Ronald,

You had such little legs.

(Which did so much work, considering.)

When you breathed

it reminded me of an emphysema victim smoking their last.

And your big bulgy eyes—were they under intense pressure?

Or just wobbling around because you were happy?

Oh Ronald!

Despite your small furry pins you could manage a run

but you did breathe like an out of tune tuba

as a result.

Because your face was so wrinkly and squishy

that you barely had a nose

But Ronald...

it wasn’t your aggressive in-breeding that did you in.

You left your mortal coil doing what you liked best:

eating everything you could find.

(literally everything on the table)

I hope it was fun; whilst it lasted.

Goodbye Ronald

I’ll miss your stubby twizzly tail

your Churchillian stares

those flabby jowls

and ears built for a much bigger model.

You never smiled, but you warmed my legs nicely.

Thanks, Ronald.

Future Me would have advised past me not to deliberately stop work to find a job. When Past Me said “surely it will give me the time and space to really think about what I want to do and not apply in a rush at the weekend” Future Me would have replied “don’t be a wanker”. And whilst I don’t have the financial worries of the truly unemployed (yet), I do, perhaps, have a sense of what a long period of not feeling useful feels like. It strongly suggests Norman Tebbit never had to apply for a job. Trust me all you right-wing bigots, no one, no one, chooses to remain jobless.

It’s hard, no matter how much the rational segment of your mind tries, not to feel defective. Broadcasting one’s self-doubt probably doesn’t endear one to future employers either, no matter how authentic organisations claims to want your leadership. (It wouldn’t be the first bullshit over-claim The Man made.) But if day-after-day all you receive are signals telling you that you are not good enough, then maybe you’re not.

When I’m feeling optimistic I try to remember I’ve done some hard things, that people I worked with I count as friends and mentors. I try to remember, too, that for each role I apply for, several hundred people are doing the same probably with equal levels of despair. Then LinkedIn suggests I should be working at B&Q - no offence to those who do, but I’ve no skills to help you. Have I become de-skilled? Was the imposter syndrome that dogged me from job to job, in fact, true? Is it me?

Or, is the traditional recruitment process fucked? I’m not the only one struggling and unless all of us are morons then maybe civilisation has not found the peak way to hire new blood. A cover letter nowadays proves little more than your prompting skills and bravado. Interviews are the best way to hire someone who looks, sounds and thinks like you do. CVs tell you about the past.

Economics likes to yammer on about the harms one person can cause another; it calls them externalities. (These impacts are external because the harm-causer doesn’t have to pay for the consequences of their actions.) Pollution is the archetypal example but I argue that the recruitment process is causing harms that no-one is accountable for. The impact of cumulative rejections under an opaque system is they chip away at your mental health with nothing positive being added to balance the loss. Ironically this makes it ever harder to write the next application or turn up beaming at the next interview. Economists fix externalities by “allocating property rights and creating a market” but until we find a way to tax organisations for making us feel shit, then more honesty and transparency would go a long way.

Technology has made the whole brutal process more painful. As the marginal cost of the next application gets ChatGPD’d towards zero the supply of applications for each role is heading towards infinity. This wave is will be fought with more technology that desperately tries to find a justifiable way to narrow the field to few enough one can interview. Given the only data meaningful data input is a machine-written letter, abandon all hope of objectivity.

Add the creeping pervasion of LinkedIn. Mankind couldn’t create a more soul crushing, dull, monotonous advertising delivery mechanism if we threw our best minds at it (did we?). Fair play Microsoft, you created a digital monster. I hear it’s done wonders for the psychotherapy business. If finding a job ought to be based on your ability to reach out your presumably figurative arms to your equally non-physical network and send non-sensical denominal verbs back and forth about how wonderful we each are, then I’m happier unemployed. If pressing a button to “Quick Apply” for a job without providing any additional information whatsoever can be considered sufficient then you have to worry deeply about what other corners your potential future employers may have cut. But like all good monopolies, what’s the alternative?

Maybe applying for jobs is my mistake. I suspect most people don’t. I should have paid more attention to offers of spending my 20s with people I found vacuous and sociopathic because one day they might come in useful. If I’d have been told it would have given me a way out of writing cover letters, I might have joined a club or two.

It’s hard to conclude much recruitment is strangely performative and opaque. Neither buyer or seller are left happy yet no one has the desire to solve the coordination failure. As in many broken markets a secondary market springs up to try to help. These come in the form of recruitment agencies but they are not much more than a way to outsource the drudgery.

Humans are famously myopic. Those hiring forget they will be stuck with a bad hire for years, even decades. More time spent with prospective recruits must be a good thing: trial periods, meeting the team, shadowing opportunities, open days; less meaningless tests, no pointless cover letters and something less weird than 45 minutes in a room with strangers is likely to yield better results.

It was therefore good to happen upon a snack that is truly multidimensional, that not only makes use of the fourth dimension of time, but pushes salt-snack limits even further by occupying the fifth, a hitherto closely guarded secret by scientists, which I can reveal is crunchiness.

A chargrilled hammer blow is delivered on a delicate wheat pillow. If the dark evenings, flooding, fires and genocides are getting you down, just pop one of these supportive meat-flavour capsules into your mouth and melt away through time into crunchiness.

Confusion exists why two juicy lamb chops are, I’m reliably told, labelled as “steak” and garnished with a sprig of Christmas tree, but don’t let that detract from the exciting meatiness that shatters as you bite into these ribbed wonders. Whilst these Чипсы may be helping to fund a craven and vindictive invasion/slaughter of a peaceful state, they are moreish.

Should you find yourself West of the Urals, I can’t recommend these crisps enough. Although, if you are, you’re probably in some trouble and likely don’t have long left to enjoy them. Na zdorovye!

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I wanted this new snack concept to work. I really did. I’m still grieving the loss of crisp variety after the wave after wave of profit obsessed conglomerate crisp consolidation of the 80s and 90s. It’s been a long time since an idea this bold reached our shelves, especially from Lancashire. The past twenty years has more or less been a salty innovation desert.

(Yes, I am aware of the good work seen recently in crisp enlargement—think Giant Monster Munch and Giant Wotsits—but all they’ve really done is take a good idea and make it bigger.)

When I saw Ploughman’s (odd it’s singular - who was he? Of course a man…) Lunch Snack Pack staring up from the back of a wooden bar after a charming countryside walk, I realised rather than order and wait for a ploughman’s lunch, I could have the whole thing delivered to me instantly in a small foil bag. Never again would one be forced to choose between waiting for food or having peanuts for lunch.

