Geronimo the pet alpaca has been ‘condemned to death’ after ‘a High Court judge blocked his last chance for a stay of execution’, leaving owner Helen Macdonald vowing to ‘“obstruct” any officials who come to her farm to put her woolly pet to sleep’.

For the first time, women will be able to buy the progesterone-only contraceptive pill over the counter at pharmacies after regulators gave the measure ‘the green light’, although purchasers ‘will still need to have a consultation with a pharmacist’ (‘The Pill is on sale at pharmacy’, Daily Express, July 9, 2021). https://www.express.co.uk/sitearchive/2021/7<

Carole Boyd, who plays ‘inimitable snob Lynda Snell’ in long-running radio 4 series The Archers, says her 93-year-old husband Patrick, ‘left immobile after a stroke nearly 20 years ago’, has been ‘so affected by the attack he had even spoken of going to assisted-dying clinic Dignitas’; in Private Passions, on BBC Radio 3 next Sunday, the 74-year-old actress reveals that the stroke has affected his left side, leaving ‘“his mobility ...

At the moment there is a problem regarding the availability of something which has long been a normal part of life in the United Kingdom. Millions of people have availed themselves of it without any difficulty, but the question is whether the continued provision of it should be dependent on legal conditions being satisfied.  If there were to be such conditions, and they caused a shortage of supply, customers would be able to travel beyond their own areas in order to get what they wanted, but of course many of them would feel aggrieved by the resultant inconvenience and expense.

The charity Just Like Us is providing lesson packs for Key Stage 1 pupils – aged five to seven – teaching children ‘to use the “correct” pronouns for “non-binary” people’; with generous funding from social media giant Facebook and support from Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, ‘senior Labour MPs including Lucy Powell, the shadow housing minister, and Diane Abbott’, and with the blessing of the Department of Education, the lessons introduce ‘gender’ issues to maths lessons.

British parents wish, to at least some extent, they had never had children, while a further 6 per cent have regretted it in the past’, pointing out that ‘the younger the parents – which usually means those with the youngest children – the more likely they were to tell YouGov that they wished they had never started a family.’ In fact, while 13 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds said they ‘regretted having children at the time of the survey’, and 9 per cent said they had done so ‘in the past’, the ‘percentages steadily declin