Climate change would stop if we all just disappeared. Global warming would stop too, if we all just agreed to cancel the advances and the technologies of the last hundred years or so. If we all went back to a time before the word “global”, we’d survive. I can remember soaking lettuces in salted water to get the bugs out. Buying fish off the quay, and vegetables in season. Nothing wrapped in plastic. Lucozade in glass bottles. Kilner jars! Bakelite telephones! I can bore for England on the virtues of the past, and maybe it’ll come to that.
 
My problem with climate change is the problem I’ve had with the last couple of (as it happens, predominantly American, with British involvement) wars: describe victory. Listening to military spokespeople talking about how well it’s all going, I’ve wanted to ask: yes, but what’s the objective? What would you count as victory? To withdraw and leave it to the locals? Seriously? Isn’t there something in your media pack, at the very least, about being waved off at the airport by a grateful population? About the streets being lined with happy local millennials in their party clothes throwing flowers onto the passing, departing tanks?
 
Wars aren’t fought to bring about bland reassurances that progress is being made. Wars are fought to bring about change. And change by definition can’t be the status quo ante, or any other kind of roughly the same with compromises attached. However carefully the soundbites are packaged. And I suggest that the end has to be clear from the beginning - not left to PR people capable of putting a positive spin on any outcome, however chaotic. Yes, I am talking about the conduct of recent wars, and yes, I am about to segue into climate change. Just watch me.
 
Climate change pits us against nature, which is a self-correcting system and not easily beaten. Yes, climate change is our fault, but once the climate starts changing, nature moves against us. Implacably. Yes, the weather’s been weird recently, and yes, I know it’s happening already. We have to stop harming nature, yes. But there comes a point, and maybe we’re not that far from it now, when nature starts to self-correct. And my problem is, I suspect nature can describe victory quite accurately. A planet with fewer people on it.
 
I’m worried that victory for us, if it’s still achievable, wouldn’t be “roughly the same with compromises attached”. I get my takeaway coffee in a reusable cup now, and I take my plastic to the recycling – the dump, I mean. I feel lighter every time I go there. But global warming doesn’t seem to be stopping. Across this landing from where I’m sitting (I’m early for an appointment) is still a poster advertising the “International Rebellion Against The Criminal Inaction On The Climate And Ecological Crisis” of mid-April. That’s still happening, I think, and may be picking up momentum. We’re getting started.
 
I’d argue against “Criminal” – we don’t want to set up a bunch of people who will resist doing the right thing because that would mean admitting they were “Criminal” before – but apart from that, yes, I guess we are getting started. My problem now – my uneasy feeling – is that “describe victory” has gone way beyond a successful protest that gets people thinking. We need to get together to shut down London, Heathrow Airport, the same in other countries. Entire road networks. Whole industries. The twenty-first century, even. Do the impossible. [Modern dentistry can stay.]
 
I don’t mean we need a group of people to occupy the runways and roads on our behalf, nor to glue themselves to passenger jets, big trucks and Chelsea tractors. Key phrase in the previous paragraph: get together. I mean we need to agree to do it. Stop what we’re doing and work together to do something else. Cover whole deserts in solar panels. Build mountain ranges of recovered plastic waste – rather than new towns and cities – and seed them with wild flowers as memorial parks to our own stupidity. Plant rainforests, if that’s possible. We need to agree like the French agreed when they got rid of their monarchy, the Americans agreed to go to the moon; I don’t know, we need a Civil Rights Movement in which everyone’s on the same side.
 
We need to stop using fossil fuels. Grow our own vegetables. Distribute one solar panel to every household and switch off the national grid – except the parts that are powered by renewable energy. Above all, agree to do all of that. Agree. Forget “Criminal”. Work out some kind of truth and reconciliation arrangement for the directors of oil companies and airlines, if we must. Localise the “global” economy so that nobody has to cross continents to do their day job. Make it illegal to suffer jet lag.
 
No, of course none of this is possible! Don’t be silly! The first practical step to achieving any of it would be stopping all the arguments, the finger-pointing, the sarcasm – and think how impossible that would be. Think about this, too: pretty much the final achievement of all our technological development has been the ability to add comments in real time to social-media posts. We’ve invented a technology for disagreeing and we’re hooked on it.
 
The human race has had thousands of years to work out how to work together and not argue. Other species get along perfectly well. Come to think of it, other species fit into nature perfectly well. Some of them will even thrive if nature turns up the heat. I can think of at least one species of insect that will have a lovely time. It’s only the human race that is the problem.
 
