I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

She adopted an abandoned dog .. look at the transformation in just 9 days.

We should never lose our sense of wonder.

For some reason this from years ago randomly flashed up on my screen. Oh Meg how we miss you.

“I wonder how abusive they’d be if they suddenly got a stitch when out swimming? They’d be screaming for the RNLI to rescue them, and the RNLI would do it” Celebrated sailor and lifelong RLNI supporter Sir Robin Knox Johnson criticises the abuse of RNLI volunteers who helped small boat migrants reach land in Portsmouth. #Newsnight

"Why do people play golf?" Sean Connery was once asked, and he gave a brilliant answer. "If you play golf, you can’t think, honestly, or do anything else while you’re playing. "I think it’s the most revealing game. I don’t know if it’s a game. It’s something other than a game. I couldn’t define it. "But it’s obsessive and revealing and a very healthy balancing act, I think. It certainly is for me, and also it’s one of the few games in the world that’s really still got dignity as a game. "It’s endless, and as Jack Nicklaus says, it’s an unfair game and you have to accept it. It’s like life in that way. "It’s also a game that you can cheat it. It’s the easiest game in the world to cheat at. The only one that suffers is you, because you know. And you can’t unknow."

Greatest shot I've seen live. A number of years ago my colleague had a request in. He asked me if I could caddie for his request's son. The dad had said that his son was one of the best youth players in the world when he was younger. Now, as I'm sure we have all heard this type of thing before, I was a little sceptical. So we meet them on the tee, nice guy, said he's only played 5 times in the last 10 years. So I wasn't expecting much. It turned out to be true. This guy might have had the best swing I have ever seen. It was pure, his tempo and timing were exquisite. He had a driving 2 iron. He was more accurate with it than the atomic clock is. He told me how he spent his childhood at IMG in Florida, how he used to hit balls until his hands bled. It was a good day watching him. He had a couple of poor holes but that was just the rust and cobwebs. So we get to 18 and we haven't hit the driver all day. We decided that the 18th at Carnoustie is an acceptable time to give it a go. Well this thing was wild. To this day I don't think I have seen a drive that wild. A massive slice, it crosses 17, 16 and lands on the 1st fairway. I have never seen or heard of someone that wide of the 18th. We get to the ball and he asks me what do we do from here. I'm looking around like I haven't got a clue. Zero line of sight at the flag. Zero distance markers. And we're hitting over the 16th green hills, the Barry Burn, the bunkers on the 18th green, and there is OB if we pull it. I look around and I can see the bridge between 17 and 18. I know it's 220 front from that bridge. It's got to be the 2 iron. The line I had calculated must be close to the very far left edge of the hotel. So I tell him what to hit and where to hit it. Well he hit it on full send, exactly where I asked him to. He looks at me and says well? My reply. I have no idea, but that's the best shot you have hit all day. I think it's going to be good. So we start walking, climb the hills and can see the green. There's his ball 6 inches from the hole on 18. Carried everything including the short side bunker. People will ask the best round I caddied for and the best shot I have ever seen. That 2 iron was by far the greatest shot I have ever seen live at Carnoustie. Whats the best shot you've seen live? 📸 roughly where the shot was hit.

Robotic Lawnmower vs. Prehistoric Reptile Alligator is like, “aaaand I’m out!” 🐊 #Florida

This is the moment robots crash yet again on the closing day of the Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, after Chinese robot Tian Jiao shattered the 100 metre sprint record in 8.64 seconds. But whilst robots are able to beat the human record, they seem to find stopping after the race significantly more difficult, often crashing into padded barriers and sometimes catching fire throughout the games. The second World Humanoid Robot Games brought together more than 2000 robots for 51 sporting and scenario-based events.

Almost one in five visitors to North Berwick say they won't return, survey suggests ift.tt/xfrZsTc

My daughter Mary got 100% in her Advanced Higher Art - it’s a massive understatement to say I’m so proud of her 🤩🤩

Hi Roberto, if the Ticket Machine doesn't offer cash as payment, you simply request a Promise to Pay slip from the machine, and can then pay by cash on the train at the usual fare. scotrail.co.uk/tickets/buy-b… ^Paul