The Influencer

There’s something faintly ridiculous about the fact that I’ve become an evangelist for a pair of flip‑flops. Not Birkenstocks. Not those overpriced “ergonomic sandals” that make you look like you should be teaching yoga in Totnes. No – humble, campsite‑shop flip‑flops from Dorset.

I found them last year in the kind of shop that normally sells buckets, spades, and inflatable flamingos – the sort of place where you go in for milk and come out with a fishing net and a lilo you don’t need. And there they were: Surf State flip‑flops. Cheap, cheerful, and – here’s the kicker – built better than the £40 ones you see in airport shops.

Most flip‑flops have that fatal flaw – the toe post that’s pushed through the sole like a tent peg. It works fine until one day, on some stony track, it rips through, and suddenly you’re hobbling like a wounded soldier, clutching a bit of rubber and questioning all your life choices. These Surf State marvels don’t do that. Their toe post is moulded into the upper. No holes. No tear‑through. No indignity.

And they’re absurdly comfortable. They cradle your feet like some over‑attentive butler, while every other flip‑flop is the footwear equivalent of a park bench. They even double as my safety boot and welding boots.

But here’s the problem – I can’t find another pair anywhere. Search online and you get the “budget holiday flip‑flop” version – cheap foam and a nylon thong. Not my moulded, orangey, black‑strapped foot heaven.

So now I’m like some tragic influencer – except instead of flogging protein powder or telling you to “like and subscribe”, I’m standing on a patio waving a sandal in the air shouting: “Find me these, and I’ll name my next grandchild after you!”

Mountain Warehouse is rumoured to stock them, but you’d hardly scale Ben Nevis in them. This is the most un‑mountainous footwear imaginable. They’re not for hiking – they’re for sitting outside a caravan, drink in hand, wondering whether to have another sausage. Oh, and for welding.

And yet, they’ve ruined me for all other flip‑flops. I’ve tasted the perfect summer shoe, and now I’m cursed to trawl campsite shops like some deranged pilgrim, muttering “Surf State” under my breath, hoping lightning will strike twice.

Trump's War Logic

Trump’s latest pearl – that Zelenskyy could “end the war if he wanted to” – is the kind of drivel only a man allergic to facts could spout. It turns reality on its head. Ukraine didn’t start this war, Russia did. If Putin stopped tomorrow, the war would end tomorrow. If Zelenskyy stopped tomorrow, Ukraine would be carved up, its sovereignty shredded, and the tanks would only pause long enough to refuel before rolling further west.

This isn’t peace, it’s appeasement – and we’ve seen that film before. In 2014, Putin took Crimea. Did that slake his thirst? No, it emboldened him. In 1938, Hitler was handed the Sudetenland in the name of “peace in our time.” A year later the Panzers were in Poland. Feeding territory to an aggressor never ends a war, it just sets the clock for the next invasion.

Trump knows this, but he doesn’t care. His whole career has been one long exercise in calling surrender a deal. Kim Jong Un milked him for a handshake and a few fireworks at the DMZ. Putin knows exactly how to stroke his ego – he doesn’t need to win on the battlefield when Trump is busy blaming the victim and peddling capitulation as statesmanship.

The logic is straight out of a bully’s lawyer’s brief: if only the victim would stop resisting, the fight would be over. It’s perverse. The only reason Ukraine survives is because it is resisting. To give up now would not end the bloodshed but guarantee more of it – just postponed, and worse.

So when Trump pontificates about Zelenskyy having the power to end it, what he’s really saying is that Ukraine should roll over so he can parade his phoney deal-making genius. It’s the same shtick every time: the bully gets the lunch money, the victim gets told to smile, and Trump slaps his name on the mugging as if it were an act of diplomacy.

He calls it peace. History calls it cowardice.

Humiliation

Trump doesn’t do diplomacy. He does theatre – and the warm-up act is always humiliation. Merkel told off for freeloading. Macron mocked for trade. Trudeau dismissed as weak. Sunak treated like a naughty schoolboy. Even Zelenskyy, pleading for his country’s survival, had to hear lectures about corruption and gratitude. It’s bullying masquerading as foreign policy.

Carney got the Oval Office version. Trump floated annexing Canada, as if a sovereign country were just another golf resort. Carney shot back that Canada wasn’t for sale – not now, not ever. He was calm, he was sharp. But the very fact he had to swat away such rubbish on camera was humiliation enough.

Starmer fared no better. In Washington, he tried to talk Ukraine and trade. Trump cut across him with a lecture: slash taxes, curb immigration, copy Farage. In Scotland, the same routine. A British prime minister reduced to a prop in the Trump show.

And then there’s the contrast. All these democrats – Carney, Starmer, Merkel, Macron, Trudeau, Sunak, Zelenskyy – ritually slapped down in public. But Putin? He gets the red carpet. The brass bands. The fixed-smile photo-op. No ritual, no humiliation, no mockery.

