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Blog Post
May 05, 2023
There’s something just perfectly British about having local elections just 48 hours before an obscenely wealthy 70-something puts on a hat made from plundered jewels, sits on an ancient bit of granite and becomes King. The local elections are just about as pure a form of democracy as possible, in wh...
Blog Post
April 28, 2023
Earlier this week, my sister sent a message to the family chat which just read “Harry Belafonte”. At first, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have passed away (surely, he was immortal?), and I just assumed she was randomly thinking about what a genius and a brilliant man he was, so I responded ...
Blog Post
April 21, 2023
John Mortimer’s third autobiography (he was very long-lived; after each one he found he went through a lot of unexpected life, hence the trilogy) opens with the reflection that the marker of elderliness is the moment you realise you cannot put on your own socks. I think the Rubicon of middle-age is ...
Blog Post
April 14, 2023
I’ve been away for the last couple of Fridays, so this week there is an absolute mass of material to get through this week. I’ve been brutal in editing it down: there are probably ten times as many interesting bits of esoteric statistics, development economics and political commentary from the last ...
Blog Post
March 24, 2023
This week’s edition of The Chronicles of Unpacking is entitled “How much of my lifetime income was spent on all of these books, and why are there never enough shelves?” We’ve been unboxing books over the last four days, and we’re almost finished, but ran out of shelf space some time ago—a few are st...
Blog Post
March 20, 2023
The UK's Energy Price Guarantee increased CO2 emissions by 3.2 million tonnes over the period October 2022-April 2023—double the achievements of UK climate mitigation aid over the same period, which we estimate at a reduction of just 1.6 million tonnes of CO2, demonstrating that when it is expedient...