Thursday, March 27, 2025

A 1922 campaign to reopen Medbourne railway station


From the Grantham Journal, Saturday 16 December 1922.

Medbourne

Re-Opening Railway Station Wanted. - At a meeting of the Parish Council, steps were decided upon with a view to inducing the G.N.R. Company to re-open Medbourne Station, which was closed during the war,, and the train service from Leicester to Peterborough, via Seaton Junction, suspended.

Medbourne station was open for only 33 years. It and the short line through it opened in 1883, the line was singled in 1905 and the station was closed as a wartime economy measure in 1916.

After that the line was used chiefly for storing wagons, but wasn't lifted until the 1960s.

One problem with the station was that the GNR's Leicester Belgrave Road to Peterborough service, which called there, took a circuitous route - though probably no more so than the Leicester to Peterborough service that runs today via Melton Mowbray, Oakham and Stamford.

The Medbourne Village site suggests that people there would rather have had a train to Market Harborough.

One irony is that the village sat inside a triangle of lines, so whichever way you left Medbourne, you crossed a railway. No wonder there was a campaign in 1922 to get their station back.

Rumer Godden writes about a multiracial London street in 1956

I'm reading An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden - it's for a thing - and have come across another early celebration of multiracial London. The previous one, by Marjorie Allingham, dated from 1965: this one from Rumer Godden dates from 1956:

The ugly accents of the Street children were unmistakably English, but the older people could have belonged anywhere; a great many had come from somewhere else, all tongues were spoken in Catford Street, faces were all colours, but even the people who had been born there and lived and died in it were like any people anywhere. 

It was all perfectly ordinary; seen from above, from the back windows high up in some of the Square houses, No 11 for instance, from the old schoolroom at the top of the house, Catford Street. with Motcombe Terrace and Garden Row - which had no gardens - running to left and right of it, made the shape of a big cross.

The observer is Olivia, the most sympathetic of the novel's adult characters, but even her worldly younger sister Angela is worried by the social class of the Catford Street children who sometimes spill into the more genteel Mortimer Square, not their race.

And note that Godden doesn't see the assimilation of people from other cultures into English society as a problem. Instead, she wonders at how quickly it takes place.

An Episode of Sparrows is the book on which perhaps the most interesting of my children-and-bombsites films, Innocent Sinners, is based.

Reader's voice: Have you left in that last bit of the quotation because it contains a whopping great Christian symbol?

An impressed Liberal England replies: Not much gets past you, does it?

Rare fossil named 'Sue' after palaeontologist's mum

 


BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale of life at the University of Leicester.

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Good evening from the Notswolds

For the third year in a row, Market Harborough has been named by the Sunday Times as one of the best places to live in Britain.

The Times report on this achievement, mercifully locked behind its paywall begins:

Some call this area the Notswolds - i.e. the Cotswolds without the pretentiousness or the price tag.

"What are they on about?" I wondered when I saw this. "No one calls it that."

Oh but they do. Try a search for 'Notswolds' on Google News and the term is everywhere.

It is used to mean Rutland in particular, or Rutland, Leicestershire. Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire more generally.

I've always said there are villages round here that would be tourist honeypots if they were in the Cotswolds. Perhaps they will be now?

Just think of a better name someone.

Looking after the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

This is the trailer for the film documentary Our Dinosaurs.

The Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs site will tell you all about them:

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was the sculptor responsible for the statues that today are remembered as the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. He was a natural history artist of international reputation. His sculptures were set in a landscape designed by Joseph Paxton that also included hillside illustrations of economic geology created by Professor David Ansted. 

This section of the park was constructed 1853-1855 to accompany the relocation of the Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to Sydenham Hill in south London following the Great Exhibition of 1851, and has remained largely as it appeared to visitors when the park opened. The statues are the first ever attempt to interpret paleontological discoveries as full-scale, full-bodied, living animals.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Liberal Democrats takes the lead in Southern England


A striking graphic from Liberal Democrat High Command.

The figures to back it up can be found in the detailed YouGov Survey Results for the voting intention survey conducted on 23 and 24 March.

