The biggest mistakes are really

The biggest mistakes are really the smallest. Like when you tell a white lie and you get found out. Like when you promise a friend you won’t make a fuss on their birthday, when you already know there will be a surprise party in their honour, and you know they will loathe the attention and the cost of putting it together.

A bad person is not the same as a bad artist. Of course, the one can easily be the other. You look like a bad person if you say you know too many bad people who just happen to make terrible art. It’s simpler to just go along with the general consensus that the art could improve, and the person should keep on trying.

The Australians discovered three new species of shark in 2022 and they finally named them a few weeks back, when I was so overloaded that I zoned out of my fear by immersing myself in the scientific shark-naming game.

The names are like a lesson in pop art splendour. There’s the Glowing Lantern shark, the Demon Cat-shark and the Painted Horn shark. I felt like I was caught in a 1980s computer game. But this is real life. And now that they have been found and named, the next thing we are about to discover is that they are already endangered.

There’s going to come a time when Damien Hirst’s floating dead shark in a tank (called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) will remind us that once he was a great artist who made us pause and meditate on our fragility.

Meanwhile, I know there are like 10 free downloads of Jaws, the movie by Spielberg, on YouTube. But I think I’ll skip it because it’s December, and the beach is beckoning.