Tixerb

Flat move out day, so the morning was spent frantically cleaning. As I will be our legal representative in-country, I had to run to a lawyer's office to provide a sample signature in case it's needed for official documents when I'm in Mozambique, and I spotted this sticker as I parked my bike.

It sums up my feelings quite nicely. Brexit is an uncoordinated, uninformed, cost-ineffective national calamity. The cumulative energy it is sapping is not allowing any useful time to be spent on dealing with existing issues, and there will be several years of policy stagnation and missed opportunities to do good stuff now. None of these impacts are worth the unproven and highly dubious benefits of leaving the EU. The UK already had all of the agency it needed to manage its own 'sovereignty.' It's that none of us appreciated that to any sophisticated degree, and in our collective ignorance just over half decided to vote against the concept of the EU based on a few extremely simplified soundbites of its perceived negative impacts.

Thank god I'll be further away from UK news by next week as I've lost interest in tracking Brexit on a daily basis.

Andy upstairs was around so we went for an impromptu coffee. Andy is a creative spirit so chats are always fun. We agreed that if you had the surname May, you'd do well at the moment to invert it to Yam. I added that my name inverted is Trebor Sirrah, which is a fairly good one. It led onto a story of when Andy worked for Saatchi & Saatchi and did a pitch at the Trebor factory in East London.

After finally moving out I made a brief appearance in the office and then went to a talk by the academic and environmentalist Robert Macfarlane, talking about connections to places and nature. It was delightful, yet I was a little too tired to fully enjoy it.

After weeks of preparations I must have been in a home storage solutions frame of mind as after the talk we could be found reorganising the Mulligans' kitchen cupboards at 11pm. I'd brought over a load of excess baking ingredients, most of which expired 5+ years ago. Some of my excitement from the early years of the Great British Bake Off must have ebbed away. Helen wasn't best pleased about having to vet each packet of flour.