It turns out I've post the second (Caus Castle) and third (Worthen) videos in this series, but not the first. So here it is.
My serious walking days in the Eighties and Nineties reinforced my scepticism about ley lines: once you've climbed to a ridge you stay up there as long as possible. But this video does explore a fascinating landscape: I remember finding an ancient and overgrown holloway on Stapeley Hill myself.
And if that doesn't convince you, just think of this as Shropshire hill porn.
Here is Ian Hamilton reviewing Carey's book in the London Review of Books the year it came out:
The book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no patience with high-flown talk about predicaments and alienation. He is first of all an educator. His sympathies are with readers rather than with writers and he believes that, with the advent of mass literacy, a great educational opportunity was missed.
Instead of sneering at Leonard Bast’s pretensions, Forster should have been teaching him at night school. But that could never have happened because, however the intellectuals chose to dress up their disdain, it was actually class-based – it had its roots in a fear and loathing of the mass, a revulsion which in some cases turned into super man delusions or fantasies of mass-extermination.
Carey's views are, I think, less controversial now than they were when The Intellectuals and the Masses was published, yet the idea that modernist writers must be, or at least ought to be, on the side of social progress was held for many decades.
Here's my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold expressing a generation's sense of betrayal when T.S. Eliot's Conservative politics and adherence to the Church of England became known:
HOW NICE for a man to be clever,
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.
To peer into basements, up alleys,
A nose for the search.
To challenge with pertinent sallies,
And then JOIN the Church.
I had a very good teacher for A level English Literature, but I have shaken off his taste for the modernists over the years, now preferring Dickens and Auden to his gods Lawrence and Eliot. And I suspect we can all see now what Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems in 1979:
Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event.
In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular.
All of this Auden rejected.
I commend The Intellectuals and the Masses to anyone with an interest in the literature and politics of the early 20th century.
The judges didn't like "train station" but were won over by the second mention in the story below: "the beloved Victorian mascot".
So BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.
This post is illustrated with a picture of my favourite Victorian dog, Sir William Wallace, who belonged to my great great grandmother's brother Sandy Campbell. This photo appeared in The Sphere for 13 October 1900, so he was very much a late Victorian dog.
An anonymous letter to the Guardian's Consumer champions:
I subscribed to Your Party at its shambolic start and am now finding it impossible to cancel my membership. No one replies to emails. My local party branch told me it can’t help.
The portal requires me to open a new account and commit to another payment in order to cancel anything.
I tried to block the payments from my Amex card but they managed to sneak a £5 payment again this month. My attempt to reclaim the money from my card issuer was rejected. I’m so frustrated that they are helping themselves to my account when they’ve been messing people about so much.
The Guardian goes on to say:
Others have reported the same vain battle to cancel their subscriptions after months of public infighting among the founders.
A Your Party spokesperson gives an email to use if you want your money back and blames Zarah Sultana for causing the problem by setting up an unauthorised web portal.
Time for the Electoral Commission to take an interest?
David Nowell Smith shows that accusations of "left-wing bias" against the BBC have a long history and arose from newspapers' fear of competition: "The first coordinated newspaper campaign against the ‘Reds’ at the BBC was initiated by the Daily Mail in January 1937, less than two weeks after a new BBC Charter had given the Corporation further editorial independence."
Carolyn Jackson and Mieke Van Houtte say the high-stakes tests common in English schools could be having a serious effect on children’s wellbeing.
"Academics warned that recovery from the October 2023 cyberattack, apparently by an international ransomware gang, has been 'agonisingly slow'. Even the imminent restoration of functions such as the library’s online catalogue will be of only limited help to researchers still unable to access key resources: Frances Jones finds a lack of concern at the plight of the British Library.
"We handed a loaded weapon to four-year-olds." Alex Kantrowitz on the regrets of the man who built the retweet.
Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms tell the remarkable story of the two men who robbed eight London banks in a morning: "Robert wrote a lengthy confession and said he did it for: 'the devilment of the matter – the excitement, the ingenuity, the almost impossible success to crown it all, urged me to attempt the fraud'."
I loved this when it came out as a single in 1972. Almost 40 years later, I saw The Zombies play Market Harborough and Rod Argent shaking hands with the front row of the audience after playing this keyboard solo.
Once again, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.
