Changing Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siphoning the Tank and Calling It Strategy

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

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

Except they do not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gas Regulator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Banana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth Social - A Brand Name in Search of a Product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Campsite Shower Block

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Few Centuries Late, With No Receipt

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

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

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

And that’s where it gets a bit slippery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All perfectly reasonable in tone. Less so in detail.

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

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

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

Insulated Windscreens

Every motorhome owner, sooner or later, arrives at the same crossroads.

It usually happens on a slightly chilly evening, somewhere unremarkable, with a cup of tea in hand and a faint sense that one ought to be doing something sensible about the windscreen.

Do you put the insulated covers on the outside, like a serious person who understands thermodynamics, or do you stay inside and put them up from the comfort of your own socks, like someone who has grasped the true purpose of a motorhome?

This is presented, in certain corners of the internet, as a technical question. Heat loss. Condensation. Dew point. The sort of language that suggests clipboards and a mild interest in spreadsheets.

The external camp will explain, patiently at first, that insulation belongs outside. Stop the cold at the glass, keep the interior warm, avoid condensation. It all sounds terribly grown up.

And they are right. In exactly the same way that a workshop manual is right about how long a job should take, assuming no bolts have rusted, rounded off, or developed a personal grudge.

Because the theory ends the moment you open the door. Outside, in Britain, at night, the air has that damp, slightly resentful quality it specialises in. You step out, realise you are still in your socks, go back in, find shoes, go out again, and begin the process of attaching what is essentially a padded sail to the front of the vehicle.

It flaps. It resists. It needs to go round mirrors that were not designed with your convenience in mind. There is always one corner that refuses to behave. By the time it is secured, you are mildly wet and no longer entirely convinced this is the pinnacle of human progress.

Still, you go to bed feeling virtuous. Proper insulation. Best practice. A man in control of his environment. Then morning arrives.

You open the door and are confronted not with a clever piece of kit, but with a large, wet object that has spent the night collecting every available form of moisture. Rain, mist, a bit of low cloud for texture. It now has the density and attitude of a damp sheep.

This is where the real dilemma begins, because now it needs drying. You cannot put it away wet. You can, once, and then it becomes a travelling biology experiment. So you look around for options.

The campsite offers none. The sky suggests it has no intention of helping. Draping it over the motorhome makes you look like you are signalling distress. Bringing it inside turns your neatly contained living space into a humid conservatory.

So you fold it. Or attempt to. It does not fold so much as collapse into a resentful bundle, which you then wedge into a locker with the quiet knowledge that you have not solved the problem, merely hidden it. Next time you use it, there will be a smell. Nothing dramatic. Just a faint reminder of previous optimism.

Meanwhile, the internal covers sit there, dry, cooperative, and entirely untroubled by the weather. They go up in two minutes, come down in two minutes, and require no drying strategy, no storage plan, and no emotional resilience. Yes, the windscreen will be damp. You wipe it. It takes less time than putting your shoes on. So the great dilemma resolves itself in practice rather than theory.

On one side, perfect insulation, achieved at the cost of wrestling a wet, uncooperative slab of fabric in a car park and then trying to dry it in a country that does not believe in drying things.

On the other, a slightly damp windscreen and a life free of damp sheep management.

We choose inside.

Not because we have failed to understand the physics, but because we have understood everything else.

Toy Influencer Kit

It’s hard not to admire the speed with which we can now manufacture a moral panic out of a £15 bag of bits of wood.

Argos puts a toy tripod and a pretend microphone in a box, labels it “influencer”, and suddenly we’re in a full-blown existential crisis about the fate of childhood. You can almost hear the hand-wringing. “Are we teaching toddlers to chase fame?” As if the average two-year-old needs a nudge in that direction.

Children have always been attention-seeking. Not in a pathological sense, just in the entirely normal, slightly exhausting way that involves being summoned repeatedly to watch the same jump, the same dance, the same “look at me” performance with only minor variations. If anything, the influencer kit is simply formalising a role they had already cast themselves in.

We’ve had generations of this dressed up in more comforting language. Dressing up boxes were not about “identity formation”, they were about putting on a show. Toy kitchens were not about “developing life skills”, they were about presenting you with an inedible plastic banquet and expecting applause. Toy microphones, karaoke machines, plastic guitars - all perfectly acceptable ways for a child to hold the room hostage.

The only thing that has changed is the label. Call it “performer set” and nobody blinks. Call it “influencer” and suddenly it becomes a commentary on late capitalism, digital identity, and the collapse of innocence. The toy itself hasn’t moved an inch. The adults have simply wandered off into a thicket of their own anxieties about social media and dragged the toy along with them.

There is also a quiet sleight of hand in some of the criticism. The kit does not connect to the internet. It does not upload content. It does not come with a brand manager or a monetisation strategy. It is, at heart, a wooden camera and a stick with a pretend microphone on the end. The idea that this is grooming toddlers for a life of algorithm chasing requires a fairly heroic leap.

What it does do is reflect the world children already see. Just as toy laptops appeared once offices filled with screens, and toy cash registers followed the supermarket, this is simply a child’s-eye version of what adults do with their phones. If anything, it is a slightly quaint, analogue take on a very modern habit.

And there’s the slightly uncomfortable truth underneath all this. The real “influencer culture” that worries people is not coming from a wooden toy bought in Argos. It is coming from the actual phones in parents’ hands, the endless scrolling, the casual filming, the small rituals of being seen. Children notice that far more than they notice what is written on a cardboard box.

