Category Archives: News

Drugs, apostrophes, and culture wars: it’s the news from Britain

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Should we start with the drugs?

We should always start with the drugs.

The Emerging Chemical Contaminants team at Imperial College London reports that cocaine use doubled between 2011 and 2014-15. They measured this by testing the city’s waterways and they’ve informed us that so much was ingested (and then digested and then, um, ex-gested down the toilet) that even after the water was treated cocaine could be found in wild shrimp in rural Suffolk. 

But it’s not just cocaine that we generous humans share with our waterways and with the species who live there. It’s opioids. It’s antidepressants, painkillers, antipsychotics, and every other drug, prescription and otherwise, that we and our neighbors take. It’s also antibiotic resistant bugs. It’s microplastics. It’s raw sewage; we’ve had floods of that lately. Have I mentioned that in the name of efficiency Britain’s water systems were (and still are) privatized? If a person was cynical enough, they might say it’s more profitable to dump raw sewage than to treat it. 

Irrelevant photo: a begonia

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How does so much cocaine get into the country? Well, this doesn’t account for all of it, but back in May the National Crime Agency found £40 million worth of cocaine in a Yorkshire pub’s parking lot. Or car park, as folks here put it, making it sound like someplace we take our cars to play on the swings.

How’d it get there? The working theory is that it came from [you’ll have to fill in a geographical location here, because the newspapers aren’t saying] on a ship that sailed past Hull, slowing down only long enough to transfer the coke to an inflatable, which took it to a beach some 18 miles from the pub.

Now picture three guys loading £40 million worth of coke into their car, then saying, “Who fancies a nice breakfast, then?”

Whether they’d have been spotted if they hadn’t stopped for breakfast I don’t know,  but they were arrested at 8:30 and, I’m sure, had put in a long night. They’d earned that breakfast. We can only hope they got to finish it before the local cops, the National Crime Agency, and the Border Force came crashing through the door. 

 

What else has been found in Britain lately?

Something that’s been described as a “beautifully crafted Roman dodecahedron” was found in Lincoln. That was also in May. It’s one of 130 that have been found since the 19th century, all across what used to be the Roman Empire. 

Dodecahedrons have twelve sides and they’re hollow and no one has a clue what they were for. To date, no one’s found any mention of them in Roman art or writings. 

Dodecahedrons aren’t just objects a craftsperson could’ve just slapped together. They’re made of a copper alloy and feature holes and knobs that wouldn’t have been simple to make. 

Theories on what they were range from measuring instruments to stress toys to religious objects. (When an archeologist says something was a religious object, feel free to translate that as, We don’t have a clue what this was for.) And someone who I have to assume doesn’t knit suggested that they might’ve been knitting tools. Follow the link for a photo and see if you can find a way to use that in your knitting. 

The contexts they’ve been found in have been resolutely unhelpful in explaining what they were for, but they’re unquestionably old and the people who found this recent one were excited about it. 

 

Politics, lying, and language

An election’s approaching and the current government’s flailing around in search of an idea that voters might actually respond to. I’ll skip most of them. They’ll be forgotten by next week anyway, but I have to resurrect one that hit the news a few weeks ago anyway and has already passed through the shredder of our collective memory. In all its murkiness, it’s emblematic of our current politics: schools in England have been told they can no longer teach the “concept of gender identity,” although “secondary-school pupils will learn about protected characteristics, such as sexual orientation and gender reassignment.”

How can you discuss gender reassignment without discussing the concept of gender identity? Beats me. Maybe you tell the kids there’ll be a lottery and they just have to wait and see if their number’s drawn. Best advice? Don’t splurge on a wardrobe until you know whether you’ll be reassigned.

I recently heard the secretary of state on the radio, in full warlike mode and talking over and through the interviewer, explaining the danger trans women pose to women who were lucky enough to be supplied with the appropriate birth certificate at the time they entered the world. She wants to keep trans women from getting new birth certificates that would recognize them as women. 

Why? As far as I could figure out, it’s to protect us from men posing as women to use public toilets. She cited a case of a woman who’d been raped in a public toilet, who of would of course have been safe if the perpetrator had been unable to change their birth certificate.

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In Wales, the Plaid Cymru party is pushing to make it a criminal offense for a politician to lie–or at least to deliberately mislead parliament or the public. If that becomes law, life’s going to be interesting, although its impact will depend on the definition of mislead.

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So now we’ve banned lying, teaching “gender ideology,” and amended birth certificates. What’s left? Local government in North Yorkshire has–okay, it didn’t try to ban apostrophes but it did want to get rid of them in street names. They cause computer problems, and new street signs, they said, wouldn’t have them.

Want a clearer explanation? Of course you do, and a spokesperson provided it: “Street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666.” 

In what? Why, the naming system set up by the British Standards Institution, of course.

And what’s the British Standards Institution? “The national standards body of the United Kingdom,” Lord Google informs me. Or as the institution itself says, “Our mission is to empower you to inspire trust, foster excellence and ensure safety in your organization; driving positive change for a better world.” 

That’s all good, then? We all know what we’re talking about here?

Of course we do.

The Cambridge city council tried to make the same change in 2014 but backed down after facing a small army of grammarians armed with well sharpened apostrophes. North Yorkshire quickly did the same.

 

Life in an English village

A flock of feral chickens has been found in Norfolk. 

“They’re out of control,” according to some residents of the chickens’ nearest village. They destroy the gardens and the food people leave for them attracts rats. 

That’s visitors leaving food, not residents. Visitors have swarmed in to see them. Or–okay, we don’t have numbers here. Maybe there’ve been enough visitors for a swarm and maybe we’re talking about one car every third day. You’re free to imagine packed tour buses if you like (Step right up, forks; see the feral chickens!) or one weedy individual on a bike, but do remember that your imagination may not match up with reality in any way.

Other residents have no problem with the birds. One said, “People in the new houses are moaning about them, but they’ve been here such a long time [that’s the chickens, not the people in the new houses] and there’s more important things going on in the world than a few chickens. They should get a life.

“Two of them have been in my garden since they were babies and they don’t bother me.”

Politics, fleas, and lettuce: it’s the news from Britain

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It’s an odd time in British politics. The Conservative Party has a massive majority in the House of Commons, which gives it the ability to push through just about any bill that doesn’t offend too many of its own MPs, and guess what: it’s falling apart. It’s a riveting spectator sport, but sooner or later some new government will come in and it’ll have to clean up after them. I don’t envy them that.

Where shall we start?

 

Let’s start with Liz Truss

Truss is Britain’s all-time champion, record-holding, shortest-term-serving prime minister, and if that isn’t enough glory for one person, in that very short time she also managed to crash the economy. That last bit happened in a fit of hubris. 

Hubris? It’s a disease politicians get that makes them think willpower is enough to transform the unworkable into the workable. It comes from the Greek and originally meant “Liz! No! Don’t cut the red wire.”

She went ahead and cut the red wire. You knew she would.

 

Entirely relevant photo: Wild garlic. It’s keeps midges away. It’s not proven to work on fleas or prevent hubris, but no one’s proved that it won’t.

While she was in office,, 13% of Tory voters switched to the Labour Party and she went from a net favorability rating of +41 among Conservative voters to a -30.

Stop nickering. Not everyone can do that.

Toward the end of her brief tenure, a newspaper ran a live feed of a head of iceberg lettuce to see which one would last longer, Liz or Lettuce. Lettuce, rather famously, outlasted her. I’d love to organize a demonstration against her. I don’t much care about the reason, I just want to be part of a group of people standing around quietly, respectfully, and visibly with lettuce leaves on our heads. Everyone will know what we mean.

Anyway, Liz is back in the headlines with what’s being widely called a memoir of her time in office (she says it’s not but who listens to her?), called Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room. 

How’s it selling? It’s been outsold by an air fryer cookbook. In its crucial first week, it sold 2,228 copies even though it got a huge amount of free publicity. You can find political memoirs that’ve done worse, so she’s not setting any head-of-lettuce-style records here, but those aren’t impressive sales. She was paid an advance of £1,512, indicating that her publisher didn’t think it had a hot property on its hands.

