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18 June 2012

The Green Man goes red with embarrassment


It's bracing in Banffshire,” says Braced of Banff.
It seems that at least one politician reads this blog: Scotland’s Minister for the Environment and Climate Change, Stewart Stevenson. 
     Since I posted on 14 May drawing attention to his robotic habit of mentioning fatuous weather details on his Twitter slot almost every day—just to show he is a man who cares for the climate, I presume—he has stopped.
      Just over a week later, he made the last in his interminable series of weather tweets. On 23 May we learn that it is “another beautiful day out there”, and then SILENCE. Apart from 3 June when the Minister reports from his constituency that it is “windy and cool out there” and then notes that “in Banffshire the sun’s shining” (odd as his constituency is Banffshire), that is it.
      Perhaps a hundred tweets have gone out since 14 May letting the world know what our hero is up to. (And revealing whose “tatties” he digs—answer: “my spouse”; yes, really, his “spouse”. How bureaucratic can you get!) But other than 3 June, not one bulletin about the weather. Has the climate come to an end? Or is he just embarrassed? Before that last celebration of a “beautiful day” we had, on 22 May “sunny out there again”; on 21 May (rather mysteriously) “A bit of radiation fog [!] out there -  should burn off by 10 a.m.”; 18 May, “A bit damp out in Banffshire”, and so on, ad nauseam.
     The real question is why the Minister is reading this blog when he ought to be applying his mind to the issues raised by the proposed Sound of Barra Seal Sanctuary, which he appears to be totally uninterested in. Maybe the reason is that Barra is not in Banffshire. Think locally; act vocally.


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