1. This one’s a bit nerdy. Pupil absence in Autumn and Spring 2024/25 from the FFT Education Datalab, which, by its own account that I have no reason to doubt, “produces independent, cutting-edge research on education policy and practice” https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2025/04/pupil-absence-in-autumn-and-spring-2024-25/

What should we make of the big increase in persistent absence between the first and second years of secondary school, I wonder? Too simplistic to say that ‘big school’ is a huge, alienating disappointment to many young people?

2. Warren Buffett has just retired. Bloomberg try to explain his astonishing track record as an investor in this piece https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-05/warren-buffett-s-astonishing-track-record-in-five-charts

By one long-term measure, from 1965 to 2024, Buffett’s return was 5,490,338 % while the best of the opposition over the same period could only manage 526,557 %. A friend of mine suggests that “some of what impresses is just the magic of compound interest”. Powerful magic!

3. Two more echoes of The Heart of Darkness:

i) The Gang of Four song, We Live as We Dream, Alone https://youtu.be/p_vpBsQdzNs

ii) A PDF of a poem by John Drew, Heart of Darkness, which begins

 She was sitting up top on a bus out of Hackney,

The young woman with spiky hair

and glitter all over her face.

She was reading a book, putting it down

every few minutes

To primp the spikes in her hair.

4. A recommendation from Paul Lay, the Senior Editor of Engelsberg Ideas: Despite his ludicrously patrician tones, the art historian Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour, made for Channel 4 TV and now on YouTube, is a compelling valedictory journey into the heart of the Italian Renaissance https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5JqSuIvtmAOG0ijDJJskYk8j9efOQRFE

See what you think of Mr Sewell’s vowels: strangulated is the word that comes to mind, but don’t let them put you off!

In the interests of balance, here’s Mr Sewell himself discussing his accent https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/the-perils-of-talking-posh-6353161.html

Is my speech really so odd that strangers in trains feel compelled to telephone their wives about it, that the Daily Mail and The Mirror invariably describe it as “plummy”, that in a new biography (not of me) the author says of it “every vowel definitively strangled”? In my head it sounds a little light and perhaps a little slow (friends mock me for saying “ears” for “yes”), but this is because I do not litter it with such filler phrases as “you know what I mean” or “and stuff” or “atcherly”.

5. And, finally and papally, a great story from The Public Domain Review about a previous papal conclave that overran slightly, A Popeless Situation https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2025/05/now-and-then-2/