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Thirty-three British souls remain unaccounted for in the mountains near Nepal, and still the month of August has not finished with us. Naresh Goyal stood before the cameras this Friday, voice breaking, and said only four words that any column would be impertinent to dress in wit: “Please help us find her.” His sister, Mrs Tiwari, aged fifty-one, had travelled to Nepal to fulfil a lifelong dream – the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra pilgrimage – and has not been seen since the floods struck. Five hundred and seventy-three tourists remain named as missing by Nepalese authorities; at least five hundred and thirty-eight people have lost their lives. Families, including that of Mrs Bector of Slough, whose husband told journalists he must be there when she is found, are now flying to Kathmandu to join the search themselves. This Author has nothing to add but the sincerest hope that they find whom they seek.
Closer to home, the National Health Society finds itself in a state that its own managers describe, with impressive understatement, as a “bad deal.” The National Health Society’s Alliance has sounded the alarm over attention and conduct assessments and autism care in the Southern Kingdom, where private providers have flooded the market with the enthusiasm of a speculator at an unregulated auction. One local health board saw its costs rise ten-fold in a single year, reaching £1.5 million a month. Another watched spending leap from £4 million to £30 million over two years. In Cheshire and Merseyside, adult attention-deficit spending has vaulted from £11 million to a projected £51 million. The government promises an independent review and a “new national approach” – which is, of course, precisely what one says when one has not yet the faintest idea what to do.
In Teesside, the grief is of a different and wholly unanswerable kind. Officers of the Cleveland Constabulary are working twenty-hour shifts to investigate a crash that killed seven people on the A66 last Saturday – among them PC Blades and PC Clough, struck by a vehicle travelling the wrong way along the carriageway – and a house fire in Grangetown on Wednesday that claimed Natalie McDonald, aged thirty-four, and her seven-year-old niece Valentina Foster, known to her family as Tina, who had been dancing around the living room that very evening. Two hundred additional officers have been deployed. Seventeen people have been arrested on charges including possession of a firearm and membership of an organised crime group. The Cleveland Police Federation chair has called it more intense than anything she has known. This Author will not attempt levity. Some dispatches simply demand that one set down one’s pen and bow one’s head.
If these dispatches bring you pleasure, a small contribution would be most graciously received. ☕
Now, for those who prefer their Friday scandals of a more combustible variety: eighteen people have died and nearly seven hundred have been injured since 2019 in fires caused by the very same electric velocipedes the Kingdom has been so fervently encouraged to adopt. Over two thousand fires in six years, and nearly half of them starting in the most intimate of settings – the home and the garage. The Capital’s Fire Brigade has noted with increasing alarm that many of the offending machines were purchased second-hand or modified with parts acquired from the Grand Online Emporium. One hundred and fifty-three thousand new electric conveyances are added to the Kingdom’s roads each year. This Author does not wish to be alarmist, but she does wish to suggest that perhaps the bicycle shed is no longer quite the refuge of quiet virtue it once appeared.
And finally, to Coalsnaughton in Clackmannanshire, where sixty houses on two streets are to be demolished because the earth beneath them has, in the bluntest possible terms, decided it has had quite enough. Some two hundred and fifty-six residents were evacuated in May after ground movement – the legacy of historical mining – sent cracks running through roads, paths, and walls. The Mining Remediation Authority has now confirmed that properties on Benbuck View and Dunmoss View are, in the precise words of its chief operations director, “beyond the point of rehabilitation.” Compensation has been promised, though in amounts as yet unspecified – which is, as any resident of polite society knows, the official language for “do not hold your breath.” There is something horribly apt, as this month draws near its close, about a Friday dispatch in which the ground itself proves unreliable. One can only hope the compensation proves rather more solid than the soil.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.