You know how before you’ve been away somewhere you really haven’t a clue about your destination, so you ask round for advice, some of which turns out to be useless and some of it brilliant? And how, once you’ve got back, even though you knew almost less than nothing a week ago, you’re suddenly Mr Expert?

Well that’s me, now, after a weekend in Florence. Suddenly I’m Mr Florence Expert.

Obviously I’m not really, but if you’re going to Florence, or you’re thinking of going to Florence, or if you’ve been to Florence, or you just like reading my stuff because it’s always entertaining then this piece will be right up your Via, probably.

Don’t Order The Bistecca

One of the main gastronomic specialities of Florence is a huge chunk of steak on the bone called Bistecca alla Fiorentina. They cook it perfectly - charred on the outside, very pink in the middle - and, quite rightly in my view, won’t serve it to you any other way. Before they cook it for you they parade the chunk of meat before you at your table and you go - “Ooh yes! I’ll have some of that!”

But this decision is a mistake. Your hunk of meat is going to set you back a minimum of 50 Euros (because they won’t cook less than a kilo), which though not expensive given the quantity of juicy flesh involved, is still a waste of your valuable Italian eating money. Let me explain why: 50 Euros is comfortably the equivalent of two really good main courses (‘Secondi piatti’), say an ossobucco or a fish dish. How many days have you got of eating Italian regional food? Not many, probably. Do you really want to use up one of your meals eating what, essentially, for all its magnificence in appearance, is just a big chunk of steak, which tastes the same each mouthful. And which you won’t finish.

You will, of course, ignore my advice. And probably rightly because Bistecca all Fiorentinais a dish you’ll want to try at least once. But the first will also be your last because afterwards you’ll have learned your lesson.

Alla Vecchia Bettola

This is possibly one of the best, most authentic and relatively untouristy restaurants in Florence. You will find it impossible to book a table because they usually won’t answer the phone. But you do have to book to get in so my advice is turn up in the morning and reserve in person. It’s worth it.

Why is it so good? Well, being just outside the city walls it’s away from the main drag. Its attitude, not unfriendly, just honest, is: “If you can’t be bothered to make the effort we don’t want you in here.” By the time it opens for dinner at 7.30pm, a big queue will have built up outside (all people who’ve booked). Then everyone surges in and grabs a place on one of the long tables. You’re dining with strangers and it’s pot luck who you get.

We were lucky. “Are you James Delingpole? I came to your house twenty-five years ago!” said a nice woman in the party of three next to us. Her name is Chrissie Manby and she’s now a very successful novelist, author of more than 40 books (including this romance set in Florence), but when she came round to our house, she was just an impoverished student and aspirant writer, who’d turned up randomly because she was a friend of a friend of mine. Apparently we were welcoming to her - which was a relief to hear - and she’d never forgotten us. The couple on the other side of the table from Perth, Australia were also nice. Obviously I talked to them about the shark danger while swimming off Cottesloe and City beaches. James, the Aussie, thought it wasn’t worth the risk, whereas I, the other James thought it was a game of percentages worth playing.

I recommend the Penne alla bettola (which I think have vodka and a bit of spice in them). But it’s all good.

Cocktails

Apparently the loggia roof bar in the Hotel Palazzo Guadigni overlooking Santo Spirito square is great for cocktails. But we couldn’t get in because we hadn’t booked. [Booking seems essential for pretty much everything in Florence, even in off-season, if you want to get in]. This did at least spare us the horror, though, of the busker in the piazza below playing pop ‘classics’ on his saxophone. First Eye of the Tiger; then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Imagine.

But I doubt for cocktails you’re likely to beat the ones in Serre Torrigiani, up by the Porta Romana. It’s in a corner of the biggest private garden in Europe, which belongs to a marquese whose family have had it since at least the Renaissance. We couldn’t get to see the garden - probably because we hadn’t booked. But you can see from the aerial shots on their website that it’s pretty incredible, even though you’re only allowed to visit a fraction of it.

I recommend the cocktail with cucumber flavouring. Or the basilica. They do food too. Apparently it gets rammed with cocktail-drinkers in summer, 500 at a time.

Giardino Dell’Iris

Too late. You’ve probably already missed it. It’s only open from 25 April to 20 May, or thereabouts, because that’s the iris season. The red iris on a white ground (not a lily, as incorrectly believed) is Florence’s emblem. I love irises. They are one of my favourite flowers, as how could they not be anyone’s? Supposedly - though I can’t quite believe this - you can see up to 1500 varieties of iris in all shades from purple to burnt sienna to salmon pink to yellow and deep blue.

