The Rolling Stones' Rice Krispies television commercial

This was written by Brian Jones and recorded by the band and broadcast in 1963 or 1964.

There's all sorts of wonderful stuff on the Anachronistic Anarchist YouTube channel.

PC stole toilet rolls from police station

This shocking tale wins BBC News our Headline of the Day Award.

Michael Heslop on his cover illustration for The Dark is Rising

This is a clip from Read On, a BBC schools programme broadcast on 9 February 1981. The presenter Vicki Luke reads a short passage from Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, then the artist Michael Heslop talks about how he produced his cover illustration for the book.

I have all five books in this series with covers by Heslop. I bought them in the mid Eighties. These days his work concentrates on horse racing and golf.

Thanks to Bob Fischer for tweeting about this video. Susan Cooper fans may also be interested in my post on the 1969 Jackanory dramatisation of Over Sea, Under Stone, the first book in the series.

Paddington has a British passport now, but the Browns could have got 14 years for helping him when he arrived

From the Guardian:

He has been one of the UK’s favourite and most prominent refugees for two-thirds of a century. Now Paddington Bear – official name Paddington Brown – has been granted a British passport.

The co-producer of the latest Paddington film said the Home Office had issued the specimen document to the fictional Peruvian-born character – listing for completeness the official observation that he is, in fact, a bear.

Aw, innit cute?

Ten years ago, as the first Paddington film was due for release, I quoted Free Movement blog:

Paddington stows away and deliberately avoids the immigration authorities on arrival. He is in formal legal terms an illegal entrant and as such commits a criminal offence under section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971. It is an offence punishable by up to six months in prison. If or when detected by the authorities it is more likely he would simply be removed back to Peru than that he would be prosecuted, though. To avoid that fate he would need to make out a legal basis to stay. 

Incidentally, for offering a home to Paddington - or harbouring him, as the Home Office would have it - Mr and Mrs Brown could potentially face prosecution under section 25 of the Immigration Act 1971, entitled "Assisting unlawful immigration to member State". The maximum sentence is 14 years.

Whatever Paddington's status now, he didn't have a British passport when he arrived in 2014. So I stand by my reaction then:

"Crikey!" said Jonathan.

The towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station await demolition

James Graham (the television writer not the former Liberal Democrat blogger) has joined calls for the preservation of the cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, which was Britain's last working coal-fired station before it shut down at the end of September.

BBC News quotes him as saying:

"Some might think they're ugly. I think they're majestic. Concrete cathedrals.

"I got to stand inside one, filming Sherwood series two. I've never stood anywhere like it on Earth.

"I'd love future generations to stand in them too. But they are inexplicably all going – all of them."

There are various online petitions calling for the preservation for one or more of the towers, but none seems to be arousing much enthusiasm.

No application for demolition has yet been submitted to the local council, says another BBC News report. But if demolition does take place, East Midlands Airport will have to be closed while it is underway.

Ric Holden calls a Westminster hall debate on pie-and-mash shops

In his parliamentary sketch for The Critic, Robert Hutton catches up with Ric Holden, whom he finds displaying a new-found enthusiasm for pie-and-mash shops:

A few months ago, Holden was the chairman of the greatest election-winning machine in history, the British Conservative Party. Now he is just a humble opposition backbencher. Some might say his demotion was deserved. He did after all oversee a campaign that set a number of records, including lowest Conservative share ever and most seats lost by a government ever. But those people miss a very important point: although Holden waved goodbye to 250 colleagues in July, he did succeed in saving his own skin. 

When his Durham seat was abolished, he realised that he had always, at heart, been an Essex man, and fled south to the ultra-safe constituency of Basildon and Billericay. Not that it stayed ultra-safe for long. Under his stewardship, the Conservative majority fell from 20,000 to just 20. You could see why he’d felt that a seat with a majority of, say, 19,000 wouldn’t have been enough. 

This all explains why on Tuesday afternoon, Holden was in a room off Westminster Hall where MPs are allowed to raise matters that are likely to be of limited interest. Officially, he was there to ask the government to save a Cockney delicacy by giving it official protected status. Really, he was there to beg the government to save Ric Holden.

A teenage Jimmy Page talks about his work as a session guitarist

The video of Jimmy Page playing skiffle as a 13-year-old is well known, but here he is six years later being interviewed about his work as a session guitarist.

It was tweeted by Nikki Kreuzer.

