If the revolution won’t be televised, the counter-revolution will at least be on PowerPoint. A series of 36 corporate-style PowerPoint slides have now been handed over to the Congressional Committee investigating the 6 January insurrection. Written and conceived by a retired colonel (who else?), the PowerPoint lays out a clear, if bonkers, strategy for keeping Donald Trump in power earlier this year. It involves the assertion that China had directly intervened in the election, skewing the electronic results to favour Joe Biden.

Steven Pinker’s latest book is called Rationality. Rory Sutherland is The Spectator’s Wiki Man. We arranged for them to meet at the Cucumber restaurant, where they discussed the logic of monarchy, gender-bending, and why academics are unreasonably obsessed with wine. Steven Pinker: Part of the reason I wrote Rationality was to ask, how there can be so much irrationality in an era that has the resources for unprecedented rationality.

A few weeks ago, MailOnline carried a rather mundane story about some personnel changes at my charity, Sarah’s Trust, and another I support as patron, Humanitas. The piece reported quite fairly some of the work that we have been doing, including supplying hundreds of sleeping bags and essential supplies to homeless people. I rarely venture into readers’ comments, finding the online world rather frightening, but for some reason on this occasion I decided to scroll through what people were saying.

I’ve lived in Chelsea for the past 35 years. Since 2002, I’ve photographed everything I find interesting here — churches, streets, door knockers and pub signs, plus two old Chelsea pensioners chatting on a bench with their medal ribbons and rank pinned to their scarlet coats. I’ve recently finished my project and added these 1,800 photographs to the historical research I’ve done about Chelsea, which is now sitting safely on my bookshelf.

J.K. Rowling Poignant, funny and genuinely scary, The Hundred and One Dalmatians was one of my favourite books as a child and the story has lingered in my imagination ever since. Blue iced cakes always put me in mind of Cruella de Vil’s experimental food colourings, and whenever our dogs whine to get out at dusk I imagine them joining the canine news network, the twilight barking. There’s simply no resisting a book containing the lines ‘There are some people who always find beauty makes them feel sadder, which is a very mysterious thing’, and ‘Mr Dearly was a highly skilled dog-puncher’.

Are we all living in a computer simulation? Is the world we imagine to be real simply virtual reality instead, an elaborate computer program? That sounds ridiculous, but nonetheless it’s what many clever people actually think — or at least, think possible. One of them, the philosopher David Chalmers, has just written a book on the subject, Reality +: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Chalmers is a serious intellect.

There is a plateau of neglect upon which an old church seems to sit for a while blessedly spared from ‘improvement’. But on the far side of the plateau, the land falls away steeply to closure, vandalism and ruination. St Mary’s church, Mundon, possessed of a rare tranquillity, had begun slipping off the plateau by 1975. The nave was exposed to rain by a gappy roof. Brambles lashed in the wind at the broken windows. Demolition was proposed.

The pandemic is not quite over, but we are getting used to its inconveniences. What disaster will be next? An antibiotic-resistant strain of the bubonic plague? Climate collapse? Coronal mass ejection? Will the next catastrophe be natural — perhaps a massive volcanic eruption, the likes of which we have not seen for more than two centuries, since Tambora in 1815? Or will it be a man-made calamity — nuclear war or a cyberattack? And might we inadvertently descend into a new form of AI-enabled totalitarianism in our efforts to ward off such calamities? To all these potential disasters it is impossible to attach more than made-up probabilities.

Migrants continue to cross the Channel and to reach Britain by other means. But what happens once they arrive? The answer for many is a new life of boredom and endless waiting. Dotted around the south coast are hotels where these people are housed, hidden out of sight. I went to meet some of them. A dozen Afghan families have ended up at a hotel three miles from Canterbury. The new arrivals numbered about 35 in all, including children, and the hotel seemed delighted to welcome them.

The closest thing we have to a native Christmas tree is the often broccoli-shaped Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). But the Norwegian spruce (Picea abies) is the classic Christmas tree. Despite it being present in Britain during the last interglacial period, it is not considered native. It did not return to Britain after the most recent thaw, waiting instead for human assistance in the 16th century. And it wasn’t until 1841, when Prince Albert brought a Norwegian spruce across from the European mainland to remind him of Christmas in Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, that the Christmas tree became a traditional part of our celebrations.