Looking down on Clun's parched bowling green from the castle

I've been to Clun today, making use of one of the last workings of the 745 bus from Minsterley to Ludlow. It's going to be replaced by a community transport scheme that sounds as though it may even be better for residents, but it will no longer be possible to get to Clun, as I did today, by catching the early bus from Shrewsbury to Minsterley.

Anyway, here's a souvenir of Clun and of this extraordinary summer. It's taken from the castle mound looking down on the town's bowling green, though 'green' isn't quite the word at present. 

It seems to be a Shropshire thing to have bowling greens on old castle sites. There is one at the top of what remains of Bishop's Castle castle, and the other day I found one in Ellesmere too. In fact, it was seeing the bowling green that awoke me to the fact that I was looking the remains of a castle.

The Joy of Six 1564

"If there is one consistent theme running through Farage’s political career, it is his striking ability to make enemies out of friends. He seems to be running out of allies. That helps to explain why rumours about his own future, including speculation that health concerns could eventually force him to step back, carry so much weight." Nigel Farage won his by-election but, says Zoe Grunewald, that victory has failed to reinvigorate his party.

Xueyu Geng asks if Britain’s railways can cope with ever‑more extreme heat: "Railway assets have very long lives: a track, bridge or embankment built or substantially renewed today could still be in service in 50 or 100 years. That creates a fundamental mismatch between the current design life and a climate that keeps changing within that lifetime."

Emma Peplow looks back to Martin Bell's victory in Tatton in 1997.

"If you are spending a couple of hours a day scrolling through various apps on your phone, that’s a couple of hours that are not available for reading. It’s also possible that they affect our ability to concentrate for long periods on time on text. Essentially, reading was a more popular leisure pastime in the past, and that probably ensured a steady pipeline of students for the humanities. That pipeline is no longer there." Daisy Christodoulou on the decline of English Literature as a school subject.

"Just occasionally, when your teenage heroes turn out like this, doesn't it just make your heart want to sing along with them?" Pete Paphides salutes Paul Heaton.

Tanya Aldred looks at the problems our extreme summer has caused cricket groundstaff.

The Joy of Six 1563

"Toby Young stole his status and career. And in every sinew of his body, he knows that. For most people, imposter syndrome is an irrational insecurity; Toby Young should feel that way. He was an imposter at Oxford, he was an imposter in journalism, an imposter in New York, an imposter in education, and most recently has set himself up as the boss of an imposter 'Union', acting as if anyone can genuinely call themselves General Secretary." Apart from that, Mic Wright has a lot of time for him in this 2020 piece.

"Perhaps the most depressing thing of all is that just when we need to be mustering competent researchers who can undertake the careful and time-consuming work of reviewing new submissions, academic publishers are pursuing rapid growth, which will provide ever more opportunities for fraudsters to find an outlet for their work." Dorothy Bishop finds that the rise of AI is making it increasingly difficult to identify fraudulent scientific journal papers.

Samantha Ward considers how climate change will affect zoos.

Anna Merlan salutes the vision of Paulina Borsook, who foresaw the right-wing, anti-government path that the moguls of Silicon Valley, who were once hailed as liberals, would take in her 2000 book Cyberselfish.

"The Venice-set Don’t Look Now remains one of Roeg’s most admired and influential works, and one of the few to be warmly received on arrival. An intelligent, harrowing and provocative adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s supernatural thriller in which a married couple (movingly portrayed by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) use a working assignment in a wintry Venice as an attempt to overcome a recent tragedy in which their young daughter has drowned, the film hints at the horrors that underlie domesticity in Roeg’s characteristically imagistic style." Jason Wood surveys the work of Nicloas Roeg.

Chris Arnade visits the beautiful, lonely city of Perth: "Right next to my apartment is a tidy pocket park, with playground, dog walk, bathroom, and a garden of plants that only could be found in Western Australia. It’s idyllic and as I passed it my first night I imagined spending my week sitting there, reading, watching kids play, making friends with the retirees, but since then I’ve never seen anyone in it other than solitary morning walkers anxiously scolding their dog for not defecating fast enough." 

