We have some new cast members. They’re great. And small #ACGAS
I thought you might like this picture I took of @RachelShenton on set.
Straight out of early 40s Hollywood
Animal handler Dean Clark showed our children around the #ACGAS holding farm in April. COVID and Foot and Mouth rules make the logistics of moving and training animals for a series like this complex.
The calves are so small they still need coats for spring filming in the Dales
Siegfried returned from the Great War preferring most horses to most people.
Tonight’s episode is the one where that stopped feeling eccentric and started to make perfect sense #ACGAS
Shoutout to our brilliant #ACGAS horse master Mark Atkinson and his son Ben.
They have a connection to their animals which is nothing short of astonishing, and they couldn’t have been kinder or more helpful to an improving rider actionhorses.co.uk
Thank you so much for your kind words about #AllCreaturesGreatAndSmall tonight. A labour of love, as I’m sure you could tell.
Water companies paying record dividends despite record fines. Between them, eight English water companies paid out more than £1.35bn to shareholders last year. They discharged sewage for a total of 3.6m hours: that's £377 dividend for every hour of polluting rivers and seas
10 000 people hospitalised for waterborne diseases. Despite the disaster of water, energy and the railways, a mad rush for more privatisation. The collapse of 28 energy providers. British Gas profits up from £72m to £751m in one year (2023). Royal Mail sold to a Czech billionaire
Fifteen years. Five prime ministers, seven chancellors, eight foreign secretaries, twelve culture secretaries and sixteen housing ministers.
A thread, for #RantyTuesday.
One third of all children in poverty. Triple the NHS waiting list (6.4m). Energy bills up a quarter in the last two years. Food prices up a fifth. Huge mortgage increases. Four million hours of sewage poured into our rivers and seas in 2023, more than twice as much as in 2022
Number of food banks up 7000% since 2010. More food banks than branches of McDonalds in the UK, and now 4250 food banks operating in British schools
I'd take Sunak's crusade against teenage 'loitering' more seriously if his party since 2010 hadn't closed more than 800 libraries, sold off hundreds of playing fields, cut arts funding by a third and local authority grants by 40%.
Young people need cheap, interesting things to do
(Mind you, the sale of playing fields has slowed down. Between 1979 and 1997 the @Conservatives approved the sale of around 10 000 of them)
Katharine Birbalsingh says that fewer girls chose physics because “physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy… There’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think they would rather not do… The research generally … just says that’s a natural thing."
Katharine Birbalsingh is the government’s social mobility commissioner.
So that's you told, girls. Get back in the kitchen and don't bother your head with hard sums. It's not natural. theguardian.com/education/2022…
The Institute of Physics @PhysicsNews is clear where the problem lies:
“It would appear that, in many schools, expectations of students are often gender stereotyped. This must be challenged by a school-wide approach to gender equity, with support from government…”
The way much of the world has handled COVID is pretty depressing.
In large so-called democracies like the US and UK, short-termism and the patchy adoption and early abandonment of easy stuff like masks proved we were governed by clowns who would rather be popular than right
Meanwhile we hoarded vaccines and their patents, ignoring the fact that no-one is safe till all are safe and leaving us open to long COVID and more dangerous variants.
Care and consideration for our fellow humans were derided as an unacceptable yoke on individual freedom, and governments who should have known better pandered to misinformation and self-interest.
Capitalism saw the disaster as a way to profit, not help