Ainsworth 1 Sky News 0 - They're Still Getting the Tone Wrong!

Following my wee rant about Sky News and how I think they’re getting the tone of their reporting on the floods in the UK wrong, I was delighted to watch Sky’s Jeremy Thompson interviewing Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment Peter Ainsworth last night. Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m no Tory. But long-time anchor figure Bowen started to rag Ainsworth about David ‘I wash regularly, actually’ Cameron going to Africa while his constituency was underwater. And that brought Ainsworth out of his corner fighting like Tyson on crack cocaine. Ainsworth slammed Thompson for Sky’s ‘blame game’ reporting, pointed out that we all had more important things to worry about and that the community was getting itself together and didn’t need Sky carping and pointing fingers right now thank you very much.

Thompson (whom I respect, incidentally) took a huge whack to the chin. And there I was cheering a spokesperson on again…

Meanwhile, talking about the weather, as the deliciously eccentric Alison Goldfrapp tells us: “It’s a strange day, no colours no shapes”. Today we woke up to the washed out colours of a summer Shamal, everything around rendered indistinct by the whirling sand, the air thick with the fine, pale dust. It gets up your nose, in your ears, in your hair, dries your skin and enervates your spirit.

The Mistral, the Khamsin, the Scirocco – the great seasonal winds of the world. And all we get is the miserable old Shamal.

The UAE’s Shamal whips up the desert and dumps it on the cities: sand streams across the roads and visibility drops, sometimes alarmingly. Shamal is Arabic for North and, perhaps interestingly, many people in the Arab World use shamal to mean left as well as yassar (right is yemin). Quite why North is synonymous with left is a mystery to me...

The beating hot wind, stinging with sand particles, is just what you need to add to that cheery summer feeling. Mind you, it could be worse. We could be 30 feet under in water.

Which is as neat a link as you’re ever going to get on this blog.