Big Ben bongs must have their echo
THE APPARENT cost of ringing out the chimes from Big Ben to mark the final departure of the UK from the EU mysteriously shot up from £250,000 to half a million.
Twin problems: the clapper of the bell is missing and there would be no floor for the workers to stand on. And the ears of the ringers would be damaged without considerable protection.
Surely there are recordings of Big Ben. I cannot believe it is beyond the wit of our ingenious engineers to hoist a ruddy great amplifier into the tower so we can all hear the great bell even if the real one must remain silent a while longer.
There is still just time, unless the Jobsworths are in charge.
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THERE must be a few of us who wish we had held on to something we once owned and which is now worth a helluva lot more. I have two such regrets. Having long ago fallen in love with the matchstick men of painter
L S Lowry, I cobbled together a collection of 10. They hung on my walls for years. On a whim I sold them all for a modest profit. Within years the market exploded. His larger northern industrial landscapes now fetch well over a million pounds each. I had five that went for about £200,000 the lot.
When I was much younger, I had an enthusiasm for two-seater no-roof sports cars. In the first flush of large book royalties, I bought, drove and sold one after another. The sexiest of them all was the Jaguar XKSS. It growled, it snarled, it went like the wind.
Then it was made plain to me that old codgers should accept reality and settle for a sedate four-door runabout the police would not pull over just to have a look. At a US auction recently an XKSS went for several million dollars. We all have our different talents but investments clearly are not mine.
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THE HEAD of the nation’s fire services, Sir Thomas Winsor, has described the fact that 300 apartment blocks are still covered in fire-accelerant cladding more than two years since the Grenfell disaster as “alarming”. It is more than that. It is appalling. There should have been a short, sharp law to ban them and insist on immediate correction by the owners.
What has never been explained is the identity of the clowns who clad residences for human beings in materials guaranteed to spread fire rather than retard it. Don’t we have laws penalising “causing death by gross negligence”?
Come on, Tories, you have the power. Do something.