We Know Zero

Three names for the same idea

15. September 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, AI, Cartoons, Education, Professions

*Source: https://xkcd.com/2347 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License*

Last week I suggested that the period of disruption we have entered would be likely to impact the relationship between society and its institutions and professions, and likened those institutions and professions to the models behind the models we normally focus on. I suggested that this has serious implications for actuarial education, amongst much else.

This week I want to expand a little on what I meant by that.

First, the impact of AI. My view of AI is that I don’t believe most of the claims coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic when noone else gets to see the data and they clearly have a vested interest in playing up the capabilities of their systems. And I certainly don’t believe the fantasy economics the Magnificent 7 are currently indulging in is sustainable (see Ed Zitron’s Hater’s Guide to Circular Financing for more on this). But I do believe that there is a lot of political power with an increasingly out of control stake in it continuing, which makes the quote often attributed to Keynes (“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, although it may have been A. Garry Shilling in 1999) even more relevant here.

However, what cannot be denied is that the existence of AI is accelerating conversations which we should have been having a long time ago. Last month, MIT issued a report called AI and Education, which turns out to be more a philosophical musing about what we should be trying to achieve in universities, and what expectations we should have of both staff and students. It’s not a long report, but for the time poor amongst you there are two passages from this that I’d like to highlight here.

First, on the expectations we should have of students:

Leaning into learning means creating a new “social contract” between teachers and students. All of us who teach at MIT will need to be prepared to help students understand both that the process of education is necessarily a productive struggle, and that the most important product of their education is not a GPA or a diploma but themselves: their personal growth and intellectual maturity and the development of their own imagination, insight, and judgment.

Instilling these attitudes needs to become a central task for every educator, so that our students know not only what they should learn, but also how they should learn and why learning matters. We need to help them develop metacognitive abilities to think about thinking, to engage in reflective practices, and to enhance their sense of personal agency. This will require both dedication and fresh preparation on the part of instructors.

Remember that social contract idea, because it will be coming up again.

Second, on what kinds of assessments we need to move to in anything we still want to be able to refer to as education:

Rather than simply “AI-proof” current methods of assessment, instructors need to revisit what they really want students to know and devise assessments that foster, or even include, the kind of productive struggle that builds durable understanding and mastery.

We urge instructors to consider forms of assessment that are less vulnerable to AI, and more valuable for learning, such as oral exams, semester portfolios, and out-of-class assignments paired with in-class conversations. This likely means resources such as TAs and class time will become more central to evaluation.

and this:

To match the shift towards assessment methods that aren’t vulnerable to AI, instructors need to increase the role of experiential and project-based learning. To encourage this kind of creative teaching, MIT should support the development of teaching skills and practices for all instructors, and recognize contributions in this domain.

As someone who has already spent some time advocating just such a move in higher education, I feel quite vindicated. But back to that social contract point. I am in a WhatsApp group called Actuarial Change in Education (A C E), where we have been discussing this point for a while, but couldn’t agree what to call it. Culture was one proposal, but I think we all agreed on the MIT point that it should be aiming to ensure:

our students know not only what they should learn, but also how they should learn and why learning matters

And then, like buses, a third take on this point came from, of all people, Seth Godin in Two schools of thought about school:

One kind of school is about culture, compliance and community. We indoctrinate kids, for better or worse, in what it means to be in this world we’ve built, and how to do it together. We teach them how to be kids, how to be citizens and hopefully, how to be adults.

And the other kind of school is about the content. All the ‘R’s. The software that goes with the operating system we taught in the other school.

The first paragraph is what MIT and my WhatsApp group are referring to. It is the bit which has been assumed we shared in common for too long, but is the most important bit. A shared culture or social contract would allow us to meet and discuss things within a shared set of assumptions about how we can get agreement and take action. It is what has been holding back COPs and peace talks and politics more generally for my whole lifetime. It is also how we decide what we put in the second paragraph, which is necessarily stuff which will be being tweaked constantly and be much more short-term in focus..

The second paragraph is what the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries respond with when you ask them about education (I am only picking on them as this is the one I am most familiar with). Curriculum. Syllabus items. Suggested number of hours study. Past papers to practise for the traditional written exam.

Seth Godin calls this software. It is content. It is largely ephemeral, as the needs of the model we operate in and the tools we are given to do so change all the time. Little of it will survive a decade let alone a career. It does not encourage looking up and wondering if there is a better way. It is full of short-term deadlines and urgency and immediacy. Which tends to get confused with importance.

But the software will never surprise you or deal with situations noone has ever met before. If it is not in the underlying model, it will not turn up in the software. The important education is in the operating system. That is what needs to be reformed.

As I said, there is a WhatsApp group discussing such questions regularly. We are a small group currently, but would welcome new members interested in these questions. If you are, then respond to me in the comments section below or via a LinkedIn message if you are reading it there.

A little more information about A C E is set out below:

What is A C E?

Actuarial Change in Education. A place to discuss where change is needed in how actuarial students learn and the changing landscape they are preparing themselves for. A place to argue about how we teach, and how we get students to care about why they are in education and question the assumptions underlying it. A place to share thoughts and ideas you have had or seen about education, actuarial or otherwise. A place to collaborate with others equally concerned about the future of actuarial education. A place to plan and deliver communications with the wider actuarial community.

What are A C E’s aims?

To have an impact on actuarial education by providing a place for developing actionable ideas about education more generally and how they can be applied to actuarial studies in particular. The hope is that these will then be a useful resource for when the need for alternatives gains a wider acceptance.

Who can join A C E?

Anyone interested in the development of actuarial students.

Models of the first and second kind

09. September 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Economics, Education, Health, Professions, Science Fiction

Copper parts of a vehicle have been mounted on a much larger wooden structure in an exhibit at the Vatican Museums — *My photograph of an exhibit at the Vatican Museums*

Worldbuilding in science fiction has certain rules, or so I thought. And the first of these according to some sources at least seems to be consistency. According to the Quirkworthy website:

The basic message is very simple: your world must be internally consistent. Doesn’t matter if it’s science fiction or fantasy, and it makes no odds if it’s a novel, game, or opera. At all times, your world must be consistent to itself.

