First take your pumpkin. Choose your pumpkin with care – for example, it can’t be the first pumpkin you bought, because you’ll have left that at Sainsbury’s checkout when you were doing that way-ahead-of-the-game thing last weekend.

So take the second pumpkin – the scabby one that you bought at 5.03pm today. You’ve got ten mins before pickup-time. You’ll need to find the one knife in the drawer that cuts things.

YES it’s never going to be what you’d be carving if you’d been brave enough to develop an ounce of real creativity in your twenties, instead of crying in Soho and generally pursuing (possibly overtaking) the dysfunction train.

But that’s okay: MOVE ON. The kids are going to love this one; if this weren’t a key element in their happy ‘kin Halloween then you wouldn’t have gone back for mank-o-pumpkin in the first place.

And actually, it’s really looking pre-e-tty good. It gestures towards (but undercuts) the obvious pop culture references, without over-reaching. The irony is light-touch; and it’s not impossible, around these East London parts, that its nods to vintage Argento will be remarked upon.

When you hear your iphone go in the other room, and scramble to answer, you’ll have 2 – 3 seconds of actual real-life slomo as you note, switchback towards, and fail to catch the pumpkin rolling from the worktop. The dull plosive thud as it meets the floor is… well, it’s the sound of horror, as any sfx person will tell you.

But this whole business around The Succession – remember this has been going on for at least 3 years – reminds me that my relationship with Apple has always been mildly dysfunctional. Apple is an exercise in making people sell things to themselves, and there’s something about the way that brand tries to be a brand without being, like, “a brand” that makes me want to cry.  Here’s a piece I wrote a few months ago but which, for various reasons <discreet>, didn’t get published.

Apple Compound: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave

So Apple’s unveiled its plans for a super-duper new HQ. The building, Steve Jobs told a meeting of the Cupertino planning committee in one of his trademark this-is-where-you-all-do-wild-applause presentations, will house up to 12,000 employees on a humongous 150-acre site that Apple bought from HP earlier this year.

There will be trees, lots and lots of trees -  and it’s got its own power-plant! And look, it’s in the shape of a giant circle – could there be a more yingy-yangy metaphor? A gathering of 12,000 like-minded souls in a nurturing-of-innovation environment which expresses its egalitarian drive to functional creativity through its circular form? Who the heck wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

Damn, I want to believe, I really do. But I can’t shake the feeling that, instead of being the architectural expression of Apple’s boundless energy and optimism, the building looks an awful lot like the bricks-and-mortar embodiment of their customers’ journey of disillusion.

Let’s unpack the allegory! You approach the building through that gorgeous landscaping. It’s minimal, but simultaneously really, you know, organic.
Through the sliding doors: boy, this first space is startlingly well-composed, so light and airy – it’s like no-one’s ever got the relationship between humans and buildings before!

Onto the next section. Hmm, the layout means you’ll have to make some awkward adjustments to your workflow – but still, in comparison with the last place you were at (a collection of ugly silos) it’s pretty cool! And look – the next space just along from here is just perfect.

And on, and on, as you move round Apple’s circular compound; alternately, spaces you love, and spaces with flaws so fundamental that, if it weren’t for the fact that you’ve already told all your friends that this place rocks some serious awe, you’d consider hurling yourself through one of those giant plate glass windows. Damn, the air-con is on the fritz again.

Back at the start of the circle: instead of exiting as you intended, you somehow find yourself herded, with a host of other souls, towards the up-escalator (there doesn’t seem to be a downwards one). Onwards you sail, up to Level iCloud, where, you finally understand, you will be locked for the rest of eternity. Going round, and round, and round.

So this latest move, which allows any old body to DM any verified account, seems, you know, counterintuitive. Truth be told, celebrities, whether high or low of brow, are the glue which bind us to Twitter. Stands to reason that the higher the follower count, the bigger the cohort of crazies that follow, and the more stuffed to the gills your email is going to be with ‘Message from Twitter: A. Dangerous-Loner sent you a direct message.’   And, oh look, here’s Google+, with its novel capacity to control and contain what you give and receive, through the medium of circles. Smells like a celebrity exodus (I call it a ‘celebrexodus’, for the snap of it; and I’d like you to join me in that).

Twitter, though, is probably not anxiously wringing its hankie.  Because brands, who also have verified accounts, would like customers to have the means to make complaints a bit less loudly and publicly. They’d really like that, because this social media thing can get awkward quite quickly, and their jaws are already all ache-y with smiling and pretending to chillax.  And Twitter is betting, probably quite sensibly, that its future lies with brands.

Read more writing at eModeration blog.

The wedge sandals were really the only good thing to come out of that day.

There were lots of comments, and a surprising number of them weren’t mad.

To be frank, my world would pretty much have to go tsunami before I’d let go of the bobbing raft of superficiality, and go it alone in the deep and scary seas of really-meaning-it.

But the fact that the LibCon Coalition’s first thrust, in the icky matter of How To Deal With Women,  has been to bestow the right of anonymity on those accused of rape? Truly, you are shitting me.

The reason that rape victims have historically been protected by anonymity is that pretty much every culture and every class has a structural inclination to believe that women ‘ask for it’ .

This is such a self-evident truth that women have been protected IN LAW (that’s quite hard to organize, by the way) from the contempt of their own communities. They’ve been acknowledged to be at such a disadvantage in terms of how this crime is prosecuted, that they’ve been set apart from the victims of every other crime. In law.

Scuttling around the damp edges of culture, in the nooks and crannies of libertarian respectability, are those who say “NO FAIR! Despite the fact that any reasonable person would look at the rape conviction stats and cry, or hang their head in shame and fear and despair – I WANT PARITY!”

I despise these people. They’re not only misogynists, they are thick misogynists, and thick misogynists are on page 1 of my Big Book of Tossers.

Rape victims aren’t being treated differently from rape defendants, you dumbarse. They’re being treated differently from the victims of other types of crime. The law has said “Is there a difference between a complainant of rape and those who allege other types of crime?” and thought “Yes, actually, there is. For the cultural and social reasons delineated above, we need to give a special Shield of Justice to rape victims – because god knows, looking at the stats, they freakin’  need it.”

This shameful legislation says “Ah come now. Women lie about rape – all the time! So often, that the law must protect rape defendants MORE than they protect any other type of defendant.” This proposal says WOMEN LIE ABOUT RAPE, WE ALL KNOW THAT.

For. Crying. Out. Loud.

Labour’s psychodrama is intriguing, and pleasingly accessible. For the past two decades, its tropes have been easily read by any fool with a copy of Brewer’s Phrase and Fable.

On balance, the overarching symbolic scaffold is Shakespearian: Brown’s blinded, roaring patriarch stumbling (sl-o-o-wly) towards Dover’s cliff;  Mandelson’s freakish but kinda-adorable combo of whispering Iago and fine-calved Malvolio, doing his thing;  and Ed Balls as dull Laertes.

Who, then, could have predicted that it would be Frasier that would, in the final act, provide the metaphor for Labour’s catastasis?

But there we go. Impossible to know how or where pop culture will work its magic.

Sulloway has a – possibly bullshit -  theory that an individual’s politics are stamped by birth order: first-born = loyal conformist, later-borns = freewheelin’ peddlars of unorthodoxy. I put this once to Ed Miliband, and it’s fair to say he was dismissive of my socio-therapeutic line of questioning.

But now, as the brothers Miliband thunder towards their own fraternal denouement, I feel a chorus-like compulsion to shriek: Ed, my darling – take care.

Don’t forget your Greek archetypes, and certainly don’t forget your Frasier.  Because someone in this fight is going to be the big swingy-balled bull, and someone is going to be the puckered calf.