Brex**it

Well - hedgehog has popped his spiny little snout above the parapet again, and it's a different world from the time of his last post. The USA is now being run by a refugee from a clown car, and Britain is obsessed with a mass national suicide project that 63% of the electorate didn't vote for.

If I hibernate again, will it all be OK when I wake up? (No.)


(See picture for a vision of post-Brexit Britain.)

The Vanishing Banana

Here's hedgehog again, as we trundle to the end of yet another arbitrary calendar setting. However, since this happens round about the turn of the year, when the days start getting longer again, I can see some logic to it.

On a totally different tack, which may read the perceptive reader to think that hedgehog has finally gone off his little spiny nut, there's an incredible video linked on the ludamus site, at http://ludamus.co.uk/mathsmuppet/richard-wisemans-incredible-vanishing-banana-illusion/, which features, as you might guess, a vanishing banana. It's a weird optical illusion/conjuring effect, and the reader is invited to guess how it's done.

Hedgehog is baffled, but you, as homo/femina sapiens, may be able to work out this really bizarre trick.

Leeds Met Squandering your Money?

Well, I don't believe it, as Victor Meldrew used to say. We hear on the news that on Monday 4th July, when Leeds United football club was bought back by its former owner, that the creditors would get only 1p in the pound from the new takeover.

We hear also that one of these creditors is Leeds Metropolitan University, who will get back £500 instead of £50,000. Now sums like this may be peanuts to business, but the question has to be asked: what was Leeds Met doing giving money out to football clubs when this money comes from Government grants and the fees paid by its own students? Do they have a moral right to be risking cash like this when it should be used for the educational benefit of the community?

The VC, Simon Lee, may have some words of wisdom on this, because his subject is ethics...

How many students could have their fees paid for £50,000? Quite a few. Hedgehog's spines rise at this. What else is Leeds Met putting money into? Casinos? Who knows.

Saint Valentine and all that

Well, we've had St Valentine's day, and the media are hyping things up even more than usual. The local BBC weatherman, Paul Hudson, was even selling kisses in a Yorkshire supermarket for a quid (or is it a squid?) a time. We can only hope that there was a facility for paying two quid not to snog him.

I'm rather hazy on who St Valentine was (perhaps avid readers of this column can enlighten me?), but he was probably somebody who met a gruesome death in the past, which seems to be one of the qualifications. Are there any ancient saints who popped their clogs in an armchair, with a good book?

We can't blame the media, of course, for seizing on anything that will push up commercial sales of newspapers and items that we don't want to buy: it's in their nature, much as chewing up seals is in the nature of killer whales. Don't we just love the press?