But forget sales. Let’s talk about content. Truss was in office for 49 days and the book runs to 320 pages (with or without an index and footnotes; I’m not sure), so she’s given us a bit more than 6 pages per day. Including weekends. Among other things, she tells us that 1) when she inherited the PM’s Downing Street apartment from Boris Johnson, she also inherited fleas from (presumably) Johnson’s dog, and 2) the queen died a few days after Truss took office. Despair wasn’t listed as the official cause of death but it would be reckless to rule it out as a contributing factor. 

That filled less than a single page, so I’m sure she has other things to say too. In fact, I know she does, because the book includes a quote widely circulated in antisemitic conspiracy circles, which incorrectly has the long-dead and Jewish banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild wanting to control a nation’s money. An unnamed source “close to Ms Truss” explained that it was all okay, though, because she didn’t mean anything by it. 

It’s particularly British to say something isn’t racist or whatever-ist because the person who said it didn’t mean it to be. I have yet to convince a single soul that their (or someone else’s) intentions are beside the point.

The close-to-Truss source explained that “numerous online sources have stated that [the quote] was attributed to Rothschild, so she simply attributed it thus. Clearly nothing more was meant of it.”

Will that little fuckup lead Truss to wonder if she’s hanging out in the wrong circles and reading some unreliable, not to mention unsavory, sources? I doubt it. If she doesn’t mean or recognize it to be antisemitic, it must not be.

The phrase If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas does come to mind.  

Her publisher has promised to cut the quote from future editions. 

Will there be any future editions? Your guess is as good as mine.

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To be clear: the logic that something is only antisemitic if you mean it to be antisemitic does not apply if you attend a march against genocide in Gaza. 

 

Is Truss typical of the party?

Not at all. The rest of the party outlasted the lettuce. Once you get past that, though, she might have gotten her antisemitic fleas from sources closer to home than Johnson’s dog. It turns out that several Conservative Party politicians, staff members, and activists have been running Facebook groups–a whole network of them–that are filled with misinformation, Islamophobia, antisemitism, white supremacism, conspiracy theories, and threats. The people running the groups weren’t public about their role. It took a Greenpeace investigative unit to dig out the connection.

Senior Tories have posted on the sites and seven Tory MPs are members.

The groups’ rules ban hate speech etc. etc., but posts that violate the rules weren’t taken down and the people who posted them weren’t banned.

The party has said it will review its “processes and policies.” It may or may not invest in flea powder. I’m not putting any bets on that.

 

What else is happening?

Chris Philip, Britain’s policing minister (no, I didn’t know we had one either) appeared on  the BBC’s show Question Time and discovered that Rwanda isn’t the same country as the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The question leading to this revelation wasn’t a gotcha question. Rwanda’s central to the only thing our prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, believes is important: deporting refugees to Rwanda if they arrive in Britain the wrong way. 

What’s the right way? Sorry, we don’t have many left, but that seldom makes its way into the discussion. 

The policing minister is part of the Home Office, and deporting people is not only the responsibility of the Home Office, it’s been the Home Office’s favorite occupation for years now. So knowing what country they hope to deport people to would seem to be at least vaguely relevant to his job description. 

What happened was that someone in the audience asked if a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo would be deported to Rwanda even though tension between the countries is high and they have a history of violence. The minister explained that he didn’t think anyone from Rwanda would be deported to Rwanda.

Um, no, the audience member said. He wasn’t talking about people from Rwanda.

“Congo is a different country to Rwanda, isn’t it?” asked the sage from the Home Office.

Philip has since explained that the question was rhetorical. And that he had trouble hearing. And that the dog ate his homework.

A Liberal Democrat on the panel summed up the interchange by saying that we don’t have “a serious government.”

 

How are we to understand all this?

At least one major paper has been driven to–well, if not predict the future at least try to understand the present by reading not the prime minister’s tea leaves but his tea mugs. Or as they put it, his teaware.

I’d never heard of teaware before I read the headline, proving that even after 18 years in Britain I’m still American. My spell check program has heard of it and so has Lord Google, who’d be happy to help me part with money in exchange for some, so apparently teaware is a real thing.

The Guardian’s gone back through photos from several of Suank’s public appearances to read the messages on his mugs and noted a union flag cup, a cup with dog pictures, a cup showing a 10, presumably to remind us of his current address, and several company-logo cups when he visited places where people do actual work. 

According to journalist and, um, political mug expert Stephen Bush, getting the mugs into his photos is a way “to signal he is somewhat normal. . . . They’re a good way of being like: ‘Oh yeah, look, I’m a normal guy. I love this country. Look at me drinking from my normal guy cup.’ “

If this sounds somewhat desperate, I have a lettuce in the refrigerator that I’d be happy to lend you.

 

So is the party united?

One reason Sunak’s so fixated on the Rwanda plan is that he suffers from the delusion that putting it into action will placate the right wing of his party, return his party to power at the next election, and keep the antimatter from mixing with the matter-matter, although my reading of the teacups is that nothing short of seppuku would placate them right now. They got a taste of power with the Brexit election think they’re entitled to more.    

I am, sadly, not the right person to comment on the matter-matter and antimatter, although I’m sure it does matter.

A group of MPs on the right of the party apparently want to dump Sunak before the next election and replace him with Penny Mordaunt. They’re probably not the only group hatching a plot, just the one I happened to have a detail or three about. The theory behind the plot is that if she took power, her right-wing initiatives on tax and immigration would win the country’s heart and proving all the polls wrong the Tories would wipe out Labour. 

The plan is apparently called 100 Days to Save Britain, which is faster if less ambitious than taking 10 years to save the West. 

Mordaunt apparently wants no part of it and said speculation about the plot is “codswallop.”

Why isn’t she interested? Because the last person whose hands were on the wheel gets the blame when the ship goes down, and every election-watcher in the country says the ship’s headed straight for the iceberg. Mordaunt would much rather wait for Sunak to sink it, then see if she can’t raise whatever’s left from the seabed.

We’ll leave that metaphor before it takes us down with it. 

Local elections are scheduled for May 2–that’s the future as I write this and the past as you read it–and the Tories are expected to have a disastrous night. And day. And day after that, all of which could shift MPs already plotting against Sunak into high gear. That in turn could trigger Sunak to call a snap election in order to head them off. If he does, he and his party won’t be expected to do well, but it’s one of a series of bad choices he has. If he has any good choices, I can’t see where they’re hidden.

The party’s jitters have only been increased by one of its MPs–a former health minister–defecting to Labour. He’s a doctor and said, “I have to be able to look my NHS colleagues in the eye and my constituents in the eye. And I know that the Conservative government has been failing on the thing I care about most, which is the NHS and its patients.”

He doesn’t plan to run in the next election but hopes to advise Labour on the NHS.

 

One more bit of mayhem and I’ll stop

According to leaked documents, senior Conservative Party officials looked seriously at–in fact, worked on–a plan to hand the party’s membership database to a commercial outfit that would have used it to track members’ locations and send them ads, with the party taking a cut of the sales. It would make the party tens of millions of pounds, they promised.

The idea came from Christen Ager-Hanssen, a Norwegian businessman who went bust in the dotcom bubble and was involved in the collapse of a Swedish newspaper. He went on to work for a cryptocurrency company that was going to be part of the deal. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The party hasn’t said why it abandoned the idea, but it could have had something to do with the cryptocurrency company firing Ager-Hanssen.

 

And from the Department for Studying Life’s Little Ironies . . .

. . . comes this: homelessness activist Stuart Potts was scheduled to talk to  last year’s Conservative Party conference about the problems ex-prisoners face. He wasn’t allowed into the hall because of his criminal record.

As if running a marathon wasn’t hard enough: it’s the news from Britain

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More than one person ran last weekend’s London marathon carrying a refrigerator. To be clear, that’s one refrigerator per runner, not a shared one. Admittedly, these weren’t the six-foot-tall kind that loom over a kitchen. They were the kind that fit under the counter and mind their own business, that are shorter than your average human, and that can, if you’re crazy enough, be strapped to your back and carried for long distances, although most people don’t care to do that. 

Laura Bird is one of the people who cared to, and she’s probably the one I heard on the radio. “You have to follow your dreams,” she said. Or if it wasn’t her, it was some other woman who ran the marathon carrying a refrigerator. I was driving and didn’t take notes. 

Whoever she was, she left me wondering whether as a culture we haven’t taken this follow-your-dreams stuff too far. I dreamed about scraping the side of my car on a rock the other night. Some dreams can just stay dreams. It’s okay.