The premise is exciting. Take a debatably historic meal, reduce it into its core elements and maximise portability: a chunk of fresh bread (two cream crackers), a fist sized wedge of cheddar cheese (a postage stamp sized warm and soft foil wrapped triangle of Happy Cow [sic/sick]) and a couple of giant picked onions and selection of gurkins (three tiny, tiny pickled onions). These snack designers saw no need to recreate the slice of pork pie, salad garnish or Branston’s.

The results

Let’s start with the hassle factor. Unless you really like unwrapping food then you are probably going to be disappointed with the prepare:consume ratio. I clocked up at least 5 minutes of prep time for about 30 seconds of chewing.

Moving to taste. I don’t know how they make processed cheese-coloured spread, but I know it doesn’t involve cheese. If cows are, they, presumably depressed at their constant need to be pregnant yet family free, are likely ashamed their temperament has been so flagrantly misrepresented, and angry they know they are capable of much greater feats of flavour. That this “cheese” doesn’t need refrigeration is of deep concern.

The best you could say is these body triangles leant much needed salt to the cracker. Of which, was no Jacob’s. It is a “Freshers”. I assume named with an ironic wink. Strangely the cracker was neither crunchy or soft. Instead, its texture is best described as weary. How one is supposed to divide three minionions across two crackers and one wedge of imitation cheese was not explained. Perhaps this is the actual intended joy of this snack experiment: a three dimensional mathematical puzzle to be literally chewed on; testing different permutations until one reaches their own platinum ratio of soft-ish stale cracker, warm pliable cheese substitute and baby onion.

Sometimes you can resize a good idea into a more compact form: tee-shirts, novellas and stools. But in this instance I regret to inform there are no such benefits. Instead, you face the prospect of twenty minutes of unpeeling, spreading, and being puzzled about how to divide prime numbers and days finding crumbs in your jumper and empty wrappers in your pockets.

Not delicious, at any time.

Before I get going, don’t get me wrong, I love a good protest. The Man needs standing up to and regularly defeating. That’s what’s great about democracies — you can say what you fucking like, call out hypocrisy, challenge authority and antagonise those in the wrong. Yet this protest was the most incoherent I’ve seen. The “message” diluted like the last of the orange.

There were a lot of angry people. Who can blame them? But walking around Trafalgar Square on a Saturday, during the pandemic, meant the only people they got their message to, were themselves and some confused tourists. But what was that message?

My first encounter was with a score of anti-vaxers. (They were standing close to the anti-mask wearers — who were imploring the crowd to wake up and realise they were all being conned, presumably by the fabric makers’ cartel.) The anti-vaxers collectively presented a confused message of their own. They claimed the vaccines were rushed and so can’t be safe, that they are a government conspiracy to dope and control the masses, presumably with an extremely advanced technology they’ve managed to keep secret, even after it has entered the arms of 44 million people; and that the vaccines were just another part of the unprecedented theatrics of a staged pandemic. (The reason why every government on Earth was able to agree and coordinate (and keep secret) a complicated, self harming policy intervention on an unprecedented scale when they still can’t agree we should save our planet from rapid destruction, wasn’t mentioned.)

It’s easy to laugh and mock their views. I just did — I’ll come back to whether one should. But it’s the incoherence I want to labour on, much like the incoherence of the whole march. Effective campaigning requires a clear message, better still, a clear, simple and deliverable demand. Yet what turned up that day was a morass of competing rationalisations to what is presumably an underlying fear — a fear emerging from confusion, embarrassment of ignorance and worry that the believable story you were told might be true.

Back to mockery. Do you like being ridiculed? I thought not. Yet those who laugh or get angry when faced with a challenge to our rational, clever minds are usually the Metropolitan Educated Elite. Which I am assuming you, dear reader, are like me, part of. We, maybe rightly, don’t try to enter into a discussion because we sense these views are so deeply held, like faith to a god they will never meet, that they will never change their minds. Because to do so would likely involve giving up a part of themselves because it would require admitting that those closest to you, who likely explained this believable story, lied to you.

And yet, my rage was fairly immediate and uncontrolled. How can these people say something so dangerous, selfish and obviously untrue? Why are they putting people’s lives at risk?

But on reflection, I know empathy would have served me and them better. I am privileged to have been taught the scientific method. My interactions with the state, although strained many times, has not been so bad that I distrust the institutions that exist to protect us. I have the ability to search for balanced news coverage and I can judge facts from myth. If you are struggling every day, if the government is the one paying you a pittance, if your kid’s school isn’t all that — an outlet for your rage may as well be the story that sounds believable. I mean, this vaccine was developed remarkably quickly — don’t you think?

Back in the crowd, I slithered on passing team Free Assange, Ban the Nukes, something about Universal Credit, a white woman saying Britain is institutionally racist, a huge Free Palestine contingency, a battalion of Extinction Rebellion (very unclear message by the way, guys), Kill the Bill, Fake Pandemic, End Global Satanic Abuse, BBC Are The Virus, BBC Is Propaganda, Lockdown is Illegal (weird given the Coronavirus Act 2020), something about rivers, cladding/don’t let people burn to death because they are poor and you are greedy, police corruption and much more. Lots of valid issues mixed with lots of fear and some great pure madness.

My overriding feeling, though, as I cycled away leaving them to it, was sadness. So many people so angry and so unable to be heard, that they must take to the empty streets in hope someone will listen. This is not the triumph of democracy but the sign of one in trouble.

If more people felt they had more control over their lives, over the things that matter most to them, and if decisions taken in their name were better explained and they had some input into the direction taken, then marches might be reserved for the most important things the government has got wrong, to show a strong united opposition and the desire to keep going, whatever it takes, until those in power do the right thing*.

*not that this worked for the war in Iraq, mind. Or climate change. Or poverty. Or racism etc.

While a deliberate simplification, the point to register is we are told that competitive markets lead to prices that are in “equilibrium” because if the price was higher, there would be more things than people want, and if they were lower more people would want them than other people are willing to sell them. Every good or service will therefore have its one price — the equilibrium price — and markets are said to clear.

To be fair to most economists, they don’t really believe this is . Most do, though, think this is a close enough approximation of reality to be useful. Hopefully after you read this article, you will agree this is untrue for many of the prices we face. This is because for that nice story of demand and supply to work, it requires a few important things to exist, that incresingly do not. Chief among them is sufficient competition.

Price is so fundamental to the predictions of economists that it underlies many of their biggest arguments of the past 100 years, such as the discrediting of communism and explaining repeated financial crises. It is important to understand that when economists talk of prices, they are thinking in broad terms about information. The magic of capitalism, they say, is that the near infinite quantities of information out there about what people like, what is plentiful or scarce, what is new or old, fun or boring: everything that needs to be known, in short, to ensure we allocate the planet’s resources well — be they the minerals in the ground, the next pound you spend or your time — is conveyed through price. But, and in economics there is always a but, if we leave everyone to it, prices do not work as the free marketers would wish. Left to its own devices, “free” markets can give very misleading signals for long periods of time.

