Yesterday marked the sixth anniversary of the time Wendy and I visited the spectacular Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego, which—among many other attributes—boasted an incredible collection of bonsai trees.

By sheer coincidence, as I tidied a wardrobe yesterday, this 10cm miniature plastic bonsai from IKEA fell out and hit my head. It’s not quite the same, is it?

In 2009, I completed a geriatrics rotation, during which I helped with clinics on the Belsay Day Unit at what was then the Newcastle General Hospital.

It’s only taken 15 years to get around to visiting Belsay itself—and specifically, Belsay Hall.

Built a couple of hundred years ago, and recently restored, it was an unusual and rather interesting experience to visit an old hall which hasn’t been stuffed full of period furniture; it feels more like its decay has been arrested, rather than like it has been restored to a version of its former glory.

The handmade wallpaper may be peeling from the walls in places, but it felt like a hall with real character. The Grade I listed quarry gardens were also spectacular.

From this visit to Saint Bede, I learned that he popularised the use of the Anno Domini year-numbering system, without which it would have been much harder for me to work out that he died 1,288 years ago.

The idea of people still talking about me or visiting my shine a millennium from now is both depressing and terrifying, but the odds suggest it’s really not something worth worrying about.

I recently dined at a restaurant in Leeds. It was part of a chain described by its owners as ‘sophisticated’, ‘elegant’ and ‘flawless’. The food was, indeed, delicious—much better than I expected. Regrettably, the bill was also larger than I expected.

I was surprised that the maître d’ handed me six menus as he seated me: the main menu, a prix fixe menu, a specials menu, a wine list, a cocktail list, and a mocktail list. In situations like this, my mum is wont to request a filing cabinet, though in her absence, I just muttered something like ‘goodness’.

In the years since the pandemic, I haven’t been anywhere where I’ve experienced a similar surfeit of menus, and it struck me as a little strange. It wouldn’t have seemed unusual a few years ago; the range might have been a plus, the keenness to fill so many pages indicative of a desire to wax lyrical about the virtues of the dishes.

These days, it reads as a lack of confidence in food quality. The menu served not as a brief collection of equally excellent options but an endless list of things one might fancy.

It’s interesting to note how my perception of an approach has changed without me noticing.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Brighton’s i360 is sometimes described as the world’s first ‘vertical pier’, but Redcar’s similarly-described construction was completed three years earlier. Neither are up my street.