Half a year of half baked takes

Adrian Chiles, a British TV presenter, is known for fronting some fairly gentle football and current affairs shows. But what he’s really famous for is a column in The Guardian where he files around 900 words a week on seemingly whatever he feels like.

Recent topics have included budgie smugglers, how much he hates umbrellas, why he loves the dump, and a piece titled ‘I knew everyone would hate my mustard shorts. That didn’t stop me buying them’.

Similarly, The Cave has, for the past six months, filed around 900 words a week on seemingly whatever we feel like. 

We haven’t touched budgie smugglers, umbrellas, the dump, or mustard shorts, but we have managed to talk about rats, prank calls, flying vegemite, killing camels, AI, Trump, a weird amount of city planning, and far too much on Labubu’s and Clive Palmer. 

Trying to discern patterns, themes, or even a general point from more than 23,000 words is nigh on impossible. What, for example, could possibly connect Valerie the dachshund to using OnlyFans content to pay off debts? 

Perhaps it’s all an attempt to put the spiralling mess of the modern world into some sort of context, a search for understanding among the suffocating ubiquity of content and information. Perhaps it’s what best sets up a silly joke.

Either way, there’s lots more still to come, even if we have no idea what that is yet. One thing we can promise is not to replicate Adrian Chiles’ recent feature, ‘Yes, I have just done a naked forward roll. But there was a good reason’.

Then again, Chiles has never been so self-indulgent as to write a column about his own column. So who are we to judge?