Skip to content
Dearest Gentle Reader,
Thirty-five point two degrees. Let that number sit with you a moment, as it has sat upon the entirety of the Southern Kingdom like an unwanted house guest who refuses to read the room. The Meteorological Office confirmed on Wednesday that Wednesday’s peak temperature at Writtle in Essex matched precisely the reading recorded at Cotton in the Elms in Derbyshire on the tenth of July – 35.2C, to the decimal, as though the heat itself wished to demonstrate a flair for symmetry. Meanwhile, last month’s record has been quietly revised upward from 37.7C to a confirmed 38.0C, recorded at Lingwood in Norfolk on the 26th of June – a correction one suspects the Crown Environmental Officers delivered with the weary air of a doctor announcing a result no-one wished to hear.
A cold front approaches, we are told, bearing some cooler temperatures and perhaps a little rain for the northern reaches of these islands. However, with more than half of the Southern Kingdom and parts of the Principality now officially declared in drought, over twenty million souls already subject to hosepipe bans, rivers dwindling to a whisper, harvests arriving early in a state of nervous exhaustion, and the Grand Union Canal in Warwickshire growing more algae than one might wish to contemplate – a light shower over North Britain seems less a remedy and more a polite suggestion. North Britain, for its part, does not officially declare drought but monitors what it calls “water scarcity,” which is surely just drought wearing a different hat in a bid to maintain composure.
From the scorched earth of the Southern Kingdom to a rather more celestial spectacle: Wednesday night brought with it the Buck Moon, that glorious July full Moon which takes its name from the season in which male deer grow new antlers – a fact that strikes This Author as one of the more charming pieces of intelligence available on a sweltering Thursday. Photographers across the Kingdom turned their lenses skyward, capturing the Moon hanging a warm and luminous orange above Windsor Castle, above drought-cracked fields in Cornwall, above a nation too hot to sleep and apparently grateful for the distraction. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich also calls it the Thunder Moon, on account of the summer storms typical of the month. Given that summer storms have been conspicuously absent this July, one wonders whether the Moon is as bewildered as the rest of us.
This Author turns now to a matter of considerably darker character. In York, in the small hours of Thursday morning, a forty-four-year-old gentleman discharged what is believed to have been an air rifle outside York Mosque and Islamic Centre on Bull Lane – at approximately twenty past two in the morning, a time at which no person of sound purpose is discharging anything at anyone’s place of worship. The man was apprehended by North Yorkshire police after departing the scene in a silver vehicle, and remains in custody. No person was physically harmed, which is rather the best that may be said. Officers have pledged high-visibility patrols during prayer times and a meeting with the imam. The investigation into motivation is described as ongoing – as indeed it must be, for discharging a weapon outside a mosque at two in the morning is not an act that lends itself to innocent interpretation.
Across the seas, a situation of prolonged anguish continues to unfold, and This Author reports it without a trace of lightness. Ahmed Al-Doush, a British business analyst from Manchester, has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since August of 2024 – apparently on account of a small number of social media posts from several years prior. He was arrested at Riyadh airport while returning home with his pregnant wife and three children. He has not yet met his youngest child. His wife, Amaher Nour, speaks of a husband whose voice she barely recognises on their permitted calls – a man fatigued, confused, and sustained by hunger strikes that his family have frequently learned of only after the fact. Amnesty International has declared his trial unfair and his conviction a violation of his right to free expression.
Lord Starmer met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah in April. The Foreign Office states his case has been raised with the Saudi authorities – a formulation that has, in This Author’s long experience of such formulations, raised rather more paperwork than results. Mrs Nour’s appeal is three words long, and they are these: “End this nightmare.” A request so simple and so just that this Author trusts the corridors of power are ringing with it, and not merely filing it.
And now, in the spirit of contrast that is the great mercy of any well-composed column, This Author presents the finest story of this or possibly any Thursday: a gentleman of ninety-nine years of age, one Jackie Brown of Stranraer in south-west North Britain, who had one wish. Not wealth, not fame, not the resolution of any geopolitical complexity. He wished to show an Ayrshire cow at Stranraer Show one more time, as he had done many times across a pioneering farming career. Staff at the Belmont Care Centre in Stranraer posted his wish upon the digital salons, the organisers of Stranraer Show – celebrating its 180th edition, no less – were duly informed, and on Wednesday, Mr Brown took to the show ground with his cow. A special rosette was presented. The gentleman himself declared the experience “way beyond anything – absolutely beyond anything.”
This Author has covered the machinations of governments, the collapse of financial arrangements, the indiscretions of the mighty, and the follies of the proud. She reports with complete sincerity that a ninety-nine-year-old man and an Ayrshire cow receiving a rosette at Stranraer Show is the most wholesome intelligence these pages have contained in some considerable time. In a week of heat, drought, darkness, and difficulty, Mr Brown and his cow are the refreshment this column did not know it needed, and now cannot imagine being without.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.