The importance of food
The great press baron, Lord Northcliffe, used to tell his journalists that four subjects could be relied upon for abiding public interest: crime, love, money, and food. Only the last...
https://nathannelson.co.uk/2026/06/the-importance-of-food/
Say it and say it again - Twitter is a toilet, but the main problem lies elsewhere, is in plain sight, and nobody really wants to talk about it.
We thought the swallows had decided not to nest in our garage this year, but they've just made a new nest. OK it's in a precarious spot on top of a tube light, but it's still a result.
There is no such thing as a last known good configuration for us and we have to move forward obviously, but the ideas about how we do that feel completely shattered. It's overwhelming.
Anyway I'm taking the dog for a long walk.
I'm both admiring this maize for being so clean and weed free while also horrified to think of the chemicals that have made that possible and all that soil being bare.
Dog: I see the cat left a ball under the TV, would you be good enough to get that for me?
Me: oh, are we going to play ball?
Dog: No, I'm just going to eat it and spit out all the bits.
I've probably lived a sheltered life but the Britain seen at the London 2012 opening ceremony feels like another world, I didn't feel the undercurrent, and it feels like the Brexit debate took the lid off everything, but I worry that's a huge oversimplification.
Have more people been pulled into that way of thinking and has Facebook and latterly X been responsible? Have we shifted right as our population aged? Or was this element always there if a minority, but the media has disproportionately amplified them? This isn't rhetorical, I'd really like to know.
Don't want to be political any more than I have to here, so sorry, but I'm curious: were there always as many people on the hard right, the kind who show up for Yaxley-Lennon, as a proportion of society? Were they quieter before Brexit, did it give them permission to be more visible?
This is also probably naivety, but I always think about the computing term of the last known good configuration, and how you can (and I use the word advisedly) restore that. Go back to when things worked. Then I realise that that is what others want, but theirs looks completely different to mine.