So yes, there is something faintly ridiculous about the outrage. Not because the questions about attention, identity and technology are invalid, but because they have been pinned onto entirely the wrong object. It’s like blaming a toy steering wheel for bad driving habits while ignoring the actual car.

In the meantime, the most likely outcome is that a small child will set up their wooden tripod, announce something incomprehensible to an audience of one, and insist you watch it three times in a row. Which, come to think of it, is exactly how it has always worked.

The Day I Cancelled Nothing and Triggered the Machine

While going through my bank account the other day, performing the sort of archaeological dig that passes for financial management in retirement, I noticed something curious. A direct debit to British Gas was still sitting there. Nothing had been taken from it for about a year. I had left them long ago.

Naturally I cancelled it.

At this point I assumed absolutely nothing would happen. After all, nothing had been happening for twelve months.

This was a grave misunderstanding.

Within hours the emails began arriving. Apparently I had just committed a serious administrative offence. I had removed my direct debit and therefore lost my "special discount", and the system was now very concerned to inform me of my newly calculated estimated annual bill.

For energy they were no longer supplying.

This, I suspect, is the modern corporate algorithm in its natural habitat. The system does not know whether it supplies you with gas. It does not know whether you are even a customer. But it does know, with immense confidence, that a direct debit has changed somewhere in the universe and that corrective action must therefore be taken immediately.

At this point one attempts the traditional British remedy, which is to telephone someone. Finding the number required navigating a series of websites apparently designed by people who believe humans should never speak to other humans again.

Eventually I found it.

To be fair to the lady who answered, she was perfectly sensible. She cancelled the account within about thirty seconds, which raises the awkward question of why the machine had been threatening me with imaginary bills in the first place.

I asked her to log a complaint.

Not because I expect anything dramatic to happen. No one is going to storm the server room and shout "stop the algorithm". But somewhere, in a quiet spreadsheet in a quiet office, a tally will go up by one under the heading "system behaving like a confused Labrador".

If enough of those accumulate, some poor IT engineer will eventually be told to adjust the rule that says:

Direct debit cancelled - panic - invent bill.

Until then, the machine will continue doing what machines do best. Confidently misunderstanding the world and sending emails about it.

The Far Right's Christian Values

There is a certain type of political bore who bangs on about "Christian values" as if he has just returned from a personal briefing with the Almighty, when in fact the last time he crossed a church threshold was for a wedding buffet and a quick moan about the parking. He likes to present the far right as the last line of defence for Christian civilisation, all solemn duty and moral backbone. The trouble is that the evidence says otherwise, which is always awkward when a whole identity has been built on sounding certain in the comments section.

Across Western Europe, researchers have found no positive relationship between religiosity and voting for populist radical right parties. None. In some cases, regular church attendance is linked to lower support. Practising Christians are often under-represented among far-right voters. So the grand army of churchgoing patriots exists mostly in the imagination of men with flags in their profile pictures and very little else going on. The people actually sitting in pews every Sunday are apparently not queuing up for the politics of grievance and scapegoating.

This does rather spoil the theatrical nonsense. Because the far right absolutely loves Christianity, provided it can be kept safely at the level of branding. It likes churches as scenery, not as institutions full of inconvenient teachings about loving thy neighbour, showing mercy, feeding the poor and generally behaving in a way that makes xenophobic ranting look a bit cheap. Christianity, in this mode, is not a faith. It is a badge. A logo. A bit of heritage trim bolted onto a rather nasty machine.

And that is the real joke in all this. The loudest defenders of "Christian civilisation" are very often not defending Christianity at all. They are defending a tribal identity dressed up in religious language. They want the architecture, the hymns at Christmas, the vague sense of civilisational superiority, and none of the moral obligations. It is Christianity with the engine removed and the bonnet polished. All showroom shine, no mechanical content.

Political scientists even have a name for the mismatch - the "religion gap". Far-right parties talk incessantly about Christianity, yet practising Christians tend not to flock to them. One explanation is almost comically simple. If you actually belong to a church, you are more likely to be embedded in a real community, exposed to actual moral teaching, and less susceptible to the sort of bilious nonsense that blames foreigners, liberals, Muslims or Brussels for every irritation from potholes to damp weather. It turns out that meeting actual human beings may be bad for ideological hysteria. Who knew.

So when some chap starts droning on about how the far right is the natural home of Christian Europe, what he usually means is that he likes the cultural packaging. He likes crosses on war memorials, nativity scenes, old cathedrals and the general smell of inherited legitimacy. He does not mean he is off to evensong, helping at the food bank, or wrestling seriously with the Sermon on the Mount. That would be a different matter entirely, and a good deal less useful to the politics of permanent resentment.

In short, the far right does not so much represent Christianity as cosplay it. It borrows the costume, waves the props about, and hopes nobody notices that the congregation has gone elsewhere. Which, according to the research, it largely has. The whole thing is a bit like one of those "fully restored" classics advertised by an optimist. Lovely paint, sparkling badges, a lot of talk about heritage, and underneath it all, not much evidence that anyone has opened the bonnet in years.

Sources include comparative research published in Party Politics on Western Europe, LSE analysis of the "religion gap", and European Social Survey-based work in Social Science Research showing Christians are often less likely to back the populist radical right.

