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"I’m more interested in what the stratospheric rise of a person like Charlie Kirk says about the state of political discourse. He was in many ways representative of a type that has come to dominate the internet’s ‘infotainment’ ecosystem in recent years. His purported renown among a section of the youth probably explains the urge among certain mainstream newscasters to conjure away the nasty bits. They too desperately want to be down with the kids." James Bloodworth on the meaning of Charlie Kirk.

European Powell claims that Labour’s "reckless data-centre dash" will gut the planet, fleece the public –and leave only noise, heat and hollow promises.

"As so often in higher education policy, it seems as though the context and focus of these comments is the industrial value of the sciences (engineering departments are mentioned). Yet the wider implication is worrying: much of what is published in humanities departments is 'unfunded' research in the sense that there is no designated external grant money attached to it." Jeremy Noel-Tod is concerned by the president of Universities UK's condemnation of "hobbyist research that's unfunded".

Sandra Laville reports on the disappearance of bus services in Shropshire: "The city of Birmingham lies just over 40 miles north-east of Ludlow, but to the 10,000 residents of the quiet Shropshire town, it may as well be on the moon."

Yasmin van der Poel introduces us to the Red Vicar of Thaxted: "Conrad Noel, a Christian Socialist, was appointed vicar of Thaxted in 1910. He fused Anglo-Catholic ritual with radical politics, transforming his parish into a sanctuary of spirit-inspired rebellion. His sermons, described in a question in Parliament as ‘sedition’, championed Irish independence, workers’ rights, and land reform."

"I know the NHS is under strain and imperfect, and I’m aware that it was my good luck to find myself at St Thomas’s. But while I was waiting to be sent home on Sunday, the doctor in charge of intensive care at the hospital walked past on his rounds. I told him that while it had been in most respects the worst week of my life, it had also been among the richest. I’d been given an unexpected opportunity to experience and be grateful for human relationships in public service – comradeship among workers, empathy for strangers – at their best. Something I’ll never forget." Richard Williams experiences a sudden health crisis and thinks about the NHS and rhythm.

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John McEvoy reveals that the government was advised Palestine Action is "highly unlikely" to advocate violence and that officials struggled to produce evidence the group posed a national security threat.

"The might of the MATs give them a power within the DfE that smaller schools do not have, highlighted here in a 2019 Schools Week article reporting that an academy leader boasted that he 'flicked away safeguarding concerns' raised by a whistleblower." Pam Jarvis explores the dark side of multi-academy trusts.

"Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t have an inkling of the relevant law, this is horseshit of the highest order. It is absolutely untrue that council tenants can be evicted in order to house asylum seekers. It is not a 'complex issue with legal and ethical considerations', it is a non-existent issue because it cannot legally happen." Giles Peaker is furious about what people may now see if they use Google to research something in the news.

Jennifer Quellette talks to two researchers whose work suggests that people who believe conspiracy theories don't realise that they are in a small minority.

"Officials would want to avoid the fate of Dunwich, where erosion led to skeletons sticking out of the dunes after plots were washed away by the sea in the 1920s. There are similar macabre tales relating to Eccles-on-Sea, which featured in the Domesday book of 1086 and was swallowed by the sea over a number of centuries. The church tower finally collapsed in a winter storm in 1895." Owen Sennitt on the debate over what to do with the graveyard at Happisburgh in Norfolk, which will be lost to coastal erosion.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine finds that the new box set chronicling the birth of Nick Drake's debut album Five Leaves Left offers some quiet revelations: "Hearing Drake speak his aural aspirations for songs – notably, he wants Made to Love Magic to sound 'celestial' – helps reframe the refined baroque arrangements of the finished album, underscoring the intentionality of the sumptuous, sighing strings."

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "It’s only a few thousand quid each"

Former Liberal Democrat leaders are often to be found at the Hall. There's Vince "High-Voltage" Cable, Gloria Swinson and Tim Farron, whom Lord Bonkers still suspects, on no firm evidence, of wanting to rip out the pews of St Asquith's and make everyone sing "Shine, Jesus, Shine".

