyance anymore – it’s baffled detachment. It’s music designed for wellies and Instagram, not Dansettes and rebellion. Whatever it was I once loved isn’t there anymore – or I’m not.

These days, the kids “discover” Zeppelin on Spotify and think they’ve found buried treasure. But they’ll never know what it meant to hear Dazed and Confused for the first time on a mono record player in a creaky old dormitory in Wales, while Bowie drifted above like a melancholy satellite and Peter Fonda rode off into the mythic dusk.

That, my friend, was education.

Crumb-ageddon

The Soggy Saga of Modern Bread.  Once upon a crustless time, bread was a noble companion. It had backbone – literally. You could slice it, toast it, lather it with butter or jam, and it wouldn’t crumple into a tear-stained heap. It had heft, chew, and dignity – like your dad's handshake. But now? Now we’ve got bread so insipid, so limp-wristed, so tragically bereft of glutenous integrity, it needs counselling after contact with a butter knife.

What fresh hell is this where spreading actual butter – not even lava-hot, just mildly assertive – rips your slice to shreds like you’re performing surgery on wet tissue paper? You try to wield the knife gently, like you’re applying ointment to a newborn hamster, and still it yields, folding pathetically at the edges like it's trying to get out of P.E. And heaven forbid you use cold butter – at that point it’s less a sandwich and more a crime scene.

This isn’t bread. It’s imitation bread essence™. A bleached, air-whipped, joyless sponge designed to last four years in the cupboard and disintegrate the moment it encounters anything firmer than a sigh. It’s been so over-engineered by food technologists in lab coats with clipboards and too many PhDs that they’ve forgotten the first principle of bread: it must hold stuff. Butter. Jam. Cheese. Dignity.

But the supermarkets call it "Farmhouse Batch". Which farm? Chernobyl? Because no self-respecting farm would own up to this pallid, plasticky fluff that sticks to the roof of your mouth like edible cling film. A proper crust? Forget it – the “crust” on modern bread is just the outer edge of despair. Tap it, and it sounds like a deflating balloon. Slice it, and it sheds crumbs like dandruff on a black jumper.

Meanwhile, artisan bread – the real deal – costs roughly the same as a minor surgical procedure. Oh yes, you can get a sourdough loaf that actually resists the knife and carries flavour deeper than "sweetened air", but only if you're prepared to remortgage your house. God help you if you want it sliced – the machine groans, cries a little, and then ejects your loaf looking like it's been mugged.

So we soldier on with this modern muck. Toasted, it turns into carbon in seconds. Untoasted, it’s barely more substantial than foam packing. And yet we dare call ourselves a bread-loving nation?

If you can’t butter your bread without destroying it – it’s not bread. It’s a culinary paper hat masquerading as food. And it’s time we demanded more from our daily loaf. Give us strength, chew, resilience! Give us bread we can spread without triggering a minor existential crisis.

Failing that, pass the croutons – at least they own their crunch.

Useless Speed Bumps

They’re called speed bumps, but what they really are is performance art for councils who want to look like they’re doing something about speeding, without upsetting the Range Rover crowd on the school run. 

I’m talking, of course, about those utterly pointless, half-hearted humps – the ones that don’t go all the way across the road, but instead sit there like abandoned Toblerones, neatly spaced so that any vehicle wider than a wheelbarrow can just straddle them.

These bumps – more accurately “bumps-for-bikes-and-hopes” – are supposed to calm traffic. What they actually do is make every white van man and Audi driver feel like Lewis Hamilton taking Eau Rouge at full tilt. You don’t slow down for them – you aim for them. A bit of a wiggle of the steering wheel and boom – clean through the middle, suspension untouched, smugness intact.

It’s traffic-calming in theory only – like painting zebra stripes on a motorway and calling it a wildlife crossing.

Now, if you're a cyclist, you're less lucky. These strategically useless nubbins of tarmac are perfectly designed to knock your fillings out. And motorcyclists? It’s a game of Russian roulette in slow motion. Either you line up just right and float through the gap like a seasoned stunt rider, or you clip one and perform an impromptu interpretive dance over your handlebars in front of a bemused pensioner walking a cockapoo.

And yet, councils keep installing them. Why? Because they’re cheaper than full-width humps, and crucially, they come with a bonus: they give councillors something to point to in leaflets. “We’ve tackled speeding in your area!” they trumpet. Yes – like a narcoleptic mallard tackles a Boeing 747.

These not-quite-there speed bumps are the civic equivalent of a motivational poster: all image, no impact. They’re the placebo of urban planning. They slow down exactly no one, they irritate everyone, and they’ve turned our roads into a bizarre game of hopscotch for heavy goods vehicles.

Want to actually calm traffic? Try speed cameras. Try full-width humps. Try a giant cardboard cutout of a police officer holding a hairdryer – it’s more effective, and cheaper. But please, for the love of sanity, stop installing these half-arsed lumps of asphalt that only serve to annoy cyclists, confuse tourists, and let every white van barrel through like it’s the last lap of a demolition derby.

Because if this is what passes for road safety strategy, then it’s not just the bumps that are poorly connected – it’s the thinking behind them.

Trump's Big Bombshell (That Blew Up in His Face)

So there we have it – Trump’s long-range, deep-penetrating, bunker-busting ego has finally detonated under its own narrative. According to The Donald, the US bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities so thoroughly that you’d need an archaeological permit to find them. Fordow? Flattened. Natanz? Naffed off. Isfahan? Is-a-gone. He beamed like a man who’d just drop-kicked a nuclear warhead into a sandcastle and declared global peace before lunch.

But here’s the problem: when you say you’ve obliterated something – like, say, a nuclear programme – you rather paint yourself into a corner. Because if it turns out that Iran still has a working centrifuge or two tucked under the mattress, and you need to bomb them again, you’ve either got to admit your original boasting was nonsense… or pretend you’re just bombing the air for fun, like a child hitting a deflated paddling pool with a cricket bat.

