Surely one of the most effective ways to covertly control a population would be to make the game so fucking obvious that eventually the population refuses to play it at all? Bear with me. My brain is wandering. Covid did something strange to us collectively. Forget, for a moment, the arguments about where it came from, what governments knew, what pharmaceutical companies knew, whether every measure was justified, whether none of them were, or somewhere in the enormous grey swamp in between....

I had a moment today where my nervous system recognised something before the rest of me had even decided whether there was anything to recognise. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no betrayal. No revelation. No actual evidence that anything was wrong. Just a tiny situation that looked enough like something from my past for my nervous system to go: Excuse me. We have historical data on this. And, to be fair to it, we do. I've been in situations before where I haven't seen something...

I love writing. I love thinking. I love disappearing down rabbit holes, pulling ideas apart, changing my mind, finding another perspective and realising that the thing I thought I understood six months ago has grown another twenty branches. Which makes what has happened since publishing a book very inconvenient. I am absolutely terrified of people reading it. My book arrived yesterday. My actual book. With a cover. And pages. And my name printed across the front in a manner that suggests I...