As my regular readers will know, I am not a vengeful man, but I am forced to conclude that Trump has Gone Too Far and Something Must Be Done. So I am urging my American friends to arrange a Presidential visit to Dallas, the home of the fearsome Texas Schoolbook Suppository. It did for poor Jack Kennedy and I have no doubt that it would do for Trump too.
News reaches me from the Commons that, far from leading a Bolshevik uprising, he is hand in glove with the Conservatives. For Tory MPs have taken to calling him ‘Pop’.
“What do you think of foreigners, Pop?” they cluster round to ask, whereupon Corbyn grimaces, shakes his fist and goes “Foreigners? Grrr!” How the Tories clap and cheer!
The hilarity continues until a division is called upon some bill to do with Europe, whereupon Corbyn takes Jacob Rees-Mogg’s hand and allows himself to be led through the government lobby.
“We’re going to Lancashire and Lincolnshire. Or are they the same place? Anyway, the idea is we cruise round and whenever we see someone who looks as they voted Leave we point at them, shout ‘Gammon!’ and roar with laughter.”Lord Bonkers also gave us his view of Norman Scott:
"a stable lad and an unstable lad."
My only companion is Tom, who proves a quick-witted child as he has smuggled some bottles of Smithson & Greaves Northern Bitter aboard under the very noses of the pirates.
Perhaps he is too quick-witted: “Why are there so many orphans in Rutland, your lordship?” he asks with a steady gaze.
There is a cottage that I make available to the party so that overworked headquarters staff can enjoy some rest and recuperation. After a stay in Rutland they return to the fray refreshed and ready to redouble their efforts – and if they do not then they are packed off to the Home for Distressed Canvassers in Herne Bay, from which they are occasionally allowed out if the lady in the library promises to Keep An Eye On Them.
For the past view days said cottage has been occupied by a fellow charged with thinking up a new slogan for the party. Despite my urging, he has insisted on continuing to work. When I call on him this morning I find he has covered the walls with words written on those yellow sticky notes. ‘Radical,’ they say. ‘Moderate.’ ‘Firm.’ ‘Fair.’ ‘Green.’ ‘Centrist.’ ‘Fluffy Kittens.’ ‘Free Cake.’
I drag him off to the Bonkers’ Arms for a stiffener. When I return from the bar I find him staring intently at a beermat. “That’s left over from an old Smithson & Greaves advertising campaign,” I tell him. “’Demand Bitter.’ That was their slogan.” His face lights up, he pockets the mat, drains his pint and asks for a lift to the station.
Like all successful genres, it developed many varieties. There was acid house, funky house, diva house, country house (particularly popular here in Rutland) and, my own favourite, hob house.
The Well-Behaved Orphans, being little horrors themselves, always demand a scary bedtime story from me on this night. I decide to call their bluff this year by reading them the most frightening thing I know: the 2017 general election results in constituencies that the Liberal Democrats won as recently as 2010.
How they squeal with frightened glee when I give the figures for Truro & Falmouth and Redcar! I am halfway through Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey when Matron hurriedly announces that it is my bedtime and sends me back to the Hall. I hope I don’t have nightmares.
One of the companies contracted by the government to charter ferries in the event of a no-deal Brexit does not own any ships, has not previously operated a ferry service and is not planning to do so until close to the UK’s scheduled departure date from the European Union, it has emerged.
Concerns have been raised about Seaborne Freight, which was awarded a £13.8m contract to operate freight ferries from Ramsgate to the Belgian port of Ostend if the UK leaves the EU without a deal, after a councillor for the Kent town queried whether it would be possible to set up the new service by the scheduled Brexit date.The company in question is Seaborne Freight, whose plans are the subject of a notably sceptical article by The Isle of Thanet News:
According to Companies House records the firm has declared fixed assets of £35,169, shares totalling £53, debtors amount due within one year of £6,364 and creditors amount due within one year of £416,607.And the councillor mentioned by the Guardian is Paul Messenger, a Conservative county councillor in Ramsgate.
"It has no ships and no trading history so how can due diligence be done?
“"Why choose a company that never moved a single truck in their entire history and give them £14m? I don’t understand the logic of that."Good questions both.
Tory education reforms are giving private school pupils a huge additional advantage in the hunt for university places and jobs by allowing them to sit easier GCSEs than the more rigorous exams that are being forced upon state schools, new official figures suggest.If this is the case, then universities must take it into account by demanding grades from prospective students from private schools than they do for state schools.
After the opening of Woburn Walk, the newly laid paving stones became a magnet for the local hares, who could easily be seen late at night resting peacefully along the walk.
Indeed, famous poet W. B. Yeats who lived on Woburn Walk in the 1920’s, wrote of "a handsome old grey hare taking rest" outside number 6.Back in Leicestershire, I found King Charles's Well near Tur Langton on a perfect autumn day. Then I went to the pictures and saw The Little Stranger.
