Wednesday 23 September, 2026

Who do you think you are? Pulling into an hotel car-park in Burgundy I found myself face to face with this Quince, which looked distinctly unimpressed by the new visitors. Afterwards, I looked it up on the RHS site to see which variety it might be. It boiled down to two possibilities. I concluded it was the ‘Champion’, though its ‘expression’ reminded me of a couple of Serbian generals in the Balkans wars, one of whom died recently in prison. Quote of the Day ”Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.” Spike Milligan* Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Abdullah Ibrahim | Water From An Ancient Well Link Long Read of the Day The drone and AI-led future is coming – but … My latest Observer column. ‘All non-drone militaries are obsolete,” screamed a headline on Noahpinion, Noah Smith’s excellent and generally restrained Substack. “All warfare is drone warfare now,” the subheading added. Smith has been interested in drones for a long…