Irrelevant photo: Honesty–which is, honestly, the name of the flower.

 

Daniel Fairbrother, another fridge carrying runner, stole the limelight, though, by stopping partway through the race to get down on one knee and propose to his girlfriend. With the fridge still on his back. He also made headlines during a training run, when he was stopped by the police, who thought he might have been an ambitious shoplifter.

“You do know . . . they’ll deliver it for you.” the cop said once he was convinced that he was just dealing with some innocent maniac.

I don’t know if this is strictly a British thing. Lord Google informs me that someone’s keeping track of the fastest time for completing a marathon while carrying a household appliance, which does argue for it being more than a personal quirk but tells us nothing about what country or countries can claim the quirk. So if you know whether people are carrying refrigerators in in other countries’ marathons, leave me a comment, will you? I need to know this.

And while we’re at it, I’d love to hear about whether it’s strictly a British thing to run races dressed as–oh, I don’t know, bananas or phone booths or ballerinas. Because people do that here too. 

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If carrying a refrigerator isn’t one of the dreams you want to follow, you could consider marathon wine tasting. Tom Gilbey tasted a glass of wine at every mile along the route, trying to name the vintage, the grape, and the producer. He got 4 wrong and 21 “mostly” right. He kept from getting pie-eyed, he said, by taking only small sips or spitting the wine out if it wasn’t good, but in the photo the BBC ran he looks a little the worse for wear and the BBC says his verdicts became hazier as he got closer to the finish line.

At one point in the race, he said, “There was a real trio of bad ‘uns, and then around a similar point I was overtaken by a fridge. So that was sad.”

He did raise money for charity, but it was also, ever so incidentally, great publicity for his, ahem, “wine event experience” business.  

 

As long as we’re talking about household appliances

I’m endlessly fascinated by the obscenities of an unequal society. This one comes from Harrods–a store that’s not known for its bargains–which is offering an “ironing system” for under £4,000. Exactly $1 under, because any marketer knows £3,999 looks like a lot less than £4,000.

I need to add a link here to prove I’m not hallucinating.

How is an ironing system different from an iron and an ironing board? Well, it has a cover–that’s important–and a water tank and wheels and a cable rewinder and a bunch of verbiage that may or may not mean anything. I’m not the best person to judge. Ironing’s against my religion.

What do you do with an almost-£4,000 ironing system? Why, you iron your clothes, that’s what. And your sheets and underwear and socks. And your dishrags. I suspect the system has too many pieces to carry in a race, although the wheels might tempt a creative sort to roll it.

 

Outdated literary gossip

Let’s change gears. There’s nothing like a literary trash fight to get the blood circulating, even when it’s old news.  

Very old news. Back in the 1920s, when John Betjeman (later a poet laureate) was a student of C.S. Lewis’s (best known for writing The Chronicles of Narnia), Betjeman annoyed Lewis enough that he he wrote in his diary, “I wish I could get rid of this idle prig.” But he didn’t keep his dislike to  himself: he refused to support Betjeman’s bid for an honors degree.

Years later, the preface to one of Betjeman poetry collections thanks “Mr CS Lewis for the fact on page 256.”

The book has 45 pages.

 

And the news from abroad is . . .

In the US, ice cream sales increased by 3.1 percent in areas that had recently made recreational marijuana legal. Cookie sales increased by 4.1 percent, and chip [that would be potato chip] sales increased by 5.3 percent. 

I can’t give you a link for that. It comes from Britannica’s “One Good Fact”–a daily email featuring random bits of useless information. My life is immeasurably richer for having received this one.

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Someone in Iceland is working to run a glacier for president. It seems to meet the requirements: it’s more than 35 years old and–well, you could at least argue that it’s a citizen. It needs a civil registration number, though, so the originator of the idea, Angela Rawlings, took its name–Snaefellsjokulll–as her middle name so she can be a proxy for the glacier on the ballot.

If you have a spare umlaut, drop it in there somewhere, would you? I’ve run out, it’s late, and the shop’s closed. 

A team of people is now working on the campaign, and like the fridge runners, who run to raise money for charities, they’re up to something serious.

“I come from the indigenous lands of Siberia,” Rawlings said, “and there the personhood of nature is something that is so common to the culture and the psyche in general.” The glacier is melting and she hopes its candidacy will put climate change at the center of the election.

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In Barcelona, residents are fed up with tourists.

Okay, lots of places are fed up with tourists. They price locals out of housing, they travel in hordes, and most of them are convinced that them having a good time is more important than someone else having an everyday life. Not long after they hit critical mass, all the old shops are replaced by bars and nightclubs and vomitoria and by places selling key chains and ice cream cones and overpriced food. In Barcelona, so many tourists were taking the number 116 bus that residents complained they couldn’t get home. 

Why that bus? It goes by Antoni Gaudi’s Park Guell (that needs an umlaut too; thanks), which is on the tourist must-see list.  

Now the city council has had the bus taken off of  Apple and Google maps, and that’s made it invisible–except to residents.

Local activist Cesar Sanchez (add an accent please; the accent shop has been replaced by one renting wetsuits to tourists) said, “We laughed at the idea at first, but we’re amazed that the measure has been so effective.”

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After last week’s post about the National Health Service, a friend sent me a link to FullFact‘s look at Rishi Sunak’s pledge to reduce NHS waiting times.

How’d he do? “Despite the ambiguity in the pledge, NHS waiting lists in England, for planned treatment, increased throughout the year following Sunak’s pledge.” Ditto waiting lists for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

The NHS has other kinds of waiting lists, including ones called hidden waiting lists–sorry, no data get published for those–but the list for planned treatment is the one politicians usually mean.

Did they grow because those dastardly NHS employees were on strike so much? Well, yes, but that added to the numbers, but they’d have grown anyway, even if the government had settled with them up front.

Britain enters the contest to be second best

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Britain’s Conservative Party, masters of social media that they are, have done it again. They posted one of history’s stranger political ads on Twitter–or at least on the site that used to be Twitter. It opened by saying, “Don’t let the doomsters and naysayers trick you into talking down our country. The UK is as strong as ever.” 

And how did it follow that up? By bragging that Britain’s the second most powerful country in the world and illustrating it with

  • A US fighter jet
  • A Canadian-owned car
  • A football team whose photo was taken just before it lost a game to Brazil
  • King Charles, looking overwhelmed by an outsized crown, although the royals aren’t supposed to be dragged into politics
  • A second fighter plane, this one developed by a European consortium back when the UK was in the European Union
  • And Rishi Sunak, who is, in fact, Britain’s prime minister

I’d link to the ad but it’s been taken down.

If anyone tells you politics are no fun, they’re following the wrong stories.

Irrelevant photo: I have no idea what this is but I am certain it grew in the right country. Whether that’s where it originated is a whole ‘nother can of worms.

 

So is Britain really the second most powerful country?

It depends who you ask and on how you define power. Also on how you go about measuring something that’s not as easy to measure as you might think, but I’ll give the Conservatives this: they didn’t make up the claim. It comes from a report by BrandFinance that ranked the UK second in something it called the Global Soft Power Index.

The what? 

It measures–or at least tries to measure–countries’ “ability to influence the preferences and behaviours of various actors in the international arena (states, corporations, communities, publics, etc.) through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion. Each nation is scored across 55 different metrics to arrive at an overall score out of 100 and ranked in order from 1st to 193rd.”

Did everyone survive that barrage of corporate-speak? Good. We’ll stagger onward.

“The report has found that at a time of global uncertainty and instability, economic credentials are increasingly important contributors to a nation’s soft power. Nation brand attributes such as ‘strong and stable economy’ and ‘products and brands the world loves’ emerge as key drivers of influence and reputation on the global stage.”

In my official capacity as a non-expert on just about all topics, I wouldn’t have said Britain’s economy was in great shape. We’ve been living with inflation and a cost-of-living crisis for long enough that the government’s started to brag when inflation slows down a bit. The cost-of-living crisis is present enough that it’s part of real people’s conversations–not to mention real people’s lives. We’re post-Brexit, post-Covid, post-14 years on Conservative government and the view from my couch doesn’t show me a country in great shape. But hey, what do I know?

Besides, in some tellings soft power is partially about a thriving cultural scene, and the ad did include a picture of the director Christopher Nolan, which gives me an excuse to mention that the Conservatives just cut arts funding. 

