Good morning forever fans of Friday. The sun is shining, the autumnal equinox is upon us and, much like one’s breath condensing into vapour on a crisp morning, everyone’s favourite possibly robotic Prime Minister is due to blow some hot air in Florence this morning.
Ah, Florence. This column’s never been but it looks ruddy nice, doesn’t it? Lots of Renaissance architecture, chuffing loads of culture and, as one of the Maybot’s spokesman told journalists yesterday, it is “a city known for its historical trading power” and for being “the cradle of capitalism”. Makes sense, probably, if you don’t think about it too much. Or, indeed, at all.
This week in charity sector satire: don’t climb Mount Snowdon in your pants and, yeah, the Daily Mail continues resolutely in its quest to be the Daily Mail.
A Superman and some super shrinkage
Far better writers than the Society Diarist have tried to describe in glittering prose the feeling of youth and, to be more specific, young adulthood. To turn 18 is to finally be allowed to reach up and taste of the low-hanging, once forbidden fruits of adulthood. The next few years are often spent, following the fruit metaphor, more or less letting the juices run down one’s chin without necessarily being shackled to all of the responsibilities that come with the social-construct of adulthood. Rent, mortgage, taxes, possible alcoholism and, well, death.
Such freedom from the weighty existential burdens of world-weary age lends (in a very serious, Daily Mail voice) ‘the youth’ an almost admirable hubris. You, dear reader, an adult human with a job and responsibility would never, for example, climb the highest mountain in the United Kingdom wearing nothing but your smalls. However, one 19-year-old has done just that.
The BBC has this take: “Mountain rescue plea after man's Snowdon climb in pants”. Followed by the officious sentence: “People climbing Snowdon are being urged to wear appropriate clothing after a mean who reached the summit in just his pants developed hypothermia”.
Yes, one Nathan French, all of 19-years of age, managed to climb to the tip-top of Mount Snowdon in nothing but a pair of Superman pants and, yeah, got hypothermia. The BBC’s picture caption is pretty good too: ‘Nathan French became ill when he reached Snowdon’s summit in his pants”.
French, described as a “Liverpool student”, undertook his perilous journey to raise money for Dementia UK after his grandmother developed the condition. He told the BBC: “I was taken by surprise by how cold I got”.
Hmmm. Anyway, the young fella's father, who was with him to document the feat, called an ambulance on the train on the way down.
A spokesman for Llanberis Mountain Rescue said that while charity fundraisers such as French were "laudable", he reiterated that Snowdon was no “walk in the park”.
"They make an assumption that because there's a cafe at the top and a train, that it's a walk in the park. It's not - it is the highest mountain in England and Wales and people need to respect that.”
Super efforts all round though, really. Nothing a hot bath (and maybe a hairdryer) won't fix.
Enough rope
Ah, the Daily Mail. Under the editorship of Paul Dacre the newspaper has essentially regressed to a frothing, right-wing id, kicking out hard at any, and everything which doesn’t chime with its, frankly, fairly dystopian vision of what Britain should look like. Yet, despite all of this, it is depressingly the UK’s go-to source for vacuous celebrity gossip, and paparazzi telephoto lens shots of celebrities in bikinis.
Anyway, the Daily Mail has lashed out once again at the National Trust, after the charity opened a new exhibition featuring “51 ropes to commemorate men who were hanged for being gay” in the early 19th Century.
The installation at Kingston Lacy House in Dorset, is part of the NT’s programme to “mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act” which decriminalised homosexual acts between men in England and Wales.
The Daily Mail is not a fan, with the unconscionably long headline starting with “National Trust’s latest PC stunt”. ‘PC’ of course being Mail shorthand for ‘politically correct’, which in the Daily Maileverse is right up there with Corbynism and Islam as being one of the worst things it’s possible for a person to be.
The DM then says the exhibition has sparked “a fresh row” between the Trust and supporters, before giving oxygen to a number of critics of the exhibition, including one MP who - while Diary hasn’t actually double checked this - is almost DEFINITELY a Tory*.
A volunteer the Mail found, identified as Bob Gates, said he and his wife were convinced the Trust has become “obsessed with trendy PC thinking” – whatever exactly that means. He added Kingston Lacey was “just not the right place for it” and then, just in case the readers had forgotten what they were supposed to be angry about, the square bracket qualifier: “gay rights campaigning”, close square brackets.
Andrew Bridgen MP is also quoted as saying: “This is totally inappropriate. It’s not what people visit the National Trust for. If I want moral guidance I go to church – not the National Trust.”
For its part, the Trust has said: ‘Visitors are given the option of visiting the installation and are given information upon which to make that decision. There are going to be some people who come here and don’t like it, but that’s the case with any programming.”
Diary would have gone with something stronger, but four letter words aren’t very becoming of an institution such as the National Trust. Even when talking about the Daily Mail.
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