But it's Our Oil

It’s funny how quickly the North Sea turns into this mythical national piggy bank whenever there’s a wobble in the Middle East.

You hear it all the time. “Our oil.” “Our profits.” As if there’s a great big tap marked “Treasury” somewhere off Aberdeen and all we need to do is turn it a bit harder. In reality it’s private companies pulling it out, selling it at global prices, and the UK getting a cut via tax when there are profits to tax. Some years that’s decent. Some years it’s not. And when things wind down, we even help pay to tidy the whole lot away again. It’s a business, not a dividend account.

Then along comes a crisis like Iran and suddenly the answer, apparently, is to issue more licences.

Which is where it starts to get a bit surreal. The price spike you’re dealing with is happening now, this quarter, this winter if you’re unlucky. A new North Sea field will be ready years down the line, long after this particular panic has passed. Even the quicker option, tying a small find into existing kit, still takes time. So as a response to a short sharp shock, it’s like ordering a new garage because you’ve run out of petrol on the drive.

There is a more serious point buried in there about imports. Yes, the UK is becoming more reliant on them. Yes, global markets can be jumpy, and occasionally properly nasty. But drilling more here doesn’t magically give you cheap British oil. It still sells at the same global price, so you might improve the trade balance a bit, keep some jobs going and slow the decline, but you have not insulated yourself from the next spike.

And this is the bit that rarely gets mentioned. The UK electricity market is set up so that gas effectively sets the price for everything. So when gas spikes, everything spikes, regardless of how much cheaper power is on the system. Even the government is now looking at breaking that link. Which rather undermines the idea that drilling a bit more in the North Sea somehow shields us from global markets.

And then there’s the small matter of who benefits from all this urgency. Oil companies are hardly going to object to new licences. It keeps the pipeline of work going for the next 20 or 30 years, from rigs to engineers to contractors, the whole ecosystem ticking over nicely. That is entirely rational from their point of view, but it does mean their version of “energy security” comes with a fairly obvious commercial incentive attached.

The war angle does raise a more interesting question, though. If you actually wanted to knock the UK’s energy system sideways, what would you hit.

Oil and gas are quite neat targets. A handful of big bits of kit, pipelines, terminals, import facilities. Take out a few of those and you feel it very quickly, especially with gas where we don’t keep much lying around. It’s efficient, but it’s not exactly forgiving. And if you hit one properly, you are not talking about a quick tidy up. You are into months at best, and in the worst case years, because you are rebuilding large, specialised, safety critical infrastructure.

Renewables are messier. Wind farms scattered about, solar all over the place, bits of generation here, there and everywhere. Knock one out and the lights stay on. You’d have to go after lots of them to make a dent. And even then, the kit is modular. Panels, inverters, cabling, much of it can be swapped out in weeks rather than years. The weak points sit more in the grid itself, substations and transmission nodes that matter whatever is generating the power, which rather underlines that the vulnerability is in the system, not just the source.

So the problem being exposed here isn’t really “we haven’t drilled enough holes in the North Sea”. It’s that we’re still tied to fuels traded in markets we don’t control, moving through infrastructure that can be disrupted, and priced in a way that lands straight on the doorstep.

Which brings you back to the licensing debate. If the problem is a price spike now, licences don’t help. If the problem is long term exposure to volatile fossil markets, doubling down on them is a slightly odd cure. If the problem is managing decline sensibly over the next couple of decades, then fine, talk about existing fields and nearby tie backs and be honest about what that does and doesn’t achieve.

But presenting a 10 year project as an answer to a short term crisis is not strategy. It’s just something that sounds busy while everyone else is watching the oil price.

When You Can't Trust the Leader of the Free World

There’s something faintly ridiculous about the position I find myself in, and I suspect I’m not alone in it. You watch events unfold, listen to what was said on Friday, then what’s being said now, and before you know it you’re thinking something you really ought not to be thinking. “Good on you, Iran.” Which is not a sentence you expect to find yourself uttering unless you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

On Friday we had the full performance. Deadlines, ultimatums, talk of flattening infrastructure if compliance was not forthcoming. It was delivered with that familiar certainty, the sort that suggests the decision has already been made and we are simply being informed of it in advance.

A few days later, same voice, entirely different tune. “Productive conversations”, “major points of agreement”, and a neat five day pause on the bombs to let diplomacy run its course. Diplomacy that, slightly awkwardly, the other side says does not exist. At which point you do start to wonder whether someone, somewhere in the administration has been having perfectly cordial conversations with entirely the wrong country. Given past performances on geography, it would not be the greatest surprise.

Now, one does not normally lean on Tehran as a reliable narrator. Quite the opposite. But if one side says talks are well underway and the other says there have been none at all, and meanwhile the strikes that were imminent have been quietly shelved, you don’t need to be terribly clever to notice that something has shifted.

And when things shift that quickly, you start to notice who is at least sticking to a line, however disagreeable, and who is rewriting theirs as they go along.

There was a time when the word of a US President carried weight. Not infallible, not saintly, and occasionally derailed by the odd episode like Nixon’s, but broadly speaking if the White House said something, people assumed it bore some stable relationship to reality. That was rather the point.

It does not feel like that now. This has the faint air of the boy who cried wolf about it. You can only issue so many ultimatums, announce so many imminent actions, and then quietly step back from them before people stop taking you at your word. When the wolf is apparently back again, the reaction is no longer urgency, it is a raised eyebrow.

