The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
RAY OF LIGHT
A heart-rending tragedy played out on a lonely Isle of Lewis beach in July, after a local crofter discovered a pod of 55 pilot whales stranded on the sand one morning. When a specialist rescue team arrived, only 15 whales were still breathing; one was successfully refloated and escaped, but after the tide receded, euthanasia was the only humane option for the others. Pilot whales are especially social, and the worst stranding incident in Britain for 70 years is thought to have resulted from the pod following a female on to the sand when she became unwell while giving birth.
It was a summer of unlikely face-offs. After Elon Musk challenged Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight (before swiftly changing his mind), Hollywood publicists pitched a plastic doll against the father of the atomic bomb. Barbie v Oppenheimer didn’t seem much of a contest to most critics, but audiences had other ideas. Christopher Nolan’s dense and brooding biopic did good business, but Greta Gerwig’s surreal, knockabout examination of gender stereotypes – played out in a world so kitsch that its production caused a worldwide shortage of a shade of fluorescent pink paint – took more than £1 billion at the global box office, cementing it as the biggest hit of the year. Across fashion pages and social media the ‘Barbiecore’ trend took hold, while the film’s stars Margot Robbie (left) and Ryan Gosling attended premieres in Dreamhouseworthy pinks and pastels. It really was a Barbie world.
Elon Musk’s seemingly tireless crusade to destroy the company he paid $44 billion for last October gathered pace when he abruptly rebranded Twitter as X – the latest expression of his infatuation with the alphabet’s 24th letter, as evidenced by his rocket and communications firm Spacex, Tesla’s flagship Model X, and Musk’s three-year old son, X AE A-XII – one of the 11 Musklets he has to date sired with three different women (it could have been worse, X – just ask poor little Techno Mechanicus Musk).
The bizarre rebrand accelerated a decline in both active users and advertising revenue – respectively down by 14 per cent and more than half since Musk’s takeover. And that was before Musk amplified an antisemitic conspiracy theory on his own platform, inciting a widespread boycott. Forbes estimates that the company is now worth less than half what he paid for it, though Musk himself – with the insouciance of the world’s richest man – has airily suggested it may have shed 90 per cent of its value.
But in Muskland, there’s no such thing as bad news. When Spacex’s enormous new Starship rocket quickly evolved into a very expensive firework not once but twice this year, a spokesperson described the launches as a triumph, notwithstanding their ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’.
When reigning European champions England reached the final of the Fifa Women’s World Cup, the dream of a historic double was dashed in a nervy 1-0 defeat by Spain. Yet, courtesy of their inappropriately excitable football chief, the winners would never be able to savour their triumph. Spanish FA president Luis Rubiales, who had already performed a macho crotchgrab celebration beside the Queen of Spain and her teenage daughter, grasped the head of star player Jenni Hermoso in both hands and kissed her ‘forcefully’ on the lips (he challenges this description). The fallout sowed tumult across Spanish society. Days before he was issued with a restraining order, Rubiales eventually resigned – in an interview with Piers Morgan.
Vladimir Putin isn’t huge on forgiveness, so when Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary army turned away from the Ukrainian front and marched on Moscow in June, his life expectancy shrivelled like the Liz Truss lettuce. In the end, the erstwhile hotdog seller who made his first fortune as a Putin-backed caterer, and his second as the boss of the Putin-backed Wagner private military company, hung on for two whole months following that abortive insurrection. After Prigozhin’s plane crashed into a field near Moscow on 23 August, his old chum and sponsor would blithely suggest that hand grenades might have gone off on board. The Wagner chief ’s extraordinary coup attempt had caused great excitement across the antiputin world, though Ukrainians were keen to remind us that Prigozhin was a sadistic bully who, like most of the soldiers he had recruited, had served several years in prison for violent crime.
After a harrowing 10-month trial, former neonatal nurse Lucy Letby was found guilty of murdering seven babies, and attempting to murder six others, at the Countess of Chester Hospital in 2015 and 2016. Her methods left little evidence: babies were injected with air, poisoned with insulin or forcefed milk. Reporters sent to cover the trial were haunted by the disconnect between Letby’s crimes and her bland, expressionless face. She was handed 14 whole-life sentences, but bereaved families also had to process the shocking claims that doctors on the neonatal unit had raised their growing concerns about Letby with hospital management three times as her crimes continued, being fobbed off and told ‘not to make a fuss’.
Eight people, seven of them children, were left dangling 900ft above a remote valley in Pakistan after their tiny cable car dropped two wires and became stuck. For 15 hours, a daring, sometimes desperate rescue operation played out, involving army helicopters and the fearless operator of a usefully proximate zipline experience. ‘They were in extreme distress and clung to me like a baby clings to their mother,’ said Muhammad Ali Swati, after ferrying the last schoolchild to safety down his lashed-up escape cable. ‘Tears welled up in my eyes. I can’t express the feeling.’
On 2 September, 872 ‘irregular migrants’ reached the UK after crossing the Channel in small boats – a record daily total for the year. It’s projected that 28,000 will arrive by small boat in 2023, a 40 per cent drop on 2022 – though net migration into the UK rose to a record 745,000 in 2022. Meanwhile the backlog of asylum seekers continues to grow, with 175,000 now awaiting an initial decision on their applications, up by more than a third on last year.
Before the autumn, most of us wouldn’t have known what Raac was if it fell on our heads. The revelation that it might imminently do just that led to the abrupt closure of more than 100 schools, just as pupils were returning after the summer holidays. We learnt that thousands of public buildings had been constructed using reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete between 1950 and 1990 – with the material’s low cost apparently outweighing its 30-year life expectancy. This tale of false-economy was never going to end well, yet it was only this summer, some five years after a Raac ceiling collapsed at a mercifully empty Kent primary school, that the Health and Safety Executive issued a stark warning: ‘Raac is now life-expired. It is liable to collapse with little or no notice.’ Pupils at 214 schools are still being taught in Portakabins, tents and gyms, and the eventual bill for the reconstruction of all affected buildings will run deep into the billions.
In a bid to reduce the £8 million daily accommodation costs, the Government announced that 500 asylum seekers would be housed on a giant barge, the Bibby Stockholm, to be moored at Portland in Dorset. In August, amid rival protests by human-rights activists and hostile locals, 39 migrants were moved aboard – then promptly taken off after the discovery of legionella bacteria. The barge is currently thought to house around 135 people.
When morning hikers in Northumberland saw to their horror that a beloved sycamore tree nestling in a dip alongside Hadrian’s Wall had vanished from the horizon, the blame was initially pinned on Storm Agnes, which had blown through in the night. But when it became obvious the tree had been felled with a chainsaw in an inexplicable act of malicious vandalism, the nation was united in grief and fury. Across three centuries, the Sycamore Gap tree had embellished this sparse but idyllic vista, inspiring literature, attracting film-makers and establishing itself as a hallowed site for amateur photographers. Three men, two in their 30s and one in his 60s, remain on police bail having been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage.