rats to 2022

My article about James Herbert's Rats - which, I'd argue (riffing on an idea from Stephen King), did for British horror writing what the Sex Pistols did for popular music - is in the current edition of Focus. (Is it time to renew your BSFA membership?).

You see, I 💗 the 1970s and I think there's a lot that you can say about the decade (which, naturally, has some intriguing parallels with our own) through talking about 'the scary and/or menaced animal' trope in the genre fiction and cinema of that time.

I hope to developing this theme further, in a paper I'm working on that's provisionally titled, 'Following the river of death downstream: animals in genre fiction and film during the British 1970s'; I had hoped to present this at Once & Future Fantasies in Glasgow this summer but other life commitments have supervened. The paper's going to take a little longer (not meant in a Harlan Ellison 'LDV' sense) and I won't be in Glasgow this July.            [this para edited in March 2022].

Still: look out for 'A Kinder Scout trespass of a day: walking the 2020s with Mack Reynolds' in a future Banana Wings installment:

"One hostile reviewer of Mack Reynold's ‘Earth Unaware’ described it as “a politically contradictory 1960s thriller with bad characterisation”; I’d urge this, though, as not a bug but a feature – friends, we’re living in a politically contradictory 1960s thriller with bad characterisation."

On that happy note... here's wishing you all the very best for 2022; hope it brings you everything that you're hoping for (for progressive, anti-racist/ anti-colonialist, pro-feminist, pro-LGBTQ+ values of 'everything', naturally).

giving birth to birds [short story]

I got the idea for this on a train, having recently failed a driving test. 

When I did eventually pass (in my early thirties), I also had to do the theory. 

At the early noughties test centre full of identical terminals (I bet it's all remote now), everyone else was seventeen or eighteen. Apart, that is, from one guy of about my age who named the complex, multi-ton piece piece of industrial plant that he was taking the test for and then asked, "what are you learning to drive?" 

"A car," I replied.

This is a 'next breakthrough in human evolution' story. 

It's 1,700 words long [5 to 10 minutes to read].

-------------------------------------

Winter

First I know about it is when I find Amanda sitting on the settee rather awkwardly one Thursday she’d taken off work in order to decorate (though it didn’t look like she’d been decorating). Since we bought the house, Amanda’s painted, wallpapered, put carpet down and fixed the guttering. I’ve never decorated but my PhD thesis on the contradictions in Frege’s logic is one of the standard reference works on an admittedly small subject.

“What is it, love?” I ask. Perhaps I should’ve guessed that something hormonal was happening when she started bringing in cushions, throws, catalogues, Hare Krishna handouts and bundled copies of the Advertiser (our papergirl throws them away in the woods), and arranging them in the lounge.

“We’re having babies, Seb,” she says.

Now, the doctors have told us, kindly but more than once, that Amanda’s reproductive capabilities don’t meet the mark and that we can’t be responsible for replacing ourselves. At the time, Amanda took it very badly. Being a stoical sort of chap (cognitive-behavioural therapy more than the philosophy business), I get ready to begin a speech with “my love, we’ve been through this; unfortunately, the doctors...” but she moves aside to show me the four eggs she’d laid. They’re each about the size of a bowling ball, ivory in colour and lightly veined with the palest blue imaginable. Perfect, like harvest mice or the better phrases in Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

“Amanda, that’s great,” I say.

What else is there to say? If we’re having children, I’m pleased. They say that having children can’t save a marriage but I’m sure that it can fill an awkward pause in the conversation. It feels like the last six months or so have been an awkward pause in the conversation. So we agree to do what any parents would’ve done: we take turns warming the eggs. One Friday evening, while listening to Messiaen, drinking white wine and reading a nostalgia book about Pages from Ceefax, I fertilise them. Biological process: it’s both a pleasure and an embarrassment.

Spring

When they’re born, it’s immediately obvious to me what we should call them. We call them Huey, Dewey and Louie after the trio of fictional anthropomorphic ducks who appear in animated cartoons and comic books published by the Walt Disney Corporation. The fourth, which seems weak and not long for the world, we call Emil Cioran and feed to the others. Of that which we cannot speak, etc.

