A LETTER published in a rival newspaper some years ago detailed a teenage girl’s delightfully disinterested take on the moon landing.
In her entry for July 20, 1969, the correspondent confided in her journal that she had gone to an arts centre by herself in some jazzy breeks, met a boy she presumably fancied while someone she didn’t fancy slipped a poem in her bag (met with a big, frustrated UGH). It ends: “Man landed on the moon.”
We’re only human; sometimes the big stuff is just too big to deal with. Take this week for instance.
In the space of a few short days, we have had the circus of Labour pretending they’ve never seen an international arrest warrant, guv, and wouldn’t know what to do with one even if they had.
Meanwhile Vladimir Putin (above) and Nato are playing the greatest game of brinksmanship since the Cold War, with the Russians lowering the threshold for a nuclear strike while the West grants Ukraine permission to fire UK and American missiles into Russia.
It increasingly feels that if we are not heading to a negotiated peace in Eastern Europe, we’re heading to all-out war.
READ MORE: Home Secretary refuses to say if UK would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu
Meanwhile, Labour’s refusal to entertain the hypothetical of whether Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if he were to change flights Elvis-style at Prestwick Airport makes for quite staggering viewing.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (below) insisted it was not a matter for her, even though she is the minister ultimately responsible for law and order in the UK.
It makes the West’s claims of commitment to the “international rules-based order” look a little shaky, to put it mildly. You might remember the outrage over the Tories saying they were breaking international law in a “limited and specific way” back in 2020; this is far more serious than that.
As for Ukraine’s use of UK missiles against Russia – which has moved Putin’s hand closer to the big red button – I can’t be the only one finding Labour’s coy deflection of questioning about it just a little frustrating.
READ MORE: Nato and Ukraine to hold emergency talks after Russia uses hypersonic missile
But still, there is no need to worry our pretty little heads about it, as the gratingly dismissive Defence Secretary John Healey (below) might have it.
Look, remember when John Prescott punched that man in Wales? Or how about the time he sank an ale in five seconds? Don’t make ‘em like that anymore, now do they?
Or for viewers in Scotland, Stephen Flynn’s had a right week of it and has decided he actually can’t stretch himself to two jobs (though I stand by my prediction last week that he’ll get a Holyrood seat if he wants one).
If neither of those grab you, then what about the poor old farmers? Easy to demonise but hard to miss as they filled Whitehall with a sea of green Barbour jackets and tweed bunnets in protest over Labour’s new death duties on family farms.
None of this is trivial, of course. The death of a political titan, a rising star in Scottish politics having the breaks rather abruptly applied to his ambitions, and the fury of British farmers are not trifles.
But it does make you wonder if historians examining the months leading up to the Third World War might look back at some of Friday's Scottish front pages and find themselves just a bit puzzled by how blase we all seemed about the whole thing.
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