Credit: Jeremy Selwyn/Pool via REUTERS
SIR – When is the penny finally going to drop that the Government will never allow this Covid crisis to end? Perhaps it will not be until our supposed day of liberation, June 21, comes and goes and our lives are still micromanaged by the Man from the Ministry.
The Government has grown used to unprecedented interference in our affairs. There are arbitrary rules: a distance of two metres is safe, but 1.9 is not; six people meeting indoors is safe, seven is not, unless they are from at most two households.
There are unproven interventions: we are required by law to cover our faces, but there is no quality control over what we use, and very weak evidence for the benefits of doing so.
If you want to get ahead, ditch your creativity
on conformity
“According to the most recent edition of the Financial Times’s How to Spend It supplement, £127,000 will buy you the ‘ultimate’ Steinway self-playing grand piano,” writes James Marriott in The Times. “Isn’t this weird?” he says, in buying the piano it “draws attention to a hobby you don’t have”. It says “my owner is slightly more boring than you might have supposed. My theory is that this is partly the point,” he continues. In the modern world “the ability to sublimate your personality, your eccentricities, your creative fantasies to your work is rewarded. The boring succeed and so being boring has become a kind of status symbol.” Unfortunately, “the cost of not conforming is higher than ever, financially and personally”, writes Marriott, so “the hobbyless, the dull, the impeccably CV-ed, the workaholic chino-wearers march ahead.”
Ben Lawrence
4/5
In The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, Paula Byrne sheds light on the comic novelist s surprisingly racy youth
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Zig Zag Railway tests running of steam engine on heritage track
Radio 2LT | Move Fm News
08 May 2021, 17:48 GMT+10
A small but significant piece of history was created on Friday.
The last steam engine to make the trip was on 7 December 2011.
Zig Zag Railway Chairman Ben Lawrence said there had been times where they ve been so close to this moment, only for it to just slip out of reach.
LITHGOW, Central West, NSW, Australia - A small but significant piece of history was created on Friday, when for the first time in more than nine years, a steam train travelled the full length of the heritage Zig Zag Railway track on the western side of the Blue Mountains.
Man attacked in alleged Radford Road assault - Nottinghamshire Live nottinghampost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nottinghampost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.