I’ll start with the happy ending: Nigel Farage is a big fat hypocrite.. Now you know where I’m going with this, I can begin.
Last week’s political storm concerned Emily Thornberry, the MP for Islington and until recently the Shadow Attorney General. In the last hours of the Rochester & Strood by-election camapign, she tweeted a photo of a house bedecked with St George flags and a white van outside. Caption: “Image from #Rochester”.
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Category: Diary (Page 69 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
For a while now I’ve been occasionally posting the same tweet, noting that its ‘International Men’s Day’ and/or ‘White History Month’. Continue reading
There’s a new documentary about David Hockney coming to the BBC, so he’s been doing media interviews. This morning he was on the Radio 4 Today Programme and last week he was in the Observer. Answering questions from fellow artists, he came out in support of… fracking!
Why? Well, for the pragmatic reason that we need the energy… and he can’t abide the alternative, which is wind turbines. In 2011, feeding reactionary quotes to the Daily Mail Hockney said that modern windmills are “big ugly things… I certainly wouldn’t paint them”.
I find the “beauty/ugliness” argument against wind farms incredibly odd. If we eschew renewable energy and burn more fossil fuels, as Hockney advocates, we will add to the problem of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and accelerate global warming. This, in turn, will lead to the ruination of precisely the landscapes that Hockney and his fellow artists throughout history have enjoyed painting. Continue reading
https://twitter.com/henley_regatta/status/532567603714457600
Congratulations to the rocket scientists from the European Space Agency who successfully landed a probe on the duck shaped comet 67P. It makes me proud to be European, a fine thought amid the relentless Euro-skepticism from UKIP and the Tories. As Nick Cohen said in the Spectator today, it’s worth remembering that support for the EU is at a 23 year high, with a plurality of British voters favouring membership. 56% of people favour staying in, while 36% of people would leave. Yes yes, the ESA is not an EU body, but apparently 20% of its funding originates from the EU. Let us just say that the success of this mission shows the value of international cooperation towards a shared vision, that could never be achieved by just one of the countries involved. Continue reading
The Great War began 100 years ago, but it still feels like part of our world. First, because the outcome of that war shaped the rest of the twentieth century, and framed many of our current obsessions. But also because most of us are only once-removed from the action. I was born relatively late in the twentieth century, yet I met and was photographed with a great-grandfather who fought on the Western Front. Many of us will have spoken to relatives who remember the conflict (even if they were not combatants).
The centenary of the war is a landmark moment that prompts me to ponder how history is like a concertina. Sometimes, events feel very close; at other times, they are incredibly far away. We often get a shock when we realise that an event we think of as quite recent is actually ‘history’ (today, for example, Twitter is in shock that ‘Everybody Want To Rule The World’ by Tears For Fears is thirty years old). Continue reading