This is what happens when you treat foreign policy like a property listing – all spin, no structure. "Decades of nuclear development wiped out in a single strike," he bellowed, like a man flogging time-shares in Chernobyl. Except now the intelligence community – those inconvenient people with data – say Iran could be up and running again in a few months. Which is awkward, because you can’t exactly launch a second round of “obliteration” without admitting the first one was little more than a pyrotechnic press release.

So what does Trump do? He doubles down, of course. Sends out his human foghorns – Hegseth and Rubio – to tell us the leaks are lies, the media are traitors, and the real problem is the truth getting out before he’s had time to invent a better version.

Let’s call it what it is: the strongman paradox. Trump wants to look omnipotent, so he declares total victory. But if he ever needs to act again, he exposes himself as the blustering blowhard we all knew he was. He’s stuck – can’t bomb again without admitting he failed, can’t sit still without looking weak. It’s Schrödinger’s airstrike: both a glorious success and a pending necessity, depending on the audience.

And the best bit? He’s done this to himself. With a mouth like a missile silo and a memory like a sieve, he’s now got only two options: lie bigger, or bomb thinner air. Either way, it’s a comedy of mass destruction – with Trump as the only man in history to bomb a country so hard it came back stronger just to spite him.

Big Lane

I was in Beaufort, Breconshire the other day, collecting a car – as you do – when I stumbled upon a sight so quintessentially British it ought to come with its own brass band and commemorative biscuit tin. Two roads, side by side. One called Big Lane. The other – wait for it – Small Lane.

No marketing fluff. No “Heol y Lili” or “Royal Crescent”. Just: that one’s big, that one’s small. Straight-talking, unpretentious, and quietly magnificent.

And where does this vision of honest signage unfold? In Beaufort, naturally – a village named for the Duke of Beaufort, part-time aristocrat, full-time landlord, and fully paid-up beneficiary of the British class system.

Now here’s the thing: the Beauforts were originally the bastard offspring of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, and his long-time mistress (later wife) Katherine Swynford. Their children were later legitimised by royal decree and given the name Beaufort, after a French castle John happened to own. Fast-forward a few generations and the head of the family becomes the Duke of Somerset – fighting on the wrong side of the Wars of the Roses and getting himself killed for it. A surviving offshoot – a younger or “cadet” branch – eventually adopted Somerset as their surname and were rewarded with a new title in 1682: Duke of Beaufort. So, to summarise: the original Beauforts became Dukes of Somerset, then a branch of the Somersets became Dukes of Beaufort, swapping names like it was a game of aristocratic pass the parcel. They're all the same dynastic spaghetti – Beaufort by blood, Somerset by name, and titled whichever way the monarchy fancied at the time.

And here’s the real cherry on top: Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, got his claim to the throne through none other than Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. So the Tudors themselves were built on the back of this legitimised-but-barred bloodline. Which makes today’s Dukes of Beaufort very distant cousins of the Tudors – and arguably more royal than half the current peerage, if your standards for monarchy include strategic shagging and looking the other way when the paperwork gets awkward.

The current Duke, Henry FitzRoy Somerset, only recently inherited the title – and has openly admitted he doesn’t actually know how much land he owns. He’s “engaged in a process of finding out,” which, in this context, means combing through deeds, trusts, and ancient entitlements to uncover just how many fields, hillsides, and rental opportunities the family forgot they had. And once found, you can be sure they’ll be monetised. Because in today’s aristocracy, the foxes are optional – but the yield must be robust.

Meanwhile, the people of Beaufort name their roads Big Lane and Small Lane. No airs. No need to flatter. Just: how wide is the road? That’ll do. It’s democratic, unpretentious, and, frankly, a breath of fresh air in a landscape still titled and taxed by medieval leftovers.

Of course, it’s hard to avoid the other form of deference – the Beaufort Arms. Every other pub in South Wales seems to be named after the very family that owns the land beneath the pool table. It’s like calling every launderette “The House of Windsor Wash & Fold” and pretending it’s patriotic.

Just up the road from me, at Badminton House, sits the Duke himself – surrounded by manicured lawns, oil paintings of dead relatives, and no doubt a dedicated accounts team for extracting every last penny of ground rent. The estate’s crowning glory, of course, is the annual Badminton Horse Trials – where wealth, breeding, and tweed collide in a high-speed display of controlled privilege. If there’s a more photogenic symbol of land-based inherited wealth monetising the countryside under the guise of sport, I’ve yet to see it.

And so Britain rolls on. Still naming villages after aristocrats. Still letting people with titles they didn’t earn and land they didn’t buy treat the country like it’s one big legacy asset. But at least in Beaufort, Breconshire, the people still know the difference between Big and Small – and they don’t pretend otherwise. Which is more than can be said for Westminster.

Big Lane. Small Lane. And somewhere in between – a bloody great estate, a horse trial, and a peer trying to locate the rest of his income on a map.

The Rocker Horror Show

I many have mentioned that I took delivery of my Mazda MX5 BP-4W engine a couple of weeks ago, and decided to effect some renovation over the weekend. These lumps are renowned for being bulletproof - this one's done 80k miles, which is nothing. All the usual things - seals, timing belt, alternator, coil packs, water pump, etc. - will be replaced.

There comes a moment in every classic car restorer’s life – somewhere between the fifth snapped stud and the hundredth eBay listing for “genuine” Lucas fuses – when he decides, without warning or sense, to paint his engine. Not just paint it, mind – detail it. Suddenly it has to look like a bloody showroom piece.

I first got ChatGPT to render some colour options - and that took long enough.

Then to stick it in a GT6 engine bay.

Nowhere near perfect - the inlet manifold is all wrong, but near enough. That took most of a morning, as it kept reverting to old images and then lost the GT6 engine bay completely for a while. However, it does give a reasonable idea of what it will look like in a California Sage, GT6 engine bay.