Jimmy Page, age 19, still completely unknown, June 1963, interviewed in Guernsey, Channel Islands, about his session guitar work. He had only been playing guitar for 4 yrs and hoped to one day become an accomplished visual artist, financing his artwork with his guitar playing. pic.twitter.com/0XTl1gWdJk

— Nikki Kreuzer (@NikkiKreuzer) September 25, 2018

Nate Silver's 24 reasons why Donald Trump may win

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Judging by my Twitter feed, British liberal opinion is unanimous in the view that Donald Trump, as well as exhibiting increasing signs of senility and having an unpleasant smell about him, is bound to lose next month's election.

As a corrective to this unwarranted optimism, here's a link to a piece by Nate Silver giving 24 reasons why he may win:

This election remains extremely close, but Donald Trump has been gaining ground. One of my pet peeves is with the idea that this is Kamala Harris’s election to lose. I could articulate some critiques of her campaign, but if you study the factors that have historically determined elections, you'll see that she’s battling difficult circumstances.

The Joy of Six 1279

"The UK now has the outline of a modern welfare state, but it is increasingly failing to fill in the gaps. Those gaps let far too many people fall through, and the consequences are both individual misery and collective decline." The state should be there when things go wrong in our lives, argues Andrew Sissons.

The most senior former judges in England and Wales have called on the government to reverse the trend of imposing ever longer sentences, giving warning that radical solutions are needed to address the acute crisis in prisons. A briefing from the Howard League for Penal Reform looks at what can be done#.

Robert Saunders reminds us that David Cameron rose without trace: "No prime minister of modern times has been so deeply rooted in the Establishment. None has been so routinely tipped for greatness. And yet few retain such an enduring air of mystery."

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Rosalie Henry de Frahan assess the effects of private schooling and school composition on student performance. "Our findings contribute to the growing body of research questioning the comparative advantage of private schools, demonstrating that their perceived superiority often arises from the socio-economic advantages of the students they enroll, rather than the quality of education provided." 

Christina Bollen presents five surprising ways that trees help prevent flooding.

"For Maynard, the old lesson 'be kind to people on the way up, because you'll meet them again on the way down', was, belatedly, about to hit home hard." Graham McGrath on a great stage feud: Bill Maynard vs Derek Nimmo.

Band of Horses: No One's Gonna Love You

It sounds beautiful, but as someone explains on Reddit:

This is basically a pretty mean-spirited breakup song. It's like saying "You will never again know happiness or true love, because you lost me".

Scott Russell on Paste, who described it as "one of the great indie-rock love songs of the 2000s," offers a more generous-minded reading:

There’s no malice in the song's eponymous oath - "No one is ever gonna love you more than I do" - but rather an overwhelming sense of certainty, despite all the attendant suffering. It’s not the possibility of a new beginning that drives the song ("Things start splitting at the seams and now / It’s tumbling down, "Bridwell admits), but rather the passion that’s survived through the pain - the bittersweet echoes of the narrator’s most intimate personal history.

Band of Horses are a Seattle band and have been going since 2004. No One's Gonna Love You comes from their second album, Cease to Begin, and reached no. 22 is the Danish singles chart in 2011, three years after its original release.

"Finding junk and talking bollocks": The appeal of Detectorists

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"Finding junk and talking bollocks." That’s how Lance (Toby Jones) describes the life he and his best mate Andy (Mackenzie Crook) live in Detectorists, the gentle and beloved BBC sitcom that began 10 years ago this month.

David Renshaw had a nice piece on Detectorists in the Guardian earlier this week, though calling the series 'gentle' downplays its ability to embrace the mystical and the sinister.

Mackenzie Crook, the writer of the series, came up with a better word:

"I deliberately set out to write something uncynical and removed from the awkward 'cringe comedy' that was prevalent at the time," Crook ... says, as he reflects on the show. 

He points to the series being made cheaply and airing on BBC Four, a channel made for obsessives precisely like Lance and Andy, as being key to the show’s slow-burn success. "Those who found it felt they’d discovered something special."

And he shared insight into the the genesis of one of the recurring themes of the show:

His introduction to the world was through an episode of Time Team in which a pair of detectorists claimed they had found Viking artefacts in a field in Yorkshire. 

The often difficult relationship between the amateur detectorists and TV archaeologists, perhaps mirrored in Detectorists through the villainous Simon & Garfunkel characters, struck him as a rich source of comedy and pathos. 

