“THERE’S A FUCKING GREAT HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER!!!!!” they exclaimed (hence the exclamation marks; if they’d just kind of ‘said’ it, we wouldn’t need the punctuation). “AUSTRALIA WILL MELT!!!!! THE SEAS WILL RECEDE!!!! ELEPHANTS WILL GO BLIND!!!! THE WORLD WILL END!!!!!!!” “THE ONLY WAY TO PREVENT OUR PLANET FROM DYING IS TO STOP USING DEODORANT SPRAYS”.

That was in 1988. The year they banned underarm deodorising. Ok, you could use roll-on thingys, powders, liquids, if you chose, or you could just forget deodorants altogether like tube travellers do and go ‘au naturelle’ and smell like a warthog in heat. But Carbon Fluoro Chlorides, the propellants used in aerosol cans, were history. They destroyed life, as we know it, and were now banned. As unwelcome as ISIS, they left our lives.

And now, in celebration of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, the ozone layer is ‘better’. Yippee! Throw out that awful ‘factor 50’ sunblock that goes on like white gloss paint mixed with iron filings, get back on the beaches, the sea level will rise once more (or fall once more, I can never quite remember which is the good one) and life will be long and fruitfull.

What kind of overly simplistic, nobbish, moronic world does Al Gore, and all the other eco-panickers, inhabit? Oh, they live in a world which is 6 billion years old but 30 years of non-spray can seriously affect the entire atmospheric make-up. Wow. Evolution takes millennia, changes happen at the rate of glacial movements, yet throw out your ‘Sure’ and the Heavens will replenish. Amen.

I’m all in favour of being a little cautious (a little, mind, just a little) about ’emissions’ and stuff, because I live in a place where we have no air quality worth being proud of. London is an ecological wreck with pollution levels always way higher than we’d like them, and certainly miles higher than the Euro-beaurocrat free-loading pedants would like it to be to come up (or maybe down) to the levels laid down in Brussels. Which also, ironically, has shitty air quality.

Yet I simply never bought into the whole SAVE THE PLANET routine, the massed hysteria of a thousand screaching Greens telling us how to live in a proper, tree-huggy, clean, fresh world with no cars, planes and farting cows (the most significant source of world methane production), where everyone recycles their grass-cuttings, eats dandelions and drives a fucking Prius.

So this OZONE LAYER IS GETTING BETTER DUE TO US!!!!! rubbish is precisely that. The Ozone layer forms a hole every spring since Diplodocus ruled the land. It just varies in size some years. Then it gets smaller. The current ‘improvement of 4% is just a normal seasonal swing. And yes the ozone absorbs ultra-violet light and thus the absence of ozone would increase levels of cataracts forming in mammels, but the whole episode is a massive overreaction and the creation of a new industry of holier-than-thouness that those of us with obscenely large car engines can really do without.

I’ll take the improvement as a good thing. We can all breathe easier now. Metaphorically if not literally.

Happy monday

A xxxxx