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There are Saturdays upon which the Kingdom contrives to set itself alight – sometimes figuratively, and sometimes, as this Author must report with a perfectly straight face, literally. Today belongs emphatically to the latter category.
In the ancient fastness of the Cairngorms, a wildfire has been raging for ten days – ten! – before the authorities saw fit to declare it a major incident. The village of Nethy Bridge has been evacuated entire, its residents directed to shelter at the Macdonald Aviemore Hotel, which is either reassuring or deeply ironic depending upon one’s feelings about hotels in a crisis. First Minister Swinney convened his resilience committee at an admirably brisk hour on this very Saturday morning and informed the public that the wind had changed direction overnight – which is, one supposes, the sort of thing one might have hoped to manage before the tenth day. Smoke from the blaze is now visible a full fifty-nine miles away in Aberdeen. At what distance, one wonders, does the phrase “contained situation” become simply untenable?
Meanwhile, in the county of Essex, near the village of Rettendon, a store of fertiliser has demonstrated that it had opinions – loud ones. Over one hundred firefighters were deployed to an industrial site where a fire of some ambition had taken hold of several buildings and vehicles on farmland. The moment of explosion was captured on film: a magnificent ball of flame erupting skyward while witnesses described a sound “like a bomb” and “like a sonic boom.” The fire service assured a rattled county that there was “no wider risk to the public” – a statement one trusts entirely, whilst also keeping one’s windows firmly shut. By Saturday morning, some twenty-five firefighters remained on site to persuade the last of the blaze to reconsider its ambitions. Fertiliser, this Author notes, is rarely the headline anyone expects. And yet here we are.
From the fields of the northern highlands to the fields of Cambridgeshire, where a rather different sort of lawlessness has been flourishing. A report of considerable disquiet reveals the hidden world of illegal hare coursing: organised gangs, some seventy-strong, descending on remote farms in convoys of more than a dozen vehicles, cutting iron gates with angle grinders, tearing up crops, and depositing burnt-out cars as a farewell gesture. One farmer found himself and his young daughter trapped inside their home for over three hours while men in military fatigues and balaclavas conducted what he described as a fully organised competitive event, complete with betting, binoculars, and a cheerful disregard for trespass law. The police, one regrets to note, did not come. If this Author were to rate the rural leisure pursuits of the Kingdom, this particular one would score rather poorly on every available measure.
Turning, with some relief, to meteorological absurdity: the Meteorological Office advises that a fourth heatwave may be approaching the Kingdom next week, with temperatures expected to reach 35 degrees Celsius across much of the Southern Kingdom and parts of the Principality. Usk in Monmouthshire and Exeter in Devon have already achieved the singular distinction of registering heatwave conditions for twenty consecutive days – a record apparently set without any medal ceremony whatsoever. The weekend brings a little rain for the north, which the north will no doubt receive with its customary stoic gratitude, while the south braces for another assault of sunshine. Three heatwaves in one year. This Author does not wish to alarm anyone, but the weather has clearly stopped reading from the approved seasonal script.
And finally, a story that this Author commends to all students of irony enrolled in any degree whatsoever. A twenty-five-year-old law student – a young woman who wishes, her solicitor tells us, to become a barrister – appeared before Trim District Court in County Meath on Friday, charged with possession of explosives. It is alleged she was driving a car intercepted by the Garda near Carrickmacross, in which was found a bag containing what officers believed to be Semtex, a timing power unit, and a detonator. Her defence: she had been asked to take a bag to the Northern Province and had not known what was in it. She has been granted conditional bail, subject to a €15,000 surety, a curfew, daily signing-in, and the surrender of her passport. This Author sincerely hopes her studies in criminal law are providing some consolation. The irony of a future barrister requiring one is, one must confess, the kind of detail that practically writes itself.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.