The problem with complaining about prices, as with many other things that economics claims but day-to-day experience defies, is what alternative reality you are making comparisons against. This is important to clarify to ward off any interpration you may have that I think prices ought to be controlled.

Because prices are a fundamental currency of information, to replace the billions of decisions that may influence prices with a state-sanctioned number would require an information gathering and processing capability beyond even Jeff Bezos’s imagination. While our instinct at seeing a small bottle of water on sale for £3 in an airport is to make this a capital offence, trying to set the “right price” for everything in a modern economy that trades goods, services, other country’s money, imaginary futures and debt is, currently, impossible. We can’t even manage to cap gas prices properly.

While I do not advocate for specific price controls, I don’t think we should accept that more state intervention to make prices less outrageous is the first step towards socialist ruin. If a growing lack of sufficient competition is leaving the setting of prices firmly in the hands of companies and not the jig between companies and consumers as we’re told, then one obvious solution is to ensure greater competition and reduce the dominance of large businesses.

Can the price of something be wrong?

What should things cost might be a more moral than economic question. Economics has a view, of course (try and stop economists having a view). The price is what it is — the equilibrium of supply and demand. If you don’t want to pay the price, don’t. Another way of looking at it, though, can suggest what the “right” price ought to be. In a competitive market the price of something rarely get too divorced from how much is costs to produce. Businesses need to make a bit of profit, sure, but if they make a massive margin then other companies are supposed to spring into existence and offer consumers a better deal.

Why, then, does this soft-cover notebook cost £50 and why does this luggage tag (well, it hold’s a £29 Apple AirTag) cost an embarassing £399 (at time of writing, sold out)? Is it because it is fauve coloured? I think the simple answer is that rich people are morons. But for things we all buy, I believe there is an increasing amount of price manipulation which means the price is wrong because it’s higher than it would be if someone else had the chance to sell it to you for less.

I’ve observed three forms of pricing madness: first, situations where you are temporarily unable to shop around and monopoly power goes to shopkeepers heads; second, a phenomenon economics says shouldn’t happen where the same item is on sale for wildly different prices; and finally, deliberate confusion to make price comparison almost impossible.

Micro-monopolies

The drinks prices in restaurants, food at a festival, concert or theme park, airline bag pricing, car hire insurance, mobile phone roaming charges, a cup of tea on a train: these are all examples of things you might like, but were not the reason you chose to be where you are. I present the micro-monopoly:

A situation where a company has captured you for a period of time to sell you things at outrageous prices, but for things that are not the primary reason you visited, and where the time cost of establishing these prices before you visit is prohibitive.

The scale of this hit me recently when I unknowingly paid £1.95 for a small packet of salted peanuts (put aside for now the peculiar fact that in Britain you pay to ingest salt to make you want to drink more beer):

What was fascinating about this con was the contrivance between a company producing a faux-luxury nut and the pub industry to try to psychologically justify this extreme peanut-inflation. These were not salted peanuts, they were “salt crust” peanuts. Peanuts with the salt made wet before they add it so it dries looking like they were specially handprinted by angels.

It’s a new twist on an old idea: find a way to make something look new to justify a price increase. In this case dilution of sodium chloride and the use of a foil bag to make it look special. But the reality is they have put less nuts in the packet and charged you more for them. (The per nut cost, by way of comparison, is six times a packet of salted peanuts sold by Morissons.) But you didn’t go to the pub for nuts, and you don’t have to buy it. But if you do, you will be ripped off proportionally to the extent that if they inflated the the cost of the beer by the increase in the cost of some nuts in another pub, it would be roughly £8 a pint.

Another example is the sale of water. In airports especially, but also in train stations, and even by such trusted brands and Marks and Spencer, a bottle of water is deliberately increased in price relative to the price in their other shops. Yes, you read correctly: M&S charges you more for water in a train station than the high street because they know you didn’t go into the shop just for water (temporary monopoly is created) and that people going on long train journeys want water. And because the relative cost of a bottle of water compared to the search cost of trying other shops nearby means you will likely pay it.

Price dispersion

Undergraduates of economics are taught there can only be one cost of things. This idea is so important its even got a judicial sounding name: the Law of One Price. If the same thing in different places has a different price there has to be good reason (and so it cannot be deemed the same “thing”). It took a while for economists to accept this was obviously nonsense and then to study it properly. Turns out, as any normal person could have told you, this so-called “price dispersion” is sizeable, pervasive, and persistent.

There is strong theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence that much (and in some markets, most) of the observed dispersion stems from consumers’ costs of acquiring information. These “shoe-leather” costs are intuitively obvious — how much time do you want to devote to trying to find a cheaper biro? Keep in mind that things that are a relatively smaller part of your budget (like salt crusted peanuts) might bother you less that you are being ripped off, but for society as a whole, those slices of pure profit add up.

Economists assumed the internet would solve this “information problem” because your ability to search for a lower price was supercharged. Turns out it made no difference. The online the Law of One Price is egregiously violated. Even more crazy is that the reduction in the cost of searching for prices that the internet and before it, the phone, newspapers and so on created, can lead to more or less price dispersion, depending on the market environment. By way of an example, I present the Chocolonely Chocolate Bar:

So what, you might say. Only £1.25 difference between the top and the bottom. But in percentage terms it’s 45 per cent. If this was a £500 washing machine that would make it £725.

Shops know you will not invest a huge amount of time in building a strategy to find the cheapest Chocolonely Bar. They also know chocolate is often an impulse buy. Like this eye-level product placement by the “healthy food” shop, Souced. These are £1.80 for 50g. That is the equivalent of £6.48 for a large bar, by the way.

Price distortion

The third way that prices are being manipulated is the creation of deliberate confusion to make comparison effectively impossible. One really useful thing economics tells us, and by useful I mean obvious, is that when there is little competition (a few big firms dominate the market — pretty much everything these days it seems), they do not compete on price. Doing so is risky because if one firms starts the others might have to and then everyone will make less money or perhaps go under.

Here is an example of a typical way consumers are unable to make a sensible comparison, in this instance choosing an electricity provider. Here are just two options of hundreds:

To make a sensible comparison on just these two you need to:

• have serious mental arithmetic chops, or the time and inclination to build a model, including the ability to factor numbers with three decimal places, in parallel;

• understand how standing charges and unit rates work;

• know how much electricity you will consume for the next two years, using kilowatt hours as the basis of measurement (and hence know the power consumption of your various uses of electricity);

• be able to construct two cost models because the standing charge is different so you cannot compare the unit cost alone — (and only the knowledge of your future electricity use will be able to show a winner); and

• have knowledge of the future wholesale cost of electricity for the next two years (and some assumptions of the future path of inflation would be great).

