Pedocin beach in Trieste hit the news is because a fight broke out when someone tried to get to the other side and since then there has been a debate about the merits of sex-segregated beaches.

You can understand why sunbathing women might prefer to nod off on a topless beach without men wearing sunglasses so they can have a good look. You know what some men are like. They have the mirrored shades and angle their heads slightly away while they gawp at a bit of flesh. It’s stupid and I still have a bad shoulder from it.

Since it hit the news there has been an increase in visitor numbers. They have sold tens of thousands more tickets. Yes, it’s a beach you need a ticket for. Would you pay €2.40 to be sure you weren’t around the opposite sex?

Here’s the strange thing about this story. The person who tried to get to the other side was a woman. She broke into the man zone.

She wasn’t on the pull. In fact the beach has a protocol for that. If you want to fraternise you are allowed to go out beyond the wall that protrudes into the sea and meet up. Technically the advice is “you have to reach the tip of the groyne” but I understand why they don’t put it that way.

She was popping over the wall to help her husband look after their child. It wasn’t the men who threw her out, it was an older female beach-goer who took umbrage. The wall-breaching woman was from Milan and called the locals oafs before she left and demanded a refund of her €2.40.

When I first heard about this story, I thought it had uncovered a backwards tradition that doesn’t fit in 2026. I thought I wouldn’t use a beach like that. I only go to the beach with my family, so why would I want to be segregated from them?

Then I realised it was the men’s section that was the desired side. It’s because the rules are that men go on one side while women and children under-12 go on the other. It’s a day at the beach where you get away without doing any parenting and you can just relax.

Yes, there’s a chance your partner will be waving at you angrily but you can pretend you’re not looking. All you need is some mirrored sunglasses and the skill to make it look like you’re glancing elsewhere. Men, our training has finally paid off.

• No 10 North now in charge - what could go wrong? (We answer that)

• Steve ends homelessness (At least mathematically)

• Well, Ronnie Wood Would (Wouldn’t he?)

• And an AC/CD investment

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Some could argue that not starting dangerous fires is generally good advice that most of us live by anyway, but the UK has seen a lot of devastating wildfires in the dry heatwaves.

If you didn’t get an alert, I don’t know what to tell you. Looks like you haven’t been selected to be one of the people saved when the apocalypse hits. Oh well. I’ll miss you.

Millions of phones went off on Friday evening with that horrible, unmistakable emergency alarm. The sort of noise that makes you immediately assume Vladimir Putin has finally got bored, the missiles are on their way and you have to work out how you spend your last four minutes.

Instead, it was a high-intensity memo about barbecues. There’s the meme where people say that meeting could have been an email, well, this national security alert could have been one too.

We’ve all had that boss who sends a message marked “URGENT” only for it to say something like “Please remember to label your Tupperware.” This felt like the national version of that. A countrywide jump‑scare to remind us not to accidentally recreate the Great Fire of London.

I was on stage Friday night and many people didn’t get their 7pm alert in a timely fashion. The sound kept going off all evening. I’d never been heckled by the Government before but I feel like I should get used to it.

Given that this happened a day after some people ended up in A&E because they looked directly at the Sun during the eclipse, it’s unsurprising to find out some responded to the national alert in a dumb way. People started calling 999 to report their neighbours were having barbecues.

This is the inevitable consequence of putting the willies up millions of people. They panicked. Suddenly everyone becomes the neighbourhood fire marshal.

“Hello, police? I can see Dave has friends round and he’s getting his disposable barbecue out.”
“Is the house on fire?”
“No. But they’re getting on like that.”
“Are there flames?”
“No.”
“Then why are you calling 999?”
“Because Dave’s making burgers!”

The fire services had to remind people that 999 is for emergencies and that they cannot send a fire engine round every time someone on the next street gets the sausages out. Surrey Fire and Rescue Service said it was unable to respond to reports of garden barbecues and bonfires unless there was an emergency. Yeah, the fire services were busy, they were dealing with wildfires. I don’t know if anyone told you.

And then there was the Welsh language episode. In Wales, the alert went out in Welsh first, with the English version following minutes later. Government records show the Welsh-only broadcast went out at 6.57pm, followed by the English-language version at 7.01pm.

I’m all for promoting different languages but most people speak English so the most effective way to inform people is English first. If your phone suddenly makes a noise like the apocalypse has arrived and then gives you a message you can’t understand, your first thought isn’t necessarily going to be: “Ah, excellent. This must be a linguistically appropriate wildfire warning.” You might reasonably wonder if Wales has declared independence.

It turns out it was Louise Haigh who signed off sending this alert. It’s a delightful irony that she should be in charge of our mobile phones.

The whole point of the system is that the sound is dramatic so people pay attention. Fair enough. But there’s dramatic, and then there’s “I’ve just woken up every dog in Britain and many a nervous man followed through.”

The difficulty with the emergency alert system is it needs to retain its credibility.

If the alarm goes off every time the Government thinks we might be slightly too enthusiastic with a sausage, people will eventually stop treating it as an emergency.

It’s like having a smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast. Eventually you stop reacting. Eventually you think: “Oh, it’s probably nothing,” and then you’re standing in a burning kitchen wondering why you didn’t take it seriously.

Since getting that message many people have said they’re turning off the feature. Well done. The memo about BBQs now means fewer people will read the “aliens have invaded” one should it ever be needed.

Maybe the problem is nuance. It can only blare the highest level of panic at you. We need a system that has a hierarchy of panic.

Level 1: “Check your flies.”
Level 2: “Pay attention.”
Level 3: “Something’s gone wrong.”
Level 4: “Run.”
Level 5: “Putin.”

Instead, we currently have one setting: Maximum Terror. And it made me jump. We need a warning system that tells us that the warning system is about to go off.

The irony is that the alert was about wildfires, and since receiving it, I haven’t started any. So maybe it worked.

We also have me taking a look at the news. That’s the main thrust of it.

🔊 In this episode:
• Why Burnham’s Prisoner Release Scheme will fail

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Back in May, Marks and Spencer introduced a new bra fitting policy. Fitters would no longer use tape measures. Sizes would be estimated by eye. Staff would look at customers and make a judgement.

I don’t know how easy it is to size up someone’s chest just by looking. Well, that’s not strictly true, but I don’t know how accurate that visual assessment normally turns out to be. People train for years to become a sommelier. What I’m imagining isn’t that different.

