Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I enjoyed some audio from BBC Sounds. Tina liked the latest Cormoran Strike novel, Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith.
It looked like, after all this time, that the world might have been faced with a no-deal Brexit, where the UK crashed out of the European Union with no plan in place for orderly leave-taking. The deal came together on Christmas Eve, just a week before the deadline.
The UK has been officially out of the European Union since January 31, 2020. That date, however, commenced a transition period which ended yesterday.
Parliament approved the deal on Wednesday, less than two days before it went into effect.
The late arrival of the agreement means businesses are not as prepared as businesses like to be for big changes. Journalists will be on the look-out for yet more disruptions at ports.
The agreement announced on Christmas Eve is 1200 pages long. Fortunately, the BBC has compiled an annotated list of highlights. And, as usual, TLDR News made an animated video that explains things in an easy-to-digest manner:
At the end of the above video, TLDR promised another video about the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, an aspect that has fascinated me from the beginning.
All of this news, which seemed so vital since the Brexit referendum in 2016, was dwarfed by continued rising cases of COVID-19 in Britain and increased restrictions as a result.
I hope all of you are staying safe and healthy through the holiday season and into the new year!
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
