This week I’ve been hugely enjoying Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. Harvey lives in our fair county and teaches creative writing ‘just 30 minutes from Wiltshire’ as some of our rival local newspapers might put it (see last week’s column) or Bath, as the rest of the world might describe it.
Regular readers will know of my belief in the importance of local newspapers. They’re an important cog in keeping communities properly informed and a vital check and balance to ensure local democracy is held to account. Unregulated Facebook groups, which is where we might end up in a decade’s time, is not the same thing.
Oh God. Oh Good. Writing this column while the polls are open in the US Presidential election is a bit of a hostage to fortune: hopefully by the time you read this the result will be clear one way or the other, and you’ll know which of these sentences is the right response!
‘Autumn days when the grass is jewelled…’ So went the song I sang in school assembly when I was growing up. I’m not saying the hymn was of its time, but other things we said a ‘great big thank you’ for were the smell of bacon, the singing milkman and ‘jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled’, the sort of shoehorned-in rhyme even I might baulk at.
If you’re in government, setting up a listening exercise must seem a good idea. You’re there to serve the people so why not ask the people what they want?
‘Like James Bond meets the Archers.’ So summarised Adam Straw KC on the opening day of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry. Straw, who also described Salisbury as ‘rural’, sounds like one of those Islington lawyers who don’t get out of London much. Hopefully he’ll be a bit sharper as the inquiry progresses.
My father is known in my family, among other things, for making the best poached eggs.
So last week I took my daughter to see Taylor Swift. As I have bored readers with on several occasions, getting a ticket felt like the pop music equivalent of one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets.
Older readers might remember my travails last summer in trying to get tickets for my youngest daughter to see Taylor Swift. This involved a confusing combination of sign-ups, lotteries, waitlists and last-minute reprieves. By the time, Ticketmaster finally allowed me a five-minute window to buy a ticket, I was grateful enough to hand over half my yearly salary for the privilege.
A break can be a chance to recharge the batteries and refresh the mind, to take stock of daily life and see things from a different perspective.
