Vandalism, voting problems, misogynists, centenarians and the NFT bubble

30 September 2023

As all Robin Hood / Kevin Costner fans will know, the most famous section of Hadrian’s Wall is known as sycamore gap, famously visited by Costner and Morgan Freeman on their way from Dover to the Buckinghamshire version of Sherwood Forest (no, me neither) in the film Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.

Until a couple of days ago, a mature, lone sycamore tree thought to be some 300 years old stood by a dip in the wall and attracted a surprising number of visitors every year to the area (including a couple of teenagers and me some years ago). Last week, it was cut down with chainsaw by somebody who didn’t know enough about tree-felling to get it to fall away from the wall rather than on top of it. The police now have 16-year old boy in custody for questioning.

What a sad and utterly pointless act of vandalism. More to the point, what is it in his upbringing that caused him (and others committing similar crimes) to carry out such wanton destruction?

Perhaps it’s part of Rishi Sunak’s plan to row back on his commitment to reduce carbon emissions by felling trees instead of planting them, along with preferring deep sea oil wells to power generated from offshore windfarms. The latter failure was confirmed when a recent auction of contracts to supply ‘clean’ energy from windfarms for 15 years at a fixed price was shunned by all potential bidders because they thought the set price was too low for them to make a profit. The future of the planet 0, capitalism 10.

Sunak has also recently said that the costs of HS2 are going to rigorously reassessed and has repeatedly refused to deny that the extension to Manchester may be axed. This would be less surprising if it hadn’t all come to light immediately before the Conservative party conference that’s being held in … Manchester. You would have thought Sunak he might have anticipated a reaction.

Many of the original proposals have already been scrapped although phase 2a, from Manchester to Crewe is enshrined in law but, with a possible change of government on the horizon, even this extension is far from guaranteed. It’s almost as if Sunak has given up and is intentionally throwing away the next election so Labour will have to turn off the fan and scrape Tory shit off the walls while the Tories can blame them for the mess.

On which subject, my greatest worry is that the opposition parties will split the anti-Conservative vote and let the buggers back in again. Why don’t all the non-Tory parties negotiate the principles of a power-sharing coalition and agree, constituency by constituency, which of them has the best chance of beating the Tory candidate and then leave just the chosen one to do all the canvassing and hustings. The others needn’t betray their principles by voting against their party – they could just fail to vote.

Perhaps this would open the door to a proportional representation electoral system by showing the value of a balanced parliament? All we have to do is to cure the people who think MPs are important people rather than just voices for their constituencies …

There is good news on the political front now that GB News has suspended Dan Wootton and Laurence Fox for misogynistic comments were made on Wootton’s show. (Wootton has also been fired by MailOnline where he had been a columnist.)

What’s the problem? Two old men well past their prime ignoring some perfectly valid comments made by the political journalist Ava Evans about men’s mental health and instead discussing whether they’d want to “shag” her, like two workmen in a hole in the road saying “I wouldn’t mind getting my leg over that” as a pair of female legs walks past them. All perfectly natural for that sort of man. Except there’s only a very fine line between men who think like this and rapists.

This inevitably reminds me that the next president of the United States could be a man who a court has judged to be a rapist, and has been fined about $5m after being found guilty of defamation and sexual abuse, and is now facing a second defamation trial over his comments after the first one.

And, in a civil lawsuit, Donald Trump has been found to have committed fraud for a decade by inflating the value of his assets and lying about his net worth while building up his business. He’s also previously been fined $110,000 for failing to comply with Court deadlines; and he still faces 91 criminal charges under four indictments, for hush-money payments to an adult movie star, illegal retention of classified information, and election subversion at the federal and state levels.

Happier news is that, earlier this month, the Office for National Statistics released some figures from the 2021 census results on the longevity of people in England and Wales. The local authority area with the highest number of centenarians was East Devon, with 64 of every 100,000 people living to be 100, closely followed by Arun with 59, and New Forest with 57 and, of the top 10, nine were in coastal areas in the south of England. North / south divide – pah!

As you would expect from the fact that women’s life expectancy is greater than men’s, more centenarians are female so were more likely to be widowed (86.7%) compared with men (70.4%).