So when Jeff Noon and Steve Beard came to the Birmingham Science Fiction Group a couple of years ago, I pricked up my ears when one of them (Jeff I think) said that the first book of the Ludwich Chronicles, Gogmagog, which they were discussing, was not consistent. They were following Cady Meade’s viewpoint which journeyed 60 miles along the river Nysis inside a ghost and the focus was to set a particular mood. It was built from the bottom up.

This idea appealed to me then, and has, in my view, become a more and more important idea recently. We all build our views of the world from the bottom up based on our own experiences and they are frequently inconsistent with those of other people. The problem comes when we stop accepting that and treat our models as, in some way, top down and universal.

I had a great example of this a few years ago in the Vatican Museums. Some bits of bronze they reckoned to be parts of a cart buried in an Etruscan tomb had been discovered and were then displayed on an entirely speculative wooden model of a cart (to be fair to them, the Monteleone chariot dated to around 530 BC, was a rather more complete find and the wooden model looks like it was modelled on that). The trouble is, once you have seen the pieces on the cart, it is difficult to think of them in any other way. Rather like some of those early dinosaur reconstructions and possibly unhelpful in a field as fast-moving as archaeology.

Source: The book of the great sea-dragons, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, [gedolim taninim] gedolim taninim, of Moses. Extinct monsters of the ancient earth. With thirty plates, copied from skeletons in the author’s collection of fossil organic remains, (deposited in the British museum.) *by Hawkins, Thomas, 1810-1889*
*https://archive.org/details/bookgreatseadra00hawk/page/n5/mode/2up*

We do this everywhere. Every competitive market is a model, as relentless in its pursuit of victory within the rules (all of which must be stress-tested as to how they are going to be applied by each individual referee in each individual encounter) as the Premier League. Sometimes if you question some of the underlying assumptions behind some of these models, you are told that is just the way the world works.

But the way the world works is opaque. Novelists have attempted to show us glimpses of it for centuries. Historians are sometimes able to agree about how it has worked in a specific geography for a short period of time. Occasionally, as a result of our own experiences, we may feel that we have managed to grasp some truth about the world and how it works in our own lives. But often the clarity slips through our fingers when we throw more light on it. The clarity certainly never seems to last that long. For clarity you often need an organisation signed up to a model.

Much has been written in recent years about our dependence on models and our inability to look outside them in many cases, most notably Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson. This has mainly focused on the models we make to try and understand the world. But there also models behind those models which effectively determine what kinds of models of the first kind we create. These are the organisations and institutions we look at the world from.

It was in a time of rapid transition and uncertainty much as our own is that the groups of organisations we call professions emerged in the nineteenth century. The model of the second kind they adopted was partly that set out by Daniel and Richard Susskind in their book The Future of the Professions.

According to the Susskinds, there is a Grand Bargain between society and the professions, which means (and I am paraphrasing a little here), in return for professions providing:

Expertise, experience and judgement;
Delivered affordably, accessibly, reassuringly and reliably;
With knowledge and methods maintained and kept up to date, members trained, standards and quality of work enforced and only appropriately qualified individuals allowed in;
Acting honestly and in good faith; and
Putting clients’ interests ahead of their own.

In return, society will give the professions:

Respect and status;
Exclusive rights to perform/provide socially significant activities or services; and;
Independence to decide how they do it and how much they can be paid for it.

What professions expect from society is jealously guarded. My own profession’s uneasy relationship with the universities can plausibly be traced back to Newton’s influence on what mathematics could be taught there, therefore denying actuaries the status they craved without setting up their own professional bodies to supply it. The last attempt to allow an allied profession to carry out limited medical activities ended with the Leng Review effectively strangling it, egged on noisily by the BMA. And it is not hard to find articles defending increases to executive remuneration way beyond that of the people who work for them as the norm.

What society expects from professions often gets less attention directed at it. Four of the five bullets above tend to form part of the professional code of most professions in some form, although there are frequent fines of large professional firms for failures in the standard of the services provided.

But what of delivering professional services affordably, accessibly, reassuringly and reliably? What has tended to happen, as the group of people requiring professional services has widened, is that the affordability and accessibility have been increasingly called in to question. And online self-service looks likely to be attempted for a wider and wider range of services as time goes on.

So is the professional structure we have going to remain? If the experience of the nineteenth century, when most of these professions emerged, is anything to go by, the level of disruption will vary hugely by profession and institution and the period of transition could be very long in some cases. But it seems clear that such a period has begun. This has serious implications for actuarial education, amongst much else.

And whatever replaces them is likely to be built from the bottom up.

The 1% view will kill us all

02. September 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change, COVID-19, Science Fiction

A wide angle picture of the Birmingham Catacombs

Some tombs which could do with being visited more often: *The Birmingham Catacombs* – excellent tour available at *Birmingham Walking Tours*

I am currently reading The End of Everything by M John Harrison, which I will be talking about at greater length in a future post. But one aspect I want to pick up now is how the response of the characters to the disappearance of many of the familiar landmarks post apocalypse is to lose their cognitive bearings. Thoughts come and go, often not joined up. They struggle to understand what other people are saying to them.

I think this is a much under-explored aspect of a period of change. Our ability to think about what is going on, to plan, to anticipate is affected. Many of us experienced this during the pandemic. Psychology as a discipline changed significantly as a result of World War 2.

This is also an aspect that speculative narratives like this one often miss. Told from the vantage point of 2100, it has humanity in despair in 2046:

I imagine that today’s world must have seemed like an impossible dream in 2046, when my parents were born in Charleston. Then, an estimated 60 million people had just died in the Great Hunger. The world had warmed by 2 °C, relative to its average temperature in the late 19th century. Ecosystems were collapsing, led by coral reefs.

Instead there is a scenario of an international climate agreement (“The Geneva Climate Compact”), followed by accelerated climate breakdown leading to emergency geoengineering (mostly solar radiation management) which stops global warming by 2080.

International agreements, emergency sessions of the United Nations (even the idea that such a session in 2047 would be the first such session since the pandemic!) and even the European Union is still present and correct in this otherwise devastated landscape. The problem with these sorts of projections is that everything the projector is not looking at (in this case everything except average global temperatures and their direct impacts) is assumed unchanged. Many climate models do the same thing. Indeed a perfectly valid use of climate models is to change one variable and keep everything else the same to try and measure the impact of that variable.

