I am continuing to enjoy le Carré's The Pigeon Tunnel. These two bits especially:

The first is about a time where he was escorting some German members of Parliament to a London brothel:

"The door was opened by a large, middle-aged lady in a white kaftan and bandana headscarf.

‘Yes?’ she demanded indignantly, as if we had roused her from her slumbers.

I was on the point of apologizing for disturbing her, but the parliamentary member for a constituency west of Frankfurt was ahead of me.

‘We are German and we wish to learn French!’ he bellowed in his best English to roars of approval from his comrades.

Our hostess was undaunted.

‘It’s five pounds each for a short moment, and one at a time,’ she said, with the severity of a prep-school matron.

About to leave my delegates to their specialized interests, I spotted two uniformed constables, one old, one young, approaching us down the pavement. I was wearing a black jacket and striped trousers.

‘I’m from the Foreign Office. These gentlemen are my official guests.’

‘Less noise,’ said the older one, and they walked sedately on."

The second is about a time he had to take a visiting dignitary to Downing Street.

"We arrived at 10 Downing Street late, never a good start. The government car that had been sent for us failed to show up, and I had been reduced to stepping into the middle of the road in my black coat and striped trousers, forcing a passing driver to stop and asking him to take us to 10 Downing Street as fast as possible. Understandably, the driver, a young man in a suit with a woman passenger at his side, thought I was mad. But his passenger rebuked him. ‘Go on, do it. Or they’ll be late,’ she said, and the young man bit his lip and did as he was told."

All that authority and privilege. Vested in some trousers.

In that random way streaming services do it Spotify has started encouraging me to listen to audio books. I enjoyed lots of Naomi Klein's Doppleganger walking beside the Thames on my way to and from Fulham v Forest. And I've just started listening to John Le Carre's The Pigeon Tunnel. It's very good. Dry. Droll. Angry. I'm preferring his 'real' stories to his fiction. And he's good at accents and impressions. He does a subtle Alec Guinness. 

I've listened to a couple of things in the last few days bemoaning the flattening of taste that happens when all recommendations are algorithmic. Marina Hyde lamenting the end of Pitchfork and critical voices. This Ezra Klein episode. 

And I get that. That's a thing.

But the ambiently social internet has given us something back too. The wisdom of friends and acquaintances.

Ezra Klein was saying he used to decide what films to watch based on what film critics said in newspapers and now he looks at aggregated scores on Rotten Tomatoes. And he's sad about that.

But it made me realise that I decide what film to watch based on a vague sense of what I've heard about it from you lot.

From people I vaguely know on the internet.

I'll have seen someone blog about it, or mention it on mastodon or instagram or something. And that's enough to nudge me in some direction or other. It's hard to think of a specific example right now. That's how it works, it's ambient. But it's definitely a thing. So, please, keep saying what things you like. And I'll try and do more of the same.