Labour List has helpfully printed the names of the 13 Labour MPs who voted for the Liberal Democrat customs union bill yesterday and the 3 who voted against.
For the bill
Against the Bill
It's interesting that there are some old lags of the left on the side of the angels, which you wouldn't necessarily have expected. On the other side, Jonathan Brash is a fully signed-up member of Blue Labour.
Though if I were creating an overambitious Labour MP for satirical purposes, Jonathan Brash is just the name I'd choose.
Huffington Post had gone behind the New World (formerly New European) paywall and emerged with a story about the level of public support for Brexit today:
Peter Kellner, who founded YouGov and sat as its president until 2016 – the year of the Brexit referendum – predicted that there’s most likely a majority of 8 million now in favour of rejoining the bloc.
And, because psephology is a heartless science, he said a lot more, beginning with the observation that more than six million Britons have died since 2016:
Considering the turnout among older voters was higher than average and that 64 per cent of over-65s backed Brexit, he said it is safe to assume 3.2 million pro-Leave voters have died in the last nine years, compared to 1.8 million Remainers.
Kellner said: "This means that among people who are alive today and who voted in the 2016 referendum, Remainers exceed Leavers by 14.3 to 14.2 million."
In addition, the pollster pointed out that the six million young people who have reached voting age since 2016 are more likely to be pro-EU.
Even if just three million of them were to actually vote in a future referendum, that would take the Remain majority to two million.
If you also take account of the Leave voters who have changed their minds since the referendum, then you arrive at Kelner's estimate of an 8 million majority for Remain today.
All of which means our government's policy on Europe is heavily influenced by a desire not to alienate dead people.
Today comes news that Matthew has been reselected as the Liberal Democrat candidate for South Shropshire. He writes on his Facebook page:
In South Shropshire with the continued rapid collapse of the Conservative Party, at the moment it appears the next general election will be between the Liberal Democrats and Reform. We need to help stop the UK descending into a very dark place. This is the strongest motivation for me to stand and win in South Shropshire. I want to be able to look my children in the eye and say I didn’t stand back, and I played my part, to the fullest extent I could, in helping resist the rise of xenophobic populist nationalism in our country.
Many have already contacted me with messages of support and offers of help in order to fight off the threat of Reform in South Shropshire, and I believe it’s our patriotic duty to do so. If you want to help, please comment on this post or message me.
You can also follow Matthew Green on Bluesky.
And he concludes:
It’s going to be a busy three years but I’m confident I’ll still find the time for walking South Shropshire’s beautiful hills, visiting castles and abbeys, and if my knees permit, still playing a game or two of cricket for Much Wenlock.
The judges wonder how our regular guest blogger Augustus Carp will cope with this when he posts his next survey of councillors changing parties.
Mark Pack will love it though.
The Roman mosaic discovered at Ketton in Rutland five years ago is even more remarkable than first thought. A story on the University of Leicester website explains why:
New research from the University of Leicester has conclusively determined why the famous Ketton mosaic in Rutland – one of the most remarkable Roman discoveries in Britain for a century – cannot depict scenes from Homer’s Iliad as was initially believed. Instead, it draws on an alternative version of the Trojan War story first popularised by the Greek playwright Aeschylus that has since been lost to history.
The mosaic’s images combine artistic patterns and designs that had already been circulating for hundreds of years across the ancient Mediterranean, suggesting that craftsmen in Roman Britain were more closely connected to the wider classical world than has been assumed.
In this video from 2021, Time Team's community archaeologist Dani Wootton talks to John Thomas from University of Leicester Archaeological Services about the mosaic and the excavation of the wider site at Ketton.
The allegations against British special forces operating in Afghanistan will not go away, argues Mark Urban.
John Sweeney says Reform's 19-year-old leader of Warwickshire County Council is skating on thin ice: "[George] Finch’s comments have the potential to jeopardise a fair trial and that, of course, would harm the victim and her family – and waste a huge amount of public money. ... Most people know that after someone has been charged for a serious offence, you must take care not to publish or say anything in the public square that could prejudice the criminal proceedings. ... Finch appears to have forgotten this."
"Here’s a rule I have developed for myself: never talk about a culture-war topic with anyone who only wants to talk to you about that topic. These conversations can only be helpful if they happen as part of a relationship. If you’re going in cold on a very hard topic, you will not be able to experience each other as people, only as opinions or symbols." Naomi Alderman offers 12 rules for online survival.