However to really think about the future you need to look to your novelists. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is a case in point. In it global sea levels have risen by 50 feet. Everyone lives in tower blocks connected by sky bridges which occasionally topple into the canals which were once streets.

I used to think that money markets would not survive events like this, but Robinson posits what I now believe is a more likely future scenario. The Intertidal Property Pricing Index is developed instead, carefully constructed to be reasonably stable despite the instability of the actual real estate being valued, and people bet on it. And soon everyone is fixated on what this index is saying daily rather than the buildings collapsing around them. This is exactly what our finance sector will do of course. There will be money to be made out of such activities after all. And so expectations that they will, in any way, be a leader out of the climate emergency are, in my view, unrealistic.

But also is the idea that our institutions as currently constructed will lead us out of catastrophe, or that a top down maintenance of international institutions will be a dominant feature of a post-apocalyptic world. Any plans we have for the future must be robust against the possible loss of central authority.

This does not lead us towards survivalist prepping, holing up in some remote area with canned foods, bottled water and armaments. As Alex Steffen teaches in his “ruggedization” classes:

I would put to you that if you find yourself in a situation where you’re having to let off some rounds to protect your canned goods, you’ve already failed, you have not understood the assignment.

It means the opposite. Remember another thing about the pandemic: people rose to the occasion, just as politicians sunk to it. People checked on the elderly in their neighbourhoods. In Birmingham for instance:

Within weeks of the crisis unfolding, near on 4,000 mutual aid groups registered on the mutual aid website with an estimated 3 million participants stepping forward to support their neighbours and communities. Widely heralded as the ‘early responders’ to the crisis, these groups – alongside thousands more neighbourhood groups – played a fundamental role in ensuring that local residents received immediate support.

This included “food distribution, errands, shopping and picking up prescriptions for those shielding”.

The truth is we all need each other, we all need back up and connecting with your local community is the most effective way that you can “ruggedize” your life. The characters in Harrison’s book have become isolated from each other.

In Goliath’s Curse, Luke Kemp makes the case that the collapse of the “Goliaths” (large imperial powers which dominate the landscape as now) are often linked with improvements in markers of human flourishing like height, life expectancy and equality. This is because, assuming you can avoid the violence associated with the groups scrabbling for status in the ruins of a collapsed state, the main contributors to that flourishing in the past have been local communities rather than at the state level. He worries that, in our current globalised inter-connected world (Ed Conway’s recent article about The 30,000-mile fish finger is one memorable example) this may not necessarily be our experience the next time. As Kemp says:

It is difficult to see through this fog of uncertainty which groups would fare best post-collapse. For now, being poor in wealth but rich in friends is a better strategy than being a suspicious billionaire under siege in a bunker. Not only that, but cultivating bonds of solidarity and mutual aid rather than ruthless self-interest means that the survivors are more likely to help recreate a world that is worth preserving.

If you want a thought experiment about what happens to the billionaires post-collapse, by the way, I recommend Naomi Alderman’s The Future and Cory Doctorow’s novella The Masque of the Red Death (not that one!). Both dark and hilarious in equal measure.

The future is all of ours to make, but we really need to think about it independently and not necessarily along the tracks that the political class funnel all discussions down. That is a 1% world they are discussing. I will leave the last word to Luke Kemp:

Our greatest achievements are not because of the 1 per cent; they are collective endeavours. As George Eliot once wrote, ‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts…half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ It’s time to drop the 1 per cent view and start paying attention to the unmarked tombs and unknown heroes upon whose shoulders we’ve built our world.

Normals: new and otherwise

25. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Climate Change, COVID-19, Economics, Health, Media & Politics, Risk

Climate campaigners get very irritated with media talking about the “new normal”, pointing out, quite reasonably, that for it to be the new normal would require a degree of climate stability that we have not got, nor have any prospect of getting while we continue to argue about whether net zero (the policy, remember, which is about moving us to a position where we don’t increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere year after year) is affordable. Poverty and health campaigners got very irritated by the call to “get back to normal” after the pandemic, when it had so clearly demonstrated how our “normal” way of organising society had failed to protect so many of its citizens. As even I could see in March 2020:

My view is that some things that must be different post COVID are already clear. I think as a society we are going to demand more resilience, for example:

Resilience of our health service – this means much higher levels of spending, building deliberate over-capacity into the system in normal times;
Resilience of our food supplies, for example strengthening domestic supply chains;
Resilience of our population, so that we do not have 1.6 million food parcels needing to be given out in a year by the Trussell Trust, in the absence of a pandemic, for instance; and
Resilience of our infrastructure – to everything from floods to banking crises to pandemics to storms and heatwaves.

A picture circulating at the time of a Santiago apartment block with a projection onto it of “No volveremos a la normalidad porque la normalidad era el problema” (we won’t get back to normal because normal was the problem) was actually taken the previous year when the Chilean President had used the word “normality” to justifying lifting the state of emergency, leading to large protests:

Source: https://x.com/inesmorsantos/status/1190192093165211648?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1190192093165211648%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fodi.org%2Fen%2Finsights%2Fcovid-19-we-wont-get-back-to-normal-because-normal-was-the-problem%2F “We won’t go back to normal, because ‘the normal’ was the problem.”

But we all have trouble with fast moving situations, or even just moving situations. Remember the media coverage in the early weeks of Covid utterly focused on the number of cases going up each week rather than on the underlying pattern this showed, which had been predicted and could be responded to.

In the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries syllabus, subject CS2 Risk Modelling and Survival Analysis has 20% of its content on dealing with our trouble with moving situations via time series:

It boils down to a number of tricks to turn our moving situation into a non-moving or stationary situation, which we can then analyse.

So not being able to deal with things that aren’t stationary is entirely normal. Indeed the Standard Normal Distribution, originally developed in response to a gambler’s query and another thing that we spend a lot of time transforming other distributions into if we can, has a fixed mean of 0 and a fixed variance (a measure of how far things stray from the mean) of 1:

Outside statistical analysis, we use different techniques to make things appear normal. Denial, ie ignoring the departure from normality, is a big one. When this one is no longer tenable in the face of mounting evidence that we are not in Kansas anymore, we often try and depict where we have got to as normal now. This will have been a good strategy in the past: once a natural disaster has passed, taking stock of what has been lost and what remains and working within these new parameters makes more sense than hankering back to how things were before the disaster struck.

