Over the last few years we have watched a ridiculous number of TV series about drug smuggling, mostly set in Galicia, where they have had lots of problems with drugs smuggled into the many rías - one of the disadvantages of having a coastline made up of fjords! This morning I read an article about people being urged to to help catch gangs bringing drugs on “mother ships” to the UK coast.
Just as in the various fictional programmes we have watched (although some have been loosely based on real events) the gangs use asdos -“at-sea-drop-offs - where packages of drugs are released into the ocean from “mother ships” and collected by smaller boats which take them into small coves and harbours. Like the Galician coast, the Cornish coast in particular has lots of little inlets which small boats can access. And a long history of pirates, Life imitates art - if you can call such TV series “art”.
Apparently there is also growing concern the gangs may begin to use more sophisticated techniques such as deploying underwater drones (aka narco submarines) to evade Border Force cutters.
We didn’t see any exciting police boat chases in our recent trip to St Bees in Cumbria!
We’re quite cool and cloudy here today. Perhaps our heatwave is really over ... for the time being. However, according to this article, Nordic countries have also been having unusual and unprecedented hot weather, in some cases the hottest since 1961 - 30+° near the Arctic Circle is not right! Apparently warm water currents from the northern countries has contributed to the heatwave in Europe! It’s the interconnectedness of everything!
I continue to marvel at the silliness of some aspects of modern western society. One of the latest I have heard about is an app provided by wedding planners which allows you to offset some of the cost of your fancy wedding by selling invitations to complete strangers for €150 a pop!
Here’s an example:
“Jennifer, 48, and her husband, Paulo, 50, who met on a dating app during the pandemic and have an 18-month-old son, will marry later this month at a country manor an hour east of Paris. Theirs is the first wedding to have paying guests. Their friends and family will number 80 adults and 15 children, some travelling from England, Germany and Portugal. But alongside those loved ones, there will be five paying strangers who have bought tickets.”
So that’s €750 off the total cost of their wedding. “It’s not only about the money, which is a drop on a hot stone in terms of the overall wedding cost,” said Jennifer, “although it will help a bit in terms of the cost of things like decoration and the dress. It’s also because we thought it could be fun and we’re extrovert and open to sharing things.”
So it seems that the thing to do when you are thinking of getting married is to go to a “wedding fair”, possibly paying an entry fee, link up with a “wedding planner”, again paying a fee for the arrangements and for the special app, spend huge amounts on a dress and so on and then book a fancy venue, preferably in France or Italy, usually quite a long way from home, where you can be married in the garden - watched by your friends and family and selected strangers whose profiles you have vetted!
It’s all got a little out of hand!
Then there’s something I read about in a fashion and beauty article: something called a “sculpt face wrap”. It’s made by a company called Skims, an American shapewear and clothing brand co-founded by Kim Kardashian, Emma Grede and Jens Grede. Skims is described as having a focus on body positivity and inclusivity across the brand and practices inclusive sizing. So what is the “sculpt face wrap”?
“The sculpt face wrap might look, at a glance, like something you would be given by an A&E doctor after standing too close to the chip pan, but it’s actually “jaw support” that you wear, like a retainer, overnight to hold back the terrible, glacial progression of jowls. According to the company, this item is not merely a piece of stretchy material you might have fashioned yourself out of an old pair of tights, but rather a “signature sculpting fabric” made of “collagen yarn”, which for £52 a pop and already selling like hotcakes is definitely a real thing that exists.”
Wow! Skims, by the way was valued at over $4 billion in July 2023.
While some people are paying huge amounts of money for fripperies, in some cases, such as weddings, taking out loans and mortgages to do so, we still have people unable to pay their bills, and needing to go to food banks in order to feed their children. It’s a topsy-turvy world!
And in Gaza children are dying of starvation. France has recently done an air-drop of aid. Good for them but ai have read that air-drops the selves have caused problems. Some land in the sea and people have drowned trying to get them. People have been injured by pallets of aid falling on them from the sky. And an air-drop is considerably more expensive and less effective than driving a fleet of lorries into Gaza!
The world is mad!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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