1. Drastic plastic reduction as England goes less big on bags
According to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, England’s use of plastic bags has been reduced by 85% since the 5p charge was introduced, to 500m. The previous year it was 7bn. The charge hasmade a huge difference: it has been calculated that 6bn bags laid end-to-end would stretch about 3m km, or 75 times around the globe. As those top polymer scientists the Buggles once sang, we are living in The Plastic Age. When producer and chief Buggle Trevor Horn wrote that song, Britain had just endured the winter of discontent and there was rubbish piled high on the streets. What they should have done was put all the rubbish into plastic bags – then the streets would have all been Clean, Clean.
2. South Yorkshire town put on alert over high bacteria levels in tap water
Thousands of people in Thorne, near Doncaster, have been warned not to use tap water for drinking or cooking, due to high levels of bacteria in South Yorkshire’s water supply. The powers-that-be have issued directives as to how to deal with this potentially Toxic liquid, for fear it might infect people’s blood, although nothing can compare to the infectiousness of the Britney Spears hit, which was produced by Bloodshy & Avant. Spears also shares a penchant for snakes, which can also be poisonous but are rarely to be found in South Yorkshire, with shlock-rocker Alice Cooper, who also wrote the fittingly titled 1989 track Poison.
3. Nude dating show barraged with complaints to Ofcom
The permissive age has apparently reached a new nadir with Channel 4’s latest dating show, Naked Attraction. The programme might have had 1.4m viewers, but it also received 160 complaints to broadcasting regulator Ofcom, from people appalled by its full-frontal take on Cilla Black’s cuddly old ITV standby, Blind Date. “Have you ever been faced by six penises?” presenter Anna Richardson asked a contestant with bare-faced (and bare- everything else) cheek as Channel 4 conducted a “bold new experiment”, in which a person has to choose a date from half a dozen naked individuals, the focus being on their bodies (and genitals), not their faces, which remain concealed until the end. As Jermaine Stewart once sang, We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off. Still, it’s one way to become Naked and Famous.
4. Fetid corpse flower causes stink in New York
On Friday 29 July, visitors to New York’s Botanical Garden in the Bronx gathered to witness one of the world’s largest and most pungent flowers – Amorphophallus titanum, also known as the “corpse flower” – bloom. According to onlookers, the aroma could variously be compared to “a lettuce when you take it out of the bag”, “the penguin enclosure at the aquarium”, “dead fish”, “a cat litter box” and “one thousand pukes”. Not one person, however, likened the odour to Teen Spirit. Attendees at the Enid A Haupt Conservatory had to be quick – despite taking a decade to bloom, the flower, making its first appearance in the city since 1939, dies within 24-36 hours. Most of them were later seen rummaging through their belongings for some regular Flowers, by Sweet Female Attitude, the garage group who are never less than fragrant.
5. Forecasters warn of rainy season
Despite Bob Dylan’s insistence in 1965 that, “You don’t need a weather man / To know which way the wind blows”, meteorologists have predicted that A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall this August. The month will get off to a chilly, bright start in the north with rain over significant parts of the south feeding into a changeable seven days, the Met Office said. And a deluge is likely – forecasters warn that there could be more rain in the next 24 hours in some parts of the UK than fell during the whole of July. Talk About the Weather brings to mind post-punk band Magazine, whose music was variable if not inclement, leading to patches of Permafrost.
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