Last year I wrote about ten things that get under my skin in our supposedly advanced modern world. The response was surprising - turns out I'm not alone in my exasperation. So here we are again, because the world hasn't stopped providing material, and I've still got things to get off my chest.

Smash Burgers and the Americanisation of Everything

Let's start with smash burgers, shall we? For those blessedly unaware, a smash burger is what happens when someone can't be bothered to properly mould a burger patty. Instead, they slap a ball of mince onto a grill and flatten it with whatever comes to hand. Bits fall off, you lose weight (from the burger, not yourself), and what should be a quarter-pounder ends up considerably lighter. But it's sold to us as "artisanal" and "trendy" when the real reason is simple economics - shaving seconds off prep time to maximise profit.

I grew up in South London and remember the pre-fast-food era, so I've witnessed this invasion from the start. McDonald's and KFC at least offered value initially. Then came the late-80s wave where "Americana" became part of the experience. I recall visiting Sticky Fingers in Kensington - owned by one of the Rolling Stones, if memory serves - and thinking it was vulgar, overpriced circus masquerading as cuisine.

Fast forward to today, and these establishments are proliferating across Spain, a country with its own magnificent culinary heritage. Every time I see one, I wince. For God's sake, exploit your own cultural tradition instead of importing smoke and mirrors from America. I left a comment on a Malaga restaurant's advert about their smash burgers expressing this sentiment. They blocked me. Quelle surprise.

Pot Noodle: An Abomination in Plastic

There should be a law against pot noodles. Without their packet of E-numbers, noodles are utterly flavourless. They have the texture of ear cartilage and possess a perverse ability to resist being eaten - too slippery to wind around a fork or cup in a spoon. Who invents food that actively fights consumption?

And the container! A plastic pot is entirely the wrong vessel for something already difficult to serve. Of course it's plastic - the fossil fuel industry's darling - wrapped in a cardboard sleeve because plastic won't take decent printing. Want 43% of your daily salt intake in one sitting? Pot noodle's got you covered. That's the nearest thing to praise I can muster.

The Right-Wing Press and the Death of Decency

I've been hate-reading the Mail Online for years, mainly to understand what the establishment opposition is saying and to do battle with the hard-of-thinking in the comments section. I've always despised its undercurrent of racism and blind monarchism - a set of values I've termed C.R.A.P. (Colonialist, Royalist, Authoritarian Patriarchy).

Increasingly though, I can't stomach the C.R.A.P. for even brief visits. The Overton window isn't pushing the envelope - as Pratchett might say, it's burst a hole in the wall of the post office. All pretense of the common decency that characterised one-nation Conservatism has evaporated. The Mail, Express, and Telegraph have embraced post-truth Trumpism with gusto, firing story after story at the public not for news value but for their ability to shock and enrage.

AI Slop and the Death of Truth

Shortly after the widely publicised boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, a story appeared claiming Anthony Joshua had nearly died in a car accident in Africa. It had red flags - the timing, the location - that made me suspect AI-generated clickbait. Except it wasn't fake. It was true.

That's precisely what infuriates me about AI. The days when a critical mind with decent technical understanding could separate truth from fiction without third-party confirmation are gone. We've entered an era where real news looks fake and fake news looks real, and none of us can trust our instincts anymore.

Phones as Phones (Or Rather, Not)

Remember when phones were for calling people? Now they're messaging devices, cameras, and tiny computers that occasionally ring. The problem is threefold: spam calls have made us afraid to answer, you can never extract the bloody thing from your pocket before three rings, and your actual friends have migrated entirely to messaging apps. The voice call is becoming an anachronism, which seems perverse for a device literally called a phone.

Passkeys: Security Theatre Gone Mad

Many of you probably don't know what passkeys are, and explaining them without diving into cryptography is tricky. Essentially, an app verifies your identity through information it can authenticate. Google and Microsoft are hastening the death of traditional passwords, which I think is a mistake. Passwords aren't inherently less secure than passkeys - they're just easier for users to mess up by choosing "password123" or writing them on Post-it notes.

The problem with passkeys is they're often device-dependent. Recently, I tried accessing a shopping site while away from home. The app recognised I'd previously logged in with a fingerprint, but I was on a different computer. Cue the authentication paper-chain: "We've sent a message to device X." Device X was at home. "Try an alternative method." The email went to one of fifty addresses I keep on my desktop but hadn't bothered transferring to my laptop.

I have password managers on all seven of my devices. I'd entered my correct username and password. Yet it took fifteen minutes and several emails to access a site where I was trying to give them money. Is this really sensible business practice?

Academia's Emperor's New Clothes

Remember that Good Will Hunting scene about dropping a hundred grand on an education you could get for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library? I just watched a video listing ten degree-level courses available free online. No networking opportunities or certificates, but all the materials are there.