Which means comparison is impossible. (If you want a dual fuel tariff then it becomes exponentially more complicated.)

What about choosing a mobile phone contract? Putting to one side the minefield that is trying to extract the higher purchase payment plan that occurs if you also buy a handset and just trying to find the best “SIM only” deal. Imagine we want to choose Three (don’t, though, trust me) one price comparison site offers this:

The parasitical intermediary, who will be paid a fee by Three for getting your business, adds their own confusing bribe into this comparison. This shifts the relative prices from paying £2 extra a month for 4GB of more data to 33p extra. You still have to do some maths to show the shift:

Looking more widely at what’s on offer, sense really starts to disintegrate. For example, would you rather pay £7 a month for 1 GB of data from Virgin Mobile;

or pay £7 a month for 4 GBs of data from Virgin Mobile?

Say you want to pay £8 a month — any clearer? Depends. You can have 10 GB, 12 GB or 15GB. Your choice then becomes which company, and trying to work out what the speed, quality, coverage, service levels are like for each. Again, impossible.

These were only comparisons with unlimited calls and texts. Adding them into the mix and you would need to make a comparison along at least the following variables:

• network reputation, coverage and speed;

• data volume;

• call and text allowance;

• contract length;

• strange additions like being able to roll over minutes; and

• whether you get free EU roaming or not (most likely not).

Thats at least 9 variables to compare across, 3 or 4 options which would be vastly helped if you can cogitate matrices in your brain as well as knowing your preferences for all of these options, in order to optimise your choice.

The companies will, of course, say they are merely providing you with the tools with which to pick your perfect tariff. Choice is a good thing. But I think it is more likely they are deliberately confusing you to the point where you will never know if you have made a good choice.

So what?

My contention is the market is failing. Companies are obfuscating prices to make more money through, what is in effect, dishonest means. We are seeing this happen, too, through the novel methods of shrinkflation where prices don’t change but volume does in ways that make value for money comparisons mind boggling.

This limits your ability to make reasoned decisions and it is possible because there is insufficient competition. But should you care? You’re too busy to shop around, these are often small amounts of money and how could we ever hope to solve this if we’re agreed intervening to fix prices is a fools errand?

The country should care because from the perspective of society overcharging people is not efficient. The world would be a better place if there were more competition. But competition is often limited by the structure of the market. It is just more efficient to have one railway than several. So what’s to be done?

The government could take a deeper interest in how firms are setting prices and where profits seem out of whack. They do now and then, like the mild intervention to stop rip-off Covid testing. But if you were a minister would you want to start to annoy the five big companies who you are probably on good golfing terms with, and then put in the hard work of convincing your party to find legislative time, challenging the incumbent firms’ well funded communications strategy that shows them to be ethical, caring companies, and waste the opportunity cost of whatever else you could have spent your political capital on instead, for the chance it might reduce prices somewhat for the millions of people who probably don’t know they’re being ripped off? Probably not.

Let me start with what La Paz doesn’t have: Starbucks, decent sidewalks, Whole Foods or even McDonald’s for that matter. Seriously. OK, Janine, stop being a drama queen! You knew this trip would be tough. Fine, so what does La Paz have? Pollution, traffic, Burger King (I know, right?) lots of people who look cold when it’s warm and hills.

Let’s rewind, OK. Those of you who know me (hi mom!), know I told Amanda there was no way I was letting her go to South America on her own, not in her condition. I mean, she’s barely had time to get angry about that, admittedly cute, monster of a man that left her almost literally at the alter. I know she said she didn’t want me to come (a lot!) but I know really she meant “please keep me company, I am having the biggest breakdown!”. So I headed to Target and bought all the things I would need to survive the trip (two suitcases versus Amanda’s tiny hipster backpack—we all know who is going to be asked for some Gold Coast Balsamic Conditioner!).

I am writing this blog, therefore, to keep y’all up to date and let you know how Amanda is doing. And for those who don’t know me (yet?!), I am writing this blog because I just feel I should, you know, put something back by letting you know where to go and where not to go. I just think it’s important we share our experiences, and get likes for them.

Back to La Paz, that’s basically the capital city. I didn’t want to get too involved in the planning, yet, not when things with Amanda are, well, so raw.

Amanda wanted to walk around the city. There were old churches and whatnot and loads of people just sitting around doing nothing. I mean, apply for a job maybe? They don’t seem to be able to build a subway so instead they have built a cable car to get around because the traffic is so bad, I guess. It’s like going skiing except when you look down instead of snow and cute boys you see lots of thin dogs and small houses that are way too close to other houses—who would want to have to see their neighbours all day long?!

We went up a mountain, I guess, to this other town called El Alto, which is Spanish for High Up. Some architect must have been having fun trying to fit as many of these houses as close to the edge of this cliff as possible. I guess they must be exclusive apartments what with the view of the city they had. There was this market which is like a mall but outdoors and only selling plastic cups and clothes from a big box and whatnot. It was too hot and crowded, no Wi-Fi and no food court as far as I could tell. Not my idea of a fun day out but it was certainly popular, especially with these old women wearing small bowler hats. I guess that’s really in right now.

On the last day Amanda wanted to take a cab, well I say a cab, it was like a van with as many people in it as you can fit. It cost like a dollar or something to go miles. We passed this family who must have been on vacation—I have no idea why, but they thought it would be fun to camp by the edge of a river, in the city, surrounded by trash and noise and people cooking GOD KNOWS what food on the street. Weird.

We travelled to some town where there was, apparently, some city in the old days probably even before America started. I mean, I saw some rocks and stuff and there were these statues but even they didn’t look all that much like a human. No one there spoke English and I couldn’t work out how to say USB-C in Spanish, so you can guess who’s cell phone died on the way back! Although this was good as I got to talk at Amanda, even though she said she was happy to look out of the window (she’s not much of a talker!). I asked her how she was feeling after Greg humiliated her like that, and told her that everyone was talking about her back home. She said it was better to find out he wasn’t the one before they got married than five years after. I know she’s bottling it all up though, classic denial. I know she needs to talk, to me.

I’m not saying that La Paz is a massive dump of a city with nothing to do, but I am glad that we’re moving on. I am a bit worried that Amanda thinks it’s a good idea to find a remote town to stay in, but as I said, she needs me right now so I am going to let her chose what we do. For now.

And of course we now are.

