The Joy of Six 1427

"For 25 years, governments have been promoting executive elected mayors in English local government, an enthusiasm fully endorsed by the current government in a white paper in 2024 and bill in 2025. Existing legislation allows central government to transfer to these mayors all the functions of local councils, subject only to scrutiny arrangements which involve no more than a power to ask the mayor politely to think again. It empowers central government to turn all elected councils into functionless talking shops, and to create mayors who are local kings." David Howarth takes aim at Labour's demolition of local government.

Alison Bennett welcomes three-year financial settlements for children’s hospices, but warns that they will not resolve the sector's funding crisis.

Will Hurst reports that Labour ministers repeatedly overruling official advice that buildings should be listed: "In almost every one of the 10 cases of rejection, the site in question was subject to development proposals, raising the question of whether the government’s drive to remove the 'blockers; to economic growth is now imperilling England’s heritage."

"The figure of the 'girl-boy' – a girl masquerading in boys' attire – was a pervasive and evocative figure within late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. My sweep of digitised newspaper repositories has unearthed at least 51 reported cases of 'girls' dressing as 'boys' between 1867 and 1919 in the British Isles alone. These stories were widely circulated, picked up by both national and regional papers, and often republished with increasingly sensational details that lent them a larger-than-life quality." Hannah Stovin on her research into youth cross-dressing in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

"The first time I saw a Mirror Scare was in Robert Hamer’s segment of the Ealing portmanteau chiller Dead of Night (1945), in which a haunted mirror reflects not its actual surroundings, but a murder scene from the past. Roman Polanski also makes terrifying use of the effect in Repulsion, when Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe mirror fleetingly reflects someone who isn’t there. But nowadays the Mirror Scare is just another 'Boo!' device; there’s even a YouTube supercut." Anne Billson explains how to film a ghost story.

Lynne About Loughborough goes for an autumn walk in the town's Outwoods.