Skip to content
To those among the Gentle Readership who had hoped this Sunday might pass without incident, this Author regrets to report that the Kingdom has once again declined the invitation to behave itself.
We begin with a matter of the gravest tenderness. Little Noah Woods, three years old, is gone – found in the water near Brantham in the county of Suffolk on the sixteenth of September, a day after his disappearance prompted more than 1,300 souls to search the village on his behalf. His family have described him as a “happy, cheeky, playful” boy, and this Author will not linger overlong, save to note what happened next. Ten members of staff at the Eastern Counties’ Medical Trust have been removed from active duty or suspended after it emerged they had accessed Noah’s digital medical records without any legitimate clinical reason whatsoever. The Trust’s deputy chief medical officer has declared such behaviour “completely unacceptable” and reported the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office. One trusts the investigation will be swift. A grieving family deserves rather better than to learn that strangers were browsing their child’s records out of idle curiosity, as though his brief and precious life were an item of gossip on a noticeboard.
From the deeply sorrowful to the merely sodden. The good people of Crawley in West Sussex awoke this Sunday morning to discover that approximately 9,000 households had lost their water supply, owing to a “significant” burst pipe near the Southgate Roundabout. Roads closed. The County Mall shopping centre shuttered. One Mr John Boulton, aged 82, reportedly spent £22 on bottled water at a shop, which is precisely the sort of detail that makes this Author’s blood boil almost as efficiently as a functioning kettle – of which, in Crawley, there were rather fewer than usual. Southern Water has assured residents that restoring supply is their “highest priority”, a reassurance that will no doubt comfort the 9,000 customers currently washing their faces with bottled Evian at premium prices.
Meanwhile, those who had hoped to fly somewhere warm and dry will find cold comfort in the news from Heathrow. The great airport’s proposed third runway, already a subject of controversy sufficient to fill several seasons of parliamentary theatre, may now be delayed by four years. The government had hoped the £33 billion endeavour would open by 2035; Heathrow now speaks airily of securing planning permission by 2029 and opening the runway “within a decade” thereafter – meaning, for those keeping score at home, something closer to 2039. The Department of Transport has noted that the timeline “always been ambitious”, which is the ministerial equivalent of saying “we never truly believed it either.” Former Chancellor Lady Reeves championed the scheme in January of last year; Lord Burnham declared himself “open-minded.” One supposes open-mindedness is a fine quality in a Prime Minister, provided someone eventually closes the planning application.
On a matter considerably more diverting, though no less cautionary: one Paul Gorton, late of the Broadcasting Society‘s celebrated programme The Traitors, has revealed that his home in Cheshire was burgled on the twenty-eighth of August – within twenty minutes of his posting on the digital salons a photograph of himself and his wife enjoying a thoroughly poolside evening abroad, children safely in bed, bellies full. The thieves employed a technique known as “lock snapping” to enter through the bi-fold doors, and then, for good measure, cut the broadband connection. They made off with a bicycle and several sentimental items, including an irreplaceable ring belonging to his wife’s grandmother. Cheshire Police described it as a “one-off hit” – targeted, deliberate, and evidently well-informed by Gorton’s own holiday dispatches. Gentle Reader, if you are presently abroad and contemplating posting a poolside reverie to your followers: do not. The burglars are watching, and they are considerably less charmed by your happiness than you imagine.
And finally, in the spirit of ending a rather grim Sunday on a note of uncomplicated triumph: in the Yorkshire Dales, an eight-year-old Labrador named Penny fell into a river at the celebrated Pecca Falls in Ingleton, clambered onto a rocky outcrop some six and a half feet above the water, and declined to come down. The Cave Rescue Organisation – eighty volunteers strong, founded in 1935, and admirably undaunted by geology – lowered one of their number on a rope into the gorge, retrieved Penny bodily, and hauled her back up the cliff to her grateful owners. The North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue provided support downstream. This Author notes, with a warmth she rarely bestows upon either bureaucrats or burst pipes, that Penny is the second dog rescued from this very waterfall this year alone. One begins to suspect the falls have a reputation among Labradors. Whatever the reason, the Kingdom’s volunteer rescuers deserve every biscuit Penny has deigned to surrender.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.