Here's the question: is it easier to ask questions in a crowded lecture hall or have an AI language model as your one-to-one education partner? The traditional university model is looking increasingly like an expensive way to make friends and get a piece of paper. 

Fake Profiles: The Uncanny Valley of Social Media

I encountered a YouTube account recently - a woman talking to camera. Something felt off, so I investigated. Full social media presence: Instagram, TikTok, the works. Videos of places she'd "visited," but even when she appeared in thumbnails, the actual footage showed her from behind, going up stairs, always in situations making it hard to confirm she was real.

After fifteen minutes of detective work, I concluded she was fake - an exceptionally well-constructed fake, but fake nonetheless. It gave me insight into the extraordinary lengths people go to for content and clicks these days. We're living in an age where you need to be a forensic investigator just to determine if the person you're watching exists.

Enshittification: Everything Gets Worse

Cory Doctorow coined this term for how platforms decay: first they're good to users, then they abuse users to benefit business customers, finally they abuse everyone to benefit only themselves. It's the perfect word for our times. Every service you rely on is on this trajectory. Your streaming platform has ads now. Your search engine is mostly sponsored links. Your social media is algorithmic rage-bait. Everything that was once good becomes progressively worse, and we're powerless to stop it because there's nowhere else to go.

Spanish Winters: The Influencer's Reckoning

I'm quite cold writing this in Olvera on 24th January 2026. Despite an hour with the gas fire on, it's too expensive to adequately heat a draughty Spanish house built for sunshine. Years ago, when money came more easily that it does now, I heated the place to 23 degrees for the whole Winter quarter and spent the best part of five hundred euros. That's why Spaniards wear coats indoors.

I've lived here since 2003, so cold winters aren't new - I had -9C and burst pipes in Murcia years back. But we've been spoilt lately with five years of mild winters and uninterrupted sunshine. This cold snap has been particularly amusing because of TikTok influencers posting "WTF" videos, moaning about ice and snow they didn't have on their Mediterranean bingo cards.

Caveat emptor, as they say. Beware what you wish for - you just might get it.

And with that warming thought, I'll leave you to your own irritations. No doubt you've got a list brewing too.

 

Normally when I write a blog post it's because I'm triggered about a topic. Something either angers me, amuses me or otherwise appeals to my sense of being a messenger to convey an important idea, as though I'm a frustrated cub reporter for a local newspaper. The opposite is true today. I'm writing about a simple milestone - I've just completed one year without drinking alcohol. Although I've had it in mind to blog about this for several months as the anniversary approached, I feel emotionally indifferent to it and I have no overriding message to get across. Still, here I am, bashing out the first paragraph at the keyboard but maybe if I'm lucky, the catharsis of writing about it may unlock a message for the big wrap-up at the end. Fingers crossed!

My doctor had been badgering me to quit or at least cut down my drinking for as long as I can remember. I dismissed the advice, thinking back to Harold Shand's quote from the movie 'The Long Good Friday' - "When my mum used to have a go at my old man about his boozing, he always used to say ‘If you drink less than your doctor, you're all right.’" Not that I did drink less than my doctor (though I'd heard stories) but this is more illustrative of the flawed rationalization, the classic pub logic that characterised my relationship with booze until recently.

Some weeks later, the results came back. They weren't as bad as I'd feared - no cirrhosis, no permanent liver damage. Yet. That would be the likely outcome if I continued drinking, the doctor explained. But I'd already made my decision. The problem was how to stick to it.

I'd never been without a drink for longer than three months before. I'd often made New Year’s resolutions, or embarked on foolhardy fitness drives in the past, only to find that maintaining these fads is almost impossible. They're impossible because they are necessarily 'displacements' from our normal activity. Just as a stretched spring snaps back when released, habits revert to their default state once the effort to change them fades. The trick seems to be to move the 'balanced' position in one's life but this is easier said than done. If we use the example of a see-saw, if you want to move an item on one side, the item or items on the other side have to move to accommodate the change. In our lives, the items that make up the balance on the other side of the see-saw can be anything - food, money, health, relationships, work, sleep. Any activity in one's life may need some adjustment. I should point out: I’m no life‐coach, just speaking from my own experience. This is how I feel after one year ‘on the wagon.’

Following the advice of one of the many sober influencers on social media, I decided to try to analyse my relationship with booze over the years, its origins and evolution. I certainly had to go back a long way. My parents used to enjoy a bottle of sherry at the weekend and indulged my curiosity about this as a toddler by pouring a glass for me too. The idea common at the time was that this was how the French took the mystery out of alcohol and had fewer problem drinkers in later life. I took to it like a duck to water and couldn't wait for the weekends to come around. In the celebration of things continental (these were still the days of Jeux Sans Frontières after all), as soon as I started work, having wine with dinner became the thing to do, and I explored with gusto the delights of Blue Nun and Liebfraumilch available from the Spar supermarket at the top of the road. Without a doubt though, starting work in the Civil Service really turned a mild interest in alcohol to a ritualistic compulsion.