For reasons that are soon explained, Nick Clegg is a rarer visitor.

Wednesday

Another advantage of Meadowcroft being in Cornwall is that it’s now safe to invite Clegg to the Hall. I’m afraid my gardener has never forgiven our former leader for setting light to the collection of cacti he spent so many years gathering from the arid south of Rutland. 

Over dinner, Clegg is his usual candid self: “I’ve been looking at the money people pay artists and writers. It’s only a few thousand quid each, but it adds up, and my plan is that it should go to me instead. I shall help myself to the artists and writers’ work and feed it into a computer, which will jumble it up and produce versions of its own. Obviously, I’ll make these versions free at first, but when all the writers and artists have given up, I’ll be able to charge what I like.” 

I suggest to Clegg that he pay the artists and writers for their work, but he explains that this would kill his business overnight.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week

• "Death to the Duke of Rutland’s Militia"
• The intelligence services like to recruit orphans

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“I couldn’t shake the fear that future generations might never experience the world as I had, that we might go down in history as the generation that knew exactly what was coming, but chose to look away. That’s what brought me into parliament.” Roz Savage explains why she supports statutory targets on climate and nature.

Alfie Steer considers the prospects for a new party to the left of Labour: “Peter Mandelson is once reported to have said that disillusioned left-wing Labour voters simply had ‘nowhere else to go’. But Sultana and Corbyn’s left party may be the biggest challenge to that theory that the Labour Party has ever seen. Despite all the problems that face the new party, it would be the absolute height of complacency for the Labour Party leadership to underestimate it.”

John Hyde on the publication of the first volume of the report of the Post Office Horizon Inquiry: “Sir Wyn Williams said it was ‘indefensible’ that the government refuses to pay for claimants in the Horizon Shortfall Scheme to speak to a lawyer before deciding whether to accept a fixed offer of compensation.”

Generative AI is like a friend who's a psychopathic liar, except it's not actually like a friend, says Steve Lane.

“I’m fascinated by this story, partly because I’m fascinated by all alleged liars and the question of why they lie; and partly because it rings bells, reminding me of a strikingly similar story from a century ago, in which another female writer also gained fame through a fake ‘nature cure’ narrative.” Rachel Hewitt offers a different take on the Salt Path scandal.

Stuart Heritage complains that television episodes have become too long, stretching the limits of the medium and reducing our enjoyment in the process.

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Blue Labour has become a destructive fantasy with little to say about the challenges of the country in which we live, says Marc Stears, who was one of the founders of the movement: "Everyone probably wants to reindustrialise, but we know that there is no future for the UK economy without a vibrant service sector. Everybody similarly wants strong defence. But there is no military alliance to be found in which the UK and Ukraine should be allied against France and Germany."

Eliot Higgins is not impressed by a report from the Cato Institute that claims public concern about misinformation is overblown: "The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities can become locked into belief systems that cannot be challenged - where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t merely distort truth; it breaks trust. When this happens at scale, it isn’t just bad information - it is a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable."

Brian Merchant has been collecting stories from tech workers at TikTok, Google and across the industry about how AI is changing, ruining, or replacing their jobs.

"Articles discussing the report offer lots of different answers as to why this happiness gap exists: better health care, high-trust culture, less pressure to excel academically. But when I asked parents and children in the Netherlands why they thought their children were so happy, they all had one answer: Dutch parents value giving their children independence, possibly above all else." Mary Frances Ruskell responds to a UNICEF report that suggests Dutch children are the happiest in the world.

"Attachments to places are how we make sense of the world around us. When these places are threatened, so too are our own places within the world": Ben Lockwood on the importance of mapping the meaning of forests in a time of destruction.

Caroline Davies visits an exhibition that explores Charles Dickens' love of the theatre and highlighs the dramatic impact of his works.

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Andrew Chandler makes a Liberal case for the right to die with dignity: "There’s a peculiar cruelty in forcing someone to live in unbearable pain for the comfort of others."

Last year, Ofsted investigations revealed the existence of more than 900 mostly single-occupant illegal children’s homes in England, over six times the number it had found three years earlier. And The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found a council spending £29,000 per week to place a vulnerable 10-year-old in one of them.

