The Joy of Six 1503

Marcus Hughes on the many problems the Welsh government must overcome in achieving its laudable aim of removing private profit from the care system. "The anxiety inducing question from those working in the sector is what happens if local authority and not-for-profit provision can’t replace that offered by the private sector in time? Finding places for some young people is already a challenge even with the current options available." 

"Could the bellicose, belligerent and braying Hegseth – with his Crusader tattoos, his disdain for diplomacy, and his evident taste for violent domination – have convinced Trump to start a war to complete the unfinished business of the Crusades?" Julia Carrie Wong reveals the militant Christian theology animating the US attack on Iran

Hannah Sharland reports on fears that the government's transport strategy will not see the improvements for disabled travellers that were promised.

"Standing at 6ft 2in, with an imposing physique and a razor-scarred face, she was a Black, gay multi-instrumentalist who refused to let a racist society or a rapacious industry confine her. Thornton should be ranked alongside the likes of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, but instead she is little more than a footnote in the histories of Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin as the original voice behind songs they would make famous." Garth Cartwright celebrates Big Mama Thornton.

"For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he." A London Inheritance takes us to St Mary's, Putney, where the Putney Debates took place in 1647. 

Simon Hughes (not that one) remembers Channel 4's years of covering test cricket – they gave us Geoffrey Boycott without the tiresome public-school teasing of him by Jonathan Agnew: "Our principle aim was to make cricket coverage more interesting and informative: to tell ‘why’ as well as ‘what’. Part of our motivation came from people who said they often watched cricket on the TV but turned the sound off and listened to the radio commentary. We wanted our content to be so intriguing viewers would turn the sound up."

The Market Harborough woman who gave birth to a cat

Agnes Bowker, the Market Harborough woman who claimed on 16 January 1569 that she had given birth to a cat, is the subject of the latest short podcast in the BBC's Secret Leicestershire series.

The photograph shows the ruined church of St Mary in Arden by Market Harborough railway station, where the story begins.

Ed Davey on Hillary Clinton, restive Lib Dem MPs and chess

Ed Davey has been talking to Hillary Clinton:

"We talked about how we need to fight Reform in the way they need to fight Donald Trump, and she gave me some choice advice, which I'm not going to repeat because that would be unfair on her."

He's also been talking to PoliticsHome – that's a quote from an interview they've posted this evening.

"Pressed" (as if he needed pressing) to say more his meeting with Hillary Clinton, he added:

"She said you have to be very strong and stand up to bullies and don't cave in and cosy up to them. She didn't say she was criticising Keir Starmer, but I think the approach we [the Lib Dems] have taken, and the approach that someone like the Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, has taken, is the sort of approach she will endorse."

He described Clinton as "very friendly and very warm!: "You could tell that she realised that we had shared values."

The interviewer, Zoe Crowther, then turned to restlessness among Liberal Democrat MPs. This is part of Ed's answer:

"I'm restless like they are… I share their restlessness," Davey told PoliticsHome, while stressing that his MPs and the party “work really well together”.

However, in a bid to face down his critics, the Lib Dem leader pointed to his electoral record.

"The polls are the polls, but the elections are the elections," he told PoliticsHome.

"Winning elections is what we've done under my leadership. If we make net gains in May, it will be the eighth year in a row we've made net gains, the sixth under my leadership. It's never happened before. That's a continual increase, year on year.

"This year we could well beat Labour and the Tories for the number of councillors we elect for the second year in a row, and it’s never happened previously."

He insisted that the Lib Dems are "still the most united parliamentary party" despite recent negative briefings.

The MPs know how well the party as done in elections under Ed Davey – I mean, they would, wouldn't they? – but that success is not a complete answer to their restlessness. I suspect that restlessness is rooted in disappointment that achieving the best result by a Liberal party in over a century in 2024 has done so little to raise our profile.

You can complain about media bias, but we have to ask whether our style of campaigning is one of the causes. We adopted the "three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can't win here" approach that won us spectacular by-election victories in the last parliament at the general election too, and are still using it two years on.

Ask the public what the Lib Dem approach to the economy is, and they would be justified in asking how they are supposed to know, even if they've noticed the stand-alone proposals we have made.