Overall, the UK as the 9^th country for the number of centenarians, with Japan coming top with 106 of them per 100,000 population.

Another interesting survey made the news this week: the website deppGambl has “scoured the web to bring you the most up-to-date, unbiased and reliable information, following a set of strict rating guidelines when reviewing crypto gambling sites, crypto games and other crypto projects.” One of its more recent findings is that 95% of the 73,000 non-fungible tokens studied are now of “no practical use or value”. Despite the disinclination of those of use who prefer investments we can funge, the NFT market peaked at $22bn two years ago and I’d guess some of the few people who gained from the collapse were the owners of deppGambl.

Billionaires, house prices, NHS, carers and a beauty tip

15 April 2023

Some billionaires are apparently getting irritated when they’re called “billionaires” and Jay-Z, the rapper and businessman, has said “they started inventing words like ‘capitalist’ and things like that”. If he actually believes ‘capitalist’ was invented to insult billionaires, there’s proof you don’t have to be clever to make money.

Elon Musk provided further evidence this week in an interview with the BBC’s James Clayton. Musk had asked Twitterers if he should stand down as its CEO and they said yes, he should. When asked about this by Clayton, Musk said “I did stand down, I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter.”

Even back in 2019, before Russia’s war on Ukraine and covid had made even more billionaires, the former Starbuck CEO Howard Schultz thought the word was “unfair” and wanted people to call them ‘people of means’ or ‘people of wealth’. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that, if they shared their wealth with those who need it, they could avoid the entire problem. After all, who can possibly ‘need’ a billion?

Darren Woods might be one. As CEO of Exxon, he’s just raked in nearly £29m, 52% more than the previous year, because Russia’s war on Ukraine increased oil prices. The company confirmed the war had “delivered exceptional business results” for the company under Woods’ leadership. Talk about damning with faint praise.

Our local newspaper reported that new census figures show the number of empty homes hereabouts has risen in the last decade. We have a lot of ghost villages where a large proportion of the houses are used as holiday homes by people who honour us with their presence and large bags of shopping from Islington’s Sainsburys from time to time. All of which means that local shops, post offices, pubs and other facilities lose the business they used to get from residents and are forced to close.

Meanwhile the Institute of Public Policy Research said that the shortage of homes has led to increases in rent, as if there were some sort of connection. Surely if I’ve bought a property and want a return of x% on what I paid for it, I fix the rent to give me that and don’t need to increase the rent as windfall gains increase the property’s value?

The NHS 111 helpline is a great headline for politicians but (spoiler alert) it’s underfunded. Analysis by the House of Commons library, commissioned by the Liberal Democrats, has shown that more than 10,000 calls to the helpline were abandoned every day in 2022 because people got fed up with hanging on. And, after seven years’ training, junior doctors get £14 an hour. After rather less training, our gardener gets £22 an hour.

People who think being rich is important are now running private care companies because the state doesn’t support older people needing care. Let’s face it, they know for 90 years exactly when somebody is going to be 90 and likely to need extra care, and the chances they will live to be 90. But it’s expensive and no government of any colour seems willing to start funding so carers’ savings have to be transferred to privateers.

To make my bias clear, I must declare a personal interest here: today is the 10^th anniversary of my wife’s stroke. We pay for a carer to come in for ¾ hour every morning to help me get her up and I do everything else.

The NHS does provide very good short-term emergency support but not ongoing care so we have to use a private agency and, from the £30 they charge us for that 45 minutes, £10 goes straight into the owners’ pockets. The same sort of money goes to the owners of residential homes for respite care and I’m now looking for a good residential home run by a charity so at least the money goes back into the service.

During normal lives, private healthcare is a choice (for some people), not a necessity. If you are suddenly disabled by, say, a stroke, there is no choice and you have to pay through the nose.

We’re lucky because we can afford it, at least while we’ve still got some savings left, but what about the families who can’t? Let’s nationalise all homecare and residential care companies and feed profits back into the service.

Suella Braverman’s racism has finally been called out by the Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi who said on Thursday “Whether this consistent use of racist rhetoric is strategy or incompetence, however, doesn’t matter. Both show she is not fit to hold high office.”

