David's Daily Diversions

For those of you across

For those of you across the Pond who thing of Britain as eternally cold and rainy, you would normally be right. This week is has been uncomfortably hot. It has been mostly sunny with temperatures in the 80s. If you are thinking that isn’t so bad, remember that we don’t have air conditioning in either the house or the car.

We drove up to the Leominster to the M&M Sports factory shop to get Aidan some trainers (that’s Britspeak for tennis shoes). Aidie’s friend Harry had gotten some there really cheap, so Mrs Holford was keen to get some Aidie as well. Does this child ever have enough shoes? Anyhow, we got him a pair of Reeboks for £7. Something tells me he will grow out of these size 5s much sooner than he will wear them out. As I prophesied in my Meandering of the Annunciation, we will going through a lot of shoes over the next few years.

And now to the news…

Well, just a brief note on the educational fiasco. 1,400 teachers got redundancy notices today.

And speaking of redundancies…

This even made the evening news on the telly. The administrators of a company in receivership sacked 2,500 workers today, mostly by sending text messages to their mobile phones. They were sent a phone number to ring. The answering machine said "All staff who are being retained will be contacted today. If you have not been spoken to you are therefore being made redundant with immediate effect. Unfortunately there are effectively no funds available to pay the salaries for May."

Let there be light!

Believe it or not, until Monday, there is still one village in Britain without electricity. The 31 villager of Cwm Brefi in West Wales have never been connected up to the mains. This wasn’t such a problem in the 6th century when St David preached there, but technological developments elsewhere in Britain, especially in the last two centuries, have left Cwm Brefi in the dark.

The bulk of the cost of stringing of the wires to the village were covered by a European Union Regional Development Fund, with a additional £100,000 from the Ceredigion Council. Nonetheless, each home owner had to put up an additional £5000 to be hooked up.