Ok, so I need to say something about the orcas, or rather the response to them, because this is pissing me off.

There is a popular portrayal that they are somehow proxies for a class war hunting down and destroying the playthings of the rich, invading their habitat, and this is absolutely not what is happening.

There are two types of vessel that can broadly be described as "yachts". The first type are the ones you're probably thinking of: things owned by multi millionaires who cruise about living a life of unattainable luxury. These vessels have price tags that start at 7 digits for a modest one, and go up from there. They are owned by multimillionaires, centi-millionaires, and billionaires, and they are completely and utterly immune from orca attack.

This is because they are motor vessels. They steer by vectored thrust, or by directing propeller wash over a relatively small hydrofoil. As a result, there is nothing for the orcas to attack, and even if there was, these people don't like to be kept waiting on their way to Monaco or wherever. They have power plants the size of road haulage vehicles and can outrun the orcas.

The second type, which are the boats that the orcas are attacking, are sailboats. These travel at about 5 knots, which is the cruising speed of an orca, and have huge rudders because they need to balance turning forces from the sails that power the boats. The smallest boats that are capable of sailing in the waters where these animals are have rudders comparable in size to an adult human. The orcas seem to regard these as prizes and love detaching them.

While the very rich sometimes do buy these kind of boats, they are not the typical person who does so. Most of them are bought second hand, and they have very long lives (a lot from the 1970s are still in perfectly good condition). They are generally bought for the price of a used car, or less A lot of people live on them and pay for mooring and maintenance fees by doing casual labour. This is still cheaper than renting a one bedroom flat in a lot of Europe.

I live in the area where these animals operate. Friends of friends have been attacked. They aren't "yachties", they're just people with day jobs who have enough disposable income to invest in a hobby they enjoy.

So either, best case, you are gloating at people of modest means facing a salvage and repair bill that they can't afford and is more than the value of the boat, or potentially you are laughing at terrified people watching their home and everything they own get sent to the bottom of the ocean by one of the most sadistic predators on earth, and who will then have to get in the sea with these predators which, if they're lucky, will decide to leave them to drown.

This doesn't make you an online class warrior, or the left-wing equivalent of an edge-lord. It just makes you an arsehole.

Saw young Dr Bacalhau (yes, that really is his name), the dental surgeon, today. In March 2020 I had a cracked tooth removed, with the intention that it would be replaced with an implant a few months later.

3 days later, the world went into lockdown. I never got the implant.

In the years since, I learned to live with the gap. It’s next to a tooth I lost for orthodontic reasons as a teen, so it’s quite a big gap.

But I have been told that the asymmetry in my bite and lack of support for adjacent teeth is causing a problem, so I need an implant.

Fist thing they did was a CT scan of my jaw. The resolution is really quite incredible. He showed me the 3D scan. Bicuspid next door has a really kinky root.

The bad news is, the jawbone there is only 6mm thick, and he wants 8-10mm.

So I need a bone graft. They scheduled me for one in September. Double appointment, done under local anaesthetic (not hugely looking forward to that, but I’ve had worse. Don’t ask. Really). He’s gonna do the graft (new technique I think - some sort of synthetic scaffold), and put the screw in. Then 4 months later, they place the tooth.

Will be nice to have my ability to chew properly on the left side back.

Whole lot (including today’s consultation and CT) is going to come in at under 2000 euros, and my experience of Portuguese dentistry thus far is that they do really, really good work.