Wait, how many 25 year olds in 2024 do you think remember the Mighty Boosh (2003-07), or Chicken Run (2000), or Who Shot Phil Mitchell (2001), or Caroline Quentin-era Jonathan Creek (1997-2000), or know people who were extras in the Harry Potter films (2001-11), or remember the Animals of Farthing Wood TV programme (1993-97), or spilled their drink on Miquita Oliver at a squat party in 2007 (2007)?

This is exactly my issue. I’m not against 20mph in urban areas, but 20mph limits on roads that are clearly designed for 30mph (or more) are a lazy solution. Every subconscious instinct of an experienced driver on these roads will be telling them to drive at 30 so they have to consciously focus on the speedometer to stay within the lower limit for prolonged periods, particularly with the proliferation of speed cameras we have in the UK - my fear in a 20 zone is often now that I’m going to cause an accident because I’m so focused on the speedometer and not the road.

The right solution is to actually turn these roads into 20mph roads (not 30mph with 20mph limits) through simple road design measures that will align drivers’ subconscious perception of the road with the speed the government wants them to drive at. I recognise that this can’t happen overnight but I see no effort by local or national government to even start investing in the set of changes needed to make 20mph sustainable. If these roads just felt like 20mph roads then people would be a lot less annoyed at driving within the speed limit and the government wouldn’t just be stoking up a massive political backlash that will end up returning them all to 30mph and abandoning all the road safety and air quality benefits that these policies are supposed to deliver for us.

NIMBYs’ excuses are becoming more and more elaborate.

What I find so dumb about naming children Khaleesi is that:

a) It’s not the name of a character anyway. Apparently a lot of casual fans thought Dany’s actual name was Khaleesi because several other characters often addressed her by her title. So there’s a good chance that either these parents are casual fans who nonetheless then misnamed their child after a character, or they are serious fans who named their child in a way that will lead other people to infer her parents were casual fans. (Nothing wrong with being a casual fan, but I’d find it a bit dumb to name my child after an IP that I was only loosely into…)

b) The child is six years old. The final episode aired only five years ago. That means they named their child before Dany’s story had even concluded. George RR Martin had been dropping hints throughout the book series that Dany might or might not end up as a genocidal mad queen like her father (the TV show had laid the groundwork for this less effectively, which is in part why the abruptness of her turn was so unpopular) and I find it bizarre that a parent would name a kid after a character who might still end up as a murderous tyrant

I think about the amount of thought and research that many of my friends have conducted when naming their children (including looking up famous real and fictional people with that name, doing word associations, etc). Then these guys come along and just say ‘fuck it, let’s just call her after that blonde girl off TV, Khaleesi I think?’

No, Russian bots lack physical form and hence aren’t able to turn up in person to in-person events. So there was probably one genuine radicalised thug in attendance.

You can’t just say ‘austerity’ every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money…

Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown’s decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today’s size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.

By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we’re not living in austere times.

It’s a sitcom and the title is clearly a joke. Maybe they should call it Snowflakelets?