I’m telling you, the Tories–in case you live in a country that isn’t Britain and need a translation, that’s another word for the Conservatives–are an underappreciated party.  I admit that they’re despicable, they’ve wrecked the country’s infrastructure, and they do horrible things, but they’re so transparently bad at just about everything that they’ve become an art form. 

 

How are they doing in the polls, then?

According to a recent poll, only four out of ten people who voted Conservative in the last election plan to vote for them this time around, and Rishi Sunak–the Tory leader, remember–has a personal approval rating of -33%.

Labour’s leader, Kier Starmer, on the other hand, has a personal approval rating of -3%, which is roughly what mine was in high school, or to put that another way, nothing to brag about. 

How can someone have a minus approval rating? I tried to find out how they’re calculated but got nowhere, so I’ve randomly decided that–well, an explanation threatens to fall off the edge of the English language, so I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re a politician in a country with 100 voters and have an approval rating of -10%. Surely that means 110 of those 100 voters hate you. Or else  100 of the current voters plus 10 of the ones who’ve died hate you. The dead traditionally vote in Chicago, and the US has been in the business of exporting democracy for as long as I can remember, so I don’t see a problem with that.

 

Let’s switch to some non-political news 

This is brought to you by the Emperor’s New Clothes Department:

The company formerly known as Standard Life Aberdeen decided it was a good idea to rebrand itself after it sold off some pieces of the business, and that probably made sense, since one of the pieces was Standard Life. So they gave an unknown amount of money–I wish I knew how much but nobody’s saying–to a branding agency, which came up with a reinvention.

Hands up anyone who knew branding agencies existed. 

No, me neither.

Anyway, in return for that unspecified but presumably large amount of money, the agency came up with a new name: Abrdn. And the company said, Yeah, that’s great. We love it. Because if they called themselves Aberdeen, they couldn’t claim intellectual property rights on the name–the entire, rude city of Aberdeen got there first. 

The nerve of these people.

Cue all the predictable jokes in the media (“rlly stpd,” etc.) and at least one unpredictable one about “irritable vowel syndrome.”  Recently, the company’s chief investment officer’s accused the press of “corporate bullying.” 

“Would you do that with an individual?” he said in an interview. “How would you look at a person who makes fun of your name day in, day out? It’s probably not ethical to do it. But apparently with companies it is different.”

Well, um, yes. For one thing, they’re not individuals. And the company not only chose their name, they spent a lot of money to choose it. 

The media is filled with remorse. The Financial Times posted, “Lv Abrdn aln,” and City AM put “Abrdn: an apology” on the front page. It read, “sry we kp tkng th pss ot of yr mssng vwls.”

*

If that last item was about things that have gone missing, this next piece is about extras:

A guy who worked at a German art museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, smuggled a painting of his own into an exhibition and hung it in a hallway. It lasted eight hours before the gallery spotted it and took it down, gave it back, fired him, and in case it hadn’t made itself clear, banned him from the gallery. 

It doesn’t always work out that way, though. A woman smuggled a piece of her work into a different German art gallery and no one spotted it until they took the the exhibit down and found an extra painting. They put up a post on the site that used to be Twitter and now has a silly name: “We think it’s funny and we want to get to know the artist. So get in touch! There’s no trouble. Word of honour.”

The artist, Danai Emmanouilidis, said she’d always wanted to get one of her paintings into an exhibition and “smuggled it in with a giant hoodie over my leggings.”

The gallery auctioned it off and the money went to an art charity called ArtAsyl in Cologne. I don’t know how much it sold for, but I’ll bet a cinnamon bun that it was less than Abrdn paid for its new name.

Will the real London please stand up?

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In preparation for London’s mayoral election, the Conservative Party ran an ad on what used to be Twitter saying London has been on the brink of chaos since its current mayor, Sadiq Khan, “seized power.” It had become “the crime capital of the world.” To prove its point, it showed a video of a panicked crowd running through what was supposed to be the London underground but turned out to be New York after a rumor about gunfire. 

The rumor turned out to be false, as did, according to a fact-check, all the claims in the ad. Khan didn’t seize power; he was elected. The murder rate has dropped under his tenure and under the two mayors before him. New York–to everyone’s surprise–is not London. And so on. 

Two things about Khan drive the Conservatives nuts: 1, he’s from the Labour Party and 2, he’s Muslim. I guess I could add 3, in spite (or because) of 1 and 2, he’s still London’s mayor.

Irrelevant photo: Pussywillows–a sign of spring.

Mind you, some Conservative MPs are Muslim, but–

You know what? I was going to explain why it’s okay to be a Musim if you’re a Tory but not if you’re Labour, but I’d be making it up. I’m not inside these people’s heads and I have no idea what goes on there. What I can tell you is that a month ago Conservative MP Lee Anderson claimed Khan was controlled by Islamists. All hell broke loose, although nowhere near as much as if you’d said a Jewish politician was controlled by Zionists. Accusations of antisemitism kick up a far more powerful dust storm than accusations of Islamophobia. (Yes, I’m Jewish. Sorry to spoil the fun but you can’t accuse me of antisemitism for saying that.)

A Conservative Party source sort of defended Anderson by explaining, that “Lee was simply making the point that the mayor . . . has abjectly failed to get a grip on the appalling Islamist marches we have seen in London recently.”

Appalling Islamist marches? Those would be the ones against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. 

Anderson has since defected to a party further to the right, Reform UK and the ad’s been taken down, although the memory lingers on.

 

Easter eggs on the island of Sanday

Britain does Easter in a big way. Good Friday’s a bank holiday, which is Brit-speak for a national holiday. Easter Monday? That’s a bank holiday unless you’re in Scotland, in which case you’d better set the alarm and waddle in to work. But if you’re not in Scotland and you’re working a Monday-to-Friday job, you get a four-day weekend. 

Easter’s also the marker for schools to take a couple of weeks off. 

Your friendly local Jewish atheist–in case we’re not being clear about this, that’s me–had heard about Good Friday before moving here, although she did kind of vaguely think all Fridays were good, but Easter Monday was news to her. Having them as holidays reminds–okay, this her stuff is getting awkward. Having them as holidays reminds me that although Britain’s not a particularly religious country, it does have a state religion. That creates an interesting, contradictory picture.

What’s Easter like in the US? It doesn’t bring us any extra days off work, which immediately downgrades it to a minor holiday. For those of us who don’t see it as a religious holiday, it boils down to seeing rabbitty things everywhere. Maybe we go wild and buy a chocolate egg or something. For some families, it’ll involve a special meal of some sort. Parents who aren’t philosophically opposed to it put Easter baskets together for their kids. Or at least they used to. I hope they still do. Easter baskets are one of life’s small joys. They involve jelly beans, chocolate, and things that look eggish, rabbitish, or chickish. And fake grass. The fake grass is important, although to the best of my knowledge it doesn’t have any religious significance.

The British, on the other hand, go in for huge single chocolate eggs filled with various sorts of candy, and that brings us to the reason I’m telling you this: a small shop on the island of Sanday–one of the Orkney islands, way the hell up north, off the coast of Scotland–ordered some of those big Easter eggs, as any small food shop will as the holiday approaches. Unfortunately, the owner got careless and ordered 80 cases instead of 80 eggs, ending up with 720 eggs. For a population of 494.

Once he pulled himself together, he set up a competition, with the winner getting 100 eggs and the proceeds going to the RNLI–the Royal National LIfeboat Institution. He figured most people would give them away, but a few told him they were hell bent to eat all hundred if they won.

Last I read, he’d raised £3,000, but Nestle–a big-league maker of Easter eggs–offered to match donations up to a £10,000 limit and he might just make it. The story spread–how else would I have picked it up?–and donations and letters were coming in from around the world.  

As were orders for Easter eggs. Wjhy walk to the corner shop and buy one when you can order it from Sanday, so he’d busy mailing them. In fact, he had to order more to keep up with the demand.

Now that Easter’s over, he may be able to squeeze in a night’s sleep.

 

Think you know everything the Romans brought to Britain?

One of the less well known things the Romans brought was the bedbug. Or to be more accurate, since they never travel singly, bedbugs, plural. 