For obvious reasons, white Tory grandees had been reluctant to accuse Braverman of racism but, once Warsi had opened the door, it became clear how many friends Braverman hasn’t got.

And here’s a beauty tip from the model Bella Hadid: “If you remove eyebrowswith something like a razor, the rumours are true – it’s really unlikely that they will fully grow back.” Ho yerss? Doesn’t work on my chin.

Ship of Fools, taxing the unwise, social care in the UK

28 January 2023

Plato forecast the decay of our government almost 2,500 years ago. The captain of the 2023 ship of fools has the telescope to his blind eye and says he can’t see any ships (his two predecessors were forced to walk the plank), the first mate is facing about 25 charges of bullying from the crew, the navigator learnt his trade on a small pool of K₉P, the bursar has run out of money but refuses to ask the owners for more, the sailmaker had given millions to his grandmother’s knitting circle for sails that can’t be used, the surgeon can’t afford to stay warm, the quartermaster spent so long fiddling the books that he didn’t get enough food for the voyage, the serjeant at arms spends her time repelling boarders who are bringing them more provisions, and the lookout in the crow’s nest is on strike.

Every week I promise myself I’m not going to mutter about politics and every week some politician does something irresistibly stupid or is caught not evading taxes. In this case, a tax expert talking about the various levels of penalty said that, basically, if someone’s made an honest mistake, HMRC impose no penalty and they just have to pay the extra tax due; if they’ve “made an error” and been negligent and/or careless, the penalty can be anything up to 30%, if they’ve been wilfully dishonest, the penalty can be between 30% and 200%. Guess who only just scraped into the negligent / careless penalty.

Then Jacob Rees-Mogg wrote about Brexit in the Daily Mail and said “The moment of national renewal has come. We can embark on this new age with confidence and excitement. Over two millenniums since mighty Augustus quelled the unrest and strife in ancient Rome …” Hang on a minute. ‘Millenniums’? Surely he knows that should be ‘millennia’, or was he making allowances for people who read the Daily Mail?

Anyway, enough of politics, sort of.

Governments have known since we were born exactly when we were going to retire but did that lead anybody to save enough money to pay our state pensions 65 years (and many governments of all colours) later? Not entirely; so they delayed retirement ages to take a few years’ pension from everyone. In the financial field, this would be called a Ponzi scheme, using today’s investors to reward yesterday’s investors, leaving no money to pay back today’s investors unless they can attract more new investors (or, as the government prefers to call them, taxpayers).

The biggest problem now facing the government is the increasing number of older people needing care. This too has been predictable from when people were born and could have been adjusted for demographic changes and medical advances as necessary. Unfortunately, for the last 13 years, those in charge have believed money is more important than people and the visible result of their financial mismanagement is the frighteningly increased gap between the obscenely rich and the desperately poor.

But the rich can spend huge sums on private medical treatment and care, and if the poor have to sell their electric fire to get enough money to buy food, tough, they should have worked harder.

About 80% of care homes are run by private companies whose prime raison d’être is to make the owners and directors richer by underpaying staff and overcharging residents.

No wonder care homes currently have more than 165,000 vacancies and are so short-staffed that many have been downgraded by the Care Quality Commission from ‘good’ when they were last inspected to ‘needs improvement’ as their standards have declined in the last few years.

One random example publicised recently, almost certainly neither the best or the worst, is Runwood Homes which claims to be “a family-led, residential care, dementia care and nursing care provider with over 62 beautiful homes and day centres to choose from. We pride ourselves on delivering innovative, personalised care with a real emphasis on celebrating the lives of each and every one of our residents” etc etc. The firm is owned by Gordon Sanders who has taken at least £21m out of the company (i.e. from his staff and residents) in the last 5 years despite inspectors finding multiple rule breaches in his firm’s homes.

As a carer myself, I know that a professional carer down here is paid slightly more than the minimum wage but gets only a small proportion of the £10,000 a year the business charges us for 45 minutes a day, and full-time care in a residential home can easily cost £100,000 a year.