And that is where it becomes self-inflicted. If your story moves from threat to pause to “we’re nearly there” over the course of a weekend, you don’t just lose credibility on that one point. You make yourself unreliable on anything. Markets notice, allies notice, opponents certainly notice, and it has a habit of coming back to bite you in the bum at precisely the moment you would quite like to be believed.

Which is how you end up in this slightly awkward place. It’s not admiration for Iran. It’s that old underdog reflex. The smaller chap taking a punch and still standing there. You don’t approve of him, you wouldn’t trust him as far as you could throw him, but there is a moment where you find yourself thinking, well, at least he’s not changing his story mid sentence.

Then you remember who he is, and the moment passes. This is an authoritarian state with a long record of suppressing its own people and throwing its weight around the region. There is nothing admirable about that, and pretending otherwise would be self-indulgent nonsense.

But none of that rescues the credibility problem on the other side. If you threaten action, then delay it, then describe the delay as progress, and the people you claim to be negotiating with say there are no talks at all, you don’t get to be surprised when people start taking what you say with a pinch of salt.

It’s not that Iran has become trustworthy. It’s that the White House has made itself difficult to believe. And that leaves you in the mildly absurd position of watching a murderous regime hold its line, while the leader of the free world adjusts his, and finding yourself checking the clock afterwards, because if someone now says 3:23, you’re not entirely sure whether that means 3:23, 3:30, or whenever the story changes again.

Cliff With a View

There are places along the English coast where you can feel time passing in a civilised, almost courteous way. Eype is not one of them. Eype is where the land quietly packs its bags and leaves, usually taking a few human assumptions with it.

We set off from West Bay under the impression it was “a short stretch”. The South West Coast Path, it turns out, has its own view on that sort of language. It doesn’t do distance so much as gradients. You begin with a pleasant walk and within minutes you are hauling yourself up a slope that feels less like a path and more like a polite challenge to your cardiovascular system.

Mine, for the record, is now a meniscal matter, which is the sort of condition one invokes to preserve dignity while still limping slightly and making thoughtful noises. It’s not an injury as such, more a running commentary from the knee suggesting that this was all avoidable.

The beach route, sensibly, is closed. Not because anything dramatic has happened, but because something might. A sizeable portion of cliff has recently decided it preferred life at a lower altitude and has relocated accordingly. The sort of decision that rather spoils a walk if you happen to be underneath it at the time.

Up on the cliff top, things feel calmer. Not stable, exactly, but calm in the way that something can feel calm while quietly failing. The official path has simply edged back a bit, like a man in a pub giving a wide berth to someone explaining their latest investment strategy. It will edge back again when required. No fuss, no ceremony.

And then there’s the summer house.

It sits there with a breezy optimism that suggests it was put up in the late 50s or early 60s, when one could build on a cliff and assume the cliff would remain where it was put. It probably once had a proper garden, a decent margin from the edge, perhaps even a washing line turning gently in the sea breeze. Now it has a front-row seat to its own eventual absence.

The giveaway is the pipe. A length of plumbing protruding from the cliff face with a sort of resigned honesty. At some point it was buried, planned, part of a system. Now it simply empties into open space, which is also roughly the future of the building it serves.

Nobody is fixing that. Nobody is rerouting it or shoring anything up. The place has entered that very British phase of managed neglect, where you continue to use something while fully accepting that one winter it may simply cease to exist. There is no drama, just a quiet understanding between owner and geology.

The return journey, of course, is worse. Descending a steep, uneven path with a mildly irritated meniscus is a very particular form of entertainment. Each step is a small negotiation. The knee doesn’t refuse outright, it simply offers commentary. Persistent, slightly aggrieved commentary.

It reminds me of a worn suspension bush. Perfectly adequate on smooth surfaces, but introduce a bit of irregularity and suddenly every minor imperfection is transmitted directly through the system. By the bottom, my knee had formed a fairly robust view of Dorset.

Still, it was bracing. That’s the official line. We observed a cliff in the process of rearranging itself, a building in quiet retreat from existence, and a footpath that appears to have been designed with only a passing interest in cartilage.

We will, inevitably, go back. Probably with a flask. Possibly with a walking pole. And with the faint suspicion that the house may not be there next time, but the climb, somehow, always will be.

Same God, Different Rules

Nigel Farage wants to ban mass Muslim prayer near historic British sites, on the grounds that it amounts to intimidation and domination of public space.

It started, as these things often do, with a solemn declaration about “protecting historic British sites”. Perfectly reasonable on the face of it, until you stop and ask what exactly we’ve been doing at those sites for the last few thousand years, because Britain has never been short of people turning up at old stones and doing something faintly mystical.

Take Stonehenge. Every summer solstice, thousands gather in robes, greet the sunrise and commune with forces that, one suspects, are not especially concerned either way. Nobody calls this domination. It’s heritage, possibly with sandwiches. Over at Avebury, you can wander about inside a stone circle while various forms of spiritual activity unfold that would have baffled the original builders, and again it is all entirely acceptable, adds a bit of colour, tourists take photos. And on Glastonbury Tor, there is a steady trickle of people engaged in pursuits best described as spiritual with a hint of improvisation, and the nation copes.

So the principle seems straightforward enough. Large groups gathering at historic sites for religious or quasi religious purposes are either a charming expression of continuity or a problem, and the interesting question is what turns one into the other. We are told, in this case, that the issue is not mere presence but something more serious, words like intimidation and domination doing the rounds, which are strong words and suggest a clear, observable problem rather than a vague unease.

