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Ninety-five per cent. Let that figure settle upon you, Gentle Reader, as this Tuesday morning’s heat settles upon everything else – slow, suffocating, and entirely unwelcome. Ninety-five per cent of women under fifty who are at elevated risk of breast cancer are, according to a new study from Cambridge University and the Institute of Cancer Research, being missed entirely by the current screening criteria of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. The National Health Society offers routine mammograms to older women, but those under fifty are largely left to their own anxious devices unless they happen to carry the correct inherited genes. Researchers have developed a risk calculator called Boadicea – a name this Author finds magnificently appropriate for anything battling the establishment – which considers lifestyle, reproductive history, and genetic information together. Used properly, it would identify eight times as many at-risk women in this age group. Eight times. One does not wish to be shrill, but one also does not wish to be silent.
And so to the Channel, where Tuesday morning brought scenes of the most alarming variety. A vessel carrying 157 souls caught fire after its engine gave out somewhere in those contested grey waters, leaving passengers to choose between the mercy of French rescue boats and their own desperate determination to reach the Southern Kingdom. Five people accepted help during the night; the remainder refused, resolved to press on regardless. One understands the impulse, even as one blanches at the risk. French and British crews ultimately rescued all 157 – two French vessels accounting for 103, British boats for 54 – and all are being conveyed to the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer. This Author notes, with a raised eyebrow rather than a smirk, that this incident arrives the morning after Lord Burnham, the Prime Minister, pledged his government would be “relentless” in curbing small boat crossings. The Channel, it appears, did not receive that particular memorandum.
The heat, meanwhile, continues its reign over the Southern Kingdom with the imperious confidence of a guest who was invited for the weekend and has now been here a fortnight. Pershore in Worcestershire and Cavendish in Suffolk have achieved three consecutive days above the heatwave threshold, and more of the south and east are expected to follow suit today. The Meteorological Office has issued amber and yellow heat health alerts across much of England until Wednesday morning. Relief is promised from midweek – though the Meteorological Office cautions that the incoming cold front is, frankly, unlikely to bring any meaningful rain to London, Essex, Kent, or Surrey, which is precisely the sort of meteorological tease that drives the English to madness. The Northern Province, meanwhile, faces a yellow thunderstorm warning, with up to 30mm of rain in an hour or two possible, along with hail. The Kingdom, as ever divided in all things, is divided also in its weather.
On a rather lighter note – though one affecting a great many young people – the government has announced that eighteen-year-olds will henceforth be entitled to purchase the 16-17 Saver Railcard, extending their half-price rail travel entitlement by a full year. From the seventeenth of this month, the card will be valid for twelve months from the date of purchase, meaning a seventeen-year-old who buys it the day before their birthday will travel cheaply until the eve of their nineteenth year. Previously, more than 70,000 students annually were, on average, £175 worse off than their still-seventeen classmates simply by virtue of having been born earlier in the academic year. This Author has witnessed many injustices in society, but the injustice of being penalised for the timeliness of one’s own birth does have a particular absurdity to it. The railcard costs £35 per year and offers fifty per cent off most fares. A small mercy, duly noted.
This Author closes today’s dispatch on a note of sorrow, tempered by warmth. The comedian Jimmy Cricket – born James Joseph Mulgrew in Cookstown, County Tyrone, in 1945 – died on Monday at the age of eighty, following a short illness. His son, Father Frankie Mulgrew, told us that his father “saw the joy in everything, right up until his death” – and that on Sunday, he requested the last rites twice, because, as Fr Mulgrew observed with the quiet pride of a son who knew his father well, “like a good comedian he wanted an encore.” A man who spent his life in wellington boots and a battered bowler hat, injecting silliness into the world from Butlin’s holiday camps to his own television series, and who never once shied from travelling to the Northern Province even during its darkest years – this is a life that deserves more than a paragraph. But then, a man who exits the world requesting an encore needs no embellishment from this Author.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.