Thankfully, this madness has ended after only three months. M&S has reversed this and said fitters can use tape measures again if they or the customer prefers. So, when you’re going to get measured, it’ll be up to you if they actually measure you. I don’t really understand why you pay for a service where you don’t get the actual service. If you go for a bra fitting and opt for the version where you just get looked at I think you might have a kink.

Surveys have claims around 80 per cent of women are wearing the wrong sized bra and M&S stopped people actually finding out. We never really got to the bottom of why. We can assume there was a paranoia about someone complaining about something. That’s the main motivation for most actions taken these days. “What if someone complains about having their breasts touched,” the bosses would think, “while having them measured? Can’t we hire the precogs from Minority Report to somehow know how big they are?”

The modern world is a mystery, made up of one big chunk of the population who always have 99% of their knockers out and another big chunk that is offended that boobs exist. And we’re meant to all get along.

I am a man. I have never had a bra fitting and I am not going to pretend I understand the specifics of the experience. The closest equivalent I can recall from my own life is the foot measuring device at Clarks shoe shops when I was a child. The Brannock Device. You put your foot in it, you expected torture but you got new shoes at the end of it. I imagine a bra fitting is basically that.

What I do understand is that the entire point of a fitting is to establish an accurate measurement. If you remove the measuring from the fitting, you have a chat with someone while they stare at your bust. Women don’t need to pay for a service like that.

Why is that less creepy than someone measuring you? Would you rather someone gets out a measure or looks at you and says, “They’re 34Ds. Do you want me to guess your weight now?”

If I went to get my tyres changed and the mechanic said they weren’t going to use a pressure gauge but would estimate the PSI by eye, I would go to a different garage.

When you go to a doctor they take your blood pressure with a device. They don’t eyeball you and say, “You seem about 130 over 80. Take some of these pills.” The measurement is the point. The device is the service.

Which brings me to the obvious question. If you don’t want to be measured, the solution is not to go for a fitting. You don’t have to leave the house. Order a selection online, try them on, you buy the ones that fit and return the ones that don’t. This is how most clothes shopping works now. My wife does it constantly. Our house looks like the regional hub for a mid-sized courier company. There is a permanent collection of boxes in the hall in various states of return. I have had to buy myself a barcode scanner to track the stock.

M&S has been selling bras since 1926 and offering fittings since 1947. For most of that time the tape measure was considered the professional tool that made the fitting worth having. Removing it was always going to raise the question of what exactly was left. A fitting without a measurement is just a suggestion.

M&S has now clarified that fitters can use a tape measure if they like. They have said this isn’t a U-turn, it’s a “clarification”. Oh, come off it. Don’t lies to us. Your nose will grow and we know where the tape measures are these days.

There has been a lot of discussion about who should play Bond and what will the new version be like. Some have said he should be played by a non-white actor. Some have said Bond should be a woman. Now Trina Parks, who played the assassin Thumper in Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, has a note for the writers. She’d like Bond to be monogamous.

Parks says the new Bond should “reflect the modern world”, that women in the films shouldn’t “just roll over” into bed with him. Is that what the modern world is like? I’m too old to know from personal experience but it feels like we’re less chaste than we used to be. I know I sound like an old man complaining about the shortness of shorts that women wear these days, but you take the point.

It’s also true that some of the women who slept with James Bond may have just fancied him. Do we want a Bond who doesn’t sleep around?

James Bond has, across 27 films and 14 novels, demonstrated very few conventional virtues. He drinks like he’s trying to forget the plot of Quantum of Solace, which wouldn’t take many. He used to smoke until the franchise quietly dropped that in the nineties when it became bad optics. At least he didn’t start vaping.

Bond manipulates people. He lies, professionally. He’s a spy. That’s not the most honest of professions. He has, as his Soviet adversary Anya Amasova once recited from his dossier, a “licence to kill, and has done so on numerous occasions.”

He has actually killed people, in a variety of unpleasant ways. He once threw a man in a wheelchair down a factory chimney. And yet we’re worried that he’s not going steady with these women before he takes them to bed.

Parks also wants Bond’s female counterparts to be stronger characters, which has been happening for decades. We have had Nomi in No Time To Die, M played by Judi Dench in many films, and even her character, Thumper, was an assassin who just tried to beat up Bond while doing backflips. He won that fight and maybe that’s why she’s still angry.

I suppose it makes a change from the standard Bond debates. This time we’re talking about what he’s allowed to do but it’s normally about who should play him. Should it be a woman? You would have thought the clue was in the name James.

People try to make the argument that it’s about representation. Imagine all those non-white women who feel like they are being held back because they don’t get shown a direct representation of themselves being a spy in a film.

I don’t feel represented by Bond. There’s never been a bald one. There’s no Bond from the Midlands. Bond was a commander in the navy and I don’t really like to swim. I’m just so unrepresented.

Monogamy is a strange hill to plant the flag on. Especially given the franchise’s one experiment with it. Bond did get married back in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The wedding was beautiful. They drove away on their honeymoon. Minutes later Blofeld and his henchwoman ambushed them on the road and shot Tracy in the head. Bond cradled her body saying “it’s all right, she’s only resting.” Spoiler alert: She was not resting.

The marriage lasted approximately thirty minutes of screen time. It’s easy to stay faithful if your marriage is only that long.

If you change Bond’s attitude to violence, his relationship to authority, his drinking habits, his romantic behaviour, his general moral framework, and his approach to women, at what point do you concede that you’ve changed the character entirely and should just call him something else? There are many other numbers that could start with a double-oh.

The point in this story is that James Bond doesn’t have to be virtuous. He’s not a perfect hero. He’s a flawed character, as all interesting characters are. He doesn’t have to be a saint. He just looked like one from Live and Let Die to A View to a Kill.

If we make Bond a clean living, non-smoker, non-drinker he’d basically end up an 1800s Mormon. The irony is, then he could have more than one wife.

Seeing as I do a radio show every weekday, and I have a podcast that’s based on it (with some extra bits) I thought, “Why not film it and add even more extra bits?”

I am sure there are many good answers to that question, but it was too late…

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Supermarkets are installing facial recognition cameras to try to stop the worst shoplifters. It won’t lead to a chat and a catch-up but at least someone will still know who you are.

Sainsbury’s already has them in 55 stores and is rolling them out to 200 by Christmas. Tesco, M&S, Boots, and Primark are already using a related system that photographs shoplifters and shares the images with a database accessible to police.

It will be similar to the scene in the film Minority Report where technology scans people’s faces to identify them and Tom Cruise has to cover his eyes to get through. That was hard to believe because everyone knows what Tom Cruise looks like.

