This week I discovered my five-year-old, the star of my previous offering, in the shower helpfully cleaning my mudcaked running shoes, doing so, unhelpfully with my toothbrush. She has form, our wee chickadee. A couple of years ago she determined it was necessary to clean (umyć in her native Polish) the TV. This she did methodically using antibacterial floor cleaning wipes, all the while repeating umyć , umyć, as if performing a sacerdotal purification rite. Not helpful. The TV was bust leaving a void of childcare to be filled during peak Covid.

Igor Judge, Baron Judge, died. What a name for a member of the senior judiciary. (At the time there was also a court of appeals justice called Laws.) I worked for him when he was president of the then queens bench division. He was first in the line of succession for the top job, and I wrote a decade ago (where does the time go?) of how he was one of the four men in the building who knew ‘what was going on in this place’ (the Royal Courts of Justice). Avuncular, sardonically witty, a bit scary with a warm smile/grimace around which his whole face would coalesce. He was shorter than he deserved to be, than I remember. ‘We are going up a bit of a gum tree on this one,’ he once said to me. We needed to attract the best criminal barristers to the judiciary to try the most complex organised criminal and terrorist cases, this is not about the ‘usual murder and mayhem’.

I begin to realise that the cozy geopolitics I thought I lived through in previous decades was either an aberration or an invention. The wicked alpha males of our times, Putin, Assad, Xi and Trump and all the others, are not bugs but features of humanity. Jewish people are starting to believe that once again they have no safe home. Israel’s devastation of Gaza in defence of its own statehood arouses unique hatred among people in the West, a visceral intensity that is absent with regard to the atrocities taking place elsewhere in the world. Antisemitism is endemic to Christendom and those that oppose struggle to avoid the taint of racism and disregard for the global south. Kremlin agents may be behind the daubing of buildings in France with the Star of David in order to stoke further division within democracies. There is toxic alignment between authoritarian regimes, their useful idiots in democracies, and justified anger at the brutalisation of Palestinians.

When you are young you’re always trying to flee your present and grasp for a future you’ll never attain. In your forties you begin yearning for the things of past you previously disdained. A family walked past in a restaurant and a waft smell of old fashioned aftershave transported me back like old grainy adverts from the 80s on YouTube, and the general decay of life surrounding you on armistice day.

On the sopping esplanade or from our dingy lodgings we

Stare out dully at the rain which falls for miles into the sea

W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening