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There are ten of them now. Ten souls lost to the waters of this Kingdom during a heatwave that, in its perverse generosity, offered the populace thirty-five degrees of sunshine and absolutely no sense whatsoever. The most recent was a teenage boy, recovered from a pond in Swanscombe in Kent on Wednesday afternoon – the tenth person to perish in water-related incidents since the temperatures began their extraordinary ascent. On Tuesday, the Meteorological Office confirmed that the Capital‘s Kew Gardens had recorded 35.1 degrees Celsius – the hottest May day ever recorded in this Kingdom. The nation, predictably, responded by leaping into the nearest body of cold water. This is, one notes with a wince, precisely the problem.
The Royal Life Saving Society has issued what one can only describe as a tragically necessary warning: however warm the air, the water remains shockingly cold – often below fifteen degrees – sufficient to cause the body to seize in involuntary shock before a single stroke can be swum. Ten families now grieve in Lincoln, Halifax, Rotherham, Warwickshire, Cheshire, Farnborough, Lancashire, Cornwall, the Principality, and now Kent. This Author sets aside all wit here and says only: stay out of the water. The sun is not worth it.
To grimmer business still. A fourteen-year-old girl in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, was attacked in January of this year by three boys – two then aged fourteen, one then thirteen – in a manner so vile that This Author shall not dwell upon the particulars beyond what duty demands. All three were convicted. All three were given youth rehabilitation orders and spared custody. The outcry was, to employ considerable understatement, considerable. The sentences are now referred to the Court of Appeal for review, and one can only hope that institution proves more attentive to the victim than the original court appeared to be.
The girl herself spoke to the Broadcasting Society and said she wished only to walk outside without fear of encountering those who had harmed her. Her father described it plainly: “This is a life sentence for her.” The Sentencing Council instructs courts to treat custody as a last resort for children – a principle of civilised jurisprudence that sits, in this particular case, in excruciating tension with the meaning of justice. This Author has no jest to offer here. Only the observation that a system which prioritises the rehabilitation of perpetrators over the safety of victims demands urgent and honest scrutiny.
And now, having discharged those most solemn duties, This Author turns to the sort of scandal that exists on an entirely different register – one that involves neither tragedy nor grief, but rather the remarkable decision by certain television producers to treat matrimony as a spectator sport. The Broadcasting Society’s Panorama programme has been investigating Married at First Sight UK, and the findings are, to borrow the vocabulary of former workers on the programme, “toxic from the top down.” Producers, these workers allege, maintained what one described as an “unhealthy” interest in whether newly-met strangers were having relations with one another – this, apparently, being the animating editorial principle of the entire enterprise.
Two former cast members have alleged they were assaulted by their on-screen “husbands”; a third alleges a non-consensual act. The production company denies wrongdoing and points, with admirable confidence, to the “high return rate” of its crew as evidence of a wholesome workplace culture. All episodes have been removed from Channel 4’s streaming service, a major sponsor has fled, and the fate of the latest series – filmed but not yet broadcast – hangs in the balance. That a show predicated on marrying strangers for cameras should end in allegations of exploitation will surprise precisely no one with functioning critical faculties. This Author has, for the record, never once watched it. She is, however, taking extensive notes.
On to a matter of jurisprudence and some financial creativity: Birmingham City Council – that venerable institution which declared itself effectively bankrupt in 2023 – has, it emerges, paid itself £472,253 in fines and daily charges because its own vehicles repeatedly breach its own Clean Air Zone rules. One in eight of the council’s vehicles still fails to meet the emissions standards the council itself imposed. The waste department’s lorries are, evidently, the principal offenders – which is apt, given that the city has simultaneously endured a year-long bin strike. Birmingham has, in other words, been fining itself for not collecting rubbish, with vehicles that breach environmental rules it created, whilst bankrupt. This Author has encountered baroque administrative folly in her time, but this deserves a small trophy.
Finally, and on a note that strikes This Author as both appropriately absurd and oddly poignant as the month draws near its close, the nation’s most celebrated naked gentleman is in need of attention. The Cerne Abbas Giant – a 55-metre chalk figure carved into a Dorset hillside, depicted in a state of considerable anatomical frankness and wielding a club – is, according to the National Trust, fading. Heavier winter rains wash his outline away; algae creeps across his contours; he grows, one ranger reports, “greener and less distinct.” Tonnes of fresh chalk will be packed onto the figure this very week to restore his crisp definition. The Trust declines to blame climate change directly, though the Meteorological Office notes the Kingdom’s winters grow wetter and its summers hotter with each passing decade. That the planet’s warming should threaten the modesty – or rather, the immodesty – of a centuries-old hillside figure is precisely the sort of detail that makes This Author feel the universe has retained its sense of humour, even if polite society has not.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.