The case for this is straightforward. Shoplifting offences hit 530,000 in England and Wales last year, a record high, up 20% from the year before. Store workers experience 1,600 incidents of abuse and violence every single day. It makes sense to have a system to identify those bad people.

Part of me will be annoyed that yobbos and oiks will be on camera more than I am, but that’s more of an issue for me and my agent.

When a store works out that a criminal has walked into their store they can act. By “act” I mean they can send a security guard to stand near them while they shoplift and do absolutely nothing about it. Money well spent.

I understand the argument for it. I also understand that every time I walk into a Sainsbury’s, my face is now being scanned, compared against a database. That gives me the ick. I’ve done nothing wrong (yet) and it feels like they’re presuming my guilt.

They say the non-matches are deleted instantly but I have to take Sainsbury’s word for it, which is the same Sainsbury’s that charged me £3.90 for a sandwich last Tuesday.

Companies have an impressive ability to discover new uses for information they’ve already collected. Today it’s, “We’re checking whether you’re on the watchlist.” Tomorrow is it, “We noticed you usually buy coffee on Tuesdays, here’s a voucher”? Will facial recognition eventually be linked to loyalty cards? How will I feel when the camera sees me and I get a text with a coupon for Slimfast?

It’s good to try to stop shoplifters, it’s a nice change to read about something being done about this problem, but it’s typical that to do so we all have to have our faces scanned. Because someone else is a criminal we all have to lose a little of our liberty.

It’s already hit a few snags. One man was already wrongly identified by Sainsbury’s system and asked to leave a store in Elephant and Castle. He was essentially accused of being a shoplifter while trying to buy his shopping. This worries me because I look a lot like most e-fits of wrong ‘uns.

To be fair to the system, he was in Elephant and Castle, so it was highly likely he’d done some sort of shoplifting while he was there.

Supermarkets already use cameras to show you your own face on a little screen when you’re using the self-scan. Presumably that’s to put you off shoplifting but it just reminds me how bald I look. I walk in hoping to buy some milk and instead get a jump scare of my own head. If anything, it makes me more likely to steal a hat.

Maybe I’m being a hypocrite because you can’t walk in my house without my sneaky little doorbell filming you, but it feels odd to know your face is being scanned when you pop to the shops.

However, if I stored the image of you on my server and used it to alert me if you ever came back, you might think I was a weirdo, but that’s what the stores will be doing. And at least my doorbell doesn’t charge me £3.90 for a sandwich.

When the new system spots a bad guy it alerts a human, and they make the final call, but whatever is being done by a human today will be done by an AI at some point tomorrow, so it feels like we’re handing over control of who’s allowed to buy food to the robots.

The great irony will come when you have walked into a large store, had your face scanned, analysed and checked against a database, but they’ll still have the cheek to ask you for ID when you buy a drink.

The latest skirmish began when Jan Rosenow, Professor of Energy and Climate Policy at Oxford, posted on LinkedIn suggesting that Britain might need more air conditioning. He was careful. He was measured. He said passive cooling should come first.

Passive cooling sounds like when you sit on the sofa in just your pants. That’s not passive cooling. That’s how I spent most of July.

The passive cooling Jan was talking about includes shutters on windows, better ventilation, using shade. He was saying air conditioning should be used only when genuinely necessary, and ideally powered by clean energy. What a soft, lefty, eco-friendly type he was being. So imagine his surprise when he was attacked for trying to ruin the planet.

Fionn Stevenson, former Professor of Sustainable Design at Sheffield, said she was “stunned” by his remarks. She accused him of “generically promoting air-con.” She said desert nations like Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia had tolerated temperatures in the high forties for centuries using traditional passive cooling, without mechanical intervention.

But air con is better. Why wouldn’t we opt for the better solution to a problem? For centuries many nations would navigate using the stars. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be allowed my sat nav.

She even pointed to the Roman hypocaust as an example of ancient technology that still works. She’s right. It is a system of underfloor channels and cavity walls that circulate warm or cool air through stone buildings. It was an impressive piece of engineering. The reason it is not the answer to the current heatwave is that installing a hypocaust in a Victorian terrace requires planning permission, structural surveys, excavating the floor, rebuilding the subfloor cavity, and approximately £40,000 you don’t have because energy bills have gone up.

The authentic Roman hypocaust was powered by slaves. That’s carbon neutral but I don’t think we want to go back to that.

She is also correct that air conditioning heats cities up. This is true and worth saying. Air conditioning moves heat from inside buildings to outside buildings, so we’d have hotter streets. Then go inside. That’s where the air con will be. You’ll love it.

Hot air rises, so the street itself won’t stay hotter for long.

We do experience the urban heat island effect, where big cities are hotter. We should look for a good solution. Again, a look to the past gives us a good parallel. In the olden days people would poo out of the window, which led to more poo on the streets. We invented sewage systems. We didn’t go back to pooing indoors and putting up with it.

I don’t understand why this has become a culture war issue. Argue over who can take a slash in which bathroom all you like, but if you think we’re heading for warmer, more extreme summers, you should think we need to treat that symptom.

Sure, it uses more carbon than doing nothing. And the same is true for heating our homes in winter. For centuries people in other countries got really cold but we invented technology to warm things up a bit. And we used it. We didn’t have rows on Ye Olde LinkedIn about it.

It’s not just idle words online. Some homeowners have reportedly been ordered to remove air conditioning units they have already installed, under net zero regulations governing external alterations to buildings.

You cannot add a unit to the outside of your house because it affects the thermal envelope. You also cannot, presumably, install a Roman Hypocaust because you don’t have a Roman house. It’s almost like that was a dumb idea.

The solution available to you is to open a window, which does not work when it is 34 °C outside and also 34 °C inside.

The Victoria line hit 34 degrees during the last heatwave. The legal limit for transporting cattle is 30 degrees. To be fair, at the end of your Tube ride no one is going to bump you off with a bolt gun to the brain stem. Hopefully.

We are ordering people to remove air conditioning they’ve already paid for. We are having an ideological argument about whether staying cool is permissible. We are suggesting that the solution used by the Roman Empire is more appropriate for modern Britain than mechanical cooling.

It almost feels like certain people think Britain should suffer. They want Brits to sweat and struggle in the heat because they want there to be karma. I’ve not done any research but if you have a Venn diagram of people who like the idea of reparations and people who think the UK shouldn’t be allowed air con, you might have a circle.

If we have plentiful and cheap energy that comes from non-carbon sources we could have the air con on so high we’d be complaining about the cold. And that’s something we Brits actually enjoy doing.