A team of archeologists at Vindolanda, a Roman garrison near Hadrian’s Wall, found evidence of Roman bedbugs. They’ve been found at one other Roman site, Alcester, but the Vindolanda batch dates to about 100 CE, making it Britain’s earliest bedbug find. The going theory is that they’d have arrived in whatever the Romans brought with them–clothes, straw, grain.

On the other hand, the Roman philosopher Pliny wrote that bedbugs helped cure ear infections and other illnesses, so I can’t help wondering if someone brought a few over as–well, not quite pets but supplies. 

How do we know Britain didn’t have bedbugs before the Romans came? I doubt we can absolutely, but no one’s found evidence of them, so until further evidence shows up we get to blame the Romans. 

The Vindolanda batch is long dead. It’s safe to visit.

 

Your reward for getting this far

A local paper, the Bude and Stratton Post, had a glorious headline this week: “Cost of parking rockets in Bude.” I read it three time before I stopped wondering, Who parks rockets in Bude? and realized, Oh. It’s a verb.

Love, death, and adverbs: It’s the news from Britain

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Residents of a care home in Surrey were sent Valentine’s cards–red heart, pink bow, all the traditional stuff—from that most caring of senders, a local funeral home. A spokesperson for the care home said residents were thrilled to get the cards, and doesn’t the involvement of a local business go to show how deeply embedded the care home is in the community? Read the quotes and you can hear “Look on the Sunny Side” playing between the lines.

Residents’ families, on the other hand–at least those who were quoted–said things like “appalling” and “insensitive.”

The funeral home itself said, “Oops” (that’s a rough summary), followed by some verbiage about “unintended distress,” and it’s that “unintended” that makes this a particularly British story. Because tossing in screamingly unnecessary adverbs is a very British thing. My favorite is when newsreaders tell  us that someone “sadly died.”

As far as I’ve been able to figure out—and I’ve lived here for almost 18 years now—you can’t die in this country without doing it sadly. You can’t die absurdly, or with a sense of relief, or even unnecessarily. Above all, you can’t die unadorned. The word died isn’t allowed out in public until it’s fully dressed and the correct adjective has been buttoned up to the neck.

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom. Indoors.

 

Immigration and the search for an enemy

Ten years ago, when Britain’s anti-immigrant fringe was still searching for a group of people frightening enough to rile up the populace, the Home Office discovered foreign students and offered them up as a target for some of the free-floating hate that drifts across the island with the rains that blow in from the Atlantic.

Why foreign students? The better question might be, Why not foreign students? They needed someone. The Home Office was led at the time by Theresa May, and she was working to establish her right-wing credentials by declaring a hostile environment for illegal immigrants, which ended up creating a hostile environment for legal ones. A hefty number of them were deported, but it’s never enough to satisfy the anti-immigrant lobby, so lucky Terri, Santa Claus brought her the off-season gift of a BBC documentary about cheating on the English-language competency tests that foreign students had to pass before they could renew their visas. The documentary focused on just a few test centers, but Terri turned off the TV and said, “Right. We’ll cancel the visas on 35,000 of them.” Or to put that another way, 97% of the people who took the test.

Is it even vaguely credible that 97% of the people who took the test cheated and, until Terri turned off that fateful TV program, got away with it?

Who cared? It played well with the anti-immigrant lobby, who by then had left the lobby and were occupying seats in the House of Commons.

Cue dawn raids, students held in detention centers for months, lost degrees, lost careers, lost reputations, and deportations before anyone had a chance to appeal or prove that their English was just fine, thanks. What the hell, they were a bunch of foreigners. Of course they cheated. Give them a chance to appeal and they’ll tie this mess up in red tape forever. Give them a chance to demonstrate their competence and they’ll only make us look silly.

Foreigners are sneaky like that.

So here we are, ten years late. Some 3,000 former students have won appeals and a new group is starting what sounds like a mass appeal. And since a TV series dramatizing a post office scandal drove politicians of all parties to make noise about compensating some deeply wronged sub-postmasters, a group of the former students are working on a TV script about what happened to them. To date, noise is all that’s come of the political agreement about the sub-postmasters, but still, if you can’t get justice, the illusion of it is comforting.

*

Lest you should be silly enough to expect consistency from the Home Office, lately it’s been closing its eyes and flinging work visas in what sound like some dodgy directions. Not because it now loves immigrants. It’s at least as anti-immigrant as it was under Theresa May, although it’s found a new boogey man: refugees who cross the Channel in small boats. They make for scarier headlines than foreign students.

The current crop of visas are meant for people to work in the care sector, which is understaffed and underpaid and relies heavily on immigrant workers. But the visas don’t go to individual care workers, they go through care providers, who get licenses to sponsor immigrant workers, and those providers are popping, mushroom-like, out of the soggy ground of our political bog. Or of our overdone metaphor.

One company that was granted 275 visas didn’t exist; 268 companies have never been inspected and some aren’t registered with the watchdog that’s supposed to do the inspecting. Some don’t have addresses, only post office boxes. Some have been formed so recently that they’ve never filed company accounts. One has a website with reviews from clients named John Doe and Jane Smith.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you. And myself.

The assumption is that the companies are selling the visas. I’ve seen reports of immigrant workers in the care sector paying as much as £15,000 for visas and once they get here being “housed in sub-standard accommodation and even forced to share beds.with colleagues.

“Some have been paid for just a fraction of the hours they have worked or [been] subjected to racist remarks, harassment, and intimidation if they complain about the treatment of the people they care for.

“Others have worked for several months without being paid by their employers, who claim this is to recoup fees towards the cost of the migrant workers’ training or accommodation.”

The number of companies with the power to sponsor visas more than doubled between 2022 (41,621) and 2023 (84,730).

 

How much for that Mao in the window?

A London auction house was selling artifacts–that’s a fancy word meaning stuff–from China’s Cultural Revolution, and a rare early edition of Mao Tes-Tung’s Little Red Book was expected to sell for more than £30,000.

What’s wrong with this picture? So much that I have no idea where to start, so I’ll leave you with the picture and save my adjectives for the time when, sadly, I have to report a death.

 

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a free stuffed toy . . .

. . . I can tell you how to get one.

This didn’t happen in Britain, but with a little work it could’ve, since it could happen any place where attractive nuisances entice people to trade coins for a chance to pick up stuffed toys with a mechanical claw and drop them down a chute so their kids can take them home and love them for ten minutes or so. Or not drop them down a chute, because no matter how simple it looks the machine never gives you quite enough time to get the toy where it needs to be.

In Australia, a three-year-old found a better way to get what he wanted. In the half-second when his father got distracted, he climbed up the chute and materialized inside the machine, standing upright among all the stuffed toys any kid could dream of.

Since using the claw to drop him back down the chute didn’t seem like a good idea, the father called the claw machine company, which asked helpful questions like, “How much money did you put in the machine?”

The only thing stuck in the machine was his son, he said, and he’d like to have him back.

The person on the other end of the line wasn’t programed to deal with that and the police ended up smashing the glass and extracting the kid. The media is (sadly) silent on the all-important question of whether the boy got to take a toy home.

 

From the Department of Historical Preservation

In an effort to polish Britain’s reputation for eccentricity and historical hoo-ha’s, the owner of a pub in Staffordshire, The Crooked House, has been ordered to rebuild it, brick by brick. It was built in 1765 and sank into the ground either because of mining in the area or a nearby water wheel (no, I don’t understand that last one either), until it sat at a 15-degree angle. It had been propped up in various ways over the years and was doing just fine until it was sold and–oops–mysteriously caught fire.

Then, just to make sure of things, the new owner had the shell bulldozed.

Local people got up in arms. Or up in containers, which they used to store 23,000 bricks that they salvaged from the rubble, and the new owner’s been ordered to put them back where they were, and at the pre-fire angle. Unless the owner appeals, they have three years, but they may be too distracted to bother, since the fire’s being treated as arson.

Of mice and men and women and Barbie dolls

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It’s not easy for me to write about the news these days without wanting to slit either my wrists or someone else’s–I lean toward the second choice, always–but I can offer you a few wristless bits and pieces. Let’s start with a mouse in Wales.

Yes, the world is indeed going to hell when the best news I can offer starts with a mouse. 

