I spotted it. A reader nominated it. The judges love it.
The Evening Standard receives our Headline of the Day Award.
The Evening Standard receives our Headline of the Day Award.
Market Harborough: Big Brother isn't watching you
From the Leicester Mercury:
Council owned CCTV cameras in a town centre have not been working properly for nearly six months according to anonymous sources.
It is understood the 17-camera network in Market Harborough has experienced difficulties since the control room was moved last autumn.
The equipment belongs to Harborough District Council which has refused to comment on the problems.
The screens are monitored from within the police station in Leicester Road but the force is refusing to comment too.The question, of course, is whether there has been any increase in crime or fall in detection rates in the town since the cameras stopped working.
If there has not, it suggests the council could save a lot of money by scrapping the system.
Or at least by replacing it with dummy cameras made from egg boxes and sticky-backed plastic.
The sugar tax and the infantilisation of coffee
In the short term it may operate like that, but the long-term effect of the tax is likely to be that manufacturers reformulate their products to avoid having to charge the tax.
Good news for the poor, though not for the school sports schemes that will benefit from the money it raises.
Children like sweet things and there are good evolutionary reasons why this should be so. Sweet things tend to be safe to eat. If children loved bitter green things the race would never have survived.
But in the last few years something terrible has happened to coffee. Queue in one of the chains today and the odds are you will find yourself queuing behind an adult buying a drink that looks like an ice cream sundae. It may well contain a similar amount of sugar.
We are, of course, free to eat as much sugar as we like, but there is a political dimension to this remaking of public taste.
Maybe it is the coffee shops that should be reformulating their products to avoid a sugar tax?
Nancy Banks-Smith on Helen and The Archers
The wonderful Nancy Banks-Smith has written a piece on The Archers for the Guardian. I assume it will be in tomorrow's G2.
She begins:
My grandmother – now, we’re going back a bit – used to describe pregnancy delicately as "being confined". It’s a phrase that suits Helen very well. Ever since she became pregnant, she has been a wraithlike presence, a pale face at the window of Blossom Hill Cottage, lank-haired and wearing the charity-shop clothes her husband, Rob, prefers, making occasional disconcerting distressed forays into an oblivious Ambridge. Wilkie Collins would have spat on his hands and whistled.
This sorry situation burst into flames recently when a toad-in-the-hole caught fire. Who Torched the Toad escalated into a full-scale fight, with Helen showing a flash of spirit, Rob hitting her and five-year-old Henry, entering into the spirit of things, shoving a small school friend called Xanthe. Though, frankly, I think any child called Xanthe is just asking to be shoved.
