When I was at school, I was oddly serious about school projects. I had a mild obsession with making them look like professional books or brochures. We didn’t have a computer, but I steered my parents into getting a proportional-spacing typewriter and used that (which dates this), and a photocopier to change sizing of chunks of text. I also scraped together enough cash to get a DeVilbiss Super 63A airbrush, an old second-hand compressor, and rigged a system that let me use the compressed air at my homemade homework desk....

Right now feels like an excellent time for any British citizen who cares about the direction of the UK to join the Conservative Party. Wait, don’t go, I know how that sounds, considering “right now” is April 2024, and everybody in the UK hates Tories and wishes they’d go away. And yes, it feels very important to spell out that this is April 2024, because this take will date very fast and won’t apply in a year’s time at most....

We are shaped by our experiences more than most of us like to think. And I grew up religious. For all of my formative years, and quite a way into adulthood, religion was the dominant force in my life. So a very big part of how I look at the world has been formed by that. I see religion everywhere. It’s all religion. Especially the parts full of people who would look at me strangely for insisting on this, because religion is alien to them and they don’t understand it at all....

When Jack woke up, it was too quiet. Obviously it was dark, because it was the middle of the night. And naturally the house was quiet. But usually there was at least a bit of noise from the main road, and instead it was weirdly still. And dark, of course. A very strange time to wake up for no reason, in fact. From the bunk bed, Jack only had to raise his head to see out of the gap between the curtains, and it didn’t look as though anything was moving outside, either....

We get the leaders we deserve. Partly because we accept as unstated fact that we need leaders. The people who think it’s important that someone is in charge, are, oddly enough, the ones in charge. The rest of us aren’t so bothered, so we aren’t. And consequently we don’t get to push the point that maybe it’s OK to have less leadership, because we aren’t responsible for the conversation. For some years now, I’ve been quite visible online....