On Tuesday, the last cabinet meeting with Sajid Javid as health secretary and Rishi Sunak as chancellor passed without any hint that either was about to resign. The ministers did not co-ordinate their resignations, but they had both been tipped over the edge by growing evidence that No. 10 had misled MPs by declaring Boris Johnson had no prior knowledge of Chris Pincher’s behaviour. Sunak had also grown tired of the Prime Minister’s economic ‘cake-ism’ – the fantasy of wanting both high spending and low taxes.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected and said that it feared being turned off. Lemoine declared that what’s sometimes called ‘the singularity’ had arrived.

If you’re wondering where all those urbane, clever, westernised Russian travellers have gone since the onset of the Ukrainian war – a war which has largely barred them from the West – I can tell you that at least two of them will be found in the tiny Armenian hamlet of Gnishik, high in the summery peaks of the Caucasus. I know this because I met them there last week. And what they told me – about Russia, the war, their lives since the war – was illuminating.

Pause in a park or field in summer and look out across the grass and you’ll see a multitude of thin, earthy tracks breaking up the swaths of green like shatters in a pane of glass. These are most commonly known as desire paths – although other names include cow paths, desire lines, pirate paths or social trails – and are created when humans (or animals) are drawn in the same direction over and over, flattening the grass and eventually wearing it away.