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…

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The 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…

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Making 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…

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Taking 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…

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Hancock’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…

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Burying 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…

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Not-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…

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Red 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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