I wrote a long time ago about the problem of time only running in one direction with relation to marketing ploys. Back then I predicted the eventual production of razors with nine blades. Whist steeled for this I was still somewhat shocked to see five bladed razors on sale the other day. A brief word on them before returning to my new discovery.

I have no doubt razor companies will keep competing on numbers of blades. But it has made me wonder how they are going to explain the need for the marginal blade when their very expensive graphics for three blades suggested the first cut the hair leaving a bit left, the second takes most of that away and the third takes what is left. So for the fourth to work there would need to be something else left to take. A way around this for them might be invent the Remaining-Hair-Half-Life: each blade cuts a fixed proportion of what remains is cut away. At the ninth cut this will probably be down to the atomic level, but it would undeniably be a smooth shave. (Another problem is that one stroke of a two bladed razor is presumably the same as two swipes of a single bladed razor, so in some regards more blades just reduces time needed to shave, but if there is a diminishing marginal return to each blade, they surely need to come up with a better story for blade three onwards.)

Back to my new discovery: “48 hour deodorant protection”. My issues are (a) why would this be needed (b) wouldn’t buying it admit you have hygiene or lifestyle issues and (c) isn’t 48 hours a rather precise number?

Why might you need it? If you used the deodorant on Monday morning you would not need to reapply until Wednesday morning. But do not most people wash at least once every 48 hours? Maybe this is intended for rig workers or junior doctors.

If you are one of those people who do wash, it should be remembered that doing so washes off deodorant. Or perhaps they are claiming this is no longer the case and you only need to use deodorant once every two days, hence making this a recession friendly innovation.

Whatever reason was dreamt up in the boardroom, the clever marketing types must have hoped this new marvel would resonate with an audience that feels the previously launched and now ubiquitous and presumably humdrum 24 hour protection is simply not enough. (And why 24 hours are needed anyway would presumably be for insomniacs or enthusiastic sleep-sweat freaks who find 18 our protection inadequate to their needs.)

So my next prediction is that eventually we will have deodorant with 72 hour protection which we will wonder how we ever lived without. And we live in unique times as in nearly living memory of some people many products didn’t exist and we will not be able to turn back time. I challenge someone to find single bladed razors.

With this in mind, I ate my first Turtle Chip. These ingenious Korean-sourced corn super-structures made me, like the spritely green chap on the packet, say “wow” when I discovered there really are four layers to each of these delicate taste capsules.

But crisps, like governments, live and die on delivery. Just like Labour, who won power with an action-packed-long-list of promises, delivery of this crisp was left wanting.

Why? First, the choice of sweetcorn (or more correctly, sweet corn) was risky, like imposing Mandelson on our friends over the pond. Whilst Turtle News’ reporting of the crispy layers was fair, the accuracy of the flavour was wildly off. Well, maybe that’s unfair, one half of the headline was bang-on: they are sweet.

Sooooooooo sweet it induced a temporary three-part blood-sugar seizure:

1. Shock—some things that are so self-evident they don’t need stating. Crisps are savoury. Labour looks after the poor—no matter how many children they have. End of. There is no place for sugar. Sweets are for children. Fried snacks are for adults. Adults eat salt, lots of salt. The INSANITY of adding sugar let alone this much sugar was beyond comprehension.

2. Disgust—the taste was wretched. I don’t understand how Koreans engage with this concept with any seriousness—think two-child limits. A mixture of sugar bullets and industrially-created artificial sweetcorn flavoured hand axes attacking your tongue with abandon.

3. Shame—as an ambassador for the crisp vanguard, I felt the movement had been cheated, let down, humiliated. It was snow at Wimbledon; Bublé dropping a drill track; strippers at a funeral.

It was sweet. Sweet like chocolate, sweet like free clothes or a universal winter fuel payment; SuperDooper saccharine.

What about the mouth feel? I must be fair to Orion Holdings, they’ve created a magnificent crisp capsule. Each of the four (four!) layers cracked with precision timing with just the right amount of torsion to create a one-two-three-four step bite action. Your teeth pass through this incredible structure as if descending the crisp stairs from heaven.

Sweetcorn Turtle Chips are a nice idea ruined—an Ed Miliband, perhaps. I strongly urge South Korea to think about the salt-based snack potential of this fantastic construction. If Turtle Chips would focus on delivery, stick to what works and stop trying to be clever, then they will find far more success and support.

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It’s surely baffling that after centuries of progress, technology and learning we think the best way to apply for a job is to write a long letter that may or may not be read.

The models of capitalism I was taught said this wouldn’t happen. It’s just too inefficient not to be fixed by the market. But here we are in 2025, being judged on my ability to organise 1000 or so words telling short stories about things I’m claiming to have done in the past for a different job I want to do in the future.

The Economist often writes about how silly it is. (I also agree with their observations on CVs.))

The combined amount of time wasted by people like myself undertaking this bizarre ritual must be staggering. Instead of our skills (assuming I still have some) being usefully deployed, we are hunkered down, saturated with caffeine, trying to stay motivated as we cut and paste the hours away. Maybe the point is just that—that we stuck at—paid our commitment in days spent trying to meet an arbitrary word limit, desperately seeking words to remove and making our verbs sound more electrifying.

If you’re not working but want to, then finding a job is your job. The difference is you work for free and alone. Job seekers quickly realise they face a process problem. If finding a job is a kind of probabilistic theatre, then your odds rise the more you apply for. Your incentive, therefore, is to maximise your chances and the way to do that, is to look for methods of automation, systematisation and repetition.

You’re quickly drawn to focus your effort on scale—break down the process into Adam Smith-sized steps, innovate, find efficiencies and crank out applications with clever tweaks to suggest each job is what you were born to do. Job hunting by mail merge.

If the role you are applying for is about process design, copy editing or innovative uses of AI, then maybe this approach is signalling something to your employer. It’s more likely, though, I am directing a lot of energy at something I don’t want to be good at, save my typing, which is really coming along (55wpm!).

Although yet to be tempted, the obsession with cover letters surely benefits those willing to cheat. If the purpose of a cover letter is to reduce the number of people expressing interest for a role to a number small enough to interview without enduring weeks of misery, then lying seems a rational approach given I have never been asked about something in my cover note at interview, that it’s nowadays unclear if a human will even read it, and of the thousands of cover notes I’ve read as a recruiter, I can remember precisely none (sorry).

Setting aside that cover letters are a terrible idea, there is no agreement on what a cover letter ought to be or do. I’ve been asked to write a one page letter, two pages, up to three pages, no more than 1000 words, 1250 words, 1500 words, with headings, without headings and maybe worst of all, just “a cover letter and CV” leading to nights of angst over which of the menu options should be chosen and what it implies about its author. I’ve been asked to say why I meet the person specification, how I can demonstrate the knowledge for something I’m yet to do and to ensure my style and approach to work is made clear. Not one role has not asked for a cover letter.