A retired postman in Wales, Rodney Holbrook, noticed when he got to the workbench in his shed, small objects–clothespins, corks, nuts, bolts–weren’t where he’d left them: they’d been gathered up into a box. So Holbrook set up a night vision camera and it captured a mouse tidying away the stuff he’d left out. Holbrook thinks it’s using the junk to disguise its stash of nuts, but to date no one’s asked the mouse, so that’s guesswork. 

He’s named it Welsh Tidy Mouse.

To understand the story fully, you have to understand the relationship between British men and their sheds. I don’t come anywhere close to understanding it, unfortunately. All I can tell you is that there’s some sort of magnetic attraction between the two.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise

 

I can also tell you that when I say “a shed” I’m not talking about a place outside the house to stuff all your junk but about a workshop. The shed’s roots run so deep in the male side of the culture that when I consulted Lord Google on the subject of men and sheds he led me to the Men’s Sheds Association, which reassured me that I hadn’t made up the connection. The group provides sheds that are “community spaces where men can enjoy practical hobbies. They’re about making friends, learning and sharing skills. Many guys come just for the tea and banter – everyone’s welcome.“

They might or might not welcome someone who isn’t of the male persuasion (they did say “everyone”), but my guess is that they’d be less thrown by a tidy mouse joining them. When they say “everyone,” they could easily mean everyone we’re thinking of. 

 

Speaking of men and women, though

Mattel, the company that makes Barbie dolls and that was thoroughly spoofed in the movie Barbie, is trying to cash in on the film by releasing four new dolls: a studio executive Barbie, a film star Barbie, a director Barbie, and a cinematographer Barbie. In response to which screenwriter Taffy Brodesser-Akner tweeted, “Where is Screenwriter Barbie? Does Mattel not know how to make sweatpants? Does Mattel not know how to get avocado toast on a t-shirt and just kind of leave it there?”

David Simon, who created The Wire went a step further, calling for a grip Barbie, a teamster Barbie, a “key set PA Barbie who has to go into Movie Star Barbie’s trailer and tell the delicate flower to get the fuck down to set because 120 other pissed-off Barbie’s are waiting for her. That film taught Mattel nothing.”

 

Enough of that. Is it safe to talk about politics?

Yes, but not for long or my (or someone else’s) wrists will be in danger. We’ll stick to the peripheral stuff.

When Boris Johnson was mayor of London, he made regular appearances at LBC Studios, which Lord Google tells me is a talk radio station but which uses a camera. Don’t ask me; when I hosted a radio show, we were invisible and free to wear as much avocado toast as we wanted, although this was so long ago avocado toast hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had avocados. Or toast. There wasn’t a camera to be found.

The reason the camera’s important is that Johnson made such a habit of mumbling and sliding his chair out of camera range in response to tough questions that eventually they bolted the guest’s chair to the floor. They called it the Boris Bolt. It didn’t stop him from mumbling when he didn’t have anything sensible to say, but it did at least keep him on camera when he did it.

*

Okay, just a little more about politics. This is from Ottawa County, Michigan, where a group of commissioners affiliated with Ottawa Impact, a right-wing Christian group, took over the county board in November 2022. One of the things they did was try to get rid of the county’s public health officer, Adeline Hambley. She and her department had supported mask mandates and Covid vaccinations, making her an instrument of government tyranny. They’d also offered sexual health tests at a Pride festival, which the new commissioners saw as “encouraging sexually perverse behavior,” according to a Washington Post article. 

Hambley wasn’t about to go quietly. As she saw it, her job was about health, not about serving the board. “I want to work with the commissioners so we can protect the community,” she said. “But I am not their subordinate.”

After ten months of negotiation (fighting might be a better word), both parties agreed that the county would pay her $4 million in return for her resignation.

Then the commissioners discovered that bad things would fall off the top shelf of the county’s financial closet and smack them on their heads if they went through with the deal, because they hadn’t consulted the most important player in the game, their insurers. 

What sort of bad things am I talking about? They’d lose their insurance, which would lose the county its AAA bond rating, which would drive up the cost of borrowing.

Oops.

At last call, the county was trying to back out of the deal and Hambley and her lawyers were trying to enforce it. 

If they ever do get rid of her, the plan is to replace her with a local HVAC (that’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) safety manager who’s never held public office and, I think we can all assume, knows a bit more about public health than the Welsh Tidy Mouse.

Hambley? She’s an environmental health specialist with an MBA in business administration and a minor in government tyranny. 

In the most recent article I found, the mess was still working its way through the courts.

Portcullis House and Westminster Palace, the crumbling seats of British government

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If you need a simple image to stand in for the complexities of Britain’s crumbling infrastructure–and who doesn’t, every hour on the hour?–look no further than Portcullis House, which was built in 2001 as office space for 213 MPs, along with their staff members and (I have to assume) general hangers-on. Already rain is leaking in and panes of glass are dropping from its gloriously dramatic atrium roof.

The original budget for this marvel of architectural longevity was £165 million, although the actual cost was £235 million. But don’t grumble. What’s £70 million between friends? The building was supposed to last for 120 years (or 200 years, according to a different article), so that’s a bargain, right?

Okay, maybe it’s worth a grumble. That works out to roughly £1 million per MP, and the price includes, as a kind of bonus, £440 per MP for reclining chairs (not available to staff and hangers-on) and £150,000 for a dozen or so fig trees that were imported from Florida to grace the atrium–at least until (slight exaggeration alert) they get bashed to bits by falling glass.

On the positive side, anyone’s welcome to enjoy the fig trees. 

The price doesn’t include some £10 million in legal costs over a contract that wasn’t awarded to the lowest bidder.

Irrelevant photo: stormy seas near Bude

Last May, the building needed mechanical and electrical repairs estimated at £143 million. But that’s just a start. A more recent estimate that includes the roof comes in at $235 million. So that’s the same amount as it cost to build, right? 

Possibly. Maybe it’s more, because I’m not sure if the second estimate includes the original £143 million or if it’s in addition. Never let me loose around numbers.

 

Yes, but . . . 

. . . in 2002, the National Audit Office reported that the building had been constructed to a “high standard of architectural design, materials and workmanship,” so you shouldn’t worry about any of this. Such a high standard that in 2018 MPs were already mumbling about lawsuits because of leaks and cracks in the roof. 

Sorry, just found another article: make that 2016. If anything’s happened beyond mumblings and grumblings–you know, anything in the way of actual lawsuits–I can’t found traces of it.

 

But what about the roof?

The atrium roof is the dramatic bit of what’s gone wrong. It’s made of double-glazed panels–basically air sandwiched between two sealed panes of glass. Their goal is to keep the heat in and let the light through, and double-glazed panels aren’t bad at that until they start to leak, which one–or maybe that’s two; it’s all a little murky–did, dumping lots o’ water on the floor many yards below. All across the political spectrum, it was described as a deluge. 

It’s heartening, in our politically divisive climate, that we can still find something to bring political enemies together. 

So far, not much glass has fallen out, but then you don’t need a whole lot of falling glass to make the average person who has to walk underneath it nervous. They’ll be putting up a safety net, just in case.

The problem is that there’s no simple way to get up to the roof. It wasn’t designed with repairs in mind. It was pretty. How much can you expect for £235 million, after all? The only way to inspect it is with a drone and the only way to do maintenance is to send up an abseiling team. Which, predictably, means not a lot of maintenance gets done.

I’m trying to picture a team abseiling with a double-glazed window panel and I can’t do it. They’d end up blown to Buckinghamshire. (It’s a non-metropolitan county, whatever that means.) I suspect any replacement has to involve a crane. And yet more money.   

The roof above the offices is also leaking, and rain’s finding its way into MPs’ offices. On the other hand, the walls and windows are bomb proof. If you want to harm 213 MPs, you’d do better to use a rainstorm than a bomb.

 

Wait–we’ve lost track of Westminster Palace, and it was in the headline

If those 213 MPs weren’t housed in Portcullis House, they would (I think) be in Westminster Palace, where both the House of Lords and the House of Commons meet. It’s positively overloaded with history. It’s also overloaded with leaks, mice, and fire hazards. The pipework is so complicated and interwoven that the pipes can only be patched, not replaced. The heating stays on because the folks in charge aren’t sure they could restart the system if they once turned it off.

And did I mention asbestos? It’s full of asbestos. And electrical plugs that spark and fizz. Toilets leak–at least one of them into an MP’s office–and I have it on good authority that this is worse than rain. A fire patrol is on duty 24 hours a day–and needs to be. Between 2007 and 2017, they had 60 small fires. 

