We arrived back from Brighton on Monday afternoon, and I proposed that we take the 381 bus that conveniently goes from London Bridge station to the end of our road. It’s a little slower than taking the Jubilee line and walking, but it’s cheaper and we had baggage.

After waiting for 20 minutes, the bus turned up, only to terminate short at Southwark Park. We stepped off and waited some time for the next bus, only to find that that one was terminating there as well. Finally, a C10 bus (also a viable option for the last leg) came and we made it home much later than we should have, and much later than we would have if we’d just taken the Tube.

When it comes to getting to Greenwich from here, there are no train or Tube options: it’s either bus or self-propulsion. (Or driving, I suppose, if you’re a psychopath.) On our way to the Queen’s House in Greenwich for a concert, we walked to the bus stop in good time, only to see that the bus had disappeared and the next one wasn’t for 25 minutes. That wasn’t enough time, so we had to find Lime bikes and cycle there. Fine, but less relaxing than I’d intended, and even less so when we had to walk all the way around the circumference of the fence (400 m on the long side) to find the un-signposted side gate that was the only one open for the concert.

The concert, of Italian music from the 16th and 17th centuries, was excellent. Two of the musicians also sang: Lucine Musaelian while playing viola da gamba, and Kristiina Watt while playing lute and theorbo. I was particularly struck by how modern Barbara Strozzi’s (1619–1677) Eraclito Amoroso sounded with Musaelian’s powerful voice over arpeggios backed by descending bass lines.

I don’t think I can trust London buses any more, however, after this week.

On Sunday night we went to The Worst Poets Club at the Hackney Empire.

With each one of them having been told they are the worst poet in existence, four of the UKs bestselling poets decided to form a club.

After a decade of headlines, articles, comments and occasional strangers in person have claimed them as the worst poets, most terrible, mediocre, not even a poet poets, individually and collectively to blame for the downfall of modern poetry, Hollie McNish, Nikita Gill, Donna Ashworth and Len Pennie have come together to form The Worst Poets Club.

It was at times moving, at times very funny. All four are good on stage; Len Pennie’s deadpan delivery of pitch-black humour was particularly entertaining.

(There was indeed verse in anapestic tetrameter, but I can think of another Scots poet who makes plenty of use of that form but for some reason he doesn’t get lambasted for it.)

The rogue superpower known as the United States of America made two further big steps in its moral decline.

First, Pete Hegseth, the guy covered in disturbing Christian nationalist tattoos who is currently employed as United States Secretary of Defense (or is it War?), announced a plan to livestream an execution. I don’t think there’s any place for executions in a civilised society, but televised executions are a level of depravity far below that, one that puts them in unpleasant company.

Then, the next day, the US announced that it was imposing sanctions on the entirety of the International Criminal Court. Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingom released a joint statement stating that they “regret and strongly disagree” but they’re all still allies and sharing intelligence, and nobody made a big deal about it when the US sanctioned ICC judges and officials in June 2025 (4 people), August 2025 (2 people), or August 2026 (4 people). You won’t find any statements on GOV.UK about all those.

The US never signed up to the ICC, preferring to be able to commit crimes against humanity with impunity, but sanctioning it is a step further in undermining human rights around the world. I hope the ICC had completed moving its computing away from Microsoft.

OpenAI published “solutions” to hundreds of outstanding problems in mathematics, (several of which were then retracted for trivial errors) in a way that doesn’t necessarily further the actual practice of mathematics but does make it harder for anyone to have an academic career in the field. What I see is a gleeful destruction of whole fields of endeavour, like children pulling the wings off butterflies, just because they can, with no real care for the wider consequences.

Armstrong said he knew of one group whose entire research program was practically “wiped out” by the release. Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU mathematician who was at the center of OpenAI’s earlier dispute over the Navier-Stokes problem, meanwhile, said he had already heard of “three people who had entire research programs obliterated.”

To [researchers who work with big AI companies] I say: learn from history and get out now. You’ll still be ahead of the curve. The current backlash against AI may seem huge, but it’s nothing compared to what I think the backlash will be in coming years.

The people working at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. would do well to remember that the more vocations and livelihoods they destroy while promising human extinction, the more enemies they make, and no amount of money will save you when everyone hates you.