However this strategy comes unstuck when one or both of two things are true:

The disaster, or change-event more generally, is not a one-off but a continuing process.
The way we were living before the disaster made the disaster more likely.

So, on climate change, both 1 and 2 are true. On the pandemic, 2 (if you define the disaster as the number of people who died during it, which I do) is clearly also true. And, although it may not be a continuing process, none other than the former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government regards another pandemic as “inevitable”.

We have built systems to look at past disasters and, in particular, try and guard against 2. The Covid Inquiry is working its way through the evidence about the pandemic, and has already produced definitive evidence on how we could do things differently for those who wish to read it, but the reporting of its work is patchy, with sometimes unhelpful fixations on the wrong thing.

And denial tends to fight back as our go-to defence mechanism, which is why we often seem to need to have Public Inquiries about the same things again and again and again.

It is all quite normal. That is the problem.

Banging the triangle

18. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Media & Politics

*Source: https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/The_Grand_High_Triangle_Lover?file=3171f.jpg*

Triangulation was about the only nearly plausible justification given at school for learning trigonometry. You can estimate the height of that tree without actually climbing the tree and dropping a tape measure, you just need the distance to the tree and the angle the top of the tree makes from where you’re standing.

Triangulation with satnavs (measuring your distance from three satellites) narrows your position down to two points, although the one you’re using probably uses more like 10 to increase accuracy and be robust against rogue measurements.

However, according to Verywellmind.com, triangulation in psychology means:

…a manipulation technique where one person involves a third party in a conflict to gain control or create division. This tactic is common in toxic relationships and among those with certain personality disorders, like narcissism and borderline personality disorder. Recognizing the signs and setting boundaries can help you protect yourself from its harmful effects.

Which is where it enters our political, business and personal lives of course. In politics, former US President Bill Clinton is most closely associated with triangulation. As Nesmith and Quirk have said in their book Inside the Presidency of Bill Clinton:

In this strategy, Clinton would stand firm on partisan Democratic positions when they were popular. On issues where Republican positions were more popular, however, Clinton would take advantage of the current Republican Congress’s tendency to overreach: he would make major concessions from conventional Democratic policies and adopt centrist positions that would have broader support than the Republicans’ offerings. By such systematic, instrumental positioning, Clinton hoped to win politically on most issues, no matter which party had the initial advantage in public opinion.

This approach was then adopted by Tony Blair with New Labour and has become pretty mainstream in politics ever since. Keir Starmer perhaps took it to new extremes with his Ming Vase strategy:

The Ming Vase strategy’s underlying premise was that, at least in matters of high political salience, policy-making should be above all driven by perceived electoral advantage. The metaphor was that Labour should treat its prospects as precarious and fragile, and that the utmost caution and prudence must be exercised in developing policy. As the term is used here, the Ming Vase strategy can be encapsulated in terms of two broad principle, opinion alignment and power accommodation. The former held that on issues which figure prominently on the public’s agenda (which of course excludes policy in many areas) policies must be adapted as closely as possible to voters’ perceptions and preferences as these can be culled from focus groups. The latter stipulated eschewing as far as possible policy options that were likely to antagonise or estrange the major constellations of power in society, those organised interests which had the capacity both to influence mass opinion and to affect the capacity of a government to deliver its policies—most notably the City and major corporations. The two arms of the strategy tended to be mutually reinforcing, in that both emphasised the need for circumspection, the avoidance of controversial and ambitious policies, and an accent on reassurance. We are not claiming that the Ming Vase strategy, as an operational code, was the sole determinant of decision-making behaviour, but rather that it was the weightiest.

And when opinion alignment and power accommodation (ie public opinion and the views of, say, powerful business lobbies) are in conflict? Well you have to pretend to be doing one thing while doing another. And there were a whole succession of examples of Starmer not acting as most of his backbenchers had been led to expect a Labour prime minister to act and putting it down to the fiscal rules they were operating under until Andy Burnham finally put him out of his misery. But the fiscal rules have remained.

These sorts of strategies ultimately tend to come unstuck because they underestimate the voters. Most people understand that our problems aren’t easy to solve, but if you make grand pronouncements about transforming politics while constraining your room for manoeuvre within fiscal rules set to appease particular interests which you don’t come clean about, then ultimately you will be regarded as untrustworthy. As you will also fail if you pin all of societies ills on desperate people taking their lives in their hands on small boats in the English Channel, and then find that none of those problems have disappeared but you now also have something resembling Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrolling the seas.

The Grand High Triangle Lover from Sesame Street is always accompanied by Norman, who bangs a triangle to get the crowd’s attention for his boss. Think of Norman as a lobby journalist. The Grand High Triangle Lover likes to tell the story of how he became The Grand High Triangle Lover by managing to pull sticks from a stone and making them into a triangle. However Norman broke the big scoop that in fact his boss just found a hat with triangles on it one day.

It sounds like a normal day in our politics, but these are muppets. Recognise the signs and set boundaries. Let’s not let them assume the rest of us are.

The Vogons are coming for Birmingham Science Fiction Group!

13. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Science Fiction

*The Friends of the Earth Warehouse on Allison Street – home to the Birmingham Science Fiction Group since January 2024*

Like many people, when I first heard about it, I assumed it was something to do with HS2. HS2 has been quietly munching its way through tonnes of cement, hard core, steel and oh-so-much-money that the site – part sandpit, part go kart track in appearance – has become part of the landscape on entering and leaving Birmingham. But no, this is in fact one of those unsexy transport infrastructure projects that have in the past seemingly been shelved whenever they had the misfortune to be located outside London as a result of the ever ballooning HS2 budget. It obviously is linked to the increase in traffic anticipated as a result of HS2, but as this video explains, this is an independent project whereby the already creaking rail capacity of Birmingham is to be expanded via a more coordinated use of New Street and Moor Street stations, with the traffic to and from everywhere else distributed via the newly constructed East and West Chords. At the expense of Bordesley station and a large swathe of Digbeth.