Our firm’s owners, William and Sara Flint, trade in Devon as Bluebird Care and their company’s wealth increased by £666,000 (Aleister Crowley might have had something to say about this number) in the two years to March 2022. This is in addition to anything they paid themselves as directors (which isn’t publicly available) and they borrow money from the company so it isn’t taxable as income.

They therefore keep almost 30 times as much money for themselves as the average (full-time-equivalent) pay they allow their carers. And the owners don’t even work full-time so the multiple is actually even greater.

The archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, has called for checks on “unscrupulous people making profit inappropriately from social care” and the archbishops’ convention has called for taxes rises to fund a new NHS-style universal social care system that would cost an extra £15bn a year.

Sir Rod Steward, formerly a devoted Conservative, has offered (in a live programme on Sky News) to pay for some of the people waiting for hospital scans and said “I personally have been a Tory for a long time but I think this government should stand down now and give the Labour party a go at it, because this is heartbreaking for the nurses.”

I’m now drafting a letter: “Dear Rod, well done, could you now look at how the Tories are failing the 900,000 people needing care?”

Good news / bad news, Wills, assisted dying and social care

31 December 2022

‘Life good in Ashby de la Zouche’ doesn’t sell papers. ‘Attractive young woman shot dead in club’ does.

This we all know, but why? Is it that we take ‘good’ news for granted so it’s boring? Or do we get some sort of voyeuristic pleasure from hearing that something bad happened somewhere we weren’t? Perhaps there’s an element of “There but for the grace of God go I” (a phrase whose origin is attributed to an early 16^th century Christian preacher when he saw a bunch of condemned people being escorted to the scaffold to which he was later taken himself).

But why does the UK still edit films of killings and accidents? We seem happy to watch films in which ‘deaths’ are shown in graphic detail, heads exploding or people bleeding slowly to death (thank you for that one Quentin Tarantino) but we know they’re actors and special effects. In real life, film of somebody being shot or knifed in the street is always stopped just before the end so we don’t see any ‘real’ person’s death.

This might be because of a wish to spare the dead person’s family and friends from seeing the actual moment of death, but I can remember seeing a copy of Paris Match from the 1960s which included a photograph of a plane crash, showing the smoking wreckage and the roofless cabin with burnt bodies still strapped into their seats.

We all tend to say “If I die, I’d like …” while the one thing we know for certain is we are all going to die so we should say “When I die, I’d like …”, and yet we’re still curiously reticent when it comes to talking about death.

Many of us also seem to be superstitious about – or just keep putting off – writing a Will, thus risking leaving our partners and families and friends in a labyrinth of paperwork and bureaucracy at a time when they’re trying to cope with their grief. (So if you haven’t yet written a Will, go and do it NOW and remember it’s Very Important to follow the exact rules; solicitors and charities will often help do this free.)

But what about dying? We’re not all lucky enough to die in our sleep and there are some nasty diseases and conditions that kill us slowly and painfully over a long time. If this happens to me, I’d want to be allowed to make a choice over when I die, preferably before the pain becomes so bad that palliative drugs can only reduce it by sending me to sleep.

My first blog in this series, posted on 19 August 2018, explains why I am committed to the principle that ‘assisted dying’ should be legal in the UK. Fans of Emmerdale will also have followed Faith Dingle’s struggles with what to do when the pain of her terminal breast cancer became unbearable. (Spoiler alert: she died in October.)

The Netherlands already has a much more enlightened approach to letting people die in comfort and with their family; in Switzerland, Dignitas apparently charges £10,000 and the Australian state of Victoria passed assisted dying legislation in November 2017. Closer to home, France will hold a national debate with a view to legalising assisted dying in 2023, a Bill is moving forward in Scotland, Jersey launched the second part of its consultation in October, an Isle of Man MHK has been given leave to introduce a private members bill on assisted dying in the House of Keys in May 2023 and the Irish parliament is launching a special committee to consider the subject after a poll showed 63% of people in the Republic supported the idea.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the powers that be are miles behind and can’t even get their heads round the problems of social care. The result is inevitably that the bulk of the support comes from privately-owned companies whose owners are more interested in getting rich than in the service they claim to offer to the UK’s 1 million dementia patients – and all the others who need care – charging their ‘customers’ an average of £75,000 to £100,000 each per year for residential care. However, we have to remember that these owners are perfect examples of capitalist entrepreneurs worshipped by free-market Conservatives so the present government is understandably cautious about offending potential donors.

