Sean Thomas

For nearly all my adult life, I’ve lived within walking distance of Primrose Hill. Indeed, for the last two decades, I’ve lived close enough that my regular evening ritual – travel, health, and global plagues permitting – involves a short stroll down Regent’s Park Road, then a stiff walk up the sacred hill itself, to take in the splendid view. Then I march home, fully dopamined, via the rugged Primrose Hill borderlands of Gloucester Avenue and the Regent’s Canal, to my Camden flat. There is the typical Primrose Hill scene – beautiful young people picnicking with M&S prosecco – and here is a young man about to be knifed to death.

I’ve got a new thriller out this week, under my pen name of S.K. Tremayne. I am pleased with the book, and I believe it’s entertaining. I am also aware that, in a tough and competitive market, that may not be enough for it to succeed. I am even more aware that readers might decide the book is dreck. They might give me one star reviews, and no sales. Then the book will crater, my publishers will probably abandon me, and my nice career will drift to an end. In short, the building is appalling, and it’s not going to get better over time And that, of course, is how it should be. No one in any career is entitled to a free ride. That especially applies to people who get to do a desirable, creative job such as novel writing.

Depending on where you stand on AI, 30 January 2026 will go down in history for one of two things. Either it is the day when the AI singularity really began and the robots became conscious – or the day when it was revealed that far too many people are credulous about AI and were fooled by a bunch of cosplaying crypto-bores.  To recap: this story begins with several confusing names you may have glimpsed on the internet in recent days – Clawdbot, Moltbot, Openclaw, Moltbook. They represent different pieces of the same extraordinary puzzle.

It has been obvious for some time that there are basic concepts that the liberal British Establishment simply does not understand. Like money. Or tax. Or business. Or going to the pub. Or the fundamental value of free speech. Well, now we can add a whole new roster of more baroque concepts to this list: meme culture, e-girls, semiotics, détournement, the subtext of black chokers and basic human nature. And all because of a purple-haired young cartoon woman called Amelia. Before we get to Amelia, we need to understand what created her – because the joke can only be grasped once you appreciate the lunacy that came before her minxy pink dresses. Amelia comes from a game called Pathways: Navigating Gaming, the Internet and Extremism.

As Donald Trump claims Nato forces stayed ‘a little off the front lines’ in Afghanistan, and the Great Greenland Crisis rumbles on, and off, and on again, one thing is clear: Europe keeps threatening to ‘stand up to America’ and every time it does, the effect is roughly equivalent to a damp baguette waved in the general direction of the Pentagon. Imagine, just for a moment, that Europe calmly announced a ban on American tourists.The psychological damage would be immense Why? Because we don’t have the military muscle, the economic leverage or even the diplomatic coherence. We famously disagree on the correct shape of a banana, or the relative evil of Russia. In this particular brouhaha, we can’t even manage a symbolic boycott of the World Cup.

First off, let me say: I’m a London property owner. It’s a pretty little flat, in a pleasant corner of the capital. Nothing special, but quite desirable. Therefore, I am not writing this article in a gleeful spirit of provincial schadenfreude, rather, I write it with a grim sense of metropolitan foreboding. I had kind of hoped my flat would be my pension. Now I fear it may end up a nicely furnished prison. The reasons why are obvious, and begin with our bewilderingly stupid government Why? For the good reason that – unnoticed by many, who always presume London property prices go up – the London market has been stagnant for years, and often falling in real terms. Now prices are actively descending, sometimes quite severely.

I’m not sure when my libido first began to decline. It was probably during the pandemic, so it went unnoticed – like much else. Given that I was stuck indoors, newly divorced, in a one-bed flat, with no garden, and only allowed out to walk for one hour a day in the driving sleet, I didn’t really clock that I wasn’t getting a lot of action. My main concern was not committing suicide through love-grief and loneliness. Also, I cooked several new turbot recipes. Then the tides of plague retreated and that is when I realised. Something in me had changed: and it was the ‘dogs of lust’, as John Betjeman called them in ‘Senex’, his fine poem about age and desire. The dogs no longer barked, loudly, 24/7, driving me to distraction. Sometimes they went entirely quiet.