I spent the whole week with a horrible cold. My nose kept running. My throat hurt. But the worst part was the lack of sleep: I slept fitfully and not very much. Four hours on Wednesday night felt like a luxury by comparison to the preceding days, and it wasn’t until about Friday that I felt actually rested.

Monday was the worst. I took the day off because there was no chance of getting any work done. I managed three days of work; they might not have been my most productive ever, but I did at least finish off the thing I was doing.

In Surrey Quays shopping centre, I saw teenagers queueing up to scan their eyeballs with one of weirdo Sam Altman’s weird World (formerly Worldcoin) iris-scanning orbs. I wonder if we’ll ever hear the outcome of the ICO’s enquiries (that post has since been scrubbed off their website), and I wonder whether scanning the irises of minors into your massive database is actually legal. I would have assumed not, but perhaps it counts as “innovation” and thus benefits from some kind of impunity.

I hope the approximately £5 worth (at current prices) of oddball cryptocurrency is worth giving their iris scans to Sam Altman forever.

It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that happens in a society where things are going well.

L— and I went out delivering leaflets for the Green Party in advance of the local elections. We tried on Friday night, but after about ten minutes it started raining hard and we had to call it off. It was sunny on Saturday morning, so we finished off the rest of it. The hardest part was getting to letterboxes in blocks of flats where the developers have blocked off the post boxes inside the locked entrance. Must be hard to get anything delivered when you live there. The second hardest thing was deciphering the unreasonable house numbering scheme perpetrated by developers when building housing during the London Docklands Development Corporation era.

On the way, we saw a fox brazenly eating off the road in the middle of the day, only moving reluctantly to allow the occasional traffic to pass. On closer inspection, its irresistible meal turned out to by a grey squirrel, squashed flat into a pancake of flesh and fur by passing cars. The fox eventually pried the sheet off the ground and carried it away to be finished off in peace somewhere else.

It’s a bit gross, but hey, that’s the circle of life in the city.