Can we not progress to the 1940s?

I WALKED into the supermarket to buy what I still call a pint of milk. Instead of the usual array on the shelf of milk in cardboard cartons here suddenly was an array of milk in plastic bottles.

In this day and age when non-biodegradable plastics are polluting our rivers, beaches and oceans, strangling marine life and entering the food chain, could there be anything more gormless?

Is it really impossible for us to progress to where we were 50, 60 and 70 years ago – food wrapped in paper or contained in cardboard; liquids contained in cardboard or glass? All of it biodegradable.

Feast of rugby

Oh, my island in the sun, Sharks and College, they both won …

HEY, a rugby double feature last Saturday at the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties – the Sharks vs Lions ding-dong and, in the dining room, Maritzburg College vs DHS on a giant screen put up by College supporters.

With all those College supporters, I’ve never seen the Street Shelter look so classy. Odd though that they should be watching on a screen a game being played just across the road – with no spectators. This dratted Covid!

Monster sturgeon

Caviare comes from the virgin sturgeon, The virgin sturgeon’s a very fine fish. The virgin sturgeon needs no urgin’ That’s why caviar is my dish …

SO GOES the rugby song. But the monster female sturgeon caught by wildlife officers in the Detroit River, in the US, could have outscrummed any rugby ensemble.

She was 1.8m in length and weighed 108.8kg, according to Huffington Post. The officers calculate her age as about 100. They hooked her in the river, it took three people to haul her aboard, they tagged her, then they had her back in the water as quickly as they could.

It happened near Grosse Ile in Michigan state.

Poor old sturgeon. This was rougher than any rugby scrum.

Border incident

WHAT do you do when you’re ploughing a field and there’s a great big stone in the way? You move it and carry on ploughing. That’s what a Belgian farmer did, according to the BBC.

However, what he’d done was reduce French territory by 2.29m and increase Belgian by the same amount. The stone marked part of the border set up by the Treaty of Kortrijk in 1820 after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The alteration was noticed by a local historian.

Does war again threaten? No, the Belgian authorities have told the farmer to put the stone back where he found it.

Phew! Crisis averted.

Political tensions

IAN Gibson, poet laureate of Hillcrest, pens some lines on the current political turmoil; The nation’s in a state of high tension, Not to mention deep depression; With political analysts

And erudite panellists

All hoping for divine intervention.

Tailpiece

I WAS buying fish the other day and asked the counter assistant for a plastic bag. He said it was already inside.

Last word

UNQUESTIONABLY, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.