And this concentration on target seats in the South of England has coincided with a further fall in our core vote. Yes, we're now in a novel political landscape, but in council by-elections where we have not campaigned, there hardly seems to be a Lib Dem vote at all.

To end on a happier note, Ed also talks about chess:

Davey – similarly to Chancellor Rachel Reeves – played chess competitively until he was about 12 years old, though he said he would "not put myself up as a great chess player" anymore. 

"Playing the long game, that's the key thing in chess," he said. 

Ed my be pleased to learn that my blog post about his chess game with Mike Ross in Hull was responded to on Bluesky by the eight-time Russian chess champion Peter Svidler.

I also liked Svidler's comment on Rachel Reeves.

timid, indecisive, unwilling to commit to even temporary sacrifices when the situation calls for a reassessment, and drastic measures might be needed. the chess game is meh too.

[image or embed]

— Peter Svidler (@polborta.bsky.social) 11 April 2026 at 13:07

Roz Savage talks about the first of her solo transoceanic rows

Roz Savage, the Liberal Democrat MP for South Cotswolds, is the only woman to row solo across the the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. She has spoken about the first of those feats to Gloucestershire Live:

"When I got up in the morning, I saw Antigua on the horizon. I was just like, I'm going to make it there today if it kills me.

"So I just like rowed flat out for the whole day.

"I was determined I was not going to spend another day on the ocean."

She said arriving on land was just fantastic after such a long time at sea by herself.

"I was just so happy, deliriously happy to be back on dry land, and loads of people came down to the dock to see me in.

"There were school children singing and, the harbour master had come out to greet me in, and had brought my mum out."

Lord Bonkers wrote of a meeting with her last year:

She is full of her plans to row across Rutland Water, having already bagged the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, but until the Monster is in less playful mood, I shall not encourage her. The chief whip will give me beans if I cause an unnecessary by-election in a seat we hold.

Thanks to an evil billionaire who wants to destroy the planet, I have been able to show you what that encounter might look like.

Bill Oddie: On Ilkla Moor Baht'at

Graeme Garden was singing the praises of Bill Oddie's music for I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and The Goodies on the Through the Square Window podcast the other day. And this is a good example of how funny and accomplished it was.

The Dandelion Records label, says Dandies in the Underworld, was a labour of love run by John Peel and record company Clive Selworthy. The latter explains how the record came about:

One of the label’s most collectable singles is Bill Oddie's On Ilkley Moor Baht’at. I think I was behind that. It was another one of our jokes that nobody got. He’s a clever boy is Bill Oddie, but people thought it was a serious record, as the lyrics went unnoticed, so it disappeared without trace.

I mentioned it to John, who said he was up for it, and we managed to get most of The Grease Band, Jim Capaldi and Sue and Sally who were on the original Joe Cocker Reprise band release, and it was great. John and his producer John Walters produced it. It was a one off, and quite expensive to record, as it featured all of those amazing players. But, again, no regrets. It was worth doing and still gives us a smile.

It’s now one of the most collectable Dandelion records and was one of the records in John’s box of 50 favourite records, along with The White Stripes and Medicine Head.

The Grease Band members playing on the record are Henry McCullough (guitar) and Alan Spenner (bass).The organ player is Verden Allen from Mott the Hoople, while Jim Capaldi, of course, was the drummer from Traffic.

And the backing singers are not "Sue and Sally" but Sue and Sunny. The Wikipedia entry for Joe Cocker's album With a Little help from My Friends says Sue, Sunny, Madeline Bell and Rosetta Hightower sang on the title track, which Oddie is affectionately parodying here.

As Dandies in the Underworld also mentions Python Lee Jackson's In a Broken Dream, I'll end by sending you to my post about staying at a bed and breakfast in Bishop's Castle run by the man who overdubbed the organ on that record.

Ken Loach was Kenneth Williams' understudy in a West End revue

In 1961 Sheila Hancock was appearing in the West End revue One Over the Eight. In her memoir The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw she writes:

The chief joy of One Over the Eight for me was meeting and becoming friends with the writer of the show, Peter Cook, and Kenneth [Williams], the maverick star.

