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Sarah Todd: Hot under the collar at pointless warnings of the nanny state
HOW has the heatwave been for you? If the "serious health warnings" from the weather forecasters were to be believed, half of us will have been hospitalised.
They expressed particularly grave warnings about the risks to the elderly which, incidentally, they seem to call anybody over the age of about 59.
One of my grandmothers, in her late 80s, has been looking in particularly fine fettle. The reason? She's as brown as a berry. She's been sitting outside on a terrace enjoying "a nice bit of sunshine".
What a nanny state we seem to be living in – 800m has been spent on government advertisements telling us how to do everything from blowing our noses to goodness knows what else.
Mothers of school children are constantly reminded to send their offspring with sunhats and slathered in cream. It would be funny, in rebellion at all this namby-pambying, to send them in bobble hats.
It's a story that's been around for a few weeks, but it's only just come to my attention that the new Farming Minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, is a vegetarian. The East London MP (shouldn't such a role go to somebody from a rural constituency?) is, like his boss Hilary Benn, a non-meat eater. Of course, as Benn himself has said, Ministers should be judged on what they do, not what they eat. But is it so difficult to find somebody with a genuine affinity for farming? Let's look for a positive. Perhaps he eats eggs...
Maybe he'd be interested in one of our hen's latest offerings. Orangela (she has an orange tinge to her feathers) hadn't laid for about two months but the other day left us a surprise in the nesting box. She'd laid the tiniest egg we've ever seen. It measures 4cm long, by 2cm wide. The children are intrigued by it, wondering – rather crudely – if it had "been stuck" and now that it had come out she'd return to being one of their best layers. But so far there's been nothing. We've had double yokers before, but do readers have any experience, or information, about these miniature eggs?
The holiday application form has just gone in for the children to have a couple of days off school for the Great Yorkshire Show. While at a local level teachers are superb, I can't help feeling that the education department is forever collating statistics to use in the future. Recently, our five year-old was weighed and measured. He's so skinny you can count his ribs, but his results were lauded as perfect. If he's ideal, there's no doubt the same exercise on our daughter – who is stronger all round from riding and swimming – would wrongly brand her on the overweight side. All too eggsasperating in this heat.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Sunday 12 February 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 1 C to 6 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 4 C to 8 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: West