The cast iron block and aluminium head were wire brushed and Jenolited before being painted silver.

I also tackled the sump and painted that satin black. Then, like some deranged alchemist, I found myself hunched over the rocker cover, muttering incantations about “crackle black” and “silver enamel,” wielding tiny brushes and eyedroppers like a cross between Jackson Pollock and a neurosurgeon.

Did I mention the lettering? DOHC 16-VALVE, embossed proudly as if to scream “I am not a Pinto.” But those letters are recessed, and filled with the sort of awkward angles that would defeat a nanobot. So the plan? Satin black enamel (less attractive to dirt and grime than crackle finish), and  drop silver enamel into the embossed lettering using a syringe. Neat. Precise. Surgical.

Ha.

Within minutes, the garage looked like Liberace had sneezed into a tin of Hammerite. The silver ran. The black lifted. The DOHC resembled a cry for help. And I discovered – too late – that the enamel, though “engine safe,” behaved like custard on a trampoline.

But undeterred – or more likely, unhinged – I soldiered on. I sanded, I wiped. I stared at the finish and declared it “not bad… from six feet away… in the dark.” Until, of course, I noticed the silver lettering paint had split like a Tory cabinet.

I did get there in the end, as you can see from the above photo..

Now, in a moment of inspiration or madness (they're the same thing at this stage), I considered filling the lettering with metal powder. Yes, glitter. Like I’ve been possessed by a drag queen with a torque wrench. The idea: dust the recesses, then dribble in clear lacquer so it sets like some bespoke jeweller’s homage to 1990s Japanese engineering. This is not a build. This is an art installation. I might yet try it.

So if you see a Mk3 GT6 with Mazda guts and a rocker cover that looks like it belongs in a Bond Street boutique, know this – it wasn’t vanity. It wasn’t for show. It was a desperate, paint-flecked man trying to assert some control in a world where every bolt fights back and nothing ever fits first time.

Next the inlet manifold has to be removed and painted silver, like the block. I have no exhaust manifold, but I need a bespoke one to accommodate the turbo anyway.  

I also need to source a full set of stainless steel nuts for the engine mounts, rocker cover, various accessories and the manifolds from somewhere. Any assistance gratefully received. Unlike for the GT6, where you can buy a complete set of nuts for just about everything, full sets simply don't seem to exist for the MX5 engine.

The problem with all this is that removing one part for renovation invariably means removing something else in order to gain access, which leads to removing something else, which leads..... Before you know it you have several boxes of parts and associated nots, bolts and screws, risking mixing them all up. The key thing is to take loads of photos BEFOE you start dismantling everything, especially if you're not familiar with the engine in the first place, like I am.

First They Came for the Protesters

There’s a line – somewhere between public order and police state – and we’re getting uncomfortably good at pretending we can’t see it.

Today, Palestine Action plans to protest in Westminster. They’re noisy, disruptive, and fond of red paint. They target arms dealers. They’ve broken into airbases and damaged military kit. That’s illegal – and there are already laws for that. Criminal damage? We’ve got a law. Trespass? Ditto. Sabotage? Fill your boots. But that’s not enough for the Home Secretary, who now wants to proscribe the group as a terrorist organisation.

Yes – a terrorist organisation. Because nothing says “reasonable proportionality” like lumping a bunch of overzealous activists in with ISIS.

Proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000 means this: the group is banned outright, and anyone who supports them – even by sharing a tweet or standing in solidarity – can be arrested. Their banners become contraband. Their opinions become evidence. Their entire cause is made radioactive by fiat.

And the irony? There’s no trial. No cross-examination. No “you’ve got the wrong end of the rocket launcher, guv.” Just the Home Secretary saying so, Parliament nodding like dashboard dogs, and poof – you’re illegal.

You can appeal, of course. To the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission – a faceless tribunal with secret evidence, closed sessions, and special advocates who aren’t allowed to tell you what’s being said about you. Kafka would need a lie-down.

Eventually, you might get your day in Strasbourg, waving your Article 10 and Article 11 rights like a pair of soggy socks. But that’s years down the line, and by then your movement’s in pieces and your comrades are up on charges for “having a chat about Elbit in the pub.”

Meanwhile, the government gets to say it’s cracking down on extremism. That it’s keeping us safe. That it’s protecting the King’s peace by kicking seven bells out of the right to protest. Because let’s not kid ourselves – this isn’t about safety. It’s about silencing awkward truths. It’s about keeping BAE Systems’ stock price steady and ensuring no grubby activist points out that we’re flogging weapons to a state levelling Rafah, one street at a time.

And it’s not like this is happening in a vacuum. The Met has already used the Public Order Act to shut down Palestine marches outside the BBC, citing Shabbat as justification. Shabbat! As if Jewish people are some kind of human buffer zone for protest management. Even Jewish groups were appalled – but the arrests went ahead anyway.

If Palestine Action is banned, expect a queue: Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, trade unions, striking doctors – all potentially criminalised the moment they become inconvenient. And don’t think for a moment that Farage, with his slurring admiration for Viktor Orbán, wouldn’t run riot with those powers if handed the reins.

We’re not banning violence – we’re banning opposition. And when that becomes normal, we’re in trouble. Because the moment we decide that protesting against war crimes is itself a crime, we’ve surrendered something far more dangerous than a broken window or a red-smeared doorstep. We’ve surrendered our ability to say: “Not in my name.”

Here's another irony: if hurling red paint at an arms dealer is terrorism, but hurling tariffs at British jobs is diplomacy, then the word has lost all meaning. We’re no longer criminalising the act – we’re criminalising who’s holding the brush. One is denounced as an extremist for trying to halt bomb shipments; the other gets a photo op and a press release. It’s not justice – it’s just power, dressing up as principle. The weak get proscribed, the strong get a trade deal. That’s not law – that’s submission.

