On a sunny Tuesday in early December last year I had the good fortune to spend an hour with Karl Lagerfeld at the Mercer in New York. I was told that we’d have no more than 20 minutes to talk but, having interviewed Karl several times over the past 25 years, I knew that we could end up spending the whole afternoon talking about whether Hamburg was better than Berlin, his love of daily newspapers (particularly the Frankfurter Allgemeine) and his aversion to the term “marketing”. In the end we discussed Brand France, the evaporation of mystery in society, the importance of deadlines, the question marks over Chancellor Merkel and the need for craftsmanship in the design industry. Along the way we digressed to countless other topics and, by the time we wrapped up, there was enough for a sizeable audio documentary about the state of the modern world. Karl was a walking museum: formidable, deep, rich and full of delightful fables. Never afraid to speak his mind, he reminded us that the world has perhaps become a bit too brittle, that having a point of view should be celebrated and that understanding specific codes is an essential element of enduring as a designer.

It’s back to Brussels for UK prime minister Theresa May, who this evening will make a last-ditch attempt to win concessions from the EU on her Brexit deal. One wonders at her capacity for rejection: she’s shouted down in the House of Commons then confronted by po-faced committees in Brussels. A new report commissioned by Euronews suggests that she might have saved herself all the bother, as it claims that a large number of Europeans already think that the UK is no longer part of the EU. The largest number of misinformed people are in France and Italy, where nearly one third believe that Brexit has already happened. Anand Menon, director of think-tank The UK in a Changing Europe, believes Europeans are losing interest. “Lengthy political processes mean people get bored – and, more importantly, assumptions like this are understandably made.” Given the stakes, now is the worst time to succumb to Brexit fatigue.