The Joy of Six 1562

"Every large fire has two causes, the spark that lights it and the conditions that let it become so severe. Naming the fire, though, can hide this, as does reporting. A fire is named in hours, blamed in days, and attributed a true cause in weeks." Doug Specht argues that we should reterg 'wildfire' in favour of 'landscape fire', stating the spark where it is known and explaining the conditions that allowed it to spread.

"Judge Paul McCloskey scanned a group of immigrant children, none of whom had lawyers present, in his windowless suburban Virginia courtroom this past Thursday. Where’s the 7-year-old?' he asked." Eric Bazail-Eimil observes immigration proceedings in Trump's America.

Anilya Krishnan on concerns about the 'wilderness therapy' programmes, which often set back families thousands of dollars and form part of the US's lucrative 'troubled teen' industry.

Christian Wolmar says cycling is a feminist issue.

"What really troubled them was that putting the story of William into the context of a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents was creating a parallel between William as an innocent boy who was killed allegedly by the Jews, with the story of the boys under two years old in Bethlehem being killed by a Jewish king, Herod." Pat Ashworth on Norwich Cathedral's approach to its troubling unofficial local saint.

Alison Kerr celebrates Alastair Sim: "His rich, commanding voice and heavy-lidded, dark-shadowed eyes lent him an air of menace upon which he capitalised to memorable effect in Scrooge and as various other characters of dubious morals. Sim appeared to play these parts – the lecherous lodger (with dyed black hair combed over to one side) in London Belongs to Me, the initially frightening author in Hue and Cry, and the mysterious title character in An Inspector Calls – with relish and gusto."

Northwood Lane, Bewdley: The Elan Valley Aqueduct, The Singing Detective and Jonathan Meades

Fire broke out beside the Severn Valley Railway (SVR) bear Bewdley yesterday, reports the Shropshire Star. I don't know if it was caused by a spark from a train, but many preserved lines have gone over to diesel-only operation because of the tinder-dry state of lineside vegetation this summer.

This fire took place near Northwood Lane, which is a long road that runs beside the River Severn north of Bewdley. And this post  is about three things you can see along its course.

The first is an aqueduct that carries drinking water from the Elan Valley reservoir in Mid Wales over the River Severn on its way to the Frankley Reservoir in  Birmingham. This 73-mile pipeline, which opened in 1906, was a wonder of its day. 

You'll find it marked on the endpaper maps of many books about the Welsh Border, and I suspect it was the inspiration for the plot about a Shropshire reservoir being blown up by German spies in the first of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books, Mystery at Witchend.

You can see the Aqueduct over the Severn and the rails of the SVR in the photograph above. Now on to two television connections...

There is a station beside Northwood Lane, and it was used as a location for Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. It's in the scene where the young Philip Marlowe returns to the Forest of Dean after his mother's death in London and is met by his father, who is played by Jim Carter. You can see a photo of them above along with photos photos of the station and level crossing.

And then there's Jonathan Meades...

You may remember his film Severn Heaven, which visited the Bewdley plotlands. This is an interwar community of some 160 self-built properties, which appears to be under threat at the moment. 

I had a wander round it some years ago myself, getting off the train at Northwood Halt.

The Joy of Six 1556

"Dartford Warblers skim across the heather before diving into the vegetation, defying all but the quickest observers. At dusk Nightjars churr from the isolated trees or fly overhead, the males clapping their wings in display flight." David Jobbins mourns what has been lost to the fire at Dunwich Heath.

Sam Power explains why Reform UK will find it hard to shake off questions about its donors: "An important thing to note is that the legal onus rests almost entirely on the donor. The party in receipt of the donation simply needs to show that it has conducted a permissibility check on them. In the case of Reform, some of its biggest donors (like Tice) are effectively woven into the party apparatus. This makes it much harder for the party to be seen to be one step removed from the money."