The scheme boundary *Source: https://mrhalliance.co.uk/api/downloadAsset?id=cmr39z4olw57707mn1gf5kz4s*

As you can see, the top left end of the X-marks-the-spot gash across Digbeth that describes the scheme boundary contains Allison Street, home of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group (BSFG) since Millennium Point kicked us out at the end of 2023. We were very grateful at the time, and remain so. As a not-for-profit, some might say even a shoestring, organisation there are many venues which are not accessible to us for the same reason that Douglas Adams (more from him below) didn’t have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day when hitchhiking in 1971: because we aren’t “in that financial league”. It would be a considerable struggle for us to find another home which offered us as much, including accommodation for disabilities and mobility issues in a central location within Birmingham, but was also in our financial league.

The parallels with Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are almost irresistible (and specifically the announcement of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council, that “the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition”) and Friends of the Earth have not tried to, from A (Weary) Climate Activist’s Guide To The Galaxy by Jane Charlesworth, to the Don’t Panic signs dotted about their website. The latter is a reference to the fact that we have until 2029 to campaign against the details of the plan, rather than the 12 minutes Arthur Dent got.

However the current consultation only lasts until 28 August and details of the current proposals and how you can get involved are here.

In addition to the Warehouse, venues on Lower Trinity Street, including Club Colette, The Night Owl, Luna Springs, XOYO, and Mama Roux’s are also under threat of demolition. Friends of the Earth are careful not to oppose the rail improvements in principle, as obviously anything that increases the capacity of public transport to replace private car use is an environmental win, but are confident that it would be possible to achieve the aims of the project with a significantly smaller project bootprint across Digbeth. They have approached the many groups operating out of the Warehouse such as BSFG to get involved in the campaign to revise the Midland Rail Hub (MRH) Alliance‘s (the consortium of Network Rail and a number of private firms which are driving the project) plan.

Since we moved to the Warehouse, the BSFG have brought numerous science fiction writers and others to Digbeth: from Peter F Hamilton to Alastair Reynolds, Claire North to Wendy and Tim Aldiss talking about our former Honorary President, Brian Aldiss. We have discussed everything from terraforming to the future for human lifespans to the history of Dungeons and Dragons. Celebrating our 55th anniversary this year, we had hoped to remain within the Digbeth community for many years to come, where even the graffiti makes us feel at home:

We understand that the Kilder bar under the arches at Shaw’s Passage is also under threat from these plans. This has been where we have taken our guests ever since we arrived in Digbeth, so has already become part of the SF legacy of the city.

There are obviously many more important groups than us depending upon the Warehouse’s continued existence – it currently houses the BRIG cafe (Birmingham Race Impact Group), Voce Books, Sprocket Cycles, Vivid Projects, BrumRadio and Digbeth Community Garden – but it is important to us. We will be responding to the consultation and hope that as many other people who care about this local resource do so too. It feels appropriate to leave the last words to Douglas Adams:

Many, many light years from here, indeed from anywhere, lies the grim and long abandoned planet, Vogsphere. Somewhere on a fetid, fog-bound mud bank on this planet there stands, surrounded by the dirty, broken and empty carapaces of the last few jeweled scuttling crabs, a small stone monument which marks the place, where it is thought, the species Vogon Vogonblurtus first arose. On the monument there is carved an arrow which points away into the fog, under which are inscribed in plain, simple letters the words “The buck stops there.”

The inequality of redundancy

05. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Birmingham, COVID-19, Economics, Health, Pensions, Science Fiction

In October 2009, while working as a pensions actuary in Birmingham, I attended the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ Joining Forces in Mortality and Longevity multidisciplinary conference at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. The canapés were excellent and, of the plenary speakers, I particularly remember Rudi Westendorp from Leiden University who, in response to the question of whether it was nature or nurture that was responsible for longevity, said it was both.

It was also the first and last time I have used a sleeper train. I had a trustee meeting on the Friday morning south of London and decided that it would be a good idea to get the sleeper from Edinburgh to London on the Thursday night. I hadn’t really researched it in advance and I suppose I was expecting a cabin to myself, but it turned out I was in fact sharing with a German guy who looked like he rode the overnight trains of Europe all the time. There was a set of bunk beds which took up most of the cabin and my memories of that night were of my being thrown around every time the train took a bend down the East Coast mainline, not sleeping a wink while my room-mate snored soundly throughout and then of his taking an annoying amount of time to brush his teeth in the morning. The trustees did not get me at my best.

But I digress. The session from the conference which has stayed with me ever since was by Eugene Milne from Newcastle University. As the blurb for his session A new model of mortality and survival stated:

A new mathematical model mimics patterns of mortality in species from nematodes to humans. Net risk, it suggests, arises from two components, an interactive element accounting for historical falls in human mortality, and redundant decay which shapes lifelong risk. This suggests “intrinsic ageing” is unrelated to the slope of the mortality curve, and is unlikely to have altered for humans in recent centuries.

Eugene Milne went on to become Director of Public Health for Newcastle and took them through the pandemic. The full paper in the British Actuarial Journal from 2009 is here.

At a time where actuarial mortality modelling consisted either of projecting observed trends into the future (with no real explanatory power for observed features like cohort effects) or attempted to project a range of causes of mortality based on the likely progress in treating them (which is limited by the quality of information on death certificates), Milne’s model stood out for starting from a biological model of gradually diminishing redundancy within the body. He recognised its limitations, as he said at the time:

As a bridge between actuarial and biological approaches to ageing it falls, as yet, between two stools. The examples in this paper are generated by probabilistic computer modelling. This is clearly not adequate for
actuarial use and the model needs to be developed further to provide a form that will serve that purpose. On the other hand, it describes (as noted in section 4) a biology that would be ‘needed’ in order to construct organismal risk as it is observed. This it does well, providing a coherent account of why mortality patterns appear as they do. Yet its theoretical ‘biology’ is at odds with currently favoured theories of ageing. If the biological quantity described in the NBM [nested binomial model] as redundancy exists, we do not yet know what it is, nor why it should appear to act in so sequestered and consistent a fashion.