Dezeen chooses 10 key buildings by high-tech pioneer Nicholas Grimshaw.
"Screwball elements run through their films like runaway socialites: eccentric leads, unexpected reversals, physical comedy, chase sequences, false identities; best intentions go hilariously awry; hard-bitten cynics battle zany dreamers in matters of romance and will." Amber Sparks celebrates the Coen brothers' 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy
Leicestershire’s Reform UK and Conservative parties have entered into a public spat over alleged threats of violence, reports the Leicester Mercury:
Reform UK leader of Leicestershire County Council Dan Harrison used a speech at the full council meeting on Wednesday, December 3, to level accusations against the deputy leader of the authority’s Conservative group.
He claimed that Councillor Craig Smith had “threatened” him with “physical violence”, including alleged threats to “knock [Cllr Harrison’s] block off” if the leader “hurt someone” Cllr Smith “cared for”.
And so on and on. It's worth reading the full report if you want a good laugh.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats are naturally making hay over this embarrassing display. Michael Mullaney, leader of the Lib Dem group on the council, told the Mercury:
“There are really serious issues facing this authority. We have responsibility for incredibly important services, whether it’s social care to the most vulnerable members of society, whether it’s the pressure on special educational needs, whether it’s the poor state of roads and pavements. ...
“So it’s very disappointing that we have got to a situation where personal disputes and threats of violence are down as the main issue for discussion.”
Given that Reform and the Tories are trying to attract the same voters, it's not surprising that they have fallen out. If this pattern is repeated in other parts of the country, it would make an electoral pact between the two parties harder to sell to activists on both sides. Neither is exactly a model of party discipline,
It's 1978 and my favourite LPs, along with Kate Bush's The Kick Inside, are Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses. So when I see Repeat: The Best of Jethro Tull Vol. II in a record shop, I naturally buy it.
I was expecting more songs about ley lines, poaching and outdated modes of agriculture, but what I got was the late British blues. I wanted to like it, and soon I did.
I watched the 1945 Ealing period drama Pink String and Sealing Wax the other day. In it, the always-wonderful Googie Withers entangles a young Gordon Jackson in her wiles, only to be defeated by his father Mervyn Johns.
It’s a striking film in that the major characters are all unsympathetic, and an unusual one for Ealing in that the Jackson and his siblings’ dreams of escape to a better life come to something. Usually at Ealing such escapes were strictly temporary, whether they were Alec Guinness’s technological breakthrough in The Man in the White Suit or the people of Pimlico’s Burgundian summer.
A more minor point struck me too. One of Jackson’s young sisters was played by Sally Ann Howe. She appeared in Ealing films throughout the Forties and grew up to be a star of Broadway and, of course, Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Yet when required to cry in Pink String and Sealing Wax her acting is wholly unconvincing.
And it’s not just her. Jon Whiteley made some really interesting films as a child in the 1950s, yet in an episode of The Adventures of Robin Hood, where he plays a boy whose pet goose had been stolen by the Sherriff of Nottingham, he can’t cry for toffees either.
By contrast, I have recently come across two examples of modern British filmmakers being astounded about what child actors can achieve.
Here’s Garth Jennings talking about the two young leads in his delightful 2007 film Son of Rambow:
“They were self-confident, but still kids. They hadn’t been to any acting schools, they were still themselves. They were quite happy to play and if you wanted them to cry, they weren’t worried about not looking tough in front of anyone.
“On the second day of shooting, we were shooting the end of the movie in the cinema. I thought, ‘This is going to be too much for little Will Poulter sitting there.’ I’m talking to him off-camera about what he’s looking at and there’s all these people sitting there in complete silence. He started to well up, tears start rolling down his face, and I was just thinking ‘Holy Jesus Christ, this kid is amazing! He has no idea, absolutely no idea how much he has just made my day!’”
And here’s Nick Holt, the director of Responsible Child, a BBC drama from 2019 that has just resurfaced on Netflix, talking about its 12-year-old star Billy Barratt in the Evening Standard:
“I was amazed with how much he let go, especially in the scenes we shot in the secure unit. These were some of our most traumatic set ups – but he realised them. He understood the darkness in the story but wasn’t intimidated or overwhelmed by it.”