The garden is just below the tourist hell spot of the Piazzale Michelangelo, full of stalls selling tat to the captive audience lured there by the panoramic view of the city. Unless you know it’s there you could easily miss it. Unusually for Florence, it has free entrance.

The Uffizi

Because the queues are so terrifyingly long, you may be tempted to give it a miss. This would be a mistake. For my money this is the best art collection in the world and if you want to see masterpieces like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus - which you do, because unlike say the Mona Lisa it really doesn’t disappoint in the flesh - then you’ve no option but to put yourself through this gruelling but rewarding ordeal-by-art.

Reserve your ticket way in advance of your visit. Be prepared to be thoroughly knackered and paintinged-out by the time you get to the Caravaggio Medusa and his even-better Bacchus. I think my favourite is probably the Lucas Cranach Adam and Eve has just taken her first bite of the apple and her coyly inviting half smile is so seductive that it’s no wonder that Adam, who has never seen anything like this before, is scratching his head and looking somewhat bemused.

All’Antico Vinaio

Shiacciata is a Tuscan flatbread, a bit likefocaccia only thinner and crispier on the outside. It’s olive-oily and melts in the mouth. One of the best places to get it is just outside the Uffizi exit - a good way to recover from your ordeal-by-painting. If you get the timing wrong, you’ll have to queue for about an hour. So, my advice is to go for the 8.15am slot at the Uffizi, which means you’ll be out well before the lunchtime crush. I only queued for about 5 minutes.

I can recommend the Pistachio 4 (Parma prosciutto crudo PDO 18 months, fior di latte mozzarella, pistachio cream, and pistachio granules). Yeah. It sounds weird. But if you don’t try a pistachio sandwich at least once in your life you’re going to kick yourself when you get home. Also, it’s delicious.

Brancacci Chapel

When I first visited Florence in my youth, the Brancacci Chapel was closed for restoration. It was also closed for restoration the next time I went. So, third time lucky.


You go to see the frescoes by Masolino, Masaccio and - turning up sixty years later to finish the job - Filippino Lippi. Felice Brancacci, the chapel’s patron, was a wealthy cloth dealer. In one of the scenes (by Masolino), his wares are advertised in the splendidly rich garments worn by a pair of snooty nobles utterly indifferent to the miracle being conducted behind them by St Peter (Tabitha being raised from the dead). Overtly, the message is: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Covertly, it’s saying: “Come to Brancacci’s high class outfitters for all your embroidered silk requirements.”

Boboli Gardens

I make no apologies for the fact that most of my recommendations are south of the river, in the area known as Oltrarno (ie ‘the other side of the river Arno’). That’s because, just like with Rome and Venice which suffer from the same problem, you need a haven to which you can retreat from all the heavy sight seeing. Oltrarno is your friend.

The gardens are behind the Pitti Palace and you could spend at least half a day just chilling there and making the most of your 10 Euro entry fee. There are lots of high hedges and avenues offering shade. And if you need things to look at there are sculptures everywhere - some Roman, some more recent, such as the one from 1560 depicting Cosimo Medici’s favourite dwarf (I wonder how his other dwarves felt about this): it has been open to the public since 1766; before that it was the Medicis’ private playground - and grottoes.

If, like me, you are down the rabbit hole then you may find the grottoes particularly interesting. They are chock-full of owls and goats, including the leering head of a horned goat looking suspiciously like you-know-who. I appreciate that the Medici family spent a lot on church interiors and religious paintings. But I don’t think that’s where their real religious sympathies lay, do you?

Churches, cathedrals, cloisters, duomos, etc

You’ll find a lot of these in Florence, more than you can shake a stick at. And they contain all manner of treasures, such as the exquisite crucifix Michelangelo sculpted when he was just eighteen and Francis of Assisi’s very rough woven black robe, plus all manner of spectacular frescoes, like the ones in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella. Not to mention some fine architecture which you will especially like if you are in to Brunelleschi.

Here’s the thing, though: if you miss some of it, or even most of it, it won’t kill you. Even though I’m writing this but a few days after my visit, already all the church interiors and paintings and frescoes have merged in my head into one messy high cultural sludge. I fear this is the normal experience for most of us. Within a year you’ll be able to remember barely a single detail about your trip. And the details you will remember probably won’t have much to do with art and churches, but with people and incidents and food.

