ON THE fifth day of Christmas the four “nations”said, that’s your lot folks. Have a merry, if not germ-free Christmas.
The Stormont specialists in Too Little, Too late, meanwhile, are offering a package that may include a £100 voucher per household and a promise of cash support for businesses. Unfortunately that support seems to be as illusory as Billy Bunter’s postal order from his aunt. It never arrives.
If the aim is for us to spend the money at local retailers and the hard-pressed bars and restaurants, why not cut out the middle man and just give the money to them directly? Surely the main problem is that the financial aid is taking so long to get paid out to the people who need it?
The three household rule is going to be a challenge for some big families here, though most understand this is the best we can get. But it is not risk-free and there may be a reckoning in January. Roll on that vaccine.
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WE’VE all spent time wondering how we would spend a fortune if we were to suddenly win the lottery. Mine would be spent on first class foreign travel, houses in the sun and other fripperies, with inevitable Catholic guilt assuaged by donations to friends and charities. But never, ever have I thought about spending a cent on space travel.
This seems to be reserved for the excessively rich like Elon Musk whose net worth is estimated at around $104.5 billion – or more money than sense. Earlier this month his SpaceX rocket ferried four astronauts to the international space station. His ultimate aim is to make space travel routine and affordable and to establish life on other planets.
Why wouldn’t he spend some of those billions making life on this planet a bit more bearable? Like investing money to give every child in the world clean water, food and education maybe?
There’s a similar outlook in Boris Johnson’s regime. He announces £16bn for defence funding, including a “space command” and moves to fuel Tory dreams of Britain restored to the “foremost naval power in Europe.” Yes, the same Europe that Britain is trying to leave.
And on the same news bulletin it was reported that residents in many high-rise flats are facing bills of tens of thousands of pounds to remove the Grenfell-style cladding from their buildings. It makes you wonder about government priorities.
Dolly Parton, meanwhile, funds libraries for the disadvantaged and put a cool million dollars to coronavirus vaccine research which supported the development of the Moderna vaccine. That’s how to spend your money. Bill Gates knows that too. Mark Zuckerberg? Not so much.
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JOURNALISTS have a strange relationship with politicians. The humorist HL Mencken said it should be like that between a dog and a lamp-post.
I’ve known plenty that I wouldn’t have voted for, but they were always good for a quote, or they made “good copy”.
For that reason I wonder if we’ll all rather miss President Trump. After he was elected, CBS chairman Les Moonves quipped, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
It was known as the Trump Bump. CNN, as a division of a larger company, generated more than $1 billion in operating profits during the Trump tenure.
Jon Sopel was never busier from the moment that Trump’s then spokesman, Sean Spicer, told an incredulous White House press corps to deny the evidence of their own eyes over the size of the crowd who watched his inauguration. The world of “alternative facts” had arrived.
Four years later, the US networks – all of them, Fox News included, cut away from a live White House briefing at which press secretary Kayleigh McEnany repeated Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud. A new era had begun.
The sight of the once-respected Rudi Giuliani going over the same ground, with the dye he used to darken his greying temples streaking down his sweating face, seemed like a metaphor for a regime whose grasp of reality was melting away.
He should give up the lawsuits alleging voter fraud and sue whoever sold him that hair dye.
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THERE are a few signs that Christmas is near. Kirsty Allsopp turns up to spend hours making twinkly things and suggesting you have time to make home-made festive cards from scraps of African fabric that you happen to have knocking about the house.
And Nigella, queen of twinkly lights in the background of her London mansion, shows you how to make buttered toast. Tip. You spread the butter on TWICE. Who knew?
The other sign is of course, the annual tut tutting about the lyrics of Fairytale of New York, which tender-eared Radio One listeners will now hear as “haggard” lest they faint in horror at the word “faggot”. But us hard as nails Radio Two listeners, meanwhile, are allowed to hear the real version.
Have any young people actually complained? Doubt it.