Holt also said in an interview Drama Quarterly:
“With this story, not only do you have a young boy in every single scene, you have him in a story that’s incredibly raw and intense and involves a brutal murder. He needs to look quite adult and it’s difficult to find all that in the same place.
“With Billy, as soon as we saw him he had those aspects. He’s incredibly mature for his age. There is a heart-wrenching scene I find difficult to watch even now. He was superb in that.”
Both Responsible Child (Best TV Movie/Mini-Series) and Billy Barratt (Best Actor) won International Emmys.
Involving children in such dramas, of course, raises ethical questions, but I know from my old day job how seriously production companies now take the safeguarding of young performers. And the networks wouldn’t risk touching them if the companies did anything else.
So why are child actors so good these days? The obvious answer is the growth of drama teaching in both specialist and conventional schools. Will Poulter didn’t go to a stage school, but in interviews he often pays tribute to the drama classes at his school, while Billy Barratt attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School.
Will Poulter has gone on to a successful adult acting career, and Billy Barratt appears to have every chance of doing so, which suggests both are exceptionally talented, but then so was Sally Ann Howes. This suggests that child actors need teaching as well as natural talent.
Mention of Sylvia Young gives me an excuse to end with an anecdote from a Guardian profile of her published in 2022 (she died earlier this year):
Every year Young takes an assembly – the school has 220 full-time students, between the ages of 10 and 16, and 900 Saturday school attenders – and asks the children “what mustn’t we be?” she says, “and they all shout out ‘stage school brats!’”
In the final chapter of Oliver Twist, Dickens tells us what becomes of his characters in later life. Charley Bates, for instance, seeing what has befallen his criminal associates, resolves to mend his ways and, after toiling as a farmer’s drudge and a carrier’s lad, finds himself "the merriest young grazier in all Northamptonshire".
Others are not so lucky:
Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, deprived of their situations, were gradually reduced to great indigence and misery, and finally became paupers in that very same workhouse in which they had once lorded it over others. Mr. Bumble has been heard to say, that in this reverse and degradation, he has not even spirits to be thankful for being separated from his wife.
And the same thing, says the Brixworth History Society site, happened to one of the masters of Brixworth Workhouse:
Brixworth Workhouse had eight Masters during its 98 year history with all their wives acting as Matrons. One Master, a James Macdonald in the 1890s, was a man with exceptional physique who would deter tramps from entering the Workhouse by exercising outside with a set of Indian clubs. It was the same Master who adorned his lavish sitting room with autographed photographs of Queen Mary and her brothers.
Despite having taught deportment and physical exercise to royal pupils, when he left the Workhouse in 1898 he fell upon hard times himself and on returning to the Workhouse as an inmate, he died there a pauper.
I've also discovered that a study of the Brixworth Union – the collection of parishes that operated the workhouse – has been published. It's Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870-1900 by Elizabeth T. Hurren.
The more you find out, the more books there are to buy.
Gunthorpe Bridge on the A6097 is the only road crossing of the River Trent between Nottingham and Newark. Built in 1927, it replaced an earlier toll bridge that opened to traffic in 1875.
In this video, Trekking Exploration – subscribe and like, my pretties – goes in search of the toll house and of the bridge's abutments on either side of the river.
Paul Bernal argues that banning children from social media is a very bad idea: "For the most part, most kids, most of the time, are able to navigate the internet – and in particular social media – in ways that work. Rather than being a cesspit of trolling and misinformation, the internet mostly works. Just like for the grown-ups, the internet is simply part of their lives – how they organise themselves, how they get information, how the socialise, how they do their (home)work, how they find entertainment, how they listen to music and watch television and movies, how they date, how they shop and much more."
"You only have to take a look recent exam papers to see the problem. For example, when my colleague Catherine Gower and I surveyed 219 GCSE, AS and A-level history papers issued in the summer of 2023, we found only 6 per cent of 991 exam questions directed students to discuss women (37 per cent directed students to discuss men)." Natasha R, Hodgson shows that women are largely absent from the questions, sources, and mark schemes that shape how history is taught and assessed in schools in England.
Municipal Dreams reviews Ned Hewitt's Housing the People of Leicester: A History of Social Housing: "Spending cuts and a cross-party emphasis on rehousing slum dwellers (previously excluded from council housing dues to its relatively high rents) from 1930 had their own impact. The North Braunstone Estate, built as a slum clearance estate, is one of many across the country that reflected both these aspects and suffered a resultant social stigma."
