Section:GDN 1N PaGe:30 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 14:34 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian Saturday 7 September 2019
(^30) National
John Crace’s
Digested week
My job is giving me
nightmares. The
reality’s even worse
Monday
It’s been a week since I got back
from Minneapolis, where we
were visiting my daughter and
her husband, and the holiday
already feels something of a
distant memory. I arrived back at
Heathrow late in the morning and
by the afternoon I was sketching
Boris Johnson’s press conference
at the G7 summit. Since then
politics has just got more and more
mad: so much so it’s even aff ecting
my sleep. Last night I had a dream
that I was crossing and recrossing
the Irish border, petrifi ed I was
going to be stopped by guards. I
don’t think that’s one I need to
take to my shrink.
But the holiday was wonderful
- the fi rst time we had all been
together as a family since
Christmas – with plenty of lazing
around beside lakes as well as
more energetic activities. The one
downside, apart from the expense - the government’s eff orts to drive
the pound towards parity with the
dollar to simplify a trade deal did
us no favours – was that we got to
learn more about the workings of
the American healthcare system
than we expected after my wife
broke her thumb playing softball.
Just as well she had taken out
insurance – though we couldn’t
reclaim the unused tokens at the
baseball centre that another family
stole while we were tending to my
wife – as her treatment came to
just short of $8,000.
Tuesday
An extraordinary day in
Westminster, which began with
Johnson giving a statement
on the G7, prorogation and the
general election he said he didn’twant but was clearly desperate
for and continued with Michael
Gove giving a statement in which
he refused to discuss the no-deal
preparations outlined in Operation
Yellowhammer on the ground that
they were top secret. Despite them
having been leaked to the Sunday
Times two weeks previously.
Then came the emergency debate
to prevent a no-deal Brexit in which
Jacob Rees-Mogg threw a tantrum,
lay down on the frontbench and
demanded nanny bring him his
bottle, and ended with Johnson
losing his fi rst vote in the Commons.
As a result of which, 21 Tory MPs,
including Ken Clarke, Philip
Hammond, Justine Greening and
Nicholas Soames, were deselected.
The man who considers himself
a latterday Churchill had just kicked
Churchill’s grandson out of the
Tory party. All the while, Johnson’s
key special adviser, Dominic “Dom
and Dommer” Cummings, was
lurking in the background, Kool-
Aid in hand and shouting at hisshadow while trying to pretend that
everything was working out exactly
as planned. To cap it all, I received a
press release saying David Icke was
publishing a new book on the truth
behind 9/11. Sometimes it’s hard
to distinguish between satire and
reality. I’m often asked if it’s easier
to be a sketchwriter now the absurd
has become the norm. I actually fi nd
it increasingly diffi cult to see the
funny side of anything. I feel like I
have become a stenographer failing
to keep pace with events.Wednesday
Johnson’s fi rst prime minister’s
questions proved to be his second
car crash in as many days. Most
Tory MPs had assumed his hopeless
performance at the dispatch box
the previous day had just been an
aberration and that the man who
had sold himself to them as the
Great Entertainer would live up to
his reputation.
If anything, he was even more
hopeless. Too much more of this
and Tories will be sending letters to
the 1922 Committee demanding the
return of Theresa May. At least she
used to make an attempt at engaging
with questions, even if she seldom
provided any direct answers.
Johnson merely alternated between
mumbling and shouting, while
insisting that his Brexit negotiations
would be going swimmingly once
he actually got round to starting
them and just making facts up to
suit himself. He even insisted that
the Andrew Marr interview in which
Gove admitted some food prices
could go up had never taken place.You’d have thought that someone
with a long history of lying to his
family and friends would be rather
better at lying to parliament. You
could see the desperation on the
Tory benches. Not even his fellow
cabinet members could summon
up much enthusiasm. One Tory MP
sent me a simple text that read, “He
is appalling”. Johnson’s election
slogan is likely to be “Trust the
people”. A hard sell when not even
his own MPs trust him.Thursday
One of the other great pleasures
of going on holiday is the chance
to sit down and read a book –
Duncan Hamilton’s biography of
the Guardian cricket and music
writer Neville Cardus, The Great
Romantic, was an utter joy. I also
love wandering around bookshops
in the US to check out how diff erent
their bestseller charts are from ours
in the UK.