Keith Frankish, a philosopher looks at what it is that large language models are doing. (The link will download a pdf.)

"While cranes have been elevated by rarity, gulls were once quasi-angelic, their clinging to inhospitable coastal rocks evoking the monks who established their cells at the extreme edges of these islands. Now diminished in popular perception, they are seen as gutter-life, scavengers on the trash-tides of our consumerism." Amy-Jane Beer reviews The Cuckoo's Lea by Michael Warren - "a magical ornithological history of Britain."

"The third 'fun fact' about Truro Cathedral is that it’s one of three Cathedrals in the UK with three spires. This is bollocks. I have no idea why people say this. There are four spires. I will elaborate later, but I have become a Spire Truther." Jay Hulme looks round - and climbs - Truro Cathedral.

Film-Authority.com watches the 1977 British thriller The Squeeze: "[Michael] Apted died not so long ago, and while his obituaries found much to discuss in his ground-breaking 7 Up documentary series, or his Bond movies, his first feature film is a fearsome beast, recommended but with the strongest of warnings; this really ain’t a pretty sight."

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Ed Kiely reviews John Pring's The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence: "DWP officials continue to dissemble when faced with the scale of harm caused by the department, even while pushing out dubious figures to justify the cuts: a recent press release appeared to overstate the increase in incapacity claims by a factor of ten. Labour has shielded the department from serious criticism, expanded its powers and fuelled anti-disabled sentiment with indiscriminate attacks on claimants."

"The media keep reporting that Abrega Garcia was mistakenly or wrongly deported. I get the impulse - journalists ... want to give readers a sense of the injustice. But all of those men were deported wrongly, because they were all denied due process." Jonathan Larsen says the US Democrats must stand up for everyone’s rights.

Sajia Ferdous argues that AI is inherently ageist, which can be costly for workers and businesses.

"It took nearly a decade for officialdom to acknowledge beavers had spread throughout the Tay catchment. When they did, they tried to round them up - to re-extinct them. But Taysiders - many of whom had grown fond of watching them work at dusk - wouldn’t have it. When Scottish Natural Heritage laid traps, some said that locals took to peeing on them, so their scent would warn off the beavers." Adam Ramsay recounts how his parents' adoption of beavers has transformed their upland farm into a rich, biodiverse haven for birds, mammals, fish and amphibians.

"The poor boy looks utterly miserable, as if he wants the ground to open up and swallow him. Or - better - swallow his dad." Sam Wollaston asks why children's football brings out the worst in parents.

Leigh Singer celebrates Annie Hall: "Diane Keaton had co-starred in [Woody] Allen’s two previous films, Sleeper and Love and Death, establishing herself as a deft comedian with a kooky sensibility and offbeat comic timing. But these roles were largely foils for Allen’s protagonist. Annie Hall, however, tailored specifically for her by Allen, is far more substantial."

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Wera Hobhouse demands to know why she was deported from Hong Kong.

"As we toured the site - not just the blast furnace but the iron ore and coal piles and the continuous casting works and the rod mill and the old coke ovens, shut down a couple of years ago - we began to glean that the workers here were reeling from a terrible shock. Most of them were just discovering, that very day, that Jingye was planning to starve the blast furnaces to death." Ed Conway tries to get to the bottom of what is happening at Scunthorpe.

"Could we see protests akin to the Luddite attacks - this time targeting server farms instead of knitting frames?" John Cassidy discusses how we might survive the AI revolution.

Michael Mechanic and Nina Berman report allegations of abuse at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida: "The scientists came out with an announcement that was disturbing, if not surprising. They had excavated 55 sets of remains at Dozier’s Boot Hill cemetery, 5 more than they’d originally identified, and 24 more than were indicated in the school’s official records. Other campus locations remain to be searched."

