An investigation by The Telegraph found billions of pounds wasted on Covid-related support, unused or broken protective equipment and apparently frivolous items, such as £6,000 on a villa in Italy.
Apparently that villa was in Naples. Used for “entertaining”.
Be interesting to know where that was and the reason why. Just because I’m curious, know the area etc. The Telegraph doesn’t actually say…..
Bung in an FOI request
” In a surprising development, we can reveal that Government employees pi**ed away billions of taxpayers money. In other shocking news, the sky is blue…”
“In other shocking news, the sky is blue…”
The way things are going in the UK, mate, I wouldn’t take that as gospel unless you’ve a colour chart at hand.
In other shocking news, the sky is blue…
Unlike the Conservative Party, then.
The sky identifies as orange, bigot.
@Andrew… ISTR reading that the ancient Greeks described it as “green” – because for some unaccountable reason they didn’t have a word for “blue”.. 🙂
@BJ – I think the ancient Greeks referred to the sky as bronze, presumably with regard to its sheen rather than its colour. A bit like saying “the wine-dark sea” doesn’t mean you think the sea is the colour of wine.
IIRC this was featured on QI, where the QI elves explanation was that ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue. This sounded like bollocks to me at the time and 10 minutes googling confirmed this. There are a few cases where certain languages do not have words for certain colours and there is no link to an inability to see said colours.
It’s the UK Civil Service we’re talking about, so I assume the villa was used for important homosexual orgies.
hold on… 14 billion minus 6k+spare quid is …14 billion.
Forget the damned villa.. What about the rest?
IIRC the English word for something the colour of a robin’s breast used to be “red”.
Then explorers discovered a fruit called an orange, and that word became used as a colour. So a lot of the things formerly called red were reclassified as ‘orange’.
Robins escaped, probably because of the nice alliteration.
Old Welsh also had a single word for both blue and green – glas (quite likely a remnant of Proto Indo-European). This is now restricted to blue and the Welsh have a new word for green. Italians and Russians use different words for light and dark blue.
It should be a Norange, bigot. The Spanish for an orange is Naranja. It derives from the word Narenj in Persian. Some European languages follow suit. But why an Orange in English? The same reason that originally an Adder was a Nadder, and an Apron was a Napron.