Malala smashed her A-levels
“I do not need to smash my A-levels because I do not need a degree. Any idiot can get a degree. Who else has got a Nobel prize? This is a pretty small club, me and Barack Obama, and all he did was get voted for.” That’s what a lesser person would have thought. Malala, with three As at A-level and a place to read PPE at Oxford, chooses greatness every day of her life.
A breakthrough in the treatment of Huntington’s disease
You get so used to hearing “incurable” and “progressive” attached to this disease that it is almost a surprise to discover that people have carried on looking for a cure. If scientists were anything like the rest of us, they would have given up ages ago and concentrated on whose fault Huntington’s was. However, they are not, and this is good: it could be better than good. It could be a breakthrough in the treatment of all neurodegenerative disease. Thank God they are the way they are.
The (very) bad guy lost in Alabama
There is a video of two black women dancing their way from the polling station, having played their part in the downfall of the homophobic Republican senate candidate Roy Moore, a man with nostalgic views of the age of slavery who was forced to deny allegations of sexual misconduct during his campaign. The choreography is beautiful; if you arrived in Alabama from a different century, you would know what it meant to be enfranchised and alive in dangerous times riddled with predators.
For part of one day, the UK got 70% of its energy from renewables
They called it “stunning Sunday”, as the carbon intensity of producing power dropped below 100g of CO2 per kilowatt hour for the first time. Denmark and Norway occasionally produce more wind energy than they can use. In normal politics, we would be talking about creating a European supergrid and ending our reliance on fossil fuels. But this is something to keep us cheerful while we press for normality to resume.
Moonlight took the best picture Oscar
Every year, people call the Oscars “too white” and are told: “What? We’re doing our best, guys. It’s not our fault all the leads are white,” and the fact that perhaps the problem is that any non-white plot is considered “niche” and so not Oscar-material doesn’t come up. So the situation seems intractable, until one year, it ends. If the Oscar had gone to La La Land – as it nearly did, by mistake – the travesty would not have been that it was saccharine and tuneless, but instead that it wasn’t as good.
That exit poll
Initially, all the enjoyment in the Conservatives’ execrable performance came from the dissemblance – people who were cock-a-hoop pretending to be sad (George Osborne), people who looked punched in the face pretending to rejoice (Stephen Kinnock). The pleasure deepened as all of Theresa May’s pompous intonations of strength and stability fell away and her every electoral statement became a hubris meme. But it wasn’t until the next day that the meaning dawned: nobody here is stupid, after all. We don’t all agree. But most of us aren’t stupid.
Trump’s inauguration being outnumbered by the Women’s March
It wasn’t the pink knitted hats or the witty signs. It wasn’t the fact that women marched across the world, in global solidarity the likes of which we haven’t really talked about since the early 90s. It wasn’t even the sense thereafter of a movement growing from that one day. It was mainly how much it irritated the White House manbaby and how many lies with which he has undone himself since to make it not so.
Glastonbury was … sunny
Unless you are there, fine weather for Glastonbury is a bit disappointing – it ruins the spectacle. How often do you get to see 1350,000 people dissolve into mud, like a cross between an orgy, a Renaissance hellscape and the first world war? Almost never. And yet, and yet … there is something about the sight of people enjoying themselves without adversity that is uplifting.
The government lost the vote over a final Brexit deal
Disaster, chaos, hypocrisy, incredible lack of foresight, planning, diligence or seriousness, the petrifying dishonesty and palpable panic – parking all that for a second, in this unprecedented phase of parliamentary inadequacy, there is one bit of it that still works: the maths. It only takes a handful of people to be a bit courageous and the uncompromising rhetoric shrinks back down to hot air and bare assertion.
The kids interrupting the BBC news interview
One minute Professor Robert E Kelly was just a guy in an office, talking about South Korea. Nothing there to turn the interview viral. Then, wham, a small kid saunters in, followed by a real-life baby in a baby walker! Finally, Kelly’s wife flew in as though, if she were incredibly fast and stayed close to the ground, nobody would see her.
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