Since the 1960s we have had notable historical figures featured on the money. You will have seen the likes of Florence Nightingale, Charles Darwin and Winston Churchill as you were buying your goods. They’re on the way out and we will be getting wildlife instead.

Say goodbye to Winston Churchill on the fiver, we’ll be getting a puffin. I hope it’s at least a puffin that caused a famine in India.

Our notes will be like NatWest cheque books in the 90s. I suppose it won’t be long till physical cash seems just as outdated as a cheque, so maybe it’s fitting.

The reason for this change is hard to pin down. The Bank of England said it was about fraud prevention. Faces are getting easier to replicate with modern technology. Wildlife imagery is harder to fake accurately. This is technically true. However, I can’t help but think if I saw a dodgy note I might think, “That doesn’t quite look like Darwin,” whereas I’d be less likely to say, “That doesn’t look like the famous beaver that’s on the money.” I don’t want to get cancelled, but most beavers look alike to me.

Others think this is all about a cultural issue. They’re trying to get rid of the old white men from the currency. The evidence for this is that the Cabinet Office, via its Office for Equality and Opportunity, wrote a letter to the Bank of England requesting greater representation of women, disabled people, ethnic minorities and LGBT individuals on the cash.

You may have thought our Government would have more pressing issues but it seems that decolonising British money is a priority.

I’m not sure if any section of the British community was thinking, “I’ll tell you what’s holding us back, not being on the tenner,” but you know how this goes. When someone suggests greater representation for a group during a meeting you can’t be the one to push back without looking like you secretly hate that group.

There’s an obvious reason why a certain demographic has been on the money a lot. They were picking British historical figures and back in the day it was a lot of the men doing things. At most it was the sexism of the past that caused that. Not the sexism of the bank’s note designers.

For some reason we’re acting like every part of British history has to be seen as shameful.

It’s a little harsh to Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry and Jane Austen to act like they don’t represent women. And you have to feel sorry for Alan Turing. He helped to win the Second World War, he created much of modern computing, and the Turing Test for AI. What did he get in return? Well, because he was gay at a time when it was illegal he was chemically castrated and only received a posthumous pardon in 2013. And now the Cabinet Office wants him removed from the notes for not being LGBTQ enough. He was literally the G of the LGBTQ and he was on puberty blockers. But he was white. Tut.

I feel sorry for the Bank. Whoever they picked to feature on our money someone would be upset. Thanks to social media, someone would whip up a furore. So now we will have cash that looks like a toddler’s educational textbook. This is why we can’t have nice things.

We have to deal with the question of which animals to feature. This is going to be its own debate. Is the red squirrel more British than the grey squirrel? The grey squirrel is technically an immigrant.

The truth is, Britain struggles with symbolism. We want to honour our past without upsetting anyone. We want to celebrate diversity without looking performative. We just want a currency without having to sit through Twitter meltdowns about it, but we can’t. I’d put money on it.

Some of the bans include South East Water, which has banned hosepipes in parts of Kent. Southern Water has announced a ban for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight from July 10th. Yorkshire Water’s ban came into force on July 11th, covering five million people. Thames Water, which supplies fifteen million people and is currently approaching nationalisation, has asked customers to stop voluntarily while it works out how to stay solvent, which is a fitting word when you’re selling H₂O.

The logic is sound on the surface. It’s hot. Reservoirs are stressed. People need to reduce demand. Fine. What’s slightly harder to swallow is being asked to reduce demand by a set of companies that collectively lose three billion litres of water every single day through leaky pipes.

Why don’t they introduce a leak ban and then we could water our gardens the easy way.

An average of three billion litres of water is wasted every day in England and Wales due to leaky pipes. If you live near a leak you might report it, but with the way things are, you’d be better off keeping it a secret and setting up a drain pipe to dump it in your garden.

Being told to cut our usage by the wasteful water companies is like hearing that Coleen Rooney has told Wayne to watch how much he’s spending.

Since privatisation in 1989, water companies in England and Wales have paid out approximately £50 billion in dividends to shareholders while running up debts of over £56 billion. If some of that money would have been spent on repair kits we’d be much better off.

It seems odd that a business can spend most of the year making a profit from selling you a life-sustaining substance, but as soon as it gets warm they can fine you for using it.

If you take a step back, it’s a strange situation. These companies sell us a commodity but when they fail to supply it they fine us for using it. When there was a shortage of KFC when they changed suppliers they apologised. They didn’t fine you if they caught you tucking into a bucket.

There are ways around it. You can also use a watering can and you can fill that watering can with your hosepipe and never get a fine but if you cut out the middle-man and use your hosepipe on your garden you could face a £1,000.

In theory you can use just as much water on your garden as you would have done but the hosepipe ban is a tax on convenience.

To be fair to the water companies, they don’t keep the money from the fines. That goes to HM Treasury. As we found out in recent posts here, issuing fines for using hosepipes, getting the puzzle of recycling wrong or doing 23mph in a 20 zone is probably saving this Government from breaking the pledge not to increase income tax.

If we’re going to have more hot summers we have to install an infrastructure that can handle it. As we also found out in other posts here, there’s a move to stop people installing air conditioning, so hoping we get the water supply fixed is a long shot.

And yet, in the middle of this cultural fast‑forward, Britain has decided that the one thing that absolutely must slow down… is the car. That’s right, the machine that we built to go fast is being slowed.

The latest figures show more than 125,000 drivers were caught breaking new 20mph limits last year. That’s a 235% rise since 2023. That’s not a gentle increase. If this trend continues, by 2028 every British driver will be legally required to travel at the speed of a pensioner pushing a shopping trolley uphill.

The speed awareness course will officially be our biggest source of education in this country. How long till they introduce student loans for it?

The Welsh government kicked things off with its blanket 20mph policy. That is the single most unpopular measure since devolution. It was so disliked they partially reversed it a year later, presumably after realising that forcing people to drive at jogging pace is not the best way to win hearts and minds. They spend millions changing all the road signs to 20mph and then more millions changing them back. It’s more expensive in Wales as you probably have to have 20 written on that sign twice, once in English and once in Welsh.

The idea spread. More than a third of English councils now have similar schemes, and London is basically a giant 20mph theme park curated by Sadiq Khan. I am often late into the TV studio after getting stuck behind someone doing 20mph in a 20 zone. You just don’t expect it.