 

The Great Modern Malady Merger

There was a time – not so very long ago – when a child who couldn't sit still was simply called "fidgety," and one who couldn’t focus was "daydreaming." The boy who climbed trees mid-maths lesson? “Spirited.” The girl who talked to herself in French and stapled leaves to her workbook? “Imaginative.” Now? ADHD. Or possibly a nut allergy. Or – in a daring plot twist – both.

You see, we've entered an era where every sniffle is histamine-related and every missed deadline is neurological. Can't sit still? ADHD. Can’t breathe? Allergy. Can’t sit still because you're wheezing from a peanut-induced anaphylactic fit while forgetting what you were meant to be doing in the first place? Congratulations – you're the final Pokémon evolution of modern diagnosis.

The statistics tell their own tale: rates of ADHD and allergies have risen faster than a gluten-free sourdough starter in a yurt full of hipsters. There’s a theory for everything, of course. One blames plastics, another blames smartphones, and a third – my personal favourite – blames it all on a lack of exposure to dirt, boredom, and robust parenting.

Let’s be honest – most of us older folk were marinated in allergens. Dust, pollen, dairy, bee stings, lead paint – all washed down with a glass of undiagnosed behavioural quirk. We didn’t get labels. We got shouted at. If you sniffled, you wiped it on your sleeve and were told to "get on with it." If you got distracted, you were smacked with a blackboard rubber and sent outside to “run it off.” It wasn’t therapeutic – but it was clarifying.

And the overlap between allergies and ADHD? Astounding. Almost suspiciously so. It’s as if modern children are less like human beings and more like experimental houseplants – exquisitely sensitive to light, sound, sugar, dairy, gluten, artificial colouring, and boredom. One whiff of a walnut or a two-minute wait for gratification, and it’s full system failure.

Of course, the industries have caught on. You can now buy hypoallergenic ADHD-friendly fidget toys – made of ethically sourced rubber and shaped like calming woodland creatures. If you twitch with purpose, it’s mindfulness. If you sniff while doing so, it’s a diagnosis.

And God forbid you bring in a birthday cake. One child’s got ADHD, another’s coeliac, three can’t go near dairy, and little Hugo turns blue if someone merely whispers “Brazil nut.” So it’s carrot sticks all round and a rousing game of “Name That Cognitive Disorder.”

But maybe – just maybe – we’re asking the wrong question. Perhaps it’s not that there are more neurodivergent, allergy-prone children. Perhaps it’s that our world has become an ADHD-inducing, allergy-triggering circus. Shiny screens everywhere. Constant dopamine hits. Artificial food. Parents half-listening while scrolling Instagram for gluten-free lunchbox ideas. No wonder everyone’s itchy and distracted – I’m halfway there myself just writing this.

In short: we’ve medicalised personality and pathologised normal variation, while feeding children beige, hyper-processed slop wrapped in polyethylene and expecting them not to develop a tic. If you wanted to design a world that breeds allergies and attention issues, you couldn't do better than the one we’ve got.

So the next time you sneeze mid-sentence and forget what you were saying – don’t worry. It’s probably just a side effect of being alive in the 21st century. Pass the antihistamines and the dopamine – we’ve got a world to diagnose.

Heatwave

Yesterday hit over 30 degrees – that's Celsius, for any Reform-voting holdouts still clinging to Fahrenheit, Imperial weights, shillings and the notion that “foreigners” are ruining the country by bringing us both pandemics and paprika.

One walk down the average British street in this weather and you can immediately spot the houses occupied by those who proudly describe themselves as “the indigenous population” – a phrase they use without irony, despite being a biological lasagne of Celt, Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman, Huguenot, and at least one Polish plumber who came round in 1982 and never quite left.

These are the folk who, faced with a heatwave, fling open every window as though inviting the sun in for a cup of tea and a rummage through the sideboard. Curtains billow like HMS Victory under full sail. Blinds are pegged uselessly upwards, as if sunlight can be reasoned with. And there's always some bloke topless in the front garden, tending to his sunburn like it’s a badge of patriotism.

Meanwhile, anyone who’s ever been to sea, set foot south of Calais or spent a week in Andalusia knows the trick: close the windows. Shut the blinds. Draw the curtains. Keep the cool air in and the blazing inferno out. Then, and only then, once evening falls and the air outside is less like Satan’s hairdryer, you cautiously crack a window like a safe.

But try telling that to Barry from number 12, who thinks “thermal dynamics” is a brand of barbecue. No, Barry’s got all the windows open and a Dyson fan whirring full blast – trying to cool a room that’s now the same temperature as a foundry furnace in Qatar. Then he’ll complain on Facebook that he “couldn’t sleep ‘cos of this foreign weather” and blame it on “the bloody EU.”

The irony, of course, is that the very people who yell loudest about defending traditional British values – warm beer, cold shoulders, and casual xenophobia – are the ones utterly incapable of adapting to a warm day. They don’t just suffer through it – they insist on suffering through it incorrectly, like a man insisting his shoes fit while limping home barefoot.

Give them a referendum and they’ll vote to remove all blinds, export shade, and reintroduce compulsory tweed for the under-fives. All in the name of sovereignty, obviously.

So next time you’re walking past open windows radiating heat like pizza ovens and wonder who voted for Farage, just remember – you’re looking at a house where science lost to stubbornness, and logic was deported sometime around 2016.

As an aside, I achieved 94% self-sufficiency on electricity usage yesterday with the solar PV battery setup I had installed in March.

John Player Special

There it was, smugly parked on the MoT bay rollers – a gleaming little Mini in full John Player Special livery. Black and gold, twin carbs jutting out like elbows in a bar fight, and decals hollering "CHAMPION!" like it had just pole-positioned at Brands. It had no right looking that good. I half expected Emerson Fittipaldi to emerge from the driver’s seat, flicking ash off a Gitane and asking for a spanner and a whisky. It even made the bloke in cargo shorts look like part of the pit crew.

