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Keeping a sense of proportion
Two world-shattering events are currently being pored over by the media this week. Responding to a perceived dis, a powerful, bullying global figurehead, self-deluded and traumatised by a violent childhood, leaps into somebody else’s space, delivers a painful blow followed by a stream of obscenities. All in the full glare of live television. The assailant…
Read MoreThe rest is history
So here we are, two years on from the first UK lockdown. A time for reflection. We all have our own memories of March 2020 – for me, it’s giving my flatmate a dodgy haircut and making my first forays into sourdough cultivation – and countries across the world are using this sober anniversary as…
Read MoreMaking a drama out of a crisis?
It’s been something of an emotional rollercoaster news-wise this week. We were able, briefly, to draw a much needed breath from the relentless coverage of the misery being inflicted on the people of Ukraine, and celebrate the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. So what if the Saudis hate us for colluding with their sworn enemy, Iran, let…
Read MoreTaking the P
As surely as night follows day, no sooner has a new Health Secretary got his knees under the desk than plans emerge for another set of NHS reforms. Having completed a national meet and greet programme, aka The Road to Recovery Tour, Mr Javid now professes to have the cure-all to the NHS’s ills. Handily, the four core ingredients of his medicinal…
Read MoreHancock’s Half Hour too long
Insight has tried to keep this week’s edition a Russia-free zone – a bit like Chelsea FC and Antibes marina – but we cannot ignore the events of the past week, and ponder at the peculiar actions of a self-deluding narcissist. We refer, of course, to the recent appearance of Matt Hancock in the Diary of…
Read MoreBurying bad news
Back in September 200, most of the world watched in horror as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Not everyone was frozen into inaction however. A combative special advisor to the then Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers, was watching the events unfold from her home. At some point between the first and second tower crumbling, she…
Read MoreNot-news is good news
Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there He wasn’t there again today I wish, I wish he’d go away… With acknowledgement to William Hughes Mearns’ poem, Antigonish, it’s been something of a week for not-news. Lots of things didn’t happen and several people didn’t appear to be there. Top of the not-news…
Read MoreRed faces all round
Wiping the dust off and clambering onto the family Peloton for the first time in, well far too long to be honest, I was left feeling virtuous if a little giddy. That was actually before one of the relentlessly upbeat instructors had whooped and high-fived me through a sweaty and dyspnoeic twenty minute, so-called low impact…
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