As readers of this blog know, I love the Economist‘s cover art, even if I think the editorial line is sometimes nuts. This week the magazine (which persists in describing itself as a “newspaper”) has decided that the way to expand Heathrow airport is to do so by building up to four new runways to the west, over what is now a reservoir.

One side-effect of this idea would be to place the flight-path directly over Windsor Castle, which might cheese off its current owners, a thought neatly captured by the cover.

Writing to his Commanding Officer, Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman…

My Dear Sir Francis

I fear we have shipped up – a close shave. I am writing a few letters which I hope will be delivered some day. I want to thank you for the friendship you gave me of late years, and to tell you how extraordinarily pleasant I found it to serve under you. I want to tell you that I was not too old for this job.  It was the younger men that went under first. Finally I want you to secure a competence for my widow and boy. I leave them very ill provided for, but feel that the country ought not to neglect them. After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick.

Good-bye and good-bye to dear Lady Bridgeman

Yours ever

R. Scott

Excuse writing – it is -40, and has been for nigh a month

[Source]

The letter has been acquired by Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute and released 101 years since Scott’s final diary entry (for March 29, 1912).