And it brought it all back.

On migrating from Lambretta scooters to cars, my first car was a Mini. Well – mostly. It had the rigidity of a Rich Tea biscuit and the aesthetic charm of a wheelie bin after Bonfire Night. But I was a student with a panel beater mate and the blind optimism of youth. Together we reanimated it with pop-riveted Dulux tins for the rear end, a fibreglass flip-front that flapped in crosswinds, and enough filler to qualify as a Grade II listed renovation. We brush-painted it Lime Green and Black, and christened it – without irony – the LGB GT, years before that came to signify rainbows and human dignity, rather than gloss, grit, and gaffer tape.

It was a marvel of bodged ambition. The brakes were theoretical. The dashboard had the ergonomic flow of a council bin. But it was mine. And it moved under its own power. And in a dim light – viewed from a considerable distance – it looked like it might once have been fast.

Then came the phone call. I was away at nautical college. “I’ve bought you a car,” said my mother, with theatrical pause. “It’s a Mini – but not a Mini.”

And that was all it took. My brain shifted into fifth. Mini Marcos? Something wedge-shaped and fibreglass? Some obscure rally special with a roll cage and no insurance category? I was practically signing autographs in my head.

Then I saw it.

A Wolseley Hornet.

Now, a Hornet is technically a Mini. But only in the same way that a bishop is technically a man. It had a pretentious little grille – a moustachioed smirk in chrome – and a rear end like it was moonlighting as a tea caddy. It came with leather seats and a walnut dashboard, as if hoping to distract you from the fact that it still had an 848cc engine and the turning circle of a shopping trolley with three locked wheels. It was a Mini that had married well and now dressed for dinner.

Still, I was nothing if not deluded. So I did what any ambitious adolescent would: I gave it the full John Player Special fantasy. Black paint, gold pinstripes, hand-rendered JPS logos done with a shaky hand and a half-dry brush. The result was a visual lie. It looked like it might once have been involved in motorsport. What it was actually involved in was a lot of apologetic lane changing and mechanical sympathy.

And then it died.

Spectacularly.

I was on a radar course in Liverpool docks – the sort of setting that makes everything feel like it’s about to go horribly wrong. It had been raining, obviously. I approached a puddle, confidently assuming it was the usual Merseyside surface damp – an inch or two at most. At 30mph, I hit it square on.

Except it wasn’t a puddle. It was a crater. One front wheel vanished into the abyss and the sump smacked down onto a submerged grid with all the grace of a piano falling down a lift shaft. The engine mounts sheared instantly. The engine rotated – literally – a full 180 degrees, like it was trying to crawl back into the gearbox and forget the whole thing had happened. Every panel buckled. It was, mechanically and emotionally, a write-off.

Enter my elder brother – ten years older, infinitely more capable, and based in West Kirby. He came to the rescue like a maritime salvage crew, arriving with a tow rope and that fraternal expression which says “I told you not to trust that carburettor.” While crouched under the front attaching the rope, he noticed his expensive watch flapping about, so he took it off and laid it carefully to one side.

And there it remained.

We drove off with the wreck in tow – and his watch left behind, presumably glinting mournfully in a puddle outside the docks until some scouser spotted it and thought Christmas had come early. My name, in the van, was mud. Possibly something worse.

That was the end of the Hornet. A walnut dash and leather seats couldn’t save it. Nothing could. It had gone out not with a bang, but with a subterranean clank and a furious brother.

And yet... I mourned it.

Because you don’t choose your early cars. They happen to you – like glandular fever or unwise crushes. And no matter how absurd they are, no matter how bustled or buckled, they stay with you.

So yes, seeing that JPS-liveried Mini stirred something. Nostalgia, yes – but also a knowing wince. Because real Minis – twitchy, leaky, glorious little lunatics – still rule the tarmac in our memories.

Even if mine once swivelled its own engine like a possessed Lazy Susan, and the one before it was made of Dulux, filler, and blind optimism – and even if I still owe my brother a bloody watch.

A National Justice Service

The idea sounds noble – wrap Lady Justice in NHS-blue, slap a clipboard in her hand, and tell her to stop charging by the hour like she’s a Mayfair escort. Equality before the law, free at the point of use, barristers on fixed salaries instead of billing like it’s a yacht fund – what’s not to love?

Well, quite a lot actually, depending on whether you want your conveyancing done by a man with a stapler from Rymans and a law degree off the back of a Corn Flakes packet.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Nationalisation, in theory, sounds like the great leveller. It worked – sort of – for health, so why not justice? Why not make the court system as universal as the NHS? You sue, you defend, you adjudicate – everyone’s a winner. Except, of course, for anyone trying to handle international commercial litigation without having to queue behind Doris and her neighbour dispute.

The NHS didn’t ban Harley Street. Private medicine still thrives. BUPA’s still gouging. Every retired colonel with a funny mole still has a consultant on speed dial. But that’s because the NHS handles colds, cancer, and clogged arteries – things that affect the masses. Global legal services? That’s a different beast entirely. The UK legal sector isn’t some GP surgery in Scunthorpe – it’s a global shop window, and it sells English law like it's Savile Row for statutes.

Strip it of its prestige, shove everyone into a state-funded queue, and you don’t just improve access for the little guy – you clobber the entire ecosystem. Clifford Chance doesn’t thrive because of Legal Aid. It thrives because Saudi billionaires and Chinese conglomerates choose London when they want neutrality, excellence, and discretion – not because their barrister was handed to them by Legal Triage Line 9.

Nationalising legal services, if done with the usual political ham-fistedness, risks driving the Rolls-Royces of our legal world straight into the sea. You think high-end legal talent will stick around on a civil service pay scale, working under fluorescent lights in a government building full of MDF desks and the faint smell of boiled cabbage? Please. They’ll be in Singapore before you can say "pro bono".

