Peter Rhodes on defining sheds, saving sharks and Afghanistan's evil harvest of weapons
Fire fighters and insurers have reported a surge in shed and hut fires as a result of people using them more during the lockdown. Less clear is what's the difference between a shed and a hut. The online dictionaries are not much help, suggesting a hut is usually less permanent than a shed, while Chambers offers that a shed is “often open-fronted.” There's got to be more to it than that.
My shed is not open fronted but it is fairly permanent, having been in constant use since 1940 when it was erected as temporary housing for city-dwellers bombed out in the blitzes. It fulfils all the criteria for being a shed and yet we have always referred to it as the hut. I suspect it's a regional thing. Oop north we have 'uts, dahn sarf they have sheds. Any other theories most welcome.
There is no point in leaving the EU unless we become a better place, not only for humans but for animals, too. The EU has banned so-called shark finning, the grisly and unspeakably cruel practice of removing fins, often from live sharks. Yet Brussels still allows a a booming trade in fins across Europe. Later this year Britain will ban all imports and exports of shark fins, using its independence under Brexit not only to defend endangered species but simply to stand up for what it right, regardless of vested interests.
The scariest image coming out of Afghanistan was one the news cameras passed over in a few seconds. It was a pile of hundreds of assault rifles and handguns, collected from ordinary Afghans by posses of Taliban. The Russians did exactly the same when they occupied eastern Germany in 1945. Handing your weapons over to the new authorities is a potent, personal gesture of surrender. Afghanistan is awash with guns and in a perfect world the Taliban would send their haul to be crushed. But I suspect these millions of weapons will vanish and reappear in other bush wars or in the hands of European crime gangs. If you wish to subvert a Western nation, flooding it with cheap guns and cheap heroin is a fine start, and the Taliban have an abundance of both.
The understatement of this momentous month surely came from the senior army officer describing Afghanistan thus on Radio 4: “It is not an easy country to govern.” No kidding?