So you go looking for it, because if something has crossed that line there ought to be a moment you can point to. What actually happened, which rule was broken, who was obstructed or prevented from using the space, where is the point at which an ordinary public event became something more coercive. And this is where it all starts to drift, because no specific mechanism is ever quite identified. It is a bit like declaring a car unsafe without pointing to the failed brake or the snapped cable. You are given the conclusion, but not the fault.

If the concern were genuinely about crowd size, disruption, or public order, we already have rules for that and they apply to everyone, regardless of religion, costume, or choice of incense. And that is where the proposal runs into a more awkward problem, because Muslims and Christians are, in fact, worshipping the same God. “Allah” is simply the Arabic word for God, used by Arabic-speaking Christians as well. The disagreement is about the nature of that God, not about which God it is, which makes the distinction rather curious. Large groups worshipping the same deity are apparently acceptable in one case and a problem in another.

Meanwhile, similar gatherings continue elsewhere without fuss. The Druids will be back at Stonehenge, the spiritualists will drift up Glastonbury Tor, and nobody will reach for the word domination, which leaves you with the slightly awkward observation that the same basic activity produces entirely different reactions depending on who is doing it.

And while all this is going on, something else quietly slips past. The economic programme attached to all this cultural theatre is not especially mysterious, lower taxes tilted in a particular direction, a relaxed attitude to regulation, and a willingness to revisit the sort of fiscal experiments that, not long ago, sent gilt yields sharply upwards and forced a rapid retreat. It is not complicated, if you reduce revenue while maintaining spending pressures, the gap is made up somewhere, and it is usually not by the people being encouraged to feel aggrieved about events in public squares.

So the debate ends up tilted. We spend our time discussing who is standing where, and rather less time asking who is paying for what, which is convenient if you would prefer the second question not to be examined too closely. It is not that people are being told what to think so much as what to notice, and once that choice is made for them the rest tends to follow without much effort.

In the end, it is not really about protecting historic sites, nor is it about responding to a clearly evidenced problem. It is about directing attention, pointing at one thing, describing it in sufficiently loaded terms, and letting the rest of the conversation rearrange itself around it, which works perfectly well right up until someone looks somewhere else, usually at their wallet, and wonders how that got lighter while they were busy worrying about stone circles and Trafalgar Square.

The Ghost in the Machine

I was watching a programme the other evening about people creating AI versions of dead relatives. Husbands reconstructed from text messages, mothers rebuilt from old emails, voices pieced together from recordings. The idea is that you can keep talking to them. The programme treated this as something startlingly new. I am not entirely convinced.

I sometimes catch myself having imaginary conversations with my father. He has been gone a long time, but the mental map of him is still there. I know the tone he would use when he thought I was talking nonsense, and the small pause before he explained why. It is obviously not him. It is my memory of him, built from years of experience, but it can still be a useful reference point when I am thinking something through.

Which is when the penny dropped while watching the programme. Humans have always done this. The real question is simply where the conversation happens. Sometimes it happens inside the skull and sometimes it is pushed outside it.

Take prayer. Many people pray to saints, ancestors or deceased relatives. They speak to them, ask for guidance, sometimes imagine the reply. Imaginary conversations with someone you once knew work in much the same way. In both cases you are consulting a mental model built from memory. The voice is internal and you know it ultimately comes from your own reasoning. That internal version has a natural constraint because it is a mental map built from real experience. It cannot easily wander far beyond what you actually knew about the person.

Now consider the Victorian seance. People gathered around a table while a medium tapped out messages from the dead. The voice, of course, was the medium's. The dead relative was only being interpreted through someone else's words. Which brings us to the modern twist, AI relatives. Here the conversation is external again, like the seance, but with one crucial difference. The voice of the machine can be trained to sound exactly like the dead person, their phrases, their cadence, even their manner of argument.

So the structure ends up looking rather simple. Seances and AI relatives externalise the conversation. Prayer to the dead and imaginary conversations keep it internal. In all four cases the human brain is doing the same thing, modelling another person's mind. The difference is where the reply appears to come from.

The AI version, however, introduces something the Victorians never had to contend with. The medium never sounded like your father. The AI can. That similarity creates trust. When the reply arrives in the recognisable voice of someone you loved, the brain is far more inclined to treat it as authentic. Yet the machine is not recalling anything. It is extrapolating, generating sentences the real person never spoke.

The internal voice you carry from memory is limited by the map you built from real life. The external machine is not limited in that way. It can extend the pattern indefinitely. Which is where the danger lies. The technology does not resurrect the dead. It produces a persuasive imitation of them, a voice that feels familiar but which can now say things the real person never said.

The Victorians dimmed the lights and waited for the table to move. We sit on the sofa and wait for the typing bubble to appear. The instinct is the same, but the modern version sounds much more like the person we lost, and that makes it far easier to trust a voice that ultimately belongs to a machine.

Performative Pins

It starts innocently enough. A small badge on a lapel, barely visible unless you go looking for it. Then, once you’ve noticed it, you realise it’s everywhere.

