It’s mostly just dull. All the gay couples I know are either super high functioning or healthy as nuclear waste - doesn’t seem to be a middle ground.

There’s definitely a conversation to be had about the Mental Load, and I’m definitely guilty of allowing my partner to take one more than her fair share of life admin.

It’s already a thing in the UK that supermarkets, gas stations and housing developments are required to have EV chargers - so we’ll see if that meaningfully speeds up rollout or not.

Which is why we’re even more grateful whenever a Hamilton Academicals, Sheffield Wednesday or Young Boys comes along

Sir, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter

Ah yes, people disagree with my dumb opinion so I must be right! The fanatic’s manifesto.

It’s more fodder for the suburbanite vegans who have never actually seen a cow before. They’ll be more convinced of their righteousness than ever, nobody else will be convinced, the world turns, life goes on etc.

I was in the US visiting my in-laws in about 2016, and in Atlanta there was a stir just about everywhere we went because they were introducing this strange new payment technology called ‘chip and pin’, which is something I remember being introduced in the UK when I was a kid in 2004.

Yeeehaw y'all, I'm from good ol' New York City

I think the confusion comes from the American vs British use of the word ‘corn’. In America corn refers specifically to what Europeans would call Maize, while in Britain it has historically referred to any kind of small, hard seed or even other non-organic things that are small and round. Even today Brits generally…

I’m too young to have seen their early career, but that long tracking shot of the school hall in Donnie Darko set to Head Over Heels totally floored me when I first saw it as a kid. I just had to find the band who did the song, and I’ve been a fan ever since.

Their mistake was leaving valuables unattended in Doncaster. South Yorkshire is worst Yorkshire.

The UK has a constitution, it’s just that it’s not on one piece of paper with the word ‘constitution’ at the top.

See, I’m fundamentally against it on the basis that I don’t believe the state should have the power to deliberately kill its citizens in a pre-meditated fashion, regardless of the reason. I’m always surprised at how many people who are otherwise deeply suspicious of the Government seem quite happy to give it legal…

In most Commonwealth countries lobbying is wildly illegal, and donating cash to political parties in exchange for policy changes is a crime.

That was certainly part of it by the late Georgian and early Victorian period, when bunk racial theories were all the rage, used to justify why the Irish, Welsh and Highland Scots were hardy but servile people (as opposed to the English and the Lowland Scots who were born to rule).

But remember that the Irish…

Oh absolutely. 1 in 4 people in Britain are eligible for an Irish passport, so there has been huge amounts of traffic to and fro for centuries. I read a particularly enlightening book about London in the 1700s that complained Irish immigrants in the Seven Dials area of the city were shunned because they kept animals…

English (and later British) distrust of the Irish came largely after the Protestant Reformation because they were an island of Catholics within striking distance of Britain who might be persuaded to side with foreign or subversive powers. It was King Charles I’s attempt to bring over an Irish army to fight Parliament…

I believe that was an exploit, but it actually allowed you to have a fully horse-based dynasty without any humans in it. You had to acquire a specific set of traits for your monarch that would eventually allow you to appoint a horse as governor of a province (like Caligula) as a kind of in-joke, but the horses were…

From memory I think Tolkien’s Dwarves were more about crafting and metalwork than hoarding gold, with the notable exceptions being the Dwarves corrupted by the seven rings and the Arkenstone, who are shown coming to a bad end as a result.

The rest of the analogues between Jews and Dwarves in Tolkien are pretty…