In 2018, a stone angel on the outside of the building dropped a chunk of masonry the size of a football onto the ground. In 2022, an exclusion zone was set up.

So why doesn’t the building get fixed or replaced? It’ll be expensive. And everyone will either have to move out for a while, which some number of traditionalist MPs resist, or the repairs will have to be done while government totters on around it, making the repairs both slower and more expensive. A specially convened committee recommended moving everyone out. So far, the recommendation has been ignored.

Both choices are problematic, so the only sensible alternative is to do nothing, which costs an estimated £2 million a week.

I’ve seen various estimates for how much a full slate of repairs will cost, including £3.6 billion, £13 billion, and between £9.5 billion and £18.5 billion. So what the hell, make up a number. Construction never comes in at the estimated cost anyway. 

If you want links for all those estimates, sorry, I’m bored. Look them up yourself.

A cross-party committee–possibly the same one whose recommendations about moving out while the building’s repaired are being ignored–said there was “a real and rising risk” that “a catastrophic event will destroy the Palace.” Possibly from an angel hurling something worse than a stone football. 

The thing is, schools and hospitals around the country are genuinely falling apart–that’s what I meant about the infrastructure crumbling, and it comes without an exaggeration warning. The buildings most recently in the headlines were constructed on the cheap with a particular kind of concrete that’s now past its use-by date. In the face of that, it’s hard for a government to let itself be caught committing however many billion pounds into for repairs at Westminster. 

But even before the latest crumbling schools and hospitals became public knowledge, no government, no party, no nobody wanted to be associated with the outrageous expense of fixing the building. The rest of the country–schools, the National Health Service, local government, and oh, so much more–are being squeezed by austerity, a political word that means We’re shrinking your budget and don’t much care what sort of problems that creates becasue it’ll look like your fault. So again, a few billion pounds to fix the seat of government isn’t a good look.

Neither is the money that subsidizes food and booze for MPs and Lords at Westminster, but that’s less public, not to mention a slow drip as opposed to a deluge, so they continue. One theory holds that some of the traditionalists don’t want to move out of Westminster Palace for repairs because the subsidies wouldn’t move with them.

So before any serious repairs are undertaken, that angel’s going to have to drop something more dramatic than a stone football. And have excellent aim.

“Party Gate” artwork sweeps the Turnip Prize

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This year’s Turnip Prize winner is Mr. Keep Calm for his artistic creation, “Party Gate.” 

You know about the British scandal called Partygate, right? It was about the government of the day throwing parties inside (and outside) 10 Downing Street during the pandemic while the rest of the country was in lockdown and less well-connected people were being fined (some heavily) for breaking the rules. Not to mention while families were being kept from saying goodbye to dying relatives. It shocked us all that a government led by someone as correct and responsible as Boris Johnson would do such a thing. Not one of us had noticed the first two, three, or fifteen parties they threw. Even the ones that made the front pages.

So that explains the work’s title, but what’s the Turnip Prize? It was created in 1999, after Tracy Emin won the prestigious Turner Prize for a piece of art called “My Bed,” which was–you got it–an unmade bed, presumably hers, although never having slept with her, or wanted to, I can’t vouch for that. 

The Turnip contest rules specify that any work that displays “too much effort” is disqualified.

Mr. Keep Calm’s work qualified. “I was too lazy to take the gate to the recycling tip and decided to enter it into the Turnip Prize,” he said. “It’s a great honour and I can see this as an opening for greater works to come.”

Competition organizer Trevor Prideaux said, “Mr. Keep Calm . . . clearly has what it takes to be recognised in modern art circles and will be remembered in art history for no time at all!”

Irrelevant photo: fields after a frost.

Did a New Zealand MP pledge loyalty to King Charles or a skin rash?

New Zealand hasn’t cut its ties to the British crown, so its MPs have to pledge allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment, who at the moment (spoiler alert) is named Charles. So some members of the Māori Party pledged allegiance in Māori–not a controversial thing to do; it’s one of the country’s official languages–using harehare, a word for Charles that can also mean a skin rash. Or something unpleasant. 

A skin rash and its related meanings are the more common translations, but either Charles or Charlie is arguably accurate. Te reo Māori–the Māori language–is like that. One word can have so many meanings that I stopped turning to the dictionary. It was leaving me more confused than I was when I started. And if that isn’t difficult enough for someone trying to learn it, the language has multiple variants, so pronunciations and meanings shift depending on where you are and who you’re talking to.     

In the past, the Māori Party has called for New Zealand to divorce itself from the monarchy, but I’m wondering if a skin cream wouldn’t be more appropriate.

 

Countries that don’t exist

I seem to remember Ikea selling a shower curtain that featured a map of the world with New Zealand deleted, possibly because some people are phobic about rashes. But that’s ancient history–it happened at least two years ago and probably more. Who remembers that far back? The updated version of Your Planet, Edited, comes to us courtesy of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, which was asked whether Australia existed and answered no. It was sure enough of the result to put it in a nice little text box.

And that’s how I learned about a longstanding conspiracy theory that claims Australia’s fake news. 

Are they serious about that? These days, who can tell? 

Once the news of Australia’s non-existence hit social media, an Australian wanted to know, “Does that mean I don’t have to pay my bills?”

Sadly, it doesn’t. Later searches held that Australia does, in fact, exist. And if the person who raised the question hasn’t fallen into the sea, it will be taken as proof of the country’s existence, because some people will seize on anything to prove they’re right.

 

And that gives you real confidence in . . .

. . . Sports Illustrated, which published several articles generated by artificial intelligence on its website, complete made-up names for the writers and AI-generated author photos.

Or else the articles weren’t generated by AI. It depends who you want to believe, since we can all believe whatever the hell we want these days. 

As far as I can figure out, Advon Commerce, “an e-commerce company that works with retailers and publishers,” generated the copy, and it told the owners of Sports Illustrated that “the articles in question were written and edited by humans” but that it lets writers use pseudonyms to protect their privacy. 

You know what writers are like. They can be so shy about getting their names out.

The scales have tipped heavily in the direction of the articles being generated by AI, with the weasel-words (you know: might, appears to, that kind of thing) disappearing from articles about it. The company that owns Sports Illustrated has since fired its CEO, not long after having fired three lower-level execs.

Did any of that have to do with the articles?

“We have nothing further to add to the company’s prior statements regarding AI,” a spokesperson said.

Staff at the magazine, along with the union representing them, pitched a fit when the articles first came out–they would’ve anyway, but the magazine’s owners has been cutting staff recently, which didn’t put them in a forgiving mood–saying the articles violated basic journalistic standards.

As we all know, though, cutting staff and using AI to generate articles aren’t related. I only put them next to each other because I’m a rabble-rouser from way back.

 

Your understated headline of the week . . .

. . . comes from the Guardian, a newspaper I have a huge amount of respect for, but that won’t keep me from making fun of it. It’s pretty good at making fun of itself anyway. A November 6 headline reads, “Sellafield nuclear leak could pose safety risk.”  

Yes, I could see where a nuclear leak might do that. 

Full disclosure: the online headline that I linked to is a little different but still not great. The article goes on to say that Sellafield is Europe’s most hazardous nuclear site, with a crumbling building and cracks in the toxic sludge reservoir. Two days before, an article mentioned that Sellafield had been hacked as early as 2015 by groups linked to Russia and China, but that the news is only coming out now. 

So yes. It could, just potentially, post a safety risk, although I’ll admit the headline won’t win any great-headline prizes. If I get to give out the award, I’ll give it to the (sadly, unknown) paper that ran with “Red tape holds up bridge.”

 

Your heartwarming stories for the week

When California’s wildfires ripped through a stand of redwoods in 2020, it got hot enough to defoliate the trees, which normally resist burning. They don’t get to be 2,000 years old by packing it in every time a wildfire comes along. It looked like the end of the ancient trees, but they’re showing signs of life. Drawing on sugars they stored decades before, they’re pouring energy into buds that had been dormant under the bark for centuries and are now sprouting from the blackened trunks.

That has nothing to do with Britain, but what the hell. It’s a nice story. We could do with a dash of hope.