In America it’s the flag, of course. Tiny stars and stripes pinned to otherwise identical suits, like a uniform accessory issued with the job. You begin to suspect that somewhere in Washington there’s a drawer marked “Patriotism - standard size”, and woe betide the man who forgets to pick one up on the way out. Turn up without it and you half expect a quiet word. Not an accusation, nothing so crude, just a gentle enquiry as to whether you’ve perhaps misplaced your country.

Over here, we’ve had a cautious go at the same thing. The Union Jack makes occasional appearances, usually at party conferences, looking faintly as if it’s been added at the last minute. You can almost hear the internal dialogue. “This feels a bit American.” “Yes, but we should probably have one.” And so it sits there, slightly self-conscious, like a novelty tie that no one quite knows how to carry off.

Most of Europe sensibly ignores the whole business. The French manage to run an entire state without pinning it to their jackets, which suggests the Republic is more robust than a bit of enamel. The Germans appear similarly confident that their national identity will survive a day at the office without visible reinforcement.

Then you notice the more deliberate users. Netanyahu with his flag, worn with practised ease, part of the overall presentation. Putin too, though there it feels less like a choice and more like it arrived pre-approved along with the rest of the staging. In both cases, it’s not accidental. The symbol is doing a job.

And that, really, is where it starts to grate. Because once the symbol is doing a job, it stops being expression and starts being costume.

Which brings us neatly to the British variation, the seasonal edition. The poppy.

Now, the poppy itself is not the problem. It began, quite properly, as a quiet act of remembrance. A small, unobtrusive marker. You wore it if you wished. You didn’t if you didn’t. Nobody kept a ledger and nobody asked questions.

Then, as ever, we got organised. The poppies appeared earlier. They became more substantial. You started to see them in places where you rather suspected the wearer hadn’t given them a moment’s thought beyond “better put that on”. Newsreaders, politicians, the lot, all pinned up on cue, as if remembrance had a start date and a dress code.

And then the question arrived. It always does. “Why aren’t you wearing one?”

At that point the whole thing tilts. The moment you have to account for the absence of a symbol, the symbol has ceased to be voluntary. It’s now a test. Not an official one, nothing written down, but understood all the same.

It reminds me of those car recalls where a perfectly serviceable component suddenly becomes a matter of urgent compliance. The car worked perfectly well yesterday, but now there’s a note on file and a suggestion that you ought to get it sorted. The difference is, of course, that the car doesn’t care. People do.

And you start to see the underlying pattern. The more secure a country feels, the less it needs to advertise itself on a lapel. The more uncertain it becomes, the more it reaches for symbols, just to reassure itself that everything is still intact.

So you end up with this curious situation where something intended as private reflection becomes a mildly policed public performance. Not because individuals are insincere, but because the system gently nudges everyone in the same direction until deviation starts to look like dissent.

And once you get there, the meaning drains away rather quickly. The flag pin, the poppy, the lot of them. Small objects trying to carry rather a lot of weight, until they collapse into routine.

In the end, you’re left looking at a room full of identical lapels and wondering whether anyone has forgotten anything important. Not the pin. The reason it was there in the first place.

The 13mm Nut That Launched a Shopping Expedition

There is a particular sort of confidence that only appears when a tap is loose. Not a flood, not a burst pipe, just a gentle wobble that suggests mild contempt every time you wash your hands. So naturally I did not check my tools. I did not measure anything. I ordered a tap backnut spanner.

What arrived could have serviced the cooling system of a small destroyer. It was vast. Heroic. The kind of tool you would use to tighten a Victorian water main. I offered it up under the wall hung basin and it laughed at me. The nut was about 13 mm. The spanner was clearly designed for something north of 30 mm, possibly agricultural.

Return number one.

Undeterred, I moved into what I told myself was analysis mode. The stud looked about 8 mm. That implies M8. M8 usually means a 13 mm nut across flats. Excellent. Progress. I bought a deep socket set to do the job properly, feeling faintly professional about the whole thing.

When it arrived in the post it only went up to 11 mm.

At this point the tap was no longer wobbling. It was observing. Quietly. Patiently. Like a cat watching you attempt DIY.

So I bought a 13 mm deep box spanner from Amazon. Decisive. Surgical. The correct size for an M8 stud. I felt vindicated by mathematics and just a trace of spite.

Then, in a moment of idle rummaging through my old box spanner tin, I found it.

A 13 mm deep box spanner. Mine. All along. It had been sitting there quietly for years. Through house moves, garage reorganisations, and previous plumbing victories. Waiting for me to complete a small retail pilgrimage before revealing itself like some metallic punchline.

There is a universal domestic law at work here. The moment you press Buy Now, the missing tool materialises in the very box you definitely checked. Usually under something irrelevant, like a Jubilee clip from 2003.

Naturally I cancelled the Amazon order immediately, hoping it had not reached that ominous status of Preparing for Dispatch, which translates roughly as it is already in a van but we enjoy the suspense.

The tap was be tightened. The wobble ceased. Order was restored. But the real lesson is not about torque or thread sizes. It is about the strange human instinct to shop before we look. Somewhere in that garage, I suspect, is also a 14 mm deep socket. And I will probably find it the day after I need it.

The Engine That Purrs While It Fails

There is a particular type of man who can say something quite alarming in a tone normally reserved for explaining how to descale a kettle, and half the room will nod along as if they’ve just heard a sensible bit of household advice.

