One Saturday back in the sixties my dad took me and my brother to our first ever football match: Tom Finney’s testimonial team vs the Coronation Street All-Stars. I would be lying if I were to claim I could remember much about the game, if indeed that particular fixture warrants such a term, but I was undeniably captivated the thronged mass of (largely) male humanity vaguely operating in supportive unison. Working class theatre no less.

It’s a well-known fact that the skin is our largest organ and, since the depletion of the ozone layer, we tend to take much better care of it. By the same token, the earth’s soil represents this planet’s skin but it appears we’re not lavishing the same level of care and attention upon it. Soil is under constant threat and in danger of disappearing right from under our feet.

Several of you questioned the realism, or otherwise, of my blog t’other week where I posited the idea that we didn’t merely need more electric vehicles to get us out of the seemingly inevitable climate catastrophe, but less vehicles of all type, fossil fuel as well as electric.

The piece t’other week on Ultra Processed Foods got me thinking of our most popular of meats and seemingly most ubiquitous of natural foods, the humble chicken, and how it can be right that a whole bird usually costs less than a pint of beer in your local?

So, multi-millionaire and supercar-fleet-owning Rowan Atkinson is struggling with the problem that cars, including his own recently purchased electric vehicle (EV), pollute the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. No s**t, Sherlock.

This is the signal. Sure, there’s no more salt on the roads and that big bright thing in the sky is sticking around until almost bedtime but the unmissable announcement that summer’s finally here is the countryside’s vivid yellow patchwork and its unmistakable heady smell. Oh, and booking your two weeks away on Cliff’s summer holiday.

At #1,375 a year per patient, obese individuals now cost the NHS more than twice as much as people of healthy weight, an Imperial College has found. This means that if everyone was of a more healthy weight, the NHS would save a staggering #14bn each year.

Whilst Boris Johnson’s partygate travails continue to be the gift that can’t stop giving, a far more important admission managed to recently slip past the editors’ attention of our red-top dailies, virtually unnoticed. Upon the seventh anniversary of the vote that took Britain out of the EU, Nigel Farage, lead UKIP-er and arch-Brexiter, the man who single-handedly took credit for the decision, uttered, on live TV, three telling words “Brexit has failed.”

T’other day I overheard (I know, I know) a conversation in my local Costa where a gentleman was bemoaning his family’s luck wrt to the snow they had ‘enjoyed’ on their annual winter skiing holiday. Apparently, the region had recorded its highest-ever temperatures and heavy rain had wiped away what little snow there was.

Under the common law rule ‘Rex nunquam moritur’, meaning ‘the king never dies’, the crown passed at the very moment of Queen Elizabeth’s death, ten-past-three in the afternoon of 8th September 2022, to her eldest son, King Charles III.