Back in the ‘80s, when beer was less than two pounds a pint, the pub lunch was almost obligatory. We even nicknamed nearby pubs as "HQ" or the "social club". One afternoon truly felt like an episode of Life on Mars with Gene Hunt. I was having a pub lunch with the team from marketing. They were often out on the road, so having them all back at base was an occasion to celebrate, not that much of an excuse was ever needed! One guy stood up to get a round in and asked everybody what their poison was. The new girl, whose name escapes me, asked for a mineral water. There was an eerie moment of silence as the more weathered members of the group knew this was a less than ideal request. "Fuck off," he said. "I don't buy water. Get a proper drink or have nothing". She acquiesced and changed her order to a G&T. We all breathed again! This was what it was like back then.

Years later, when I ended up in Spain, the cards landed in a weird way and I found myself working on building sites to pay my mortgage. A similar orthodoxy prevailed. We’d meet up in the bar at eight in the morning for a coffee and a shot of whisky, do a day’s work, then head to the pub to drink (without eating) from six until about nine, then do it all again the next day. I gather this used to be the same back in the UK, although one of the guys I knew from those days recently reported back from building sites in blighty lamenting how empty the pubs were on a Friday afternoon, putting it down to the cost. Clearly for all its faults, Neoliberalism is having a positive effect on the health of builders’ livers.

Anyway, leaving the sojourn down memory lane, here I am today handling sobriety as best I can. I don't go to meetings or anything like that. The doctor offered to fix me up, but I figured it would be group therapy in Spanish, so of limited usefulness. I tried anti-depressants for a while, but these made things worse rather than better, so after a month or so I knocked them on the head. I console myself with the notion that I'm not an alcoholic. I can't be. It's not an available condition anymore. Today the medical establishment uses the term ‘Alcohol Use Disorder’, which is supposed to be a person-first, less stigmatising term, though I'm not sure I like the idea of being known as ‘disordered Steve!’ One small thing I do take comfort from is the reaction I get when people learn I haven't had a drink for a year. "Well done," they say, "I couldn't do that" Even people who are on the face of it quite moderate drinkers attribute reverence to the act of not drinking as though the very thought of not being able to have a drink - the concept of prohibition - is completely alien to them. I think something we all share at a deep level is the sense of being naughty and a bit rebellious when indulging in a vice of any kind. If I want to stick two fingers up at society and live life on the edge now I have an ice-cream, where the threat of type-2 diabetes is real!

So at the end of the day, what are the benefits of not drinking? Am I a nicer person? No, I don't think so. If anything I'm even more the judgemental curmudgeon I was before. That became apparent this week when I went to pick up my 'free' recycling bags and had to queue for 15 minutes at the designated town hall office. It seems to have grown to employ four people and is protected by a security guard, such is the unpopularity of the wretched scheme. Despite asking very nicely, the ‘jobsworth’ refused to give me two rolls of biodegradable bin-liners for my refuse (we were allocated two rolls when the infernal scheme started, now we're limited to one). On the way home, I couldn't help grumbling to myself. A roll of bags lasts three months if I'm lucky, so I would have to make this round-trip four times a year to satisfy the town hall recycling zealots. That’s two hours of my limited time on this planet sacrificed on the altar of corporate greenwashing - companies that exploit our planet’s resources without any financial accountability. Oops - see there I go again.

I have however dispelled the myth that it's the late night drinking that induces us to make dubious online purchases. Trust me - stuff still turns up from Amazon and AliExpress that I have only the vaguest recollection of ordering.

The only major benefit that quitting the booze has really made to my life is attention. Being more present means I spend a tad more time on things I would previously have deemed too boring and trivial. As a result I'm making better use of space in my house and time in my day. I had a six-month fight with sleep due to my dopamine system being wrecked to get to this place, but I'm glad I'm here. This couldn't have come at a better time as, and this will sound just a little bit weird, AI has come along on this journey with me, solving problems where previously there would have been roadblocks to progress. I can't help thinking if I'd tried to quit drinking five years ago, before Claude, Grok and ChatGPT were standing by my side as I go into battle against the demon drink, I just might not have made it!

Of sun-born olive-branch bonfires

Of over-revved two-stroke engines

Of early morning bleached pavements

Of just-baked loaves off the bread-man's van

Of coiffured old women pebble-dashed in talc

Of elderly men dripping in Tabac

Of expresso and tostadas 

Of the secret smell of budding ganja

Of churros and chocolate

Of workman's sweat and builder's dust

Of puros scenting up the street

Of frying squid and boiling octopus

Of brandy, ponche and anis

Of sun-scorched earth and tar then rain, reminding us of life again

These are the things I smell in Spain, of life, of love, of being sane.