Monday
An all-party parliamentary group is calling for everyone to be given the right to go wild camping and swimming across our green and pleasant land (and, I suppose our blue and hopefully non-besewaged waters). Apparently we only have the right to roam across 8% of England at the moment, a situation that strikes me as so perfectly us that it should be submitted to the Unesco intangible cultural heritage list immediately if not sooner.
But anything to do with land rights and rules in this sceptic isle always throws up a delight or two – usually around the vision always conjured of furious, red-faced owners shouting impotently at paddling peasants (or, should your mood or Norman ancestry prefer, shooting at them non-impotently with the family’s Holland & Holland). Born and raised in Catford, I was 30 before I realised that people owned the countryside – that fields could be rented like flats and vegetation could have a landlord. The idea that you can own a tree still blows my mind.
Obviously, as a pleb, I fully support the push to give us access to the wonders of the remaining 92% of the place that is still forbidden to us. Not least because as a kind of reverse Dick Whittington I sort of think there must be gold lining the hedgerows and things. All I would ask is that when the rights to wild camping and swimming are bestowed, they are accompanied by stringent legislation against people talking about it. Enjoy your activities by all means. But do not make it 92% of your personality and conversation. You know what I mean, and you know who you are. Think on.
Tuesday
The Tenth at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park has opened a luxury postpartum retreat for new mothers. You can check in for up to a month to get 24/7 access to therapy sessions, massages, lactation guidance, reflexology and more (the more includes yoni steaming, as if you’re letting anything near there ever again. I presume it’s offered as a joke in order to test how your pelvic floor is recovering when you laugh). It’s almost enough to make me want another baby. Or it would be if I just had the £1,795 a night minimum it costs.
You used to get a week in normal hospital after a normal birth, you know. Yes, even the most plebeian (it’s turning out to be a useful word this week) vagina and womb – the latter recovering, lest we forget, from a wound the size of a dinner plate left by the placenta bidding adieu – were considered worthy of recuperation. I wonder what that was like. For at least 1,795 reasons, I will never know.
‘So, if we just move slowly backwards, blend in with the forest, we can make a run for it. Where do you want to start your new life? I think I’m going for Aylsham.’ Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
Wednesday
I showed my 14-year-old son a cassette tape once. He didn’t know what was going on. I explained. Songs. A finite number. Until it self-destructed in a “cassette player”. Sober burial or, if a “mix tape” from a beloved, entry into a keepsake box for your mother to throw out when you went to university. Or to the shops if she was in a particularly manic menopausal decluttering mood.
Joke’s on him though, because they are poised to make a comeback. This time incorporating tape developed by Chinese researchers that uses DNA to hold data. A 100-metre strip could store 36 petabytes, which is up to 7bn songs in old money. No word yet on whether your old sound system will play it or a pencil through the spoolie bits will straighten out the chewed bits, but I have a feeling our time is coming again. The old ways shall be restored and those with mastery of them shall be revered as gods instead of pitied and subjected to another paean of overly detailed praise of Silksong. Oh yes.
Thursday
My favourite genetic and de-extinction research company Colossal Biosciences (motto: Never Knowingly Undernamed) is back in the news. In March it announced the creation of a woolly mouse that reopened the way to the woolly mammoth. In April it reckoned it was about to bring back dire wolves. And now? Now it’s dodos. That’s the big one, guys. Metaphorically speaking. Obviously mammoths probably have the edge in literal terms.
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Leaving aside the objections of cynics who say the company likes to announce its supposed breakthroughs in ridiculously overhyped terms, it’s great news. Colossal (we are on first name terms now) says it has succeeded in growing pigeon primordial germ cells for the first time. Need I say more? Oh. Well, OK – these are the precursors to sperm and eggs and when they have succeeded in making those too, they have gene-edited chickens raring to go as surrogates for dodo 2.0s.
Boring people are citing such work as “a moral hazard” and de-extinction projects as “dangerous” distractions from efforts prevent new extinctions. To them I say – it’s OK. DNA storage is going to obviate the need for electricity-gobbling data processors so we’ve got some slack in the system again. Bring on the dodos, the dire wolves and the woolly anythings. Haven’t we earned some fun at last?
‘Cheer up, being pope isn’t that bad.’ Photograph: Vatican media handout/EPA
Friday
I have a busy weekend coming up. I have to counsel a dozen companies through the loss of my custom. At the beginning of the week I fulfilled a new year resolution (before November – a personal record, please send flowers and congratulatory telegrams to the usual address) and went through my finances, pruning subscriptions, switching insurance providers and all the deathly but ultimately worthwhile rest of it. Now all I have to do is respond to the offers, plangent emails, emotionally blackmailing voicemails and other blandishments the rejected parties have sent since and all will be well. And cheaper. I might have enough for a night at the Mandarin. Fourteen years postpartum is still postpartum, you know.