“There are two kinds of European nations,” said Kristian Jensen, the Danish finance minister, last year. “There are small nations, and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.” With Brexit, it’s become painfully obvious that the United Kingdom is among the latter.1

They call it “the scandal”. And in Bethel church in Bristol, two independent advisers to the Home Office called on those who had been blighted by it to testify. Sitting in front of a sign that read “Moving forward – together in faith” and a union flag propped alongside a Jamaican flag, they appealed to the orphans of empire to share details of how the place their parents had referred to as the “Mother Country” had abandoned them. In a tone owing more to bewilderment than belligerence, they stepped up.

The first interview I conducted for the Beyond the Blade series, which investigated the impact of knife crime on the young, was with Patrick Green of the Ben Kinsella Trust. He expressed a view that I would hear a lot over the coming year. On the one hand he was impressed by a lot of good work he had seen in the field; on the other, he was weary about how little seemed to change. “Part of my frustration is I think we’re doing more of the same and we’re still getting the same results,” he told me. “I really feel it just needs to be shaken up. Politically, someone just needs to take a chance and give somebody who’s been around this for a while the opportunity to go off and deliver something really, really different … I would hope your work and whatever comes out of this shakes people up a little bit.”

If there is one thing more damning than the racist cartoon of Serena Williams published in Melbourne’s Herald Sun earlier this week, it’s the paper’s response to accusations of racism. And that’s saying something. Because the cartoon is bad. It’s Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind, Mammy Two Shoes from Tom and Jerry, going out in the cotton fields with Topsy to eat watermelon, Aunt Jemima’s pancakes bad. It’s Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Pauline Hanson, Jeremy Clarkson after a bottle of scotch and a screening of Katie Hopkins’ documentary on white South African farmers bad.

In Shrek Forever After, the eponymous ogre opens his heart to the arch-schemer Rumpelstiltskin. Tired of family obligations, Shrek wants to live just one day as a footloose, scary, bachelor ogre. “Back when villagers were afraid of me,” he says. “And I could take a mud bath in peace. When I could do what I wanted, when I wanted to do it! Back when the world made sense!”