• (59 year old) Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s. Terry Pratchett is the only author whose books I’ve consistently read since I was about eleven - he has a unique talent for metaphorical satire without being so cynical that he can’t write fleshy, fascinating characters - and hearing this news really shocked and upset me. I only hope he has the most merciful form of the disease he could.

• In Britain, we love our cakes and our biscuits (a biscuit is a cookie, USians). In fact, apparently, we have a special tax for biscuits. Dubious biscuits of past legal fights have included the honourable Jaffa Cake and the Cheddar. Now the “chocolate-covered teacake” is causing trouble. How do you define a biscuit and why on Earth do we tax them differently?

• Reading about New Jersey’s likely abolishment of the death penalty today it struck me that the USA still widely enforces the punishment. The topic comes up every so often, in the media, in films, in conversation, but the plain fact that a Western country still claims the right to judge whether people deserve to live and enforces it shocked me as if I had been told for the first time. It’s almost incredible. It’s such a useless, bizarre, barbaric, sado-voyeuristic legislation. I suppose we are sheltered from that fear in Britain. On a tangent, I did hear a pair of police officers telling some twenty-somethings the other day: “Lads - just so you know, you’re being watched on CCTV right now.” You’re being watched. (”Good evening, London. This is the voice of Fate.”) 1984 may have come twenty years late but it’s not twenty years too late. In any case, CCTV is rarely of any use in deterring or solving crimes. In a celebrity culture it seems to me like nothing more than Hard-Fi’s suggestion of a route to everybody’s “fifteen minutes”…

• On the subject of the absurdity of the law, whatever my anarchistic opinions of the value (or lack thereof) of punishment, the news that the five boys who killed a pensioner by throwing stones and bricks at him have won an appeal becasue “it could not be established which of the allegedly ‘unlawful or dangerous’ actions, if any, had led to Norton’s heart attack” infuriates me. Regardless of whether the system as a whole has any credibility, it’s reduced to a farce when this sort of pathetic unconjecture can be used to deny an obvious crime. I wonder how the court would react to the OED’s definition of slavery as pointed out by this article: “the condition or fact of being entirely subject to, or under the domination of, some power or influence”. By this definition, the law is in defiance of itself, since slavery is necessary to rule that slavery is illegal…

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Some more personal news: I’m applying for a second internship at Oxfam that I can do alongside the current volunteer work. It involves monitoring activities in Westminster to help the team preparing campaigns, which sounds really interesting and fulfilling. Wish me luck!