Rolling vegans down a hill

This morning's Guardian reports Monday's events at Cooper's Hill near Brockworth in Gloucestershire, where the locals traditionally hurl themselves down a 1 in 2 hill in pursuit of a Double Gloucester cheese.

Just the sort of eccentricity we English are known for, you might think. Though not in the class of Hallaton in Leicestershire, where Bottle Kicking and Hare Pie Scrambling take place every Easter Monday. (Yes, really. And you thought I made Lord Bonkers' Diary up.)

But not everyone is happy. The Grauniad quotes Yvonne Taylor, chair of the animal rights campaign group Peta, as saying: "It's just not fair that vegans cannot enjoy the fun of the cheese rolling contest."

Why can't vegans take part? They don't have to eat the cheese if they catch it. They can always release it into the wild.

Another solution would be to role the vegans down Cooper's Hill.

Rant of the Week

From Recess Monkey's column in the free newspaper The London Line:

Has Britain finally become a franchise of the USA? This week, Home Secretary Charles Clarke agreed to extradite to the States three City whizz-kids, who are implicated in the Enron accounts-fiddling affair. That is three British people accused of a crime carried out in Britain being sent to face a 35-year jail term in the US if convicted. Perhaps if Condoleezza Rice asks him nicely, Charles Clarke will roll over to have his tummy tickled, too.

Patsy Calton

Michael White's Guardian obituary of the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheadle, who died on Sunday, can be found here.

This is not the news either

Last month I wrote about news stories that you do not read any more. I was thinking of plane crashes, Formula One drivers dying and ever younger children swimming the English Channel. Thinking about it, I might have included strikes too.

For a while this week it looked as if another of them was making a come back: Japanese soldiers emerging from the jungle not knowing that the Second World War was over. On Friday the BBC reported:

Japanese officials are investigating claims that two men living in jungle in the Philippines are Japanese soldiers left behind after World War II.

However, this morning's Australian Daily Telegraph (a paper whose readers presumably believe the country is going to the dingoes) says:

Security forces on the insurgency-wracked Philippine island of Mindanao are increasingly sceptical of reports that two elderly Japanese men have been hiding in the jungle since World War II.

While Japanese diplomats tried for a fourth day to establish the veracity of the reports, suspicion grew today that kidnapping gangs on the island might have invented the rumours as a scam to lure foreigners into the region.

Oh well, maybe someone will sight the Loch Ness Monster this summer.

The Best of British

Tim Worstall's latest round up of the best in British blogs can be found here.

Less a constituency than an incantation

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News:

Feigned praise

Sammy Wilson, the new MP for East Antrim, gave the best guide to maiden speeches. His leader Ian Paisley had told him to say nice things about his constituency, pay tribute to his predecessor and not be controversial.

Wilson hymned the beauties of Ulster, but found it hard to be too kind about the previous member. He had spent years trying to get rid of him. Worse, they are neighbours: “In fact, he is only a stone’s throw away – I pick them out of the garden every morning.”

And controversy? He was doing fine till he got on to King Billy and the Boyne. But then he is a Democratic Unionist.

Let’s see how some of the Liberal Democrats’ maiden speeches measured up last week. Danny Alexander had an advantage: his is less a constituency than an incantation. Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey – there are coach tours with less ambitious itineraries. Dan Rogerson struck a nationalist note: North Cornwall “stretches from the border with England…”

Elsewhere it was local history time. Chris Huhne said Eastleigh was created when the London & South Western Railway’s works arrived there in 1891, and William Cobbett once lived down the road.

Julia Goldsworthy had to mention two previous MPs for Falmouth & Camborne. Not just Candy Atherton, but also David Mudd. He won it for the Tories back in 1970 and took it into his head to stand as an independent this time. David Howarth said Cambridge often changed hands in the nineteenth century, usually after the unseating of MPs for corruption, but did not name names.

That was tending to the controversial. Chris Huhne went all the way, questioning Labour’s mandate with the lowest vote share of any governing party since 1832. Dan Rogerson called for the law to ensure only pasties made in the Duchy can be sold as Cornish pasties. That is controversial to some, but if they stop claiming to make Melton Mowbray pork pies down there he may even win support from us in Leicestershire.

Sammy Wilson also said a maiden speech is like a first night out with a girl: “One wants to do enough to impress but not too much and get in trouble with her father.” I wonder what Dr Paisley thought of that?

Headline of the Day

Thank you to the Guardian:

Kitchen knife ban sought

A marriage of convenience?

A couple of weeks ago I reported that a Lib Dem/Tory administration had ousted Labour and taken control of Leicester City Council.

Political passions continue to run high in the city, as this BBC report shows:

A Leicester man who gathered a 2,000 name petition calling for free toilets in the city is worried a new council administration could reintroduce fees.