"There was something suspicious about these guys and the feeling was that they weren’t telling the whole truth," he says.

UK experts warn against buying ‘XL bully cats’

The Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges ask why there is now a mania for strange breeds when the domestic cats we know and love are so beautiful.

Margaret Wintringham: The first woman Liberal MP

The first woman Liberal MP was Margaret Wintringham, who held Louth in a by-election in September 1921. She won despite being in mourning for her husband Tom, whose death caused the election.

This video explores her political career and achievements during her short time in the Commons (1921-4), including her work on the Widow's Orphans' and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act and the Guardianship of Infants Act.

Accounting for the rise and rise of Russell Brand

I strongly recommend Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey's latest Origin Story podcast, which covers the rise and rise of Russell Brand:

Dorian and Ian reassess Brand’s extraordinary rise to fame in the 2000s in light of recent allegations of sexual misconduct and explore how British culture gave him a free pass. 

In 2013 Brand swapped sex and fame for a new compulsion, reinventing himself as a flamboyant agitator to great acclaim. In the void between Occupy and Corbynism, his verbose mishmash of self-help and socialism briefly made him a lion of the left. 

During the pandemic Brand embraced a darker shade of politics, promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19, Ukraine and much more besides. After the allegations broke last year he went full crank, aligning himself with Robert F Kennedy Jr, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones in the paranoid space.

As they say, this is a bizarre story of celebrity and conspiracy, addiction and attention, which says a great deal about where we are now.

Two ghost signs from the back streets of Northampton

It was a nice sunny day so I headed for the back streets of Northampton. 

Discoveries included The Old Grocery Espresso Bar (have the sausage roll if you go), Heyford Books (interesting stock at miraculous prices) and these two ghost signs.

Roger Blackmore (1941-2024)

Liberal Democrat Voice has posted a tribute from Leicester Liberal Democrats to Roger Blackmore, who died on 6 September at the age of 82:

Having moved to Leicester in 1963 when he became a student at Leicester University, joining the local party whose brief revival that year quickly faded.

Roger managed to establish himself as the main voice for Liberalism in the city as well as contesting the Gainsborough constituency in Lincolnshire. He fought the seat four times, his campaigns being the stuff of legend.

As this excellent tribute says, Roger went on to fight Jeremy Thorpe's old seat of North Devon, to be leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicester City Council and then leader of the council itself, and after that a popular Lord Mayor.

If you click on the picture of a youthful Roger above, you will be taken to a 1975 news report about the strike at Imperial Typewriters in 1975. Roger is interviewed about the formation of an action group that attempted to prevent the factory from closing.

The Joy of Six 1278

Christine Jardine believes that dying people should be able to make their own choice about whether they want palliative care or to end their life: "I would want that choice to be mine. More importantly perhaps I feel I don’t have the right to deny that choice to others. I believe the law as it stands does not offer those facing such circumstances the compassionate and humane options they deserve."

Berna León reviews a study of how Britain’s elite continues to reproduce itself through entrenched structures of privilege, despite the appearance of increased meritocracy and diversity.

"It would introduce a legal requirement for local authorities and the Department of Education to collect and publish data about the extent to which they are finding local placements for children in care ... Local authorities would also have to develop and publish sufficiency plans, setting out what steps they are taking to meet their requirements to find local homes for children in care, under the Children Act 1989." Jake Richards introduces his private member's bill.

"Rural voters stopped caring about the Democrats because the Democrats stopped caring about them." Tom Zoellner searches for solutions to the Democratic Party's "rural problem".

Mary Colwell remembers her early encounters with curlews: "I saw a large group in a field in northern Scotland as I waited for a ferry. It was autumn and they must have been migrating. I remember thinking how elegant and strange they looked with their long bills and legs, and I watched them for ages. When I reached Orkney, one flew over a loch, crying an unearthly, evocative call. It fitted the landscape and the mood of the day perfectly They were with me from then on."

"Rod Argent was the engine room of the Zombies. He wrote She’s Not There and his playing takes it to another level. It’s very English-sounding, very reserved and melancholy, then out of nowhere he plays this incredible solo that’s soulful but slightly classically influenced. It both fits the song perfectly and takes it somewhere else." Elton John on the piano and organ players who inspired him.

