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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Kingdoms have debts, and on this Wednesday, as October draws near its close, several of them have come due simultaneously. His Majesty sets sail for the Caribbean. A telephone network quietly expires. A march in the Northern Province awaits the verdict of a judge. This Author’s lorgnette barely knows which direction to point first – though in truth, the sunglasses of a monarch always win the opening paragraph.
His Majesty the King has arrived in the Bahamas wearing sunglasses and, one assumes, the full weight of several centuries of imperial history upon his grey-suited shoulders. He spoke, with admirable candour, of the country’s culture being “born out of darkness” and acknowledged the “great suffering of the past” – a phrase that, delivered by a reigning British monarch upon Caribbean soil, is rather more than mere pleasantry. He will not, we are told, apologise formally, nor offer reparations; that remains the government’s position and the King sails within its harbour. A dozen or so protesters outside the venue cried “pay us what you owe us,” which is, This Author must observe, an argument unlikely to be settled by a nine-day tour and a handshake. Still, that he came, that he spoke, and that one schoolchild described seeing him as cooler than his Dancing Lantern appearances – these are not nothing.
Meanwhile, in rather less glamorous waters, Parliament has been exercised by the fate of the humble copper telephone wire. Operators plan to complete the switch to an internet-based landline network by the end of January next year, and MPs representing remote corners of the Kingdom – the Western Isles, the Lake District, the West Country – have raised the rather reasonable objection that elderly persons living alone in a valley, during a seventy-mile-an-hour storm, with no mobile signal, no mains electricity, and a battery pack that lasts one hour, are not ideally positioned to benefit from modernity’s advances. The government says the digital network will be more reliable. One wonders whether “more reliable” has been adequately tested against the West of Scotland in November. A back-up battery pack distributed to a crofter on the Isle of Lewis is, This Author submits, not quite the same as a copper wire that has faithfully connected him to civilisation since before any of us were born.
From the Northern Province comes word that a judge is due to deliver his ruling on whether Sir Chris Bryant, the Northern Ireland Secretary, acted lawfully in banning the Drumcree parade through Portadown. The legal challenge was brought by a Portadown Orangeman against Sir Chris and Jon Boutcher, the chief constable, who had written to the Secretary warning that all proportionate options to facilitate the march had been exhausted – and that the remaining options carried “an unacceptable risk of serious injury, disorder, and a wider contagion effect across Northern Ireland.” The court also heard that dissidents may have planned gun attacks on police had a path been cleared. This Author will not pretend to find the comic absurdity here, for there is none to find. A march, a road, decades of dispute, and the ever-present spectre of something far worse than disorder. The judge ruled Wednesday morning. The Northern Province held its breath.
On a matter both urgent and thoroughly avoidable: one hundred and fifty-seven drugs are currently in short supply across the Kingdom – up from one hundred and seven in January, which is the sort of upward trend one would prefer to observe in house prices or sunshine hours. Among those affected is a woman from Coleraine who has managed her multiple sclerosis with Nabilone for seventeen of the eighteen years since her diagnosis. Without it, she describes the pain in her eye as being “stabbed with a hot poker” – and she has spent the past week largely confined to bed. The drug is out of stock with wholesalers and not expected to return until December. The reason for the shortage? “Commercially sensitive,” say officials. This Author is rather of the view that pain is rather more sensitive than commerce, but she is, of course, only a gossip columnist.
Finally, a dispatch from North Britain, where Bonfire Night is shaping up to be the largest policing operation since the visit of Lord Trump to these shores last year – which is either a testament to the enduring combustibility of the Scottish calendar, or to Lord Trump‘s extraordinary talent for requiring seventeen hundred officers wherever he travels. Operation Amberlight, as it is grandly titled, will deploy up to 1,700 officers on and around 5th November to manage fireworks disorder, a Continental Football Assembly match between Celtic and Besiktas in Glasgow, and what police describe as “planned protest activity” circulating on the digital salons. Eighteen English and Welsh forces are sending assistance under mutual aid arrangements. Emergency crews have in recent years been pelted with petrol bombs. This Author notes that the Kingdom has spent centuries setting things alight on the fifth of November in celebration of a failed plot, and expresses no surprise whatsoever that this tradition has retained its essential energy.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.