Born punching and kicking, the triplets grow stronger and healthier. “You certainly look more robust than your mother and I,” I murmur, leaning over the cot, thinking of my asthma, her diabetes, SSRI prescriptions, fears of open spaces and seagulls, hypertension, anaemia. “What do you think this is, the Midwich Cuckoos?” After some discussion – Amanda’s half-Jewish and I’m Church of England; I went to Buddhist meditation classes for a year but there aren’t any Buddhist faith schools – we take them to City Life for baptism and enrolment in the Youth Church. It’s one way to keep them all busy for free on a Sunday. When the youth pastor says something inane about ducks to water, ducks get it?, Amanda gives him a Paddingtonesque hard stare.

Summer

We’re neither of us tidy people and this is not the house in which we’d planned to have children. From here, I can see the ironing board, the vacuum cleaner, TV, various book stacks, Amanda’s pile of birthday presents which still haven’t found homes, the settee and the clothes horse, plus fouled Advertisers, Tellytubby videos and bits of membranous shell. Oh, and Lego of course. Always Lego.

At City Life, the triplets are enjoying Youth Church. Huey doesn’t give much away but Dewey starts learning guitar and PowerPoint, and Louie tells Amanda that he’d like to take the Word of God to Iran. One Sunday, the pastor, a rugby-playing man named Geoff, tackles me about my reluctance to help Amanda decorate.

“What about the story of Mary and Martha?” I ask. Luke chapter ten. “Mary and Martha were sisters,” he replies, talking as if to a special needs child. A couple of weeks later, we decorate. I help. We make a playroom with pictures of Harry Potter, the Good Samaritan, Iris Murdoch, the Gruffalo and other luminaries on the walls. After selling a first edition of Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics – sshh! I won’t tell you how I came by it – I buy a second-hand Vauxhall Corsa.

Autumn

Though feeding is a struggle at first, we enjoy parenthood. As much a vocation as a mere fact, it lifts us. What a surprise! My will has chosen life, as previously-dumb Holly Hunter says in The Piano.

When the Health Visitor sees the triplets, their height and weight gains and developmental indices are off the dial. “What are you feeding these children?” she asks. What games do they like? Do they have friends to the house? What do they like to watch on television? A couple of days later, Children’s Services turn up. They seem bothered on two counts. First, they appear to have worked out or intuited what Huey, Dewey and Louie’s first meal was; second, they’ve observed that the triplets appear to be thriving in the midst of what looks like squalor and neglect. There’s no recipe for raising healthy kids, is there?

A few weeks later, I’m reading the triplets a bedtime story. Danny the Champion of the World. It’s early October and the wind is throwing handfuls of rain against the windows. When I finish, Dewey and Louie are already asleep and Huey asks me what he means.

“What do you mean by what, pickle?” I reply.

But what does he mean is what he means and it’s a fair question.

“Well, I think that there are essentially five different standpoints from which we can establish the terms of reference necessary for beginning to calibrate our response - and really we’d be investigating semantics, epistemology and, though it’s not really my field, post-Hegelian theories of time and history...”

“It’s alright Dad,” he says and then tells me that in the changing rooms at school he’s been teased for not having a belly button. It’s a shame we can’t protect them all the time. When Children’s Services return, they bring an expert from the Natural History Museum’s Palaeontology Department. They’ve accepted that the triplets ate their sibling: we’re just a different culture, that’s all. I mean, just - get over it, right? They do wonder aloud about whether City Life Church is right for us as a family but, on the whole, hooray for cultural relativism.

Winter

Getting ready for Christmas, I vacuum and clean the house for the first time in months. I even open a bottle of Windowlene (to clean with, not drink). There’s the usual nausea as I fetch the tree and decorations down from the loft – remembering the thing that happened with Uncle Nigel one December 27^th when I was about nine; that was weird, we never talk about it though. It was the same year I got Big Trak.