He never gave the impression when he talked to you that he was looking over your shoulder for someone more important.And there was good news. David Howarth is at the heart of the campaign to force a second referendum on EU memebership and Zuffar Haq, three times our candidate in Harborough, has been awarded an MBE.
It concerns an official from the old Soviet Union who came on a visit to Britain.
Back home he was responsible for ensuring that the right amount of bread arrived in Moscow each morning.
When he arrived here he was asked if there was anyone he would like to meet.
He replied that he would like to talk to his opposite number - the government official who was responsible for ensuring that the right amount of bread arrived in London each morning.
And he was astounded to be told that there was no such person.
Well, that is not true any more.
I know what they say, but I remember the 1960s and the picture we have of it now as a musical wonderland is only half the story.
Simon Titley used to say that if you picked a Sixties chart at random Ken Dodd was generally at number 1. And what I remember from the era is the songs from the shows.
Seemingly by law, every request programme played Harry Secombe singing If I Ruled the World and Stanley Holloway singing I'm Getting Married in the Morning.
And if you went to a friend's house their parents would have, not Ogden's Nut Gone Flake or The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, but the cast recordings of Oliver! or My Fair Lady.
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| Zuffar Haq fighting Harborough in 2010 |
"I am honoured, and humbled, to receive this award.
"Born and brought up in Leicester I have always felt it important to play a part in the community which has given my family and I so much."Zuffar also fought the Leicester South by-election for the Lib Dems in 2011. He escaped the fate of most Lib Dem by-election candidates during the Coalition years and held on to second place.
While the United States had not yet entered World War I and was officially neutral, American munitions dealers could legally sell to any of the warring nations. Most of the arms, however, were going to the Allies - Britain, France and Russia - because the British navy had blockaded Germany.Wikipedia takes up the story:
After midnight on July 30, a series of small fires were discovered on the pier. Some guards fled, fearing an explosion. Others attempted to fight the fires and eventually called the Jersey City Fire Department.
At 2:08 am, the first and largest of the explosions took place. Fragments from the explosion travelled long distances, some lodging in the Statue of Liberty and some in the clock tower of The Jersey Journal building in Journal Square, over a mile away, stopping the clock at 2:12 am.
The explosion was the equivalent of an earthquake measuring between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter scale and was felt as far away as Philadelphia. Windows were broken as far as 25 miles (40 km) away, including thousands in lower Manhattan. Some window panes in Times Square were shattered. The stained glass windows in St. Patrick's Church were destroyed/The explosion was originally put down to safety violations by workers on Black Tom. Elizabeth Nix explains:
It would take years for a persistent team of American lawyers to find sufficient evidence that showed that in fact the disaster had been plotted by the Germans. The lawyers sued Germany in the Mixed Claims Commission at The Hague, and in 1939 won the case. Germany, under the rule of Hitler, failed to pay up and the settlement was renegotiated in the early 1950s. The last payment was made to Black Tom claimants in 1979.You can learn more about the Black Tom explosion in the video above.
The East Midlands Regional Party was considered to be one of the most viable in England because it owned a (near-derelict) house in Loughborough. The house did not even had a functioning loo and visitors had to rely on the facilities at the nearby railway station. This was the regional office and home for the administrative secretary, a man called Maurice Bennett, who also hailed from Liverpool.
Beware of arguments that involve expressing indignation on behalf of a third party.
There is something of the school bully about Chope. He takes a delight in coming across shiny-eyed new MPs who are ardent to change the world and showing them that the Commons is no place for such ambitions.
He's like a prep school tough who raids the junior dorm on the look out for teddy bears and photographs from home that he can taunt younger boys with ever afterwards.A Harborough Conservative councillor joined the Lib Dems, while I pondered the strange transformation of Darren Grimes.
The British Rail Class 13 was a type of diesel-electric shunting locomotive. The type was designed in 1965 because of the need to provide more powerful shunters for the Tinsley Marshalling Yard.
Because of Tinsley's status as a hump yard, it was not possible to use a single locomotive owing to the risk of grounding. So, to achieve the required power, a pair of Class 08 shunters were permanently coupled in 'master and slave' formation, with the slave unit having had its cab removed. ...
With the end of hump shunting at Tinsley the class became obsolete. The unique qualities of the locomotives were not required elsewhere and so withdrawal was inevitable; 13002 was withdrawn in 1983, with the remaining two locomotives going with the closure of Tinsley hump in 1985. None of this unusual class survives.
I saw the straw bear dance and caper, led by his keeper and followed by musicians playing his own loping tune.
And it turned out that Whittlesey, like Play School, has a big bear and a little bear.