"The four principal characters have signed on to a suicide mission, driving two truckloads of nitroglycerin across three hundred miles of winding, mountainous, badly paved roads. After a lengthy setup, the movie itself becomes a fuse of indeterminate length. 'You sit there waiting for the theater to explode,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther ended his review when The Wages of Fear opened in early 1955 at the posh Paris Theater in Manhattan.'" J. Hoberman reconsiders Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film.

John Lacey traces a pre-historic trading route across Leicestershire.

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"The UK AI Action Plan quite explicitly encourages building up a greater tolerance for 'scientific and technical risk'. This is the language and ethos of venture capital investing, but with government funding: ”move fast and break things” on the path to AI dominance." Elke Schwarz says the British government has thrown caution to the wind in favour of an uncertain, speculative benefit.

Amanda Dylina Morse says youth workers can be powerful counters to figures like Andrew Tate and provide a positive example of manhood.

Andrew Pakes, Labour MP for Peterborough, introduces his co-operative housing bill: "Co-operative housing sits in stark contrast to the exploitative rental market or unaffordable home ownership, because the model gives power and control to the people who live there."

"In 1958 the Roman Catholic archbishop, John Heenan, was stoned while visiting a sick woman at her home off Netherfield Road; in 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, advised against Queen Elizabeth attending the consecration of the city’s new Roman Catholic cathedral for fear of a Protestant backlash. In the following year, Protestant Party candidates were again elected to seats on the city council." Ian Cobain on the evaporation of sectarianism in Liverpool.

Jeff Swim goes wandering through pagan Wiltshire with Richard Jefferies: "The Uffington White Horse ... showed me that paganism, as it is expressed in Jefferies, is an aesthetic of the process of walking the countryside and seeing things scurry in and out of view as you proceed, of seeing lines and figures take shape as you move with them."

At last! I've found a site celebrating cats in cinema and television: Cinema Cats.

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"In the past two weeks, Elon Musk - a man no one elected to any office - has gained unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, fired federal workers, shuttered entire agencies, and installed his loyalists throughout the government. If this were happening in any other country, we'd call it what it is: a coup." Parker Molloy complains that the media is treating this outrage like standard political news.

Rachel Coldicutt asks what Musk's rampage through Washington means for Britain's technology policy.

"Something significant happened last week. The UK government forced the chair of the Competition and Markets Authority to resign. Marcus Bokkerink’s crime? Not being sufficiently 'pro-growth'. The chair of a regulator who is supposed to ensure a level playing field for businesses has been replaced by a former Amazon executive." Sue Hawley argues that Keir Starmer's drive to cut red tape could unleash a new wave of dirty money and corporate bad behaviour.

Jonathan Mills draws parallels between British universities today and British Leyland in the Seventies: "When an organisation's revenues fall, or look like they will ... panic sets in. The organisation starts looking at profitability and because it's all set up around departments in the first place, that's how management think in a crisis. Unproductive departments must go, so they look at the department accounts and pick a productive department with the least "profit", and close it. Wonderful! Next year will see a return to profit! Except that it doesn't."

José Vela Castillo introduces us to the revolutionary immigrant architects whose stories inspired Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist.

"The rest of the cast exited and still we waited. Frankly, having stood there like lemons for nearly an hour we were on the brink of giving up but then we heard her trademark voice – a cross between an exultant yell and a prowling growl – and she came bowling out of the theatre, extravagantly gesturing and slightly fried. Correction: slaughtered. Thrilled, it seemed to us, to see two schoolboys anxious for her autograph, she threw herself upon us and to our amazement, we wound up walking her back to the Savoy." David Benedict on his meetings with Elaine Stritch.

GUEST POST How Dune anticipated Deep Seek

Peter Chambers turns to Frank Herbert's classic science fiction for help in understanding the Artificial Intelligence world of today.

Recently a small company in the People's Republic of China released a GPT-LLM model set called Deep Seek. This seems to have surprised some in the US tech oligarchy to the tune of about a trillion dollars.

This is presented by some commentators as ‘little China’ being nimbler than ‘big America’. But this is not strictly true, and Frank Herbert anticipated the point in Appendix I of his novel Dune.

Big America is in reality a bandwagon started by OpenAI and Nvidia around a specific architecture epitomised by Chat-GPT. 

