Patch

Currently getting perilously close to the end of Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer (the fourth and final book in his Southern Reach series).

I'm enjoying it, but it's a trip. Every 100 pages or so my wife will ask how the book's going, and I'll respond "er, it's gotten stranger...".

This seems insane to me. I see foxes at least every month.

I literally just had a pair yelling their terrifying night music outside my window.

They're common as fucking pigeons in towns and cities.

Yeah...it's autumn.

Presumably this isn't your first autumn.

There are lots of spiders because it's spider season. There are always loads of spiders in September and October.

And you're noticing all the foxes because this is their mating season, and they make a horrendous amount of noise when they're mating.

You'll be panicking about all the leaves on the trees dying and falling off, next.

Do the fish need to be in North Tyneside in order to be sexually attractive, or will any fish from the Tyne & Wear area do?

Would probably be pretty useful as a way for getting my son to eat it. He's a right chilliphobe.

I cook all sorts of spice-free spicy food for him; the grown-ups can always add chilli at the table to liven it up a bit.

Interestingly, Swindon is becoming a bit of a drone manufacturing hub. This is the fourth company to announce a Swindon factory in the last few months. The others being:

• Stark
• Munin Dynamics
• Flyby

This one (Tekever) is by far and away the largest of the four, though.

I didn't really have "Swindon becomes major arms manufacturing hub" on my Swindon bingo card, but there you go.

It's been a very hot summer, but it's back to more normal temperatures now.

Although it's still pretty warm, to be honest. I think today might be the first day it's failed to get above 18 C in the day.

Being a scrooge in a house which has all the thermal efficiency of a pile of wet cardboard, my thermostat is set at 18 (and occasionally creeping up to 19) anyway.

I'm just glad that things are finally cooling down to a more civilised temperature...

Having thoroughly learnt their lesson, Mercedes now partners with Geely Autos instead, under the Smart marque. Although I think at this point the flow of knowledge and R&D might be the other way around.

Makes sense from an internal party management point of view. Rayner remains a popular figure with the membership and the left of the party. Starmer might have known that he was going to end up needing to sack her, but it's useful for him (not always the most popular figure with that crowd) to show some support for her and avoid sticking the knife in. Ultimately the independent ethics report was going to come back with what it came back with, and Starmer and Rayner would both agree that she couldn't remain in role at that point- but at least it doesn't look like Starmer was itching for an excuse.

From the voting public's point of view, I'm not sure it makes much difference in this case. Starmer said he'd wait for the full facts, and then sacked her when he had the full facts. Anyone upset with him for not going a couple of days earlier would probably have been upset with him whatever he did anyway.

At £33 million, it's an eye-wateringly expensive development, and there's certainly an argument that it's not really £33 million's worth of benefit. But it is really very nice, and it's nice to see investment in public transport infrastructure.

This only benefits passengers if it comes at the same time as fixing the fare structures.

At the moment it's often cheaper to buy a split ticket, because it can be inexplicably far more expensive to buy a ticket between station A and station C than it is to buy tickets between stations A and B, and B and C on the exact same train. This would be impossible in a tap-on-tap-off type system; if it's just used to lock people out of cheaper fares, that's not good.