Trump reserves his contempt for leaders who answer to voters. For autocrats, he rolls out the bunting. That isn’t strength – it’s submission dressed up as swagger.

The real humiliation isn’t theirs. It’s ours – the West reduced to background scenery while Trump plays lapdog to despots.

Right to Buy Scam

Right to Buy was sold to the public as a patriotic crusade – Thatcher’s great vision of turning every council tenant into a proud homeowner, waving the keys to their own little castle. What she didn’t mention, of course, was that the castles were sold off at car‑boot prices, the drawbridge yanked up, and the moat filled with Treasury IOUs.

Here’s the con: councils lost the houses but didn’t get the money. For decades, between half and three‑quarters of every sale went straight to the Treasury – central government’s version of fishing down the back of the sofa and nicking all the loose change. Councils were left holding the deeds to nothing, staring at shrinking housing stock and a growing waiting list, while Number 11 quietly swept the proceeds into the national coffers.

And when the rules changed in 2012, the “freedom” to keep more of the cash came with so many conditions it made a Victorian workhouse contract look generous. Councils could keep the money if – and only if – they built new homes within three years. Oh, and that money could cover just 30 % of the cost of a replacement. Find the other 70 % yourself, or hand it back. It’s like being mugged, then offered your wallet back if you can refill it for the thief.

Meanwhile, the rents those sold homes would have generated – billions upon billions – vanished. Social housing wasn’t replenished; it was gutted. The lucky buyers flipped properties into buy‑to‑lets, raking in profit from the very tenants the policy was supposed to “liberate”. And councils? They got the blame for the housing crisis that Westminster engineered and banked.

This wasn’t about homeownership. It was an asset‑strip. A deliberate hollowing out of public wealth, dressed up as aspiration. The receipts didn’t build a better Britain – they built a giant black hole in social housing, one we’re all now paying for, just so a few ministers could boast they’d “spread opportunity”. What they really spread was poverty, and the smell still hangs in the air. 

Digital ID

There’s a new ritual in modern Britain, and it doesn’t involve tea, queuing or moaning about the weather – though it does involve moaning. It’s that moment when you’re at the dentist, hospital, car hire counter or, for all I know, the vet, and someone cheerfully hands you an iPad and says: “Just sign here with your finger.”

You stare at the little glowing box. You dutifully jab at it, and what appears is not your signature, not even a vague cousin of your signature, but something that looks like a spider fell in ink and had a seizure. You’re meant to believe that this squiggle – this digital sneeze – is legally binding.

In the old days, your signature was your proud flourish – the one thing you wrote the same way every time. It was you. It was unique. Some people even practised theirs as teenagers, dreaming of one day signing autographs. Now, you’re reduced to scrawling on a greasy bit of glass with your fingertip like a toddler drawing a slug.

The companies don’t care, of course. The solicitor, the hospital, the bloke at the phone shop – they all nod solemnly as if you’ve just scrawled the Magna Carta, while the thing you’ve actually produced wouldn’t fool a toddler with crayons. It’s not a signature; it’s an “X” in a slightly pretentious font.

And that’s the absurdity. The whole point of a signature was to prove it was really you. But this new breed of “digital signature” bears no resemblance to your real one. In court, a barrister would hold up your normal signature next to the finger-scrawl, and the jury would assume one was written by you and the other by a drunk otter. But here’s the thing – the law says it doesn’t matter. It’s all about “intent”. So long as you intended to sign, that childlike smudge might as well be a Rembrandt.

What makes it worse is that, in the age of fingerprint scanners, face ID and enough biometric wizardry to identify you from your left ear lobe, we’re still squiggling away like Neanderthals discovering charcoal. A fingerprint – your literal identity pressed into the screen – would be foolproof. But no, instead we smear a half-baked doodle across a tablet, then watch someone solemnly print it on paper as if it’s the Crown Jewels.

It’s modern bureaucracy in a nutshell – something once solemn and precise turned into a farce of convenience. But don’t worry, the tablet assures us that our mangled “X” is recorded with an IP address, timestamp, and possibly a blood sample, so it’s perfectly legal.

In years to come, historians will puzzle over this era. They’ll unearth digital archives filled with misshapen signatures and wonder whether 21st‑century Britain was overrun by an illiterate population who could barely hold a pen. No – we could hold pens. We just weren’t allowed to use them.

The Empty Deal

So, Trump and Putin meet. The world braces for fireworks, a grand bargain, perhaps even “the deal of the century”. What do we get? Nothing. Not a sausage. Just two men who can start wars, topple democracies and bankrupt economies, yet when they sit down together produce less substance than a vegan sausage roll at a petrol station.