And nature has realised that. Nature is moving against us. There’s only one thing to do. Nothing else will bring us together, so I suggest – it’s a million-to-one shot – that it’s time for us to panic.

Somewhat pleased, this week, to receive my first “sponsorship opportunity” for this blog. Via email. From a marketing company I’ve heard of (of which I have heard, sorry, I’m on my best behaviour now). I’m not precisely sure what the idea was, because I didn’t read the email, but I know teenage vloggers get offered sponsorship by make-up companies and fashion brands, so perhaps it was something like that. I wouldn’t do teenage, of course, but if I hooked up a camera (or took the Elastoplast off the built-in one), I’m sure I could attract a “demographic” of grizzled veterans to watch me rabbiting on about how I get ready for the day. Wake up. Coffee. I’m sure I could spin that out.
 
[I sat next to a seventeen-year-old vlogger at an event recently - yes, I get invited to events - so I know that a “demographic” is the thing to have.] But I turned it down, my first sponsorship opportunity. I said no, and after not reading the email again, I didn’t click the link to find out more (although I might have accidentally on purpose clicked the “accept” button to connect via LinkedIn; I’ll have to have a word with myself about that). I turned it down because I wrote a paragraph a while back (strictly, two paragraphs, down there on the right if you’re reading this on a big screen) saying that I don’t write this for money. I’d have to go back to that paragraph to find out why I do write this, but money isn’t it.
 
I fantasise about having principles, actually. No offence to the marketing company, but after not reading the email a third time (okay, beyond the first couple of lines), I went into quite a daydream about “selling out” and other such phrases. People sell out, or they adopt higher (conflicting) principles, and/or they wrestle with their consciences, and all that’s kind of interesting in a gritty-urban-drama subtitled kind of way. Deep, meaningful, furrowed-brow stuff; there’s probably a clothing range to match. Heck, whole creation myths rest on temptation: there’s the snake that happened to be passing through Eden at an awkward moment; there’s Pandora and the Box that should have remained closed. Plot-turning elements in creation myths, anyway.
 
So. I got myself into a conniption about whatever I was being offered - don’t know, and it’s not really the point - and decided in the end that you couldn’t even pay me to wear a different t-shirt while I write this. Of course, every person has a price, and if you paid me enough (my social-media links and email are at the top of this page), I’d wear a tiara and pearls while writing this. And possibly even remove that Elastoplast. We’re all human, and while I realise that my sponsorship opportunity wasn’t tailored exclusively just for me – I bet you say that to all the bloggers – I might just reinstate, yes, excuse me, here it is, in my ‘deleted’ folder. I’m not going to read it, you understand, but just for academic interest, the first few lines…
 
Temptation is the lure of self-betrayal, I suppose, and inexplicably (but I’m going to try) part of human nature. We make decisions about who we are, and/or who we want to be, and then discover that we’re not like that at all. We try to be an ideal version of ourselves, maybe? What the heck is it? I mean, I’m a rational adult capable of thinking these questions through, over-thinking them even, much younger than my date of birth would suggest, far better looking than any of my mugshots, so I’m sure I can work it out. Admittedly, I have a shambling, wild-haired figure staring back at me through the mirror at the moment, still in his pyjamas, but I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for that, too.
 
If the answer is that just getting through the day requires a degree of self-deception, well, okay, perhaps I can come at this whole temptation question from a different, possibly more lucrative, angle. I did have an ostensible – I like the word “ostensible” – reason for writing that paragraph of mine. I wanted people to stop telling me – as they did in the early days – that I should pick a single subject and write about nothing else (“William, that’s Blogging 101!”). Oh, and okay, yes, perhaps I was also feeling just ever so slightly pompous and self-inflated that day. “I don’t take money for my own opinions.” I wrote. It is of course easier to write sentences like that when you’re not being offered money. But getting through the day, back then, required a self-belief that I was above money.
 
Actually, I’d prefer cash, if you don’t mind? Used notes, preferably? Non-sequential? Thank you. Now, what was the product?
 
Oh. That’s why you came to me. I get it now.
 
No, don’t open the Box. I’d prefer to leave it closed.
 
Of course I won’t open it.
 
Temptation. The lure of self-betrayal. You’re on a diet, but you dream of dough-nuts. We could get really deep and meaningful here, and start blethering on about the journey of the soul – the chocolate you don’t eat makes you stronger – but maybe we could add a dose of realism instead. Pandora was always going to open that box. The politician railing against the inequities of private education is always going to do the best for her child, even if that means, et cetera. We’re human. A large bar of chocolate – dark chocolate, probably Green & Black’s, almost certainly organic, perhaps with ginger or hazelnut, and maybe I could also mention the Velvet Edition range – could be described as a temptation, but I much prefer the term “comfort food”.
 