This burden of the application process also seems to be being outsourced to the applicant. I often open a job description to find:

• long list of bullet points stating things the person in the role might do, under an arbitrary list of exciting sounding bold headings (usually with pictures of people smiling madly)

• a vague section on “the sort of person we’re looking for” which might be a set of abstract nouns, personality traits or corporate “values”

• a person specification, as if people can be specified, usually a set of abilities or maybe experiences that range from worryingly vague (”experience with people”) to so detailed it’s clearly describing their friend who ought to be promoted next

It’s common, maybe increasingly so with AI, that these sections are muddled, overlapping and inconsistent. If you want to present examples that meet, say, the person specification—which I think is the point—one often needs to first re-write the specification and ideally group it into four or five sections from the long list that’s often presented. I’ve seen many job descriptions with 10 or more “requirements” that need to be met in 1000 words. And to really wind you up, sometimes you can download a friendly “how to write a cover letter”, each with its own cheerful claims to know best.

Unless you have a week to spare, your best bet is to re-write another application until you feel you’ve used enough of the words in the person specification such that the reader might consciously or otherwise feel you’ve paid sufficient attention to merit a chance. If—the horror—you are asked to state your motivation, then you concoct (outsource to AI) a saccharine claim that this specific cause is your lifelong passion. ChatGPT must be laughing at us.

All this confusion must be managed whilst navigating an AI arms race: us job hunters up all night prompt-twerking their applications so that a machine can read and summarise, sometimes via another layer of a recruitment agency—increasingly places to outsource the mountain of recruitment logistics, rather than focus on placing those without a job where they would be happiest.

Perhaps my mistake is applying for jobs. Maybe it’s true most people don’t bother. Maybe many vacancies are performative—to show they tried to bring in new blood. I don’t know—I probably don’t move in the right circles, and I’m definitely a tad jaded. Do suggest what I’m doing wrong.

Hoping at least some employers are looking for the right person, then cover letters cannot be our best idea. Nothing this exhausting can’t be improved. Having willing and (skilled?) labour sitting idle is not helping meet the government’s growth target, either. It’s daft. I don’t want to write it them and you, recruiters, don’t want to read them.

There has to be a better way. I have some ideas—I’m sure you do, too. I’ll leave that for another day, though; I’ve a deadline pending.

For a while, Doritos, the Amazon/Google/Microsoft of snacks, have been narrowing the traditional divide between tortilla chips and crisps with flavours like Flame Grilled Steak. I have not supported this scope creep. Things need to know what they are not, to know what they are. No one asked for cronuts, toe-shoes or Milton Keynes.

Now, the reassuring divide between tortilla and crisp has been bridged without permission by the arrival of Doritos Zingy Blast.

They’re not kidding about Zingy. The Oxford English Dictionary goes with “energy, enthusiasm, or liveliness”; trusting the experts at PepsiCo are credible lexicographers, then we ought to update the dictionary to “pummels your taste buds like an electric eel dipped in acid”.

I’m not saying the result is bad, leaving aside the logistics of rewriting earth’s dictionaries, but I must prepare you. Unless you love vinegar, and love the feeling being dental-treatment numb for half an hour, these may not be for you. If you live for acetic acid then you will not regret wrestling with these corn triangles.

First, you can detect some salt but soon after your tongue is quickly starting to realise it’s been invited to a vinegar festival. You spend a few moments in the queue where you can sense something is afoot but then suddenly you are visited by the brute-force arrival of a vinegar Blast reversing towards you at too high a speed for you to get out of the way. SMACK! You’re being zinged left right and centre by an increasing vortex of snack acid, drilling into your taste buds like a jack hammer. You’re left wondering what happened. Amped up needing another fix but shaking with trepidation and moist eyes.

Perhaps this zing-bling couldn’t work on a potato base: a flatter, stronger plane is needed to weaponise vinegar. But no matter how invigorating and exciting, the snack world’s clear edges have forever been blurred by this experiment. This brazen incursion is, I portend, a move the Doritos management will regret—much like the A&M renegade that handed Jimmy Nail his first record contract.

It’s rare to find a novel snack design but I must hand it to Takis, this is new. Imagine a tortilla. Now imagine rolling it so tightly that it has the tensile strength of a Roman column. These tight tubes are dense but not brittle; they have a pleasing mouth snap effect post-bite and are very chewable.

Where these joy sticks really standout, though, is the flavour stakes. Whilst they may be billed as chilli and lime, the truth is these are lime and chilli flavour as shown by the larger but equally as pixellated images of giant sliced zesty Mexican citrus fruits than the sliced red peppers, leaving aside the strangely placed unsliced chilli surrounded by twisty fire.

The soursplosion creeps up slowly but hits hard like being cricket-bat-mugged on a moonlit night. It’s then into the numbing phase with the chillis dancing around your mouth bar-fighting the lime for survival. The larger limes win out, but the effect of this fracas is an enticing to and fro as if the taste department couldn’t make up their minds what they were making.

Even though Taki’s art department leaves one feeling these are a budget crisp, my experience was quite different. I am hoping the public will reward this welcome innovation with a loyal following. It’s much deserved.

4. Persuade others’ the killer idea was theirs: one of the most important things you can learn as you enter more senior and value-strategic positions in the modern information-based environment is that success is measured in terms of salary and position, not in self-congratulation. This is a vital part of building collaboration. People like people who like them back. Tell your team you could not do without them (I know, I know!), when you throw in your latest value-laden idea say that you were taken 95% of the way there by what John said, tell Mary that she just sparked an idea in her last thought-burst that you are merely reflecting back. I guarantee the more you stroke their egos the more likely they will follow you; and the more you can then tell them what to do.

5. Use silence: I talked before about the constant hum technique in meetings. Well, the opposite to this is to communicate using silence. This technique can be extremely powerful if done well. Examples include: when an email arrives asking you to take a decision you know that the sender knows that you know you don’t really want to, wait 10 days before replying. This makes the sender feel bad. In a meeting when you are encouraged to do something through the use of the “this is what is best for you” technique, get up and leave the room for a drink and never go back. In a duo-realtime-body-meet if you are pushed for a yes or no answer, shake you head slowly and sigh.

Clive, with these techniques I am convinced you can become a master of the arts of communicollaboration. Not only will you have more people around you willing to be followers, you will also be maximising the impact of your thought-led ideas. Until next time.