Now, before we go any further, let’s deal with the obvious point: speed kills. The RAC says speed was a factor in 58 per cent of fatal crashes last year. Some of the speeds recorded are genuinely terrifying: 89mph in a 20mph zone in North Wales, 114mph near a primary school in Leicester, and one driver hitting 161mph on the A5. That’s not speeding. That’s auditioning for Fast & Furious 12: Stoke Drift.

Those speeds would also be shocking if these pillocks drove like that in a 30 zone.

But here’s the problem: the debate around speed limits has become so simplistic that it’s almost impossible to talk about sensibly. If you say “20mph everywhere is silly”, people assume you want to drive through school gates like you’re recreating the opening scene of The Italian Job. If you say “slower speeds save lives”, people assume you want Britain to become a giant pedestrianised museum where cars are displayed behind velvet ropes.

Historically, speed limits weren’t set by vibes or moral panic. They were based on something called the 85th percentile rule. The idea that the safest speed is the speed that 85 per cent of drivers naturally choose on a given road. It’s a compromise between safety and realism. If you set a limit too low, everyone ignores it. If you set it too high, people die.

It’s a grown‑up way of thinking. Which is probably why we don’t use it anymore.

Instead, we’ve drifted into a strange national mindset where “slower = safer” is treated as a universal truth. But if that logic were applied consistently, the safest possible speed would be 0mph. No crashes. No injuries. Just millions of people sitting motionless in their cars, waiting for the government to announce the next phase of the plan: “Walking is now too risky. Please remain indoors until further notice.”

The truth is, speed limits are supposed to be a compromise. Any speed above stopping brings risks. What level of risk do we accept? A blanket 20mph limit doesn’t do that. It treats a quiet suburban cul‑de‑sac the same as a wide, empty arterial road at 11pm. It’s the legislative equivalent of giving everyone the same haircut because it’s easier for the barber.

Which brings us neatly to the online rumour doing the rounds:

Are 20mph zones being introduced because they’re easier for self‑driving cars? It sounds ridiculous. It probably is ridiculous. But it’s also… interesting.

Self‑driving cars struggle with unpredictability, things like pedestrians stepping out, cyclists going through a red light, dogs deciding today is the day they chase a pigeon into the road. Lower speeds give the algorithms more time to react. And if you were designing a city for autonomous vehicles, you might well choose 20mph as your baseline.

Is that what’s happening? There’s no evidence. But that doesn’t stop me telling people that’s what I think is happening. Why else would we have 20mph zones?

The answer could be fines. Remember, 37,219 drivers were caught breaking 20mph speed limits in 2023, with each one paying a fine. It’s the stealth tax on steroids. It’s hard to stick to that speed. You have to creep along at speeds that feel unnatural, staring at the speedometer more than the road, and getting fined for doing 23mph in zones that used to be 30mph for decades without issue. Kerching!

Speed limits should be smart, targeted, and based on evidence, the conditions of the road. Maybe even the time of day could be a factor. Specific rules would be safer. Blanket rules treat drivers like naughty children who can’t be trusted with sharp objects.

Until then, thousands more will be caught out, councils will rake in the fines, and Britain will continue its journey towards becoming the only country on Earth where your broadband moves faster than your car.

I now have a new bike with a better lock. I also have a GPS tracker hidden on it somewhere in case this one gets nicked. But what will I do with that?

If it goes missing and I look in the app, will I go round to the house of the criminal? I don’t even like the confrontation of telling someone they’re sitting in my pre-booked train seat.

I wish I were more like the Batman of Lagos de Moreno. Let me tell you the story.

There is a man in Lagos de Moreno, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, who has had enough of bike thieves. The police weren’t doing anything about them, so it’s just like the UK in that respect. The courts weren’t doing anything about them, apart from the bike parking spaces provided.

This man did something about them himself. He hunted them down, beat them up, taped them to lamp posts, wrote “rat” on their foreheads in marker pen. He then drew cat whiskers on their faces. I feel he was running out of ideas at that point. He left the stolen bikes beside them as evidence, and put up a cardboard sign warning others that this was what happened now.

He did this to five men in ten days. Then he disappeared into the night. He is... the Batman of Lagos de Moreno! [Theme music plays]

There is a part of every reasonable person that finds this extremely satisfying. Bike theft is rampant, prosecutions are rare, and the general experience of reporting a theft to police is that you fill in a form and never hear about it again. You’re better off writing to Santa for a replacement.

In 2023–24 there were around 77,000 bikes reported stolen in the UK. Fewer than 1% of bike thefts lead to a charge or summons. We’re basically running a free bike scheme for wrong ‘uns.

The fantasy of someone actually doing something about it, dramatically and publicly, taps into something deep and completely understandable. Yes. That. More of that.

Then you think about it for another thirty seconds.

The punishment, for starters, is exactly what happens on a British stag do. You wake up taped to a lamp post in a town centre with something written on your face. In Jalisco it’s “rat.” In Newcastle it’s usually something worse. It would be hard to know who were the criminals and who were the grooms.

The street-level problem is also worth considering. We think we want this. We don’t actually want to walk past it. It’s bad enough on a Saturday morning navigating the Friday night pavement pizzas. Add five taped criminals to that and the morning trip to get the milk becomes considerably more eventful. The vigilante thinks he’s cleaning up the neighbourhood. He is, in practice, making it more difficult to get past the lamp posts.

The deeper problem is the innocent man question. Whether the men were actually thieves doesn’t change the fact that prosecutors are treating them as victims of kidnapping and bodily harm. A good lawyer will use that to make sure these men aren’t punished for their bike thefts. I don’t know if you can hire a good lawyer when you can only pay in bike parts, but it’s a risk.

Our official justice system, with its courts, lawyers, juries, appeals processes and considerable expense, still manages to lock up innocent people by mistake on a regular basis. A man with duct tape and a marker pen in the middle of the night is not going to do better. At some point he will tape up the wrong person.

The issue is that Batman, the actual Batman, the one this man is being compared to, doesn’t tape people up. Batman catches criminals and hands them to the police. He has deep respect for due process given that he is a man dressed as a bat who operates outside the law. The Batman of Lagos de Moreno has skipped the handing-over part entirely and gone straight to public humiliation.

We don’t want a world where vigilantes are fighting on the streets and taping up bike criminals before the police turn up, free the men, and they get compensation. We want a system where the police investigate the missing bike.

And that’s why, along with the bike lock and the GPS tracker, I have also stashed a copy of the Qur’an on that bike. If I call the police and tell them that’s a risk, they will be there in seconds.

I remember that era when every summer was filled with stories of messed up fields and claims that they could be caused by aliens. Looking back it was a logical leap, but we were bored and there was no real internet.