Comfort is a necessary part of life. Green & Black’s chocolate can be bought online. Paragraphs can be rewritten. Giving in to temptation, comfort, is part of life. My sponsorship opportunity was almost certainly a blanket email sent out to a vast mailing list, but I’ve enjoyed the mental exercise and now I’m enjoying the daydream – the business-class flight out to Los Angeles, the film people wanting selfies with me, and of course the meeting where we discussed who would play me in the biopic about the setting-up of this blog, as well as the basics of how often I’d mention the product. I didn’t really want all the peanuts in my bowl to be facing East, but it was touching that they did that. If I’d known that we’d be drinking tea, I wouldn’t have asked for an umbrella in my drink.
 
Temptation – yes! What I really meant when I wrote that I don’t take money is that, um, you’re welcome to share my chocolate bar. If you buy it for me first. I may not be living the dream, but hey, I’m certainly ready to write about it.

What was that Groucho Marx quote about principles? I'd find it, but I have a paragraph to rewrite.

Today, I have no opinions whatsoever. I don’t mean that I’ve cancelled all my social-media accounts, but I have gone through Facebook snoozing everybody for thirty days (no offence), so that instead of having my passions inflamed by some diatribe against [redacted], I’m shown that notice telling me to start by finding some friends.

Modern equivalent of “get a life”, I suppose, although I am old enough to remember when it was still a novelty to have “Facebook friends” without even knowing them. [Younger readers: “friends” used to be people close to you; to “like” them would require a self-generated and typically involuntary emotional response.] I do feel that I like (old-style) some of my Facebook friends in remote corners of the USA and other countries, but I do also realise that “remote corners” is just my way of saying that I’ve no idea where any of them are. The USA is rectangular, isn’t it, with blue and red squares drawn on it? Remote corners, not so much.

There’s a caucus, whatever that is, and the trees are hanging with chads. There’s a South, although nobody seems to mention the North. I did once (more than once) answer a question on Quora, asked by an American person about some detail of British life, but I’ve learned my lesson from that experience. I’m a southerner too, apparently, and therefore I don’t know anything. I did once look up the physical address of a US Facebook friend (who gave it on a personal website) on Google Maps, and the houses are different too. [Older readers: idle curiosity and stalking are different things, thank you very much.]

So yes, I’ve snoozed everybody. [Beep! Story idea.] It’s possible that I’m even having a “digital detox” today, given that I’m writing this with a pen on paper, but that’s just newspeak for what used to be called an average day. Sun’s up (actually, it’s cloudy), sea’s calm (flurries of wind in the trees and on the water), the bluebells are up and so is the cow parsley (genuine news). The scaffolding-and-roadworks season is over, and the car parks are open for visitors. A cruise ship came in earlier, so the trade in beads and trinkets with FALMOUTH written on them will be brisk today. Oh, and I have things to do.

I remember a trip to London once, a long time ago – a very long time; I don’t go to London much – and walking up the ramp past the taxis into the daylight. I remember being struck by the billboard advertising: so much “noise” forcing its way into my attention. I was used to looking at trees back then, and fields with sheep in them. Not that staring at a tree’s worth of leaves and listening to the noise of the wind is necessarily “better”, in whatever sense you’d like to stipulate, than listening to traffic noise and being told to buy Aptamil follow-on milk*, but, well. Mostly I drink goat’s milk these days.

I’m going to have a day featuring daylight and air and work and tidying up and imagining things (I’ve been working on my interior monologue) and probably gardening as well. I might buy an actual physical newspaper, not for the news as it was yesterday but for the tactile association with the past, and I might go take another look at all the typewriters for sale in the antique shops. Even people who never owned typewriters seem to miss typewriters, going by how often they're used online to represent writing. Perhaps I should...

But that would be a step too far. Too noisy. I might grab a sandwich or a baked potato at the newly-open-for-the-season Castle Beach Café, and if my walk back home takes me past Gyllyngvase Beach, I will definitely think about swimming (see below the picture). “Grab” – funny how verbs attach themselves to actions. I will order and pay for and sit down and wait to be brought a sandwich or a baked potato at the Castle Beach Café. “Grab” – I suppose our collective self-image these days is grabbing and rushing and always being excitingly busy and engaged.

