It Must Be Thursday: The Campaign For Equal Heights

The start of a weekly That-Was-The-Week-That-Was posting that, if my usual attention span is anything to go by, will probably last all of two weeks.  Commenting on things that caught my attention for better or for worse and left me shaking my fist at the sky and shouting "Whyyyy!!!" 

After all: until science brings us a better use for Thursdays - what else is there to do?

PC Anthony Wallyn (left), 7ft 2in, with his colleague, PC Tony Thich, 5ft 6in. 

Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

Photo from The Guardian website 

I have often wondered if there is a special age you reach where all of a sudden your point of view of the world suddenly shifts and you find yourself craving ginger biscuits dunked in a nice warm cuppa, spouting casually racist comments over the Christmas Turkey that begin "I've got nothing against them personally but...", wearing only gray and believing the sun shines out of the Queen's backside (gawd bless er').

As many of my regular readers will know I am unhealthily obsessed with what life must be like for the royals and can barely imagine how they have anything approaching a normal life.  How does it feel to see your face every time you get a letter or want to buy something at the shop?  Do they take little pills to help them cope with the interminably dull Variety Shows?  Do they wear the crown of England in bed, or nip down to the kitchens for a bacon sandwich in the middle of the night?  Is the reason we never see Edward or Andrew in the news any more because they're locked in the Tower Of London to stop them being so embarrassing?

This week poor old Queenie developed a bit of a dicky tummy - probably one too many Swans or Quails Eggs for elevenses, and she was taken to a small ward where a wall of silence rapidly descended.

And so with nothing else to do and with TV airtime to fill attention turned to the poor coppers on duty at the door who were, get this, different heights!  These coppers were the flavour of the moment - newspapers and reporters even giving them nicknames (which unfortunately I wasn't sufficiently interested to remember)

Wow.  Someone find me a barrel, because I think we're more than ready to scrape the bottom of it.

Today I worked with someone of a different height to myself, but is that the BBC suddenly hoving into view with camera crew in tow?  I think not.

They were so desperate to fill air time that when I actually heard about this story it was when I turned on the TV to find a news-presenter standing outside the hospital and reporting to the studio that the now world-famous police officers were, sadly, not on duty right now.

Hang on a sec.

So now the fact that there AREN'T two coppers of different heights on duty outside the Queen's hospital is news?  How does that work?

I wonder what other things not happening could be newsworthy?

It makes me wonder what other non-event my TV license money will pay for next.

Not, of course, that this is anything new - there has been, for as long as I can remember, the little humorous item at the end of the news to make us feel a bit better about the grim 25 minutes that proceeded it.

Yes: there are troops in Basra, the economy is shot, no one has any faith in politicians any more - but never fear, there's a Panda in Beijing that is getting his end away.

So that's alright then.

And of course: there are always slow news days when there is nothing else to do but stand about on the street waiting for something to happen, but I really object to having my intelligence insulted by this kind of time wasting.

But the thing that really gets me is that in all of the other news about this non-event of two boys in blue just trying to do their job no one else seems to have noticed that the small one is called Thich (Tich being a euphamism for small).

Go figure