Take Netanyahu or Putin. They speak in complete sentences, pause in the right places, and look as though they’ve read the briefing notes and, crucially, understood them. It all feels reassuring, like a pilot calmly explaining a delay. Then along comes Trump, who sounds like a man assembling flat pack furniture without the instructions while narrating the process. He starts a point, abandons it, returns to it from a different angle, and occasionally discovers a new one halfway through the sentence. Because we are human and slightly lazy in our thinking, we conclude that the first pair are believable and the second is not.

Which is where it all goes wrong. A well delivered argument is not the same thing as a true one, it just feels like it is. The brain hears fluency and quietly ticks a box marked probably correct, which is rather like assuming a car is mechanically sound because the engine note is smooth at idle. You can have an engine that purrs beautifully while quietly eating its own bearings, and you can have one that sounds a bit agricultural but will run forever if you leave it alone. The noise tells you something, but not the thing you actually need to know.

Putin in particular has turned this into a system. Calm voice, neat narrative, no visible hesitation. It creates the impression of inevitability, which is very useful if what you are saying would look rather less convincing if anyone stopped to pull it apart. Netanyahu is cut from a similar cloth, albeit with a different audience and a different set of arguments. Very polished, very controlled, very certain. You may agree or disagree with him, but he rarely sounds as if he is guessing. Trump, meanwhile, sounds exactly like someone guessing in real time, which makes people uncomfortable even when he stumbles onto something broadly correct, because it doesn’t come wrapped in that reassuring layer of polish.

So we end up judging the message by the smoothness of the delivery, which is a bit like buying a car based on how nicely the salesman closes the door. It shuts with a satisfying thunk and you think, well, that feels solid, and then a week later the gearbox falls out somewhere near Swindon.

Culinary Misidentification

We’d done the sensible thing before we set off in the motorhome and I’d made a proper hachis Parmentier, the sort of slow cooked beef dish that sits there quietly proving you are, in fact, a competent adult. Something rich, deliberate, unmistakably beef. The kind of meal that does not invite debate about what species is involved.

Which is just as well, as it turns out.

Because one night is always given over to a Charlie Bigham. We call it a treat, which is a polite way of saying we’ve decided not to bother. Hay cooked one in the motorhome in Portesham, and it came out exactly as they all do. Golden lid, creamy interior, the visual equivalent of a reassuring nod.

I ate it quite happily. No complaints at all. And when I’d finished, I sat back and, with the calm authority of a man who clearly understands what he has just consumed, announced that it was a very nice fish pie.

It was not a fish pie. It was chicken and ham hock.

Now, that would be bad enough on its own. Confusing fish with poultry and pig is not a minor slip. It is a full category error. But the detail that really ought to concern everyone involved is this: I hadn’t just mislabelled the dish. I had actually eaten pieces of chicken and calmly registered them as prawns.

Not vaguely prawn-like. Not “something a bit fishy”. Proper chunks of chicken had gone through chewing, consideration, and whatever passes for analysis, and emerged in my mind as seafood. At that point we are no longer dealing with a simple mistake. That is a complete breakdown in quality control.

It is rather like lifting the bonnet, pointing at something entirely at random, and declaring the alternator has gone, only to discover the car is missing a wheel. The process has not just gone wrong, it has gone wrong with confidence.

And that, I think, is the interesting bit. The certainty. There was no hesitation. No cautious probing. My brain took a quick look at the situation, decided it recognised the pattern, and shut down further enquiry. Creamy pie, pale protein, eaten in a motorhome - close enough, move on.

Which does make you wonder how often this happens elsewhere. A familiar outline, a quick assumption, and then a firm conclusion delivered with just enough authority to discourage anyone from asking whether you’ve actually checked. Details become optional once the general idea feels about right.

In fairness, those Bigham’s pies do encourage this sort of thinking. They all arrive under the same polite golden lid, each one a variation on a theme of middle class reassurance. Once you’ve decided what it probably is, the rest of the evidence seems to be treated as an administrative inconvenience.

Hay, to her credit, handled this with admirable restraint. There was a pause, a look, and then the quiet correction. No fuss, no lecture, just the gentle dismantling of my entirely misplaced confidence.

Which leaves me with the slightly awkward conclusion that, given enough sauce and a pastry lid, I may no longer be able to distinguish between land and sea. A worrying development for someone who prides himself on knowing what he’s looking at.

I shall stick to the hachis Parmentier in future. At least then, if I insist it’s something else, we can all agree the fault lies with me rather than the evidence.

No Off-Ramp for Trump

Trump is not operating a normal presidency. He believes his own judgement is sufficient, treats advice as optional, and sees any form of restraint as personal weakness.

He has been pushed into confrontation with Iran by Netanyahu, whose objective of decisive action aligns neatly with Trump’s instinct to escalate. The result is not a considered strategy but a reinforcing loop. One pushes, the other amplifies, and neither has an incentive to pause and ask where it leads.

His stated military aims are straightforward enough on paper. Degrade Iran’s capabilities. Reassert deterrence. Stop the threat. But they are not being met. Iran has not collapsed. It continues to absorb strikes and respond. Deterrence has not been restored in any meaningful sense. If anything, the exchange has broadened and hardened.

And now we have the added wrinkle of his own counterterrorism chief resigning, stating there was no imminent threat. If that reflects the internal intelligence view, then the public case for war was, at best, stretched and, at worst, something else entirely. The subsequent FBI investigation rather suggests those concerns may have touched something the administration would have preferred to keep quiet.

