Angeldubba

I’ve been saying this for years – but you probably won’t yawn in recognition, as I’m under the radar, and don’t put every thought or wish on an internet platform.  But isn’t this the solution? What is needed is a government with the cojones to read the riot act to Mark Zuckerberg, and an appetite for shutting down a multi-billion dollar monster with literally billions of friends. Does such a government exist? Is it the US? China would no doubt be delighted, given its track record  in suppressing internet sites . But licensing is a different matter. Licensing is a way of making sure that industries which have most intense effect on people’s lives are acting at least partly in the interests of the customers. An example in architecture would be that fire safety is part of the considerations of the building design. In the US, home of Facebook, licensed industries include architecture, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals. A quick look at that short list indicates the...

Nothing! Except you have to be dreaming, or living in Utopia, and Ryanair ain’t flying there yet. But this is the cheery British prime minister’s upbeat prediction for his country in the future. Boris Johnson really wants us all to think of him as the new Winston Churchill. Or rather, he wants the jolly old Brits who cherish Rule Britannia and that mostly-pink map of the world to think of him as WC reincarnated. These are the people who gave him his 80-seat majority in the British lower house of Parliament. Possibly the attack on Ivor Roberts-Jones’s wonderful statue of Winnie opposite the House of Commons in London, which happenedin June 2020, might have given him a brief pause, but only the briefest. Does Johnson’s attention focus on anything for more than goldfish-memory time, apart from the great endeavour of Making Boris Great Again, and Again, and Again … ? Waspish it sounds and waspish it is, after suffering through the insult which was BoJo’s comedy routine at the Conservative ...

  How’s re-entry going, in your work and life? I spoke to a young woman in the beauty     business at the weekend. She was off work for five months, due to Covid, and the other five people who share her house (!) all worked in hospitality (!!) and somehow survived Ireland’s stringent lockdown. That’s all but a memory now, unless your business was ruined by it, which I fervently hope is not the case. Travel is becoming a reality again. It seems half of Ireland has flown to Portugal in the past few weeks, and I hear of people planning to revive their Christmas shopping jaunt to New York (why? All that way for stuff that is either wildly expensive or junk.) Australia announced that its borders are reopening , so all the Aussies stuck in other parts of the world for the past 18 months can finally go home, and those trapped in the homeland can get back to their actual places of residence. Being something of an Eeyore, I’d expected that air fares would be astronomical once flyi...