But she didn't feel London was really swinging yet and neither did Kenneth Williams:

One night after the show, when I gave him a lift back to his chaste flat on the back of my Lambretta, he waved his furled umbrella at Eros as we circled Piccadilly Circus crying "Where is it? Where is it all happening? Where are all these orgies? Why haven't we been asked?"

Peter Cook wasn't the only writer who contributed to One Over the Eight: The Stage lists John Mortimer, Lionel Bart, N.F. Simpson and John Bird among the other contributors.

But the reason for this post is that Sheila Hancock reveals that Kenneth Williams' understudy was Ken Loach and so gives us our Trivial Fact of the Day.

In this era, Loach was also involved with Leicester's The Living Theatre. His first screen credits as a director came on television in 1964.

The Joy of Six 1502

"As need has grown and reform and resources have stalled, 1.9 million people in England alone provided a 'full-time' (defined as 35 hours or more) week of care in 2023-24 – that’s 70 per cent more than 20 years ago. Others have to fit caring responsibilities around their jobs: dropping off the kids at school, going to the office and then helping their elderly parents bathe and eat." Frances Ryan asks who will care for the carers.

Ari Berman names the far-right conspiracists who are urging Trump to take control of the mid-term elections. 

Tao Wang says a study of  the prohibition of absinthe in France in 1915 can teach us about modern day blaming and shaming. "Scapegoating operates as a powerful social mechanism. It often turns uncertainty, fear or political conflict into social blaming directed at certain persons or groups, based on thin, selective or simply false stories being told or repeated as if they were true."

Caitlin Chatterton argues that though female fans can make a musician's career, they are not taken seriously: "Perennial sexism in the music industry has often seen female fans stereotyped as hysterical. Rooted in Ancient Greek, 'hysteria' has long been used to portray women as somehow innately unstable, and therefore incapable of critical thought. It’s what kept us out of politics for so long, and it’s why our opinions are still being discredited."

"Though supported by the Parish Council and pressing need, this modest plan for six council houses aroused fierce opposition. William Maclean Homan, the town’s historian, argued it would cause Winchelsea to become a 'third-rate modern village'. He favoured, instead, a proposal to build private rented housing on low-lying land away from the town at the bottom of the hill on a site rejected by the Council because of its poor drainage." Municipal Dreams on the battle to build council housing in Winchelsea.

Adam Roberts wonders why no one reads Walter Scott any more: "Back then, everybody read him. He was the first global superstar of the novel. It's the Rule 34 of 19th-century literary studies: Everybody read Scott, no exceptions. ... Dickens's great dream, when he began writing fiction, was to do what Scott did."

Sylvester McCoy and Sheila Hancock on The Happiness Patrol

In this British Film Institute video Sylvester McCoy, Sheila Hancock and members of it production team discuss the 1988 Doctor Who story The Happiness Patrol.

You can watch all three parts of it on the BBC website.

My Doctor was Jon Pertwee, though in those days the Brigadier and Roger Delgado were a large part of the success of the show. These days I'm not a great Doctor Who fan, but I am a Sheila Hancock fan.

Ed Davey sews a blazer in Stockport and plays chess in Hull

Most Liberal Democrat MPs, and most of the limited number of target seats we have yet to win, are in the South of England, with inevitable consequences for the policy positions we adopt.

So it's good to see two reports on BBC News about Ed Davey visiting areas in the North where we hope to do well in next month's elections.

One is about a visit to Stockport, where the report says we are "eyeing full control". Ed also spoke of the party making gains "in places like Preston and Manchester and Trafford".

He is pictured sewing a blazer at a Stockport school uniform supplier he visited with Lisa Smart. This hardly counts as a stunt, and the media - local television in particular - wants pictures to go with our news stories. As I've said before, this is something Leave grasped and Remain failed to grasp during the EU referendum campaign.

It's just that I feel sorry for the kid who's going to be put into isolation for having a wonky blazer when the schools go back.

As it's in the Manchester commuter belt, parts of Stockport have a lot in common with some of the seats we hold in the South East of England. This is less true of Hull, where Ed has also been.