The 1966 BBC radio adaptation of The Box of Delights

Look what I've found on YouTube. This radio adaptation of The Box of Delights was first broadcast at Christmas 1966 and repeated in the same season in 1968 and 1969.

It may have been through the 1966 broadcast, but is more likely to have been through the 1968 one, that the story won my heart. Who can resist a healthy blend of the Christian and the pagan? I know I was enthralled by it as a little boy.

Listening to the broadcast today, it's slow to get going. But when the story picks up, the production makes good use of sound and the proper music is used.

Cole Hawlings is Cyril Shaps and the young Kay Harker is Patricia Hayes. Caroline Louisa is played by Carol Marsh, whose first film role was Rose in Brighton Rock, and there's even a small part for Stanley Unwin.

Welsh Lib Dems attack Labour over cuts to rail services in North and Mid Wales

The Liberal Democrats have attacked the Labour government in Cardiff over proposed cuts to services on the Cambrian and Heart of Wales railway lines.

Herald Wales reports that:

Under proposals by government-owned Transport for Wales, services on the Heart of Wales line will be cut from five trains a day to four. They are also removing the two late evening services to Llandovery and Llandrindod Wells.

On the Cambrian Line, TfW will cut four services between Machynlleth and Pwllheli (two in each direction).

Promises for an hourly service on the Cambrian Line between Aberystwyth and Shrewsbury ... have also been scaled back and will only be in place for four months of the year when they finally commence in summer 2026.

The paper quotes criticism of the cuts by two leading Welsh Lib Dems. Senedd Member Jane Dodds said:

"At a time where we should be encouraging rail usage and adding extra services, Labour is allowing Transport for Wales to make sweeping cuts to services in rural areas. It is an appalling state of affairs. 

"While services in South Wales are being increased, North and Mid Wales are facing cutbacks. Year after year we see the same story from Labour in Cardiff Bay. 

"I am appealing to the Labour First Minister Eluned Morgan, who represents Mid & West Wales in the Senedd, to intervene directly to stop these cuts."

And the Lib Dem MP for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe, David Chadwick, added:

"These cuts from Labour are an absolute disgrace.

 "You have Labour on the one hand telling people they need to use their cars less, but on the other hand, they are cutting public transport options. The two things don’t go together. It’s a ridiculous situation that shows how poorly they understand rural communities.

"We need more reliable and more frequent rail services across Mid Wales, not less. Access to public transport is vital for increasing economic investment and employment, supporting our tourist industry and attracting highly skilled workers like GPs to work in our communities."

This is a good point to send you to a guest post by Eric Loveland Heath on singing the songs of the Cambrian Railway.

Fred Titmus goes to the opera

In his latest book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, Mike Brearley writes of being an intellectual among professional sportsmen and turns it into a reflection on the accident of our birth:

Similar cynicism came my way when I was doing philosophy in my early days playing cricket for Middlesex Fred Titmus, the senior player (whose first game for Middlesex in 1949 coincided with the first of my father's two games, so that after Fred played in my last game at Lords In 1982 he was able to say he 'saw the father in and the son out'), would prod me with questions like: "This philosophy that we're all paying for, what's it all about?" He was being sarcastic, goading, but he was genuinely curious. 

I took his curiosity seriously, and tried to give some sort of answer. In other lives, with different backgrounds, Fred might have been doing philosophy and I might have been born and brought up in King's Cross and had left school at fourteen, and learned cricket, football and boxing at a local boys' club. (I once had a spare ticket for Benjamin Britain's Peter Grimes, and asked him if he'd like to go. We sat in the gods, and Fred was taken with it.)

Brearley talked to the Australian cricket journalist Gideon Haigh about this book and his life for the podcast Cricket, Et Cetera. It's well worth a listen.

Traffic Babylon

Paul Rees tells the story of Steve Winwood's second band, with more of an emphasis on its darker side than you normally see:

With the extravagant Capaldi cheerleading, and fragile, mystical Wood bringing with him a traditional English folk tune called John Barleycorn – which he’d heard on Frost And Fire, a 1965 album by Hull folkies The Watersons – the stage was set for Traffic to at last become the band Winwood had wanted all along: one capable of harnessing a dizzying array of musical styles and then make them over into a fresh, original form that ebbed, flowed and soared. 

The John Barleycorn Must Die album was the first, giant step along that path. From there they conjured three more records that marked them out as prodigious explorers and rare virtuosos. Yet it also extracted a heavy price from the three principals – it could be said that not one of them was ever the same again.

