When did normal life in the UK get this expensive?
£5 coffee
£7 pint
£20 takeaway
£30 haircut
£60 tank of fuel
£100 meal out
£150 energy bill
£1,200 rent
There’s barely a luxury on that list.
Yet somehow just existing now needs a decent salary.
In August 2020 a child in Igiugig, Alaska, a village of about sixty-eight people, needed a night medevac when the airstrip lights would not come on.
Tribal clerk Ida Nelson called neighbors. In roughly twenty minutes some twenty cars, trucks, and ATVs lined both sides of the runway with their headlamps pointed inward. People from eight to seventy came out, some still in night clothes. The aircraft landed on that improvised path, took the child, and left for Anchorage.
The photograph looks staged because the geometry is so clean. It was not. It was a short village doing the only thing that would put a plane on the ground after dark.
Summer hasn’t quite gone yet, but you can feel it beginning to loosen its grip. The mornings are cooler, the evenings arrive a little sooner, and autumn suddenly doesn’t feel very far away.