Nonsensical Quote of the Week

It comes from Graham Eccles, the chairman and managing director of South West Trains. Speaking of the slam-door rolling stock his company is in the process of withdrawing, he says:

"Although they have passed their sell-by date, they don't owe anybody a living."

Can any reader make sense of it?

Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: It's sure as hell got me beat.

The Shropshire Star returns to form

It is hard to resist a story that begins:

Shropshire fish and chip shop magnate Balwinder Singh Chatha...

Did you have help with this, Tompkins?

There is an article on the BBC website questioning the value of schools giving children homework. Your task is to guess which of these quotations comes from the head of a state primary school and which from the head of a private prep school.

Quotation 1

"Children should be allowed to experience the joy of childhood and have time for play and activity, to develop human qualities, and develop talents and interests that will last them a lifetime."

Quotation 2

"[Homework is] a basis for parents and pupils to work together and to understand the curriculum, reinforcing knowledge for both students and parents. It's a handy assessment tool for teachers in order for them to understand their pupils. In addition, it's a very good home-school link.

The answer is that Quotation 1 come from the prep school head.

I have always argued that professional left's enthusiasm for homework springs from a wish to discipline parents quite as much as a wish to discipline children. Even so, it is a surprise to see this confirmed so blatantly in Quotation 2.

Many Liberal Democrats believe as an article of faith that the state should be the monopoly provider of education, and that there should be no parental choice allowed within that system.

Perhaps it is time for them to think again?

ID card bill ignores recommended safeguards

Analysis from Privacy International shows that the reintroduced identity cards bill ignores all but 9 of the 105 recommendations for reform made by the home affairs select committee after the original proposals were published.

Read more here.

Amani, T-Jay and Lita

I am not one to worry about the tabloid hate figure of the week, but it's hard to resist Julie Atkins. She is the mother whose three daughters gave birth aged 12, 14 and 16.

Her grandchildren's names are Amani, T-Jay and Lita, but it's a free country.

She was on the regional TV news here in the East Midlands last night, complaining that she has been unfairly treated and misquoted by the press.

I am quite prepared to believe it, but I could not help laughing when she said:

"I never said I blamed the school. It's the government's fault."

The Orange Book

This one is strictly for those with an interest in the internal policy debates of the Liberal Democrats. (If you are going to fall asleep in here, do please try not to snore.)

The Westminster Bookshop says it has got hold of new stocks of last year's The Orange Book, the oddly timed collection of essays from some of the brighter Lib Dem MPs.

Some regarded it as the work of the Devil, but see my more measured review here.

In praise of the BBC strike

It was wonderful not to listen to the Radio 4 Today programme this morning. Though the selection of repeats broadcast in its place was not inspiring, there was something very restful about not hearing politicians, John Humphrys or reports of the latest disaster.

It may sound naive to say that if there were fewer newspapers and broadcasting outlets to report it then less would happen. But so much news now consists of events staged for the media or commentary on other media reports that I suspect there is some truth in that argument.

Legend persists (and this website dates it to Good Friday 1930) that one evening the BBC announced: "There is no news [or it may have been "are no news" in those days] this evening, so instead here is some light orchestral music." After this morning's experience I see the sense of that approach.

The major reason I listen to Today is that I am used to timing my morning routine by it. (If it is the review of the papers then I should be brushing my teeth - that kind of thing.)

Yet they are not even very good at timekeeping any more. The sports desk used to be on at exactly 25 minutes past the hour, now it often starts five minutes after that. And they have stopped bothering to announce that Long Wave listeners are about to leave the programme for Yesterday in Parliament. They just fade it out.

The answer is to buy a clock for the bathroom so I can listen to Radio 3 in the mornings instead.

The Best of British

Let me see. There's Javine and Bucks Fizz and the Brotherhood of Man.

Oh yes, and there's Tim Worstall's latest Britblog roundup.

The heart of Europe (boom bang-a boom)

Last night's Eurovision Song Contest was fascinating. I don't mean the songs - it is always a mistake to watch the songs - but the voting.

As Terry Wogan pointed out, the bottom four places were occupied by Spain, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, who just happen to be the four largest financial contributors to the European Broadcasting Union. As a picture of how Europe now operates, it could not be bettered.

Progressive Britons used to imagine that if they joined the original six members of the EEC then they would have arrived at the heart of Europe. It now seems that the heart has moved elsewhere.

It's not just that there are the power blocs of Balkan and Baltic states which vote for one another with ruthless discipline. As well as there being this geographic shift there has been a cultural one.

When the UK chose Javine's "Touch my Fire" we probably thought we were being rather daring choosing a song with such a Bollywood sound. As it happened there was nothing daring about it at all. Europe's heart has moved a long way to the east, and now everyone sounds something like that. If anything, her song was lost in the crowd.