An increasingly narrow English curriculum, with its emphasis on phonics and 'teaching to the test', is squeezing reading for pleasure out of our primary schools, experts in the field tell Lydia Chantler-Hicks.

Rebecca Johns finds that British scientist James Lovelock warned executives of the risks of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s. Rather than share his reports with the public, claims an imminent legal case, Shell responded by funding the Global Climate Coalition – an industry group that pursued multimillion-dollar influence campaigns promoting climate denial and misinformation.

Leanne Tritton reports on the fate of Shrewsbury's Shirehall, the modernist former home of the Shropshire County Council.

"Dirk Bogarde came in for some stick from certain quarters for his portrayal of General Sir Frederick 'Boy' Browning, who was under considerable pressure from Monty to deliver Operation Market-Garden. Dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning stated that they’d be going 'a bridge too far.' He said this before the operation, but there is no scene with Montgomery in the film, instead Bogarde gets the line after the snafu, coming across like an aloof clever-dick 'told you so' type." Tim Pelan looks back to to 1977 and the making of A Bridge Too Far.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The arid south of Rutland

As ever, Lord Bonkers was ahead of the curve on the climate crisis. Perhaps the sands at Trescothick Bay remind him of the deserts of southern Rutland?

Wednesday

They say these heatwaves will soon render the South of England uninhabitable, which is a bit of a facer seeing as we Liberals have worked so hard to ensure we don’t have MPs anywhere else. But don’t despair: the arid south of Rutland is simply teeming with life – human life included. 

Of course, if the Home Counties do turn to desert it will require changes to the way we fight elections there, which is why, a couple of years ago, I invited some of the ALDC’s leading lights to an awayday at an oasis near Uppingham. 

There I instructed them in the polite way to canvass bedouin, the correct tying of the kafiyeh and the use of camels in Focus delivery. It won’t be my fault if we fail to gain Runnymede and Weybridge next time round.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"
• Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents

The Joy of Six 1551

 Vince Cable makes the case for building more council houses: "The most compelling argument for councils becoming developers is that the private developer model, however valid for most housebuilding most of the time, depends on a set of circumstances – the ability to earn a profit margin above rising land and property prices – which may not exist. Public sector developers can build through economic cycles and where market conditions are unattractive for private developers."

"Changes in public spaces (including increased provision of green parks, lakes and water fountains) enable easy public access to cooling. Everyday heat adaptation is not only about technological fixes, but about building or redesigning everyday infrastructures that enable a fair and equitable living environment for everybody, whatever the weather." Subina Shrestha and Claire Hoolohan on what Britain must do to prepare for future heatwaves.

Mark Braund looks at Andy Burnham's past support of a land value tax.

"Three Lions has started to to more harm than good. I think that 'thirty years of hurt' line has helped seed a sense of entitlement, a baked-in belief that anything other than outright victory legitimises a sense of hurt. It raises the stakes and ratchets up the pressure – a pressure that ultimately bears down on the very players you're counting on to try and deliver a result." Pete Paphides says it's time to say thank you and goodbye to the song Three Lions.

"The final prisoners left Crumlin Road Gaol in 1996 and, in 2012, it reopened as a visitor attraction and conference centre, sharing the grounds with McConnell’s whisky distillery. Although the prison experience is now dominated by atmospheric lighting, holographic presentations and short information videos, it is possible to see the history behind the modern technology." Angela Buckley experiences the Crumlin Road Gaol Experience.

Jeremy Rees celebrates the magnificent Queenie Watts.

The Joy of Six 1547

"The world-renowned academic institution has nothing to say in response to a six-month investigation by Byline Times raising serious concerns about the safeguarding of students and foreign influence at Cambridge University." Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu ask why.

"Over the last ten years the question of Irish unity has moved to the centre of the Irish political stage. This surprisingly rapid change has been driven by demographic and economic trends, to the advantage of Irish nationalists both north and south of the border." Patrick Cockburn reviews For and Against a United Ireland by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride.

