Tag: BBC

Ironing made easy

It’s bizarre really.

I always used to hate ironing, really hate it, but since the advent of podcasts, I love it.

There is nothing finer, especially when it’s raining outside and you’ve caught up on all your freelance work and you’re not feeling particularly creative, than popping the pile of unironed clothes on one side and churning out neatly pressed garments on the other.

And all with the aid of the latest podcast.

There are several on which I’m hooked at the moment, with many more in the listened to and recommended pile.

The Rest is Politics is one of them, with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart but particularly the US version with broadcaster Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci, who was Trump’s director of communications for ten days in 2017 and is now a candid opponent of the former US president.

My brother put me on to that one. It’s laugh-out-loud brilliant, and hugely informative. The latest episode, in which the listener learns of Scaramucci’s surprising role behind the scenes for the Democrats at this week’s big debate, is revelatory.

From there, I went to The Rest is History, a programme hosted by two very amiable historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, whose banter is delightfully schoolboyish in its delivery.

I was glued to their series about The French Revolution, and also the one about the Piltdown Man. But the latest one about beards through history is astonishing.

For example, in 1698, Peter the Great of Russia brought in a beard tax, which men had to pay for the privilege of wearing a beard. To prove they’d paid, they had to wear a beard token featuring the lower part of a face with a beard.

Who knew?

I certainly didn’t.

Other fascinating podcasts to which I’ve listened in recent months include the BBC’s To Catch a Scorpion, a real-life search for a people smuggler who transports migrants from the European mainland into the UK; The Ratline, a story of love, denial and the Nazis, and Worse Than Murder, about the kidnapping and murder of Muriel McKay in 1969. The men who took her thought she was the wife of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Then there’s Marianna in Conspiracyland, about the rising tide of misinformation on social media, and The Gatekeepers, a truly terrifying account of ‘how social media allowed a new digital elite and their platforms to conquer the planet and control what we see’

I get through a lot of ironing.

Women Ironing, by Edgar Degas (1834-1917). I suspect the woman on the left is drunk on podcasts and the other one has earphones hidden under bonnet.

Batten down the hatches

Mammatus storm clouds, San Antonio. Picture: Wikipedia Commons

The storm tickled us here in west Dorset, with high winds and rain but nothing we couldn’t handle.

We were lucky. Other parts of the country have had it much worse than us.

Storm Isha is the ninth named storm this season. We have Storm Jocelyn just around the corner. Batten down the hatches.

I don’t know about you but there are so many named storms, I lose track of them all.

Someone told me yesterday that the storms are named by European countries jostling for position in the naming stakes.

I didn’t think that could be right. But there was something in the back of my mind about storm names alternating between male and female.

So I turned to the internet and looked it up.

Thanks to a very comprehensive (and, thankfully, short) article on the BBC website, I am now considerably the wiser.

The male/female names were indeed a thing, but not any more. (And to digress, when did the words any more become anymore? I must have missed that memo.)

The US began naming storms in the 1950s.

Here in the UK, it’s a much more recent phenomenon.

According to the BBC, ‘in the UK, the Met Office names any storm when it has the potential to cause disruption or damage.

‘It believes that it is easier to follow the progress of a storm on TV, radio, or social media if it has a name.’

So how are storms named?

Over to the BBC article again:

‘The UK Met Office and Irish service Met Éireann launched their first Name our Storms campaign in 2015.

‘Most years, they draw the names from a shortlist of favourites submitted by the public. Since 2019, they have been joined by the national weather service of the Netherlands, which also chips in a few suggested names each year.

‘In previous years, storms have alternated between male and female names.

‘However, for the 2023-24 season, the Met Office has altered this, naming a number of storms after prominent scientists, meteorologists and others “who work to keep people safe in times of severe weather”.’

So, this season, it will be mostly:

Agnes, Babet, Ciaran, Debi, Eli, Fergus, Gerrit, Henk, Isha, Jocelyn, Kathleen, Lilian, Minnie, Nicholas, Olga, Piet, Regina, Stuart, Tamiko, Vincent and Walid.

(Storm Minnie!)

We might not get through the whole alphabet and the letters Q, U and Z don’t get a look in. But over the coming months, you may hear some names which aren’t on the British/Irish/Dutch list.

Explains the BBC: ‘That is because storms are named where they originate. Storms that reach the UK are occasionally the tail end of one that started in the US several days earlier – and may have been downgraded from hurricane or cyclone status.’

Keep safe.