Back to nature with lockdown hair and sexy weaponry - POLITICO Europe

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Welcome to Declassified, a weekly column looking at the lighter side of politics.

Remember back in the early days of lockdown when people became excited about nature returning to cities? There were fake photos of dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice and genuine photos of unicorns building town halls and printing their own money before beginning their inevitable quest for world domination (probably).

Well now it’s us going back to nature, not nature coming to us. This week, 15 volunteers emerged after spending 40 days underground in southwest France (who organized this, Jesus?) as part of an experiment to see how the absence of clocks, daylight and YouTube videos of cats falling over would affect their sense of time.

It seems a strange moment in human existence to conduct such an experiment, given that all our days are essentially the same and we now no longer measure the passage of time through the seasons but by when the hairdressers are open. Speaking of which, social media exploded on Tuesday when footage was shown of Tony Blair’s lockdown hair: a mixture of plays-keyboards-in-a-middling-prog-rock-band, worked-in-the-City-but-now-runs-a-vegan-café and wizard.

Still, footage of Blair provided a momentary distraction from the sleaze allegations swirling around the man who now occupies No. 10 Downing Street. Boris Johnson has spent the week under increasing pressure to come clean about who paid for the refurbishment of his swanky flat and therefore doing his best Amy Winehouse impression (“They tried to make me pay for refurb, I said no no no”).

Johnson also spent a good chunk of the week denying that he told colleagues to “let the bodies pile high in their thousands,” which seems an odd thing to deny when for the first few months of the pandemic it was seemingly actual British government policy!

Anyway, back to nature and to Bavaria, where the bomb squad was called to investigate a suspected hand grenade found in a forest near Passau. Turns out it was a sex toy in the shape of a hand grenade, thereby putting in the spotlight a hitherto underground fetish: people who get turned on by antique weaponry. As a result, I’m now developing a range of sex toys to tap into this market. However, so far the Big Bertha, the Long Tom and the Dirty Dora haven’t made it past the prototype phase.

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Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.

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