The Wrong Empire

will never get tired of watching this dream day

Liverpool's social media team have knocked it out of the park with this and the announcement of Mo and Virgil's new contracts

Arne Slot has really rocked my world - expected a transition season but he has surpassed every expectation

“This book is about my father and my mother,” he says, “their love for each other and the way they used love to find meaning in a world they knew to otherwise be meaningless. I think everyone is confronted at a certain point with the knowledge that the universe is empty of meaning. So the question is: how do we go on? They found meaning through kindness and goodness to each other and to others. They practised that love and they fought for that love for decades. It ceased to be what I thought was an illusion, and became their hard-fought-for reality. It became a truth – it was really a form of magic, and they the magicians. I realised it was an immense achievement. They came from very poor backgrounds: they understood the hardness and harshness of this life, yet they found wonder within it everywhere.”

Love Lucho's song

RIP James Earl Jones

And then you stop and realise it isn’t the game that brings meaning to it. It’s the friendships, the relationships, the memories. And whatever your involvement with football that is as true for you and me as it is for Sven or Tord Grip or David Beckham or whoever.

Finding meaning in life is hard for us, but easy for dogs. Meaning in life exists wherever the love of life emanates from a nature that is whole and undivided. Being undivided by reflection, being whole and entire, a dog has only one life to live, whereas we – in whom reflection’s canyon is deepest – have two. For us, there is both the life that we live and the life that we think about, scrutinise, evaluate and judge. A dog will inevitably love its one life more than we love our two lives. Meaning in life is easy for dogs – and hard for us – because meaning is simply the joyful expression of a nature undivided against itself. I have been fortunate enough to spend my life with many dogs. I have loved them all, but, perhaps more importantly, in them I glimpse, obscurely but resonantly, what it is to love life.

In 1963, a young American woman might dream of becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a college professor — but dreaming was pretty much all she could do. She could not compete in a marathon or play varsity sports. If she was single, she couldn’t get a prescription for birth control, never mind have a legal abortion. She could not prosecute her rapist. If she wanted to come out as a lesbian, she would have had a mountain to climb.

In a tribute to her partner and collaborator Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson wrote: “I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.” Love is a lot like grief. It’s rarely pure, sweet and easy. It can be heavy and painful. It can rush in like a tide, buoying us up, and knocking us down. It doesn’t have a sense of proportion. We don’t love in direct correlation to the amount we are loved. If I was more guarded with my love, maybe I’d have a more straightforward relationship with my grief. But I’m lucky in love – it fills my life. I have a lot of feelings for a lot of people and I’ve learned that there is as much wonder in loving as there is in being loved. Inevitably, this will lead to grief, concentric circles of it lapping my heart. And it will never be dignified or appropriate. It will be vast and wild, the same size as the cast of people who make my life brighter.

When Voyager broke, the team couldn’t fix it. They did not, for example, have any flight-software engineers. No one remembered the intricacies of its arcane source code. They could not decipher its whimpering messages. They didn’t know how to build a pyramid any more. They needed craftspeople and they needed archives. They call them the tiger team — an elite squadron of experts in software, systems, telecoms and other assorted wizardry plucked from every corner of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, charged with diagnosing and fixing the anomaly. It was led by Jeff Mellstrom, chief engineer of JPL’s astronomy and physics directorate. He’d also worked at JPL for decades and his own retirement was just a few months away. “I was anxious,” he told me. “I made commitments to people I love.” Along with Dodd, they began recruiting. One by one, the wizards’ phones rang. “You’re not going to believe this, but would you like to work on Voyager?” The lab became a Level 1 trauma ward for a geriatric spacecraft, staffed, in many cases, by greybeards. At least a couple of wizards were lured out of retirement, one of whom first started working on the project before it launched. They were the “freakin’ geniuses” of the lab, as Kareem Badaruddin, the acting Voyager mission manager, told me. JPL was getting the band back together.

How might Europeans think about ourselves differently if the second world war were understood as a multiracial endeavour to which Black people were integral, as opposed to a conflict in which, if their presence is acknowledged at all, is seen as peripheral? How would conversations about responsibility, obligation, entitlement, sacrifice, patriotism, immigration, integration, welfare, equality and justice, as they relate to Black people and migrants, be discussed if their contributions to this crucial moment were fully recognised?

The men of the England football team seem similarly relaxed with their own diversity, just like most of their generation. These days, no more than one in 10 white people in England feel that “only people who are white count as truly English”, according to a survey analysis from the British Future thinktank. The same study found that it was the team of Bukayo Saka and Harry Kane that served as the symbol of England most capable of unifying people of all ethnic backgrounds, in a way that other symbols – the flag or St George’s Day – struggle to do. But if Southgate’s England have modelled a more enlightened stance on race, they have offered a different version of maleness, too. The Graham play focuses on how Southgate worked to fix the fear that haunted previous England teams: fear of penalties, fear of failure, fear of disappointing fans, fear of not matching up to England’s much-mythologised past. Part of the remedy was to bring in psychological help, to get the players to talk about their feelings, to encourage them to be kinder to themselves and each other. The macho football old guard mocked him, of course – “woke Mr Southgate is a soft lad in a hard world” says the stage version of Matt Le Tissier – but he persisted.

Dutch dancing: Our grooving days ended with the cossack but even we have been inspired to get our bright orange disco boots back on by the Netherlands. It’s no Will Griggs’s on Fire but Links Rechts by Snollebollekes has become the sound of the streets in Germany. When the orange army arrived in any city, a party followed thanks to the simple words of “left”, “right” and “jump”. Seeing a wave of tens of thousands (of all ages) hop side to side in unison is quite impressive. A nice reminder that fandom is about enjoyment and not chucking chairs at one another.