28 FEATURE
27 MAY 2021
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From the front line…
Civil aviation and personal freedom should be inviolate
BY JACQUELINE CURZON A horrific accident in the Italian Alps killed 14 people last week when a cable car plunged to the ground, possibly as the result of a snapped cable. Of the 15 occupants in the car, 14 of them - including one child - died. The only survivor was a little boy of 5, who lost his grandparents, parents and his 2 year old brother. In China disaster hit marathon runners three hours into a high altitude mountain race, when they encountered hail, freezing rain and gale winds. Emergency services were called out, and although 700 personnel undertook a rescue mission throughout the night, authorities confirmed that 21 of 172 participants had perished, including two of China’s professional long distance runners, Liang Jing and Huang Guanjun. In an article about Britain’s craft renaissance it was brought to our attention about crafts under threat of extinction. The Heritage Craft Association added 20 new practices to the ‘critically endangered’ category of its latest red list. Amongst this list were wainwrights (skilled in the making and repairing of wagons and carts) and of special interest to me is pointe shoe making, which is essential to the ballet industry. As my daughter has recently gone ‘on pointe,’ I’ve become familiar with the brands available, namely Grishko (Russian), Bloch (German), Capezio, Sansha (Italian) and Freeds of London. Diamond cutting, barometer making and horse hair weaving are other crafts on the danger list, as is the making of glass eyes. Jost Haas, a maker of glass eyes, trained for four years in Germany, and still holds clinics at Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, as an ocularist. As he approaches retirement, his skill will be lost for good. Some industries have fared better during covid, including gilding, reverse glass signwriting and rug tufting. If you fancy taking up a new hobby, look no further. An unattended Honesty Gallery in Soho had all its pictures - valued at £1000 each - pinched by thieves, who even took the signs with them. The artist, Andrew Brown, who had devised it as a social experiment, said it had been a ‘dismal failure.’ Big shame! The big C is back in the news; no longer covid, but the cost of cancer, which predicted 304,000 people have either missed a cancer screening or a referral. We are in danger of seeing cancer become the next pandemic. One case which I wish to flag up is that of Jess Brady (27), a satellite engineer experiencing chronic fatigue and a cough she couldn’t shake off. Doctors insisted it was long Covid, although she had never been diagnosed with coronavirus, and the sporty young woman’s symptoms made her increasingly
Jacqueline Curzon PHOTO: LARA MINSKY PHOTOGRAPHY
debilitated with weight loss and vomiting. She contacted her GP surgery more than 20 times in five months and went to A&E. By last November her mother was alarmed over the possibility of cancer as large glands had appeared on her neck. When they finally managed a face-to-face appointment with the GP, these concerns were dismissed because she was young and healthy, and there was no knowing how long a referral would take. Such was her mother’s concern that Jess secured a private hospital appointment with urgent tests, which identified a stage 4 adenocarcinoma which had spread throughout her body. As it was by then too advanced and aggressive to treat, Ms Brady died on December 20, less than a month after being diagnosed. Stories like this are an absolute disgrace, and a failure of GPs to resume face-to-face appointments will prompt more heartbreaking stories. Late diagnosis has set survival rates back by eight years, according to Cancer Research UK. I feel that GPs who had a hands off approach for the whole lockdown should be subject to disciplinary action, for they had an obligation to continue with urgent diagnoses and treatment. Dental patients are now facing up to a three-year wait to be seen under the NHS, with 80% of those surveyed by Healthwatch England complaining about waiting times. Some NHS patients are being removed from lists and told they can instead be seen ‘privately.’ A DHSC spokesman said ‘we are committed to supporting the dental sector… so everyone can access affordable, high quality care, and all practices have been able to deliver a full range of face-to-face care since last June.’ Who writes this nonsense? A little bit of news concerning Scotland and the SNP relates to the Eurovision Song Contest. A senior SNP, Rhiannon Spear, has now apologised after posting a hostile tweet, after the UK’s entry flopped in Eurovision. [When has it not been a pop flop?] She had tweeted, ‘it’s okay Europe, we hate the UK too.’ If this is typical
