A fascinating article

Exactly. It's surely illegal for political parties to accept foreign money (not that that's likely to deter Farridge)

A pure fluke. Not great with plants generally. However, we do have a cactus grown from a seed we brought back from Colorado years ago, and it’s grown to a point where it looks ready to return to the desert! Another fluke: none of the many other seeds germinated.

I especially loved the audiobook narrated by Siân Thomas - who sounded uncannily like our Ukrainian daughter-in-law at the time

What a bleak future awaits humanity if we give ourselves up to these "stochastic parrots" (I so love that term, sums up genAI perfectly)

That's good to know, though I moved away long ago. Back in the day it did have the feel of a cultural backwater. Very few interesting performances ventured further west than Bristol

That was always one of my frustrations growing up in Exeter