The sun never sets on the British blazer

Apropos of nothing, I enjoyed this opener to a column by the FT's Michael Skapinker:

One of the curiosities of travelling from the UK to Australia is that you spend more than 24 hours flying over evermore remote and exotic locations only to emerge, exhausted and aching, in a place so immediately familiar. The similarities are everywhere: the cricket grounds, the striped school blazers, the newspaper worries about knife crime.

The rest of the article is well worth reading, too. It's a cautionary tale: a stimulus program offering people incentives to insulate their homes was a major balls-up.  Lots of substandard work, creating fire and electrocution hazards.