Lib Dem MPs voted against Labour's plan to impose VAT on private school fees

News from the Guardian that

The UK’s biggest and richest ­private schools are in line for substantial financial windfalls as a consequence of the government’s plan to impose VAT on their fees, according to official new guidance issued by tax authorities.

has done nothing to undermine the impression that out new government isn't terribly good at governing.

But this wasn't the reason that Liberal Democrat MPs gave for voting against Labour's plans last week.

Today, #LibDem colleagues and I voted against ending the VAT exemption on private school fees because we believe in protecting parental choice and opposing the taxation of education.

— Charlotte Cane MP🔶 (@CharlotteCane8) October 8, 2024

No one is going to march in support of the taxation of education, but that does feel a little like a principle you make up to appeal to once you have decided how you are going to vote.

And I'm pleased to see our MPs supporting parental choice. It's just that I'd like to hear our plans for extending it beyond the seven per cent of parents who send their children to private schools.

Alleged cheating scandals rock conkers and chess

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From the Guardian:

The World Conker Championships is investigating cheating allegations after the men’s winner was found to have a steel chestnut in his pocket.

David Jakins won the annual title in Southwick, Northamptonshire, on Sunday for the first time after competing since 1977.

But the 82-year-old was found to have a metal replica in his pocket when he was searched by organisers after his victory.

The retired engineer has denied using the metal variety in the tournament.

Meanwhile on Chess.com:

22-year-old GM Kirill Shevchenko has been expelled from the 2024 Spanish Team Championship with his draw against GM Bassem Amin in round one and win over GM Francisco Vallejo in round two turned into losses. 

When Shevchenko’s regular absence from the board aroused suspicion in round two a locked phone was found in the toilet, with arbiters claiming a link of the phone to Shevchenko based on handwriting and behaviour. 

Shevchenko, who is originally from Ukraine but now based in Romania, also denies the allegations.

Derek Nimmo says "P… p… pick up a Penguin"

If you want an accurate picture of Britain in the Seventies, forget Dominic Sandbrook. Look instead for an archive of Nationwide or of TV commercials from the decade.

As everyone is so young these days, this post probably needs a link to something about Derek Nimmo. What this obituary doesn't say is that, along with Clement Freud and Nicholas Parsons, he was part of the Just a Minute cell of Liberal Party supporters.

Mark Knopfler's father finished second in the 1953 Scottish chess championship

This just in from our Trivia Desk...

His father, Erwin, had arrived in Glasgow in 1939 after fleeing Hungary. Erwin Knopfler was a chessplayer & was runner-up in the Scottish championship of 1953.

(Credit to the formidable Alan McGowan for establishing the identify of E. Knopfler in the cross-table below.)

(2/2) pic.twitter.com/xIqc2bmN6x

— Douglas Griffin (@dgriffinchess) September 19, 2020

And a word too for James Aitken, who not only won the title that year but beat all the other competitors in doing so. As well as winning this championship on ten occasions, he was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the war.

The Joy of Six 1277

Roz Savage explains why she has tabled her Climate and Nature Bill: "While I was out there, alone in the middle of the ocean, I witnessed the beauty and strength of the natural world first hand. I realised how utterly reliant we are on the health of our planet, and how vulnerable we are to the Earth’s changing climate." 

"It is certainly true that the two remaining candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, stand on the far right of the party. Both make Margaret Thatcher, a famously right-wing Conservative prime minister, look like a sopping wet liberal. But anyone who thinks that the far-right capture of the Conservative Party means that the party is now irrelevant is deluding themselves." Peter Oborne warns Britain not assume that it's immune to global trends.

Gemma Gould tells the story of her journey as a child through the care system.

Stephen Parsons gives a detailed account of the challenge offered by LGBT students against the dominant culture among evangelicals that assumes the gay-affirming position is inevitably wrong.

"The city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development." Gerry Mooney on the rise and fall of Glasgow's Red Road Flats.

"We unexpectedly got the seal of approval from Morrissey. His nephew came to the gig in Manchester, met us backstage for a drink afterwards and told us he thought it was a nice thing to do, and the next day, Morrissey posted a photo his nephew had taken at the gig and put a message on his website thanking us, with the headline, 'If there’s something you’d like to try - Astley, Astley, Astley', which I thought was fantastic." Rick Astley sings The Smiths.