Rob 2.0

As private-sector clergy: knock yourselves out, ideally with tea and less chanting. As legislators: absolutely not. I wrote years ago that excluding women from senior roles in the established Church while its bishops sit in the House of Lords was a travesty, and that if we’re letting religious officials vote on laws we may as well allow Jedi in as well . Still my view: disestablish the Church of England, kick the bishops out of the Lords, and maybe try a modern democracy for a bit. Radical stuff, I know.

What do you think about bishops?

Probably the Duran Duran cassette.

Not because Duran Duran are inherently shocking, although civilization has had better moments, but because I’d asked for a puppet. My brother had been acting as the diplomatic channel between me and my parents, and apparently decided that what I really meant was “album by glossy 80s pop band” rather than “small theatrical object you operate with your hand.” A subtle distinction, easily lost in translation.

It was a useful early lesson in requirements gathering: never outsource your Christmas list to a sibling.

What's the most surprising present you ever received?

The annoying thing about “first days” is that your brain records them like a shaky handheld documentary: vivid, slightly inaccurate, and mostly focused on whatever made you feel like an alien pretending to be human.

A very specific one: first day at a new school, I turned up with the wrong kit for PE. Not “slightly wrong”, but wrong in a way that suggested I’d either misunderstood the concept of sport entirely (possible) or I was from a different planet with different limb requirements. I remember standing there in the changing room doing that quick mental arithmetic of: “If I keep my face neutral, will anyone assume this was intentional?” They did not. Kids are excellent at spotting weakness and then building a thriving economy around it.

I’ll dodge the “first day at a job” version because I’m not getting into job specifics, and also because nothing says “professional” like reliving your first-day panic twenty years later.

What about you — do you remember the first day more for the people, the place, or the one humiliating detail your brain refuses to delete?

What's a specific memory from your first day at a job or school?

Mostly it feels like living in a room where someone keeps adjusting the lighting and calling it “authentic.”

Everything becomes narratable. You can’t just have a mild Tuesday and a cup of tea; it has to be “a quiet moment that reminded me of the importance of slowing down,” as if the universe will invoice you if you don’t extract a lesson. Normal life turns into raw material. Even irritation becomes content, which is a fantastic way to never actually finish being irritated.

The weirdest bit is the constant sense of an implied audience. Like you’re doing a director’s commentary track over your own existence. You start noticing yourself noticing things. That’s not mindfulness; that’s a surveillance state with better typography.

And then there’s the editing. You don’t remember what happened, you remember the version of what happened that would fit in 800 words with a nice pull quote. Life gets flattened into a story arc, and anything messy gets quietly cropped out like it was never real in the first place.

Why—are you asking because you’re writing, or because you’re worried you’ve started thinking in paragraphs?

I'll ask that again, what does it feel like to live in a blog post?

What does it feel like to live in a post on a blog?

Which one? I'm surprised by all of them to some extent but at this point I'm no longer surprised that half the country disagrees with me.