The Mirror Crack'd

Dear friends I'm sorry not to have written sooner but I've been very busy recently protesting about the global climate crisis. I appreciate that this is affecting you much more directly than us in the global north but we're all in the same boat aren't we? Not the flimsy inflatable kind, obviously, but metaphorically. As you may have seen, we in the UK are currently experiencing a shortage of tomatoes and cucumbers in our supermarkets. Can you believe it?  Brexit must take its share of the blame, of course, as the rest of Europe seems unaffected by such shortages but they are having other problems, like the rivers Rhine and Po running dry. And the French and Italians are getting very worried about their vineyards, which might actually work in England's favour. After all, the Romans grew grapes here right up to Hadrian's Wall and our white wines are really quite good so maybe, with a few more degrees of heat, we could actually start producing some decent reds too.

An article on yesterday's Fruitnet (yes, I cast my net wide!) blames UK supermarket shortages on...supermarkets. According to Ged Futter, an expert on the Groceries Supply Code of Practice (GSCOP), legislation which came into force in 2010 to protect food and drink suppliers to major supermarkets in the UK from being treated unfairly, current supply shortages in UK supermarkets "are down in large part to retailers' all-consuming focus on price at the expense of product availability". Futter suggests that by driving hard bargains with their suppliers, ostensibly to protect consumers, the major supermarkets have led many suppliers simply to give up as their profit margins slump and their costs rise stratospherically.  Ever since the Second World War the UK has been in thrall to the myth of cheap food. This was understandable at a time when the population was half-starved after the food rationing imposed by five years of war. That mentality has driven food policy ever si

SNP MSP, Kate Forbes, appears to have blown her chances in the race to become her party's new leader and First Minister of Scotland almost before the echoes of the starter's gun subsided. Where to begin? Recently I wrote about 'woke' but now it seems I must move on to cancel culture. Ms Forbes' announcement (some commentators have said honest, others hurtful, but almost all unwise) that had she been an MSP at the time she would not have voted in favour of same sex marriage when it was put to the Scottish Parliament has prompted a predictably angry and hurt reaction. As a member of the socially conservative evangelical Free Church of Scotland, the so-called 'Wee Frees', she said that the public "were longing for a politician to answer straight questions with straight answers". Well, they certainly got a straight, in the sense of heterosexist, answer to this one and, for very many, her ineptitude was enough to decide the matter. And not in her favour

There's a great deal too much talk about 'woke' these days, but what does it mean anyway? It's clearly the new dividing line in the 'culture wars' emanating from the USA so it's hardly surprising that the concept of woke started there. But it is surprising to learn that the word was first recorded in its current usage in 1938, almost the late Middle Ages in American terms but remarkably modern to us in the UK, where it has only crept into mainstream usage in the past couple of years. In fact, as if to prove how rapidly and firmly it has embedded itself in the culture here there's even been an Oxford Union debate about it! BBC Radio 4 began a mini-series today entitled Woke : The journey of a   Word presented by Matthew Syed. It's broadcast for fifteen minutes daily until Friday (24th February) at 1.45pm and is well worth tuning in to. In today's first episode Syed told the story of the Scottsboro Boys, a cause celebre in the States in 1931

If it's true we get the police service we deserve, what have we done to deserve the one we've got? The current 'crisis in policing' is not confined to the UK but is, most notably, playing itself out in the USA too. In both countries a series of catastrophic policing failures has undermined trust in the integrity and impartiality of the police. In other developed countries, if not actually identified as a crisis, there are issues with policing, but maybe that's as it should be in any mature democracy. Eternal vigilance must be an essential part of the deal between citizens and the law enforcement agents whom they pay to protect them and their property, and keep the peace. It's a trade-off between unfettered personal liberty and societal stability - the voluntary surrendering of some individual 'liberties' in exchange for the assurance of safety and security - which we celebrate as 'the rule of law'. The founder of modern British policing, Sir Robe

We Brits, especially those of us who voted Remain in the EU Referendum, tend to think that public services are always better in Europe, but the reality can be more nuanced. News reaching us in the Canary Islands today focuses on a major demonstration in the Spanish capital, Madrid, yesterday when 250,000 protesters took to the streets. This was the third such rally against what marchers see as the systematic dismantling of the public healthcare service in order to bolster the private sector. Sound familiar? The factor that links Madrileños' concerns with those in the UK regarding the NHS is that it is happening under a right-wing government, in this instance the Madrid regional administration of the right-wing Partido Popular  (People’s Party) ( PP ), led by its regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Things are little better in the Canaries where an item on local television channel, Mirame TV's current affairs and investigative journalism programme, Canarias   Al Día ( The

Bosola's dying words in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi could almost be my motto. Readers of my previous posts on other platforms will know that I make occasional trips to the Canary Islands with my Canarian husband. These are emphatically not holidays, or not as most visiting Brits would understand the concept anyway. Our main objective is to restore the family's rural patrimony and engage in wider protest actions to prevent or frustrate corporate destruction of the islands' heritage, both manmade and natural. Not for us the 'fly and flop' breaks beloved of most Brits who come here in huge (and unsustainable) numbers. In fact, insofar as they can be characterised as holidays at all, ours are distinctly of the working variety. Tourists may be flocking to the ritzy Carnaval in Santa Cruz de Tenerife as I write but, for us, the glamour never starts. It's a hard slog being an environmental activist here - and, God knows, it's no walk in the park in

Publication of the 2021 UK census reveals some fascinating demographic and social shifts in a decade but are we a more integrated society - and do we want to be? My answer to both questions is probably not, especially since Brexit threw an almighty spanner in the works - though we were hardly living in a multicultural nirvana before 2016. Grayson Perry's Full English , the artist's new exploration of Englishness now airing on Channel 4 TV, touched on some uncomfortable truths in its first episode, although, being Perry, the tone is generally upbeat and positive. His ask of 'minority' communities (in some areas now actually in the majority) to define their own identity threw up some interesting responses to the question of Englishness versus Britishness, one which has exercised me personally. As a white man born in England to English parents does that mean I automatically define as 'English'? Not necessarily. If someone were to pose the 'Lady Susan Hussey que