Some good news from the Independent. It’s Easter Day and the other Good News appears to have been banished from British television at least. No religion in the schedules apart from the Mozart Requiem and a programme on the history of choral music. The other headline on Good Friday was that I could go and place my bet at the bookies, and then on Saturday the storm about embryology where Gordon Brown plans to put a three line whip on the party to vote for merging human and animal cells. Catholic MPs are put on the spot as their leaders speak out in horror. Just in time I found two of J.S. Bach’s Cantatas for the second day of Easter, BWV6 and 66. The opening chorus, including a dialogue between fear (counter tenor) and hope (tenor), was particularly uplifting.
However the news I speak of is of a turbine emerging from the former shipyards of Belfast. It has a number of things to commend it. It speaks of power from tidal energy. Evidently, unknown to us – like the Nubia of ancient times never mentioned in the shadow of Egypt, a scientist has been experimenting with a turbine in the Nile in the Sudan. From the experiment in the river attempts were made to transfer the idea to harness tidal power.

So there are jobs in Belfast, and presumably with such a dire need to combat global warming other such centres could spring back to life. We hear that Nicolas Sarkozy will visit Gordon to discuss energy, but no it’s not about tidal power, it’s back to a nuclear future. Here we go again, but no doubt it will all take second place to the continuing soap of Nicolas and Cecilia