Here the Liberal Democrats have a one-seat majority on the council and are looking to increase that - a third of the seats are up for election next month.

Hull has long been a fight between Labour and the Lib Dems (you might call it a "two-horse race"), but Reform UK won the mayoral election here last year. So he turned his fire on them

""People have been very disappointed in the Reform mayor who's frankly missing in action. He's done nothing for the region."

and

"Nigel Farage backs Donald Trump left right and centre. He would have taken Britain into this war. He should take some responsibility for the high petrol prices people are paying and higher mortgage costs."

And the gentle stunt? I'm pleased to say that, as you can see in the video above, Ed was filmed playing chess with Mike Ross, the Lib Dem council leader of Hull City Council, on what looks to be one of Rishi Sunak's much-maligned chess tables.

For analysis of their game, see Paperback Rioter.

Drink-drive ban for alcohol-free bar's general manager

Like Alanis Morissette, the judges are amused by irony, so BBC News has strolled away with our Headline of the Day Award.

Lord Harborough's Curve and Oscar Wilde's first biographer

Lord Harborough's Curve: photo by John Sutton

Many railway enthusiasts will know the story of the Battle of Saxby and Lord Harborough's Curve, told here by the Leicestershire Museum Collections site:

In mid-November 1844, railway surveyors were making their way slowly through the Leicestershire countryside. George Stephenson had sketched out his preferred route for the Syston & Peterborough Railway and now they were taking the levels. 

Four miles east of Melton, near the village of Saxby, they reached the estate of Lord Harborough, whose ancestral home of Stapleford Hall stood nearby. His Lordship hated the very idea of railways and had put up signs warning the surveyors to keep off his land. 

The railway men attempted to avoid causing offence by following the towpath of the Oakham Canal, but this added insult to injury, as Lord Harborough was a shareholder in the canal, which faced ruin if the railway was built. His servants and estate workers set about removing the surveyors by force, leading to four days of fighting between the two sides.

Sidetracked adds some colour:

Pistols were allegedly drawn by surveyors, clubs and iron pointed staves carried and bare fists used.  Artillery was even mentioned! The estate Fire Engine was deployed as a primitive water cannon and the railway company was threatened by letter that:

"We have barricaded the towing  path and have in readiness a few cannons from Lord Harborough’s yacht. If you force us to use them, as a last resort, the blood will be upon your hands."

Lord Harborough won his dispute with the railway company, so its engineers were forced to construct a tight curve in order to avoid his land. "Lord Harborough's Curve", as it was known, remained in use until 1892, when a route through Stapleford Park was finally built. You can see the wooded embankment of Lord Harborough's Curve in the photograph above. But the title died with him, as he did not father any legitimate children.

In another part of the forest, I have noticed that whenever I search for pictures of Market Harborough in photo libraries, portraits of a writer called Robert Harborough Sherard come up. He was a friend of Oscar Wilde and his first biographer.

Sherard's father was the Revd Bennet Sherard Calcraft Kennedy, who turns out to have been one of three illegitimate children that our Lord Harborough had with an actress called Emma Love. Through his mother, Sherard was also a great grandson of the poet William Wordsworth.

Sadly, he is not an attractive figure. His books on the poor of England generally lay the blame for their sufferings at the door of Jewish landlords.

Still, we have our Trivial Fact of the Day: Lord Harborough who won the Battle of Saxby was the grandfather of Oscar Wilde's first biographer.

The Joy of Six 1501

Samira Shackle meets victims of successive governments that have sought to reduce immigration while insisting universities recruit more overseas students: "Each year, about 400,000 international students are granted study visas to the UK. A significant proportion do so with the help of education agents: middlemen paid by universities to find foreign students. In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate."

"In places like Kootenai County, where white Christian Republicans hold a supermajority, local politics is mutating into something undeniably extreme. North Idaho offers a particularly stark example. A decade after Trump took over the GOP, the Coeur d’Alene region finds itself beset by a ­vexing mix of far-right activists and white nationalists who are trying to drive moderate voices out of political life." Michael Edison Hayden talks to the locals who are fighting back.

