The Delights of the Weekend FT
I’ve written before of the unlikely content carried by the Weekend Financial Times as well as the vivid prose that is found in the pink pages.
This weekend’s newspaper was a fascinating read. It contains a delightfully random mix of information you’ll find nowhere else:
- A series of articles in the House & Home section nestled between ads for $23 million New York apartments. These give details of remodeling projects undertaken by members of the newspaper’s staff including the story of a 13-year-long tussle with bureaucrats in Spain to obtain permission to convert a farmhouse into a holiday home. This is followed by a correspondent’s humble upgrade to a garden greenhouse with broken glass panes. Other reports cover remodeling projects in Jakarta, Mozambique, Egypt and South Wales.
- A prize-winning first-person report from a Bolivian navel base — 2,000km from the ocean — maintained by that landlocked nation (one of nine countries with no coastline that maintain navies).
- The need for certain huskies on dog-sled teams in Arctic Norway to wear special jackets if they don’t have ‘sufficiently hairy testicles’ to combat the cold.
- The fact that the average German today owns 10,000 objects, the average British household owns around £4,000 worth of clothes and 6-8% of US adults suffer from compulsive buying disorder or ‘oniomania’.
- In 2002 a third of all employees in Japan lived in corporate housing.
- A new book retells the story of The Merchant of Venice in the contemporary setting of Cheshire, my home county in England.
- An airport is set to open on remote island of St. Helena which contains ‘the world’s most isolated hospital, police station, prison, distillery, cathedral and cricket ground.’
- The ‘hipster economy’ includes a taste for craft beers, flat whites and beard balm. But there’s no mention of kombucha — surely the hippest of hipster beverages?
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