And yet, here's the twist: nationalisation could solve one of the ugliest distortions in the current system – the SLAPP. Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. When the rich and powerful weaponise defamation law to silence critics. Not to win. Just to hurt. Just to bleed the journalist dry, intimidate the whistleblower, and bury inconvenient truths under a mountain of paperwork. While the UK has recently introduced some anti-SLAPP protections related to economic crime, there is still no comprehensive legislation to prevent the use of litigation to suppress public interest journalism or whistleblowing.

Why does it work? Because justice is expensive, and the scales aren’t balanced. The rich can afford endless litigation, while the rest of us fold, settle, or shut up.

Now imagine a National Justice Service that actually works. Where facing a SLAPP means you're backed not by crowdfunding or goodwill, but by competent, state-funded defence. Suddenly, the plutocrat isn’t up against a terrified freelancer – he’s up against the state. That changes the game.

SLAPPs rely on inequality. A properly designed public legal system could bulldoze that imbalance. With strong triage and early strike-out powers, these lawsuits could be binned before they metastasise – like cosmetic surgery on the NHS. “Sorry sir, suing someone because they called you ‘shady’ isn’t clinically necessary.”

But – and here comes the footnote nobody prints – a rich man can still pick up the phone to his silk and launch a SLAPP anyway. Nationalising legal defence doesn’t stop legal offence. If private practice still exists – and it almost certainly will – then the oligarch, the kleptocrat, the litigious billionaire, will simply bypass the queue. He’ll weaponise the remaining private system like a cut-price missile silo.

So unless you also bring in real reform – anti-SLAPP legislation, early dismissal powers, mandatory cost penalties for vexatious claims, and stronger public interest defences – you’ve just handed the bullied a better shield, while letting the bully keep his sword.

We need judges trained to sniff out the stink of intimidation disguised as litigation. We need transparency on who’s funding these suits, especially when it’s flowing through offshore accounts with fewer vowels than morals. And we need a legal culture that treats abuse of process not as strategy, but as a form of perjury by proxy.

And now, just as the dust begins to settle, along comes AI, ready to throw the whole profession into the shredder. Algorithms now churn out pleadings, spot inconsistencies, cross-reference precedent, and write entire contracts before a human can open Outlook – though not without risk. Courts have already sanctioned lawyers for relying on hallucinated case law produced by chatbots, and the need for human oversight remains critical. Entire swathes of the profession – especially the £300/hour memo merchants – are staring at the abyss.

But don’t get too excited. AI won't kill the expensive lawyer – it’ll make them even more expensive.

Because when the machines can do 80% of the work, the top-tier human becomes even more valuable – not for their typing speed, but for their judgement. Their timing, their nose for when to press, when to settle, and how to spin a narrative that lands with judges, juries, and the front page of the FT.

AI can't walk into court and read the room. It can't catch a raised eyebrow from a judge or decide when to pivot under cross-examination. It can draft and summarise, but it can't understand risk like a seasoned KC who's already lost sleep over six-figure damages. who's already lost sleep over six-figure damages.

So yes, the mediocre may vanish – replaced by machine-assisted paralegals with cheerful avatars and 24/7 availability – but the top brass? They’ll adapt, integrate AI into their arsenal, and charge even more for being the last real brain in the room.

So build your National Justice Service. But build it like a smart NHS – not one that pretends it can do everything, for everyone, forever, but one that prioritises what matters: protection from abuse, defence against the powerful, and access to justice in the moments that actually shape lives.

Let it handle the essentials – housing tribunals, wrongful dismissal, family court, discrimination, asylum, criminal defence. The emergencies of law. Not everything needs a KC and a client dinner at the Ivy. Give people solid legal cover when they can’t afford it and can’t afford not to have it.

But don’t shackle the high end. If you want a silk in a three-piece to sue a newspaper on your behalf because someone said your hedge fund smells a bit fascist – fine. Go private. Pay for it. That’s your Harley Street moment. But don’t let the public system bankroll the litigation tantrums of oligarchs and charlatans. And certainly don’t let it be used against whistleblowers and watchdogs.

In fact, make it clear: if your goal is to silence the public, you’ll be litigating uphill – with the system designed to protect expression, not strangle it with procedural costs.

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget: when the police sue, when the King prosecutes, when the Crown brings an action – that’s us paying for it. Taxpayers. Citizens. The public purse is on the hook for every hour billed, every motion filed, every courtroom theatre performance in the name of public interest – or political convenience. So we deserve accountability. Because justice may be priceless in principle, but in practice it costs an absolute fortune – and someone's paying, usually someone without a voice in the room.

The result? A justice system with two clear principles:

1. You will not be destroyed by litigation simply because you’re poor.
2. You will not use litigation to destroy others simply because you’re rich.

Layer on AI where appropriate – let it handle the boilerplate and precedent, freeing up real lawyers for real problems. Don’t fear the tech – fear the lack of vision.

Because if we get this right, we won’t just reform justice, we’ll futureproof it. And if we get it wrong? We’ll build a state-run call centre for miscarriages of justice, while the rich fly first class on a private legal jet, SLAPP writs in one hand and a King’s Counsel in the other – both funded, one way or another, by the rest of us.

Your move, Lord Chancellor.

Silent (But Visible) Prayer

Adam Smith-Connor stood silently outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth. Head bowed. Hands clasped. Not a word spoken. He says he was praying – silently, for his son. But he did so within a legally defined buffer zone, where councils have banned displays of approval or disapproval regarding abortion. He was warned. He stayed. The court said his posture was expressive, political, and therefore unlawful under the local order. He walked away with a conditional discharge and a bill large enough to make you think twice before folding your hands in public.

He’s appealing – that much we know. But here’s the twist. If his case fails in the domestic courts, he could take it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. Yes, that European court. The one that sends the Free Speech Brigade into a monthly state of patriotic cardiac arrest. The one they accuse of undermining British sovereignty, overruling our judges, and letting dangerous foreigners stay in Britain on the grounds that deporting them would make them sad.

