But what does it mean? They obviously haven't read Habermas or Minnie the Minx.

I remember that crispy noodle experience. Wonderful. And the Vesta curry led to my adventures in Indian food. You know, grinding spices, varying proportions of cumin or fenugreek seed, making paratha. We only had rice in puddings when I woralad at home in Bradford.

8. *I mean, FFS, what hope do we have if hardly anyone knows what capitalism is? I endlesly hear the bleat “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. God, I hate that self-exonerating mantra. Of course it bloody is, if you haven’t yet managed to imagine capitalism!

7. Resistance to capital and capitalism (which is a completely different thing from commerce, by the way, but perennially and deliberately confused with it*) is our only hope of escaping the dire, multiple predicaments we face. But where is it? Where is everyone?

6. Just about everyone else in public life is working, at some level, as a concierge for capital. Farage and Truss occupy the extreme and obvious end, but they’re on the same spectrum as, say, Wes Streeting and Samir Shah.

5. Those who dissent from the demands of capital have been almost entirely marginalised from politics, the media and public life. From the Labour Party to the BBC, we are treated almost as pariahs. Our crime is to seek to defend humanity and the living world from the greed of the few.

4. I don’t say that left and right have no meaning (generally, people who make this claim have recently moved to the far right). But the real political divide is between those who grovel to capital (a group extending all the way from Starmer to Farage) and those who seek to resist.

3. This is why the BBC has so assiduously promoted Farage, building him from the entirely marginal figure he was into a major political force, by giving him wall-to-wall access and coverage. Because it too, like almost all major institutions, bends like a reed to the demands of capital.

2. Everything they do supports such interests, which pay their bills and give them platforms. All the culture wars, the grandstanding, the rhetoric about immigrants are designed both to conceal their real agenda and to shift blame onto scapegoats.

I'm reading "Case Histories" by Kate Atkinson. I've never managed to get on with Atkinson's novels but this one was mentioned in Sophie Smith's article "Sleeping Women" (LRB 26.12.24) Piqued my interest.

I like a bit of irony.