Given my absence, and my belief that clients need constant attention so they don’t over-grow their self confidence without me; I have asked my colleague and ideas-marshal Veronica Bluster to outline her three top rules for Winfluencing which still stand as the best approach I know to maximum successtivation in persuassion-scenarios. Over to you Ronnie:

Dear Clive, some leaders influence; some leaders win: you are going to learn to winfluence. Profit leaders and thought-makers alike all say my course has transformed their action efficiency and project focus.

I will simply outline five rules that you can apply in these unsettling and ever-increasingly risk-ridden times, to ensure that you not only survive: you thrive through winfluence.

1. Prepare for all influencing situations in order to win(fluence): in all current and future and past business decision environments leading decision takers like you Carl cannot do everything yourself — as much as you would like to. We need to work through others. Sadly this involves persuading and cajoling people to do what you need them to do. We experts call this winfluencing. Think of every encounter as a game, a battle, a dual in which you much WIN. This will give you the inner strength to come through victorious. Your state of mind is everything.

2. Winfiltrate the minds of your opponents: each situation is different, but they are nearly always similar if not the same. Picture this. There I was at last months board meeting. The only mid 30s successful career women who still has her looks, against a room of overweight stressed out has been execs. I needed to persuade them to take a risk on a new venture I have been cooking up. Best designer shirt on I went into that room knowing what makes each of them tick and attacked, attacked, attacked. Be it Ralph, who we all know is having an affair; Dale with his secret love of dolls. All you have to do is find a weakness and go for it.

3. STOP: Sit down, Translate emotions into actions, Offer your inner mind a way forward and don’t forget your Posture: nothing in business cannot be overcome without an acronym. When you feel you are not maximising your winfluencing potential, then leave the room as soon as you can and STOP. Sit down and consider the full array of approaches — can you blackmail them? Have you threatened to talk to their superiors? Is there any way you could claim they are being sexist etc. Translate all those negative thoughts into actions. Write down three things you are going to do when you re-enter the theatre of war. Surprise them if you can, shout a quick mantra or pull out a trusty quote from Rik Wagoner (see my online bookshop for a handbag sized book of Modern CEO Quotes). This will Offer your inner-mind, your real mind, a way forward to go on to success. Finally readjust your posture, stand tall, push out your chest(s) as far as they will go and stride back in ready to WINFLUENCE.

The humble bike is most children’s first taste of freedom. Summer holidays trundling beyond previous boundaries, zooming faster than you could run, forming two-wheel flocks of friends, and going to school alone. Bikes reduce congestion, save the NHS billions, reduce emissions and strengthen communities. Cyclists look out for other cyclists.

This is why those who steal bikes are especially evil. Contemptuous, malignant, sociopathic. If you steal bikes you are stealing a family member, you are making the world worse in countless ways, you’ve taken away some of my liberty. You care nothing about the environment, care nothing about health, care nothing about society. Damaging childhoods, disrupting daily life and, worst of all, breaking people’s hearts.

True, some bikes can be expensive, but most are not. You cannot be making your fortunes from your acts of horror. It must be true that thieves feel no empathy for if you knew how gut-wrenching the loss of one’s treasured bike is, you’d wouldn’t dare.

If you suffer this loss, as I and my friends have many times, the next kick in the teeth comes from the police’s utter disdain for your loss. Some desk-bound analyst has deemed the cost benefit ratio too low to bother doing anything beyond sending a pro-forma email, which you’re lucky to have your name typed into. If you stole my lawnmower I’d probably agree, but your equations are missing something important: emotion.

“It’s fine if you have insurance” someone said. Has society sunk so low that we passively permit acquisitive crime because Admiral will pay out? First, not everyone can afford to be insured; second, most bike owners don’t want a new bike, they want their bike—the one they took on holiday, the one that got them home the night they were dumped, the one that got them through the driving rain, the one they went to work on the past ten years. A society that thinks progress is allowing insurance companies to get rich because the police are off chasing trespassers is not one I want part of.

So, bike bandits, why do you do it? Are you being forced to? Are you desperate? I’m keen to know because there has to be a better way to spend your time. I’ve met career criminals. They usually aim higher than this. They have some sophistication. What’s your explanation? OK, maybe you’re really desperate and you need help. Fine, let’s work on that, but stop it with the bikes. If you have to steal then steal something else, please.

The misery you’re creating has value, too. Maybe you have a good explanation. Even if I cannot fix your problems, I can suggest other things you may want to steal instead. I see a lot of Teslas these days.

I’ve lost count of how many of my bike friends I’ve been forced to break up with. Is it five? Ask anyone in London or another big city, and you will hear they are resigned to the fact their relationship with their two-wheeled pal is likely to be transitory. Figures for London alone range from fifteen to twenty thousand thefts a year—50 a day—and that’s just the ones reported. Knowing this means we don’t commit to them as properly as we should. We treat them less well. We keep our insurance documents close to hand. We care less about what we have, limit our love, treat each journey as a transaction. When will I have got a positive return on my investment?

We must not lose our love for our wonderful machines. Stop taking them, please. Cyclists are good people. We give and take. We put up with abuse. We look out for each other. We can handle the cold. There are worse people out there you can profit from. Go to Chelsea, if you must.

If there were a competition for worst job, Bike Thief must be near the top. On the off-chance one of you is reading this: you are morally hollow, your contribution to life is a big negative, you deserve to feel the pain that you cause. If you did, I think you’d stop and think before you angle grind your next D-lock. So please: stop and think.

Meetings have sure changed since I was a kid, Clive. I remember being elected chair of my high-school student council. Fired up with ambitions to make edutainment compulsory and to maximise the school day by combining lunch with math, instead I spent hours with my hand in the air waiting for the chairman to let me speak; typical of the bleeding heart leftie communist apologist politics of the day that had slowly infiltrated the administration. I decided then that I had to find ways to make myself heard and create actionable outcome metrics that others would slavishly follow.

Thankfully, this is no longer the case. Meetings (thought gatherings, mind-revolutions etc.) are now simply a place to determine who is the alpha male, who is really in charge: position is irrelevant — the ability to circular breathe is all. Clive, I know you have a lot of meetings, so to tackle them with successivation here are my top five pointers to take control, take no prisoners and take away the power and leadership of others you have paid for (your transaction cleared, by the way — we had a few glitches but they are all resolved now).

1. Do not listen to others: do not fall into the trap others do by thinking meetings are where you exchange pleasantries or enter a non-actionable state by listening to other people’s problems. Work is not for making friends. If you need friends, you can find them on the squash court (if no colleagues are available). Meetings are where you, Clive, get people to do what you want. This is achieved by constantly and ruthlessly not listening to other points of view (or as I call them, excuses not to act). You have done your action prep: go into the room, delagatize ruthlessly and leave as soon as possible. The more efficient you are, the more respect you will gain and the more time is freed up to maintain your core stealth-like focus on the goals and blow the opposition quite literally out of the water.

