We had a U-turn on tax, a Plan B from the chancellor, a row with M People and a rocket launch from SpaceX.
By midweek the headlines were already looking like alphabet soup and then along came an Inverness bus that couldn’t get from A to B (Press and Journal, October 6).
As Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng swapped lanes on economic strategy, the only thing with a worse sense of direction appeared to be Scotland’s first autonomous vehicle which lost track of its route.
Unlike the government, the bus did have the excuse of not having anyone in the driving seat.
The Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Driverless Machiney has been driving itself around Inverness for some time now, but unfortunately on its official launch day, it didn’t know where it was.
I know how it feels – I’m like that in Farmfoods.
You may have seen me wandering between the freezers, tutting – why do they have to move everything around?
Is it so I don’t notice that the three-for-£5 deals are now £7?
Eat local
I do hope so, anything that distracts me from the price of frozen pizza is welcome and so I was particularly interested in the NHS Shetland worker who ate only local produce for 30 days and saved a fortune (Press and Journal, October 4).
Alex Armitage dined on fresh fish, potatoes, honey, butter, tomatoes, yoghurt, raspberries and more, knocking a third off his grocery bill in the process.
It’s inspiring to hear about ways of saving costs and the planet by thinking differently about food and that’s why the Too Good To Go app is now on my radar.
The P&J’s Karla Sinclair did well this week with a lunch worth £19 from Foodstory for £3.90 by using the app which aims to stop food waste (Press and Journal, October 5).
Geothermal energy
Planet Earth scored another point with news of a feasibility study to see if geothermal heat beneath Cairngorm Mountain could be used as a renewable energy source (Press and Journal, October 6).
If the Force is strong at Cairngorm, it’s even stronger at Cruachan Dam, the filming location for Star Wars series Andor (Press and Journal, October 5).
Disney’s Luke Hull said: “If you look at the dam, it looks like Darth Vader’s mask.”
It’s not the first time Disney has been inspired by the Scottish landscape, having used Dunnottar Castle at Stonehaven as the basis for DunBroch in Brave.
Perhaps we could bring more filming our way by drawing attention to similarities between other Scottish landmarks and fictitious places and characters.
Moana and Frozen
The Mither Tap is a dead ringer for Te Fiti island in Moana – it’s even nicknamed the Mother Island – and Ben Nevis could double as Frozen’s North Mountain.
Reader Tracy Leach appears to be way ahead of me by pointing out that the ringed lights proposed for a revamped Union Street resemble Captain Scarlet’s alien invaders the Mysterons.
And there’s us thinking she was having a laugh when really this was a serious attempt to secure inward investment from the American entertainment industry.
As it happens, there are Space Invaders headed for Union Street, in the form of the retro video game when a new ‘barcade’ opens next year (Press and Journal, October 3).
Mixing beer and computer games sounds fun – although just how easy it is to zap a digital alien while balancing a tray of pints remains to be seen.
SpaceX
In real life, a Russian cosmonaut has rocketed to the International Space Station with a Native American astronaut and two others aboard Elon Musk’s cosmic taxi service SpaceX (Press and Journal, October 6).
It’s nice that Russia and the US can co-operate despite the war in Ukraine and proof that in space no one can hear you argue over the results of an illegal referendum.
Meanwhile, the spacesuit worn by David Bowie in the video for Ashes To Ashes is expected to fetch up to £80,000 at auction next month (Press and Journal, October 4).
As a devoted fan, a Bowie song will be my first choice in the unlikely event that I have to dance on stage before giving a speech at a political party conference.
Had Liz Truss opted for the Thin White Duke instead of M People she wouldn’t have enraged the band’s founder, Mike Pickering, by walking out to Moving On Up, the song he co-wrote.
And come to think of it, Absolute Beginners would have been more fitting.
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