If you look at the top right of page 1, you will see that England is divided into only four regions: North, Midlands, London and South.

This means that the Lib Dems are running first across a huge swathe of Southern England.

Recent developments in the US have been bad for both the Reform and the Conservatives, which suggests that their dogfight over which of them is more right wing is going to drag them both down.

Munira Wilson routs David Frost on the effects of Brexit


Three years ago an "ally" told The Sunday Telegraph earlier that David Frost was a "proper Conservative" with "star quality", who could even be a future prime minister. 

There was little sign of star quality when Frost debated the effects of Brexit with Liberal Democrat front-bencher Munira Wilson on the BBC's Politics Live yesterday. By common consent, she sent Frost back to school on the subject.

You can see a little of their exchanges in the video above, and you can read an enthusiastic, blow-by-blow account from Huffington Post too:

Asked if she agreed with Frost, Wilson said: “Absolutely not. We know that Brexit has massively hurt our economy, and actually everybody wants growth.

“The best way we can kickstart growth is by negotiating a far better deal with our European friends and neighbours at a time of great economic insecurity.”

She said this would help “cut the red tape that David is so desperate to cut” – and pointed to businesses in her own constituency who are spending huge sums to overcome Brexit bureaucracy.

Frost replied: “Anybody can come up with anecdotes about extra paperwork. The important thing is to look at the macro-picture, what’s happening to the economy.”

“It is not just anecdotes!” Wilson cut in. “We know that our exports to the EU are down £27bn, we know that four out of 10 British goods that were on European shelves before Brexit are not there anymore.

“How is that anecdote? That is cold hard fact that your hard Brexit is damaging our economy.”

Let me finish by offering a useful glossary to help you to decode terms you may come across in the political press.

Glossary

'Ally of Lord Frost' - Lord Frost.

Steve Winwood: Dear Mr Fantasy

Before he ever saw a Hammond organ, Steve Winwood was a brilliant guitarist and jazz pianist. 

Here he is at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2007.

Monday, March 24, 2025

Measles was good business for Mr Sowerberry in Oliver Twist

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Our reading today is taken from chapter 6 of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens:

The month’s trial over, Oliver was formally apprenticed. It was a nice sickly season just at this time. In commercial phrase, coffins were looking up; and, in the course of a few weeks, Oliver acquired a great deal of experience. 

The success of Mr. Sowerberry's ingenious speculation, exceeded even his most sanguine hopes. The oldest inhabitants recollected no period at which measles had been so prevalent, or so fatal to infant existence; and many were the mournful processions which little Oliver headed, in a hat-band reaching down to his knees, to the indescribable admiration and emotion of all the mothers in the town.

Measles vaccine was not introduced to Britain until 1968, but I have often thought how miraculous earlier vaccines must have seemed to mothers of my own mother's generation. Suddenly, they didn't have to worry about diseases, like diphtheria and polio, that had haunted their own childhoods.

And now, in the US at least, there are many who would throw this blessing away.

h/t @sarahinrainbows

Market Harborough's friendship park gets ready to open


Market Harborough's new mini-park is due to open at the end of the month, and today I noticed that its name sign has gone up.

This is the project that so outraged the local Conservatives - it must be that parks are woke, or maybe friendship is? Maybe they both are?

For news of plans for a much larger park just outside the town, see my story Harborough District Council buys land for rewilding project.

Rutland County Council to open a new children's home

Five years ago, Leicestershire County Council told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse that it no longer ran any children's homes. And, I blogged at the time, its counsel announced this fact as though it were self-evidently good news.

Opinions have changed over those five years. Today, Oakham Hub News is reporting:

A council is proposing to open a new children's home in a bid to save costs and keep children taken away from their families closer to home. 

Currently every child in the care of Rutland's children's services is placed in a children's home outside the county, and Rutland County Council says in one case a family is having to do a 150-mile round trip to see their child. 

Now in a bid to save costs and bring children back into their home county, the authority, which is run by a Liberal Democrat administration, is proposing to open a new children's home. 

Talking of the IICSA, Richard Scorer has an article in The Times today calling on the government to enact its recommendation that there should be a duty on professionals working with children to report knowledge or suspicion of the sexual abuse of children.

Sunday, March 23, 2025

The Joy of Six 1339

Anthony Painter explains how Britain's weak economy is limiting Labour's room for manoeuvre: "What is the difference between the austerity state and the Brexterity state? There was a way out of the austerity state. And in fact, ahead of the EU referendum, things were starting to recover. They recovered enough to give the Conservative party a majority in the 2015 election. Sometimes you have to think we are cursed. That majority enabled them to follow through on an insane referendum. The rest is, well, not yet history."

"Due to the collapse of my country, which surrendered to Russia in full view of the world on February 28, 2025, I have been seeking out dissident voices from the past ... to help us figure out what we need to do in the present." Heidi Siegmund Cuda turns to Václav Havel’s dissident essays from 1978, The Power of the Powerless, to learn how people can find a collective way back from democratic ruin.

Taylor Noakes explains how Donald Trump has brought a divided Canada together - against him.

Are mental health conditions overdiagnosed in the UK? On The Conversation, Susan McPherson (professor in psychology and sociology) and Joanna Moncrieff (professor of critical and social psychiatry) have an enlightening debate.

"In a nation that often demands that Black people perform either rage or gratitude, George Foreman dared to be something else: complex." Bryan Armen Graham on the career of the twice world heavyweight champion.

Sheila O'Malley dissects the artistry of Joan Crawford: "Crawford was extremely smart in choosing material for herself once she was in a position to do so. She had to campaign hard for some of her best roles. She understood her own persona intimately. Acting teachers often say that self-knowledge is even more important than talent. Crawford knew which roles were 'hers' even before she had landed them."

Paul Simon: Born at the Right Time

Paul Simon issued his album The Rhythm of the Saints in 1990, four years after Graceland. It uses Latin American and South American music as its basis, just as Graceland had used South African.

Here the North American voice is not the introspective Simon, but a brash persona. And the song, for me, is about hope and redemption coming from the poor.

Now listen to the Brazilian drummers on The Obvious Child from the same album.

Saturday, March 22, 2025

Rising Damp: Rigsby burning love wood outside Miss Jones's hut


This post was written for Terence Towles Canote's 11th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon.

“I’ve given Rigsby some love wood. He’s going to burn it outside Ruth’s hut.” 
“Will it work?” 
“I shouldn’t think so. It came off the wardrobe.”
I’ve chosen Charisma because it displays what was unique about Rising Damp. Here is a Seventies situation comedy with something interesting to say about race.

Running to four series and broadcast between 1974 and 1978, Rising Damp dealt with the seedy landlord Rigsby (played by the incomparable Leonard Rossiter) and his tenants. Though other characters came and went, the core cast was only four.

Alongside Rossiter, there was Frances de la Tour as the lovelorn university administrator Miss Jones, Richard Beckinsale as the innocent medical student Alan, and Don Warrington as the black student Philip.

What Rising Damp did that was different is bring out how racism can have envy at its heart. Because Philip is everything Rigsby wants to be: cultured, urbane and successful with women. In particular, while Rigsby ineffectually lusts after Miss Jones, she only has eyes for Philip.

And Philip, with all his talk of being the son of a chief and having ten wives, plays up to every ridiculous belief Rigsby has about Africa, because he has worked out that impresses Rigbsy all the more.

This is in danger of making Rising Damp sound worthier than it was. What it was above all was funny, both in its in-character one-liners and its plotting. It’s one of those shows where you can see what’s going to happen in advance, yet it’s still funny when it does happen.

And the cast was so good that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in those four central roles. By the end of its run, we may have liked Rigsby no more, but we understood him better and wanted his unlikely romance with Miss Jones to have a happy ending.

The Banana Box
Let’s begin with the writer. Eric Chappell was an auditor with the East Midlands Electricity Board in Hinckley with ambitions to be a novelist, yet his manuscripts never interested publishers. Then one day he thought he would try his luck writing a play – they were, after all, shorter – and the result was impressive enough to get him an agent.

