Monday
Who does David Cameron think he is? Well, a lord, of course (he’s right on that one, eye-rollingly enough). Still, our noble foreign secretary drew Labour ire this week when it emerged that his recent tour of central Asia had been conducted not in an RAF jet or comparable chartered plane but – shock news, this – in “one of the most expensive, most luxurious private jets on the market”.
That’s the Embraer Lineage 1000, which has been described as “the ultimate symbol of wealth” with its “comfortable double beds, elegant tables and fine crockery”. Yours for just £10,000 an hour.
The Foreign Office says this was the most “time-effective” way for Cameron to “pursue the UK’s interests” in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Labour was unimpressed. Ministers are supposed to be careful with taxpayers’ money, not “swan around the world like a … Kardashian sister”, countered the shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, libelling swans everywhere.
But wait – maybe it’s a family thing. Thornberry has evidently forgotten Cameron’s extremely random claim in 2015 that he and Kim Kardashian are, in fact, 13th cousins, through a shared 16th-century ancestor.
It provoked a few snorts at the time, but the similarities are there if you look hard enough. She broke the internet; he broke Britain. Uncanny.
Tuesday
Plato is a giant of Greek philosophy, the father of western thought and the guy to blame for every time that person you had a crush on at uni wanted to just be good friends. He was also, it has now been revealed, a bit of an arse.
We know this thanks to the most astonishing scientific breakthrough, in which an ancient papyrus scroll that was charred to a brick in the Vesuvian destruction of Herculaneum has finally been decoded.
Since the Herculaneum scrolls were first excavated in the 18th century, their contents have tantalised scholars. Now, using a dazzling combination of minutely detailed scanning and artificial intelligence, experts have been able to read them, even in their chargrilled form.
And what has the new analysis revealed? That Plato spent his last night alive listening to flute music played by an enslaved girl from Thrace and – though the philosopher was seriously ill with a fever – somehow mustering enough energy to complain about her lack of rhythm. (Let his death the following day serve as a warning to critics everywhere.)
I’ll tell you what I would like science to discover: what the unnamed young woman thought about being held captive and forced to play the flute for some grumpy old philosopher who then had the cheek to heckle her.
Wednesday
Congratulations are due to our animal wrangler of the week, Darren Reitz, an Essex refuse collector who bagged himself a catfish weighing 64kg, or 143lb – yes, you are correct, that is more than 10st – from a lake near Maldon. The fish, which he has nicknamed Scar, was so enormous that it took a 50-minute struggle, three of the angler’s friends and some very large nets for Reitz to wrestle it on to shore.
After weighing the beast (“I was, like, this is unbelievable, are these scales set properly?” he told the BBC) and taking a photo, Reitz set Scar free to roam again, a mildly terrifying prospect for Essex readers given that catfish aren’t too fussy what they eat, I learn from Google, and can be predatory.
The “huge moggy” (© Angling Times) is thought to be Britain’s biggest fish ever caught by line in fresh water, though as the anglers’ bible notes, the timing of its catch was lucky for Reitz. The British Record Fish Committee – apparently a thing – has only recently begun accepting catfish records again after they were banned for 20 years over concerns about the fact it is an invasive species.
One leading angler was once even threatened with prosecution by the Environment Agency, the Angling Times reported, after catching a diamond back sturgeon and then releasing it again, since technically it is illegal to release a non-native fish in the wild under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.
Which raises the question of what else Reitz was supposed to have done with his new pal Scar. Pop it in the bath?
Thursday
Polling day arrives in large parts of Britain, and with it crunch time for Rishi Sunak – and for those parents who realised too late that their kids’ school was a polling station and they’d need to find emergency childcare.
The charming children’s art on polling station walls must offer a little welcome distraction, all the same, to that cheerful army of clerks who turn out in their thousands to staff the polls for every vote, armed only with a box of those dinky wee pencils and assorted piles of ballot papers in different pastel shades.
Poll clerks are recruited and paid by individual local authorities, so their working conditions may vary a little from place to place, but they are hardly lavish. Bristol council, for instance, pays £12.12 an hour for 16-hour standard shifts, from 6.15am to 10.30pm. Staff can’t leave the premises until polls close, and “you will be required to provide your own refreshments”.
Just sometimes, though, there can be small compensations. Imagine the joy of that one lucky clerk in south Oxfordshire who found themselves face to face with Boris Johnson, the architect of the new policy requiring voters to present photo ID, who had forgotten his.
Sending him packing surely brought just the teensiest degree of schadenfreude – ample recompense for a numb bum and having to bring your own teabags.
Friday
The best news of the week comes from two American academics whose new book sets out exactly why you can never find your keys when you’re leaving the house.
The most cheering bit? It doesn’t mean you are losing your marbles, oh no. Rather, your brain is forgetting that stuff on purpose so it can make room for other things. “You may be unsurprised to learn that our memory systems are not necessarily designed to remember where we put our phones or keys or water bottles,” note the authors of The Psychology of Memory, adding that our memories are less like a tape recorder and more like a Wikipedia page (uh-oh).
Speaking as someone who has two mobile phones, nominally to keep work and home life separate but really so I can use one to call the other one down the back of the sofa, this is great news. My brain has edited that bit out, you see, to leave room for more useful and relevant stuff like the names of the spouses of minor royals and the full lyrics of the 1986 Spitting Image chart-topper The Chicken Song.