As opposed to staring at our screens while sea levels rise around us. The next big idea is going to be the world we can enter fully via our minds, and I suppose we’re nearly there with our games and virtual reality. The next big idea will be the virtual world that we can enter to get away from real reality, I mean. Take ourselves away from all the disaster. If you see an ostrich in a cartoon, it’s sticking its head in the sand to avoid catastrophe. [Actually, spellcheck, it’s and its; I’m pretty sure that’s correct. Sorry to confuse you.] If you see a not-quite-young person in a cartoon, er, there’ll be a smartphone, and, er, no, I’m not suggesting anything. Just, you know, like to mention ostriches every now and then.

That was close. Perhaps I should Harness The Power Of Technology to stay out of trouble with my youngers. [“Respect your elders!” I was told, a long time ago. But I’m running out of those.] There’s probably an app for it. But no. I like this day. I’ll stick with it. Time enough later to open up a screen and retrieve my passionate interest in the big remote issues that fill our collectivised attention. [I’m sure there was a life-or-death struggle over something beginning with B, but we all seem to have dropped that. How easily we're herded into caring, right? How easily we forget when we're not being told what to think.] As I say, I like this day. The sun’s out properly now, and there’s a whole outside world out there. Sun, and wind, and seagulls, and the soon-to-be-enormous gunnera in Queen Mary Gardens. That cruise ship. Life, the neighbourhood, and all the rest of it.

Facebook’s advice is good, after all. I’ll go out and find my friends. I wonder where they are.

*I think I got that one off the TV.

Once upon a time, my superpower was going to be seeing people as they imagine themselves to be. If they felt themselves to be beautiful, I’d see them as beautiful, and if they felt themselves to be – yeah, I’d see them like that and perhaps be able to reach out in a way that would help. But I tried it for a while (even in my own life, I am not a reliable narrator), and decided to go back to the one where I could breathe under water. I like the idea of heading off down to the beach and keeping on heading.

I’d have to lose weight, I suppose, or at least be negatively buoyant in some way, and the whole breathing-under-water thing would have some kind of a ramification for my on-land respiration. Perhaps people who wear scarves all the time are concealing gills. Or perhaps that’s why so many people carry bottles of water all the time. It’s not hydration; it’s breathing. I’d have to invest in a wetsuit, I suppose, or perhaps I would adapt. The man was pointed out to me – this is last time I was at the Gylly Beach Café; try one of the salted caramel chocolate brownies – who swims every day of the year.

In fact, I can’t go near the beach without somebody being pointed out to me who swims every day of the year. Or early in the morning. Or by actually getting into the water rather than by sitting down and thinking about it over a hot chocolate and a – yes, one of those. Aid to the concentration, you understand. Swimming is wonderful exercise, and just for the record, I did go swimming for the first time this year on Saturday 30th March. Then again – I was Not Alone this second time; we had a picnic breakfast on the sand afterwards – on the Sunday.

But I can’t go into the water now, I find, without one of the other swimmers whispering, “There’s the man who…” and phrases come to me across the surf – “salted caramel” … “in the café” … “eats” … “every day of the year” … and perhaps it’s just that my other superpower is to hear what everybody’s thinking and (but) mix it up with my own guilty conscience. No, I don’t own a wetsuit, which is something. Yes, the water is cold, and no, I don’t eat brownies that often. All the other swimmers, at the times I go into the water, seem to be strong-looking women who swim for miles in the time it takes for me to get my feet off the bottom without sinking.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have so much trouble after all if I did switch my superpower to the one where I go walkabout under water. I don’t think I’d go far, or look for anything in particular, but I’m just curious, that’s all. If you follow the same nature documentaries as I do, you’ll know that fishes are colourful little things, synchronised-swimming in shoals and occasionally being grabbed by things that conceal themselves in the ocean floor. I’d have to watch where I put my feet, and perhaps wetsuit shoes would be an investment, but I think there’s potential here for a variation on my usual walk.

Does plastic sink eventually, do you suppose, or would I have to take an enormous butterfly net and wave it above my head? And what about all the discarded fishing nets and lines and all the snagged hooks? Are there stories, sometimes, of nuclear waste and other pollutants being dumped far out at sea? Dangerous business, being a fish. On second thoughts…

Hot chocolate, please, yes, with marshmallows, and another of those…

One of these days, there’s going to be a revolution and the people are going to rise up in its wake. They’ll flow across whatever wall has been set up to hold them back, and in doing so, remind us (again) of the limits of what we call power. But not yet. The lesson of the Occupy movement, if I remember rightly, was that there needs to be a next step. Whatever the demonstration, however good the cause, the question “You’ve made your point; now what do we do?” needs an answer.

