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January 23 - February 3, 2025
Magicians tell nice lies, like ‘I can read your mind’. Actors do too: they pretend to be other people. Adam Woodyatt isn’t really Ian Beale, even though it’s literally the only thing he’s done his entire adult life. You could say Adam Woodyatt’s whole life has been a nice lie, for him, and – in a lesser sense – for us.
Donald Trump has a different definition of lying from most other people, just like he has a different definition of sex...
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Newspapers are a sort of paper version of Twitter for your nan. Apparently they still exist, but only outside petrol stations near the briquettes, behind little plastic windows, like a little news zoo.
Newspapers made ordinary people feel part of big events, whether it was the sinking of the Titanic, men pretending to land on the Moon, the death of Lady Diana or Kinga off Big Brother sticking a wine bottle up her growler.
Imagine a Britain without wine, roads, Caffè Nero, baths, Cornettos, Aston Villa, aqueducts, alphabetti spaghetti, the Fiat Panda, the moustache, Milli Vanilli, paella, bukkake, hand gestures, the isosceles triangle, Viennetta, toga parties, pictures on floors and Cesar dog food. It’s unthinkable. So to the Romans we have to say a great big Latin thank you: THANKVS YOV.
The sixth sense is the feeling you get that you can’t explain that you might be a ghost, or that everyone else is a ghost, or that Bruce Willis is a ghost. Again, this is way more developed in humans than in any other animal, except hippos, who think about almost nothing else.
Even though he’s been dead for thousands of years, we still talk about William Shakespeare. But why? We don’t talk about Les Dennis any more, and he’s still alive, and he hasn’t done anything wrong.
Being in love was a big thing for Shakespeare – you can tell because much, much later he wrote a film about it, and called it Shakespeare In Love, so we’d know. He also did what a slightly sappy boy does when he fancies a girl: wrote poems. Specifically, he wrote sonnets, which are a type of poem with an almost musical flow. Sort of like rap but designed especially to be impossible to dance to or enjoy.
After he’d become rich and famous, Shakespeare bought loads of property and built a second theatre. He was in many ways the Donald Trump of his day, except he had loads of talent and hadn’t completely publicly lost his fucking Maltesers.
Sir George is the patron saint of old England. Scotland, Ireland and Walesland have their own ones, just like they get different ITVs.
Your bones keep growing until you are in your early twenties, when other stuff starts growing instead like your arse, beer gut and nose hair.
Trump, Donald See Lies.
Throughout history people called fullosophers have wondered if anything was true, and refused to accept reality, which was a good way to avoid having to get a proper job.
Aristotle said, ‘To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false. While to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.’ To this day, nobody knows what he was drinking.
like Lego, if you stood on a Viking in bare feet, it would really hurt. They were covered in spikes and liked to smash stuff, like Sonic The Hedgehog or Keith from The Prodigy.
