I hope it's controlled via a cygnet ring.
Lawyer, writer, Zedra
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I hope it's controlled via a cygnet ring.
A large part of what we are seeing is a great inversion, where physical jobs will gain in relative value in coming decades against office and mental jobs. This is counter to the experience of the last century, and disruptive. But once we accept it, esteem will follow job value. 4/4
And I really can’t fathom how simultaneously we supposedly need to worry about AI taking all the jobs and there not being enough people left to do the remaining ones. 3/4
People living longer can be expected to work longer, especially if we pay more attention to morbidity as well as mortality. Perhaps we just need to value some jobs more than we currently do. 2/4
I’ll start taking low birth rates seriously as a possible problem when (a) the world’s population stops increasing (b) when Britain’s population stops increasing and (c) Britain’s population density becomes more normal for a country of its size. 1/4
Moving from the devout into the frankly homoerotic.
I wasn't expecting to see a statue of Woody Allen in Oviedo, but here he is.
I can't help feeling the Greens have made a big boob today.
Not "Tomorrow" by The Communards?
Good afternoon.
The American mind cannot comprehend that other countries can also be mature multicultural nations.
The government looks feeble. It needs to change that image fast.
When you find a perfect neighbourhood bistro, treasure it. Restaurant Agua Salada, Santander.
All we need is Betsygate to complete the defenestration by traditional Tory techniques.
Echoes of Perugia and Iain Duncan Smith.
I mean, how can someone be so lacking in awareness as to say this as a considered thought to a journalist? If someone tells you your baby name is different or unusual, they mean that you're a maniac who has chosen something ridiculous.
Unironically, large parts of the online right need to be reported to Prevent.
I must reveal myself as a sourdough sceptic. Too often it disappoints.
I'll let you deal with that abstract question. I'm still goggling at the idea anyone could mourn white sliced.
It is, however, unsurprising that the radical right has produced a terrible roll model.
Exhaustingly, I can make out the glimmering of a case for sourdough being woke, given it is gluten-free.
Santander
There's nothing as old-fashioned as one of yesterday's visions of the future.
And who didn’t have the fish for dinner.
My dad used to count along these lines (slight variants). He was born in St Bees.
My second 1/6!
Jesus was a refugee. I cannot see how anyone can reconcile the extreme anti-migrant sentiment found on the radical right with Christian beliefs.
Part of my job entails verifying the identity of payees, for which we require a face picture. More than one young man has sent in a shirtless picture that I assume has been repurposed from Tinder.
Heaven forfend that the public should know who is trying to buy their attention and influence their thinking, and to what end.
The idea that the City is boring is too ridiculous to be offended by.
Obligatory shots of the Guggenheim. It really is a very special building.
I'm taken back at the apparent strength of feeling about Gaza in Bilbao. There are more Palestinian flags than Basque flags, and it's not close.
Once again I'm in a restaurant cursing Nouvelle Vague.
Friday gym selfie.
I expect this is the rationale. But with four years to go to the general election we’re entitled to expect some defence of basic principles by the government, irrespective of its effect on polling.
Today's discovery: fake tan gets EVERYWHERE.
The idea that Somewheres and Anywheres were anything new for the 2010s is daft. But it sold a book, I suppose. 2/2
On this theme: 1) to her dying day, my aunt refused, as a resident of the royal town of Sutton Coldfield, to use a Birmingham postcode. 2) in my youth, when I moved to Hadleigh in Suffolk, I knew an elderly resident who had visited Ipswich (10 miles away) three times in her life. 1/2
Really great album though.
I was on a crowded district line train into the City this morning. I was the only one in a suit and tie. And I'm only wearing it because I'm going to be filming this afternoon. How the world has changed.
Labour had at least 3 days to prepare for today, since the Times outlined what the Reform proposal would look like. It's utterly incompetent to have no rebuttal message to deliver with that much notice.
Both a benefit and curse of getting older is it becomes much easier to spot phoneys, and much more frustrating that others can't.
Is it too much to hope that there is at least one major politician who has a backbone made of something firmer than braised celery?
How did we move in under two decades from vexillology being the comical obsession of the biggest misfit nerd in a comedy about misfit nerds to being a supposedly serious obsession of everyone to the right of Ed Davey?
Largely (I think) people like my mother, for whom voting Conservative is just what you do. Mum is 83.
Strong agree. HOWEVER. It does mean that there's a model ready and waiting for the UK government to reach for whenever it decides the time is right to engage more closely.
I was ferreting around some old floppy disks and I found this picture of me from 1999. Enjoy.
