With Bio-Waste Spreader: "It's always been hard to define the financial worth of the ‘average' British farmer, given that the likes of billionaire Sir James Dyson and the Duke of Westminster actively farm all or some of their vast land holdings while many others eke out a living as tenant farmers on small acreages. But have the Westminster government's policies towards English farming now created an additional category: the farmer ‘haves' and ‘have nots'?…"
With MD: "The merger of NHS England (NHSE) and the Department of Health and Social Care is not proving as simple as planned. This is probably because it wasn't planned: health secretary Wes Streeting stressed his commitment to keeping NHSE intact as recently as, er, 31 January. According to a staff note leaked to the Health Service Journal, NHSE's temporary new leaders, Sir Jim Mackey and Dr Penny Dash, wanted ‘to deliver an initial picture of what the new organisation might look like by the end of April'…"
With Dr B Ching: "South Western Railway services won't improve immediately after renationalisation on 25 May, but money has already been saved by not franchising the trains again. Replacing the current contract, held by FirstGroup and MTR of Hong Kong, with a new franchise would have taken years and cost the government and bidders millions of pounds. Renationalisation avoids the palaver…"
With Remote Controller: "One of the case studies in Saving Lives in Cardiff, the latest in an always long waiting list of NHS observational documentaries, is John, a retired French polisher in his mid-seventies. His emergency surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm – or ‘triple A', medical shows being partly a jargon class – is complicated by lung damage from the unguents of his profession. Remarkably, the patient in this storyline – like soap operas, this documentary credits a ‘story producer' – is the same vintage as the genre he swells…"
With Old Sparky: "With no immediate explanation for last month's massive super-regional blackout across Spain, Portugal and parts of France, there are calls to review the resilience of the UK's own electricity grid. The security of any grid depends on maintaining the unwavering stability of the frequency of electricity output. This is much easier to achieve when coal or gas-fired plants predominate, rather than with solar or wind power…"
With Lunchtime O'Boulez: "The death last month of Charles Beare, a leading authority on rare instruments, has drawn mixed responses across the music world. Likeable and avuncular, he was for some a trusted friend and adviser. But for others he was a powerful figure in a murky world where experts are also dealers, buying and selling instruments that they themselves authenticate and value. Given that a good Stradivari violin can realise more than $20m at auction, there are huge amounts of money to be made…"
With Slicker: "Pro-Palestinian activists last week disrupted the Barclays annual shareholders meeting for a second year, with protesters accusing the bank of ‘bankrolling genocide'. Highlighted was Barclays' role as a primary dealer in Israeli government bonds (vital to funding state spending), including on the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, together with illegal West Bank settlements. Last year also saw red paint, graffiti and window-smashing at bank branches..."
Letter from Asunción
From Our Own Correspondent: "Paraguayans are unaccustomed to change. The rest of South America may know a thing or two about volatility, but the National Republican Association (‘Colorado') party, save for a brief interregnum in 2008-13, has held power here for more than 70 years. For decades, our president was Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled as dictator, with long periods when all other political parties were banned…"