Red sky in the morning

When I got up in the dark this morning, the lights in the brewery tower were already lit. It's not the same every morning: sometimes they do early starts, sometimes late nights, all driven by biology and chemistry. By the time I was back with tea, dawn was breaking, and this sky formed. Someone at the brewery noticed it too: later in the day, MrsM showed me pictures similar to this on their social media feed

No Neolithic hunter, out at dawn when the game are easiest to catch, ever saw a sky like this. Nor any medieval peasant, preparing the oxen for a long day ploughing. Even twentieth-century mill-workers, clinging to their jobs in the inter-war depression, clocking into the building as soon as there was light to see by, could not have experienced it. It's an artefact of the aviation age, of course, and even I am a little shocked at just how many lines I could fit into a single frame. We live beneath a cross-roads in the sky, it seems, lacing the atmosphere with carbon

Meanwhile, a ten year-old conviction, for a crime so trivial that the presiding magistrate imposed no fine or sentence, means you can't be UK transport secretary. A judicial declaration that you are a sex-offender, along with 34 convictions for false accounting of hundreds of thousands of dollars, does not prevent you serving as US president

Warning signs