But the idea stayed with me, and perhaps that made me particularly receptive to Richard Murphy’s recent article about allostatis, which he describes as “the way living organisms survive by continually adapting to the changing world around them”. As Murphy points out:

If something breaks, a wealthy person can simply have it repaired or replaced. If travel arrangements fail, alternatives can be found. If income is interrupted, there are savings to draw upon. Problems remain, because they always will, but they rarely threaten the stability of everyday life for a wealthy person. In other words, the amount of adaptation required of them is reduced.

There have been a number of attempts over the years to draw attention to how your level of income affects your ability to adapt to your environment.

In George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, he describes the effect of poverty:

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

However Orwell has been criticised, as the temporary tramp that he was, for deciding that meant the end of anxiety. More recently, Jack Monroe used Terry Pratchett’s example of Captain Vimes’ boots, to illustrate how what life costs depended on how much you already had:

A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.

Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.

Jack developed the Vimes Boots Index to highlight inflation in basic food products, which then persuaded the ONS to launch a shopping prices comparison tool.

But to return to the idea of redundancy: it is clear that if you have, say, redundant money which can be brought in to play when things go wrong, then things generally go much better for you. But imagine if you have used up any redundancy quite some time ago and therefore any reverse is a potential crisis. Your stress levels will be much higher all of the time, as your body tenses for the battles it knows lie ahead about anything from a car that won’t start to a boiler that packs up to a hike in the price of bus fares or the basic food products on the Vimes Boots Index. Day in, day out.

At the moment one of the differentials in redundancy is around heat stress. Housing which cannot be cooled without electricity which cannot be afforded. Day in, day out, for much of the summer so far. But in winter the same housing will need far more heating because its occupants cannot afford capital investment like insulation.

And the reason for this enormous inequality in the level of redundancy, is of course wealth and income inequality. The Equality Trust sets out the statistics as follows:

The UK has very high inequality of income compared to other developed countries; the 9th most unequal incomes of 38 OECD countries (OECD, 2022).

The UK’s wealth inequality is much more severe than income inequality, with the top fifth taking 36% of the country’s income and 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth have only 8% of the income and only 0.5% of the wealth according to the Office for National Statistics.

And this stress, day in, day out, means that people also die earlier, as shown below in the House of Commons Library research briefing on Inequalities in life expectancy, using ONS figures (and honestly they’re not picking on Blackpool):

And yet the most likely way for you to hear the word redundancy is when some company is planning to get rid of some of its workforce.

The trouble with people is that you don’t need them until you do, as Jonn Elledge has written here:

There are substantial differences between the US military and the NHS: but what both have in common is that, when they need something, they really do need it. The entire notion of “efficiency” is misplaced.

Similarly, in Nate Hagens’ latest interview, with biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant, they explore:

…how cheap, abundant energy allowed human societies to substitute the “safety net” of resource abundance for the safety net that living systems actually rely on: diversity, redundancy, and cooperation.

Until the resources stopped being so abundant.

And then there is the kind of workplace sustained redundancy programmes create, as Seth Godin says in a recent blog post:

“How few people can we get away with?” That’s a question many bosses think hard about. Automate. Streamline. Improve productivity and take humans out of as many tasks as possible. It’s a time-tested way to create profits and to increase a certain kind of reliability. Claude Code is popular with many organizations for precisely this reason.

“How can we include more people into this process?” is a less popular but often more valid way to create value. In an organization that is in the business of bringing insights, humanity and care to problems, more involvement from people creates better outcomes. The challenges make it far more valuable.

Which sort of organization would you like to work for?

And what sort of society do we want to have? One that supports the people in the bottom quintile with no redundant capital, so that they might have the resources available to maintain the stability of everyday life and reduce the adaptation required of them? Or one which keeps demanding more and more from those it allocates less and less of national wealth to. To quote from another Orwell book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, from the mouth of O’Brien, Big Brother’s Grand Inquisitor:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

I think we can all come up with better pictures of the future than that one.

Professions, triangulation and the costs of adaptation

28. July 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Climate Change, Economics, Education, Health, Professions

The Charybdis is a swirling water feature in the temperate house at Savill Garden. It was designed by Giles Rayner in 2006. https://funandgames.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-Charybdis_Savill-Gardens_9257-2-scaled.jpg *– you may have recently seen the original in The Odyssey*

Last week I mentioned that I thought this blog, for the rest of the year at least, would be about what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of a terrifying future. This week I thought I should start to put a bit of flesh on that particular carcass.

One source for my thinking on this is Alex Steffen. I recently attended one of his Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics webinars. He is particularly good on the importance of continually updating your world view in the face of climate discontinuity and increasing evidence of societal brittleness, and how professions can often be a barrier to doing this:

The greatest danger in any work that asks you to think systemically about the future is getting locked into the worldview that made sense to you when you first began, that you built your successful career on.

We all have limited time and energy. Building up an insightful mental model of how the world works takes a lot of both. The pay-off is in the profit and sense of purpose gained from one’s expertise. It is very common, when you’re highly rewarded for a given set of working insights, to commit more to those insights as your career unfolds, to begin even to defend those insights from challenging new perspectives (ones you fear might devalue your intellectual stock in trade). This “sunk-cost expertise” can easily become a set of shackles.

The article then goes on to explain the process of triangulation, by which professionals can “deflate pressure (from the public, regulators or activist stakeholders) to change more quickly and shore up the power of management and experts who would otherwise be forced to admit that they don’t really know what they’re doing”. If someone starts by saying that they support what you are suggesting, then responds with a bunch of short-term easy actions and claims that these are the start of a journey towards what you are suggesting, you are probably being triangulated.

Another is a recent article by Richard Murphy on the political economy of adaptation. As he says:

The biological idea that first made me think this might be possible is called allostasis. It is not a complicated concept. It simply describes the way living organisms survive by continually adapting to the changing world around them.

As we all know, nothing alive exists in a stable environment. Every living thing must continually respond and adapt to changing circumstances. Human beings are no exception. Our brains and bodies are constantly anticipating change and adjusting to it. Most of that work happens without us ever noticing. Allostasis happens all the time, and most of us do not notice. But the fact is that this continual adaptation has a cost.

