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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/01/yeti-legend-busted-international-relations-strange-trump-digested-week
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| Version 2 | Version 3 |
|---|---|
| Yeti legend busted as international relations get stranger than fiction | Yeti legend busted as international relations get stranger than fiction |
| (10 days later) | |
| Monday | Monday |
| I seemed to find myself out of step with almost the entire nation when Prince Harry announced his engagement to Meghan Markle. While half the country was overwhelmed with happiness and the other half was in a republican funk at so much attention being given to the royal family, I merely found myself in a state of bemused indifference. I was passingly pleased that two people I didn’t know loved each other, but I couldn’t work up any strong feelings one way or the other as I have little invested in them. My interest was more piqued by a YouGov poll that reported differences in attitudes towards the royal wedding based on how people voted in the EU referendum. It turns out far more remainers believe it is acceptable for a member of the royal family to marry someone who is not British, who is much older than them and is of a different ethnicity than those who voted Brexit. The poll didn’t mention divorce, but I’d bet Brexiters wouldn’t be too keen on that either. So I’m guessing there must be quite a few royalists with mixed feelings. | I seemed to find myself out of step with almost the entire nation when Prince Harry announced his engagement to Meghan Markle. While half the country was overwhelmed with happiness and the other half was in a republican funk at so much attention being given to the royal family, I merely found myself in a state of bemused indifference. I was passingly pleased that two people I didn’t know loved each other, but I couldn’t work up any strong feelings one way or the other as I have little invested in them. My interest was more piqued by a YouGov poll that reported differences in attitudes towards the royal wedding based on how people voted in the EU referendum. It turns out far more remainers believe it is acceptable for a member of the royal family to marry someone who is not British, who is much older than them and is of a different ethnicity than those who voted Brexit. The poll didn’t mention divorce, but I’d bet Brexiters wouldn’t be too keen on that either. So I’m guessing there must be quite a few royalists with mixed feelings. |
| Tuesday | Tuesday |
| It’s been more than 30 years since I last took drugs but I still cannot totally escape them. At least twice a year, I have really vivid dreams where I am back using heroin. The most recent was last night. The dream is almost always the same. I’m never actually taking the drug, just in a frantic panic trying to score as I know I’m about to run out and go cold turkey. It’s also as if I am observing myself in real time and am desperate to hide the fact from everyone who knows me that I am back using. Always when I wake up from one of these dreams I feel profoundly disturbed, unsure what is real and what is not and uncertain of whether I have torpedoed my life. Today it took until lunchtime for me to settle back into my normal working groove and it never fails to astonish me just how deep-rooted this darkness is within my psyche even after such a long period of time. There’s still a part of my unconscious that’s reminding me that self-destruction is never far away. | It’s been more than 30 years since I last took drugs but I still cannot totally escape them. At least twice a year, I have really vivid dreams where I am back using heroin. The most recent was last night. The dream is almost always the same. I’m never actually taking the drug, just in a frantic panic trying to score as I know I’m about to run out and go cold turkey. It’s also as if I am observing myself in real time and am desperate to hide the fact from everyone who knows me that I am back using. Always when I wake up from one of these dreams I feel profoundly disturbed, unsure what is real and what is not and uncertain of whether I have torpedoed my life. Today it took until lunchtime for me to settle back into my normal working groove and it never fails to astonish me just how deep-rooted this darkness is within my psyche even after such a long period of time. There’s still a part of my unconscious that’s reminding me that self-destruction is never far away. |
| Wednesday | Wednesday |
| Along with all the plastic bottles that are floating their way around the ocean – a lobster has recently been found with a Pepsi logo on its claw – it’s also all the microfibres in fleeces that are killing off our marine life. I fear that I may be complicit in this. While I always prefer my Diet Coke out of a can – I find the bottled stuff goes flat in seconds – I did spend much of the weekend wrapping up my banana plants in their thermal fleeces to protect them from the ravages of the Streatham winter. I’ve been doing this for the best part of the last 15 years and so far I haven’t lost a single plant to the cold. Quite the reverse in fact, as many of the bananas have self-propagated so prolifically that I have now many more than when I started, even allowing for those that died after fruiting. So, much as I am keen not to contribute to the destruction of marine habitats, I am also anxious not to lose my front garden. I am conflicted. | Along with all the plastic bottles that are floating their way around the