He then concentrated on writing 30-minute television plays, until one was accepted and made by Harlech TV. It was a comedy-drama starring Henry McGee, but was broadcast only in Wales.

It was Chappell’s second stage play The Banana Box that both launched his writing career and led to Rising Damp. In fact, the early episodes from its first series, like Charisma, are largely taken from the play.

The play was first given a rehearsed reading at Hampstead Theatre Club in November 1970, and then a full staging at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in May 1971. The Phoenix was the scene of many of my teenage experiences of theatre, and I suspect Chappell being a Leicestershire writer encouraged them to put on the play.

None of the four leads we know from Rising Damp were yet in place, but Rigsby (or Rooksby, as he was called in The Banana Box) was played by a name familiar from television: Wilfrid Brambell from Steptoe and Son.

The play was popular with audiences and departed on a regional tour. By the time it arrived back at the Hampstead Theatre Club in May 1973, three of the four central cast members of Rising Damp – Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour and Don Warrington – were in place. Alan was played, not by Richard Beckinsale, but by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann.

The Banana Box’s short run in the West End wasn’t a huge success, but by then the play had been noticed by Yorkshire Television, who sensed that it would make a good sitcom. So Chappell was commissioned to write a pilot episode, which was screened in a series of six comedy pilots in September 1974.

From this came a commission for a series of six episodes, and this was shown in December 1974 and January 1975. Rising Damp was launched.

The cast
Leonard Rossiter was quite arguably the greatest British actor of his generation. The public got to know him through situation comedies – Rising Damp and then the Fall of Rise of Reginald Perrin – but in the theatre world it was his performance in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui that made his name.

He was also a successful screen actor, and still has a talent for turning up in films where you don’t expect him, from Oliver! to King Rat. He was a particular favourite of Stanley Kubrick, which is why you will find him in both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon.

It’s a measure of his standing that last year the Guardian marked the 40th anniversary of his death with a major feature. That death came in his dressing room during a performance of Joe Orton’s Loot. I am so glad that I saw him in the play a few weeks before.

It has to be admitted that Rossiter had a reputation for being difficult to work with: he was a perfectionist and expected high standards from those around him. When I met the late Braham Murray at a Leicester event to mark the 50th anniversary of Orton’s death, he said Rossiter was a wonderful man.

I mentioned his reputation, saying that he would turn up at the first rehearsal of a play word perfect and expect other actors to be too. Murray bristled a little and asked: “What’s wrong with that?” If you were a director, you would see things that way too.

Frances de la Tour was to become a major stage actress and has not always appreciated the fame that Rising Damp brought her. If you are playing Hamlet in a matinee, you don’t appreciate a party of children going “Ooh, Miss Jones!” when you walk on. At least I managed to restrain myself when I saw her play the lead in Shaw's Saint Joan.

She has won a Tony Award and three Olivier Awards – there is a good Observer interview with her by Lyn Gardner.

Leonard Rossiter was 57 when he died: Richard Beckinsale was only 31 when he suffered a fatal heart attack in March 1979. 

Two years before he died, Beckinsale was the subject of This is Your Life, and Rossiter paid him this tribute:
“There are plenty of people who can be quite funny other than Richard, but I just want to say two things about him. One is that he has a unique talent and I use the word very specifically – he has a unique comedy talent. He is the most generous person – not in financial terms – do let me finish – not in financial terms, but he is one of the most generous people in spirit I have ever met and I am delighted to have worked with him.”
You can watch that episode of This is Your Life online, and the episode of the radio programme Great Lives about him is worth a listen too.

Don Warrington was not long out of drama college when he appeared in Rising Damp, and he accepted Leonard Rossiter as a mentor – a relationship that Rossiter rather enjoyed. He has been an actor ever since, his career encompassing an acclaimed Lear and a recurring role as the police commissioner in Death in Paradise.

