The roadmap out of lockdown is the signature document of Boris Johnson’s new team in No. 10. It’s intended to be cautious, detailed and based on a new mantra of under-promising and over-delivering. It’s meant to strike a contrast with the chaos that came in the early stage of the pandemic by projecting an image
Last week, Edwin Poots was elected leader of the DUP. You will have read all about him. I have. You may not previously have known much about him. I didn’t. We should hesitate, I think, to respond to his elevation with a broad-brush sneering dismissal, or in personal terms. We know, of course, about Mr
However surreal and dystopian the pandemic landscape seemed at first, no enduring vista feels ‘surreal’ and ‘dystopian’ indefinitely. Citizenries uniformly obliterating their faces with ear-to-ear muzzles has come to seem par for the course. But I’m still amazed by how eagerly a certain segment has embraced masking in public, especially in the US. More perplexingly
We are being urged — and, in some cases, paid — by the government to plant more trees. Actually, this happens most years. I can even remember ‘Plant a tree in ’73. Plant one more in ’74’. It is a bit like saying ‘Have more babies’, without any provision for their care once born. It
The happiest thing that happens in May is the coming into leaf of my long beech hedge. The shift from brown to green symbolises, for me, an annual economic revival — of openings, reopenings and entrepreneurial optimism. This year, after April’s frosts on the end of a dismal winter, it was especially welcome. And as