"Does the democratisation of information and access provided by social media help or hinder women in political careers? Is it an essential tool for visibility and mobilisation or another obstacle that disproportionately discourages women, especially those from marginalised backgrounds?" Georgia Richardson reports on a discussion of these questions.

Michael C. Munger recruits an unlikely pair of thinkers to question naïve optimism about government intervention in the economy: Adam Smith and Michel Foucault.

"The newly exposed floodplain was cracked and parched, the slate river chugging along in its rediscovered course. I’d hoped to see a fish or two; instead, the river practically vibrated with them. Salmon skittered from pool to pool, shark-like dorsal fins waving above the surface, dozens of Chinook chasing and nipping and circling each other in ancient dance." Ben Goldfarb celebrates the rebirth of an American river.

Ryan Lambie on the importance of Professor Quatermass: "ITV didn’t launch until September 1955. As a result, The Quatermass Experiment was viewed by just about every British person who owned a television; it was reckoned that some 3.4 million people tuned in to watch the first episode, and that the figure steadily climbed to a staggering five million by the sixth and final episode, which aired that August."

An Edward VIII postbox on Ryhall Road, Stamford

Today I bagged another Edward VII postbox. Having stalked and photographed the three examples in Leicestershire (on the Saffron Lane Estate and in Earl Shilton and Hugglescote) a couple of years ago, I was looking for more worlds to conquer. Then I read online that there was a box in Stamford.

And here it is. You'll find it on Ryhall Road, not far from Greyfriars Gatehouse.

Genesis: I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)

If you'd been reliant on Radio One and Radio Luxembourg for your music in 1974, this single would have sounded like something from another planet to you too.

Three Catholic churches have closed in Northamptonshire

Holy Trinity, Desborough

Opponents of the moved vowed to "take this fight to the Vatican", but as far as I know the closure of the Catholic churches in Desborough, Rothwell and Burton Latimer has gone ahead. Certainly, their websites have been closed down.

Holy Trinity, Desborough, was already up for sale when I photographed it last year – the estate agents' particulars say it is "offered for sale in need of significant repair or demolition" and describe it as a "perfect development site".

Taking Stock: Catholic Churches of England & Wales reveals that Holy Trinity was built as a Methodist chapel in 1894 and purchased for Catholic use in June 1971. Its altar is at the north end of the church, though latterly, services appear to have been held in the hall next door.

Holy Trinity, Desborough

I did not discover St Bernadette's. Rothwell, until my last visit to the little town, when I had a good wander. Taking Stock says it dates from 1959 and that alterations made in 1993 radically and detrimentally altered its appearance.

St Bernadette's, Rothwell

St Bernadette's, Rothwell

The Grotto, St Bernadette's, Rothwell

I've not made it as far as Burton Latimer, best known for being the home of Weetabix, so the photo below is by David Dixon on Georgraph. The church is dedicated to St Nicholas Owen, a Catholic carpenter and builder of priest holes who was martyred in 1606 and canonised in 1970. Taking Stock says it opened in 1972.

David Dixon: St John North, Burton Latimer

Why the Lib Dem fuel duty cut would not reduce petrol prices

I don'r recall any debate about it within the party, but it's now Liberal Democrat policy to cut fuel duty by 10p. This, we claim, would bring down prices at the pump by 12p per litre.

But I don't believe it would.

Petrol prices at the pump have gone up because the US attack on Iran has led to less crude oil coming on to the world market. This has increased wholesale prices.

The Liberal Democrat fuel duty cut would do nothing about situation in the Gulf, so no more oil wuold be available for refining.

What it would do is give motorists a bit more cash to spend. And in the absence of any increase in the supply of petrol, that cash would bid up prices at the pump more or less by the amount of the duty cut.

You should add ceteris paribus after any statement about the economy, if only to make yourself sound learned, but I can't see any flaws in this argument.

I feel a certain nostalgia for the years the days when the Lib Dem front bench included Vince Cable, David Laws, Chris Huhne and Steve Webb. We need to have something more substantial to say about the economy than this.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I love publishing guest posts here on Liberal England. Why not try writing one yourself?

It could be on the Liberal Democrats, politics more generally or… anything really. Why not an article about a local campaign or quirky piece of history?