Western civilisation hasn’t failed yet and there are still goods in the shops, so we drive down to Toys R Us and get the triplets an Xbox 360 and an electrical set. I had one of those when I was little. We buy silly putty and various other pocket money toys. We buy Louie a camera and Dewey the new England away strip. In Waterstone’s, we get Huey Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (we ordered it; they didn’t have it in) together with a good edition of the Tractatus. That’s my boy. (“Isn’t that a bit hard?” asks Amanda. It’s what he asked for, I reply. And it’s the easier translation).

On Christmas morning, the triplets show some properly childlike enthusiasm while opening their presents and then we have a cooked breakfast. My favourite thing about Christmas used to be Radio Three on Christmas mornings but this year I’m enjoying my fine sons, even if they’re developing nictitating membranes, asking if girls can stay over, and looking forward to moving out. Huey cries off attending church because of Anselm and an alleged lack of fit between God’s status as the ground of all being and his evident world-historical partiality in Scripture. “I want to stay and finish Splinter Cell,” says Dewey. Sorry, I reply; that doesn’t qualify as a conscientious objection. “That so takes the mick,” he says. True, but there must be some bulwarks against chaos. In the second week of January, a good clutch of GCSE results are posted online; heavens, but this is all going by quickly.

Spring

I struggle to believe it but a year after they’ve hatched, they leave. Dewey’s talked himself into a job with Activision in the States, Louie’s a student psychiatric nurse and Huey’s a security guard at a cosmetics firm’s experimental kitten farm. He emails regularly in his favourite font (JAF Bernini Sans) about his workout regime, libertarianism, global power politics and Ayn Rand.

It’s been a busy year. Birth, childhood, adolescence, exams and all of a sudden the whole ‘empty nest’ thing. Also, we re-organised the shoe cupboard; we found a hedgehog in the back garden; ferry disaster off Brittany; UKIP surge; Elizabeth II died; I started to get junk mail from the Sunday Times Wine Club and, mein Gott, an invitation to join the University of the Third Age.

I look at Amanda a little differently now that she’s the mother of our three children as well as my wife. These days, we hold hands in restaurants as though we’re young and newly in love (even more careful about what we eat though; don’t want to be up half the night). Although I enjoy her company more than ever, I miss our young children. I miss our car journeys out past the level crossing at Shawford and into town to visit the bowling alley, Café Anomalos or Funky Jack’s Play Shack. I even miss the night feeds: looking out into the darkness, I picture myself in the rocking chair at 3:00 a.m. or so, watching the Parliament Channel or Turner Classic Movies and regurgitating vegetarian kosher ready meals into three feathered eager throats.

a seasonal tribute to Prince Phillip

Happy International Day of Aviation and Cosmonautics, comrades! Has it really been sixty years since Yuri Gagarin took that first flight?

With the recent death of the Queen’s Consort in mind, and seeing the real Prince Philip (may he rest in peace) through the lens of Matt ‘Eleventh Doctor’ Smith’s portrayal of him in The Crown, this feels like a good day for thinking about lost futures, counterfactuals and might-have-beens. (When is it a bad day for thinking about such?).

Specifically, I’m imagining a lost future in which Britain is a little less bankrupt than it was following the Second World War, in which the purported ‘New Elizabethan Age’ (read Peter Hennessy's 'Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s', children) contains a higher ratio of real gold to tinsel, and in which it's the young Prince Philip (who was, after all, a pilot) who becomes the world’s first spacefaring human. The book cover would, of course, depict the Prince in heroic, stylised terms according to the then-extant dictates of Monarchist Realism.

I won’t be writing this short novel personally – lack of time, not really my politics. But as books go, it would be fun to read, so if anyone else wants to have a try...

----------------------

"You Americans have always been a bit conservative about space flight, and didn’t take it seriously until several years after us.” – Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Prelude to Space’ (1947), a near-future ‘hard SF’ novel in which the world’s first manned lunar mission is put together by Britain and its Commonwealth, launching from the Australian desert.

Position statement: this left-libertarian culture blog sees human beings as ineffably complex creatures. Therefore, while strong value judgements will from time to time be made, no truck will be had with notions that the Prince was 'just' some horrible old racist, that Sir Kier Starmer is 'just' some sell-out melt or that Jeremy Corbyn is 'just' some kindly, harmless old grandfather etc etc. Save that for #SocialistSunday twitter, or for pub talk! Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, that's the watchword my friends.

twenty twenty all over again, yeah like you even wanted that

This year, I attended Punctunation (an online science fiction convention).

