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‘What? You don’t like chocolate?’ The British Airways attendant almost shouted at me in incomprehension as she was passing out little packets of chocolate digestives. I had had the temerity to ask (in economy, of course) whether there might be any other biscuits on offer. To which she had responded with a concerned enquiry about allergies. No, I said, I am not allergic. I just don’t like chocolate. I can’t say I was surprised by the attendant’s reaction. Any suggestion that you might not share the current appetite – nay, fetish – for chocolate and you are treated as though you’re inexplicably withdrawing yourself from the cultural mainstream. This applies

It’s unlikely you’ll find a sorrier-looking pair of hiking boots than mine. As a result of my Camino addiction, the backs of my boots are literally crumbling, while the fronts have split open like a French baguette. They look like prime candidates for the hiking boot version of assisted dying – to put them out of their misery. But on my last pilgrimage, and in recognition of my complacency, I began treating my boots like royalty. I applied leather grease at the end of each day, packing them with newspaper to draw out the moisture. In short, I put those boots before all else. They are lasting far longer than

Britain’s public loos are a national embarrassment. If you are in any doubt, head to Liverpool Street Station and spend a penny. It’s unquestionably the most odious and unpleasant public lavatory anywhere in the supposedly civilised world. It has to be experienced to be believed, but suffice it to say that the level of cleanliness on display would make a Medicine Sans Frontier doctor fresh from West Africa recoil in fear and reach for their PPE. The floor is usually awash in various places with unknown fluids. The long shared trough installed for handwashing is so disgusting that you wouldn’t clean your dog in it. The supposedly automatic taps barely dispense

Is Claude your confidant? Is ChatGPT your yes-man? Your wingman? Artificial intelligence seems more like a friend than the apex predator we feared. Maybe it’s not gearing up to enslave us or turn us into paperclips after all. But I find there is something just as malign about AI posing as our friend. Slowly, subtly, politely, it is changing how we think of ourselves, other people and our relationships. The friendliness of AI is a user-retention tactic. OpenAI, for example, relies on its models to be informative, yes, but also on them being more agreeable than humans. Sam Altman recently announced that OpenAI was rolling back its latest model of ChatGPT

In a recent diary for The Spectator, the editor noted that many of the world’s leading tech companies have names inspired by The Lord of the Rings: Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Mithril; Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. ‘J.R.R. Tolkien has a curious hold on the minds of Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters,’ he wrote. Well, they’re not the only ones. If I had founded a company I probably would have called it Anduril too. While less odd teenagers spent their money on CDs or football boots, I used to have a life-sized replica of the Elvish sword hanging above my bed. I, like the tech bros, was a LOTR obsessive. A super fan.

Talking to a former politician about lying felt very appropriate. It was during one of my ‘Magical Thinking’ sessions, a corporate team-building event I run in which I perform close-up magic tricks and the participants try to work out how they’re being done. Among those at this session was Anne-Marie Trevelyan, who had initially been baffled by a particular mentalism effect. She thought of a day of the week, then a month of the year and finally a playing card, and my guesses on all three proved correct. Every possible route by which I could have cheated seemed blocked off – but Anne-Marie was brilliant at responding to my hints