of the sentiments and calibre of the party in power, we should simply resign ourselves to a divorce and be done with it. Keeping a foot in the door of politics, it was outrageous to hear of the Ryanair plane forced to divert to Minsk, to facilitate the imprisonment of Belorusian journalist Roman Protasevich (26) and his Russian girlfriend Sofia Sapega (23). They had been on a work assignment accompanying Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, an exiled Belarus opposition leader, to the Delphi Economic Forum. The flight - Athens to Vilnius - was diverted after a spurious security threat, and only 2 minutes before entering Lithuanian airspace. To persuade the Captain to comply, a handy Belarusian MiG 29 fighter popped up alongside for ‘encouragement.’ Protasevich knew what the announcement meant, and told fellow passengers he could not land there, for he had been living in exile since 2019 and was designated a terrorist by Lukashenko. Things had begun to look suspicious at the airport when a Russian man standing behind the journalist at check in snapped a picture of his documents before suddenly turning away; however there were still other men in the queue watching him. Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair believes there were KGB agents on the flight, presumably to escalate the situation should the captain refuse to comply, or the journalist resist getting off the plane. There followed a document check for all passengers and a show of emptying some bags, but the SWAT team and accompanying police were only interested in the journalist, who said candidly, ‘the death sentence awaits me.’ Three other passengers got off at Minsk, all of them with Russian passports, so quite likely they were the KGB agents. I would have hoped that the flight would have forced its way on to Vilnius, with the Captain locking himself in his cockpit. It was only minutes from safety and extremely unlikely Lukashenko would have shot down a passenger plane, although we can’t be overly confident of that. One must additionally sympathise with the terror this obviously inflicted on the passengers and crew. Belarus has said Sapega and Protasevich are being held in Okrestina prison (Minsk), and a video was released last night saying he has ‘not been harmed.’ Believe that if you will. Make no mistake, we have just sent this young man to his death. Such a blatant act of aggression was air piracy, plain and simple, instigated by a known dictator and underpinned by Moscow. Hooray, let’s give ten points to the Kremlin: - The Aerovision Contest has no opposition. It's never going to be a fair game putting a fighter jet up against a lowly passenger plane, so interesting now to see how the west responds. There
seems to be nowhere in the world left where free speech is encouraged or permitted (often including here), with communist countries notoriously known for their suppression and harsh punishment of those who mouth the word ‘democracy.’ Were it so simple that sanctions were unilaterally imposed, decency would be restored, but as long as most of Europe are beholden to Mother Russia for energy supplies, their protests will be tokenism at best, and Putin knows that. President Biden last week partially removed sanctions on companies building the pipeline which runs from Siberia through Belarus to Europe. Assuming the Embassy doesn’t scour the internet looking for references to Russia and the Kremlin, I doubt they’ll come looking for me. Although, if you do see me being forced into a car, please don’t assume I’m going on a surprise vacation…. Okay, hands up those who are game for a run round the jungle gym? As my twins are now completing year six, they have a medley of enjoyable outings to round it all off. It was however a little disconcerting for them to insist that I accompany them to Go Ape. Having done zero research on this, I bravely decided when I got there I would just give it a go, and got harnessed up. I set off on the first level of the course, after which you’re expected to either progress to a much harder level, or to stick with what you’ve done already. Now, not one to be easily deterred, I opted for level two, only to find it quite alarming with bridges galore swinging wildly as one tried to wobble from step to step. Never mind the considerable height you are above the forest floor and the slightly unnerving zip line you need to complete your circuit, I can honestly say the last time I undertook anything of this level would’ve been for a pre-RCB back in the 80s and of course I’m now considerably older with health issues, knee injuries, a mother of seven, with no level of fitness or personal training. To my great surprise I got round it in one piece and lived to tell the ‘tail,’ but I’m in no rush to repeat the ‘monkey business.’ At least I kept my girls happy. Lastly, something to get you thinking. If you ever wondered what the secret to happiness was, scientists have now discovered it. Neuroscientists at UCL used the Happiness Project app and MRI scans of people’s brains to develop the following equation. Well, it’s beyond me, but here you go. (t)=w0+w1∑j=1tγt-jCRj+w2∑j=1tγt-jEVj+w3∑j=1tγt-jRPEj
Love Jacqueline x
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