Canada

As much as the government has any kind of strategy for lifting Britain out of lockdown it appears to revolve around the ‘R’ – or Reproduction – number. So long as this stays below one, we are told, the epidemic cannot progress – while the moment it strays above one then the disease will start to grow exponentially. That is easy enough to understand in itself. What is less easy to work out is just how this R number is calculated. We are told that for Britain as a whole it currently lies somewhere between 0.7 and 1. But whether this really means an awful lot is open to question.

I had forgotten how much I disliked cannabis until I found myself under its influence, in the rain, trying and failing to find Toronto’s Union Train Station so I could get to the airport and go home. The plan had been to enhance my mood for a long journey, floating back to the UK in a higher state of consciousness. In practice, I just got confused, wet and was lucky to make my flight. I had intended to purchase the kind of low-THC, high-CBD weed that disappeared from Britain’s black market when skunk took over in the 1990s. Put simply, THC is the psychoactive component that gets you high but

In May 1845, HMS Erebus and her sister ship HMS Terror set sail for the Arctic, never to be seen again. Erebus, named after a Greek god of darkness, was herself cast into oblivion for the next 170 years, until she was found in 2014, by sonar, submerged off the Arctic coast of Canada. Immediately after her disappearance, ten years and £28 million (in today’s money) were spent looking for her. It was during a golden period for British exploring, between the end of the Napoleonic Wars of 1815 and the Crimean War of 1854, with a Royal Navy that had shrunk from 145,000 men to 19,000. Instead of fighting

Bill Blair, the former police chief of Toronto, slides into his restaurant chair and twinkles at the waitress. He’s 6ft 6in, white-haired now but perky. Bill has 120 years of policing behind him. He, his father and his grandfather all served 40 years in the force. Now he’s an MP and he’s legalising cannabis in Canada. The restaurant has been here since early in Bill’s father’s time on the beat. It claims to have invented the bacon cheeseburger. We sit round a plastic-topped table and Bill tells me how he ended up pushing drug reform. ‘When I left the force all three political parties wanted me to run for office.

What a great year this has been, what a good mood I’m in, why, it’s almost like being in love. The year 2016 will be seen as the worst ever by many patients of Dr Klinghoffer, the famous German psychiatrist who treats those suffering from the extreme distress of post-electoral disappointment syndrome, and a man about to make a fortune treating the poor dears. There are many Brits under the Herr Doktor’s care, and his clinic, situated near Ossining, New York, resembled a British retreat for broken-down thespians following 23 June of this annus mirabilis. Now more American voices have been added, and when I last spoke to Dr Klinghoffer

One side of the hostel overlooked Waterloo station’s 22 platforms. Trains departed and arrived at the rate of two or three a minute. Another side abutted a Victorian cast-iron girder bridge over which suburban trains arrived and departed with rolling thunder, to which was added that fingernails-dragged-down-a-blackboard, pigs-screaming-at-feeding-time, metal-on-metal noise as the trains negotiated a bend whose curve was at the very limit of what was geometrically feasible for fixed, in-line bogies. On the remaining side of this discordant triangle was an arterial road hazy with diesel particulate through which heavy traffic accelerated and braked between traffic lights. I arrived here mid-morning after a Spectator party wanting only to lie