As to the racial politics of Rising Damp, this is what Warrington told the Telegraph in 2022:
“A lot of black people still say to me that their parents would call them down from their bedrooms whenever it was on, because of the way it showed a black man on TV who was not being put down or abused.”
Was Philip the son of a chief?
One question remains. In The Banana Box and in the film that was made of Rising Damp, it is revealed that Philip has never been to Africa in his life but comes from Croydon.

This revelation was never made in the television version, so if you want him to be, then Philip can be the son of a chief.

But the odds are that the Croydon story is right, in which case Philip based his view of Africa on much the same sources that Rigsby had. Oh the ironies of empire, race and immigration.

Lib Dems urge government to fund scheme that traces Ukrainian children abducted by Russia

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From the Guardian:

The Liberal Democrats are urging the government to provide replacement funding to an American project that locates Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia, as the party gathers for a spring conference heavily focused on the response to Donald Trump.

British support for the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University could be part of a more robust approach towards the US president, particularly over Ukraine, according to Calum Miller, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson.

Earlier this month, Yale said US government funding for the lab, which has attempted to track the fate of the estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children taken to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, had been ended as part of cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency.

The paper has spoken to the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson Calum Miller. As it reminds us, he entered politics just four years ago when he became an Oxfordshire county councillor.

But with his background as a senior civil servant and then heading Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, he was given the foreign affairs brief immediately after becoming an MP in July.

Calum will be moving a motion at the the party's spring conference expressing "profound alarm" at Trump’s presidency and urging closer European collaboration in response. 

He is calling for the government to use the £2bn-plus proceeds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC to help such efforts:

"We’d like to think that some of this Abramovich money could be put to exactly those purposes, so this terrible chapter of children being forcibly removed and almost indoctrinated in Russia, can be brought to an end, but also hopefully when those children return to Ukraine they can be given all the support they need as part of a humanitarian package."

Calum also told the paper that more confiscated Russian assets should be used to aid Ukraine.

He is strongly critical of the Conservative approach to the new international situation:

"I’m genuinely baffled by the approach taken by the Conservatives in this regard, fawning over Donald Trump at his inauguration and declaring a new era in UK-US relations. It looked unwise at the time and events since have proven how ill-advised it was.

"So many people in my area opened their doors to Ukrainian families, like they did across the whole country. Voters can see that the Russians have been emboldened and empowered by the US administration, and they think that’s just the wrong thing."

It's worth reading the whole piece: Calum also talks about the Labour government's approach to US under Trump.

Finally, as a Chelsea fan I cannot help reflecting that, after paying £2bn to buy the club, its new members have invested another £1.4bn in making the team far weaker than the one they inherited.

Friday, March 21, 2025

GCSE in Natural History to go ahead after all


The Guardian reports that the government is to introduce a GCSE in Natural History. It had previously said that the new qualification was in doubt because it was "seen as a Conservative Party initiative".

This led me to recall the George Orwell column that began:

Last time I mentioned flowers in this column an indignant lady wrote in to say that flowers are bourgeois.

But now, says the Guardian:

Announcing the new GCSE in parliament, the education minister Catherine McKinnell said it would equip young people "to understand and respect the natural world and contribute to the protection and conservation of the environment locally, nationally and internationally".

If you want to read more about the case for the qualification, see the guest post that Mary Colwell wrote for me:

It arose from a realisation that the world is unfamiliar to so many. Although we live here, breathe the air, eat what is grown in the earth and watch programmes that celebrate the natural world, many people know little about their surroundings.

This was not the case 50 years ago. There has been a steady erosion of the rock that kept us stable on the planet - our understanding of nature and our place in it.

Steffan Aquarone's Commons debate on coastal communities

Yesterday Steffan Aquarone, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, led a backbench Commons debate on coastal communities. Here is part of his speech:

I have covered just some of the key pillars of the challenges that our coastal communities face, as well as their resilience and our opportunity as a whole country to support them. What frustrates me greatly is that despite the wide-ranging and various challenges, responsibility for supporting them is fragmented and siloed across Government. 

I am delighted to see the Minister in his place; however, his remit contains only the communities aspect of our coastal communities. We have unique health challenges, economic challenges and opportunities of major environmental importance. 

