From time to time, in this job, you have the privilege of meeting an individual whose vivid spirit stays with you. For me, one of those individuals was Jeremy Richman, who was among the bereaved parents of the Sandy Hook school massacre in December 2012. I spent a humbling day with Richman seven years ago, when he talked in detail not only about his daughter Avielle – he made a point of smiling every time he said her name – but also about the work he and his wife, Jennifer Hensel, were doing in her treasured memory. Both medical research scientists, they had established a campaigning foundation to study the psychosocial factors that created mass killers, “so that other people might not suffer as we were suffering”. In the months afterwards, we corresponded from time to time about the progress of the foundation’s research, in chatty emails. There was only one subject about which Richman would not speak, however: the utterly vile conspiracy theories spread on the Infowars YouTube channel by Alex Jones, that claimed the Sandy Hook murders had been faked by the anti-gun lobby; that Richman and his fellow grieving parents were “crisis actors” and their children were still alive. For all Richman’s determined positivity, the fact of Jones’s lies had seemed too much for him to bear. In March 2019 I received, out of the blue, the shocking news that Jeremy Richman had taken his own life, the 27th victim of the tragedy. Since then, I have followed in detail the legal case brought by the Sandy Hook families against Jones, resulting, in 2022, in a $1.5bn (£1.2bn) judgment against him. Last week, after much cowardly evasion, Jones appeared to accept that he will be forced to liquidate Infowars to help compensate the families. In a shameful video he remained unrepentant; but at least, finally, in a small measure of justice, he may yet be broke. I raised a glass in Jeremy Richman’s memory. Merde! In a couple of weeks, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, will plunge into the Seine to prove that the €1.4bn (£1.2bn) of public money spent on cleaning the river for the Olympics has worked, and that triathletes can confidently follow her lead in the Games. This being Paris, the clean-up is less a cause for celebration than an opportunity to protest at its eye-watering cost and dubious success. A mass defecation in the river is planned, with the aim of giving the mayor a dose of E coli. Reading that story, one thought occurred: Liv Garfield, chief executive of Severn Trent water, last month defended her £3.2m pay award in a year in which her company was responsible for more than 60,000 sewage spills, telling the BBC Today programme that the latter fact “really doesn’t make me feel good”. Surely there is one obvious way to test the sincerity of such apologies? New era On any given weekend you can take your pick of London walking tours: Jack the Ripper or Swinging Sixties, Paddington Bear or Sherlock Holmes, mostly at about £20 a head. Some guides, with an eye to the arrival of the Eras tour next week, have inevitably added Taylor Swift walks to their roster, taking in the locations from the singer’s hit London Boy. Satirical Swiftian inflation has obviously been factored in. Prices for a wander up from Camden Town to Highgate (where Tay met all her ex Joe Alwyn’s best mates) are advertised at about £100 a time – or you could do it on the Tube for £1.90. Tim Adams is an Observer columnist