National Museums Scotland tells the fascinating story of the Isle of Lewis chessmen and their discovery.
"Living in the Past was a song in five/four time, with jazz flute solos, and grumpy lyrics about how the hippie lifestyle, with protests about war and talk about revolution, wasn’t for Anderson, who was also very staunchly opposed to drug use, and in general found little common cause with the hippies, despite his bearded, long-haired, eccentric appearance." Andrew Hickey on the eccentric single that became Jethro Tull's biggest hit.
A low winter sun and bare tree branches always make for shadows that look like they are out of a folk horror film.
There is a horrible irony about the village. It's workhouse was notorious:
Soon after the Workhouse had opened the Secretary of State had to send a Bow Street Runner to Brixworth to investigate the strict policy being adopted by the Guardians regarding the payment of "out relief" to the poor and needy of the parish. Brixworth became known as the "dark portion of rural England" due to its almost complete withdrawal of "out relief".
Conditions inside the building were often criticised too as being prison like and spartan and Mrs Briddon, one of the cooks, described the food as meagre and tasteless. It was an institution feared by the old and needy, a place where families were split up and accommodated in single sex dormitories.
The surviving central block of the workhouse – it used to be considerably larger – now houses a cafe. I always feel guilty when I order my avocado toast and latte there.
The judges were also impressed by the photograph provided by Lincolnshire Police.
Here's a seasonal treat: a tour of the areas of London associated with Charles Dickens – or at least some of them -– in the company of John Rogers.
John's YouTube blurb for this walk explains:
This Charles Dickens London Walking tour starts in Southwark where Dickens lived as a child while his father was held in Marshalsea Prison on Borough High Street. This influenced much of his writing, most notably Little Dorrit. There are also multiple references to character in The Pickwick Papers around Borough.
After stopping by The George Tavern where Dickens used to drink we cross London Bridge which is mentioned in multiple Dickens novels - most strikingly in Oliver Twist, we walk through the City of London, The Magic Lantern, visiting various locations mentioned in the works of Charles Dickens including St Peter's Cornhill, The Guildhall, The Bank of England, Mansion House. We also look for the site of the first address the Dickens family stayed at on Wood Street when they arrived from Chatham.
From here we go via St Bartholomew's Hospital, site of the Fortune of War pub (A Tale of Two Cities) before going to Bleeding Heart Yard (Little Dorrit), Saffron Hill (Oliver Twist) and finishing at The Dickens Museum in Doughty Street.
The Guardian says it has already exchanged contracts on the site and will use funds, grants and bequests to cover £2.2m of the asking price. Presumably the £300,000 is needed on top of that.
Its report also says:
The planned purchase is expected to clear the way for more archaeological investigations around Britain’s largest chalk hill figure, which looms over the rolling Dorset landscape.
It would also mean more work can be done to protect the flora and fauna on the hillside, including the rare Duke of Burgundy butterfly. And the conservation charity hopes the purchase will lead to better access for people to the figure, with more chances for exploration and play.
The National Trust clearly regards this as a major project, because it is using the graphic above on social media to promote it.
You can donate to the Trust's Cerne Abbas Nature Appeal online.
Robert Reich on Trump, billionaires and the media: "Why are the ultra-rich buying up so much of the media? Vanity may play a part, but there’s a more pragmatic – some might say sinister – reason."
Save Ukraine shows how Russia teaches children to hate the West.
"Restoring ponds – old and new, rural and urban – is one of the simplest, most effective steps we can take. Every pond counts, from a farm hollow to a garden bowl. Together, they form networks that wildlife needs to survive and make our landscapes more resilient to climate change." Lucy Clarke explains why restoring Britain's ponds is vital for wildlife and climate resilience.
"Philosophy is the foundation of Stoppard’s plays. They cite Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Bentham, Kant, Moore, Plato, Ramsey, Russell, Ryle and Zeno. One philosopher in Stoppard’s radio play Darkside is never sure if he is spelling Nietzsche correctly." Fergus Edwards examines the importance of philosophy to Tom Stoppard's work.
Graham McCann uncovers one of comedy's great feuds: Tommy Trinder vs Bruce Forsyth.