Please drop me an email if you want to discuss your idea first: I’d hate you to spend time on a piece I really wouldn’t want to publish.

Here are the 10 most recent Liberal England guest posts:

• Artist Nick Jensen steps into history's shadow at Belvoir Castle – Matthew Pennell
• Reform are still gaining councillors and Labour and the Tories are still losing them – Augustus Carp
• In the cause of duty: Walter Stolworthy is remembered at Wymondham station – Neil Hickman
• Understanding the views and worries of the city of Oxford Lib Dem – William Lane
• Local councillors changing party: Augustus Carp’s review of 2025 – Augustus Carp
• Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires" – Anselm Anon
• The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon – Peter Chambers
• Lord Summerisle obviously took the Liberal whip – Anselm Anon and Wighard of Canterbury
• To realise the health benefits of nature we must first admit we are part of it – Stuart Whomsley
• Political lessons from science fiction – Peter Chambers

Exploring the disused railway tunnels at Standedge

Britain's longest canal tunnel is Standedge Tunnel on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. It runs for three and a quarter miles, taking boats from Marsden in West Yorkshire and Diggle in Greater Manchester.  Before local government reorganisation in 1974, both ends of the tunnel were in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

The canal tunnel opened in 1811, and by the end of the 19th century three railway tunnels had been built more or less in parallel to it. Two of them have long been disused, and it is these that the video explores.

As you will see, the four tunnels are still linked underground and contain many surprises. Don't have nightmares.

The Joy of Six 1500

"They should pivot to the centre-right – announcing a bunch of sensible policies that pitch the Tories as a fiscally and socially conservative alternative to Labour's meek leadership. But Badenoch won’t do that. And here’s why." Sam Bright explains the Conservatives' mystifying strategy. (Clue: follow the money.)

Ruth Lucas reports on depressing but unsurprising new research findings: "Only 40 per cent of disadvantaged pupils identified as high-achieving at the start of secondary school go on to achieve top GCSE grades, compared with 62 per cent of their more affluent peers."

Patrik Hermansson and Harry Shukman take us inside The Sanctuary in Westminster, which offers financial support, free meeting rooms, podcast spaces and catered events to hard-right activists: "Furnished like a Pall Mall gentlemen's club, The Sanctuary has Chesterfield sofas, a taxidermied penguin, and a sketch of the Victorian colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Its bookshelves are decorated with Moët & Chandon champagne, a Fabergé egg, and maps of St Helena, the island on which Napoleon was exiled."

How many lives does God take in the Bible? Colin Marshall points us to a video that makes the total 2,599,499.

"The film succumbs to the constant temptation to map Liverpool’s changing face against your own. Davies’s childhood, like my father’s, was marked by the slum clearances, the first step in the seemingly endless process of regeneration and reification that continues to mar the city to this day." Lizzie Mackarel watches Terence Davies's 2008 film Of Time and the City.

Bill Bibliomane reviews When Last I Died by Gladys Mitchell: "There’s always something to like and appreciate in a Mrs. Bradley novel, but When Last I Died goes the longest way yet to building a taut, suspenseful, and gripping narrative, right up to the closing pages."

GUEST POST Political lessons from science fiction

Peter Chambers turns to Dirk Gently and Battlestar Galactica to help him understand what is happening in the world.

The Electric Monk is a character introduced by Douglas Adams in his 1987 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The Monk is a machine intelligence in the service of an alien who visits Earth before life as we know it arose here. It probably looked like Julian Glover wearing an unconvincing rubber mask. It was about as diligent as a human.

The alien had a problem. Its ship – shamelessly copied from the Dr Who serial City of Death – was then about as reliable as SpaceX Starship. The normal rockets were not functioning. But the alien decided that a tech-hack might work. It would take off on Warp Drive. From a planetary surface. With no Tech Support.

Now before SF fans choke on their pints of Dow Bridge Centurion (4.0 per cent), pause for a bit. It was desperate and there was some oppression stuff and illiberal anti-democratic stuff needing doing out in the galaxy. It possibly had a PPE degree, and was used to trading off risk. Or at least closing the agenda. Naturally it could inspect the Warp Drive itself. But what a faff!