Murphy points out that, at a time of continual change like ours, that cost is high. And the adaptation required is much higher for people who cannot just throw money at their problems. He then goes on to say:

That changes how we think about political economy. Politics then becomes the process by which societies decide how those costs of adaptation are distributed, whilst economics becomes the study of how institutions either increase or reduce them. Accounting becomes the means by which we identify who ultimately bears the cost of adaptation and health becomes one of the principal ways in which we observe its effects.

I think there is a lot to this approach, which would also provide a structure to identify and critique the triangulation process set out by Steffen. Murphy only mentions education once in this piece:

Education should recognise that human beings learn differently, rather than assuming that everyone should conform to a single model.

I would go a lot further than that, because I think education is the key to helping individuals with their own adaptation strategies as well as in developing the political understanding to see how the costs of adaptation are currently distributed and how to change that within a democratic system. This seems to be an extension of what I have been writing recently about how not to be a reverse-centaur for instance.

The implications for this in health, education and our institutions are considerable in my view and growing all the time. So that is what I am going to be writing about for a while.

Starting next week with allostasis.

55 years

24. July 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Climate Change, COVID-19, Science Fiction

Two events recently have made me think about the last 55 years in a different way. The first was the last Birmingham Science Fiction Group meeting, which we had dedicated to a 55 year anniversary celebration for the group (the 50th anniversary having been pandemicked). We had a cake, illustrated by David Hardy’s Stratus Hotel, and we showed a film of interviews from members across the years, again featuring some of David Hardy‘s artwork, with stories about guest speakers from Asimov to Frank Herbert to Iain Banks to Jack Cohen and very frank recollections from our current honorary president, Alastair Reynolds. If you want to see the film, you need to join the Group, which you can easily do by emailing us at contact@brumsfgroup.org.uk. Seeing some of the original organisers talking about some of these meetings like they had just happened made me reflect on how we often attribute significance to things after the event and tend to downplay things happening around us now. Things are both never as good or important as they used to be and, of course, as we prove to ourselves over and over again, they also are.

The other event was a visit with my brother and his wife to where we used to live, in the officers’ married quarters of an RAF station in Yorkshire, 55 years ago, when I was eight. Just standing on this patch of grass, with a field of wheat still growing the other side of the fence (to the right), I got a very strong sense of another way of getting from there to here. Obviously there was the one I had taken, with countless house moves, school moves, marriages, careers, children, holidays, illnesses and death and grief and so much joy and laughter in the very fortunate and privileged life I have lived.

But what if I had just stood here and the 55 years had just sped past me instead. My Liverpool football kit would have been a bit tight, with the number seven sewn on the back by my Mum (actually that might have been the following year, when the full magnificence of Kevin Keegan had become apparent). Or, much more spookily, if the eight-year-old just found themselves on the same patch of grass 55 years later in a Wells’ The Time Machine kind of way. It all suddenly felt just as possible and plausible, as if the 55 year old football-and-everything-else pitch was still there within touching distance somehow.

The thing is, I could understand the world of 1971, once I had been reminded of a few things no doubt. A world of cash (just decimalised so no shillings and old pence), phones fixed to houses and telephone boxes, smaller cars filled with leaded petrol, three channels on the black and white TV. I had just driven up there in a car with bodywork comprising mostly plastics, with no spare tyre and no wallet. Just a device known as a mobile which can not only make calls, but send and receive text messages, carry out all my financial transactions and navigate me to my brother’s house. My eight-year-old self would recognise very little about this world beyond the patch of grass he stood on and the field beyond the fence where he had parachuted his mother’s childhood teddy bear.

And this is the terrifying thing about life: we are all that eight-year-old facing the incomprehensible future, and so much of what we spend our time doing is trying to deal with that fear and lack of understanding with often meaningless structures and practices and customs to ward off the sense of being totally out of control. Trump is scary because he appears to have taken a lot of the guard rails off the path we are on, with little sense that he understands what he is doing. AI is scary because it is putting its foot on the accelerator before we have a clear idea of where we are going. Climate change is scary because we no longer look like we are headed where we thought we were.

And we try and stick some grit in the wheels to slow down the disruption to our own little bit of the world, whether to our sense of ourselves, or to how we think life should be lived. And sure we need to question whether we need to change things which are working perfectly well, but often the driver for resisting change is fear of what we don’t know is coming and finding familiar things irresistibly reassuring.

And when we realise that it is not just us with our, certainly in my case, fairly small and unimportant lives (although obviously very important to us!), but also the people who seem to be shaping the world around us that feel these insecurities and uncertainties, the possibility of working together to make it easier to adapt to the very weird future that is coming suddenly doesn’t seem so outlandish after all.

I think this – what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of this terrifying future – is what I am going to be writing about for the rest of this year, as we all rattle on down the road in the back of someone’s van.

A week in football

13. July 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Media & Politics

Lobby journalists often fall back on “a week is a long time in politics” whenever there is more than one thing going on. It’s like what the rest of us mean when we say we’re quite busy at work. It is unclear how the phrase was originally coined, but it is usually attributed to Harold Wilson during one of his sterling crises in 1964. He could not remember ever having said it himself.

I am here this week to say it’s all tosh anyway, because the place where a week can be a really long time sometimes is football.

The World Cup week started at 2am on Monday morning. It should have been 1am, but the lightning storms and North American monsoon had led to a delay in kick off time to 7pm local time and the local weather forecast rather unfortunately designated Mexico City as having “poor weather for running right now”.

I anticipated that it was going to be an operatic night, win or lose, so at 1am I decided to take a walk through Sutton Coldfield to take the temperature of my neighbourhood. I was Charles Dickens’ uncommercial traveller in my mind, who documented several nights of night walks, starting around 12.30am. He described:

The restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep, formed one of the first entertainments offered to the contemplation of us houseless people. It lasted about two hours. We lost a great deal of companionship when the late public-houses turned their lamps out, and when the potmen thrust the last brawling drunkards into the street; but stray vehicles and stray people were left us, after that.

By contrast Sutton was very quiet. The first pub I came to, the Horse and Jockey, was closed and dark. Lights behind curtains and blinds were dotted around the streets, but everyone seemed to be keeping their own company. The Distillery had gone full event night, with bouncers posted on the door, but I walked past the Wetherspoons just as the staff were locking the front door there. Otherwise the only communal places still lit up and active were the pool bar and the Sher Punjabi Bar and Grill, whose Facebook page encouraged you to “feast like a lion”. Compared to the London of the 1860s, where pubs open until 2.30am seemed commonplace, Sutton Coldfield was, on the whole, tucked up in bed with the sound turned down.