In the 1990s we were sure our fields were the playthings of ET and that planes near the Bermuda Triangle would disappear. There’s a meme that points out that the number of miracles reported since the invention of the camera has dropped. By the same theory we see that no one talks about the Bermuda Triangle now we have GPS.

Something like that must have happened to crop circles because they are now seen as so terrestrial that the police force has warned they could charge those who create them.

Wiltshire Police warned people that creating crop circles without permission from a landowner amounts to criminal damage.

Surely that means we think they’re man-made. It would be a bold threat from a police force to think they could slap a ticket on the windscreen of a parked UFO. A civilisation that is so advanced it can travel across space to Earth, but somehow the cops think they can catch them.

We have police that can’t catch most shoplifters. They can’t tell which is worse, stabbing or hurty words, yet they’re taking on the Martians over causing a mess in a field.

And if this is our first contact with an interstellar race, trying to put cuffs on them might not make a great first impression. But good luck with that.

Then again, maybe the aliens would be easy to outwit. If the best idea you have with all that technology is to turn up to a planet and flatten some wheat, you’re not the brightest star in the sky.

Of course it’s people doing it. You see people on social media say things like, “That’s another conspiracy theory proved right,” when something goes their way, but they never bring up these ones.

In 1991, two men called Doug Bower and Dave Chorley confessed to having made more than 200 crop circles since the late 1970s using nothing more complex than ropes and boards. They were inspired by a 1966 account of a UFO sighting in Australia where a flying saucer supposedly left a depressed area of reeds in a lagoon. They thought, “We could do that.”

Yes, you could. It’s the “should” question that should take up people’s brain space.

It won’t be the same people doing it in 2026. The 1990s were a while ago. If you were active then you’re not far off retirement. That’s too old to be getting an ASBO for what you get up to in a farmer’s field.

The National Farmers Union has basically said, “Get orf my land.”

Chair of the NFU in Wiltshire, Peter Shallcross, said they can be “troublesome” for landowners, adding: “It’s very difficult to harvest a crop when it’s on the ground. It won’t mature properly.”

It’s the arable version of cow tipping, so no wonder they’re angry.

Shallcross said, “[We don’t know] how the artists, as it were, make the design in the first place and then carry it out on the ground. When you’re walking, it’s out of perspective.”

It almost makes more sense for aliens to do it. For all we know that’s some method of communication we don’t yet understand. If only we could decode the symbols it could be a message or at least a pop up ad saying there are hot AILFs in our area.

If it’s humans doing it, they have one of the worst hobbies going. What do you fancy doing on the weekend? Flattening some cereal? It’s a roll in the hay with your timing all off.

Whether these field designs are caused by alien life or by pranksters they should both realise their time has been and gone.

One ad exec thinks he knows why. Andrew Harrison was the marketing director behind Yorkie’s “It’s Not for Girls” campaign. He has said it would be “absolutely not” allowed today because people have lost their sense of humour.

He is annoyingly right. You can imagine the protests it would cause, the boycotts that would be arranged. If a chocolate bar ran an advert saying it is not for women there would be support charities saying it is triggering. Somehow both sides of the eating disorder debate would find a way to be furious.

Everyone would miss the fact it was a joke, the one detail that used to matter. I was alive during this time and women could actually buy Yorkies. If a Government brought in a ban on one sex doing something I would protest against it, but if it is just a joke it should be treated as such.

The irony he pointed out is worth noting. The campaign was developed with significant input from senior women, including at the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson. The women on the team helped create the advert telling women they could not have the chocolate. This was considered funny rather than something requiring a UN resolution.

It was a pushback against the oversexualised chocolate adverts of the day. Back then they sold Flakes by showing us a woman taking a bath. Even the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny was inexplicably hot.

The Yorkie campaign ran from 2002 to 2012. In 2006, Nestlé released a pink wrapper edition “especially for girls” because demand from women was so high that they had to create a product specifically for the people the product was not for.

I did not try to sue them because I realised it was a joke and I could have bought one any time without dressing as a woman or waiting for a weekend when I already was. I would not have had to stand outside the shop waiting for a woman to go in and ask her if she could buy me one, like some teenager trying to get a bottle of WKD.

By 2012 it was over. The slogan went. For a brief period Yorkie tried “man fuel for man stuff”, which sounds worse. It is the sort of slogan that now appears on the dodgy pills advertised between YouTube videos.

The reason it could not be made today has nothing to do with whether the joke is funny. The joke is still funny. The reason is that the ecosystem in which jokes exist has changed completely. In 2002 an advert appeared on television, people either laughed or did not, and that was the end of it.

Today the same advert would be clipped, labelled, debated, misquoted, overanalysed, defended badly, condemned loudly, and turned into a story about society rather than a story about chocolate.

The advert has not changed. The audience has not fundamentally changed either. I would take it a step further than Mr Harrison and say it is not just the loss of humour. These days jokes are scrutinised more than government policy, more than tax rises, more than anything that actually matters. “It is just a joke” used to be a defence of why something was OK. Now it pulls greater focus.

Take films. If a script includes offensive language it gets an 18 certificate. If a comedian quoted the same line on stage they would never work again. That can be hard for the observational comedians. What are they meant to say if three people like that walk into a bar?

If you are offended by a joke you are thick and nutty. You sound more like a chocolate bar than the Yorkie does.

The latest plan in the net zero push is to ban the sale of heating systems that use “too much” energy. Some towel rails will soon be allowed to run for only six hours a day. As a man of a certain age who knows that in the next decade or so I’ll be starting my middle of the night wee era, this feels personal.

Underfloor heating is also being targeted. Nearly half of the electric models on the market will be banned. This feels like a massive step backwards because even the Romans had underfloor heating. We’re aiming for a pre-Roman Britain to cut our carbon?

The Romans had aqueducts, roads, and warm floors. We have potholes, Thames Water leaks, and now a minister telling us our ancient ancestors were irresponsible with their energy use.

The justification is that older systems use “excess energy”, which creates an “avoidable cost to society”. Normally when an environmental debate happens someone will bring up the fact that the UK’s emissions are only around 1% of global emissions, so what difference can we make? I’m not sure what fraction of the UK’s carbon footprint comes from our bathrooms. Don’t get me wrong, there are certain methane emissions coming from my bathroom at times, but the carbon dioxide side of things is tiny.

There’s a fundamental issue here. If I want to spend my hard‑earned cash warming a tiled floor to the temperature of a Gregg’s steak bake, shouldn’t that be my choice? If I want a towel rail that runs all day because I enjoy the luxury of not smelling like a tramp after I’ve showered, is that not between me and my electricity bill?