Our coastal communities are too important to be bit parts of different portfolios, and we urgently need to take a holistic approach to supporting them, understanding how the different factors interact with one another. We need to be able to see and understand the impact of economic outcomes on health and wellbeing and how environmental challenges and renewable energy opportunities can go hand in hand.

That is why I have been calling for the creation of a Minister for coastal communities to give us a specific representative, speaking up for our areas in Government. That call has cross-party support, with MPs from across the House supporting it in the previous Parliament.

You can read the whole debate in Hansard. It was a good debate, and several other Lib Dem MPs spoke or intervened.

Behind the concerns expressed by members on both sides of the chamber, I suspect, is an anxiety about the appeal of Reform UK to some of these communities.

When Thatcher led international debate on the environment

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A word of uninvited advice for the Conservatives: listen to Margaret Thatcher on the climate crisis, not Kemi Badenoch.

Here, thanks to a 2013 Guardian article by the late John Vidal, are some of the Iron Lady's words of wisdom on the environment.

Here is an extract from a speech she made to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988:

For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

And here is one from her speech to the United Nations general assembly in November 1989:
What we are now doing to the world … is new in the experience of the Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all. 
The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. Those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.
As Vidal says, her enthusiasm soon waned. But he also quotes the words of Jonathon Porritt:
Thatcher … did more than anyone in the last 60 years to put green issues on the national agenda. From 1987-88 when [she] started to talk about the ozone layer and acid rain and climate change, a lot of people who had said these issues were for the tree-hugging weirdos thought, "ooh, it's Mrs Thatcher saying that, it must be serious". She played a big part in the rise of green ideas by making it more accessible to large numbers of people.
Mrs Thatcher was many things: one of them was a scientist.

Later. It's not in John Vidal's article, but here is another Thatcher quote from this era - her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in October 1988:
It's we Conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth—we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come. [Clapping]
The core of Tory philosophy and for the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy - with a full repairing lease. This Government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full. [Clapping].

I wonder if today's Tories would clap those points?

Thursday, March 20, 2025

Harborough District Council buys land for rewilding project

More good news on World Rewilding Day. HFM News reports:

A new publicly-accessible open space and country park is to be created near Market Harborough.

Harborough District Council has spent just under £1.8m purchasing over 130 acres of land for the ambitious rewilding project.

The Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust will lead the scheme either side of the A6 bypass near Great Bowden.

It will restore the nature-depleted land - an area the size of 79 football pitches - re-establishing natural processes and building a network of nature sites where wildlife can thrive.

HFM News has interviews with Ben Devine from the wildlife trust; Phil Knowles, the Liberal Democrat leader of the council; and Darren Woodiwiss, the Green Party cabinet lead for climate change and environment. The video above shows the site that's to be rewilded.

I'm convinced that contact with nature is important for human wellbeing, so housing development must take place hand-in-hand with projects like this.

"We didn't bring otters to Rutland Water - they chose to come here"


America has fallen, but Rutland continues to thrive.

BBC News reports:
Matt Scase says he is often asked when otters were introduced to Rutland Water Nature Reserve.

However, the nature lover, who works at the reservoir for the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, tells the BBC people are always surprised by the answer.

"We actually didn't introduce them - they chose to come here," he said.

"That's a good sign for us because they wouldn't have come unless we had a really good quality of water."

"Well, that and the fact we have a massive reservoir with loads of fish they can eat. That helps too." 
And:
Mr Scase has spent recent weeks out and about on the reserve trying to capture footage of the mammals.

He said: "We describe them as elusive but it's actually getting much easier to spot them because they have been thriving here.

"We are not sure about the exact number [of otters] but we can see a mixture of male adults and females and cubs."
Lord Bonkers comments exclusively for Liberal England:
It just shows that Rutland is open for business and offers a welcome to all. 
While there are currently no vacancies on the staff of the University of Rutland's famous Department of Hard Sums, if any American academics want to send their children here for safekeeping during the current unpleasantness, my own Home for Well-Behaved would be an excellent choice. Please direct all enquiries to Matron (she's usually better before lunch, if you catch my drift.)

