Several of you have quite rightly commented that, once a highly vociferous and vocal supporter of cryptos, I have been noticeably silent of late on the divisive digital future. Guilty as charged, your honour. However, whilst I do concede I’ve been licking my wounds and counting my losses, I remain stupidly/heroically/idiotically/calmly* a firm believer and here’s a broad-brush summary of the last few months.

As many of you are probably already aware, our very own British Broadcasting Corporation turned a hundred years old this week and I, for one, would like to wish it a very sincere and genuine happy birthday. My life would be less rich without her dulcet tones caressing my ears on a daily basis.

Little wonder Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on the idea of the metaverse as his recent brushes with commercial and financial realities don’t appear to have gone down altogether too well. The problem, in a nutshell, is that Meta (parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) is losing users (specifically to the Chinese-owned TikTok) and Apple’s continued changes to privacy settings mean a massive $10bn hit to its digital ad revenue.

Exactly what duration is a long time in politics and didn’t it used to be a year, or perhaps at least a month? Man, how I miss those days. However, the maelstrom we are all living through is not of recently-departed Librium Liz’s or the long-departed Kamikwasi’s making. No, when the historians of the future look back at the current madness they will draw direct lineage from the summer of 2016: Brexit.

T’other day whilst Kamikaze Kwasi was asserting that his party constituted “a humane society” his erstwhile ministerial colleagues begged to differ. First outta the traps, minister without portfolio, James Jacob Gilchrist Berry helpfully stated that those facing higher energy bills “can either cut their consumption, get a higher salary, or go out there and get that new job”.

Well, apparently she’s our first ever Prime Minister to have attended a comprehensive school, only she isn’t as that particular honour goes to Theresa May. Ah, okay but she’s a lady who’s not for turning and doesn’t give a fig about being popular, until, at the first sign of trouble, she’s the one grabbing the handbrake and blaming it all on poor Kwasi. In the co-authored Britannia Unchained she lamented that “the British are among the worst idlers in the world” only to row back and claim she neither wrote those words nor held that sentiment.

There she was, ol’ Lilibet, one minute smiling and extending a hand in greeting to her fifteenth Prime Minister, and the next she’s gone. And, though it’d been apparently anticipated for an age by everyone that matters, it kinda caught the rest of us by muted surprise. God bless her, thank-you and my sincere thoughts remain with her nearest & dearest.

I’ve always been highly sceptical wrt any actual ‘real-life’ benefits from our hugely costly and distracting forays into deepest, darkest space. To my marginally unambitious and down-to-Earth mind my default position is to consider the here-and-now problems we have in the world and think of the benefit that could be done in diverting the space budget to those needy causes.

I know. I know. I know. I know I’ve been banging on about Boris for years and I do hereby solemnly promise that I’m now trying to ween myself off the utterly compulsive habit.

Several of you have politely enquired as to whether I am both still alive and what, if anything, I make of the last month’s political shenanigans? The good news is a very positive yes to the former but the bad news is I have precious little comment on the latter, the fifty-five day contest that finally revealed Liz Truss as our next prime minister.