Peter Rhodes on mulch, tortoises and a variant on the four-day working week
Star columnist Peter Rhodes gives his views on some of the hottest talking points - do you agree?
The Student Loans Company reports that almost a million people who took out loans have not started repaying them. Any shortfall will eventually be paid by hard-pressed taxpayers already facing the cost of living crisis. We will starve by degrees.
On Remembrance Sunday the BBC could have used its Radio 4 Appeal to support any number of service-related charities. But with its finger firmly on the pulse of public opinion, it chose instead to give us Stephen Fry appealing for money to help giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands. Good old Auntie.
As you may recall, I have a friend who clears houses and collects all sorts of curious objects. Latest is a Victorian-looking brass tube about two feet long with a Fahrenheit thermometer at one end and a sharp, perforated probe at the other. It appears vaguely agricultural and my friend suggested a bovine rectal thermometer, but I think not. If you tried inserting the pointy end into a bull, it would probably be the last thing you ever did. It remains a mystery.
However, the day after this mystery arrived, the tree fellers (there were actually two of them) called to saw our hedges into shape, leaving us with a big pile of woodchip mulch. After a couple of days, the mulch became warm through bacteriological action. You can probably see where this is leading.
We inserted our mystery tube into the pile and I can report that when the outdoor reading is 50F, the temperature inside the mulch is a startlingly warm 112F. It seems I am the proud possessor of a biologically-warming mulch-heap thermometer. Cometh the hour, cometh the widget. (No ruminants were harmed in the making of this column).
As our glorious public sector staggers towards the four-day working week, I am reminded of a newspaper where I worked in the 1980s which operated a nine-day fortnight. It seemed to take a huge amount of admin and you always felt everyone else was having more days off than you. Apart from that, fine.
The Guardian has been offering its journalists counselling after the “upsetting” election victory of Donald Trump. I was going to write more about this but unfortunately my sides keep splitting.
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