And now it might be the last hope for a British man’s right to silently pray in public.

You can’t make it up. The same court that gets blamed for all of society’s ills – from unisex toilets to the decline of common sense – could soon be called upon to defend a devout ex-serviceman punished for having a quiet word with God outside a clinic.

Imagine the fallout. The very people who usually yell “Get us out of the ECHR!” may have to put down their pitchforks and whisper, through gritted teeth, “Thank goodness for Strasbourg.” And if they don’t, they’ll have to explain why it’s acceptable for their side to invoke international human rights law, but not anyone else.

This is the beauty of it. It exposes, with surgical precision, the real position of the Free Speech Brigade: they don’t actually oppose the ECHR because it protects rights – they oppose it because it occasionally protects the wrong people. Protestors, asylum seekers, muslims, climate campaigners - and let’s be honest, it’s only a small fraction of the court’s total caseload. But those few headline-grabbing cases are enough to send them into orbit. Because the outrage was never about numbers. It was about narrative.

So here we are, watching the spectacle of culture warriors desperately trying to square a circle they drew themselves. A Christian man prays silently and gets charged. His last legal resort may be a European institution they’ve spent the last decade denouncing. And somewhere in the middle of it all, the rest of us are left marvelling at the sheer, glorious absurdity of it.

You couldn’t script it better.

We Let Anyone Vote — And It Shows

Democracy is a beautiful thing, they say. But so is fire - until you hand it to a toddler and ask them to boil the kettle. Let’s stop pretending that universal suffrage, in its current unfiltered form, is sacred. It’s not. It’s broken. It’s being abused by a nation that can’t spell sovereignty but demands it at volume.

We live in a country where people think “should of” is a grammatically acceptable phrase, and where political opinion is shaped not by newspapers or policy briefings, but by sweaty Facebook memes, TikTok conspiracies, and talk radio ranters whose only qualification is a microphone and a persecution complex. It’s mob rule, turbocharged by WiFi and lacking even the dignity of a pitchfork.

These are the same people who cheerfully voted to torpedo their own economic future because a bus said the NHS would be showered in cash. You wouldn’t trust them to programme a microwave, but they’re apparently well-qualified to decide on trade deals, human rights law, and constitutional arrangements. One glance at the comments section and you realise the Enlightenment has gone into reverse.

We test people to drive a car. We test them to cut hair. But give them the vote – the ability to choose governments, wreck treaties, and empower demagogues – and it’s “help yourself, love, there’s the ballot box, bash away like a chimp at a vending machine.”

Why? Because politics isn’t about policy anymore. It’s content. It’s clickbait. It’s a popularity contest held in the midst of a nationwide attention deficit. Where once politicians shaped public opinion, they now chase it – like toddlers after pigeons – eyes fixed on the algorithm. Gone is the statesman. In his place, a PR mannequin live-streaming from a tractor factory while retweeting racists. It’s not leadership – it’s customer service with flags.

Populism thrives in this cesspit, not because it’s clever, but because it’s loud. It promises simple answers to complex problems, yells about “elites” while being bankrolled by them, and counts success in the number of retweets, not results. It weaponises criticism, monetises outrage, and flogs patriotism like it’s knock-off perfume.

So here’s a radical thought: a basic civic competency test. Nothing Orwellian. No ideological witch-hunts. Just the democratic equivalent of a driving theory test – a minimal demonstration that you understand how voting works, what the parties stand for, and that you can distinguish the EU from the ECHR without resorting to angry emojis. If that’s too much to ask, maybe sit this one out and focus on spelling "dictatorship" correctly.

Because right now, our democracy is being steered by people who think the WEF is installing microchips, that immigrants are the reason the bins weren’t collected, and that shouting “common sense” is a substitute for a manifesto. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still trying to have grown-up conversations about housing, the NHS, and whether we’d like a future – and we’re being shouted down by people who think Farage is Churchill with a pint and a podcast.

Yes, the vote should be a right. But like all rights, it should come with responsibility. We’ve tried letting anyone with a pulse and a grudge have their say. The result? Brexit. Boris. Truss. Reform UK. A country proudly marching into decline, eyes glazed, voice raised, waving a cardboard cut-out of sovereignty and demanding someone else pick up the pieces.

Enough. Voting isn’t therapy. It’s a civic duty. And if you don’t know the basics of the system you’re trying to hijack, maybe stick to shouting at clouds and let the grown-ups steer the ship before we hit another iceberg made of hubris.

ECHR

So here we are again: the usual suspects frothing about leaving the European Court of Human Rights, as if it’s the last villain in some feverish Brexit sequel no one asked for. Apparently, it's all the ECHR’s fault that the government can’t run a functioning asylum system, police force, or even post office. If only we could cut ties with Strasbourg, everything would be fine. Spoiler: it wouldn’t.

Let’s inject some actual facts. Since 1975, the ECHR has ruled on 571 UK cases. Out of those, immigration-related rulings are vanishingly rare - fewer than a dozen have ever seriously interfered in removals or asylum. The Court isn’t stopping Britain from enforcing immigration rules. It’s stopping Britain from becoming the sort of country where the government can do whatever it likes to whoever it likes, without consequence.

And that’s the bit Reform voters never seem to get. The ECHR doesn’t just protect migrants. It protects you. Yes, you - the ordinary British citizen who doesn’t have the cash for fancy lawyers or the clout to fight the state on your own.

Remember Gillan & Quinton? Two Brits stopped and searched by police under “terror” laws for the crime of walking near an arms fair with a camera. The ECHR ruled the law was so vague it violated their privacy rights.

Or Big Brother Watch v UK, where British journalists found out the state was hoovering up everyone's emails and phone data like a digital vacuum on crack. The ECHR said no - your privacy matters.