I returned home to take my seat for the opera. It started with the national anthems. I have never seen a team and home crowd singing a national anthem more terrifyingly. “Mexicans, at the Cry of War” it translates as, written in 1853 to refer to various Mexican victories in battle in defence of their homeland. This was soon after the Mexican-American War between 1846 and 1848, following the United States’ annexation of Texas from Mexico, a war which resulted in Mexico being forced to sell its northern territories of New Mexico and most of California.

The venue was the Azteca stadium, the largest stadium in Latin America, built in 1966 when the 60 years of hurt began. It is 7,352 feet above sea level. ITV had this hilarious graphic:

The 20% reduction in oxygen partial pressure at that attitude means you have to work harder to breathe. This is something that can be adapted to in time. The Mexican team had played every game except one (Guadalajara at 5000 feet) in Mexico City.

England had last played in the Azteca in a World Cup 40 years earlier when Maradona scored with his hand (he called it “the hand of God”) for one of his two goals (the other was one of the most brilliant individual goals ever seen) to defeat England in the quarter finals. They had never beaten Mexico there. Indeed Mexico had only ever lost there twice before, in 2013 and 2001.

I won’t document the actual match in much detail, as there are many match reports around and you don’t come here for the sports reporting. But in summary:

Quietened the crowd for 20 mins by breaking up any flow to the game – first hydration break – 2 goals in quick succession from Bellingham followed equally quickly by one back from Quinones – half time, when the Azteca produced its own light show including flashing all the lights off in a very unsettling way – Quansah sent off and down to 10 men for most of 2nd half – Gordon won a penalty which Kane scored then Kane gave away a penalty which Jimenez scored – then Tuchel at the hydration break assessed the state of his 10 men at 7000 feet and changed the entire team to one which could man barricades and they threw themselves bodily in front of any attempt at a shot for over half an hour – 3-2 phew!

Jordan Henderson managed to get yellow carded and injured without even coming on the pitch. It was that kind of night.

The mythologising of the match began almost immediately. Sky Sports described it as “one of their greatest knockout results”. The BBC report said:

On a night of sheer sporting theatre, with the game delayed by an hour because of severe storms, Thomas Tuchel’s side even survived Jarell Quansah’s red card early in the second half to record one of their finest wins in recent years.

The Telegraph inevitably had the headline:

The week continued. Spain knocked out Portugal and Ronaldo in stoppage time, which seemed appropriate after Portugal’s win over Croatia being so controversial the crowd rained plastic water bottles down on them. Even more appropriate was Belgium’s 4-1 win over the United States, who fielded Folarin Balogun after his red card suspension was itself suspended following a conversation between US President Donald Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino, with the Belgian forward Romelu Lukaku doing a Trump Dad dance at the end and the team posting this on X:

Argentina struggled past Egypt controversially too, with Egypt having a goal disallowed and their FA calling for an investigation of the entire team of referees and VAR team over “blatant errors and insisting on not reviewing some of the footage that we believe are in favour of the Egyptian national team”.

This was not the first country to lose its shit over an early exit. The South Korean President has instructed their Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to conduct a thorough investigation into the team’s early exit, citing the amount of public money invested in the team’s World Cup campaign.

The week continued. Neither Switzerland nor Colombia were able to shoot straight, but Switzerland went through on penalties.

So, as part of this hard-hitting report, a good friend of mine suggested I look into the incidence of people having their boots trodden on, which we agreed to call Bootgate. To be honest, unless it was one of the many things happening to Jordan Henderson I had not really been paying attention, and after an extensive investigation I can confirm that I can find no evidence for my friend’s claim. However one reason, if it were true, might be that everyone’s boots seem to be DayGlo pink this year.

On to the quarter finals. France looked dazzling beating Morocco, with Mbappe now almost unplayable at times. Spain, as clever as they were in the European Championships but much more incisive now with the 19 year old Yamal, eased past a severely injury-depleted Belgium, who even lost their legendary goalkeeper Courtois before the end.

And England? Well huge amounts of drama but not a great game of football. The Norwegian fans’ Oops-Upside-Your-Head routine roused their team fitfully. Both teams had goals ruled out and England a penalty too. In the end Bellingham wanted to win more than anyone else on the pitch and carved out two goals from sheer bloody-minded willpower.

One thing I didn’t pick up until the following morning’s coverage was the controversy over England’s first goal. The Norwegians claimed their goalkeeper’s clearance hit the camera cables suspended over the pitch and changed direction before it landed, and there should therefore have been a drop ball. This is when I discovered that FIFA had installed snickometer technology, of the type that tells whether batsman have hit the ball before it hit their pads and therefore whether they are lbw or not, in every match ball. And it didn’t snick! If we win, I predict this will be talked about as long as England’s third goal in the 1966 final.

And then, exactly one week from the start of England’s game in the Azteca, Argentina kicked off against Switzerland in the final quarter final. Argentina scored an early goal against Switzerland and then did very little after that, with Switzerland looking like the most likely team to win until Embolo managed to get a second yellow card for falling over his own feet and was sent off, at which point Argentina stirred themselves to two extra time goals to win it. Meanwhile Tuchel was saying his team were lucky to get through and that he was unhappy with the performance. To which Bellingham, clearly feeling unappreciated, retorted that:

“Maybe he doesn’t know what it’s like to play in those conditions against Erling Haaland, Martin Odegaard, Antonio Nusa and Alexander Sorloth.”

Harry Kane stepped in like a good captain to both defend his manager and indulge in a bit of Good Cop-Bad Cop psychology:

“He’s trying to drag it out of us and we know ourselves we have another level we can reach.”

So that was a week in football. What did politics achieve in that time? Well Trump ended a war and then restarted it. Nigel Farage resigned as an MP and then immediately stood for a by-election in the same constituency, with only Count Binface for company. All of Labour’s MPs have now ruled themselves out of challenging Andy Burnham for the PM role. Compared to the football it feels like Groundhog Day in politics.

Next week in football may turn out to be just as long!