Greetings from, well, the United Kingdom.
It’s been exactly three months since I was last ‘home’ and two months since I left this island.
Anything big happen since I left?
Let’s see now…
HOLY CRAP.
- Work on the world’s largest windfarm was completed off the coast of Yorkshire. It’s record will superseded by another being built off these shores next year.
- Waltham Forest became the first council in the UK to divest fossil fuels from their pension fund.
- A trial showed that Oxford University’s malaria vaccine is the cheapest and most effective yet, with protection up to 80 percent. Not bad for a disease that (speculatively) may have killed 50 billion humans to date.
- The University of Manchester have developed the first diagnostic test for Parkinson’s.
- Period products became free in Scotland.
- Cycling is booming in the UK with weekday journeys up 47% since 2021.
- Doctors will soon be able to prescribe free bikes.
- 86 percent of British companies that took part in a 3,300 person trial of the 4-day working week say that they plan to keep the model.
- A pine marten was spotted in London for the first time in a century.
- The proportion of British people who think immigration is ‘bad for the economy’ halved from 42 per cent to 20 per cent. Despite all the frothy headlines over ‘culture wars’, social attitudes in the UK are becoming steadily more liberal.
- Thomas & Friends got its first autistic train character, Bruno the Brake Car, and Peppa Pig got its first same-sex couple.
Amid the dread of returning to the UK, it’s good for me (and you too, perhaps) to remember that, at the same time as things going wrong, some things go right too.
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I caught up on all that UK news by looking through the weekly Positive News ‘what went right’ archive, which you can also get as a newsletter.