Kate Moore says we need more trees: "The sooner we plant trees – ideally in groups, as solitary trees are more vulnerable – and nurture them through the early years, the cooler we'll feel.  So, whether your garden is small or large, it’s time to plant trees to give you your own shaded, and naturally air-conditioned space."

Brett DeJager finds that school teachers are "worried about academic dishonesty but also about assessment, student reliance, critical thinking, misinformation and privacy. Those concerns point to a practical challenge schools now face: how to preserve meaningful evidence of learning when AI can produce polished academic work."

From psychiatric wonder drug, to CIA mind warfare to teenage menace. Grant McPhee looks at LSD use through its evolving coverage in British newspapers.

Jospehine Botting watches 21 Days, a film made just before Vivien Leigh took the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and as her affair with Laurence Olivier was blooming. It captures the pair falling in love and on the cusp of stardom, but its producer Alexander Korda thought it was not good enough to release.

The Joy of Six 1544

"The plunder of children’s services by business is one of the big scandals of our time. Children’s homes, special schools and foster care services are increasingly run for profit. Almost every time a child is removed from their family, somebody, somewhere cashes a cheque." Martin Barrow looks at one company that received £500m from local councils last year for the care and support of children and young people.

Rory Jones finds that "England is beginning to develop a cooling divide, one in which access to protection from extreme heat increasingly depends on where people live, how much they earn and the type of home they occupy."

Does becoming a parent lead politicians to focus more on the future? Research by Chris Hanretty and Sarah Childs questions the assumption that it does: "There is no single effect of parenthood upon future focus: rather, parenthood affects men and women differently. Fatherhood causes a small increase in future focus sustained across a range of topics. ... Motherhood, by contrast, causes a decline in future focus.

"The exhibition showcased Freud’s lifelong fascination with human faces and figures, covering several different types of drawings – from pencil, pen, and ink portraits to charcoal works and etchings. In addition, several paintings were also included in the exhibition to illustrate the relationship between Freud’s works on paper and those on canvas." JacquiWine went to the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Sean Burns on Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, which bombed at the box office on release but is now recognised as a classic: "I was struck by how relevant Sweet Smell of Success seems today, when we’re seeing people who know better grovel and prostrate themselves for proximity to power on a daily basis, submitting to humiliation rituals live on cable news the way Sidney dutifully jumps to light Hunsecker's cigarettes."

Quentin Shaw on the miracle of glow worms and the threat to them from artificial light at night: "It is something of a mystery that glow worms came to be so widespread. Surveyors have noticed that the places where the beetles survive today are often sites of ancient human habitation. Perhaps people deliberately introduced them, to brighten their lives and to chase away the dark."

The Joy of Six 1539

Roz Savage says our electoral system is not just unfair but dangerous: "Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed."

"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.

Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"

Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."

"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."

The Major Oak is dead and Phil Harding has discovered another ancient site near Stonehenge

Forget Sycamore Gap: this is real tragedy. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest is dead.

The Guardian reports:

The Major oak, one of Europe’s oldest, largest and most celebrated ancient trees, has died.

The huge tree, which has grown in Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, England, for at least 1,000 years, failed to produce any leaves this year, after becoming stressed by a series of hot, dry summers.

Thousands of visitors admire the oak each year, with its great age, enormous 11-metre girth and 28-metre canopy inspiring a forest of folklore. Although the oak would not have been hollow in Robin Hood’s day, it was said to have provided a sanctuary for the outlaw and his gang when fleeing the tyrannical Sheriff of Nottingham.

Of course it did.

The paper's report blames the tree's demise on climate change and "well-intentioned historical interventions":

Experts believe that the props that continued to support the tree’s mighty limbs also placed it under strain. Left alone, ancient oaks shed their limbs and “grow down”, retreating into their trunk and thereby requiring less water and nutrients as they age.

There's more on Sherwood Forest and the Major Oak in my post about an old travelogue.

