Monday
A weekend stealth visit to the movies. I started reading Paddington when I was a child in the 1960s and I’ve never entirely stopped. Even now, I occasionally treat myself to one of his adventures when in need of comfort reading, and marmalade sandwiches have been a part of my diet for more than 50 years. But my wife and I did feel self-conscious standing in the queue for Paddington 2 when we realised that – as we had suspected – all the other people waiting were families with small children. We toyed with a couple of options. One was pretending we had accidentally got into the wrong queue and were expecting to see Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool; the other was to talk loudly about our non-existent grandchildren. In the end we settled for brazening it out and giving Paddington death stares to any children who looked at us too quizzically. I’m glad we did, because the film was a delight from start to finish. It also turned out there was an unexpected advantage to going to a cinema packed with five-year-olds: almost all the kids were so small their heads didn’t show above their seats and for the first time in ages I had an entirely uninterrupted view of the screen.
Tuesday
From this week, Eurotunnel has been renamed Getlink to “mark the group’s passage into an exciting new era for mobility infrastructures” post-Brexit. This isn’t, as you might think, a piece of jingoism to expunge the word Euro from as many words in the English language as possible before March 2019, since the company that owns Eurotunnel is French. Rather it is a spectacularly misjudged piece of corporate rebranding. Presumably orchestrated by the PR company, Perfect Curve. Eurotunnel – or Getlink as we should now call it – was worried people might think it only shuttled cars between France and England and would remain unaware that it also offered a bespoke service for lorries. Talk about missing the point. The whole reason most people might not know of the lorry option is because they don’t drive lorries and don’t have to worry about freight transport. I’m equally certain that all haulage companies are clued up on all their freight options. So, in the effort to get car owners to think more about lorries, Getlink have trashed a well-known brand for one that will be forgotten within months.
Wednesday
Never one not to focus on the big picture, the thing that struck me most from all the coverage of the Queen and Prince Philip’s 70th wedding anniversary was just how many medals the Duke of Edinburgh has got. My father, who would have been the same age as Prince Philip were he still alive and – like him – served in the navy throughout the second world war, ended up with just eight: a Distinguished Service Cross, six campaign medals and a victory medal. Prince Philip, though, has somehow ended up with 17 medals – nearly as many as a leader of a failed state – and only about seven of which related to his time in the navy. While you might wonder what the duke had done to deserve two medals for services to New Zealand, the most curious awards are those to mark the Queen’s silver, golden and diamond jubilees. If I had chosen to commemorate various landmarks, such as my 25th wedding anniversary, in my marriage with my own medal ceremony, I think my wife might have had some sharp words to say.
Thursday
The first day of an Ashes series in Australia is always a tense moment in the calendar and one I try to mark by staying up to watch most of the morning’s play. This time I lasted an hour before dozing off contentedly as England batsman Mark Stoneman set about scoring 53 runs in 53 overs. That’s a scoring rate to calm the nerves of old-timers such as myself. I was once dropped from a school side after me and a fellow opener scored no runs whatsoever in the opening 10 overs of a limited-overs game. A teacher, who was acting as umpire, angrily told us we should try to hit the ball and we were both out to the first aggressive shots we played. Leaving our side rocking on 0-2 after 10.5 overs. The one downside to watching the Ashes series on TV this time round is that the coverage has moved to BT Sport and the commentators are a bit rubbish. They all sound more hyped up than the players and they never stop talking. The art of good TV cricket commentary, as the great Richie Benaud often used to observe, is knowing when to say nothing.
Friday
There usually isn’t much enlightenment to be found during the debate following the budget in the House of Commons as most MPs lack the forensic accountancy and economics background to unpick what the headline figures really mean. To get a real handle on what the budget means you’re better off going to the briefing by the Institute of Fiscal Studies – a thinktank that must be doing something right as it is frequently called out by both the Conservatives and Labour for casting doubt on their rose-tinted predictions. After staying up all night to crunch the numbers, the IFS was able to point out that the chancellor had rather glossed over just how bad the forecasts for the UK economy really were. “Astonishingly awful,” was how the IFS’s director, Paul Johnson, described the situation. He also didn’t have much better news for the chancellor on his two main budget announcements. The best it could say about cutting stamp duty was that the probable increase in the cost of buying a house would all go on the house price rather than to the government. And Philip Hammond’s increase in duty to stop people drinking high-alcohol cider was a non-starter as White Lightning was still by a long way the best bang for your buck.
Digested week, digested: The £45bn downgrade