Monday
Perth has a special place in my heart: it was the venue of my first one-day international wicket. Perhaps I should explain. It was 1992 and I was writing a book about Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, part of which was to tag along with the Pakistan team for the cricket World Cup. At first Imran Khan and co were understandably distant, but by the time we reached Western Australia I was allowed to bowl in the nets – where I inexplicably had Zahid Fazal caught behind. Whether I ever got another wicket is a matter of dispute. I claim I had Wasim caught at mid on. He said he would never have hit it there if I had had a fielder in place. No matter. That week in Perth was the highlight of what passes for my cricket career. Not that I’ve ever been tempted to go back. It just felt so far away. Remote even from the rest of Australia. A five-hour flight from Sydney. But if you like beaches, 300 days of sunshine a year, not having to cope with a cost of living crisis and aren’t put off by the distance, then it could be the place for you. At least that’s the sell Western Australia is trying to make as it seeks to recruit 31,000 doctors, nurses, teachers and plumbers from the UK to come and make their homes near to the Indian Ocean. Predictably some MPs and the British Medical Association have been quick to cry foul. How dare the Australians try to fill the vacancies in their job market with professionals trained in the UK! What about our own staff shortage in the NHS? Er … perhaps we should have thought of that when we recruited thousands of doctors and nurses from eastern Europe and elsewhere around the world. Just another Brexit bonus.
Tuesday
My friends Simon and Olivia have a word for it. They call it “The Year”. You know how it is. People you’ve seen regularly over a long time and who don’t appear to have aged much. Then one day you see them again and it’s as if they’ve aged a decade overnight. When that happens to you, you’ve had The Year. I’m not too sure how many times I’ve had The Year. At least twice, I’d say. Just recently I was asked to send off a photo of myself for a book festival programme later in the year. The only snap I had available looks nothing like me but I sent it off regardless. Mainly because I couldn’t be bothered to take another one. When people look nothing like their byline photos it’s not always vanity at play. It’s also laziness.
Up till now though – and we’re talking 30 years or so – my front garden hasn’t had The Year. One or two plants have died, of course, but nothing serious. The bananas are on to their third or fourth generation without me needing to replace any, I’ve added one or two other new tropical grasses and ferns and everything else has just got bigger and bigger. But this winter has taken its toll. The bananas – wrapped up in their fleeces – are still standing but everything else is looking a bit desolate. The proteas have died, the euphorbia looks like it’s on its last legs, there’s no sign of the ginger lilies and some of the palms are struggling. Worst of all the tree fern that I’ve nurtured for more than 15 years has croaked with some turquoise blight. It will cost a fortune to replace. Quite why this winter has proved so tough, I’ve no idea. The temperatures have been no worse than other years that the garden took in its stride. None of us can escape The Year. Though at least the garden is worth spending money on to restore its glory.
Wednesday
Almost everyone seems to have been weighing in. Not just writers and those in the book trade, but politicians too. Even Rishi Sunak has spoken out. Most have been outraged that Roald Dahl’s books should have been remodelled for the sensibilities of today’s children. This has been deemed a makeover too far. The triumph of woke culture. Only sensitivity readers – or their editorial equivalents have been with us for more than 100 years – and no one has really complained before. An illustration of Peter Rabbit’s dad inside the farmer’s pie that appeared in the first edition was hastily removed from the second. It was OK to imagine a parent getting eaten: seeing it in action was a step too far. And it’s not as if Dahl’s books haven’t been reshaped in the past. In the original of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa Loompas were black pygmies from “deepest, darkest Africa”. By the 1970s they were restyled as “fantasy creatures”. No one took issue with that.
Part of the problem with the recent changes is that they seem a bit pointless. Changing Augustus Gloop from “fat” to “enormous” doesn’t really achieve anything. The first image that comes to mind is still fat. The Dahl books were slightly after my time – at least my parents never put one my way – but I’ve asked my children what they thought. They both said they weren’t at all bothered about the language when they read Dahl in the 90s and the early 2000s but are all for the changes if they make life better for kids today. I was brought up on Biggles and Sherlock Holmes. Now there is a job for sensitivity readers. On the one hand a charming pilot who seldom met a German he didn’t want to kill, and on the other a cocaine and heroin addict super sleuth.
Thursday
It’s been a strange sort of week in Westminster. The Commons highlight has been the sight of Boris Johnson and, for the first time since her resignation, Liz Truss, protecting their legacies during the Ukraine debate. You can see why Boris was there. Ukraine is about the only good thing he has done in more than 20 years in politics. But Truss? She doesn’t have a flame worth keeping. Especially not over Ukraine. President Zelenskiy wouldn’t recognise her in a criminal lineup.
Mostly, though, there has been a sense of something important going on behind the scenes. We’d been led to believe Sunak was going to announce a deal with the EU on the Northern Ireland protocol on Monday, followed by a statement to the house on Tuesday. Reporters had even been briefed on what would be in the deal. A red route, a green route and a whole load of arbitration panels designed to obscure the fact that Northern Ireland would still be subject to EU law. It could hardly be any other way with a hard Brexit. Then Monday and Tuesday passed with no announcement. As did Wednesday. It turns out that Sunak had initially decided he was going to sign off on the deal with the EU and then face down the Brexit hardliners in his own party and the DUP. Only when Boris indicated he might make trouble, Sunak lost his nerve. So he’s stuck trying to dream up an impossible form of alchemy that will satisfy everyone. HINT: No such words exist. Instead he just looks weak. Unable to put country before party. Terrified of getting his deal through with Labour support. Meanwhile, the rest of us just keep waiting.
Friday
This week was the annual conference of the National Farmers’ Union. You might have thought that after Sunak and the farming minister, Mark Spencer, had crashed and burned on Tuesday – the PM for sending a two-minute video message in which he claimed to love milking; Spencer was laughed off stage for talking up the Australia trade deal – that the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, might have got the message that Tories can’t take the rural vote for granted. Think again. Coffey appears to be someone who likes to say no. For whom almost everything is too much trouble. Her laziness is almost a death wish. She was openly booed for saying food shortages were nothing to do with her. She couldn’t help it if temperatures were unseasonably high in Spain. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that UK farmers were struggling to pay increased costs of maintaining polytunnels.
Coffey crowned a dismal performance by claiming avian flu was just one of those things, before wandering off stage mid-questions claiming she had a train to catch. Even on Thursday back in the Commons, Coffey was totally unrepentant. Either that, or she’s a very slow learner. Answering an urgent question on food shortages, she insisted that the solution to rising prices was for people to get better jobs and work harder. A bit of a cheek coming from someone terminally workshy. Nobody had a right to food and if people wanted to eat they should pull their fingers out. She then went for the kill. The result of a lot of hard thinking on her part. People should stop trying to buy tomatoes and should eat turnips instead. Thérèse-Antoinette. Four years ago I tweeted, “Let them eat turnips”. It was meant to be a joke about Brexit. Now it’s government policy. Satire comes at you fast these days.