Luckily for these entrepreneurs, dementia patients tend not to know there’s anything wrong with them and can’t remember who did what to them so victims of abuse can’t testify against them. I have a feeling it’s worse for people watching someone develop dementia, seeing the person they knew and loved slowly drifting away and dissolving, leaving only a shell.

The care homes regulating body, the Care Quality Commission, has reported that more than three times as many care homes in England were given the worst possible rating in 2022 as were in 2019. Their latest report also showed some homes to be filthy and unhygienic, that medicines weren’t properly administered, that patients had unexplained bruising and injuries, and family visits were restricted.

In addition to delaying the dementia strategy it promised in May to deliver by the end of the year, the government has also postponed its promised funding reform to “fix social care”.

As a carer myself, I know just how exhausting it can be, both physically and emotionally. We pay a private company some £10,000 a year for ¾ hour of help every morning and the best part of £2,000 for a week’s respite care every so often. When our savings expire, we’ll be broke and on benefits.

In the meantime, the company’s balance sheet shows that it (i.e. the husband and wife who own it and are the only directors) increased in value by £236,000 in the year to March 2022 and by £430,000 in the previous year. (The accounts don’t say how much extra, if anything, they paid themselves as directors.) If the service had been provided by the government, that’s an extra £666,000 it could have used to improve and increase care services just in our small local area. Isn’t 666 the number of the beast?

Still, this is traditionally the time we look back to last year so I’ll limit myself to the good things because I’m getting short of space.

Ummm.

Women showed that football can be interesting and players don’t have to be failed thespians.

That’s about it really so a happier new year to all of you who are starting a new year tomorrow.

PS: A friend has criticised me for saying last week that we gave away our winter heating credits, a perfectly fair criticism of something which could be seen as an attempt to impress people rather than trying to encourage more giving. In fact, I gave a lot of thought to this before leaving it in because I had been inspired by a real person (Joan Bakewell in case you’re interested) saying several years ago that she always gave hers away and I thought that, if she did it, then so could I. And, if somebody read this and thought here’s somebody I know who’s doing it, maybe I could. Nevertheless, I apologise unreservedly to anybody who found it distasteful and an attempt to brag – it’s not a competition.

Failing memories, words and swearing

5 November 2022

Losing a word when I was in my 30s wasn’t a big deal, I’d just stop and say “you know … what’s the word? … begins with a P”. And, some hours later, I’d be ironing a shirt and I’d say “pernicious, that was it”.

As I’ve grown older and stopped ironing shirts and still lose words, I inevitably wonder if this is the beginning of the end and am comforted only by the facts that I’ve always done it and I’m still learning new words (we have a new friend who also likes words so we swap exciting discoveries, my latest being bruxism which luckily isn’t something I suffer from).

I’ve always loved words and regular readers will have noticed that I occasionally make up words because I think they sound a bit different from the obvious one. For example, I recently made up the word ‘coronated’ for fun because it was so obviously wrong. At least, I thought I’d made it up but, a few weeks later, one of the weekend newspaper pedants complained that it was being used quite widely by people who should have known the word ‘crowned’.

(There is actually one word which is filed in an ambitiously inaccessible part of my mind: ‘eponymous’. Obviously I know the word but it’s surprising how often I can’t think of it when I want it.)

My own pet peeves at the moment are the increasing use of ‘likely’ instead of ‘probable’ and using the wrong preposition, as do people who say they’re bored OF something.

But. (There has to be a ‘but’ and not just one that leads to a rant about starting sentences with conjunctions.) I love the English language’s willingness to incorporate new words, to extend the meanings of old words and to distort ‘proper’ grammatical constructions for effect

For example, I like “Never an hour goes by without I think of her” because it’s less predictable than “Never an hour goes by without my thinking of her”.