This suggests that the old arguments about a shared Western European culture will no longer wash. The European Union is going to be a far more diverse and interesting place than we had once imagined, though for how much longer Western European voters will want to go on funding it remains to be seen.

So where does the UK go from here in Eurovision? That Moldovan grandmother with her drum put me in mind of the British group Lieutenant Pigeon from the early 1970s and their classic "Mouldy Old Dough". That had the leader's mother playing second piano.

Their oompah sound may be just what we need to gain some Central European votes next time. I wonder if they are still playing?

Bolsover and D. H. Lawrence

Just as it was more or less obligatory for someone of my generation to study Lord of the Flies at O level, so D. H. Lawrence was hard to avoid if you took English Literature at A level.

Perhaps for that reason, I always think of Lawrence as a writer who appeals most to adolescents. No doubt this is unfair, but I have seldom been tempted to spend much time on Lawrence since leaving school.

One thing I disliked about him even as a teenager was his exaggerated rhetoric about industrialisation. Again and again, industrialism and the way of life it leads to are compared unfavourably with rural, "organic" alternative. It seemed reactionary, and at worst to point the way towards something like Nazism.

I could not have put it half so neatly, but Edward Mendelson expresses this distrust of Lawrence and the other early twentieth century Modernists perfectly.

One of the unexpected side-effects of my visit to Bolsover Castle yesterday is that I now understand Lawrence better.

Let me explain. Even to those of us who live elsewhere in the East Midlands, the area to the north of Nottingham and the east of Chesterfield is a non-descript one that we imagine to have always been industrialised. We think of it as all Dennis Skinner and slagheaps.

Yet a little study shows that this is a travesty. Mining came much later to the area than you might imagine. So much so that the first coal mine did not open at Bolsover until 1891.

For centuries this was an area of great landed estates - so much so that there is an area of Nottinghamshire still known "the Dukeries" because of the number of leading aristocrats who had houses there. We should imagine instead a rural landscape dotted with great houses, the whole devoted to sport or, in the case of Bolsover, more amorous pleasures.

In Eastwood, where Lawrence grew up, the mines opened a decade or two earlier. But it remains true that, in his own boyhood, Lawrence saw the rural, aristocratic landscape summoned up by Bolsover Castle transformed into one of exceptional industrial desolation

This should not lead you to a Tory love of aristocrats - it was, after all, they who sold the land or the mineral rights to allow this spoilation to take place - but it does explain Lawrence's extreme reaction to industrialisation. It was something he had lived through in his own lifetime.

Bolsover Castle

Look where I have been today. The castle remains date from the early part of the sixteenth century, and show a building dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. Ironically, this mock castle went on to be garrisoned by the Royalists in the Civil War.

There is no truth in Lord Bonkers' suggestion that is the ancestral home of the Skinner family.

Slap a Norman innit?

Here is today's Election Points from Liberal Democrat News. Eagle-eyed readers may spot an amusing name that appeared on this blog earlier in the week.

Hood-lums

They make me uneasy. In part it’s what they wear – on their heads in particular. In part it’s the strange words they use. It’s almost a different language.

Yes, there’s something about seeing the aristocracy out in force at the State Opening that makes my hackles rise. I remember the English civil war radical who asked who his betters were but the descendants of William the Conqueror’s generals. Slap a Norman innit?

The theme of the Queen’s Speech, of course, was respect. Ali G has not stopped New Labour using the word any more than the League of Gentlemen stopped Liberal Democrats demanding everything should be local.

For ministers have returned from the election campaign convinced the public is talking of nothing but antisocial behaviour. To an extent this is a sign of the sheltered lives they lead. People have always been convinced things were used to be better. And if you ask them what they mean by “antisocial behaviour”, it usually turns out to be criminality – often serious criminality.

As far as it is a new problem, the question is whether government will make things better or worse. I am not just thinking of the scaremongering by some politicians that encourages voters to see every timid 14-year-old in a hoodie as a potential mugger, though there is a lot of it about.

The Labour Party’s own website talks of “tackling the linked problems of crime, terrorism, illegal immigration, drugs and anti-social behaviour”. Whatever you think of groups of youths hanging around, it’s a bit much to link them to terrorism.

I also mean that encouraging people to call in the state to solve every problem could increase their feeling of powerlessness. Watching the parenting advice programmes that now dominate the airwaves – badly behaved children are the new gardening – you get the impression many adults feel they are not allowed to do anything off their own bats.

But there is hope. The Daily Express has been running a campaign in favour of bringing back National Service. Being the Express it is also against baseball caps and hoodies – and quite possibly against blue jeans too.

Tuesday’s paper carried a supportive article by the executive director of Community Service Volunteers. (It’s an odd interpretation of ‘volunteer’, but let that pass.)

Her name? Dame Elisabeth Hoodless.