2. Gain and maintain control: this is the burning platform issue. In order for people to want to follow you must first eliminate all excuses not to be followed. First, never show weaknesses, in fact abandon them altogether — they are an annoyance leaders like us have no time scheduled for. Second, act as if everyone in the room owes you. If they don’t, then one day they will. Eventually your co-workers will enjoy the warm feeling of being told what to do and not have the added stress of having to think before they act. Finally, use embarrassment and peer pressure whenever you can to shame others into working harder for you. This is easily achieved through such phrases as “Jan, why have you not given me that report, Brian gave me his — are you suggesting his is incomplete or you were unable to follow a simple order?” (do not worry if Jan is your line-manager, it is just as effective).

3. Do not allow silence to be wasted: key modern meetings are unruly and uncivilised arenas within which generally self-conscious people waste time waiting for stronger people to make decisions. The unguided and inefficient organisation of such gatherings is ripe for strong leaders to go forward and leverage to their advantage and add meat to the bones of their excellence. The most easily learned technique takes advantage of the modern fashion of letting people speak whenever they want (thankfully leaving the weak and junior almost irrelevant). You may have noticed the odd and monotonous noises produced by primary stakeholder-figures in major decision-huddles: “so.. you know… uh… ah… ba… da….” and so on into infantile inane rambling. These are how thought-followers have adapted to no longer being able to raise their hands. You make a noise and people instinctively look at you, useful for hunting, not useful for enhancing the quarterly sales figures, Clive. However, you can claw back this waste and take advantage of the evolutionary weakness of the masses by this tried and tested technique: simply hum whenever you are not talking so everyone continues to look at you expecting you to speak. At first they will find it odd, but staff are easily trained.

4. Your body is language: get ahead of the curve, Clive. We all know body language accounts for 90% of what we say (100% for mutes). Knowing this productivity factoid you can increase the payoff to your directives just by tapping into a few of my scientifically presented tips. The most important is to always walk into the meeting last, when people are wondering when the meeting will move into the starting blocks. This has several advantages: it makes you feel and appear important, it makes people think you were the reason the meeting could start; and you receive maximum attention as you will be arriving on your own and not with the masses (this will make many think you have been at a very important wrap-up tasking session).

5. Harness the power of your eyes: look: eye contact is the easiest way to manipulate those in a meeting to follow your lead. Stare intensely at people not talking, who you want to remain that way. This will undermine their self-confidence if you ensure you never smile at them (avoid humor, particularly in meetings). When someone is talking aimlessly, batting some idea or other around the table and you want them to stop, look at them intensely, never acknowledge what they are saying (you will see the rest of the room nodding like donkeys) and then look away quickly to the corner of the room. This will cause them to look around and you can then elevate your hum into action-speak and regain vital talk-control.

This crisp is on fire, much like the world. No fucks have been given for the meeker of our people, like me, who will be reduced to drooling, mouth open wide, jaw paralysed.

There are echos of Spicy Nik Naks of yonder but the ingredient department put the decimal in the wrong column when ordering the chilli.

It left my heart pounding and all my senses amped to 11. The putrid purple packet took on ultraviolet sheen of mouth-malice. The font team went literally mad. The magnified corn puff knobbly sticks are literally aflame.

The snack equivalent of being asked “what are you fucking looking at, pal?” If you need an escape from the never-ending-doom-news-feed then this will render you incapacitated for some time.

I'm not saying don't do it but I want to make sure I was clear that I warned you.

Rating: No.

Why this peculiar British obsession with the sea? Because were an Island Nation? Our proud sea-faring tradition? This isn't quite enough for me. I cant find any pride in helping the slave trade, colonising Africa and blowing up the Malvinas. It doesn't excuse Bergerac or Howards Way, either. Because we (me?) love to suffer and complain? Because we dont have nice weather, nice food, or children we like? I know not.

Still, we go. And in great numbers. Indeed, attending the pre-climate change British beach was, like street fighting, processed ham and tutting, one of our dignified traditions. We must surely be the only country that takes a temporary wall with them to try to reduce the biting winds from further burning our pale and flaccid bodies. We attempt frisbee in hurricane conditions, give up and try the beach ball which we lose instantly as its swept out to Ireland. We have a huge argument and then when the rain really starts up we end up in a cafe where the steamed up windows leave us only knowing we are at the beach because it took four hours to get there crawling along eighteenth century roads. These, plus chewing sand, ironic sunburn, chilblains and drinking from a Thermos flask are my abiding memories of this annual torture.

However there is, even spoilsport I must admit, something innate in our need to see the sea, or at least having seen it, to return. (I should add Ive met many people who have never seen a sea and they dont see the fuss or feel this urge.) From the comfort of a bed, plane or well-stocked bar, there is absolutely something mysterious, mighty and overwhelming about these vast saline murderous expanses. Perhaps the audacity of its nothingness throws us. Or envy of its simplicity.

It was a defining moment. The big inhale, the morass of mist, then a face of calm toxicity and not a hint of guilt, shame or fear. Why not? Has work intruded into our private domains, or the reverse? It’s my home, my territory: you’re telling me I have to be here so I will do what the fuck I want. Rejoice!

Why can’t I wear my pyjamas in all the extra lockdown meetings we are subject to? Since work and home life have effectively merged, who says I can’t give a performance review from the bath or hoover whilst listening to Kevin droning on?

The New Yorker tried to preserve the past by saying senior executives cannot masturbate whilst on a zoom call. But if we shift our reference frame, in a way I find more ethically persuasive, instead ask why should your zoom call be happening when one is masturbating? It’s not my fault I cannot leave the house, and in this house I am the boss and it’s my rules.

Vaping is the thin end of a rapidly growing normality-distorting wedge. My initial reaction to Vape Gate was shock: this coworker (Brian, let’s say) was deliberately transgressing the unwritten moral code and probable rule that you cannot take drugs in the office. I thought Brian was going to be in trouble.

But the more I thought about it, Brian is a hero—for us all. He’s starting a new workplace revolution from a semi-detached in Neasden. We owe it to our Brians not to tut, or secretly message Jane and ask if he’s OK: but to join him. If we all pick one forbidden behaviour, it will add up to a nationwide upsurge of moral confusion and HR intolerance that senior management will not be able to process. From will come unimaginable freedom whence we return to our workplaces.

So stroke your dog’s belly, fold the clothes, wear shorts in winter, have a beer for lunch, go for a run, dig the garden, tell Kevin to shut up, wear your dressing gown all day, eat leftover pizza for breakfast and scream at your neighbours. Embrace the discombobulation, undermine our most treasured social mores and let the change in.