This demo caught the common imagination and was backed by Elon Harkonnen, Eric Corrino, Mark Richese, Sam Atreides and others. They organised investment in the $100 Bn range. Eric even said at a closed meeting at Stanford that the technology would do what his “15,000 programmers would not do”.

Little China was one company within the PRC headed by one Liang Wenfeng, which claims to have spent about $6m on electricity for their demo, using older export-grade chips from the USA.

How many firms and universities in the PRC failed to produce anything? We do not know. We will never know. Deep Seek found a sweet spot in the landscape of possibilities. We do not know what combination of skill, money, inspiration, technology, and luck led them to this. But they got there.

What did Frank Herbert say about finding success? In Appendix 1 of Dune he wrote:

Kynes knew that highly organised research is guaranteed to produce nothing new. He set up small-unit experiments with regular interchange of data for a swift Tansley effect.

Sir Arthur George Tansley FRS was an English botanist and a pioneer in the science of ecology. There is a lot of stuff on him online. He organised committees. One term - 'ecosystem' - associated with him was actually from a colleague. He was an inspiration, but not perhaps a Great Man.

Small teams with a lot of lateral information sharing versus a highly organised structure run from the centre. I shall not labour the point more.

Trillion-dollar pivots can come about by quite humble people noting that an Emperor is actually naked. Maybe 9999 people at that time miss that point. It might take only one though. 

There are a lot of possible configurations in the space of GPT-LLM. Multiple ones may be valuable. Herbert used the example of ecology in his Appendix to appear profound. Ignoring this might cost someone a trillion dollars.

Peter Chambers is a Lib Dem Member in Hampshire.

Glossary

GPT – generative pre-trained transformer, something that generates an output by transforming an input using pre-trained (fixed) weights, mathematically. The inputs and outputs are digital data.

Chat-GPT – a demonstration GPT made by the firm OpenAI. It obtained viral PR fame.

FRS – Fellow of the Royal Society

LLM – large language model, a model that uses a language of digital data tokens, which are strings of bits. Make it a large one. The meaning and significance of the tokens exists in the senses and minds of humans, natural intelligences that evolved on the Third Planet.

PRC – the People’s Republic of China ("the Mainland one").

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"The policy is less interesting than the politics, simply because the policy isn’t going to happen any time soon- at the risk of saying the most boring thing I’ll ever write on this substack: the Lib Dems are not in government. But for me, this remains an important milestone, because it is the biggest crack yet in the unloved Brexit consensus. The fact Davey feels able to make the shift at this time, tells us something important about the politics of the moment we’re in." Lewis Goodall weighs the importance of Ed Davey's foreign policy speech.

Dan McQuillan fears Labour's AI action plan is a gift to the far right: "Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, has repeatedly stated that the UK should deal with Big Tech via 'statecraft'; in other words, rather than treating AI companies like any other business that needs taxing and regulating, the government should treat the relationships as a matter of diplomatic liaison, as if these entities were on a par with the UK state."

"The problem for Siddiq is not her personal connections to Hasina - no one can help who they are related to, or be judged for having a personal relationship with their relatives - but rather the fact that the Labour MP is herself named in the investigations taking place in Bangladesh." Shehab Khan on the resignation of anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq,

David Zipper argues that gigantic SUVs are a threat to public health and asks why we don't treat them like one.

Pam Jarvis explores the philosophy, psychology and politics of Pooh.

"When the Paramount executives saw the finished product they were appalled and planned to delay distribution. But by December 1968, Paramount had failed to show their annual quota of British films. Their Barbarella was proving a disaster at the UK box office, so they had to replace it with something, preferably British. Two nights after if.... was released in central London, the queues stretched for half a mile." Alex Harvey revisits Lindsay Anderson’s groundbreaking film If....

Google-Backed Chatbots Suddenly Start Ranting Incomprehensibly About Dildos

In a Liberal England first, the website Futurism wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges were heard to quote Keir Starmer's judgement that AI offers a chance to turbocharge growth, create the companies of the future and radically improve oviewur public services. 

