This Week In The News

Todd Higgs

28/08/08

We pick out our top stories of the last week and apply a helping of sarcasm

The victorious GB Olympic team returned this week to bask in the nation’s feverish good cheer. The forty-seven medal haul they have returned with has sparked a frenzy of pedantic glee from statisticians seeking to prove quite how extraordinarily well our athletes have performed. Whichever way you look at it, we have something to be proud of; if not through personal effort, then by association, which is less tiring and doesn’t curb your alcohol intake. Rule Britannia.

The public was warned to stay away from the gold tipped 747 to greet the team after fears that tens of thousands of well-wishers could have caused chaos at Heathrow. Since when does it take well-wishers?

All this positivity was foreshadowed by the return of a somewhat less celebrated son to these shores. Former rock star Gary Glitter touched down to the revelation that no one wants to be in his gang, or indeed let him into theirs, after being refused entry into Hong Kong and Thailand. He was subsequently forced to sign the sex offenders register which will strictly limit his freedom of movement and civil liberties. He will rightly have to lead a more celibate existence than a Catholic priest at a private all boys school.

Speaking of evangelical abstinence, it seems to take on a different flavour among Italians. “Do you think nuns are all elderly, straitlaced and funereal?” posed Father Antonio Rungi. I must confess to believing that they are usually two of those things, but am open to being proved wrong. Rungi, a member of the Passionist Order of Roman Catholicism, has organised a beauty pageant for nuns.

Entitled ‘Sister Italy’ the competition will begin next month. Two nuns a week will be photographed and featured on Rungi’s website, detailing the order they are from and their daily duties as well as something of their ‘lives and miracles’ in order to seek your votes. I’m curious as to how the Roman Catholic establishment feel about this enterprise, but would also like to see the initiative used as a vehicle to display some of the marvellous architecture in which the sisters live. Perhaps a separate page entirely devoted to photographs of the old, antiquated buildings themselves. I mean, we all love a bit of full frontal nunnery.

And finally… Rosie Swale Pope, 61 from Tenby, West Wales (left) completed a staggering 20,000 mile run across the northern hemisphere to raise awareness of prostate cancer. She set off in October 2003 and returned to rapturous applause as friends from as far a field as Alaska cheered her homecoming. Surely if anyone deserves the nation’s sporting platitudes and a big hunk of gold, its Rosie.