Now the good news. A team of archaeologists led by the mighty Phil Harding has discovered an ancient site close to and even older than Stonehenge.

Harding told the Salisbury Journal:

"In a few days’ time, Stonehenge will be filled with people celebrating midsummer solstice.

"But what few will realise is that 5,000 years ago on a nearby hillside overlooking modern day Bulford, people were doing the exact same thing – revering and celebrating the sunrise on midsummer’s day.

"This discovery is probably one of the greatest finds of my career and what makes it so important is just how early it is.

"Up till now, our knowledge of this ancient feat of astronomy was based on Stonehenge and other monuments of a similar period, but what we’ve discovered at Bulford is 500 years earlier than the famous stones we know so well.

"It makes me incredibly proud to be an archaeologist."

The Joy of Six 1529

Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it’s easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can’t always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish.

Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, rather than passenger cars, had 77 per cent higher odds of fatal injury. For children under nine, the odds were more than three times higher."

"Too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning." David Didau argues that systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better.

"Boudicca and co surprised the Reserve staff by digging canals. Because there are plenty of trees on the edge of the lake, the presumption had been that they would not require canals. The beavers knew otherwise, and the ditches are altering the way water flows around the site. They’ve built two lodges and, as well as stripping bark and eating foliage, have begun to fell some larger trees. In one area, they have cut down most of the young saplings." Isabella Clarke reports on the remarkable success of the Nene Valley beavers.

Discontinued Notes has been to Somerset House to see the the M.C. Escher exhibition.

"The Station Hotel, the original home of the Crawdaddy Club where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds played some of their earliest gigs, is now a gastro-pub. L'Auberge, the coffee bar at the bottom of Richmond Hill where beatniks and then hippies gathered to trade gossip and other substances, has become a branch of Nando’s. A little further up the hill, there is no trace of Sandover Hall (another early venue for the Stones), Potter’s Music Shop, or the Hanging Lamp, one of the key sixties folk clubs." David Buckingham goes in search of the South West London venues that fostered British rhythm and blues.

The Joy of Six 1524

"You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say 'that’s outside the Overton window' as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them." Liberal Democrat Tom Reeve introduces us to the Overtons.

"Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation – the Larry Ellison Foundation – has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries." Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin take us inside the Tony Blair Institute and introduce us to its main funder.

Steve Webb says the triple lock cannot last forever, but scrapping it now would trigger a retirement disaster.

"What happened to the master con man? For one thing, as the former reality show star should know, people get bored. The same old Trump shtick gets tiresome; the public's patience with his excuses wears thin. They have heard all the lies, all the Biden blame-shifting, all the 'two weeks away' deadline-shifting. It’s stale." Jennifer Rubin says Donald Trump is losing his grip on US voters.

Chloe Duteil, Daniel Cumming and Jon Winder look back to how London, Paris and New York coped with past heatwaves: "When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach – the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants – a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers."

Morgan Jeffery talks to people from Film is Fabulous!, the organisation that recently found, preserved and screened two lost Doctor Who episodes.

The Joy of Six 1514

Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business – the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies – in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable."

"For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them." Alice Milner on her research into peatlands and tackling climate change.

Norman Baker explains why buses in central London are slower than their horse-drawn counterparts were more than a century ago. He also has suggestions for speeding them up.

Danny Chambers is campaigning against the cruelty often involved in breeding what are, to my eye, ugly animals. "Across the UK, more and more dogs and cats are being bred to look fashionable or cute. But this can come at a serious cost to their health and welfare."

"The film encompasses many influences – neorealist working-class documentary in its early Belfast set street scenes; poetic realism in its studio-bound aspects and fatalism; noir thriller; and expressionist reimagining of Greek myth, as a fatally wounded Johnny is left behind in the botched escape and a rogue’s gallery of the city’s denizens alternately help and hinder his path through the Underworld entries, bars and rain-slicked slums of a darkened, almost Dickensian city." Tim Pelan sings the praises of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947).