I’m also quite tolerant of spelling mistakes, especially in emails when one’s typing speed overtakes the need for textbook language (and emails get less editing than these mutterings). Indeed, spelling can be irrelevant:

“Aoccdrnig to a rsceearh pjrocet at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it denos’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat lteerts are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ttaol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

I asked a friend who is a specialist in ageing if people with larger vocabularies were less likely or slower to suffer from age-related dementia but she said she didn’t think it worked like that.

Scientists at Cambridge’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences have discovered that it may be possible to spot signs of dementia as early as nine years before patients it is diagnosed. Their project collected background information from different tests, including problem solving, memory, remembering lists of numbers, reaction times and grip strength, as well as data on weight loss and gain and on the number of falls experienced. Subjects were then assessed again after five and nine years.

The results showed that the people who remained healthy had done better in the tests than those who went on to develop Alzheimer’s who were also more likely to have had a fall in the previous 12 months.

As someone who shops from a list and will forget to get anything not on the list, however important it is, I wonder if I’m heading that way. My problem is compounded when I can remember I’ve got three things to do but can only remember two of them.

However, I take comfort from Professor Bruno Dubois, Director of the Institute of Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease (IMMA) at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, who has said that “if you’re aware of having memory problems, you don’t have Alzheimer’s; if you have a memory illness or Alzheimer’s, you won’t be aware of your shortcomings”. If you’re OK, the information is still stored somewhere there, it’s the system that searches for it that’s just slowing down or taking a tea-break.

Here are three tests:

1. Find the C in the table below:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2. Find the 6 in the table below:

99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

96999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

3. Now find the N in the table below:

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMNMM

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

There, that was easy wasn’t it! If you too found the three odd ones quickly without using your finger, you probably don’t have anything to worry about.

I’ve always managed to go upstairs and wonder what I came up for so I stopped worrying about this and will only start worrying again if I can’t remember where the stairs are.

A 20-year research project carried out by Dr Robbie Love at Aston University into the use of ‘bad’ language, and how it relates to the user’s age shows some interesting changes in the prevalence of certain words in conversation. For example, the word ‘bloody’ is much less common than it used to be while the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ (and their various derivatives) are much more widely used.

The former word is thought to have been printed without asterisks for the first time in 1960 (in what had, until the previous year, been called the Manchester Guardian) in a report on the result of the obscenity trial of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and was broadcast for the first time in a live TV debate in 1965 when theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was reported to have said “I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.”

A new paper published by Elsevier BV contains encouraging news for those of us who swear quite a lot. It claims “Swearing produces effects that are not observed with other forms of language use” and “It generates a range of distinctive outcomes: physiological, cognitive, emotional, pain-relieving, interactional and rhetorical.” These include “emotional force and arousal; increased attention and memory; heightened autonomic activity, such as heart rate and skin conductance; hypoalgesia (pain relief); increased strength and stamina; and a range of distinctive interpersonal, relational and rhetorical outcomes.” Experiments showed that subjects who swore could keep their hands in a bucket of ice for longer than those who didn’t, and chanting a swearword improved muscle strength during physical exercise. (Go down a treat at the gym, that would.)

The increasing popularity of ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ possibly contrasts with the decline of ‘bloody’ because both are more versatile and easily combined with other words to produce powerful new words and phrases, such as ‘clusterfuck’ and ‘gobshite’, but even in their unadorned forms they can ease the discomfort when one has hit one’s thumb with a hammer, or dropped something messy.

There are (arguably predictable) demographic divides in the use of swearwords: women tend to swear less than men and older people tend to swear less than younger people but, although I can’t help change the image of women, I’ll continue to disprove the ageing theory.

The context is also important. A constant stream of swearwords just becomes meaningless while a carefully placed swearword can add something to what is being said, but some people are (or have been conditioned to be) seriously shocked by ‘bad language’ so we need to edit our ‘ruder’ pearls of wisdom in their presence.

Since I assume anybody who’s read this far isn’t too bothered by swearing, let’s all reassure ourselves that we can delay the onset of dementia if we say “Oh fuck it” every so often.

(And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed for democracy in America’s mid-term elections this week.)