The real threat to US democracy

Hero
Edwin Rayner, who has become a TikTok star at the age of 92. The retired businessman and lifelong crooner began singing at care homes near his house in Bournemouth after his wife of 60 years died nearly a decade ago. His granddaughters stuck a video of him up on TikTok in 2022, and he now has nearly 500,000 followers. “Age doesn’t matter,” he tells BBC News. “People think at 90, 92, you’re finished – you’re not. Keep doing whatever you want to do. Only do it more so.” Watch his videos here.

Villain
An unnamed doctor who apparently had to tell a patient who was having trouble impregnating his wife that he needed to stop wearing a condom. “Doctors have a sacred duty to their patients,” says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times, but surely they have a duty to the wider world too. “Wouldn’t it have been better, in this case, if the medic had kept his mouth shut?”

Villains
Vegans, for killing the planet. Oxford researchers who examined 24 meat and dairy substitutes found that once land use, water use and so on are factored in, almond milk and veggie bacon are worse for the climate than the products they are intended to replace.

Villains
Staff at a zoo in the Cotswolds, who waited four years for their prized female king penguin to lay an egg before realising that she was in fact a male. Keepers at Birdland Park and Gardens in Bourton-on-the-Water say “Maggie” seemed especially taken with a fellow penguin called Frank, with the pair regularly “flirting” and even appearing to mate. But a recent DNA test confirmed that she had been misgendered all along. “Maggie” now goes by “Magnus”.

Heroes
Japan’s pâté en croûte makers, for continuing to beat the French at their own game. Japanese chefs scooped first and second place at the World Pâté en Croûte Championship in Lyons this week, marking the fourth time in five years that they have trumped their French rivals. “It’s my fourth final and each time, it’s a Japanese who has won,” one disappointed French chef, Olivier Nicolau, tells The Times. “They are very good.”

Conclave
If Ralph Fiennes doesn’t win an Oscar for Conclave, “I’ll eat my hat and also yours”, says Deborah Ross in The Spectator. The film is based on the 2016 thriller by Robert Harris – about a vote in the Vatican to choose a new pope – and Fiennes is in “practically every shot” as the cardinal overseeing the process. Frontrunners in the race include John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci (“who may or may not prefer to be at home making arancini balls”), while overseeing the domestic side of things is Isabella Rossellini’s Sister Agnes, “who gives great side-eye”. Watching a bunch of old guys casting ballots may not sound riveting, but the whole thing is “smart, taut and visually stunning”. I particularly love the costumes: the cardinals may be “catty and bitchy and deceptive”, but boy do they “know how to work red”.

Modern Britain: awash in “slush and cutesiness”

I remember the moment I first realised the British had a “national character”, says Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. It was the mid-1970s, and ITV were showing, “for a giggle”, clips of an American TV show celebrating the love between mothers and daughters. A hyper-glamorous “mom” and her young daughter descended a pair of marble stairways, meeting below at a “gently tinkling plastic fountain” where they took turns to “stare gooily” into each other’s eyes. “You are my guiding light, Mommy,” lisped the daughter. “You are the light of my life,” replied the mother, “and I bless each day.” I must have been seven or eight, but I joined my parents – and the entire British audience – in hoots of derisive laughter. “Why are Americans like that?” I asked. “We’re just different to them,” my mum replied. Well, not any more.

Today, there is “slush and syrup and cutesiness” all around. Take the mural of Paddington Bear on the South Bank. “Mrs Brown says that in London everyone is different,” reads the painfully anodyne quote, “and that means anyone can fit in.” In October, the BBC announced that Paddington had “finally been issued with a passport, 66 years after he was first said to have arrived in London”. It’s enough to make even the most reserved Brit want to spray “ENOCH WAS RIGHT” over the made-up marmalade muncher’s face. On the Tube, “sickbags should be supplied” for those nauseated by the endless, cloying “Be Kind” cartoons. The ads are worse: everything from orange juice to assisted dying is advertised with a cheeky “You ok, hun?” vibe. British culture used to be calibrated to give a “satirical edge to any sentiment”. I miss it terribly.

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