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Drone footage of the remarkable Welland Viaduct

Something different from the Trekking Exploration YouTube account: drone footage of the mighty Welland Viaduct. This stands on the line between Corby and Manton Junction, which was built in the late 19th century as part of a quicker route from London to Nottingham.

Today the line is chiefly used for freight, though there is one passenger journey each way between Melton Mowbray and Kettering on weekdays. This is chiefly so drivers can learn the route - it's also used for diversions on the St Pancras main line if there's a pressing need to avoid Market Harborough.

This footage was shot by David Blower.

Subscribe to the Trekking Exploration Facebook page for exclusive content.

The Joy of Six 1338

Chaminda Jayanetti examines the hidden impact of Labour's disability benefit cuts - from carer's allowance to railcards.

"When they receive the annual service charge statements, they find costs that bear no relation to the services they receive - street lighting for a block of flats, access to facilities they are not allowed to use, or simple paint jobs costing tens of thousands of pounds with no say over who carries out the work or how it is done." Labour MP Kate Osborne says the end of the feudal leasehold system cannot come soon enough.

Seventy years before congestion pricing landed in New York City, Lewis Mumford sounded the alarm on letting automobiles run amok in America’s downtowns. David Zipper tells his story.

Tim Radford reviews The Age of Diagnosis by the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan: "How do you take on a real set of problems in medicine, concern about which can be seen as conservative-coded, without getting into bed with the vibes-based bores who will bang their hammy fists on tables in prejudiced agreement? The answer is: carefully. O’Sullivan is an excellent, fluid writer, and an eloquent speaker, but I’m bracing myself for braying allyship from right-wing broadcasters during her very well-deserved media appearances."

"At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn't a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: 'I think you should look into incel culture.'" Jack Thorne on writing Adolescence.

Luka Ivan Jukic casts light on an unexpected corner of European history: Latin remained a live language in Croatia until the middle of the 19th century.

Leicester Cathedral's oral history project on the discovery of Richard III


Leicester Cathedral is running an oral history project to capture the story of the discovery, identification, and reinterment of Richard III in 2015.

Here are a few snippets from the project's site:

Richard Buckley, former director of University of Leicester Archaeological Services, talking about Philippa Langley's powers of persuasion

"The site was occupied by Social Services department, but Philippa managed to get the ear of the then Chief Executive, Sheila Locke, who was attracted by the idea, which I thought, you know, if I'd gone to them and said, 'I want to destroy your car park on this wild goose chase for an unachievable project'", they'd have said 'No', so fair play to her for getting them to agree, so that, yes, they agreed to that." 

Jo Appleby, osteologist at the University of Leicester, on realising she was working on Richard III's skeleton 

"So, I started looking a little to the side to see if that was it, and I realised that no, the spine did go to the side, but it went to the side in anatomical alignment, it was still, it was still articulated. And as I followed it round, I began to realise, okay, there's a, there's a curve in this spine. And that was the point where I thought, I think this is Richard. 

"I'd already, when we started uncovering the upper cranium, that we weren't sure if it was part of the body, I'd noticed that there was an unusually square looking hole in the cheek. And I thought, well it's probably just some damage from the ground, but it was very strangely square hole that does look a bit suspicious, I wonder what that is. 

"And that was the point where I put those two things together, and I thought, that square hole actually is genuinely an injury, isn't it?"

Richard Buckley on being told by Matthew Morris what had been discovered:

"But then Mathew then whispered a bit slightly more assertedly. 'Well, the skeleton's got evidence for trauma to the skull and curvature of the spine'. And for me, that was when it was... It was like an out of body experience, it was like things were now happening that I had no control over, and I just couldn't believe it, and I couldn't, I can't repeat what I said!

"I jumped up and down! You know, nowadays, what's it called... That programme called Detectorists, where they talk about the dance that the detectorists do, where they find some gold. I think I did a bit more of a stamping, I think mine was, because I just couldn't believe it. 

"You know, I really couldn't believe it. What are the odds then, of being successful? So anyway, that's what happened."