This is what attendees said they’d been doing during this pandemic year. (There was a 'Staying Sane in the Apocalypse' panel). I guess it’s okay to share this, it’s anonymised:

Watching ‘The Walking Dead’ was me. Yep, all ten seasons. (Why watch a zombie apocalypse series during a pandemic? Aristotle's 'pity and fear', I guess. Hershel Greene's one of the more strikingly sympathetic portrayals of Christian faith in recent film or TV: this interested me. And, y'know, Michonne, blood, death, zombies and that). This year I again signally failed to learn either Polish or Bulgarian (пепелник = ashtray though), or to learn more French. Perhaps as chances to travel open up again, I’ll feel more motivated to do it (“do or not do, there is no try”). 

Long walks with a short dog was me as well; lucky/blessed to live in such beautiful, relatively uncrowded surroundings; got to know them better.

Okay, I did order the Bulgarian language course, began it, watched a couple of Bulgarian-language movies (subtitled) to begin to get the gist. One was ‘The Boy Who Was A King’, which tells the story of Simeon Saxe-Coburg Gotha, who ascended the Bulgarian throne at the age of six during World War Two, only to be deposed and forced into exile by Communists three years later. There’s some lovely archive footage of both the royal household and the wider social and political context in this, plus it’s an affectionate observational film about both the country and the pleasant-seeming, almost nondescript elderly chap who was once its King (and, later, subsequently, its elected Premier, a turn of events unique in the post-Soviet world; he's also the only living person to have borne the title ‘Tsar’). So, talking of learning the language, I now know that the Bulgarian transliteration ‘Saxe-Coburg Gotha’ is ‘Saxe-Coburg Gotski’ – just as the English transliteration is, of course, ‘Windsor’.  

This year, I watched some other films.

I’m not going to write twenty-seven word reviews for each of them because, well, that water's flowed under the bridge. Also, some I watched in connection with a virtual film club I started at work during lockdown, where we watch ‘coming of age’ movies together and reflect on them as adults who work educationally or therapeutically with teenagers. Others I watched in order to have covered the same cinematic ground as Thomas Wolman, author of The Erotic Screen: Desire, Addiction and Perversity in Cinema: I’ve reviewed his book (under my real name) for one of the UK’s counselling/ psychotherapy journals – and book reviewing for therapy journals is a new angle, a way to encounter new thinking within one’s professional field and to have to order one’s thoughts about that new thinking, plus I enjoy receiving Free Stuff by post

Other films I’ve watched run thematically. There were the feel-good, heart-in-the-right-place-politically films – Brassed Off, Pride. There were films of which my daughter might say to a friend, "yeah it was great, all the middle-aged British actresses were in it", like Calendar Girls. There are the films watched during First Lockdown, which also affirm the importance of family, or community – Good Bye Lenin! (I’d remembered this as a sort of Ostalgie-flavoured counterweight to The Lives of Others - actually, it was made first; my memory's rubbish - but on a second watch it's more clearsighted, less celebratory about the DDR than that; national lies beget family lies), About Time, The Straight Story, Heavy Load. (Do obtain and watch Heavy Load - meaning the 2008 film of that name about a punk band whose members have learning difficulties, not the short 1975 Danish feature film about the truck driver whose enthusiastic sexual appetite somewhat impairs his work ethic - thanks for that, IMDb). Then there the films watched during Second Lockdown, which provide a quick hit of the live music/ festival experience that the past year has so conspicuously lacked – Yesterday, Spinal Tap, Still Crazy. (Haven’t yet watched Woodstock for, what?, the seventh time… but I’ve been forever just about to), followed by both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogies over Christmas and New Year. Last but not least, there have been films which fit the category of oddball indie romantic comedy with consciously retro detailing set in New Zealand – Eagle Vs Shark, for instance. Come to think of it, there’s one film in this latter category: it’s Eagle Vs Shark. 

This year, I read some non-fiction.

