Sharing my Saturday with Nigella and the wily Fu Manchu - but I'll save the best of Willie until tomorrow.
However only one of them will produce a winner on Saturday!
Back in 2016, I tried to watch Stranger Things. I got through the first three episodes of Series 1, where a kid gets trapped in a dark, decaying mirror dimension they call “The Upside Down.” There is a predatory creature (the Demogorgon) crossing between worlds, thanks to another kid who accidentally opened the gate that let it through. So, essentially, undisciplined kids with no adult oversight almost end the world.
Sadly, my desire to see every child in the cast sent down a mine, leading a pit pony, or up a chimney with a brush was beginning to swivel my eyes, so I had to stop. I thought the town of Hawkins was a blueprint for what Purgatory would look like if it were to manifest on earth. The Demogorgon reminded me of a Champions League footballer giving an interview after a losing game and 50mg of Ketamine. It was unintelligible crap.
But compared to everything else since that time, it makes almost perfect sense.
In the time it took the kids of Hawkins to grow up, the UK has had six Prime Ministers from Theresa May to Keir Starmer. We’ve had The Platinum Jubilee in 2022 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign; her funeral in September of that year, and then the coronation in 2023. We formally left the EU in 2020; we’ve had a cost-of-living crisis running for two years; we’ve won the Euros with a team of women, and we’ve handed over the British Indian Ocean Territory, because someone said we should, but only if we pay billions of pounds to some corrupt foreign politicians.
OK, some of it wasn’t helped by a global Pandemic, in which our politicians played a blinder, probably delivering an additional 40,000 excess deaths through poor science, poor leadership, and mismanagement’s younger sister, Corruption dressed as emergency-driven activity. Yes, we invented the vaccine, but gave most of it away or sold it at cost.
If Stranger Things is about a secret “Upside Down” world bleeding into our reality, the UK’s geopolitical life since 2016 has felt like a slow-motion invasion from a different kind of reality, one made of fibre-optic cables and shadow companies. We had the Salisbury Novichok attack in 2018; we had to promise the US to strip out every part of Huawei from our 5G infrastructure by 2027, because they pointed out the kit was being listened to and could also be shut down on Chinese Government orders. In 2020, the Intelligence and Security Committee released a report that was essentially a shrug in document form, which suggested that the government didn’t find evidence of Russian interference in the Brexit referendum—primarily because they didn’t actually look for it. In 2022, we “suddenly” realised that Russian Oligarchs owned London’s best bits. A year later, we’ve had “secret Chinese police stations” operating in mundane locations, such as an office in Hendon or a restaurant in Glasgow, presumably because the Russians had taken all the best addresses.
Since at least 2016, we have been in a constant “Hybrid War”—daily cyber-attacks on the NHS, disinformation campaigns on Twitter (X), and the hacking of the Electoral Commission, which we discovered in 2024 had actually been compromised back in 2021 by the Chinese state. Never mind, Starmer is being “historic” and allowing the Chinese to come in visa-free with no restrictions, so they can fill up their police stations, barracks and embassy buildings with as many “diplomats” as they need, when it’s time for the Demogorgon to break through.
For my part, I am just increasingly bamboozled by life. Take Master Chef and Bake Off, for example. They proceed as though the biggest threat to the human race is the presenters being sacked for saying “Soggy Bottom” in a sordid manner.
How can two