The gossip beforehand was delicious. Putin would demand his pound of Ukrainian flesh, Trump would nod like a novelty dog in the back of a car, then insist Ukraine be allowed into NATO so he could strut out and claim to have delivered “peace in our time”. The cherry on top? Trump could then announce America was “stepping back” from NATO - translation: Europe gets the bill, Trump gets the applause.

Except it was nonsense. Ukraine wouldn’t get all its land back, Russia would bank its theft, and NATO would gain a member while risking its linchpin. And yet, here’s the irony: Ukraine would be the Alliance’s best new asset. Battle-hardened, bloodied but unbowed, its army has spent years teaching itself how to fight Russia with one hand tied behind its back. NATO would be getting the heavyweight champion on the cheap.

Then there are the borders. Before all this, just 6 percent of Russia’s land frontier touched NATO. Finland and Sweden pushed it up to about 20 percent. Add Ukraine and you’re at nearly 30 percent of Russia’s vast edge pressing against the Alliance. That’s not the strategic triumph Putin had in mind when he pictured tanks rolling into Kyiv.

So what actually happened? Nothing. Which may be the best result of all. Because when nothing happens, nobody can pretend it’s genius. Putin goes home empty-handed, Trump goes home without a headline, and Ukraine keeps resisting without their pantomime. The much-vaunted “deal of the century” never left the beer mat it was scrawled on. Sometimes, blessed nothingness is better than a disaster packaged as diplomacy.

Danger - Red Car

In the 70s, things were simpler – and a bit more brutal. Cars were sprayed with paint and that was it. No lacquer, no protective top coat, just straight colour on metal. A bright red Escort or Marina would fade to pink in a few summers flat, the pigment chalking under the sun like seaside deckchairs. But at least the paint wore out honestly – you could polish it back, bring up some shine, maybe even look smug about the “patina.”

Then, in the 80s and 90s, manufacturers trumpeted progress: the brave new world of basecoat and lacquer. The pitch was seductive – a colour layer sealed under a clear coat that would stay glossy for decades. Only, for red cars, this promise turned out to be about as reliable as a BL indicator stalk.

Red pigment is fragile, cooked alive by UV light. Add to that the fact red panels soak up heat like a pizza oven, and you’ve got thermal stress constantly making the lacquer expand and contract. Worse, factories often sprayed red with a thinner coat of lacquer – it looked vibrant straight out the booth, so they saved time and money by not laying it on thick. That worked fine for the first few years – long enough for the warranty – but once that lacquer started to dry out, it didn’t just lose gloss. It cracked, peeled and flaked in ugly, scabby patches.

Other colours get clear coat failure too, but red does it spectacularly. Black goes dull, silver just gets a bit flat, but red? Red throws a full‑blown tantrum – the lacquer peels like sunburnt skin, the panels patchy and raw, the car slowly mutating into the scrapyard exhibit you’ve seen outside every Halfords.

And that’s why there’s a preponderance of red cars with peeling lacquer. In the 70s they simply faded. In the 80s onwards, the lacquer arrived – but too thin, too fragile and too stressed – and now entire generations of red hatchbacks, saloons and coupes are out there shedding their skin, victims of a chemistry lesson gone wrong.

So if you’re looking at a used red car, the highest‑risk window is anything built between about 1985 and 2005. Those are the cars most likely to have lacquer peeling off the bonnet like filo pastry, unless they’ve been garaged, pampered, or resprayed. Even some into the 2012s are very suspect.

Closed All Hours

I was in Frome the other day, dropping off a car, and had to come back by train. While waiting, I spotted this fine blue plaque proclaiming that in January 1912 Leonard Woolf travelled from this very station to London to propose to Virginia Woolf. A romantic gesture now immortalised for all to admire – except there’s a small, practical problem. Today, this station has about as much operational openness as Fort Knox on a Sunday.

Everything’s locked. The booking office? Locked. The toilet? Also locked – although, reassuringly, you can ask the booking office to open it. Which would be marvellous, except… you’ve guessed it… the booking office is locked. And the waiting room? That’s locked with not one, not two, but three separate locks – just in case a determined traveller might try to sit down somewhere warm. If Leonard had tried it now, he’d still be pacing the platform, checking his watch, and doing that little knee-bob dance we all do when we’ve had one too many cups of tea.

It’s entirely possible the only thing that’s changed in the last 113 years is the addition of a sign saying, “For assistance, please contact a member of staff.” Which is quaint, because there are no staff. You could send a carrier pigeon to London and it’d probably arrive before the next train.

So yes, hats off to Leonard. Not only did he get to London, he got there in time to propose, marry, set up the Hogarth Press, and help establish the League of Nations – all without once being thwarted by a padlocked loo or a triple-bolted waiting room. If nothing else, it proves one thing: romance may not be dead, but station facilities certainly are.

