Life
The crash that turned me into a musical maestro
When Edward Freytag woke up after sustaining a brain injury in a motorbike accident in Tennessee, says Sadie Dingfelder in The New York Times, he was a changed man. The normally mild-mannered music teacher, 66, was “cursing up a storm” and refused to get dressed for two full days. Then, about two weeks after the crash, he turned on the car radio and began calling out the complex chords of a jazz tune: “C minor 9, F 13 sharp-11, G minor 13”. He had, somehow, developed perfect pitch: the ability to name any note on hearing it, with no reference point. Only one person in 10,000 can do this – including the likes of Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald – and it is nearly impossible to learn as an adult.
That wasn’t all. A month after the accident, Freytag spotted an unfamiliar file on his computer called “Brain Bleed”: more than 50 pages of strange, lurching music, credited to him, that he had no memory of writing. Even more bizarre, his wife Joanna started humming along to it. “Did you write this?” he asked. “No,” she replied, “you wrote it, dummy.” Every night, it turned out, he had been rising at about 2am and silently sitting down to compose. Some of the chords were so inventive he had to chart them out to understand them. A second, equally creative piece followed over the next few months. Then nothing. As his brain healed, he gradually went back to being his old, mild-mannered self. And his perfect pitch and creative flair faded with his impulsiveness. Musically, he says, nothing he has written since comes close. “Sometimes, I say to Joanna, ‘Can you just sneak behind me and hit me on the head?’”
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Heroes and villains
Hero
A runner who has walked the last mile of the London marathon six months after suffering a cardiac arrest during the race. Paramedic Gareth Hopkins’s heart stopped at mile 25 because of overheating, and he was so ill he only left hospital in September. After walking (gingerly) alongside Buckingham Palace and down The Mall with friends and family, the 43-year-old said he had “finished what I started”.
Hero
Rachel Reeves, according to Rachel Reeves, who hailed the “gender lens” she applied to her policies as chancellor, citing in particular the introduction of 30 hours of free childcare for children over nine months. “There’s no reason why a male chancellor couldn’t prioritise some of the things I prioritised,” she said, “but I’m not sure if any ever did.” Only it wasn’t Reeves who introduced that 30-hour policy, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. It was her predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, a man “not famous for his gender lens”.
No grazie. Getty
Hero
An Italian chef who was sacked by a fancy restaurant in Australia for repeatedly refusing to put pineapple on pizza. Davide Tamburella says he told his boss at La Costa in Brisbane that the addition of the fruit would be an “insult to his culture”. He’s not wrong.
Villains
Old Hamptonians, the old boys’ cricket club for an all-male independent school in southwest London, which has been demoted from its league in part because it doesn’t have a girls’ team. Under England and Wales Cricket Board rules, top tier clubs are required to have programmes for juniors and for girls. Old Hamptonians argued that this would be rather tricky given that their alma mater, Hampton School, has no female students and plenty of junior teams itself, but to no avail.
Hero
Alex Chalk KC, who has agreed to chair an independent review into the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton last year on one condition – that he is not paid out of public funds. The former Tory minister told Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood there were already too many inquiries hoovering up taxpayers’ money.
On the money
Musk handing out $1m ahead of last year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Jamie Kelter Davis/Bloomberg/Getty
Elon Musk gets his comeuppance
This year, says Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic, Elon Musk became the “single largest non-candidate donor” in any election cycle ever. His overall contributions of $474m account for around a quarter of all campaign donations received by Republicans in 2026. They included more than $168m for the Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who lost; $216m to Musk’s own political action committee, to spend on canvassing and advertising; and another $90m to other individual candidates and organisations at both the state and federal levels. “In almost every instance, that money failed to buy the richest man in the world the results he wanted.”
Partly this is a repudiation of Musk himself. Although he was clearly helpful in electing Donald Trump in 2024, today the billionaire represents “almost every faction” America has come to hate: he is the “oligarch class”, data centres and AI, Maga politics and cronyism rolled into one man. In Paxton’s race, Musk’s money may have backfired, signalling to Texans that a tech oligarch was trying to buy an election. It certainly galvanised the opposition. In his victory speech, Democrat James Talarico said Texas was sending a message to “every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor… We will not be conquered”. And it’s worth remembering that Musk is merely the most prominent member of a whole entourage of Silicon Valley bigwigs who have enthusiastically supported Trump, presumably spying opportunities to shape (or block) regulation of crypto and AI, to secure lucrative government contracts and, in the case of DOGE, to undertake an “unprecedented bureaucratic coup”. All this rubbed Americans up the wrong way. So this week, almost everywhere pro-AI or pro-data centre initiatives or candidates were on the ballot, Americans voted against them.
😳📱 Now Musk and the other tech leaders will have to “recalibrate their politics” for a Congress likely to be “actively hostile to their interests”. Perhaps it’s already begun. While polls were open, Musk posted on X: “Vote red today!” After results came in, he swiftly deleted it.
The Knowledge Crossword
Love etc
A bit dodgy? Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals
How to spot a modern cad
There are plenty of warning signs when it comes to spotting the modern day cad, says Country Life. Any chap reading a book on business strategy or removing his top when jogging is to be swerved. Same for those who don’t ask any questions, have few longstanding male friends, don’t know the lyrics to Jerusalem and don’t “return a salmon to the river”. Topping up a date’s glass when it’s already half full is a sure-fire sign, along with dark-coloured bedsheets and ordering the Chateaubriand then suggesting you “go Dutch”. Perhaps the biggest red flag of all: “treating his bonus as if it were a national news story”. Ignore at your peril.
Is that all, asks Sophia Money-Coutts in The Times. Based on my breadth of experience with these sorts of men, we can surely tack on a few more. Beware the man who feels the need to prove himself by “weaving in and out of lanes on the M25” or who can’t control a quick temper. I once watched a date throw a tantrum that would embarrass a three-year-old when he temporarily lost his AirPods. Shiftiness around money often offers a good clue. On a trip to Spain, a new lover declared on the first night that I’d be paying for all the dinners because he’d covered the hotel – then proceeded to book the most expensive restaurants possible, including Nobu. “What kind of pervert wants to go to Nobu in Spain, anyway?” And I was once told a good yarn about a much lusted-after actor who arrived for a date armed with not only condoms in his pocket but also “an individual sachet of lube”. A definite “whiff of cad”.
Weather
Quoted
“Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.”
Walter Cronkite
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