Be afraid, be very afraid: there’ll be rain … and wind!

 

There was hardly anything in today’s “news”~papers to get excited about. Even good old ‘staff’ has given up: “Newspaper headlines: Moose stabs Joe Pasquale and Gary Lineker applauded” (link). Obviously, we don’t have any problems besetting the body politic of this country!

There is the weather though, and the precious Met Office has got it wrong again. I’ll tell you a guilty secret, between you and me: I’ve now become addicted to checking out the local forecast for my neck of the woods which the Met Office provides. Yesterday, it had the ‘sun’ icon across most of the day. This morning it’s dire: rain, even hail! Since the image changes hour by hour, we’ll see how long this forecast lasts. Obviously, just looking out of the window to check the weather is too hard for Generation Smartphone.

There’s also the good old BBC ‘weather’, for the whole country. printing the ‘warnings’ by the Met Office we’ve all come to love and cherish (link). I’m certain these ‘warnings’ will be changed as the day goes on, because that’s what the Met Office does. It’s nicely sorted according to area and time of day:  ‘yellow’ for wind (!) and rain (!) for some areas, ‘amber’ for others. I wonder if we’ll see ‘red’ when an actual storm is just about hitting the area wherever we live.

I found some ‘other’ news on the online front pages of the august broadsheets. Going with The Times (link, at the time of writing) I really couldn’t find it in me to even click on such promising headlines as the one warning of foreign students taking away places at Uni for our homegrown lot.

I’m also extremely disinterested in ‘Gen Z’ and the cost of  their ‘dreams’. As a despised oldie I know that dreams at that age are lovely but that real life will clobber one. In the end, I think it’s not about having ‘achieved’ one’s dreams but about having lived a good life – a life not determined by possessions or positions but one where one can look oneself in the face each morning, without shame.

There were a few headlines I found mildly interesting. The articles themselves however warbled without addressing the actual, underlying problems, for example this one in the DT: 

“Thousands of new homes but no GP’s surgery – the real reason for nimbyism – The UK’s biggest new town since the 1960s has precious few amenities – and the development is testing local infrastructure to the limit” (paywalled link)

The report certainly doesn’t ask what role the huge influx of ‘guests’ might conceivably be playing on the housing and ‘GP’ market. That would be racist …

Staying with ‘health’, there’s another report in the DT with an unpromising headline: “Children as young as seven to get NHS trans treatment” (paywalled link). It seems that children with these problems “will be offered psychological support and therapy that will focus on issues that may have led to their feelings about their gender.” (paywalled link). Does this mean they’ll look at the role of social media and NGOs? The article doesn’t say …

There is one very pertinent warning which came from Dr David Bell who became a whistleblower regarding the works of the infamous Tavistock Clinic, now closed (my emphasis):

“Dr Bell also described the definition of gender incongruence in childhood included in the specification as “dangerous”. It says it is characterised by “make-believe or fantasy play, toys, games, or activities and playmates that are typical of the experienced gender rather than the assigned sex”. The definition, which comes from the World Health Organisation, is “completely the wrong way of looking at it”, said Dr Bell. He added: “We are corrupting a child’s capacity to have an imagination and imposing a gender stereotype on them.” (paywalled link)

Just so! I wonder how long it’ll take our Westminster chattering classes to realise that even this small change in the NHS treatment is coming perilously close to Russian laws. After all, who wants to be called a Putin-lover just because they demand a far more careful approach to this issue than certain NGOs and their helpers in the MSM want all of us to accept …

Finally: ‘Culture’! I have to applaud the DT for giving a reminder, in the form of a film critique, headlined “The brutal, brilliant Hiroshima film showing you what Oppenheimer didn’t dare” (paywalled link). The author is referring to the 1953 film by Hideo Sekigawa. I checked: it’s available to buy or rent on youtube and amazon. I’ll certainly watch it later this evening.

That’s all I have for today. As for the weather – I know who is to blame: SE Water which imposed a hosepipe ban on 26th June which apparently is still in place. Will they ever learn that hosepipe bans equal rain and bad weather as soon as the ban is active? Seems not … Have a good weekend.