Cheer up, at least you’re not in 6th century Constantinople

This week: the hollowness of modern Tory-ism, the counter-intuitiveness of Great Circle Navigation, and let’s rank pandemics for a giggle.

Some despair

Now that the local elections are behind us and the world is opening up, and it’s at least possible that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, we have time to take a breath and consider the question of exactly why politics at the moment is so completely awful that it makes me want to repeatedly attack my own hands with a cheese grater, just…