The Griper's Times

WHEN I first told people last year I was leaving my job as a journalist to take a history degree and the path to a possible new career a few told me it was a "brave" decision. This worried me a tad as someone more sensitive than most to people's choice of words. There is a certain kind of courage which may be labelled "brave" in the same way that leopard print wallpaper is "interesting" and your new neighbour - an enthusiastic taxidermist - "seems nice". And as is obvious to anyone who knows me I'm very much not known as one of life's risk-takers; I'm super careful reheating rice, I steer clear of canoes and I still wear a mask* when I visit the local Tesco.  I leave gambling to other people who look better craning over roulette wheels and can at least shuffle a pack of cards. Probably the last bold move I'd made was around 15 years earlier when I decided to leave university to train as a reporter - despite all the advice that...

ONE of the most moving moments of the first Covid lockdown was the sight of streets turning out in force to applaud frontline workers. From Scarborough to Southampton there were scenes of enthusiastic clapping on the doorstep.  It's true that, cheering as the images were, even at the time the show of gratitude disguised a multitude of problems. As senior politicians hurried to get on the bandwagon, I had spoken to union reps concerned that their members had been left exposed by a dire shortage of PPE. There were stories of vulnerable people - who should have been shielding - who felt pressured by employers into taking risks. And I heard warnings that some workers, on zero hours contracts and unable to afford to self-isolate, were taking chances themselves. What the pandemic should have done is lead to a major reassessment of just how we treat the people doing the most important jobs. Because when HM Government hurriedly published the list of key workers - those roles deemed of the ...

MY interest started behind the shining panels and space-age sheeting of the Ecolab. A rare bright spot in the scary first weeks of secondary school was being assigned to the college's futuristic-sounding greenhouse. Now admittedly this was a school which rather revelled in buzz words - it didn't have a reception it had a "foyer", it gave computer rooms pretentious sounding names like "C cubed" and even the library was given the grandiose title of Information Centre. But at least the Ecolab almost lived up to the billing. If it wasn't quite the sort of facility that could have sustained Matt Damon through his unexpected exile on Mars it was a step up from your standard potting shed. Rows of lettuce were nurtured in hydroponic systems, nutrients solutions were stirred up in a great green water but and banana trees grew in pots filled not with earth but clay pellets. Even pesticides were prohibited, with "biological control" the key to seeing off ...