Good take. Just answer the phone. It could be something interesting.

Apologies for being a joyless intellectual snob, but what these discussions reveal is that most people think about food, and especially the food of foreign countries and cultures, in an incredibly shallow way.

Thank goodness my dishwasher beeps when it's done. I hate to think what would happen if I didn't remember, and left my clean dishes in it overnight.

I hope whoever replaces Bragg on In Our Time focuses on what really made the programme great. Yelling at nerds.

Really happy with how this illustration turned out. Would be even happier if you took the chance to subscribe to the mag!

I'm noticing a lot of performative men ostentatiously reading Sorrows of Young Werther, dressing in blue frock coats and yellow trousers, and shooting themselves with pistols borrowed from their love-rivals

R/moths is generally a pretty laid back subreddit, but every so often someone posts a picture of a spotted lanternfly, and all hell breaks loose

I'm as anti-AI as they come, but I do think this sort of thing can best be explained by the fact that, almost by definition, a small portion of the population is always going to be making very strange choices.

My copy arrived today, and I must say it's already drinking very well

There's an absolute glut of early sloes this year, and I can't find a recipe to make them into booze because Kier Starmer's firewall blocks the winemaking subreddit

The Pub Is Finally Open! With writing from @seamas.bsky.social, @roisinlanigan.bsky.social, @anakinsella.bsky.social, @jimmymcintosh.bsky.social, @charlotteivers.bsky.social, John Banville and @vizcomic.bsky.social. Available at all bookstores & the link below 🍺 www.penguin.co.uk/books/462310...

I would like a restaurant that only sells elaborate aspics. A hushed, cool, dimly lit, dining room. Solemn, sacerdotal waiters. Every dish comes suspended in a block of pellucid jelly.

In conclusion, Zambia is a land of contrasts

Nobody travels to China disguised as a Nestorian monk on a mission to steal silkworms for the Byzantine Emperor any more.

It's incredibly perverse that Dorothy L Sayers wrote 11 Lord Peter Wimsey novels that contain not a hint of the supernatural until the last chapter of the last book, in which it is established that ghosts exist, and have regularly been seen by title character.

I always found Beadle a compelling and sinister figure. I was delighted to learn about his arcane library, scattered and ransacked like the Mortlake collection of John Dee.

My colleague in Australia is off sick because he was bitten by a poisonous spider. Ridiculous country. It must be like living in a platform game.

Queen Anne was a 17th century monarch, and I won't be discussing this further.

If I ran a restaurant I would only take reservation by phone. Not because of bots, I just think you would get a better class of customer that way.

Personally, I prefer a nice long conclave

I wonder what the booze situation is like at the Conclave? I reckon a glass or two of light red with lunch, then you get a pretty free run at the drink over dinner, but no digestifs.

The papaya, or "fool's mango"

Due to a mishearing, I have spent the last few weeks telling people that the new Minecraft film is the directorial debut of Jared Harris

It's interesting how "drinks party" implies elegance, but a "drinking party" sounds grotesque and depraved.

Get in on this

I said 'hop in'

Frantically googling sugar beet, carob and chicory root companies, to position my portfolio for the new era of deglobalisation

There's actually no such thing or a good or bad pub. Every sesh is a Heraclitean fire of transient moments swept into the past. You can't jump into the same river twice.

When buying peppers, remember the old saying: red for the King, green for the wise man, orange for the yeoman and yellow for the fool.

Rich people aren't as interested in Egyptology as they used to be.

As I wrote last week, it’s time we stopped calling the lanthanides “rare earths”. www.mining-journal.com/energy-miner...

It's easy to laugh, but if I became president I would also want to go and look at the gold in Fort Knox. It's a very relatable impulse.

Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy L Sayers

If Alan Coren were still with us we'd get a brilliant 1000 word description of Bond fidgeting around his Chelsea flat waiting for the Amazon driver to turn up with Q's latest gizmo

If an office is full of roaming dogs and people drinking alcohol at their desks, it’s either a failing agricultural land agent in a small provincial town or a cutting-edge Hoxton startup. Or the Spectator, I'd imagine.

A single dam between Cancun and Miami, incorporating Cuba, would turn the Gulf of Mexico into a highly saline endorheic lake, enlarging Texas and Louisiana and potentially doubling the size of Florida. I'm absolutely convinced I could sell this plan to Trump in under ten minutes.

I don't know anything about cryptocurrency, or hard drives, or landfill excavation, but I recognise a junior miner with an overhyped asset when I see one, and some investors are about to get absolutely torched www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

hen once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

A lot of people believe matter is created from the irreducible elements of earth, air, water and fire. But I've been thinking perhaps matter generates from the actions of salt, sulphur and quicksilver #fridaythoughts

I saw this magnificent little dragon (a black girdled lizard) sunbathing on Table Mountain

It's amazing how bad TV has become. Slow Horses and Shogun seems revolutionary just for having a modicum of respect for viewer's intelligence. SNW is the worst Star Trek series (Discovery aside), and is the best show out right now. We've watched an entire artform collapse in a decade.

Today I made a sandwich of sliced Seville oranges, soft goat cheese, capers and Parma ham, in a floury bap. It was, and I don't use this term lightly, genre-redefining.

Time to debut my new comedy character "Afrikaans Elon Musk". Basically the same guy, except he drives a Datsun and owns a lot of collectable plates with pictures of Big Five animals on them

One unexpected thing about Saudi Arabia is how much Vimto there is here

A gentleman never wears new shoes

Amazing stuff going on over at LinkedIn

Love to see Stephen Fry and Alastair Campbell both get a well-deserved kicking this week

The Golden Globes makes a lot more sense when you remember that their average awards voter is a 73-year-old Italian man who is wearing a tuxedo