Plus, a €12 million estate, and a rare outbreak of good news in Britain's waterways — it's The Dawn Chorus, our regular daily round-up of things you don't need to know, but will enjoy finding out about nonetheless.
The dog that costs £120,000 (and that’s before you even feed it)
Why buy a labrador or a spaniel when you can get [checks notes] a ‘military grade protection dog’? We can think of many, many reasons — not least that it’s arguably nicer not to have a pet who terrifies the sweet bejesus out of anybody who stops by for a cuppa — but it seems that a significant number of well-heeled, security conscious, would-be dog owners are signing up to get a dog from an enigmatic, Montana-based breeding and training company called ‘Svalinn’.
The dogs delivered to customers (after 1,000 hours of training, and at a cost of $150,000 — roughly £120,000) aren’t any one particular breed, but apparently crosses of German shepherds, Dutch shepherds and Belgian shepherds. ‘Not all the dogs are the same,’ they say. ‘Each has their own distinct appearance and temperament, with some being a better fit for a family.’
‘A lot of us don’t want to live our lives in fear,’ says Kim Greene, Svalinn founder and CEO, ‘but knowing that we kind of have an ever-vigilant guardian angel by our side just makes us feel we can just live our lives in a state of awareness rather than having to be vigilant all the time.’
We’ve yet to ask our resident dog guru Ben Randall about this sort of thing (we’ll get round to it soon) but you can see more of the dogs, with their very happy-looking trainers, at svalinn.com.
Quiz of the Day
1) In 1964, who became the first commoner to appear on a British postage stamp?
2) What does a misanthrope dislike or distrust?
3) The Lancashire heeler is among the rarest breeds of what in the UK?
4) The term ‘political correctness’ first appeared following which revolution?
5) Which retailer makes the pledge ‘Never knowingly undersold’?
Great balls of fire
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS measures approximately 130,000 miles (209,000 kilometers) in diameter and the tail stretches out for about 18 million miles (29 million km). The comet will not return for another 80,000 years. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
We couldn’t get a nice picture of comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over a British castle, so how about this one of it over Torre Squillace, near Lecce, Italy? (Photo by Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Come on, how else were we to bill these images of the ‘comet of the century’, which has graced skies across the world in recent days?
The longest headline of the year
Picking a lovely line out of an opinion piece to use as a headline is a time-honoured tradition — but what do you do when the piece in question is so filled with lovely, clever phrasing that you just can’t boil it down to a pithy 10 or 12 words? In the case of Ben Pentreath’s article on English Style, the answer is to just go long:
The article, incidentally, is itself a 1,444-ingredient soup (okay, 1,444 words) that absolutely has to be read.
Super sewer
Another day, another headline that our rivers are in an increasingly dire state. It is, of course, unacceptable what is happening to our rivers and waterways, but perhaps you would like some good news? Some news of awfulness being removed from a river? You would? Excellent.
London’s new ‘Super Sewer’ is already stopping hundreds of thousands of tonnes of sewage from entering the Thames, it was revealed yesterday. The £4.5 billion project, named the London Tideway Tunnel, is 15 miles long and stretches from Acton to Becton. The Tideway is designed to catch, store and remove sewage waste away from the capital’s river and it’s hoped that by cleaning up the Thames, wildlife and fish stocks will regenerate.
It’s early days yet, with only four of the 21 total sites operating, but initial results are very promising; in one 24-hour period, 600,000 square metres of sewage was captured and diverted. I’m not sure I can picture what 600,000sq m of sewage looks like, but I know it’s a lot.
‘We are starting to have an impact, we have got a long way to go but the cleaning up of the tidal Thames has definitely started,’ Andy Mitchell, CEO of Tideway, told Times Radio. ‘We are now on the cusp of starting to have some really tangible results.’
It’s quite expensive living in the south-east of England
In news that will likely shock absolutely nobody, it’s been revealed that houses in the North of England are more affordable than those in the South. James Fisher gets to grips with the figures, and immediately puts his flat in Bermondsey on the market with a view to moving to Northumberland. (That last bit is made up.) (At least, I think it is.)
Still on the market
August might feel like it was about five minutes ago, but it was actually two months ago — which means that you might well have expected all the best homes for sale to have been snapped up by now. We’re sure many have been, but this cracker of an estate in Ireland is still available. A total snip at €12 million.
That’s it — we’ll see you again tomorrow
Quiz answers
1) William Shakespeare
2) Humankind
3) Dog
4) The Russian Revolution (1917)
5) John Lewis