If you enjoyed this piece you may also enjoy:

https://delingpole.substack.com/p/venice-lots-of-nice-canals-churches

We’ve just passed the third anniversary of a piece I wrote entitled “Why Chemtrails Are My Favourite Conspiracy Theory.” Four years! How time flies when you are a batshit crazy, tinfoil hatted, ever-deeper-down-the-rabbit-hole loon!

Chemtrails - My Favourite 'Conspiracy Theory'

I’ve just re-read the piece and I think it stands up quite well. At least I don’t say anything embarrassing like “Chemtrails are my favourite conspiracy theory because they are so demonstrably, ludicrously absurd.” Rather, I manage to have my cake and eat by saying that even though I haven’t yet made up my mind about chemtrails that I really want to believe them because it’s a ‘conspiracy theory’ that ‘pisses off so many people.’

Since then, you won’t be surprised to hear, my position on chemtrails has become rather less nuanced. Of course they are real - and so very obviously so that I’m amazed that as recently as April 2022 I ever had any doubts.

But I suppose, in defence of the more recently-Awake person I then was, I wanted to be sure of my subject before committing myself to a conclusion. This isn’t like me. I’m generally more of a gut-feeling, shoot-first-ask-questions-later conspiracy theorist than the kind of autist who has to dot all the is, cross all the ts and get affidavits signed in triplicate from a dozen accredited experts before making up his mind.

In the case of chemtrails, though, I think I must have recognised that this was too important a subject to be given my usual wing-and-a-prayer treatment. If chemtrails were real, then I needed to know not just why they were real, but how they were real, what they were made of, who - at least roughly - was behind them, how they were distributed, what was their purpose, and so on and on.

https://jamesdelingpole.locals.com/post/6878238/matt-landman

Now, thanks mainly to my latest wide-ranging and mind-blowing conversation with Matt Landman, though bolstered by information I have absorbed from other podcasts, I’m more sure of my ground.

Here are my rough conclusions:

Chemtrails are not distributed by commercial airliners but mainly by drones, light aircraft and decommissioned commercial aircraft flying from private or military airfields. Among the materials they distribute into the atmosphere are fine particles of aluminium, barium, strontium, arsenic and other toxic metals. This happens daily across the world. Nowhere appears to be wholly exempt.

The purpose of this spraying is multifarious. So multifarious, in fact, that it could easily be used as a way to discredit the very notion of chemtrails: “All those things? Really??”

Yes really. Here are a few things that chemtrails are used for:

Poisoning the populace (eg through the Alzheimer’s caused by aluminium exposure) and livestock.

Increasing the chances of fire.

Damaging crops.

Mind control (eg spraying particular areas with mood-changing chemicals; or inducing a general sense of despair at yet another day completely blanketed with grey-white cloud).

Depriving people of exposure to beneficial sunlight

Weather manipulation.

I’ll add more to the list, if anyone has any good suggestions. I think the last one - weather manipulation - is the primary purpose of chemtrailing. Who controls the weather controls the world.

This is roughly how it works: the particles of metal in the sky are bombarded with electro magnetic radiation, which causes them to vibrate and get warmer. By manipulating selected parts of the atmosphere with targeted radiation The Powers That Be can now create whichever kind of weather they wish: heavy cloud, bright sunshine, storms, rain, even hurricanes and tornadoes. Perhaps not since the Nineties have we experienced anything close to ‘natural’ weather. [If I’ve got any of technical details wrong here I’m happy to amend].

From the early Nineties this weather manipulation was carried out largely by the HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) in Alaska. There is another HAARP installation at Capel Dewi, Carmarthenshire, Wales. But these days, most of the weather manipulation is carried out, locally, from NEXRAD (Next Generation Radar) facilities. These are now at strategic locations, almost everywhere, on cliffs, mountains and other promontories, as well as on the decks of ships. They look like giant golfballs.

Clearly if the mass of the public ever woke up to the fact that real-life Mr Burns characters are genuinely stealing their sunshine - and poisoning their food and brainwashing their kids and destroying grandma’s brain with Alzheimers - then the jig would be up for The Powers That Be. Which is why, perhaps more than with any other ‘conspiracy theory’, all discussion of chemtrails is so heavily policed, so corrupted with misinformation and disinformation.