This is where the Electric Monk came in. The alien’s people had invented these MI when they wanted reassurance about things, without being diligent about things, or – by crikey – sweating the detail. So the alien asked the Monk to check the Warp Drive. The Monk assured the alien that all was well. Which is about as useful as a ferry safety check conducted by Chris Grayling and the SNP.

Chop chop. Switches on, batteries to power, warp to speed, retract landing legs. Boom.

End of alien. Normal life starts on Earth. Here we are. Then we invent GPT.

We now have something that will draft that conference speech for you. And check it. And do a schedule. And reassure you that the speech will be fine. Even accept that minor correction you made. Progress. Which is a term seldom heard in Market Harborough.

The hard six

The line "Sometimes you have to roll the hard six" occurs in episode 1.10 of the 2004 American SF series Battlestar Galactica, which is titled The Hand of God.

Edward James Olmos plays Commander Adama, Mary McDonnell plays President Laura Roslin, Katee Sackhoff plays Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, and Jamie Bamber tries to play Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama. The Executive Producer (lead writer) was Ron D. Moore. Ron used a team writing approach, and his writers bible included portraying the BSG as a USN carrier and the convention that those enemies of humanity, the Cylons, were monotheists. The Cylons know who created them, so surely the whole world was a creation?

The situation in 1.10 is desperate. The human fleet is very low on fuel. They either land on a planet or find some fuel or fuel ore. A scout locates a defended enemy base with a fuel refinery. The Commander and his pilots draft a plan to take the enemy base. It is high-risk, high-reward. There will be losses of irreplaceable pilots and machines, including civilian freighters. They take the plan to the political administration. President Roslin listens:

Adama: If you keep running from the school-yard bully he keeps on chasing you, but the moment you turn around and stop and you punch him really hard in a sensitive spot, he'll think twice about coming back again.

So it's either this, or run out of fuel and be annihilated. Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.

Roslin: Well the Freighters are yours. Good hunting.

You can watch this scene online.

The term "hard six" originates in the dice game craps. There it means a pair of threes on two dice. The probability is 1 in 36, which is 2.777 recurring percent. The payoff is high. It would have to be in an episode where a good outcome is moderate losses of irreplaceable people. The payoff would have to change the game.

There follows some well scripted action involving the "which hand is the ball in?" subterfuge with large explosions and dead AI. Which was the point of the episode in series one.

This is all easy to do in a scripted drama. It is routinely used by hacks. Ron D. Moore used it this once in series one.

In real life, with limited uncertain information, it may still have to happen. Contemporaries say that Operation Market Garden fell into that category. It was said to be worth the risk at the time. Later historians and writers endlessly second-guess that.

And what for the Lib Dems in 2019? There was a lack of solid information, high risk, possible high reward. But it did not work. Sometimes it does not. Was it right?

Peter Clarke on T.H. Green and the working man

Thomas Hill "T.H." Green

Peter Clarke is the author or two books, Lancashire and the New Liberalism and Liberals and Social Democrats, that anyone interested in British Liberalism should read.

Here he is back in 1980, reviewing Ian Bradley's The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism in the London Review of Books:

The attention given to T.H. Green can be justified partly because he sought to present such a formula in philosophically cogent terms. "When we speak of freedom," he argued, "we do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespective of what it is we like. We mean the greatest power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves." 

Green had reached this view by 1881 in a public lecture on "Liberal legislation and the freedom of contract". The opportunities for state intervention which this doctrine suggests were to give Green a subsequent reputation for fathering a collectivist approach in welfare legislation. 

But the reputation was really fathered upon Green – he was more fathered against than fathering. Green himself had not meant to move so far. But that he had moved away from any tolerably strict definition of voluntarism is surely evident. In 1873 he had declared that "the drink curse is altogether too big a thing to be dealt with by individual effort only." In this field at least, higher claims than mere liberty had to be asserted, albeit by the citizens as a body. 

There is a splendid vignette, dating from the following year, of Green in conversation with a friend, dwelling "with great disappointment on the use made by the workmen of their half holiday and shorter hours. He even said that he thought it was better they should not have a half holiday, but should be kept constantly at their work so that they should not have time to drink."

