If you search for “hedgehog” on EGi, you’ll find four past Diary pages – and three exceptionally cute photos. Well, let’s make that five and four.
We were delighted to see The Times shares our enthusiasm for prickly critters, with the news that “one of Britain’s largest builders has pledged to accommodate the need for hedgehogs to roam at night when it constructs new homes”.
Bovis Homes, the developer in question, has promised to incorporate “hedgehog highways” — holes in fences that allow the creatures to trudge in and out of gardens — in its existing housing developments and all future sites wherever possible, and will also build “hedgehog homes” in open green spaces.
Hurrah! At last, a positive story about housebuilders that we can all get behind.
Poetry in planning
Here Diary is making regular references to movies, 80s TV and comic books, while Antony Slumbers is throwing out far more elevated allusions on Twitter. “Do wish planning permission had to pass the test of whether it abides by this,” he tweeted, before quoting poetry by no lesser a light than John Keats:
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
All very lofty an ideal, but when one considers how much room for argument is left in the prosaic language of the National Planning Policy Framework, we’re not sure a Keats test would bring any greater clarity to planning.
Check and, indeed, mate
Caught on camera: the sad moment a staff member removes the final poster from the window display of the Wandsworth branch of Debenhams. Has a clever marketing slogan ever come back to haunt a retailer so quickly?
Out of order in Intu
You’ve got to love local journalism. While it still exists, at any rate. Where else (well, apart from Diary…) could you find stories such as “The things you can’t do inside Watford’s Intu shopping centre”.
The Hertfordshire Mercury gets our hopes up with the tantalising strapline “some of their rules may be weirder than you realised…” before going on to disappoint us with a rather prosaic list of don’ts, sourced from the Intu website, that we can file under blooming obvious.
That all said, Intu deserves praise for some of the wording on its “visitor code of conduct” (which applies to all its centres). Example: “No swearing, shouting or use of other unpleasant language. As your mum might say, ‘It’s not nice and it’s not clever’, and she’d be right.” And then there is: “No ball games, even if you are Lionel Messi.” We’d love him to sign for Watford, rock up and put that to the test: we suspect the policy might be a bit more flexible if he did.
Where there’s a will…
…there’s an opportunistic press release. “Could Harry be written out of the Queen’s will?” asks Dan Garrett, chief executive of will writers Farewill – seizing his moment to list the “strangest celebrity request in wills”.
On a personal level, Diary is impressed he included Mark Gruenwald, a Marvel Comics writer who asked for his ashes to be mixed into the ink of a graphic novel – as it happens, we once wrote a tribute to Gruenwald’s work on Captain America. But we digress.
Of broader appeal, apparently William Shakespeare left most of his possessions to his eldest daughter, only bequeathing his wife his “second-best bed” (which a scholarly colleague assures us was actually romantic). Then there’s Harry Houdini – the escapologist gave his wife a secret 10-digit code and requested that she host a seance to prove his continued existence. A sound option for any readers out there with sizeable property portfolios anxious to retain some measure of control, post mortem.
As for the (current) Duke of Sussex, Garrett posits that the so-called “Megxit” may affect the estate planning of the royal family, and says it will be interesting to see if the ongoing crisis talks affect either the last testaments of the Queen or Prince Charles. Wills and Harry – what more could you ask for in a Diary entry?
Court blimey
Donald Trump’s approval rating has remained pretty constant in the low to mid-40s throughout his presidency. We mention this at it gives some context to the Property Litigation Association’s survey of its members, which revealed that a frankly astounding 93.4% of respondents feel our county courts are “not fit for purpose”.
That, by Diary’s maths, amounts to a 6.6% approval rating, at best. Can an entire court system be impeached? Read more details from the damning report here.
Slack Mirror, episode two
The story continues:
“Two days later, I wake up. I have no recollection of falling asleep. I am summoned to the Timberlake room for an urgent meeting but I have no idea where that is. Tearfully, I slide down the first helter-skelter I can find – but it only leads to a windowless cube in which a jazz quartet is playing. A hologram barista appears.”
