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Four people are dead in Shoreham. A family, British Palestinian, travelled from the Capital to spend a Tuesday afternoon at Kingston Beach – and did not come home. Hassan El-Khawas, fifty-five, his wife Zeina Alayn, thirty-seven, and their fourteen-year-old daughter Sara were lost to the sea off Shoreham Fort. Their youngest, six-year-old Saja, was pulled from the water by emergency crews but died in hospital days later. The Sussex Constabulary has said there was no third-party involvement – a tragic accident, the hypothesis runs – and yet this Author finds no wit to reach for here, only the wish that the sea had been kinder. The Shoreham community, the emergency responders, and this entire readership may grieve freely and without irony.
From Shoreham’s shore to Teesside’s roads, this Saturday has not been gentle. In the early hours, at approximately twenty minutes to four in the morning, a police vehicle and a Volkswagen Passat collided on the A66 in South Bank, near Middlesbrough, following a pursuit initiated by Cleveland Constabulary. Multiple fatalities have been confirmed. Fourteen ambulance resources attended. The A66, the great artery of Teesside, was closed in both directions for the remainder of the day. The Office of Police Conduct has opened an investigation, which is entirely appropriate. This Author asks only that the public heed the force’s appeal: do not speculate. There are families yet to be told.
To lighter matters, then – though lighter only by comparison. Over eighty-one thousand Kingdom eighteen-year-olds have declared their intention to live at home when they begin their studies this September, the highest proportion in nine years. One in three students, compared with one in five in 2017. The culprit, one hardly needs a degree to identify, is the cost of student accommodation – which, in Liverpool at least, is running to between three and four hundred pounds per week. Three hundred pounds. Per week. For a room. This Author has known town houses in the finest parts of the Capital let for less. Young Beatrice commutes fifty minutes to Manchester; young Amelia takes twenty minutes to the Liverpool Academy of Learning. Both pronounced the accommodation costs “insane,” and this Author, for once, declines to argue with youth. The Universities’ Council may wish to examine its conscience at its earliest convenience.
Now, Gentle Reader, to the matter this Author has been saving with the particular relish one reserves for a second cup of tea on a Saturday morning: the Duchess of Sussex is, it is understood, in discussions to join the cast of the Netflix series The Gentlemen – a comedy, one notes with exquisite appreciation, about a duke who becomes a drug baron. The Cotswolds setting of the series is, naturally, the very region to which the Duke of Sussex and the Duchess of Sussex are said to be relocating imminently. One cannot decide whether this constitutes splendid artistic synergy or the most elaborate piece of residential planning in recent memory. The Duchess last graced our screens as a lawyer in Suits. She is now contemplating a drama about aristocratic criminality. The Prince of Wales could not be reached for comment, and this Author suspects he did not need to be.
Finally, and this Author places it last only because it is so perfectly theatrical it deserves its own moment: a twenty-three-year-old gentleman went overboard from the MV Caledonian Isles, a vessel of the Caledonian Maritime Fleet, carrying three hundred and twenty-nine souls from Brodick on the Isle of Arran. He was retrieved from the sea by the ferry’s rescue boat – a mercy, by any measure. He then informed the crew there was a bomb on board. The vessel proceeded to Ardrossan, all passengers were removed on foot, and a search was conducted. The threats, police established, were not credible. The man was arrested. The passengers, meanwhile, waited in a nearby supermarket car park – which, in North Britain, constitutes a rather more dramatic Saturday afternoon than most had planned. An extra sailing was laid on. Order was restored. The sea, at least on this occasion, gave back what it took.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.