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Zoe Crowther asks what the Westminster social media landscape will look like in 2025.

"You get people saying they can’t say anything. But a lot of them are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix. Jimmy Carr carries on despite the idea he was cancelled for his joke about gypsies. Ricky Gervais would love to be properly ‘cancelled’, I think, but ... he doesn’t seem able to say anything actually controversial enough to be as controversial as he’d like to be." Stewart Lee talks to Prospect.

Far from displaying intelligence, argues Baldur Bjarnason, chat-based Large Language Models replicate the 'cold reading' techniques of fraudulent mediums.

Sugata Srinivasaraju pays tribute to his friend Jeremy Seabrook: "He was so much different from all that the colonial curriculum had imparted to us of a British life and character. He was like us, I thought. Very much like us. He was like a family elder. He happily fit into that very avuncular Indian role. He had no position to proselyte you into."

"In late December 1831, white Jamaican planters slept restlessly in their beds. Rumors had long been circulating of disquiet among the enslaved Africans residing in plantations across the island. Before they knew it, the island would be set ablaze as tens of thousands armed themselves to fight for their freedom." Perry Blankson on Christmas Day 1831, when 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in the history of the British West Indies.

Ruth Lewy and Maxine Beuret present a photo essay on Britain's last milkmen: "[Beuret] first photographed an electric milk float while undertaking another project called Familiar Interiors of Leicester – her hometown – in 2005. As well as creating a record of the library, the hospital, the pub and other cherished places, she visited the local dairy, Kirby & West, and "instantly fell in love" with the milk floats, she says. "I loved the compact, functional design, clean lines, and fragile sense of history they carried with them."

A disturbing image of two Well-Behaved Orphans digging an escape tunnel

After producing benign images of Freddie and Fiona and of the Elves of Rockingham Forest with Canva, I turned to Grok to help me generate one of the Well-Behaved Orphans. It came up with this - don't have nightmares.

When I tweeted it earlier this evening, someone suggested:

Maybe Musk’s Boring Company never had real tunnelling machines, and were in fact metal tubes full of orphans.

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Arthur Snell explains why Assad was so violent: "The implications of a small, historically marginal and theologically unorthodox group holding the reins of power are clear: from the start they have had a strong incentive to shore up their power-base through inter-marriage, self-enrichment and repression of the majority."

"A decade ago, liberals, liberaltarians and straight libertarians could readily enthuse about “liberation technologies” and Twitter revolutions in which nimble pro-democracy dissidents would use the Internet to out-maneuver sluggish governments. Technological innovation and liberal freedoms seemed to go hand in hand. Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes." Henry Farrell analyses the changing politics of Silicon Valley.

Isabelle Roughol and John Elledge take us on a women's history tour along London’s Suffragette line: "In a tale as old as social progress itself, suffragists and suffragettes clashed with one another over issues of ideological purity and how to win over public opinion. As the suffragettes’ tactics got increasingly radical, 50,000 women marched on London’s streets in 1913 to say 'Not in our name!'"

"The sea has been pressing back into the boulder clay here for centuries, claiming churches, homes, villages and lives. Ten miles north of Withernsea, at Aldbrough, I saw a recently tarmacked road charging confidently out into thin air like something from a Road Runner cartoon." David Hancox writes about living on the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe.

"Her new home in Rotherfield, East Sussex had fifty acres and included a lake, topiary and an orangery. Lisa Marie cooked, gardened, created her own pub at the house where local friends such as Jeff Beck would pop by for a pint and a singalong." Jessica Olin reviews Lisa Marie Presley's posthumous memoir.

Charles Bramesco argues that David Lynch's Dune (1984) is due a re-evaluation.

How Generative AI imagines Freddie and Fiona and the Elves of Rockingham Forest

I was playing about with the free AI images that Canva offers and came up with these results for Freddie and Fiona and for the Elves of Rockingham Forest. Both are uncannily accurate - the elves are in Lord Bonkers' woods on the shore of Rutland Water, of course.

But I've used up all my free goes there now and can't find another free site that offers images of the same quality.