Among the novels I’m not writing at the moment is a loosely fictionalised account of the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, but with added social media. This was the one in which Wat Tyler led a march on London to protest about high taxation (to pay off debts incurred during the Hundred Years’ War), government incompetence (put whatever you like between these brackets) and a range of social upheavals first triggered by the Black Death of the 1340s. Half the taxpaying population was dead of plague back then, so the debt-laden government had the bright idea of raising taxes. Yeah!

Wat Tyler uses Facebook and Instagram to build up a following, and then Twitter to gather a crowd for (and during) his march on London. He’s watched throughout by agents of King Richard II’s government, and he’s lucky to beat off an attempt to shut down all his social-media accounts using terrorism legislation. Early skirmishes go viral, and the insurrection spreads through London’s Docklands (which in those days actually were docklands). King Richard II, being 14 in 1381, is adept at vlogging, and breaks off from his series of profiles of celebrities visiting court, to appeal for calm.

That goes down badly with the cabal of sinister-looking hard men in black hats and tights leading the royal government, and the Lord Chancellor, Simon Sudbury, colludes with the Lord High Treasurer, Robert Hales, to force through legislation whereby all online activity carried on government servers has to be vetted by his office. But the various young noblemen (and women) who grew up with Richard, sharing his private tutors, et cetera, have their own ideas about that. The government scrambles to shut down YouTube, but can’t get it done before another clip appears in which Richard appeals to people to, like, chill.

And we take it from there. Encouraged by the king’s attitude, the marchers press on to the Tower of London, where they find Sudbury and Hales both laughing maniacally from high windows, and then they stop for lunch at Smithfield Meat Market – where they’re met at last by Richard, who has been encouraged by his friends to lay on a big spread at Vic Naylor’s in St John Street, which was actually open from 1986 to 2009 but what’s a story like this without at least one anachronism? The two sides immediately hit it off, and it’s agreed that, one, serfdom will be abolished, and two, the Council Tax won’t be introduced in 1993.

King Richard II was nothing if not forward-thinking. English (and in due course, British) history goes off in an entirely new direction. The widespread use of social media in 1381 completely messes up the endgame for the grown-ups around Richard: the militia raised by London mayor William Walworth doesn’t crush the revolt – the rebels use Twitter again, to raise the alarm – and in due course Henry le Despenser’s army fails to stem the tide of revolution at the Battle of North Walsham, which in my version never happened. There’s a clip of a young woman standing in front of a fully caparisoned warhorse, and refusing to budge.

The Summer of Love comes early – 1386, not 1967 – and history accelerates. Restrictions on cross-channel travel are lifted, and a trading alliance is formed between England and France. The Long Parliament, which is on record as having sat from 1640 to 1660, actually gets its act together in 1388. First item on the order paper is a bill to replace the established system whereby old, rich men (and women; this is alt. hist.) with country estates and private armies run everything. That’s approved unanimously, and Richard’s young allies carry their beanbags and smartphones into the debating chamber.

Around about now, coffee begins to be imported from the New World, and on 5th April 1389 the first takeaway Tall Skinny Latte is ordered from a coffee shop in Pudding Lane, London. The place used to be a bakery, but they’d had a small fire, and after the owner had installed his new-fangled sprinkler system, there wasn’t room for the old bread ovens – just for one coffee roaster. Sprinkler systems took up a lot of space back then. The Spanish Armada drops anchor that lunchtime at Canary Wharf (fair weather, lousy navigation), and to their collective surprise the soldiers and sailors on board are invited to the first of a series of street parties that’s going to be held on the western edge of London as it was then (they accept).

The Long Parliament debates a motion to extend the European Free Trade Area to include Castile, Aragon and Granada. But – this being a novel that I’m NOT writing at the moment – nobody dashes off any merry quips, epic poems or complete plays in blank verse about the merits of free trade. There are NO parallels here with the events of today. The English Civil War doesn’t start on time, admittedly, but when it does start it has nothing to do with empire builders versus free traders. It’s all about early surveillance capitalism, and the king’s monopoly on podcasting. Some of those royal fashion shows are a bit, y’know, samey. Yes, and all those men standing in shop doorways with big box cameras on tripods and black cloths over their heads can’t be doing much for trade.

