BAA, which runs Heathrow, has admitted it turned down an offer by the British Army to help shovel away the snow and ice on its runways. Instead, it went it alone, and has cancelled thousands of holiday flights, spoiling Christmas for tens of thousands of people. It also only invested half a million pounds this year in cold weather removal gear, but boasted of profits of over 350 million. Heathrow should be ashamed. The truth is, British companies offload the suffering onto the British people, when bad weather strikes, shrugging their shoulders and blaming an act of God or aberrant weather, when in fact the fault is in their own balance sheets - the weather is perfectly ordinary at Christmas (we had snow last year too) and such snowstorms, in American, Canadian, or Russian, cities, would be shrugged off, as minor, easily de-iced and cleared away. This is incompetence with a human cost.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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As an expat, I often have family to visit at Christmas - not this year sadly as we know from past experience that bad weather and bad company policy can truly throw a spanner in the works.
B.
Tell me about it! My sister is stuck in New York and can't get home (at least she has George Osborne and Andrew Neil for company!) and my step-daughter who is flying in from Turkey can't get her flight confirmed. Merry Christmas everybody!
Best wishes from Simon
-Phil