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It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me for details about the invisible guest, whereupon I outlined a farmer resembling every description Mum had heard of her great-grandfather. Her great-grandfather was a 19th-century ploughman who worked the fields where our home would later be built. My parents had never spoken of him in my presence. I have no recollection of that night beyond

The gardening world is a gentle, friendly place. Rows are rare, with disagreements creeping in softly like moss, not blowing up the way they do in politics. Everyone is quite nice to one another, almost to a fault. Which is why the row over Tom Massey’s AI garden at the Chelsea Flower Show is quite so striking. Since the line-up for the 2025 Royal Horticultural Society version of London Fashion Week was announced last week, gardeners have been absolutely and abnormally furious about the first shoots of AI appearing. Massey’s garden promises to be an ‘intelligent’ one, using AI trained on RHS plant data and advice to tell visitors how

I’ve been fighting Brent Council over some graves. Paddington Old Cemetery is dilapidated and Victorian and has been classified as a park by Historic England for decades. Only a tiny section of its 24 acres is used for new burials. Without life, cemeteries attract foxes (who mess on graves), and the wrong type of people – drug addicts and drinkers Brent recently launched a rather biased consultation looking at whether off-lead dogs should be banned (my favourite question in the survey: ‘Do you agree with dogs urinating on graves?’). The council claims they have received ‘a growing number of complaints’ from mourners about dogs but won’t say how many complaints.