 I also like Clarke's formulation that "history does not repeat itself: historians repeat each other".

Jane: It's a Fine Day

This is the record that Opus III were sampling, covering or something between the two. Sovering, perhaps. Or campling.

Introducing interviews with Edward Barton and Jane Lancaster, who respectively wrote and sang It's a Fine Day, Bob Fischer explains:

It's a Fine Day, the acapella single written by Edward Barton and sung by Jane Lancaster, is both haunting and enchanting in equal measure. Turned into a daytime Radio 1 staple after evening plays from – inevitably – John Peel, it later became the sampled source material for a deluge of 1990s dance hits: including the Pete Waterman-backed Opus III, who took it into the Top 5, and Kylie Minogue, whose 1994 No 2 hit Confide In Me incorporated sizeable chunks of the melody.

Edward would later claim the only section of the song not to have been sampled is the concluding line: "We will have salad".

Pineapple Road station, Rhubarb Curve and the Rhubarb Express

Transport for West Midlands

On Tuesday three new railway stations are opening in Birmingham: Kings Heath, Moseley Village and Pineapple Road. They're on the Camp Hill Line, which will see local passenger trains for the first time since the 1940s.

Pineapple Road is a great name for a station. There was one on the site between 1903 and 1941 with the name Hazelwell, but Pineapple Road was the most popular choice for the new station in a public vote.

A Birmingham World report says its champions thought it was memorable and described the station's better than the other two candidates, Hazelwell and Stirchley.

So there's now a Pineapple Road station on the network, but there has long been a Rhubarb Curve. It's in Bristol and mainly used by freight trains, but it does see rate but regular passenger workings. It allows trains from Bath to go to Bristol Parkway and the Severn Tunnel without going through Bristol Temple Meads.

There's also a Rhubarb Triangle in West Yorkshire, of course, but that has nothing to do with trains even though it sounds as though it should have. It's an area famous for the production of forced rhubarb that was awarded Protected Designation of Origin by the European Union in 2010. The points of the triangle are Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell.

But there was a Rhubarb Express, as a post on a railway forum explains:

The LNER "Rhubarb Express" was a 209 mile non-stop overnight run seasonally from Leeds to London Kings Cross (or St. Pancras). Conveyed hundreds of tons of early-season forced rhubarb originating from various locations in the West Riding of Yorkshire for sale in London (Covent Garden/Spitalfields) and the South, the following day. ...

The rhubarb trains were cancelled in early 1940 following the onset of WW2. Not sure if, or when, they were ever subsequently resumed ... following the end of the war.

The Joy of Six 1499

Alexandra Hall Hall warns that Donald Trump’s Iran war is bringing the post-war international order to breaking point. "The UN has been completely sidelined in this conflict. The US, who helped design the institution after World War 2, no longer pays either its dues, or even lip service to its founding charter, including the requirement to resolve international disputes by peaceful means."

"The cumulative effect is an ecosystem that looks, from the outside, exactly like what it is: a set of institutions that have come to prioritise their own stability over their original purpose. Outsiders do not see idealism when they look at us. They see a class protecting its position. And that fuels the populist rage, because at some level, they are right." Gregory Maniatis has no words of comfort for the US left.

The new universities of the 1960s were founded on intimacy, radicalism and community. Looking to what is happening at Essex, Adam Wright asks whether an obsession with growth has made those promises impossible to keep.

Michael Solomon Williams makes the case for expanding our railway network: "The story of British rail is often told through major infrastructure projects or high-speed lines. But just as important are the quieter stories of reconnection: the return of a station, the reopening of a route, or the transformation of a corridor into modern public transport. These changes show that the legacy of the Beeching cuts is not permanent. With the right decisions, communities can be reconnected and the network can grow again."

"Crawley has been given a great many opportunities to prove himself – enough, you could argue, that he has already done precisely that. For years and years, he has generally done just enough to maintain the idea of Zak Crawley, without ever really managing to move things beyond that." King Cricket concludes that if England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be.

Anne Bilson ranks the surprising number of killer-rabbit movies.