Don’t mock the Prince’s ‘black spider’: it could save the albatross

Briefly last week the nation chortled over its cornflakes at newspaper headlines about the ‘black spider’, and reports of letters to ministers from the Prince of Wales, and pictures of letters from ministers to the Prince of Wales heavily annotated in the sort of spidery black ink, which did look obsessive when spread across the front of a newspaper above a giggly caption, but hardly differed from the exasperated marginal scribbling we all produce but never expect to see in newspapers.