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Fame’s corrupted Peterson as the Ring in Tolkein corrupts its bearers. While some observations in this are cheap and a bit tawdry, others correct prevalent fuzzy thinking.

(Possibly Maps of Meaning was good. Let me get back to you on that).

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything.   Klein, a gifted storyteller of true stories, explains ‘extractive’ mindsets past and present, the war for public opinion, and how to prosecute the intensifying struggle for liveable futures.

Douglas Gillette & Robert Moore, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.    Everyone who can read and who’s ever attended a Men’s Group has read this. I read it again during a camping holiday in North Yorkshire, journaling extensively.*

(*but not neglecting opportunities for family time and good fellowship in so doing; what kind of a human does that? Okay, a fallible one: true. I don’t always sleep well, let’s say. Have Kindle Reading Light, Will Travel. And some of what I wrote down was stuff I wanted to share with my son and then did, so there’s that).

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense. This – from admirably versatile author who’s also covered ‘British boffins’, Krushchevite thaw- contains the most vivid (persuasive?) explanation I’ve yet read of what ‘sin’ means to a Christian.

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.  Interesting, careful, sensitive work from this increasingly concerned veteran explorer (since before there were home computers, almost) of the social psychology of the human-machine interface.

Chris Harman, People’s History of the World. Ambitious; flawed. When Harman narrates primitive communism, dawn of agriculture, writing etc, he sounds fascinating, well-informed. When he speaks of Catholicism and Protestantism as “religions”: tone-deaf, under-researched.

 

Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. Two axes (scarcity versus abundance; egalitarianism versus hierarchy) yield four possible futures (communism, rentism, socialism, exterminism); too simple, perhaps, but an interesting model to think with. 

Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart: How The World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundations for Socialism. Firms like Walmart and Amazon are, essentially, monopolies; “any firm’s a planned economy on the inside” (and when Ayn Rand fandom pretends otherwise, Sears-like disasters may unfold).         

Speaking of libertarian disaster movie scenarios, do read ‘The Town That Went Feral’.   

The graph above - which starts from Peter Frase's work - is by Shalev Moran, game designer, curator and artist based in Copenhagen; it was accessed at this site. See also Speculative Tourism.

Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. This ‘memoir of ideas’ by pioneering sociologist, political theorist, and editor of the NLR is both emotionally involving and thought-provoking, especially about British and diasporic identity formation. 

(It’s what Stuart Hall says of his friend and former mentor E.P. Thompson, best known for ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ – his remarks for warm, considered, appraising, and in some measure distancing – that’s particularly got me thinking. There’s, on the one hand, a ‘left’ version of 'our island story' – Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson help tell it – which, at best, can motivate and inspire but, at worst, will tend to mystify the concept of ‘nation’ as much as 1066-and-all-that ‘King and Country’ stories do; there are, on the other hand, readings of history which make more space for the plural, compound, shiftng identities that many of us live in, for, and with. Hmmm).

Hunter Davies, The Other Half: Ten Candid Insights into the Lives of Britain’s New Poor and New Rich.  Ten intriguing, naturalistically-rendered ‘slices of life’ from the Beatles biographer and journalist; companion volume to every kitchen sink drama you’ve ever watched. Relatable: I’m part-curate, part-“N.S.P.C.C. Inspector."

James Riley, The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties. Fascinating linked series of explorations into the 1960s darker, more apocalyptic aspects: ‘Poetry Incarnation’ and after, bad drugs, Altamont, Satanism and occultism, armed antinomianism, flights from reason.

David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse). Some of this is filler, much of it’s a workable guidebook to the American 1970s told from a conservative though sane (Frum’s a Never-Trumper) point of view.

Vivian Gornick,   Fierce Attachments. A portrait of the artist; the growth of one Jewish- American socialist-feminist poet’s mind; a meditation on belonging; an extended love (/hate) letter to the author’s mother. 

Vivian Gornick,  The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir. A sort-of sequel; a love letter to friendship and to New York City which proves so inexhaustible (being also every city: Dickensian London, Baudelaire’s Paris) that one never leaves.*

*and she still lives there in her mid-eighties... so we look forward to her NYC-during-the-pandemic memoir, should she choose to write one.