The Tory response to Liz Kendall? She hasn't been nasty enough

Bad as Liz Kendall's announcement was - and it was awful - the Conservative response from Helen Whately was worse:

Where is the fit note reform crucial to stem the flow of people on to benefits? Where is the action on people being signed off sick for the everyday ups and downs of life? Why is the right hon. Lady planning to save only £5 billion when the bill is forecast to rise to over £100 billion? ...

Fundamentally, this is too little, too late. The fact is that £5 billion just does not cut it with a bill so big going up so fast. She needed to be tougher. She should be saying, “No more hard-working taxpayers funding the family next-door not to work, no free top-of-the-range cars for people who do not need them, no more sickfluencers helping people to claim money they do not need.”

I am reminded of Bernice Woodhall, the vicar of Royston Vasey:

“‘And he will give strength to legs that are weak and arms that tremble. The crippled will throw down their crutches and leap up and down in praise of his grace.’ Doesn’t say they need five car parking spaces outside Safeways now does it? They’re always empty, I only nipped in for five minutes to get a bottle of Taboo.”

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Alan Bennett on Dudley Moore and jazz


Alan Bennett is happily still with us, but his diaries no longer appear in the Guardian and the London Review of Books. I believe I read somewhere that he has said his life is too uneventful these days to be of interest, but if anything exciting happens he will be in touch.

Here he is in 2003, writing just after the death of his Beyond the Fringe colleague Dudley Moore:
30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into Beyond the Fringe as a musical afterthought. 
In fact he came in as the acknowledged star of the Oxford cabaret circuit, and right through the run of Beyond the Fringe remained the darling of the audience. Cheerful, extrovert and on his own musical ground very sure of himself, he only started to play up the melancholy and portray himself as a tortured clown, a line journalists are always happy to encourage, after he’d teamed up with Peter and subsequently gone into analysis or psychotherapy. 
Obviously Dudley did get sadder as he got older and coping with Peter’s drunkenness can have been no joke. But portraying himself as shy, put upon and intimidated by Jonathan, Peter and to a lesser extent myself was a construction that came later. On and off the stage during Beyond the Fringe he was sunny, social and effortlessly successful. A sad clown he wasn’t.
Later Bennett thinks again about the subject:
We all professed to like jazz, though it was not as modish as it had been for the generation of Larkin and Amis a few years before. Jazz was no longer the anthem of youth and disaffection. ... 
Still, we would go along to hear Dudley play, particularly when Peter Cook’s The Establishment opened in New York. ...  But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller’s experience of it didn’t stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his vigorous though uncoordinated attempts to jive.
Perhaps because he was the youngest of the four of us Peter’s lack of interest in jazz was the most obvious, though he would later have heard a good deal more of Dudley’s playing than Jonathan or I did. When in old clips of Not Only ... But Also Dudley is seen playing or parodying jazz as the play-out at the finish, Peter will sometimes be standing by the piano with a sophisticated smile, clicking his fingers to what he hopes may be the beat. 
This was both a pose and a piss-take but it came closer to the reality than Peter would perhaps have liked to admit. ...
None of which is of much interest except to make plain that whatever the public’s appreciation of his musical talent, Dudley was nevertheless corralled for four years with three other performers who didn’t share his enthusiasm and then for ten or a dozen years more with Peter who regarded his music as at best an interlude between the comedy. 
So when later in life with that slightly aggrieved air with which he discussed his early career Dudley complained of being unappreciated by his colleagues in Beyond the Fringe, this was partly what it was about.
The video above, parodying at once Benjamin Britten's composition and Peter Pears' singing, shows Moore's brilliance.

By all accounts, Pears found it very funny, while Britten was not at all amused - much as John Lennon enjoyed the Rutles much more than Paul McCartney did. But then the piece's title, Little Miss Britten, was surely what we would now call homophobic.

Bulgarian footballer honoured with minute’s silence … despite not being dead

Embed from Getty Images

The Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award. 

And our illustration is a tribute to the Mascots Minute Silence Instagram page.

Elvis Costello and The Attractions: Watch Your Step

An immaculate live performance on American TV.