I miss the days when you could casually browse a website and not spend the rest of time getting adverts from that company.
Unprompted, twice in the last week I’ve had people mention how expensive food shopping is now.
Look at the only subject where the dot colours are reversed. If the government has any sense, it will be thinking hard about inflation.
Marisa Tomei’s performance in this film is one of the all time great comedy performances. Rarely was an Oscar so richly deserved.
The Mirror And The Light, in my view, is much the weakest of the trilogy.
Would HG Wells be the last effectively to straddle the divide?
I keep coming back to the question: who are the new readers the Times hopes to attract? How big is the pool of successful professionals with nativist politics?
It was party over, oops, out of time for my hair.
There are many worse problems in the world but one of the more inexplicable recent ones is why Google Pixel have replaced the perfectly good design of the stopwatch function with something hideous.
I was ferreting around some old floppy disks and I found this picture of me from 1999. Enjoy.
Pollsters not named. It looks more like a self-selecting survey.
A lot of press coverage of the anti-asylum seeker protests has had the flavour of this poem, minus the pretence at regret.
It is reasonable now to ask the mass media outlets to examine their role in the reporting of the anti-asylum seeker protests and ask to what extent they were reporting the story and to what extent they were creating the story. And why.
I don't think it's said often enough how remarkably good alcohol-free beer now is.
(I have no fixed view on where these cases should be heard, but there’s no neat home for them.)
I work as a trustee of group life assurance schemes distributing lump sum death benefits. The work I do is often highly analogous to the remit of the 1975 Act. I’m subject to the supervision of the Chancery division, and the Pensions Ombudsman has a role in death cases in pension schemes.
I suspect she thinks *this* is action.
I was going to suggest that would be a terrific place to stash contraband, but on second thoughts with that surname perhaps not.
Half of them are going to end up as ashtrays.
I've quoted the very end of this film to so many of my juniors as a teaching point about working as a team. One or two even listened.
It apparently needs repeating that the paying readership of national newspapers now is very old, very weird, or both. They’re catering to an extreme fringe of British society. The rest of us should seek to ensure the rest of the media realises this rather than treat it as mainstream.
The steaks are high.
Reminiscent of the line in the Paul Simon song "Graceland": "She comes back to tell me she's gone."
Sometimes you just have to doff your cap. Well played, sir.
For a small town, Vác is surprisingly strong on the sculpture front.
Vác cathedral
I note the headline has been updated pretty sharpish.
It's an interview where he announces his intention to set up concentration camps and his willingness to send people to their certain deaths. His commitment to rights should be understood in that context.
Get down off that cross, you’re a far right inciter of pogroms. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08...
Of no interest to anyone but me, but my 2015 home vintage of plum and vanilla brandy is now spectacular.
A Song Against Europe.
I'm not a fan of my local council, Tower Hamlets, but I have to say this seems like a good scheme for it to have got involved with. www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/leisure...
It has for some time been the settled and considered position of the pro-Brexit mob that the fruit should pick itself.
If we're talking bars, this is a uniquely Hungarian institution: the borozó. It loosely translates as "wine bar" but you ain't going to be getting Robert Parker 95 pointers.
You're absolutely right. I shall leave it up as a 10 minute penance then delete.
You're absolutely right. I shall leave it up as a 10 minute penance then delete.
I've just put some plums in the fridge. I hope they're still there in the morning.
London is ahead of the curve here: it already technically qualifies as a forest. There's always room for improvement, of course.
My niche position is that MPs are slightly overpaid and ministers are grotesquely underpaid.
There is no current shortage of people standing to be an MP.
It is hardly a good reflection on MPs that they, supposedly paid to persuade people to their arguments, have so comprehensively failed to persuade the public of their worth.
Para 856 sets out the key findings of fact.
Full judgment here. www.matrixlaw.co.uk/wp-content/u...
If this is the cream, the run-up to the next election is going to be a fiesta of Reform crackpot candidates.
We're going to need to rethink what knowledge is valuable. (And how we test it.)
My favourite recent example of this was a poll where young men and young women were asked what women wanted in a man. The women said a sense of humour and sensitivity and the men said a good salary, height and good looks. And everyone said that young men didn't understand women.
I don't see virtue in failure and new means to improve are good. In the same way that people shouldn't be chastised for using Ozempic. But the question whether ultimate failure at some things improves us is well worth considering.
I profoundly disagree with the central premise, but it's an interesting and important question.
I've put together some thoughts on how the City has become a much nicer place to be. alastair-meeks.medium.com/the-pedestri...
Proposal: a fast track lane at airports for people who know what they are doing.