"As time went on, I felt more in control of the thing, and stopped fearing that I was going to show myself – and all womenkind – up, by passing out from the heat, more relaxed and more appreciative of the experience. The engine is indeed a star. There were waving people on every bridge, and we passed a campsite with lots more waving people. I got so keen on waving back to them that I almost forgot my job." Stephanie Gaunt learns to drive a steam locomotive.

The Joy of Six 1506

"A project that ought to be broad, open and compassionate has come to be dominated by a narrow set of ideological demands which leave little room for genuine diversity of political perspective." Vlad Vexler and Rupert Read argue that if the climate movement does not embrace pluralism it risks handing the future to the far right.

Laura López-Aybar reminds us of the way society can turn a blind eye to the human rights violations involved in psychiatry.

Melinda Wenner Moyer on studies that suggest young people are in many ways doing better than previous generations: "In addition to their interest in helping people, youths today also appear to be more accepting of others and their differences. Some research suggests that youths are becoming more open-minded and inclusive across various realms."

"While the directors express confidence in future revenue growth exceeding £700 million, the margin for error is non-existent. Any sustained failure on the pitch, or a further tightening of regulatory loopholes by the Premier League or UEFA, would jeopardise the entire capital structure of the Group." Paul Quinn digs deep into Chelsea's troubled and byzantine finances.

"Forteanism is not the same as 'skepticism', it is not front-loaded with an agenda of debunking, but it might end up doing some if the evidence (or lack of it) points that way. Skepticism is generally quite boring because the Skeptic is not the fearsome character who has haunted western philosophy for at least 500 years (and also philosophy in other times and places), but a person who thinks religion is A Bad Thing and science is A Good Thing." Yesterday Discontinued Notes went to an event at Conway Hall organised by the London Fortean Society.

 Gyles Brandreth remembers how Hayley Mills snatched the child role in Tiger Bay from his grasp. "This is another film with Mills, but set in South Wales. It’s about a young boy who witnesses a murder. Quite dark. Lovely script. You’ll be the boy. John Mills is the detective. They’ve seen your photograph, Gyles. They like the look of you."

The Joy of Six 1494

"After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a 'department of land', and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission." Guy Shrubsole welcomes the news that revealing who owns England has just become government policy.

Josiah Mortimer finds that Reform UK councils are dismantling the fight against climate change.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge on the relationship between Karl Popper's account of human knowledge and her view of raising children.

"The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce, was indeed a man named John Beckett, who was formerly a Labour MP. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I'm Beckett’s biographer. I'm also his son." Francis Beckett decries the trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war – myths that will do us real harm as we confront the new face of fascism in 2026.

"What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England's tortured landscape and its war-battered population." James Chappel considers the early poems of W.H. Auden.

Jo Hutchings has some behind-the-scenes photographs of Jon Pertwee filming filming the Doctor Who story The Dæmons in Aldbourne.

You can visit Noah's Ark in Williamstown, Kentucky​

Embed from Getty Images

Most Europeans who visit the United States go to New York or California, which are liberal, cosmopolitan places very like Europe. But the rest of the country, as I was told when I visited New York myself, isn't like that.

You can say that again. Here's Alexander Bevilacqua writing in the London Review of Books:

In Williamstown, Kentucky​, no small distance from the "mountains of Ararat", the biblical resting place of Noah's Ark, a 510-foot-long wooden structure rises from a ridge. The Ark Encounter – less than an hour's drive from Cincinnati International Airport and within a day’s drive of much of the Bible Belt – is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. 

A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers Centre, where creationist-friendly science textbooks are on sale next to Noah's Coffee. Outdoor speakers play music reminiscent of a fantasy video game. The Answers Centre looks out across a lake to the main attraction. The ark is massive (roughly the length of St Paul's Cathedral), handsome and very strange.

Entertainments are on offer: a petting zoo; camel rides; zip lines; virtual reality ‘time travel’. There are flashes of humour: visitors can pose as a biblical patriarch in a cut-out panel; the refreshment stands promise "a flood of refills". Yet the attraction serves a serious purpose. 