Or Keenan v UK, where a 28-year-old British man died in prison after being denied mental health care. The ECHR ruled his treatment was inhuman. Without that ruling, his death would’ve been just another footnote in Whitehall’s bin.

Even prisoners - yes, even them - had rights upheld in Hirst v UK, where the blanket ban on voting was ruled unlawful. Not because murderers need ballots, but because if you let the state strip away rights wholesale, it’s only a matter of time before it’s your rights next.

So let’s be blunt. Leaving the ECHR doesn’t hit “illegals.” It hits everyone without money or power. It removes the last line of defence when your government locks you up without charge, spies on you without warrant, or leaves your loved one to rot in a cell. And it puts us in the same league as Russia and Belarus — the only countries to walk away from the Court.

Reform UK and their pub-patriot fanbase bang on about freedom. But the minute you ask them which freedoms they're actually defending, they go quiet - or start shouting about dinghies. Because truthfully, they don't want freedom. They want vengeance dressed up as policy. And they’re willing to torch your civil liberties to get it.

So next time someone sneers about "foreign judges" or calls for the ECHR to be binned, ask them a simple question: when it’s your rights on the line - who’s going to stop the state for you?

Because without the ECHR, the answer is: no one.

Sacre Bleu

Yesterday was Trooping the Colour – that annual pomp-drenched extravaganza where we dust off the plumes, shine the buckles, and pretend the monarchy is still a unifying symbol rather than a gold-plated tourist attraction with constitutional side-effects. A proud tradition, we’re told – pageantry and patriotism hand in hand, goose-stepping toward the past. The horses trotted, the guardsman fainted on cue, and His Majesty stood on the balcony like a man quietly wondering whether the whole thing might be a bit much before lunch.

And then came the Red Arrows.

The nation’s aerial pride. Nine crimson darts shrieking across the sky in perfect formation, trailing plumes of red, white and... blue. Which sounds fine – until you notice the arrangement. Not the Union Flag. Not even a drunken echo of it. No, it was three polite, evenly spaced vertical stripes. Red, white and blue. Or more accurately: bleu, blanc, rouge.

The French flag.

Yes – on the day meant to celebrate Britishness in all its feathered, brass-buttoned absurdity, our crowning aerial flourish looked suspiciously like a homage to la République. You half expected Charles to produce a baguette from under his robes and start humming the Marseillaise while Camilla tried not to look too much like Marianne.

And I’m sure some apologist will chirp up, “But the Union Flag also uses red, white and blue!” Yes – but not in that order. Not in three parallel stripes like a bottle of fancy shampoo. And certainly not in the precise sequence flown over every mairie from Marseille to Dunkirk.

You could almost hear the ghost of Napoleon chuckling in his crypt.

Whether it was a subtle message from the RAF or just an accident of dye cartridge logistics, the symbolism wasn’t hard to miss. On the most patriotic of British days, we managed to daub the sky with the colours of the country we spent centuries fighting, mocking, and more recently – trying to negotiate trade deals with while pretending we’d never really liked them anyway.

It’s all a bit on the nose.

Perhaps it’s a cry for help. Perhaps the Red Arrows are trying to say what the politicians won’t – that we’ve cocked it up, that Brexit was a tin-pot fantasy, and that now we’re floating around like a post-Imperial ghost ship waving at container ports we no longer dock in. Maybe the French flag in the sky is less a symbol of surrender and more of longing. “Sorry about everything – can we come back?”

Or maybe it's just habit. We buy their wine, nick their cheese, and the last remaining Conservative voters all seem to have second homes in Provence. Even the coronation quiche was halfway to a pissaladière.

So next year, let’s lean into it. Replace the fanfare with La Vie en Rose, issue berets to the Household Division, and let Charles swap the orb and sceptre for a string of garlic and a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Because if this is British sovereignty, it seems to come with a surprisingly French aftertaste – and no amount of flag-waving can cover that up.

Three Wheels Good, But Are You Dry?

So there I was, cruising up the motorway, when what should whizz past but a chrome-clad symbol of impractical valour – a motorised trike, dressed like a Road Captain from an American retirement fantasy, towing a solitary teardrop caravan no bigger than a large coffin with ideas above its station. At first glance – I’ll admit it – it looked cool. Like something a postman in Mad Max might use on his day off.

But once you get past the novelty and the sun-glinting-off-the-aluminium moment, you realise this thing is basically a Romahome that’s gone on a bender and joined a biker gang.

Let’s break it down. You’ve got three wheels, no cabin insulation, exposed to the elements like a Victorian mill worker on a lunch break, and towing what amounts to a glorified aluminium slug on casters. Yes, it may scream freedom – until the M6 spits rain sideways into your open-faced helmet and you start questioning all your life choices since buying that £200 leather waistcoat. It’s the sort of setup that says: “I want to camp like it’s still 1963, but with more back pain.”

Contrast this with the humble Romahome. Not sexy, I grant you. No one has ever looked at a Romahome and thought, Yes – that’s the vehicle of a renegade outlaw who probably has a snake tattoo. But it’s dry. It’s warm. You can make a cup of tea without having to towel off your eyebrows first. You don’t need to pack your panniers with tarpaulin, hope, and a prayer. And if it chucks it down (this being Britain, of course it will), you’re not climbing into a metal seedpod soaked through and covered in grit like some sort of soggy hermit crab.

This trike-rig is performative roughing-it – like someone cosplaying hardship while actually carrying a credit card with “Adventure” written in Helvetica Bold on the back. It’s the vehicular equivalent of an Instagram influencer ‘wild camping’ three feet from a lay-by.

And the irony? The Romahome owner is probably already parked up at a pub with proper plumbing, eating a hot pasty off real crockery, while the Trike Crusader is still trying to wrestle his mini-ark into a lay-by without it toppling over in the crosswind.

Yes, it looks cool at first glance – but then again, so did the Sinclair C5.

Give me weatherproof and unsexy over soggy heroics any day.

This, however, is a better idea: