Every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic field reverses itself, in a process called the solar cycle. The north pole becomes the south pole as the star at the centre of our galaxy completes the biggest flip-reverse it since Blazin’ Squad.

Don’t be confused: this isn’t some kind of astrophysical Freaky Friday where everything’s upside-down for a day. But it does mean that when the sun is at the peak of its cycle, there are more eruptions and sun spots on its surface, which (as all attentive readers of NASA’s educational webpages for children will know) can increase the likelihood of auroras back home on Earth.

In pursuit of the northern lights

The aurora: it’s perhaps the second most-pursued photographic opportunity on the planet, just behind “pretending to push the Leaning Tower of Pisa upright” (or “Leonardo DiCaprio with a woman his own age”). And your humble author has failed—not once, but twice—at photographing this event. In two separate countries, no less.

As I’m sure all my subscribers are keenly aware, this year’s Met Gala happened on Monday. All the world’s press and photographers turned out to breathlessly cover the great and good from the worlds of fashion, stage and screen. As I’ve written before, I’m not entirely qualified to opine on the various outfits, “looks” and other clothes-related news being made that night, but one thing did strike me.

I follow a former school acquaintance on Instagram and she—a dedicated follower of fashion—posted a breakdown of her thoughts on various celebs’ outfits and styles for the Met Gala. I swiped through half a dozen of her stories without interest, and then was slightly gobsmacked to see her immediately follow this set of fashion critiques with one of those reposted pleas for humanitarian assistance for mutilated babies in Gaza. How could someone just seamlessly swerve from frothy, frivolous rubbish like fashion directly into the crisis in Palestine?

I almost fired off a ranty post on Bluesky (RIP Twitter) about how things like the Met Gala should be ignored and irrelevant in times like these, before I caught myself. I remembered that the day before the Met Gala, this year’s Giro d’Italia began.

I’m writing this later than usual – apologies to those of you expecting their weekly hit of Man Feelings on Friday. It’s been a busy week!

Changes: turn and face the strange

Lots has changed in our household: my partner Maddy went back to work this week after a year of maternity leave. Our daughter Robin, eleven months old yesterday, started nursery this week too.

This meant adjusting all our routines: we now have to get two kids to two different places at two different times every morning. Previously we were able to get away with being casual about this when only one kid needed to go somewhere (and it was to his school a few hundred metres from our house), but we had to assemble spreadsheets, pre-plan outfits and wake up an hour earlier than usual to make the new regime work out.

It was my son’s fifth birthday this week, which immediately gave me reason to suspect we live in some kind of time paradox: I’ve aged at least ten years in the same period.

Kids’ birthday parties at this age are a social minefield: do you have to invite the whole class? Is it a faux pas to hold your child’s party at the same soft play centre everyone went to the week before for a different kid’s birthday? (Yes.) And how do you make conversation with all the strangers you’ve invited to hang out with you for a couple of hours?

Thankfully, years of making desperate chat with tired-looking parents in parks and play areas has steeled me when it comes to small talk with my fellow kid-wranglers. And a clash of birth dates solved the problem of whether we had to invite all the kids in the class. But I still found myself trying to coax my son’s nervous friends onto a trampoline last weekend, urging them to throw dodgeballs at me as they stared uncomprehendingly at their classmate’s weirdly enthusiastic dad.

A few days ago I was playing with my ten month old daughter on the sofa. She’s in a very tactile phase and loves grabbing things—typically my glasses—and swinging them around. She reached over and grabbed the TV remote control and happily waved it around her head.

Suddenly she flicked her hand backwards and whacked the remote into my top lip, swiftly followed by her own head. “ARGH!” I yelped in pained surprise as blood began to pool on my lip. There was a brief pause of complete and total silence, and then she began to howl.

It was my yell of pain: the volume of it, plus its unexpected and angry arrival – she was terrified. She sobbed and shook, her little limbs shaking as tears poured down her face. I pulled her close to me and stroked her little head and spoke soothingly, cursing myself for reacting so strongly (while trying not to bleed on her hair).