*

Back in Britain, a three-year-old’s stuffed toy–a monkey called Monkey–was lost when he and his mother were on a train, and (reading between the lines here) he had the predictable meltdown. His mother says he was distraught. I expect she was too by the time she reported the loss in Birmingham, where they changed trains.

The monkey was found in Edinburgh–it had continued on to the end of the line–and was sent to Birmingham the same day. It stayed there overnight and someone found it a little Christmas sweater with the British Rail logo in sparkly yarn, then they sent on to Bristol, where mother and son collected it. It had traveled 619 miles, on three train lines. 

No charge. 

*

In St. Paul, Minnesota, someone returned a library book, Famous Composers, that was more than a hundred years overdue. 

The library no longer charges for overdue books, so no charge there either. Which is just as well, because the person who returned it (predictably enough) wasn’t the person who borrowed it. 

Musical chairs, artificial intelligence, and British politics

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The people allegedly leading Britain played musical chairs this week. Suella Braverman, who’d been the head of the Home Office, was the one most noticeably left sitting on the floor when her chair was yanked away. So she goes from Home to home, or at least to Parliament’s humiliating back benches, where she’ll do everything she can to make herself the focal point of the party’s combative right wing. 

Her de-chairification surprises no one. She was a horror show, although that doesn’t disqualify anyone these days. More to the point is that she was too blatent about not following orders. 

I don’t like admitting this, but I find it hard to make fun of her. She drains the humor right out of me, so forgive a lapse or three here.

One of the least horrid things she’s done, and that’s because it didn’t involve any actual consequences, was say that people lived on the street as a lifestyle choice. She’s also tried to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda (the Supreme Court just ruled that illegal) and dog-whistled up a right-wing mob that fought the police and tried to attack London’s ceasefire demonstration.

Irrlevant photo: Grapes, growing above the tables at an outdoor cafe this past summer.

 

Since her chair was pulled out from under her, she smashed it up on her way out (metaphor alert there), sending a letter of resignation that accused the prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, of failure, betrayal, magical thinking, and bad breath.  She claims that she made a secret agreement with Sunak when she accepted the post of Home Secretary, which he betrayed.

Would she release the text of it, a reporter asked? 

Um, not today. 

In the meantime, as long as he was moving the furniture, Mr. du Jour moved everyone else around too. The foreign secretary became the home secretary, which is his seventh ministerial position since 2019.  He is, of course, an expert in whatever the hell he was in charge of in all of them. The health secretary became the environment secretary. The chief secretary to the Treasury became the paymaster general.

Hands up anyone who knew the country had a paymaster general.

Me neither.

And to solve a problem I didn’t know we had, he appointed Esther McVey to be a minister without portfolio in charge of the government’s anti-woke agenda. We’ll all be notified that we need to turn in our alarm clocks any day now. 

Okay, she’s also in charge of common sense. I did know we had problems around that.

To replace the foreign minister, Mr. du Jour grabbed someone who’s been sitting home contemplating the obesity of the universe* and made him the new foreign secretary.

Who are we talking about? Why, David Cameron, one of our many former prime ministers. We’re rich in former prime ministers these days. Since Britain’s deindustrialization, producing them is one of our top industries and if you’d like to order a few dozen let me know and I’ll send you a link.

Cameron, what with being the foreign secretary of the moment, isn’t available for export just yet, but let me talk him up anyway. He’s the guy who thought having a referendum on Brexit would mean his party would stop arguing about it, the country would settle down, and we’d stay in the European Union and live happily ever after. So yeah, he’s a bright guy with infallible political instincts.

After he retreated from politics, he got caught with his fingers not quite in the till but close enough that an inquiry scolded him for a “significant lack of judgment” after he lobbied government officials on behalf of a bank he had an interest in, which collapsed not long after. But who cares about that? We’re all so punchy, it looks like the act of an elder statesman. Mr. du Jour’s hoping Cameron comes with a stash of stability and authority that he’ll share with his several-times-removed replacement, and maybe even pass around the table at cabinet meetings. 

As for Mr. du Jour himself, no one yanked his chair away but someone did replace his political persona. Some five weeks ago at the Conservative Party conference, he presented himself as the candidate of change. He wasn’t running yet, but so what? It’s never too early to stake out your position. It makes you look strong. And stable. And several other adjectives. He would be the candidate of change, overturning three decades of political consensus.

Why did he want to overturn thirty years of political consensus? Is political consensus necessarily bad? Who cares? It’s something to run against, and it costs nothing. Or–well, yeah, it costs a lot when the country falls apart, but it doesn’t appear as a line item in the budget so you can always blame someone else for the results. 

Whatever. His party has been in power for thirteen years, making it hard to be the candidate of change, so whatever he came up with was likely to be extreme.

But now Mr. du Jour is positioning himself as the candidate of stability. He’s moving to the center of his party. Which isn’t that close to center, mind you. Cameron’s the guy who introduced austerity, driving a fair swath of the country into poverty and leaving the infrastructure creaking and groaning, but hey, it’s all just politics, right? Don’t take it personally.

Are these people real? 

Possibly not. It turns out that artificial intelligence can now generate pictures that look more real than pictures of real people. Admittedly, it has to stick to the faces of whites to do it. It’s absorbed the structural racism of the society in which it functions. 

As an aside, if Suella Braverman heard me say that, she’d accuse me of being a member of the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, and she’d be one-third right. I’m not a big fan of tofu and can’t stay up much past nine these days, but the Guardian’s a good paper.  

But back to artificial intelligence. I’m reasonably sure that these people aren’t real–especially Sunak, who’s had more political persona transplants than any flesh-and-blood human could survive.

I mentioned that AI isn’t as convincing at generating non-white faces, though, and Britain’s current government has a significant number of brown-skinned cabinet members, who are doing fuck-all to make the country a more equal place, except possibly for the people at the very top. Or at least for themselves. So they may look slightly less real than the white cabinet members, and–following the logic that says the most real looking people are the ones who aren’t real–you might therefore mistake them for real people. They’re not. They’re a double bluff using AI’s limitations to scam us all. 

We’re being governed by avatars who’ve broken loose from some apocalyptic computer game. Or the next season of Dr. Who.

 

And from the Department of Political Overreach . . .

. . . comes this story: 

The principal of a Texas school introduced a policy that said students could only play theatrical roles that aligned with their sex at birth. His goal was to cut a trans boy out of a starring role in a production of Oklahoma. High school drama departments being what they are though–there are never enough boys–that meant other students couldn’t play the roles they’d landed. 

All hell broke loose and the school said, okay, fine, you perverts can play any role you want but we’re cutting the play so it’s more age appropriate–incidentally cutting the trans kid’s solo. 

What’s age inappropriate in Oklahoma? It was first performed in 1943, when sex hadn’t even been invented yet.

More hell broke loose and the school board reversed the principal’s decision.

We’ll give the last word to the trans kid, Max Hightower: “To know there is a big group out of people who want to help me and help everyone affected, it feels like we’re on even sides now and can actually win this fight.”  

*

And this: The Florida legislature is considering a bill that would ban any discussion of girls’ menstrual cycles in the schools before the sixth grade. Any discussion. So if some kid is bold enough to bring it up, presumably everyone has to run out of the room. Forget the enforced calm of a fire drill. Run, kids, before the sound wave catches you. It’ll destroy your innocence and you’ll never get it back.

How old are kids in the sixth grade? Eleven to twelve. Some kids get their periods at eight. 

*

Not to be outdone, a priest in a Czech village smashed the pumpkins that kids had carved and set out near his church. Twice, since when the original ones were replaced he did it a second time. 

In a letter of apology, he wrote, “Leaving the rectory on Sunday evening, I saw numerous symbols of the satanic feast of ‘Halloween’ placed in front of our sacred grounds. I acted according to my faith and duty to be a father and protector of the children entrusted to me and removed these symbols,” 

He wouldn’t have done that if he’d known they’d been carved by kids, he said,

“But try to remember that my duty as a figure of authority and a priest is to protect children and families from hidden evil.”

Now there’s a guy who knows how to apologize.

 

And finally the Department of Political Irrelevance reports . . . 

. . . that deodorant sales are up 15% since workers have (reluctantly, for the most part) returned to the office after working remotely.

—————-

  • Contemplating the obesity of the universe: I’m indebted for this phrase to a guy who taught philosophy, and to a student of his who wrote in a paper, “When we consider the obesity of the unvierse, we know there must be a god.”