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With M.D.: "Since the last Eye, weekly hospital admissions with Covid rose 33 percent on average in England to 6 October, but then only another 4 percent to 13 October. Around 40 percent of patients in hospital with Covid were catching it while in hospital, but the reintroduction of stricter infection control measures, and the protective effects of the autumn boosters (anyone 50 and over is eligible; MD has had his), may now be kicking in and the number of patients needing admission is slowing down…"
With Bio-Waste Spreader: "Liz Truss says farmland should be yielding ‘fantastic produce' from livestock or crops and ‘shouldn't be full of solar panels'. The prime minister has rightly taken considerable flak for many of her economic policies, but is there a case to be made for limiting the future installation of arrays of solar panels on productive farmland in England? The UK imports 40 percent of its food and in 2021 had an annual trade deficit in food of £26.6bn, which is likely to worsen this year as global food prices have soared…"
With Dr B Ching: "Failing franchise operator Avanti West Coast, which came to the end of its contract this month, has been offered a six-month lifeline by the government despite its pisspoor track record. AWC on the London-Glasgow mainline and London North Eastern Railway on the London-Edinburgh line have similar jobs. LNER was nationalised in 2018 after another franchise flop. In April-June this year, LNER had 6 percent more passengers than in that quarter of 2019; AWC had 26 percent fewer passengers …"
With Remote Controller: "Channel 5 has repositioned itself as a refuge for older BBC viewers neglected by the corporation, but evidently something in the C5 business model still requires shock and schlock. Maxine is a three-parter dramatising Ian Huntley's 2002 murder of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman through the viewpoint of Huntley's girlfriend, Maxine Carr, who was jailed for giving the killer a false alibi and then granted a lifelong anonymity order on release. The most inexplicable aspect of Maxine is the decision that the central empathising role…"
With Old Sparky: "The die is cast for the winter ahead: whatever policy-makers could come up with to ameliorate Europe's very real energy shortage has been done, and we await whatever the weather has in store for us. It's possible to argue in detail with the emergency decisions taken on supply and demand: too much coal being burned? Too little new insulation for homes? But Herculean efforts have been expended, and vast amounts of hard cash…"
With Lunchtime O'Boulez: "The problems of the prickly bass player turned political activist Chi-Chi Nwanoku have increased significantly with major disputes in the orchestra she founded, Chineke, and her refusal to let it play the national anthem after the death of the Queen. Last month, five of Chineke's eight trustees resigned en bloc…"
With Slicker: "Until this year, the post-2008 period of anti-recession cheap money with record low interest rates and quantitative easing (ie printing money), accompanied by low inflation, lulled regulators, the regulated and their customers into what former Bank of England governor (Lord) Mervyn King has described as a ‘fool's paradise' – one his successors allowed to persist. But the post-pandemic economic recovery, combined with energy and food price shocks from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, ended the cheap money era …"
Letter from Buenos Aires
From Our Own Correspondent: "In the United States they may be proud of their ‘greenbacks', but here in Argentina we have a blue dollar. This has nothing to do with the blue whales that bask off our southern coasts, nor our old-school ‘blue movie' industry. It's what we call the foreign currency that tourists and porteños exchange unofficially on street corners or bars for our local currency, the peso, and is so called because a quick test leaves a blue mark if the dollars are fake…"