From that starting point, escalation is not a choice, it is the default. Each strike invites retaliation. Each retaliation justifies a larger strike. And because stepping back would look like losing, the only available move is to go further. In practical terms, he has no off-ramp, because taking one would contradict the image he is trying to maintain.

That dynamic widens the conflict. Iran absorbs the blows and responds, as states under attack tend to do. It does not collapse. The exchange spreads. Targets expand. And before long, the conflict begins to reach beyond military assets into the infrastructure that underpins the regional and global economy.

That is the point at which his actions introduce a second dimension. Not just war, but economic disruption. Energy infrastructure comes into play. Shipping lanes become uncertain. Insurance rises. Prices move. What began as a military escalation starts to spill into the systems that keep the global economy functioning.

And that part is spiralling.

The Gulf states feel it first and most directly. Energy production, ports, shipping lanes, all exposed. They did not choose the war, but they bear its consequences. Economic damage builds, and with it pressure to act, not out of ideology but necessity. The line between staying out and being drawn in begins to disappear.

Europe follows for the same reason. It does not want involvement, but it cannot absorb sustained disruption to energy flows. So it edges in, step by step, through protection of shipping, defensive support, and political alignment. Each move limited, each one justified, but together they amount to participation driven by economic survival.

At the same time, a further, rather uncomfortable truth is exposed.

There are Iranians who want regime change. That is not in dispute. The protests were real, large, and brutally suppressed.

But escalation shows no real concern for them at all. Bombing a country does not empower its civil society. It does not create safe conditions for protest. If anything, it strengthens the regime’s grip and justifies further repression.

And on the ground, the reaction is telling. Many Iranians want change, but reject war as the means of achieving it.

There is also a darker edge to this. If an uprising were triggered under these conditions, protesters could simply be slaughtered. Which suggests that, while regime change is spoken of, the human cost of how it might happen is not the limiting factor. Netanyahu’s priority is the removal of the threat, not the welfare of the people living under it. If that requires Iran to be battered into submission, that is a price he appears willing to contemplate.

So the people most likely to suffer from “liberation” are the ones it is supposedly for.

And through all of this, a very clear lesson is being learned. If you are a state in that region, conventional strength does not guarantee safety. Alliances are uncertain under pressure. States without ultimate deterrence remain vulnerable.

In that environment, Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons becomes rational. Not admirable, but logical. And once that logic takes hold, it does not remain confined to Iran. Other states will draw the same conclusion and begin moving in that direction.

That is how nuclear proliferation starts, not with a declaration, but with a series of decisions that all point the same way.

Meanwhile, the same escalation that drives the conflict outward begins to erode support at home. Strength without clear results starts to look hollow. Costs rise, outcomes remain uncertain, and even core supporters begin to question it.

Which creates a second loop. To maintain the image of strength, escalation continues. That escalation deepens the problem. The deepening problem further weakens support. And so the cycle reinforces itself.

So you end up here.

A personality-driven escalation with no usable off-ramp. A widening conflict failing on its own stated military terms. An economic dimension now spiralling beyond control. Allies being drawn in by necessity rather than choice. And a steady, rational drift towards nuclear proliferation as more states conclude that the only reliable insurance is one we spent decades trying to limit.

And the final irony is this. The more force applied to achieve the stated objectives, the further away those objectives become. Each step taken to increase security reduces it. Each escalation makes resolution harder. It is not just a war without an off-ramp. It is a war in which every turn of the wheel drives further away from the destination.

A catastrophe set in motion by Netanyahu, and enabled by Trump, who lacks the wit to see he has been played.

The Quiet Disappearance of Songs of Praise

The other day Hayley and I somehow ended up talking about Songs of Praise. Not exactly a cutting edge cultural discussion, I admit, but it was a Sunday morning and the conversation had already wandered through the weather, the garden and whether we had any decent tea bags left.

At some point I confidently announced that Songs of Praise had been cancelled years ago. Quietly dropped by the BBC, I said, probably after someone noticed that the average viewer remembered the Coronation the first time round. It sounded entirely plausible and I delivered this verdict with the sort of authority normally associated with people who have not checked anything at all.

It turns out, of course, that this was complete nonsense. The programme has not been cancelled. It is still alive and well on BBC One.

They have simply moved it to Sunday lunchtime.

Now for decades Songs of Praise occupied what broadcasters used to call the “God slot”. Early Sunday evening, just as the weekend was gently winding down and people were beginning to contemplate Monday morning. The roast had settled, the washing up was done, and somewhere across Britain a choir in sensible cardigans was warming up to sing Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer.

Even people who never watched it knew exactly when it was on. It sat there in the schedule like a sort of national punctuation mark at the end of the weekend. You might not tune in, but you knew it was there, humming away politely in the background.

Now apparently it goes out around Sunday lunchtime.

Sunday lunchtime is not a time when the British public is sitting quietly contemplating Anglican hymnody. Sunday lunchtime is when people are arguing about the timing of the roast potatoes, or standing in the kitchen wondering why the oven isn’t hot yet despite being on for twenty minutes. Half the country is trying to peel carrots and the other half is in the garage looking for a screwdriver they were holding five minutes earlier.

Which rather explains my mistake. I assumed the programme had been cancelled because, in any practical sense, it has been.

Somewhere in Britain a choir from Shropshire is still singing its heart out to the nation. The nation, meanwhile, is elbow deep in gravy looking for the vegetable peeler.