Apart from the usual rash of
“How to get on in business and make
a fortune” books, what struck me in
Barnes & Noble was the number of
titles about dogs that were in their
Top 20. I counted at least three.
There was The Art of Racing in the
Rain: Meet the Dog who will Show
the World how to be Human , the
story of how a pooch brought a
family together and turned a bloke
into a racing driver.
There was also A Dog’s Journey ,
about a pit-bull mix who gets lost,
wanders round a bit and then comes
home, and A Dog’s Purpose about a
dog that teaches people to be nicer
to each other. I wondered if it might
catch on over here and if I might be
able to cash in with a book about my
own dog, Herbert Hound. Though
it might have to be quite short. I
can’t see much fi lm tie-in potentialin the story of how he had such a
good time staying with our friends
Kim and Sarah while we were away- they were happy to throw him a
ball for hours on end, even though
his retrieval success rate is only one
in three – that he sulked for a week
when he got back home.
Friday
It appears to be sod’s law I managed
to miss one of England’s greatest
fi nishes to a Test match since 1981
and have come home to fi nd that the
cricket team has reverted to playing
as badly as it did before I left.
Nor are Spurs doing much for
my mental wellbeing. Last
Sunday’s north London derby
against Arsenal was more pain.
Surrendering a two-goal lead and
hanging on like grim death for a
draw, only to miss a golden chance
to steal the win right at the end,
was pure misery. Made worse by
being hit on the shoulder by a
plastic bottle thrown by an Arsenal
fan sitting above the away end. I
complained to a steward but he
just shrugged and said he hadn’t
seen anything. My observation that
preventing these kinds of incidents
was the whole reason he was there
was met with a blank stare.
Not so long ago I looked forward
to sport as a release – time out
from myself – but now the bit I
increasingly enjoy the most is
the anticipation before the game
has started and I’m beginning to
wonder if it’s every bit as bad for
my mental health as Brexit. I read
a report recently that pessimists
have a shorter life expectancy than
optimists. In which case, I suspect I
am already on borrowed time.Digested week digested
Once, twice, three times a loser‘I hope
they’ve
agreed
a pre-nup’‘He’s even
worse than
you’PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY;
JESSICA TAYLOR/PA▲ The two-headed rattlesnake found
in a New Jersey forest by researchersDouble Dave
the rattlesnake
may fi nd two
heads are not
better than one,
say scientists
Martin BelamScientists have named a rare two-
headed snake Double Dave after it
was found in a forest in the US state
of New Jersey.
The baby timber rattlesnake was
found last month by environmental-
ists from the Herpetological Associates
group, which studies endangered and
threatened reptiles.
The name Double Dave was coined
because it was discovered by the envi-
ronmentalist Dave Schneider and
his colleague, also called Dave. The
venomous snake, which is a type of
pit viper, is 20-25cm (8-10 in ) long and
has two fully formed heads.in many cultures to be a portent of dis-
aster and have frequently appeared in
mythology. In fact, although rare, hap-
pening in about one in 100,000 live
births in the wild, two-headed snakes
turn up fairly frequently.
In recent weeks, photographs ofanother two-headed snake in Bali ,
Indonesia, made the news.
Keeping two-headed snakes alive
can pose problems. Photographs of
a two-headed eastern copperhead
found in Woodbridge, Virginia, last
year went viral, and the breeder
Cooper Sallade, who was looking
after it, told Wired magazine : “Since
the snake had such an incomprehen-
sible amount of media attention, there
was a lot of pressure on me to keep that
thing alive.” He ended up gently force-
feeding it, because the heads were
unable to eat independently, but after
a few months the snake died.
Because of its poor chances of
surviving in the wild, Double Dave
is being taken into captivity by the
Herpetological Associates.Schneider explained that Double
Dave’s two heads worked indepen-
dently of each other, and it would be
diffi cult for such a creature to survive
in the wild because the condition
meant it was slow-moving and could
be easily picked off by prey.
Two-headed snakes often have one
head that is slightly more developed
than the other, and the heads have
been known to fi ght each other over
food, not realising that what they eat is
heading to the same digestive system.
The condition is known as poly-
cephaly and happens in much the
same way that conjoined twins are
formed : an embryo that has begun to
split into identical twins stops before
fully dividing.
Two-headed animals are believedRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws