For Putin, Gaza is the gift that keeps on giving

What happened to the glory days of nudity?

I’m not sure why anyone would want to get married in the nude, says Jeremy Clarkson in The Sunday Times. “Maybe the cost of living crisis means you’re forced to choose between a dress and a honeymoon.” But for whatever reason, it’s now possible, thanks to an enlightened mayor in Sardinia who’s designated a local beach where couples can tie the knot, tackle out. And why not? When I was growing up, “nudity was everywhere”. In every BBC Play for Today there would be a bit of dialogue and then, all of a sudden, “someone with a Seventies welcome mat between their legs” would breeze in and start making tea.

Back in the day, any time you popped into a petrol station for a pack of sherbet lemons “one whole wall would invariably be plastered with a seemingly endless selection of girlie magazines”. Now, nudity is frowned upon. If you go to Juan-les-Pins this summer, “you’ll see very few women in carefully designed topless swimsuits”. The days of Brigitte Bardot letting it all hang out are over. The remaining nudist beaches are mainly for people who are “melanoma enthusiasts, German or mad”. At a nude beach in Mykonos I once met a young man wearing only motorcycle boots. He must have got up that morning and thought: “What do I need? Sun cream. Towel. And motorcycle boots.” Not the thought process of someone who’s sane. Why do you think these beaches so remote and hard to access? “It’s not that we don’t want to see all those bits. It’s that we don’t want to see the people the bits are attached to.”

Recycling plastic is worse than useless

It’s time to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth, says Eve Schaub in The Washington Post: plastic can’t be recycled. “This seems counterintuitive.” We’ve been told for decades that the answer to the plastic-waste crisis is more, better recycling. “If only we sorted better!” If only we rinsed more thoroughly! But unlike paper, glass and metal, plastic “is not easily, efficiently turned into new products”. What passes for “recycling” is “costly, energy-intensive and toxic”, and needs the addition of a “shocking amount of new virgin plastic”: around 70%. Only about 5% of plastic actually gets recycled – or 30% at the most for certain varieties – compared to 68% for paper and cardboard.

Even if we could properly recycle plastic, we’d be foolish to do so. It’s made from “fossil fuels and toxic chemicals” – when you grind up, melt and re-form it, those thousands of dodgy chemicals “combine to make a Frankenstein material”. Chemicals that are not supposed to be there start showing up. You do not want your food wrapped in this stuff. Recycling plastic also adds to the crisis of microplastics, tiny particles that scientists are finding “everywhere they look”, including in human sperm and human brains. “A study of just one plastics recycling facility discovered that it might be washing three million pounds of microplastics into its wastewater every year.” We should treat plastic “like the toxic waste it is” and send it where it can hurt people least: landfill. Then we need to get to work on the real solution: “making a whole lot less of it”.

Creative train drivers? I’d settle for punctual ones

“Hold your wine glass steady,” says Douglas Murray in The Spectator. The other day, the BBC splashed the news that train drivers in the UK are “overwhelmingly middle-aged white men”. What a surprise. Don’t they know that most of the UK is white and half of it is male, with the male half tending to be more “train-oriented”? You don’t see many women at the end of Reading station “noting down train numbers in a little book”. I had always expected the diversity obsession would be confined to “high-status professions”. Most road-layers are men, for example, but so far nobody’s moaning that “none of us are free until women are made to lay more tarmac”. Yet it seems the age we live in is “even madder than I thought”.

Take Zoey Hudson, “head of talent, diversity and inclusion” at Southern Railway, who spouts the “usual verbiage” that comes with her line of work. “It’s really important that we have diversity of thinking within the railway,” she explained to the BBC. “It brings creativity.” I’m not sure how much creativity I want in my train drivers. Loyal, punctual, good in a crisis – these are the qualities I look for when boarding the 7.48 to Totnes. But creativity? I suppose, for Hudson and her colleagues, trying to push more women into the railways is “something to do”. But it’s silly to suggest that the reason only one in 10 train drivers are women is because middle-aged white men are blocking their path – as though the very existence of these men “is some sort of affront to minorities”.