We’re told this is all about saving households money. The official estimate? A saving of £8 a year. Eight pounds. That’s two sandwiches at Pret. Or, depending on if you’re reading this a month from now, one sandwich at Pret.

Eight pounds spread across twelve months is 66p a month. We’re literally in the Freddo price range.

Meanwhile, the new “efficient” systems cost more upfront. And the government admits manufacturers will pass those costs “directly on to the consumer in full”. So we pay more now, to save £8 later. It’s like being mugged by someone who promises to return a fiver next spring.

So, we have worked out that this isn’t about saving money. Maybe this is all about carbon. Well, if you want to cut out carbon output it’s not about tinkering around the edges of our usage. If we had a solid nuclear base with loads of solar, we could power our lives with no carbon output. We could have a bathroom floor so hot we could realistically play “the floor is lava” and still produce no carbon.

Trying to reduce carbon without changing the source of energy is pointless and I can show you why. The amount of energy we can save by me having wet towels will be more than offset by my use of AI. Here’s a picture of me in a bikini.

That will have used more energy than I’ll save having a cold floor. Extrapolate that across all people who’d enjoy seeing me in a bikini and you realise our energy use will go up and up. You can’t solve this problem on the usage end.

Surely the image of the future should be a civilisation with plentiful energy, not a land of restrictions that leave us thinking of ancient Roman floors with envy.

Stick solar panels on roofs. Stick them on warehouses. Stick them on every new build. Stick them on the Houses of Parliament so MPs can experience the thrill of being useful for once.

Governments don’t actually want us to have lower energy prices as they’re getting a cut of what we spend in duties and VAT. It also looks like they don’t really want to cut carbon. They want to outsource production so we can pretend that carbon emitted over there is different to carbon emitted here.

So we end up with a policy that bans things people like, raises costs in the short term, saves pennies in the long term, and gives ministers the warm glow of “doing something”.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left tiptoeing across cold tiles, clutching a damp towel, wondering how we became a nation where the government regulates bathroom comfort.

If Ed Miliband really wants to help, he should stop policing our towel rails and start making renewable energy cheap, abundant, and boringly normal.

Until then, I’ll be using my towel rail whenever I like. If that’s a crime, they can come and take it from my warm, dry hands.

We could point out he should have bought Father & Baby magazine but that’s probably just a pamphlet saying, “It’s not about you. Shush!”

That magazine, brimming with tips for parents, arrived last Friday. The only problem is he ordered it in 2007. Royal Mail took so long to deliver the item his children are now eighteen and twenty and they’re both at university. I hope he gets a refund. It will help with the tuition fees.

It took so long to get to him he’s now needing tips on how to deal with an empty nest. There’s probably a magazine for that but he won’t get his copy till 2043.

It’s part of a trend. Royal Mail delivered just 75.7 per cent of first-class mail within one working day in the year to March. Ofcom’s target is 90 per cent. The previous year it was 76.3 per cent, so performance is declining. We need to be setting a target that Royal Mail could actually hit, like asking them to drop fewer elastic bands on the floor every morning.

A first-class stamp now costs £1.80, up 10p in April. You are paying more for a service that is getting worse. The company was fined £21 million by Ofcom in October for missing targets but that just means money from the new stamp price goes to paying Ofcom instead of updating their systems. They will also have to pay interest on that fine. I’m assuming they will pay late. It takes them two decades to get a magazine to someone.

While we all enjoy moaning about this terrible service we should also realise that it doesn’t really matter. That’s the problem. Back in the day the only way to get some information to someone was a letter and you wanted it there the next day. Now if you want something sending you pop it in an email.

It used to be the case that if you ordered an item of shopping to be delivered you had to give it 28 days to arrive, but a letter you wanted to get there in a day. Now, if you Amazon Prime something you want it there in a day, but if you send a letter you’re lucky if it gets there in a month.

And what can you do if it doesn’t arrive? You could send a complaint but, well, you know.

Imagine my shock when I read in the news that men with moustaches are considered one of the biggest turn-offs for women.

The same survey found that women with lower-back tattoos are the biggest turn-offs for men but it was a survey on that Illicit Encounters website. It’s a site for people planning infidelity. Is that a bigger insult or not? The people surveyed are hardly known for their good decision-making but it’s also saying, “These people would bang anything and they don’t want you.”

Either way, if I am shunned along with tramp-stamp holders, I’ll be having a great time. In between tests for Hep C.

For a while I could retreat into a Churchillian style response to feel better. “I may be ugly but in the morning I could have shaved... whereas you, my dear, are a c**t!” I’m not quite as witty as he was but I’m in the ballpark.

But then another news story came along that has proved who is more attractive, men or women. Do you want to guess?

It’s women. Of course it is, for many reasons. If the research actually found that men were more attractive they’d keep quiet about it. The online pile-in would shut down the institute and the researchers would never pull again.

It’s funny that we know you can’t objectify women these days but you also can’t do the opposite.

A new academic study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B has analysed 1.5 million ratings across 76 countries to conclude that female faces are universally rated as more attractive than male ones.

One take is to conclude that men are ugly but you could just as easily say it’s well done to the cosmetics industry.

What makes this particularly devastating is that the study found women are rated as more attractive even by other women. Men, meanwhile, can’t even win the sympathy vote from their fellow males.

Part of me thinks there’s something of the Eurovision about this. It’s all political voting, you know. Men, in general, are only looking for attractiveness from one source. We don’t stop to think about men’s faces. Women seem to be far more attuned to the attractiveness of their potential competitors.

And men aren’t valued for their looks, that much. In a terribly reductive approximation, natural selection will favour attractive women and men with resources. Therefore, it is understandable that evolution gives us really attractive women. Those same factors should lead to a state where men are richer than women. Divorce laws level that out more than is possible with looks. You can’t be granted 50% of your partner’s hots in the settlement.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this result. A while ago, OkCupid released data showing how men and women rated the attractiveness of the opposite sex on the site. The results were completely lopsided. Men’s ratings of women followed a perfectly symmetrical bell curve. They were incredibly charitable. A woman was just as likely to be rated exceptionally attractive as she was below average, with the vast majority landing right in the “medium” middle.

Meanwhile, over on the graph of how women rated men, they rated an incredible 80% of men as “worse-looking than medium”.

This data shows us one thing. The women on that site did not understand what below average means. If all men are lumps of flesh crammed into a face shape, the average would move down and half of men should be above that pig-faced munting average.

