“These super-cheap boards won’t even see out the day, never mind the week. Some of them are broken within two hours."

A sinister development in the Chinese masterplan to fuck the world.

A little over eighteen months after a mutant virus escaped the ancient city of Wuhan, and as its war machine readies for a war with the west over Taiwan, it has been revealed that Chinese-made bodyboards selling for as little as sixty pence (around a buck) are “poisoning UK beaches” and killing its leatherback turtles. 

See, tourists come, buy the kids a couple of the boards, bust ‘em or tire of ‘em, and then toss ‘em in the bin or leave ‘em to self-destruct on the beach.

“We find thousands of these boards on the beaches,” said Neil Hembrow, of Keep Britain Tidy. “They’re imported from China or Asia and they last a very short time, perhaps even just one surf. They’re made of two inches of cheap polystyrene covered with nylon, sometimes a plastic sheet. But a single wave can weigh up to a ton. So the impact on these boards makes them snap.”

The UK’s Daily Mail did a little walk around Devon and “we saw hundreds of plastic, brightly coloured bodyboards in use and picked up handfuls of rainbow-coloured polystyrene bits as we walked along the beach.”

Beach ranger Holly Robertson told the Mail, “These super-cheap boards won’t even see out the day, never mind the week. Some of them are broken within two hours. They get dumped and they break up into tiny fragments. To birds, the pieces look like food. They think it’s a fish egg. But it’s killing them… The leatherback turtles out there between us and Lundy Island are being killed by plastic pollution. These are the same turtles pictured on the kids’ bodyboards. How ironic is that?”

Now, and in a spirit y’might called Churchillian, stores are fighting the Chinese on the streets and on the beaches, refusing to stock the shitty one-surf sleds and offering, instead, higher-priced alternatives. 

Nathan Lockwood, from the UK Bodyboarding Association, said, “They are not sustainable in any way and give the sport a bad name.”

Bodyboarding is still a sport? Who knew.

“A statement of contemporary elegance, but with undeniable heart and soul.”

The three-time world surfing champion and shark attack survivor, Mick Fanning, has augmented his already impressive property holdings with a three-mill buy a little off the Gold Coast Highway and just under the flightpath for Coolangatta airport. 

Four hundred yards or thereabouts to the Gold Coast’s fifth best point.

The joint, which backs onto a bird sanctuary, was a hot target for buyers in an already over-heated market. Three mill for a house a ten-minute walk from the beach? A few years back, you’d be stretched to catch a buyer willing to shovel a million bucks at it.

Anyway, 5 Farrell Drive, Tugun, is pretty enough, has three-beds, features a three-foot indoor mini ramp, owner Luc Conforti is a local shredder, and the house is, if we can quote the promotional material, “A statement of contemporary elegance, but with undeniable heart and soul.”

An astute investor, Fanning made a surprise pivot away from surfing four months ago when he bought a yoga studio in Byron, a brave move as the West falls deeper into its culture wars, cultural appropriation, of course, a not-too-distant cousin of that gravest crime of all… racism. 

Brrrrrrr. Shiver up spine etc.

Yoga has been labelled the “whitest sport on earth”,and was the subject of a brave essay in The Atlantic in 2014 where its “white privilege”, “upper class privilege”  and “implicit racism” was laid bare, shattering the woke bona fides of tens of thousands of white skinny gals in plastic pants everywhere.

“I’m always looking at businesses … and Byron is one of those places where I think it’ll do really well,” explained Fanning, who has scoliosis.

No word, yet, if Sarah Foote, the mysterious strawberry blonde who invited herself into Fanning’s beachfront house at nearby Bilinga and who was subsequently charged and convicted of unlawful stalking and entering a dwelling with intent (sentenced to fifteen months in prison with immediate release on parole), will be invited to celebrate the happy purchase.

Japan hit real hard after Games, a three-hundred percent increase in COVID infections… 

The mayor of a pretty little hamlet near Ichinomiya, Chiba, where Brazilian Italo Ferreira and Hawaiian Carissa Moore became surfing’s first gold medal Olympians, has come out swinging after his town experienced a surge in COVID hits after the event. 

Eyes fluttering behind his medical-issue paper mask, city of Isumi Mayor Hiroshi Ota said, “From around the time the event began, the number of people (in the area near the venue) increased, causing infections to spread.”

See, from late July locals began contracting COVID around the city’s Taito beach, next to Ichinomiya’s Tsurigasaki beach. 

And even though COVID protocols meant the event was held without spectators, plenty of locals hung out at Taito to watch. Shops, restaurants and so on were busy as hell. 

It ain’t a fanciful take. 

The whole country got hit pretty hard after the Games, a three hundred percent increase in COVID infections, up from four k a day to 12, although the Minister for the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games Tamayo Marukawa spat on that fire saying, “I don’t think the Olympics caused infections to spread… When someone tested positive, they were transported to treatment facilities and other institutions. People they had close contact with were swiftly identified and quarantined.”

Surfers, the worst etc.