Matthew Wilcox

The most memorable thing about Keir Starmer's resignation speech yesterday was not the resignation. It was the soundtrack. As the Prime Minister tearfully announced his intention to depart Downing Street, the veteran anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray began blasting Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’ across Whitehall.  I was initially mildly surprised that modern broadcast technology proved incapable of filtering out a single protester with a loudspeaker somewhere down the road. As the speech dragged into its second minute, I was no longer entirely certain which audio I most wanted removed.  The great joke of the morning was that ‘Ode to Joy’ is a piece about reconciliation.

‘We failed,’ wrote Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday, ‘to see the writing on the wall in letters of fire.’ Looking back on the twilight of Habsburg Vienna, Zweig marvelled at how an entire civilisation could remain so certain of itself just as the ground began to give way beneath it.  The same sense of elegiac anxiety now drifts over Chipping Norton, although its prophets are chiefly property correspondents. According to a recent report in the Times, house prices in parts of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire are beginning to soften. This comes as a surprise. The Cotswolds has spent the past decade attracting the sort of wealth that normally regards gravity as an optional extra.

There is a moment in a recent University of Cambridge study into Artificial Intelligence in children’s toys that unintentionally recreates one of the most disturbing scenes in film history. The report, AI in the Early Years, published earlier this month, involved observing 14 children aged three to five as they played with a conversational AI soft toy called Gabbo, a device that looks like a Nintendo Game Boy that has been embalmed in pastel fur.  During one interaction recorded in the study, a five-year-old tells its stuffed companion: ‘I love you.’ Where Kubrick gave us ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

I live on a road where parking is forbidden. This has not stopped any of us from needing cars. Instead, we crowd each evening into the small cul-de-sac opposite, where ten vehicles can park legally, and 15 can park optimistically. The sign is unambiguous: ‘Three hours. No return within two.’  Most days I manage to comply. Some days I even set an alarm. The cruelty is that nothing happens for ages. Weeks pass. Months. You begin to suspect you have cracked the system or even that the sign is entirely ornamental, the sort of bluff recognisable to anyone familiar with the steady arrival of ‘Final’ notices.  Then, without warning, that little yellow envelope appears on your windscreen. The wardens have descended like a pack of seagulls on an unattended tray of chips.

Last week I was in a branch of Greggs, in the small market town in north Wiltshire where I live. Behind the sausage rolls, steak bakes, corned beef pasties and trays of vanilla slice was something that almost made me drop my Tesco meal deal in shock. A machine dispensing matcha lattes.  Greggs, the last bastion of brown food in the post-Ottolenghi era is now retailing aspirational green, radioactive TikTok slurry … in Wiltshire. A cheerful, democratic, brute-force provider of cheap calories in culturally legible form has collided with a beverage whose main function is performative wellness. It felt less like innovation than a stitching error. Two incompatible worlds roughly bolted together, animated despite never quite cohering.

Halfway through a downward dog, red-faced and breathing a little too hard, a hen stops about 18 inches from my face. It squats, and lifts its a tail a fraction. There is a brief, unmistakable pause. Something warm and biological drops onto the mat beside me. It is not an egg.  From the front of the class, the instructor’s voice calls out, instructing us to inhale deeply.   To my side, another chicken wanders into the danger zone just as a pose collapses and someone nearly brings an arm down on it. The bird emits a short, offended squawk.   How have I ended up here?