ocean – a lobster has recently been found with a Pepsi logo on its claw – it’s also all the microfibres in fleeces that are killing off our marine life. I fear that I may be complicit in this. While I always prefer my Diet Coke out of a can – I find the bottled stuff goes flat in seconds – I did spend much of the weekend wrapping up my banana plants in their thermal fleeces to protect them from the ravages of the Streatham winter. I’ve been doing this for the best part of the last 15 years and so far I haven’t lost a single plant to the cold. Quite the reverse in fact, as many of the bananas have self-propagated so prolifically that I have now many more than when I started, even allowing for those that died after fruiting. So, much as I am keen not to contribute to the destruction of marine habitats, I am also anxious not to lose my front garden. I am conflicted. |
| Thursday | Thursday |
| International relations took a surreal turn after Theresa May rebuked Donald Trump for retweeting a Britain First Islamophobic video. You’d have thought that an adviser would have warned the president he had acted out of order and that while he might be able to get away with tweeting support for such organisations in the US, that sort of behaviour doesn’t go down too well in Britain. Instead Trump chose to double down on his tweets, first by trolling a Theresa May in Bognor and then getting round to informing the British prime minister to butt out of his business. A US president that can’t press the right button should be a worry to us all. The incident also raised the issue of just what Trump would have to do to get the offer of a state visit withdrawn. This was the subject of much of the emergency debate in the house of commons. Unusually, MPs from all parties were pretty much agreed that the president had well overstepped the mark. Even Amber Rudd, tasked with defending the government’s position of kicking the visit into the long grass, gave the impression that she would much rather withdraw it. Never before can a US president have been called an incompetent, fascist, misogynist Islamophobe in the British parliament without a word of dissent. | International relations took a surreal turn after Theresa May rebuked Donald Trump for retweeting a Britain First Islamophobic video. You’d have thought that an adviser would have warned the president he had acted out of order and that while he might be able to get away with tweeting support for such organisations in the US, that sort of behaviour doesn’t go down too well in Britain. Instead Trump chose to double down on his tweets, first by trolling a Theresa May in Bognor and then getting round to informing the British prime minister to butt out of his business. A US president that can’t press the right button should be a worry to us all. The incident also raised the issue of just what Trump would have to do to get the offer of a state visit withdrawn. This was the subject of much of the emergency debate in the house of commons. Unusually, MPs from all parties were pretty much agreed that the president had well overstepped the mark. Even Amber Rudd, tasked with defending the government’s position of kicking the visit into the long grass, gave the impression that she would much rather withdraw it. Never before can a US president have been called an incompetent, fascist, misogynist Islamophobe in the British parliament without a word of dissent. |
| Friday | Friday |
| One of the highlights of Christmas as a boy was getting the Victor annual in my stocking. Along with old favourites such as Alf Tupper, Morgyn the Mighty, Gorgeous Gus and Killer Kennedy RN, there was almost always a comic strip featuring an encounter with the abominable snowman. Ever since then, I’ve always wanted the existence of the Yeti to be true and now it appears that it might be – if not exactly in the form depicted in the Victor. The biologist Charlotte Lindqvist has published findings that suggest the Yeti is not an unknown giant ape but a rather reclusive species of brown bear that hangs out high in the Himalayas. Lindqvist has studied artefacts that people had claimed came from Yetis and, through mitochondrial analysis, has found that all but one of them were bear related. The other one came from a dog. I know it’s perverse, but part of me is disappointed that the mystery appears to have been solved. | One of the highlights of Christmas as a boy was getting the Victor annual in my stocking. Along with old favourites such as Alf Tupper, Morgyn the Mighty, Gorgeous Gus and Killer Kennedy RN, there was almost always a comic strip featuring an encounter with the abominable snowman. Ever since then, I’ve always wanted the existence of the Yeti to be true and now it appears that it might be – if not exactly in the form depicted in the Victor. The biologist Charlotte Lindqvist has published findings that suggest the Yeti is not an unknown giant ape but a rather reclusive species of brown bear that hangs out high in the Himalayas. Lindqvist has studied artefacts that people had claimed came from Yetis and, through mitochondrial analysis, has found that all but one of them were bear related. The other one came from a dog. I know it’s perverse, but part of me is disappointed that the mystery appears to have been solved. |
| Digested week, digested: The £50bn divorce. | Digested week, digested: The £50bn divorce. |
| Politics | Politics |
| Digested week | Digested week |
| Monarchy | Monarchy |
| Theresa May | Theresa May |
| Drugs | Drugs |
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