Vivian Gornick,  The Romance of American Communism.  Recently republished by Verso, this 1970s autoethnographic landmark works outward from her own ‘red diaper baby’ experiences to encompass the lived experience of CPUSA activism more generally.

Francis Wheen, The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg: Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Outlaw.  A biography of this strange, talented, capricious, sometimes cruel character - Edith Sitwell, Lord Beaverbrook, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Bevin, Mick Jagger and the Krays all feature.

Humphrey Carpenter, Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop. Ended up not so much reading this, as looking up ‘women priests’, ‘Thatcher’, ‘gay clergy’, ‘Crockfords preface affair’ and ‘Miners’ Strike’ in the index. It’s how I roll.

This year, I read some mainstream fiction.

Sally Rooney, Normal People. Colleagues were talking about this. I found it readable, pacey; as far as contemporary, ‘realist’ novels go, though, I preferred ‘The Slap’ and ‘Left of the Bang’.

Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist. The characters in this tense, tightly-plotted novel stick in my mind, as does the ultra-left (pro-IRA) London milieu and the ending. Time to try ‘The Golden Notebook’ again..?

This year, I read some genre fiction. 

Mack Reynolds, ‘Earth Unaware’ (or ‘Of Godlike Power’).  Mack was a prolific American-as-they-come pulp fiction writer, first of detective stories, latterly of SF; he was also a sincere communist, or something close (a one-time regional organiser for the Socialist Labor Party before the writing bug bit him). This has been an important novel for me since plucking a copy out of the bargain bin in John Menzies during my mid-teens; I talked about it in the 'Your Favourite Book That No-One Has Heard Of’ panel at Punctuation, and have written an article about it which may see print in Banana Wings soon. 

(Other panellists chose Peter Martin’s Summer in 3000, Steve Aylett’s Lint, Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Martin Booth’s Adrift In The Oceans of Mercy, a book whose title I forget to write down by George MacDonald, Martine Leavitt’s The Doll Mage, and The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, written at the age of seventeen by Jane Webb who was roughly a contemporary of Mary Shelley’s).

William Morris, News from Nowhere. Honestly? “Stick to curtain designs, Will; this is kitsch.” Interesting… but too much know-it-all lecturing from over-cheerful authorial viewpoint character; worldbuilding ‘too good to be true’. Didn’t finish.

Michael Moorcock, The Dancers At The End of Time Trilogy. Post-scarcity anarchist utopia proves remarkably readable for seventy pages; then plot happens as time traveller Mrs Amelia Underwood teaches Jherek about sin. An early 1970s genre masterpiece. 

Ursula LeGuin, The Word for World Is Forest. This Vietnam War allegory may remind you of (it prefigures) Avatar – though it’s uncomfortably better than that because more nuanced about imperialist motives. [“Are we the baddies?”]

Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven. This parallel-worlds novel’s both a glum-making reminder that we knew about ‘all this’ [gestures at climate] fifty years ago and a sustained meditation upon power-over versus power-with: recommended.

James Herbert, The Rats. This one’s about ‘late postwar [consensus] London’, as much as it’s about mutant feral rats devouring people. I shall doubtless have more to say about both aspects presently.

Tim Maughan, Infinite Detail. This near-future dystopia, in which a massive DDOS-attack's destroyed the planetary internet, leading to worldwide socioeconomic collapse, left me curiously hopeful. Maybe it was the Bristolian trip-hop. 

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire. This is both reminiscent of, and better than, Asimov's Foundation; the world has more texture, etymology, interacting high and low cultures of both imperial and 'barbarian' peoples.

--------------------

This year, I spent time on Zoom, and too much time following the continuing twists and turns of the Brexit story (see ‘Two Cheers for the EU’, ‘Boris Johnson's End of the Pier Show’).

This year, I didn’t fly.

And in other news…

there’s apparently a habitable zone in the cloud decks of Venus; phosphine, a possible bio-marker, has been detected there - remember this in the news during September? Dr David Clements, who worked on this project with Dr Jane Greaves, talked us through it at Punctuation; see also this Cardiff University explainer.