Built by an evangelical Christian group called Answers in Genesis (AiG) and completed in 2016, the Ark Encounter makes the case that the story of Noah occurred exactly as told in Genesis: that humanity was saved by the eight people who built the vessel and boarded it together with seven pairs ‘of every sort’ of animal, then stayed on it during a deluge that lasted forty days and for a further 150 days when the floodwaters prevailed, plus the better part of a year as the waters receded.

He ends on a more secular note:

AiG doesn’t have a monopoly on contemporary interpretations of the ark. A Dutch carpenter and creationist called Johan Huibers built his "half-size" ark – 230 feet long – after a dream in which he saw his country "disappearing under an enormous mass of water’" (fifty years earlier, in 1953, the North Sea Flood killed almost two thousand people in the Netherlands). 

In 2010, he sold it to the impresario Aad Peters, who turned it into a travelling gallery of Bible stories. When Peters brought the ark to the UK in 2019, Extinction Rebellion activists boarded the vessel. On one side they hung a giant banner bearing the words: "We need a better plan than this."

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"The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, his press critics are always acting in bad faith, and he is never adequately rewarded or appreciated." James Butler on the fall of Peter Mandelson.

"'At the moment, you’ve got Reform, who are weaponising concerns around net-zero', she says, and 'the Conservatives recklessly rowing back on the very infrastructure they created to tackle climate change, which is the Climate Change Act;". Noah Vickers talks to Pippa Heylings, the Lib Dem spokesperson on energy security and Net Zero.

Gemma Motion makes the case for raising England's age of criminal responsibility: "Internationally, the UK’s position is becoming isolated. Article 40(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states to establish a minimum age of criminal responsibility. While no specific age is prescribed, 14 is the most common minimum across Europe. Several other countries set it higher still. Even our devolved neighbour Scotland, which historically had a lower threshold at eight years of age, has now raised it to 12."

Tourettes Hero discusses the fallout from the BAFTA awards ceremony.

"The central strategic question is not whether non-host counties will survive. They will. The question is whether they will retain any meaningful competitive agency within the professional game. On the evidence available, the answer is no. Not under the current framework." Gary Mason and Simon Aldis argue that the future is bleak for most of cricket's first-class counties.

Discontinued Notes has been to Oxford to see the exhibition at the Bodleian about John Le Carré.

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Richard Reich argues that employers will not share the gains from AI unless they are made to: "If the five-day workweek with five days of pay shrinks to four days with four days of pay, and then to three, and to two, and perhaps one, AI will supplant most people’s work and drive down our take-home pay. We may see a dazzling array of products and services spawned by AI, but few of us will be able to buy them."

"In opposing these children’s homes, neighbours resort to language about children in care that they would not use for other groups of people, such as same-sex couples or people who are not white. Children in care are trouble makers, they complain; they bring down house prices, they are not from our community, they make too much noise." Martin Borrow asks why proposals to open new homes, which often for only two or three children, are met with such hostility.

"This part of south-west England, much of which is currently under water, used to be known as the 'land of the summer people'. Historically, frequent flooding was the main reason for purely seasonal occupation in this area bordered by the Bristol Channel and the Mendip, Quantock and Blackdown Hills." Jess Neumann sets out the threat that climate change poses to Somerset.

Lottie Wood explores gender fluidity, rural landscapes and the Women’s Land Army, introducing us to E.M. Barraud's memoir Set My Hand Upon the Plough.

"It is deeply troubling that the drive of Brontë’s Isabella, a survivor of domestic abuse, has been reread to dramatically absolve her abuser. The girl sobbing behind me as the credits rolled attests to the success of this exoneration. Really, she should be crying over the scripting of violent abuse as consensual play." Anna Drury is concerned by Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.

Richard Elliott celebrates a new box set that brings together live and studio recordings of the Scottish folk singer, guitarist and songwriter Dick Gaughan.