Beyond that the day is a festival of dancing. There were the inevitable morris dancers, but also clog dancers (almost military in their noise and precision) and mysterious molly dancers.You can see the Straw Bear dance and hear that loping tune in another post.
walk in areas that are usually under deep water. You can ... see the paddles that are raised to let water into the locks from the side pounds used at Foxton. ...
I also learnt that rather being cut into the hillside, the locks were largely built on the surface and then had earth heaped up against them.
It is notable that the brick floor of the chambers probably dates from 1814 when they were opened and that the piece of metalwork at the bottom of one of them is the work of an early 19th-century blacksmithOne of the pleasures of 2018 for me was the television channel Talking Picture TV (Channel 81 on Freeview). In February I wrote about the film Violent Playground, which starred a young David McCallum:
among McCallum's gang you will find Melvyn Hayes and a boy called Fred Fowell. After a spell in a minor Merseybeat band he emerged in the 1970s as the comedian Freddie Starr.Meanwhile, Tory Wandsworth wanted to fine children for climbing trees, flying kites and playing cricket in its parks.
We should not play along with his act by calling him "the Member for the 18th century" or anything like that. It is just how he wants to be seen.I was right about Jacob Rees-Mogg, but no one seemed to take much notice.
Seemingly by law, every request programme played Harry Secombe singing If I Ruled the World and Stanley Holloway singing I'm Getting Married in the Morning.
And if you went to a friend's house their parents would have, not Ogden's Nut Gone Flake or The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, but the cast recordings of Oliver! or My Fair Lady.
There was more fun to be had at one friend's house as his parents had the cast recording from Hair, which we used to play.These two advertisements from my Danny La Rue programme reflect this era.
The text that Britten uses is by an anonymous poet and probably dates from about 1300. It appears in The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900, which he won as a school prize for music.
It’s a macaronic verse; that is, a poem in which one language is introduced into the context of another. The main body of the choir sings in Middle English and another semi-chorus (or group of soloists) supplies a refrain in Latin.
Few in Britain voted to leave the single market; remaining in it was proposed by many Brexiteers and promised in the Conservative election manifesto. Estimates put the cost to Britain of this kind of “hard Brexit” as high as £200bn over 15 years.
Already companies are leaving, taking with them livelihoods, expertise and the futures of many citizens. We are now embarked on a course that will bewilder future historians as the most remarkable example in modern history of a country committing an act of monumental self-harm while still in full possession of its faculties.
So why has May moved her party onto policies indistinguishable from those of Ukip? For the same reason that Mr Cameron insisted on the Referendum in the first place: the best interests of the nation are once again being held hostage to the internal management of the Conservative Party.The article begins with a quotation from Hazlitt and ends with the words:
If you feel depressed today, don’t be. Be fighting mad. There’s still everything still to fight for.
Vistor: I say my good man, why is that station here so far from the town?
Local inhabitant: 'Appen they wanted it near t'railway, sir.
Once you have been adopted, however, there is only one volume that will do: A Fortunate Life: The Autobiography of Paddy Ashdown (which is by Paddy Ashdown, incidentally).
I know of no book that sets out half so clearly what is needed to win an election campaign. I don’t mean the chapter on "The Winning of Yeovil" that was made available free on the electric internet recently, excellent though it is In Its Way: no, I am thinking about the section on jungle warfare in Sarawak where Ashplant explains how to mount patrols, the best way to lay an ambush and how to treat an open wound using red ants. It was no surprise to me when, armed with this knowledge, we took control of South Somerset District Council.
Like many serious readers, Mill read with pen or pencil in hand, marking passages he found interesting, protesting against premises and conclusions he judged facile, and sometimes summarising his own thoughts in annotations on unprinted pages.Mill's annotations are now the subject of an international research project: Mill Marginalia Online.
tucked between pages 674 and 675 of Arnoldus Vinnius’s Institutionum Imperialium – a weighty and much-reprinted history of Justinian law – are two paper dolls, with a third waiting between pages 866 and 867. ...
But the question is, whose dolls were they? Printed in 1665, the book is old enough to have been in the Mill family library when the young John Stuart was tutoring his sisters. Left in the library at Blackheath after his death, it might also have served as a toy depository for Harriet Taylor Mill’s daughter Helen (Mill’s stepdaughter) about whose childhood relationship with Mill we know very little.
Richard Alderman, the 'Democracy Rutland' councillor, today received a six-month community order for his posts on Facebook.
He will have to wear an electronic ankle tag to monitor a 7pm to 7am curfew.
As the Leicester Mercury has said he intends to carry on as a councillor, he had better hope there are no evening meetings.But there are evening meetings. The council's meetings all start at 7pm.
The Farranfore to Valencia Harbour Railway was 39.5 miles (63.5 km) long single-track broad gauge railway line that operated from 1892 to 1960 along Dingle Bay's southern shore in Ireland. It was the most westerly railway in Europe.
