Our British shopping

On villains in suits and fatigues

Since my last newsletter, I’ve stopped doom-scrolling. A friend helpfully reminded me that I have Freedom app on my phone, told me that she used Freedom to switch hers off overnight and so now I have done the same. From 9pm to 9am I can’t go on social media or much media. And it is GREAT. I actually look forward to 9pm. The best thing about Freedom is that you can’t quit it (if you choose that setting, which I do). What do I do instead? I watch TV (Freedom doesn’t stop me doing that) but once in bed I read and I am making sure to read print books. I love my Kindle and it always travels with me, but I am de-screening. I am still doing smug yoga every morning, even when I’m in cold and wintry Leeds and when Tim Senesi, my favourite online yoga teacher, has filmed the January challenge videos on a gorgeous beach in southern California:

It looks *just* like the view from my studio window.

But the Freedom app is not why I missed a 6.30am call from BBC 5Live this morning, wanting me to come on the breakfast show at 7.10 to talk about the Yemen strikes and shipping.

I couldn’t answer because I was asleep.

Next, an 8am call from 5Live again, this time a producer from the Nicky Campbell show, wanting the same.

I couldn’t answer because I was doing yoga and my phone was on silent.

(I did call back, got no answer, called again and they had found someone.)

Next, a text message from BBC World Service wanting me to go on to talk about the economic impact of shipping. I could. I could do some research and sound authoritative. But for once I was honest. That’s not my expertise. But if you want to ask me about the crews and the human impact, I can do that.

Oh, no thanks, we’re all about economics.

The crews. I used to say this all the time: why does no-one talk about the crews? This is not a “MSM never covers X-Y-Z” because MSM covers immense amounts of things and you can find coverage of anything if you look. In December, the Galaxy Leader car carrier was hijacked. The footage taken by the Houthi hijackers is terrifying even trhough a screen. It is that appalling menace that you can see approaching and do nothing about.

Imagine now being one of the crew stood on the bridge. You’re not armed, and here are men with automatic weapons suddenly, who have landed on your ship and you can do nothing about it.

I googled “crew Galaxy Leader.” The last BBC coverage, to taken example, was in early December when the ship was taken hostage. The trade publication Trade Winds published a piece a few days ago saying the shipowner hoped the crew would be released soon. They have been hostages for over a month. I have no idea what condition they are held in, probably better than the Gaza hostages for sure (this early piece showed them being greeted by a military bigwig and said they were allowed limited contact with their families) but still they are not free and they have done nothing wrong but are imprisoned for it.

Seventeen Filipinos, and eight more who are Bulgarian, Mexican, Romanian and Ukrainian.

(Having travelled to Iraq twice, I would never feel comforted by khaki and medals.)

As for the “self-defence” argument for the strikes against Yemen, what pish. There are hardly any British-flagged ships any more. There are hardly any British merchant seafarers. Only 12 percent of global shipping goes through the Red Sea anyway. If you were aiming to hit a British-flagged ship crewed by a British crew, you’d be waiting a long, long time. It’s not about protecting our British selves, but our British shopping and our British oil and gas.

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Mr Bates vs the Post Office

Mr Bates, rightfully and finally, is everywhere. The villainous Post Office is everywhere. I won’t go into why the appalling behaviour of the Post Office has taken so long to explode, nor why Dishy Rishi’s argument that he had been thinking about urgent legislation to exonerate sub-postmasters for five minutes and nothing to do with ITV is insulting to our intelligence. I’m just going to talk about Monica Dolan.

I had resisted watching the ITV drama. I don’t quite know why. Partly because I was ploughing through the Netflix schlock that is Fool Me Once (which forgets to make its main characters likeable), but partly because it started to feel like an obligation and who likes homework? Finally, Fool Me Once done with, a Zwift workout done with (I’ve got shin splints and can’t run and have finally succumbed to Zwift and it’s good fun), and I started on the first episode, expecting it to feel like a chore.

No.

It was entirely gripping. It was so gripping that I carried on watching beyond my bedtime, beyond my Freedom time, and I don’t regret it. The actors are great but Monica Dolan, as sub-postmistress Jo Hamilton, was particularly fabulous. Maybe it was the combination of her bucolic Hampshire village and the black black hearts of the Post Office employees, from CEO downwards. Maybe it was her west country accent or her freshly baked goods. But I think it was her so-realistic portrayal of the combination of shock, disbelief, grief and mental assault that she has had to endure, entirely innocent of any crime or misdemeanour. I cried, I raged, I was entranced. So, so good. Do your homework. Watch it.

Jo (L) and Monica playing Jo (R)

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Animal hero of the week : Llygoden daclus Cymraeg

I’m not exactly revealing much this week that is new or unknown because Llygoden daclus Cymraeg, the Google translate version of Welsh Tidy Mouse, has been all over the news all week. But he or she is wonderful so he or she is my animal hero of the week, if only because he or she has possibly made people stop and think briefly about how they think about mice and whether it is wrong.

Welsh Tidy Mouse, if you have been living in a garage for a week, is a mouse who lives in the garage of Rodney Holbrook in Powys. Rodney couldn’t understand why his untidy bench kept getting tidied. My first suggestion would have been these chaps:

But no. It was a wee llygoden, whose Latin name, pleasingly is mus musculus. Almost as good as rattus rattus. Here is Tidy Mouse, hard at work.

I enjoy this story very much because although the film is silent, it says a lot. About how humans and other animals share space, or don’t. I was at the allotments at the weekend and a woman was complaining that she had seen rats. Immediately helpful people started talking about traps and things. And I thought, why? You’re outside. You don’t own the space. What’s wrong with sharing it with a rat? Also recently, the woman who manages my house in France told me she had seen mice droppings in the downstairs study. Again my reaction was: let them stay in for the winter. I have no bookings, there is no food they can eat, and I can share. Because who is invading whose space? (You will tell me they eat through cables and breed like, well, mice. I know.)

Humans are still debating the motive of Welsh Tidy Mouse to do its tidying. Is it storing food? Is it Mouse Marie Kondo? Does it want to do Strictly Ballroom on the cleaned garage bench? Is it, as this earnest Guardian piece wonders, doing its “mousekeeping” for fun, or nesting, or hiding something?

It’s not the only Welsh Tidy Mouse either. Another one was filmed in 2019, also doing some mousekeeping. Not enough to become a global viral mouse, or to get a nickname. But enough to maybe make humans think, quickly and possibly forgettably, that perhaps a mouse is not just a pest or a problem, and that humans don’t own the planet, we’re just the ones messing it up.

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