I inherited far too few of my parents’ many admirable traits, but one thing I am very grateful to my father for passing on to me is the Brownstein sleeping gene. If I wanted to add up the number of times in my life I have had to count sheep after failing to fall asleep within a few minutes of laying my head on the pillow, I could count them on the lambs of one litter. (Actually, on the rare occasions when I can’t drift off, I don’t count sheep. Instead, I play through an imaginary England Test cricket innings, which is usually more entertaining, and always more successful, than the real thing.)

However, I seem recently to have encountered a number of stories that threaten to disrupt even my sleep pattern. Since misery loves company, I thought I would, this week, share some of them with you, on the off chance that you’ve been looking around for something to make you feel really depressed.

First, a podcast referred me this week to a Substack article offering an insider’s view of the future of AI that, while being far from sugar-coated, does actually offer some guidelines on how to avoid being totally crushed under the wheels of the AI juggernaut. Rather than borrowing from the article (as I like to think of it) or plagiarising it (to be more accurate), and thereby failing to do it anywhere near justice, let me just give you a link to it. The article is very readable, and while, as I say, it pulls no punches, it does also offer what seems like very sound advice for those who are still (if, conceivably, not for as long as they think) in the workforce. So, pour yourself a stiff drink, and, if you haven’t already encountered it, settle down to read: “Something Big Is Happening”.

Next, the Sports pages of the Times of London. No, this is not going to be a bewailing of the inadequacies of England’s performance in the T20 World Cup. First, I realise this is a niche topic; furthermore, T20 isn’t real cricket anyway. In addition, any disappointment I feel is tempered by the knowledge that Australia, England’s arch rivals in all things cricket, haven’t even qualified for the next round of the competition, the Super 8 stage. This is a huge comfort.

What I really find depressing about the paper’s sports pages is that they are full of not-sport stories. One day it will be Sturla Holm Laegreid, the Norwegian biathlete, exploiting his live television interview shortly after winning a bronze medal at the Winter Olympics to confess that he has been unfaithful to his girlfriend. He had already confessed to the girlfriend, in private, and she had left him. By what journalistic criterion does this qualify as a news story? And even if we are currently living in a universe where the Winter Olympics biathlon bronze medallist’s lovelife is deemed newsworthy, then the story certainly does not belong on the sports pages.

Perhaps even more incomprehensible, because it is not even prurient, was today’s story about Coco Gauff, a black American tennis player ranked fourth in the world, who in a set of less than fluent answers, presumably in a press conference, stated her opposition to Trump’s recent deployment of ICE in Minneapolis. Is this a sports story? No. Is it a news story? Only if you believe that Coco Gauff has something insightful to contribute to the debate. If she has, she appears to be keeping it close to her chest. Her grandmother is apparently a civil rights figure who, in 1961, became the first black student to integrate her Florida high school. However, pedigree alone is not a sufficient qualification for Gauff.

This story followed on the heels of British-American skier Gus Kenworthy who posted an image purporting to show a urine script of ‘f*** ice’ in the Milan snow. I have to say that the neatness of the calligraphy (consider, for example, the perfect flow control required to render the dot above the ‘i’ in the picture below) leads me to suspect that the image was the equivalent of ‘airbrushed’, even before I added my censorship. So, this was not a sports story, not a news story, and almost certainly not a true story.

However, my prize for the week’s most depressing story was the publication of a report in Britain highlighting how increasing numbers of children are entering the education system in a state of unreadiness. Among the areas of unreadiness highlighted were personal hygiene, with one primary school reporting that 50% of children of the pupils in reception and nursery (ages 3–5) are not toilet-trained, and some are unable to state their own full names. An increasing percentage are also unable to interact socially at an appropriate level for their age.

The immediate consequences of these statistics for Britain are dire. Countless thousands of class-contact hours a year have to be devoted by teachers and teaching assistants to toileting, cleaning and dressing children, rather than to the curriculum’s age-appropriate education. These hours are disproportionately lost in schools whose pupils come from disadvantaged homes. Any hope of levelling up is destroyed in such an environment.

Above all, I can’t stop thinking about the home lives these children have been living for the years before they first come into the state system. The opportunities that have been lost to help them develop their innate intellectual, emotional and social abilities; the passivity of their early childhood; the stultifying lack of stimulation they have experienced.

I have been reminded in the last six years in my own family what an amazing time early childhood can be. To see how readily children respond to stimulation and how rich their potential is; to watch the joy in their discovery of the world; to see them explore and test the boundaries of humour, storytelling, music, painting. All of this is to have something of one’s faith in human nature restored, and to manage, somehow, and against all the odds, to sleep easy at night.

Sweet dreams,