Normies have, to a large extent, been persuaded to ignore the chemtrail evidence in front of their eyes by a number of false narratives: that chemtrails is the craziest of all conspiracy theories - and has been put out there by the intelligence agencies just to make some of us look stupid; that no one would have the power or ability or desire to spray on such a scale (the “But why would they do this?” fallacy); that weather has always behaved in this way; that chemtrails are in fact just ‘contrails’.

Their delusion is reinforced by all manner of carefully placed fake or misleading ‘evidence’: testimonies from pilots insisting that such a thing has never happened and that if it had they would know; easily debunkable videos purporting to prove chemtrails but which are actually designed to make chemtrail ‘conspiracists’ look ridiculous; photos from World War II showing thick white contrails coming from Flying Fortresses or lingering in the sky with all manner of twists and turns in the aftermath of a dogfight; etc.

Not all of this misinformation and disinformation emanates from bots, paid shills, or cyber propaganda specialists like 77th Brigade. Some of it comes from ordinary members of the public who’ve bought into the narrative that chemtrails aren’t real and feel compelled to reinforce this message by chipping in with their own supposedly relevant experiences. "[“I was a pilot for 45 years and…” etc] This is a phenomenon I call “Doing the Enemy’s work for them.” And it’s what Catherine Austin-Fitts calls ‘building the walls of your own prison’. It’s an unfortunate tendency among the purple-pilled which, of course, suits the Cabal’s divide-and-rule purpose very well.

To further muddy the waters, They have so arranged it that chemtrails are simultaneously a) a crazy, nonsense theory that has no basis in reality and b) a well established fact, so nothing to see here. If you use the Enemy’s preferred euphemism ‘geoengineering’ you will be amazed - or not - to discover that this non-existent phenomenon can be studied at well-established courses at various universities around the world, and that experiments have been conducted on it since at least the 1940s.

Here is a report from the Daily Telegraph in 2002:

Millions of pounds are already being spent on "cloud seeding" worldwide, notably in dry areas, yet weather scientists still look furtive if you ask them about rainmaking: despite decades of anecdotal evidence that it works, most feel that they lack statistically significant data to prove that it is possible to create an artificial downpour.

History is littered with attempts to alter weather patterns by shamans, witches and rain dances but the first suggestion that rainmaking might indeed be feasible came in the Forties as a result of Project Cirrus, a study of rain and snow formation.

Conducted by General Electric, America, the project was led by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir, who believed, wrongly, that seeding in New Mexico could trigger rain in New York. But he did make important advances in understanding how to make drops fall.

And here is an April 2025 report from the same newspaper, suddenly re-remembering the existence of a phenomenon which it has generally preferred either to ignore or dismiss as a conspiracy theory.

Experiments to dim sunlight to fight global warming will be given the green light by the Government within weeks.

Outdoor field trials which could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, or brightening clouds to reflect sunshine, are being considered by scientists as a way to prevent runaway climate change.

Aria, the Government’s advanced research and invention funding agency, has set aside £50 million for projects, which will be announced in the coming weeks.

Prof Mark Symes, the programme director for Aria (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), said there would be “small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches”.

Our dark overlords love to play this game. Mark Schreckenstein summarised well the process in this tweet:

1. Of course they could never do that! 2. Perhaps they could, but they wouldn’t of course! 3. Maybe they will, but only at some point in the future. 4. Of course they’re doing it - because it’s actually good for you! We always said so.

Yes. There are many candidates for the worst conspiracy being practised against us by the Predator Class. But I think chemtrails - and all that relates to them - have to top the bill because they are so universal and inescapable. You can choose, with a bit of effort and determination, not to take their kill shots, eat their processed junk food, drink their poisoned water, engage in their corrupt system. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot escape their weather.

It’s even worse than that, though. What a lot of even Awake people fail to grasp - I was guilty of this myself till quite recently - is how intimately connected chemtrails/weather manipulation are with the ‘global warming’ scam. I write about this in the updated edition of my book Watermelons. (You can get a copy here https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/index.html#Books)

When I first published the book in 2012, I knew full well that the climate industry was based on one almighty lie - and that all the claims made by politicians, eco-loons and other shysters on the alleged threat of global warming rested on the shonkiest of made-up, fake science. But back then, I was still missing one piece of the jigsaw: the fact that man-made global warming IS a reality, only not in the form that They claim.