By now, the Long Parliament has given up all pretence of being a debating chamber, and every day, new-fangled apps are being trundled out on carts and carried to Ye Innovation Hubbes of the City, where young people fired up on caffeine and the adventure novels of William Shakespeare are fitting out ships to sail off over the horizon and explore distant lands. They've all got hats and cloaks and telescopes, and they're all fired up with the dream of bringing back tobacco, expensive footballers, mythical beasts, dinosaurs thought to be extinct, self-help gurus spouting the wisdom of remote tribes, jewels prized out of weird little statues with curses attached.

As they work, and as they celebrate their good fortune to come, those young would-be adventurers share but one aim: to build a free-trade area on which the sun never sets.

Having only recently arrived from a parallel universe, I find it impossible to understand how you people make such a mess of your politics. You voted on a simple question, and then you turned it into a complicated question. To listen to your media, and the talk around where I live, you’re all in favour of retaining the status quo, and yet when you all voted, the result took you all by surprise. What’s actually happening – after the vote by a narrow margin to overturn the status quo – is underpinned by a deafening silence. Voters for change keep quiet while the loudest voices continue to agree that the status quo is best.

I looked up a politician the other day. This individual had been described as “loathsome” on Facebook. He’s not somebody I would support, and his views are some way distant from anything I could believe, but I have a problem with attacking individuals directly, rather than engaging with their beliefs. Not just because history’s full of examples of how wrong that can go, but also because any set of “loathsome” beliefs can be refuted by argument – assuming that they’re wrong – while name-calling says so much more about the person shouting the names. Call me idealistic, or naïve, but a founding principle of liberal democracy is that we prefer debate to insult.

So. I looked him up. He’s out of step with what “we all believe”, if I can put it that way, and my reason for looking him up was that I couldn’t quite work out what he was doing in the House of Commons, as an elected MP. How could those views have won an election? Still don’t know the answer to that one, but what I do know is: in the general election of 2017, this individual won by a margin of more than 10,000 votes. That “deafening silence” I mentioned earlier – the people who don’t talk about politics outnumber the people who do. And they vote differently.

Because I’m not half as fluent in Latin as I like to pretend, I looked up “ad hominem attack” online, and yes, that is what I’m talking about. An “ad hominem attack” is a “fallacious argumentative strategy” whereby you call me an idiot rather than telling me where I went wrong. Nothing in the word “loathsome” will convince our featured politician that he’s on the wrong side of the argument. More importantly, while you’re busy name-calling, those 10,000 voters will keep silent rather than engage with you, and they won’t switch their votes.

There’s a diagram. Look up “Paul Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement” and scroll down through the results until you get to this, for example. You can stop off at the essay on "How to Disagree" at paulgraham.com, but what you want is the pyramid – actually, it’s on the Wikipedia page as well, but that link gives you both pyramid and a bit of background. [And, curiously enough, a YouTube clip entitled "Jim Gaffigan Wants You to Talk to a Trump Supporter – and Listen." Which makes a similar point, in a US context, rather well.] Searching for “How to Disagree” gets you a lot of other results, most of which emphasise politeness, but we’re going with the pyramid.

Lowest form of political argument – disagreement – is name-calling, so the pyramid tells us. Second-lowest is the ad-hominem attack (Paul Graham’s essay explains the fine difference between the two). If you want to be heard – for example, by those 10,000 voters – you have to go further up the pyramid. At the top is refuting the central point of an argument. And what Paul Graham says about that one is: it’s the only form of disagreement that involves no dishonesty whatsoever. That’s his point rather than mine, but – yeah, I get it. Make your point. Justify it. Convince people. Get elected, and sort out this mess.

Back in 2016, we had a People’s Vote on the question “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” On Monday of this week, our politicians failed to agree on: should we stay in a customs union with the EU; should we remain in the EFTA; should we hold another referendum; should we vote on whether to leave without a deal if we can’t agree on a deal? All of those options arising as part of our elected representatives’ attempts to implement the result of the 2016 vote. They represent us, right? Does that mean they’re like us?

Discuss. But before you start – Paul Graham concludes his essay with this. “You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.”

Let’s just argue, shall we, without the insults? We’re all on the same side, after all – or if we’re not, we should talk about that.

Turned on the radio to hear Theresa May talking about parliament “looking for a solution” to the B***** crisis. Struck me that if only parliament would stop looking for a solution, the crisis would solve itself and we could move on to sorting out the aftermath. That’s literally true of the current stalemate, but maybe there’s a lesson here that could be applied more widely.