One explanation for this is about the freedom of compliments. Men may feel that, while you can’t objectify, you’re the villain if you say a woman is unattractive, so you get bunching around the mean.

Meanwhile there may be societal pressure for women to not compliment men too much. It moves the power from her to him, and remember, you must protect the eggs!

We see stinginess with the compliment a lot online. You may remember the short-lived trend of women answering the question, “Would you rather be alone in the woods with a random man or a random bear?” Overwhelmingly, many women chose the bear. But the bear wouldn’t care. You could read the results to a grizzly and he wouldn’t be offended, he’d just rip your face off. So the main effect of picking the bear was to send a message to the men reading it.

The best part of the OkCupid data, which isn’t often mentioned, is that men rated women fairly, but then ignored the average ones and overwhelmingly sent messages to the absolute top tier of most attractive women. Women rated 80% of men as brutally below average, but messaged them anyway.

Men want someone who is out of their looks league, and it’s possible that women don’t want a man who makes them look less attractive.

It’s another gender double standard that we all accept. As a stand-up comedian you see many acts talking to couples in the front row and they joke to the man, “You’ve done alright for yourself there,” and he laughs, she laughs, oh it’s lovely. Imagine what would happen if the MC says to the woman of the couple, “You’re punching above your weight there, luv.”

So, consider all of that as you look at the recent survey again. Everyone says that women are more attractive than men when surveyed. That’s great. It’s the only result where everyone walks away happy.

Perfume has been doing that job reliably for about four thousand years. Somehow that isn’t enough any more.

The wellness fragrance market is booming. According to a survey of twelve thousand consumers across fourteen countries, 80% of people now choose their scent specifically to enhance their emotional state.

Some might see that as a Pyrrhic victory. “I was really happy today. Not because of anything real in my life, but there was a nice smell.”

Half of those surveyed said they want a “measurable wellness benefit” from their perfume. Don’t start wanting things that are measurable. That implies it’ll stand up to a bit of scientific rigour, and the wellness industry isn’t the place for that.

They call this new fad functional fragrance. Or, if you want to sound even more serious about it, neuroperfumery. Just because you can make a fancy new word doesn’t make it real. I call that principle neologistic verisimilitude. See? Two can play the fake word game.

The research that goes into this involves someone in a white coat watching your brainwaves while you sniff things. This is a job that exists. There’s probably a new word for that, but we used to call those people pervs.

One industry analyst has predicted that fragrance will evolve into what they call “environmental mood architecture.” You won’t just wear a scent. You’ll curate your entire emotional environment through carefully targeted aromas for focus, sleep and social energy. You won’t just get dressed in the morning. You’ll architecturally design your mood. With a spray.

I’m going to predict that your emotional state will still be fragile and crying a lot. If you’re the kind of person who is into wellness, you’re probably fragile and crying a lot.

This is, of course, the natural endpoint of a journey that began when Gwyneth Paltrow decided to sell a candle called “This Smells Like My Vagina.” A £75 candle. It sold out. Twice. At least there is genuine science that has found that smelling ladyparts can bring about a mood change in men. You see why these scientists were called pervs?

Brands are now selling sprays specifically designed to trigger calm, focus, energy and what one company describes as “nervous system grounding”, which I think means you’re earthed if you get an electric shock.

As if the aimless wellbeing types smelling more isn’t bad enough, we also see teenage boys spending 44% more year on year on fragrance because of a TikTok trend called smellmaxxing. Kids these days act like they invented everything but back in the 90s we had young lads smelling like an entire can of Lynx. We hadn’t invented a new word for it to make it seem like a social movement.

So, everybody smells. Anyone who wants to change their moods with this feng shui of the nostrils, teenage boys and anyone who vapes smells like an air-freshener. It’s going to get a bit much.

It won’t be long till we’ll be longing for the whiff of a sweaty person on public transport again. It will be like a breath of fresh air.

We now have cameras inside the fridge so you can check what you need from the supermarket, without having to remember. There’s AI that suggests recipes based on what’s on the shelves, so you don’t have to think. It’s not simply a case of making fridges smarter, we’re also making ourselves thicker.

Now we have found a new way for the smart fridge to get the upper hand. The smart fridge lock.

The Habit Control Smart Fridge Lock is a Bluetooth device that connects to your phone and tells you when you’re allowed to eat. It’s not like a calorie-counting fitness tracker, it locks the fridge so you can’t get into it. If, like me, you’re hard-wired to find food, you think, “Well, it’s a good job I don’t keep everything tasty in the fridge. I could still get into the snack drawer or cupboard,” well, you can buy extra ones to fit on those too.

After you have installed them on all your cupboards, pantry, drawers, you will realise it would be easy to make something called ‘The Habit Control Smart Face Lock’ to keep your cakehole shut.

There are still weaknesses in this plan. You’re the one who sets the grazing hours, so you could still give yourself a lot of access. The ideal device would have a Bluetooth fridge lock that connects to your Bluetooth weighing scales, but there’s probably some law against it.

There are two modes. The first allows overrides, for people who want to improve their willpower gradually. A gentle nudge. A reminder that you said you weren’t going to do this. The second mode has no override at all. You set it, and that is that. Like a time lock vault in a bank. Unless you can Hans Gruber your own fridge you’re going hungry.

When the timer expires, the fridge does not unlock automatically. You still need your phone to open it. Which means if your phone dies at eleven o’clock at night, no food for you. Morgan McSweeney could have starved to death.

The product also has a sharing feature, which allows you to give other people access at different permission levels. You can, if you choose, hand your partner administrative control over your refrigerator. They decide which items in the fridge you are allowed to eat. You get a similar effect when you get married.

The pitch is aimed at people doing intermittent fasting, managing binge eating, or working on portion control. The marketing says it helps you “build healthier habits without relying on willpower alone.” But are you building the right habits if you spend all night scratching at your fridge like a dog trying to be let in?

I understand the impulse. I have stood in front of a fridge at midnight making decisions I knew were wrong and making them anyway. The heart wants what the heart wants, and at midnight what it wants is cheese. A lock might genuinely help some people and I’m not here to mock anyone’s relationship with food.

I am, however, here to note that we have built a fridge with an AI, an OLED screen, and a camera, and the feature that’s selling is the one that stops you getting in. That’s a feature some broken fridges have.

Good luck to you if you’ve bought The Habit Control Smart Fridge Lock and I hope no one points out to you that you can just Deliveroo more food to yourself in a matter of minutes.