They’ve been telling us that climate is man-made and a lot of us sceptics have fallen into the trap of saying “No it’s not. Climate is a natural phenomenon - and here is the evidence.” But what, even now, most climate sceptics don’t quite dare acknowledge is that ‘natural’ weather no longer exists - and has not done so in most of our lifetimes.

In my days serving in the climate trenches, what would often happen is that the mainstream media would give great prominence to the latest unprecedented weather disaster - Cat 5 hurricanes; ice storms; wild fires destroying Australia; whatever. Then, various sceptical bloggers would put up posts patiently explaining that these weather events, though they might seem extreme, were perfectly normal in the context of climatic history. A good recent example of this was the Valencia floods.

Valencia: Man Made Climate Change is REAL

We thought we were being very clever, and pro-science, we sceptics. But actually, unwittingly, we were doing the Enemy’s work for them. The more we promoted the idea that weather and climate are both natural phenomena, the more we distracted from what was really going on behind the scenes: the Cabal were quite literally creating all the weather disasters we were doggedly insisting were normal.

Chemtrails (if understood as shorthand for weather manipulation) are the conspiracy that embraces everything: media scaremongering to promote fear and division; disaster capitalism; 15 minute cities; the war on freedom of movement, including car travel and flights; the war on public health; the war on private property; deeply sinister, unaccountable forces on a mission to torment us, control us, impoverish us, enslave us and destroy us. There is almost no area of our lives that their tentacular reach does not touch. Chemtrails are the Forces of Darkness in excess. No wonder They work so extra-hard to persuade us that they don’t exist.

Watching - or trying to - the painful encounter between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith on the Joe Rogan show, I was reminded how much I dislike ‘debates’.

I explain why in a long-read piece I wrote a while back called ‘No I Don’t Want To Take Part In Your Stupid Debate.’

https://delingpole.substack.com/p/no-i-dont-want-to-take-part-in-your

It’s a good read. But if you haven’t time, the short version goes something like this…

Debates are the enemy of truth. They pretend that they are trying to get to the bottom of this or that important issue. But really all they tell you is which side is better at rhetorical trickery. Or which side the moderator is secretly rooting for. Or which side the audience is already biased towards. Or which side is prepared to play dirtiest. They are about as fair a way as achieving justice as trial by combat. I think debates stink.

Douglas Murray is a model debater. I certainly wouldn’t go up against him myself. But that’s because he plays to win not to make friends. To this end, he is more than happy to bring a knife to a fist fight, which is what he did on the Joe Rogan show.

Murray’s mission, it was evident from the off, was to crush - and crush utterly - his opponent, a stand-up comedian and libertarian political commentator called Dave Smith. He did so using a technique which students of rhetorical fallacy will know as ‘Argument from Indignation.’ That is, Murray’s tone throughout was a mix of lofty disdain and of but-barely-restrained righteous outrage.

Here, or something like it, was the message we got from Murray: “I cannot believe that I find myself having to engage with someone so inferior to me both morally and intellectually. But I shall endeavour - sigh - to be as polite as I possibly can under these extreme circumstances, and will do so by feigning to agree with my worm-like opponent on the occasional trivial point, in order to make him feel slightly less uncomfortable and to show everyone else how reasonable and amenable and magnanimous I am.”

Or, if you want to visualise his approach, imagine someone in a periwig, knee breeches and a gold-embroidered, Louise XIV-style silken coat stooping reluctantly to deal with a turd that his King Charles spaniel has inconsiderately left on his host’s lawn in the middle of a croquet match, there being no staff immediately available to remove it.

It’s a devastatingly effective technique because it puts your opponent instantly on the back foot. Rather than being treated as an equal addressing in good faith a different but valid point of view your opponent is represented as someone whose position is so ugly and reprehensible or so ignorant and incoherent - or both - that it barely deserves the courtesy of consideration. In this instance, rather than being given space to make his case, Dave Smith had to defend himself against the imputations that, first, as a mere comedian he simply wasn’t qualified to be talking about grown up subjects like history and politics and that second, he was dangerously close to being an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier and a fan of Adolf Hitler/Vladimir Putin/Evil generally.

When you see someone whose opinions you dislike being given this brutal treatment it’s quite tempting to join the lynch mob and cheer on their destruction. But in this case, I felt that Dave Smith was making some perfectly reasonable points and that he deserved a more generous hearing.

