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“Where are all my favorite parts?” Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica symphony. “Oh, there they are. In the tiny notes.” The tendency of many people, presented with the overwhelming abundance of an art form, is to exclude as much as possible. Reduce the wonderful life of incidental invention to the tiny notes; erect walls excluding the fascinating curiosity, the eccentric, the madly idiosyncratic. Produce a list of the 100 Best Books, sticking to declared Greatness. People have been producing lists of the Best Books for a hell of a long time. When copyright law was reformed in 1774, it enabled publishers to produce collections of novels for the first time.

Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as he explained in a recent interview, he was keen to try a GLP-1, one of those drugs that have revolutionized weight loss in the past five years. You can understand why he was curious. Ozempic and Mounjaro might appear to have nothing in common with artificial intelligence, but both phenomena have helped to create the sensation that we’re entering an era of accelerating and uncontrollable change. Alas, he screwed it up. He had someone inject him with a megadose, puked all night and then lay in bed for days "staring at a white ceiling thinking nothing," not only feeling no urge to eat but also no "desire for anything.

There’s a question I’ve started being asked at work. Given I’m a psychiatrist, it isn’t one I’d ever expected to hear: “Do I have cancer?” A young woman with anxiety wants to know whether the lump on her neck is sinister; she has been watching a great deal of TikTok. A man in his late thirties, in for a routine review, mentions in passing that his sister has been referred for a colonoscopy and wonders whether he should be too. At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend leant across halfway through her low-alcohol natural wine and asked me, in a small voice, whether it was true her generation was getting cancer in their thirties. Yes, I said, perhaps a little too bluntly. She looked rather panicked for the rest of her evening.

It is the early hours of the morning and an email drops into my inbox. Lacking any kind of willpower, I open it. Now I’m wide awake. Because this isn’t the usual PR slop that starts my days. It’s a tip-off. A big one. A reader has discovered something about a company and they are urging me – me! – to investigate. Adrenaline surges. This must be what it felt like to be Woodward. Or Bernstein. Only my informant is pointing me in a slightly different direction. Their intel is on Gentleman’s Relish: the incredibly niche spread is disappearing from our shelves. It has been available in the House of Lords dining rooms – but for how much longer? Online supermarkets and delis are showing it as out of stock. What is going on?

The 17:48 from Paddington does not, on first sight, seem exceptional. Overhard seats, overbright lights and a scramble for the ticket barriers: none of these are special. The modern Hitachi trains are solid but dull. Only Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s great arching iron roof adds splendor to the scene. But pause by coach L on the daily London to Carmarthen express and you might notice a small miracle. This train is one of the very last in Britain to carry a proper dining car. To its immense credit, GWR, the route’s operator, cooks and serves decent meals on six services a day: three at lunchtime and three in the evening, on its lines from London to Wales and the West Country.