TGIF

Thank God It’s Friday. TGIF. The war cry of the wage slave – a battle chant belted out across open‑plan offices by people who’ve spent the week in captivity under fluorescent lights, flogging their sanity to make someone else’s quarterly report look good.

But here’s the rub – TGIF only became a thing when plutocrats started ruling the roost. Back when work meant tilling the soil, hammering out horseshoes, or flogging cabbages at the market, nobody knocked off on a Friday and yelled TGIF. Farmers didn’t get to clock out – the cows still needed milking, and the fields still needed tending. You couldn’t tell a pig, “Sorry mate, it’s the weekend now, you’ll have to wallow quietly till Monday.” The pig would simply grunt, and continue being a pig.

Even into the Industrial Revolution, Saturday was a full day’s graft. Mill workers didn’t “thank God” for Friday – they thanked God for surviving the machinery with all their limbs intact. The idea of two consecutive days off didn’t exist until the early 20th century, when industrialists, terrified of strikes and bolshie unions, begrudgingly carved out a “weekend.” Not because they were generous, mind you – but because a rested worker is a productive worker. TGIF wasn’t liberation. It was a pressure valve, installed by the plutocrats to stop the wage slaves storming the gates.

And that’s what it remains: a sop. A shiny carrot dangled before office serfs who spend their week being “looped in” and “touched base with.” TGIF is the illusion of freedom, two short days of respite before you’re dragged back in on Monday.

Meanwhile, the older trades never had that luxury. Farmers still slog on. Retail braces for the Saturday hordes. Baristas gird their loins for the flat‑white brigade. For them, TGIF might as well stand for The Grind Isn’t Finished.

So yes, TGIF is a war cry – but it’s a war cry designed by the ruling class. A little chant to keep the wage slaves cheerful, while the plutocrats laugh from their country estates… where, naturally, the staff work weekends.

The Elastic Self

This post was sparked off by a Radio 4 programme yesterday morning, Me, Myself and Mine, an exploration of what the self actually is. One of the more fascinating points was how elastic the brain’s idea of “me” can be – to the extent that it can be persuaded to adopt anything from a teaspoon to a space station as part of its own body. Provided the experience is repeated often enough and comes with instant sensory feedback, the brain will obligingly rewire its sense of self to include the object in question. Give it a bit of resistance here, a vibration there, the odd splatter in the right place, and suddenly “I” now extends into something that definitely wasn’t issued at birth.

This is why an astronaut can end up feeling as if the robotic arm of the International Space Station is an extra limb, and why I, after a lifetime of driving, regard my car as an extension of my own nervous system. But here’s where things get interesting – and occasionally domestic. My wife does not, under any circumstances, experience her car as part of herself. It’s just a box that gets her from A to B. Her sense of bodily extension is rooted firmly in the kitchen, where the cooker, sink, and a set of stainless steel pans form an integrated biomechanical ecosystem. The way she moves around them, the way her hand goes unerringly to the right utensil without looking, you’d swear the implements were wired directly into her cerebellum.

This isn’t down to some mysterious gendered wiring, despite what a few retrograde types might mutter over their pints. It’s pure exposure and reinforcement. I’ve spent decades fine-tuning throttle control, feeling the feedback through a steering rack, judging closing speeds to within a gnat’s whisker. She’s spent just as long fine-tuning heat control on the hob, feeling the feedback through a knife blade, and judging a joint’s readiness by smell alone. The brain simply learns what it’s given.

So if I can “feel” the contact patch of my tyres on a wet bend, she can “feel” the exact moment a sponge cake reaches perfection. If she can’t parallel park without a stiff neck, I can’t sauté an onion without burning the garlic. We are each, in our own domains, fully integrated cyborgs – half-human, half-machine – only our chosen machinery is entirely different.

And in the far future, the possibilities boggle the mind. Imagine astronauts with their proprioception wired straight into spacecraft hulls, “feeling” micrometeorite impacts on the far side of Mars. Imagine surgeons working through kilometre-long nano-fibre manipulators as if they were their own fingers. Imagine gardeners who can sense the moisture levels in the soil through neural-linked trowels, or divers who can feel the currents around an entire submersible as if it were their own skin. The same brain machinery that once learned to swing a hammer could one day learn to pilot a ten-mile-long generation ship – and still be grumpy if the coffee machine at the other end is out of order.

And perhaps this is where it circles back to something bigger. If the boundaries of “me” can stretch to a car, a saucepan, or a spacecraft, perhaps they can stretch without limit. Perhaps the self is not a sealed jar but a temporary eddy in a larger stream – an expression of something vast that flows through all of us. Call it The Source, if you like – that deeper reality behind all appearances. If my mind can embrace a steering wheel and hers can embrace a Kenwood mixer, maybe both are just warm-ups for recognising that every extension, every sensation, is already part of the same Source… whether it’s taking the car out for a spin, or making a Victoria sponge.