G’bye and g’day

There’s a very old canard about a traveller, on arriving at the Australian border control, being asked if he had a criminal record. To which the man answers, “I didn’t know that was still mandatory…”. It’s not a joke that goes down terribly well these days.  The genesis of the quip is over two hundred…

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Paws for thought

Paws for thought Never shy to point out the absurdities of life – in particular as they relate to the communications industry or the health and care sector – this has been something of a bumper week. Especially for veganism: After years of being vilified as full of sugar and salt, beans on toast have been…

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Transported to another place…

Motoring news The announcement has not been made public yet, but you now have a new Secretary of State for Transport. It will come as something of a surprise to Insight readers to learn that the new man for the job is me. I appreciate that this will be somewhat shocking news to the incumbent,…

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Poets Cornered?

Does the rise of the chatbots threaten the nation’s poets? Not for the first time, Insight has arrived somewhat late to the party, in this instance, the rave that is ChatGPT. Depending on your point of view, this latest bit of artificial intelligence, (full name, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) will either debase the art of…

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Missing the point?

Did the Lancashire Constabulary get it right? This blog was originally written before the discovery of a body on the River Wyre over the weekend. Sadly, it seems inevitable that it will turn out to be that of missing mother, Nicola Bulley. In the week prior to this, the British media had gone into one…

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Wizard idea

Even the keenest observers of health news might be surprised to learn that there is another ambulance strike today, Friday. The BBC homepage affords the news with little more than a “Strikes Update: How Friday 10 February’s walkouts will affect you”.  The ambulance strike has slipped from front page news, and the nurses and physios…

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Tell it to the birds

At last, a piece of good news that will, quite literally, cheer us all up. In a consummate bit of PR, the Royal Society for Protection of Birds made the headlines with news that listening to birdsong boosts mental wellbeing in 90% of adults.  The YouGov poll commissioned by the RSPB found that 88% of…

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Jaw-jaw vs war-war?

Many of the “soldiers” that make up the band of mercenaries collectively known as the Wagner Group, are convicts. Faced with the unpalatable choice of doing stir in a Russian gaol, or being used as cannon fodder in Ukraine, many have opted to take their chances with the latter. Russia has a history of deploying penal battalions…

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