A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The twenty-eighth post of a series.

Corbeil Essonnes, France: Your package was cleared after the scheduled transport departure. We will reschedule for the next available departure.

Truly, the Brexit dividend keeps on giving.

This week, I’ve twice been subjected against my will in a public place to Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden. (I would argue that the peak of Theakston’s career was a brilliant but commercially unsuccessful game show.)

They frequently plug a competition in which the listener must text the station during songs by a given artist in exchange for cash. They are clear that only entries made during the duration of the song will count. And this led me to wonder how on Earth they would know: with the highly variable delays between FM, DAB and (most especially) online broadcasts, how can they accurately time this?

And so, I consulted the terms and conditions to see how they fudged this, and the answer is specifying certain ways of listening:

To enter the Promotion by SMS text message, you must text in when the sequence of one, two or three songs by the specified artists play, as heard on FM or DAB, following the instructions by the presenter(s) on-air

I have never once heard this restriction mentioned on air… but then, perhaps the internet steam is different, and perhaps I’m hearing an FM or DAB version.

Any which way, pondering this was much more engaging than their execrable ‘chat’.

I feel seen.

I believe that God fed the five thousand with the bread and the fish

Cah I seen mommy do some similar things

I’m pretty certain that if you listened to nothing but Dave and read nothing but Ali Smith, you’d have a better understanding of the state of politics in the UK than most Westminster correspondents.

The two are phenomenal writers, but I think this is also partly a timescale thing: politics moves slowly, but is forced into a daily news cycle (or a minute-by-minute news cycle on Twitter). I’m not sure that’s helpful or healthy.