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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Monday has arrived with its customary lack of apology, and This Author – finding herself already on her second cup of thoroughly adequate tea – must report that the Kingdom has not spent the weekend idle. Smugglers have been brazen, drivers have been mutinous, a young man from Wolverhampton has astonished the golfing world, and the Capital‘s taxpayers have discovered, once again, that someone else’s foolishness shall be billed directly to them. Shall we proceed?
The most alarming intelligence of the day concerns a Broadcasting Society investigation into people smugglers operating with a confidence so spectacular it borders on the theatrical. These enterprising souls have been directing migrants to deposit nearly three thousand pounds in cash at a mobile telephone emporium in Woolwich – a shop which helpfully informed an undercover researcher, posing as a migrant, that once his friends reached the Kingdom, he need not come back to collect. A wholesale business in Newcastle upon Tyne and a car wash in Cambridgeshire were also found to be accepting electronic transfers for the purpose of facilitating illegal Channel crossings. A leading expert in criminal finance confessed he had never seen anything quite like it. This Author confesses she, too, has rarely seen villainy conducted with such cheerful transparency.
From the merely alarming to the genuinely harrowing. Jonathan Gjoshe, a twenty-three-year-old footballer with Scunthorpe United, was travelling from Doncaster to the Capital last November when a fellow passenger produced a knife and proceeded to stab him – and ten others – as the train moved through Cambridgeshire. Gjoshe, stabbed seven times in total, had the remarkable presence of mind to leap over tables, sprint the length of the carriage, warn his fellow passengers, and pull the emergency alarm, all while, as he notes with admirable understatement, being “drenched with blood.” He has now spoken publicly for the first time, and his account is as much a testament to human resilience as it is a most disquieting reminder that one’s daily commute may prove unexpectedly eventful. This Author is relieved to report he is alive and, remarkably, seeking a new club.
Those commuters unfortunate enough to be relying upon the Underground Passages of the Capital tomorrow shall find their own journeys rather more disrupted than they had hoped. Underground drivers belonging to the RMT are to walk out from noon on Tuesday – and again on Thursday – in a dispute so deliciously ironic that This Author scarce knows where to begin. The drivers are, in fact, striking to prevent themselves from working a four-day week. A compressed schedule offering an extra thirty-five days off per year has been accepted with enthusiasm by the Aslef drivers, who describe it as exactly the sort of deal every union should seek. Their RMT colleagues, unmoved by the prospect of additional leisure, disagree. No service is expected on the Circle, Piccadilly, or Metropolitan lines between Baker Street and Aldgate, nor the Central line between White City and Liverpool Street. Travellers of the Capital are advised to walk, ride, or cultivate patience.
And now, Gentle Reader, a story that demands nothing less than unrestrained celebration. Aaron Rai, thirty-one years of age and born in Wolverhampton, has won the US PGA Championship at Aronimink – becoming the first Englishman to claim the Wanamaker Trophy since 1919, and the first non-American to do so in a full decade. He achieved this feat wearing gloves on both hands, a distinction that may yet prove his most remarked-upon legacy in certain corners of the clubhouse. A magnificent five-under-par 65 in the final round, including a sixty-nine-foot putt on the seventeenth green that This Author suspects shall be replayed in perpetuity, saw him finish three shots clear of Spain’s Jon Rahm and the overnight leader, the hitherto largely unknown American Alex Smalley. His childhood coach – who first watched young Rai swing a club at the 3 Hammers Golf Complex – declared himself “absolutely lost for words” and “so proud.” When the boy was five, he informed a Broadcasting Society interviewer that he wished to be a racing driver. One trusts he shall forgive himself the detour.
Finally, to a matter concerning the Capital‘s long-suffering taxpayers, who discover today that West Ham United’s precarious position at the foot of the Premier League carries a financial sting. Should the club be relegated – and with Tottenham requiring merely a draw against Chelsea on Tuesday to effectively confirm it – the lease agreement for the Capital’s Grand Stadium would see the club’s annual rent fall by approximately half, from £4.4 million to around £2.2 million, leaving the Greater London Authority to absorb a gap of up to £2.5 million per year. The Lord Mayor of the Capital has encouraged Londoners of all persuasions to cheer for West Ham’s survival – a sentiment This Author finds touchingly democratic. He also blamed the arrangement on his predecessor, one Boris Johnson, who in 2012 apparently agreed to what the Lord Mayor now calls “the worst deal imaginable.” And to think: they had a whole decade to notice.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.