We bring you the first picture of the Rutland Water Monster

Over to BBC News:

Undiscovered "sea dragons" are lurking underneath the feet of Leicestershire and Rutland residents, an expert has said.

As readers of Lord Bonkers' Diary will know, they are lurking above ground too. Here's the old boy writing in September of last year:

Who should I spy on the lawn at breakfast but my old friend Ruttie, the Rutland Water Monster? Between you and me, I think she is getting jealous of all the attention being paid to Loch Ness. The next thing we know, she’ll be waddling across the Oakham road and pulling faces at the motorists to get in the papers herself. 

Later I call at my Home for Well-Behaved Orphans as they are having a film show. The little inmates have voted amongst themselves to decide the main feature and chosen The Colditz Story.

The illustration above is what generative AI makes of the concept of a Rutland Water Monster. And it is very intelligent - there would have to be more than one.

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"It doesn't matter what statistics Musk does or doesn't announce, or which advertisers stay or which leave - this statistic is the real ballgame. Engagement numbers that can't even reach a dozen, for an account that boasts over 30,000 supposed fans, is an outright apocalypse." Hunter Lazzaro offers a post titled How to Kill Your Tech Company (Elon Musk edition).

Katie Rosseinsky claims Euston Station is hell on earth: "You stand, neck craned towards the departures board, squinting under artificial lights that seem perfectly calibrated to induce migraines. You dodge passengers who stampede like wildebeests towards platforms announced moments before trains are due to leave."

Simon Price says Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history. Hear him.

"Art historians look carefully at images to search for incongruities. In authenticating or attributing a painting, we don’t just look at brushstrokes and pigments. We consider the painting’s ownership, the hands through which it has passed, and other information about the history that the painting has accumulated along the way." Sonja Drimmer suggests the profession will be invaluable in the battle against misleading AI-generated images.

"For many urban planners, desire lines are a sign of failure; evidence that a public space hasn’t quite met the needs and wishes of the people who use that space. And there’s some truth in that. But for me, they’re also a reminder that our cities are uniquely human places, and the ones that function best are those that are safely navigable not by private vehicle, but on foot." Laurie Winkless celebrates desire lines - the unofficial footpaths the public makes for itself by repeated use.

J.J. Jackson on the ticking time bomb that threatens south Essex: "The SS Richard Montgomery was a United States Liberty Ship. It was transporting explosives from the USA, to use in the war against the Nazis. She ran aground and broke her back off the Kent coast in August 1944. Salvage crews were able to remove 5,000 tons of explosives after the wreck. But they had to abandon the attempt, leaving 1,400 tons still on board."

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"The default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after." Sarah Jeong says the world we grew up in, where photographs provided strong evidence for the truth, is about to disappear.

Kate Moore argues that allotments beat food poverty, boost mental health and bring back the insects and bees.

"The 1902 Metropolis Water Act set up the Metropolitan Water Board. Eight existing private companies – plus the water undertakings of Tottenham and Enfield Urban District Councils – were taken over, with £30m compensation paid to the shareholders. Henceforth, London’s water would be provided by a public utility with an indirectly-elected board comprising 67 members from all the affected local authorities." A Municipal Dreams article on the municipalisation of London's water supply has many contemporary resonances.

"Sven took over an England team that had long been the international equivalent of a domestic ‘yo yo’ club - a Norwich, Fulham or West Brom - who go up and down, down and up. And he quickly transformed them into an embedded upper top-tier club which might just one day win something again: like an Arsenal, Aston Villa or Tottenham of today." John Sturgis pays tribute to Sven-Göran Eriksson.

Adam Scovell goes on a pilgrimage to discover the locations used for the filming of Powell and Pressburgere's A Canterbury Tale: "Relying on some fictional places as well as some camera trickery and illusion, the picturesque German Expressionist-influenced cinematography of Erwin Hillier brings the settings a fantastical, mysterious, even spiritual character."

Steve Richards has some remarkable photographs from 1973, when trains bound for Ruddington Ordnance & Supply Depot had to reverse at Weekday Cross in the heart of Nottingham.