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Monday
I’ve finished my Christmas shopping. You can do this when you have no extended family you care about and no friends at all. Strong recommend.
If you start cutting off the latter (begin by accepting no invitations to Christmas parties is my top tip) and arguing with the former (if you do so in the run-up to 25 December then really get into it over the turkey dinner then you will get maximum estrangement bang for your bellicose buck), by this time next year you too will be in a position to do a quick dash to M&S for a new blue jumper for mum, buy some online gift cards for all the under-18s, pick something concordant with your personal budget from your sister’s email full of links to desired items from Wolf & Badger, choose a book/contribution to his latest stupid hobby for your husband and then sit back and relax with a boxful of peppermint creams while you apply yourself to the important business of searching the internet for the perfect new beds, outfits, toys and treats for your pets. Happy Christmas 2026 to you all.
Tuesday
Collins Dictionary has announced its word of the year. It is two words, which seems about right in this faithless, degenerate age. Those words are “vibe coding”. What do they mean? Well, in one sense they mean the practice of telling AI what you want your computer to do and then having it write the code necessary for it to do so. In another sense, it means we have all lived too long and, collectively, quite badly.
Still, kudos to Collins for having its finger on the (just barely) fluttering pulse of socio-cultural trends and announcing this in the week that also gives us the world’s first AI-generated hit (Walk My Walk, performed by an avatar called Breaking Rust, passed 3m streams on Spotify and made it to No 1 on Billboard’s country digital song sales chart – sample lyrics “Kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk”) and Elon Musk shared a prompt for his new toy/agent of destruction, AI video and sound generator Grok Imagine, that “created” a “woman” smiling into viewers’ eyes and saying “I love you”. It was also the week in which climate scientists announced that the world is still on course for an absolutely catastrophic 2.5C rise in global temperatures, which suddenly seems as if it cannot come quickly enough. Funny how things work out.
Wednesday
But they don’t always, alas, as Kim Kardashian discovered this week when she found she had failed the California bar exam. It’s a notoriously difficult thing to pass, involving three days of essay writing, performance tests and multiple choice questions requiring mastery of legalities that, unlike many other states, are markedly different from federal laws. Most would-be lawyers fail it at least once. Nevertheless, Kim K was incensed and took to TikTok to berate – and, ironically, you may not have seen this coming – the psychics who told her she would pass. “I’m just letting you guys know that all of the f***ing psychics that we have met with, and that we’re obsessed with, are all f***ing full of s**t,” she told her family. “They all collectively, maybe four of them, have told me I was going to pass the bar so they’re all full pathological liars. Don’t believe anything they say.” You heard it here first, guys.
Thursday
A constitutional crisis that has been brewing all week has finally been resolved, with the news that the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew (until he was stripped of his royal title last week because of the cataract of revelations about his connections with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the girls he trafficked and abused) will now be known not as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor as he wished but Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. It’s the hyphen. It’s the hyphen, you see. He likes his name without, but various men – in, I’m guessing, wigs and tiny oak-panelled rooms filled with ancient vellum volumes – looked through a few salient calfskin leaves and said … “Nah”.
On the one hand, it’s still not the charges, arrest and long prison sentence many in his place might be looking at. On the other, there is much to love about the granular pursuit of making the man as minutely unhappy as possible (see also King Charles’s redesigning of the garden at Andrew M-W’s new home to include a maze and “healing plants” which is top-level trolling by an older brother) while we wait for wider justice to prevail.
Friday
Speaking of sovereigns, the Royal Mint has announced that real ones are coming back. Not men in ermine and a penchant for splitting with Rome, but coins. Thanks to surging gold prices and high investor confidence and other things I do not understand, our official coin striker has banished the rose-gold interloper that has stood in for the good stuff for the last few decades and reinstated the proper yellow gold coin that was first introduced into the nation’s purses (though, to be fair, not very many of them) in 1489. This version will have micro-text, a latent security image and sophisticated background patterning to guard against counterfeiting but otherwise – samesies! You can throw a handful in a leather pouch (you can make your own from a passing heriot or, probably easier, get one from Amazon) and stride around making like a favourite of Henry VII just like you’ve always dreamed! As long as you have £1,200 a pop to spare, of course. The cost of pretend-living crisis is no joke.