I especially agreed with Smith on the subject of ‘experts.’ Murray’s argument appeared to be that we should defer to them on almost every occasion. For example, on the subject of Winston Churchill he declared that we should listen to professionals like ‘his current greatest living biographer’ Andrew Roberts and not to ‘guys [who] are not historians’ like Darryl Cooper. Also, in Murray’s view, we shouldn’t listen to ‘very, very discredited’ historians like David Irving.

But what if the people Murray is insisting are the go-to experts have got it wrong? What if Ukraine and Gaza expert Murray is wrong about Ukraine and Gaza? What if Churchill expert Andrew Roberts has got it wrong about Churchill? It has been known to happen before, experts getting stuff wrong - as eminent (and no doubt ‘expert’) historian Lord Dacre once famously demonstrated when he verified as genuine the fake Hitler diaries.

I’ve experienced this ‘experts being wrong’ phenomenon on one or two occasions myself. Climate change, for example. After spending about ten years looking into the subject, I came to the conclusion that all the award-winning expert climate scientists are a bunch of bullshitting liars, cheats and shills. It’s not that they are a teeny bit wrong about man-made climate change here and there. They are totally wrong about it in every last detail. The whole thing is a hoax - and a very expensive and destructive one at that. For more details, you can read the book I wrote on the subject, now available in an updated edition.

Then, of course, we had another handy example of the ‘experts being wrong’ phenomenon in the form of the Covid vaccine. Or, as I prefer fondly to call it, the Death Jab. I remember well the period when it came out, because all the ‘experts’ - from my doctor to the Chief Medical Officer on TV to the vaccine manufacturers - were telling me, quite persistently, that I had to take it. Apparently it was ‘safe and effective’. It offered a high degree of protection against this deadly disease doing the rounds called ‘Covid’. And not to take it was an act of selfishness which might endanger the life of every granny in the neighbourhood and which by rights ought to render me liable for incarceration in an isolation camp, or which at the very least ought to prevent me from being allowed to go on holiday - or shopping or anywhere else.

Bizarrely, despite my not being at all an expert in either epidemiology or vaccinology, I somehow knew enough to resist all these blandishments and decide that the ‘experts’ were all wrong. I refused to take the jab. So did one or two other ignorant chancers who, merely on the basis of stuff they’d read or heard on the internet from people who sometimes weren’t even doctors. You’ll never guess what happened to us. Yes, that’s right. We all contracted this novel, Chinese-bioweapons-lab-generated disease called Covid and died hideously shortly afterwards, blood bubbling out of our mouths as we gasped our last desperate words “If only I’d listened to the exp…arrggh”.

No, I jest. What actually happened is that, despite having pointedly ignored the experts, we all ended up not getting any of the following conditions: myocarditis; blood clots; turbo cancer; reproductive issues; heart attacks; sudden death. If only the same could be said of the people who trusted the experts and did take the jabs. Sadly that isn’t the case. Some developed conditions that more or less ruined their lives. Others simply dropped dead, suddenly and unexpectedly. And those who were lucky enough to have escaped apparently unscathed must now live with the possibility that this could change at any moment, for the long term consequences of these expert-approved, safe and effective jabs remain as yet unknown.

Some unkind souls have suggested that people who took the vaccine have only themselves to blame. I disagree. We are culturally programmed to trust the ‘experts’ whether it’s the gent in the tweed jacket on Antiques Roadshow evaluating that cracked vase great-great-great-Uncle Jack brought back from the Sack of the Summer Palace, or the diet guru on breakfast TV telling us how much kale we should eat or the doctor telling us how cancerous that lump is. It takes a real effort of will to resist our ingrained inclination to go along with whatever plausible-sounding prescription we’re being sold by the people we assume know better than us. Especially when, as during Covid, you’re simultaneously being subjected to all manner of psychological warfare techniques to nudge you in the right direction.

What the authorities did to us during Covid was so horrifying that I’m not sure many of us have yet really come to terms with it. Perhaps most of us never will because to do so would involve accepting the almost unimaginable: that governments in every country in the world participated in a co-ordinated experiment designed to weaken, impoverish, immiserate, divide, maim and kill their populace under the risibly inappropriate pretext of ‘public health.’ And the reason they got away with it, in large part, was because of the misplaced faith so many of us have in those experts to whom my old friend Douglas - against all evidence - insists we should continue to defer.