The nearest beach to Leicestershire and Birmingham

 Warning issued as beach closest to Leicestershire shuts amid health fears

So ran a headline in the Leicester Mercury. I wondered where the nearest beach to Leicestershire is. Hunstanton? Skegness? 

But it is, of course, on Rutland Water.

The story is about the brief closure (it was reopened this morning) of the beach at Sykes Lane there because of dangerous levels of blue-green algae.

I took these photos some years ago at Whitwell Harbour, which is just along the coast but lacks sand.

Secret Birmingham has worked out that Rutland Water has the nearest Blue Flag beach to them too.

Council gives update on investigation into former Sheriff of Nottingham

Following dozens of nominations from oppressed serfs in Sherwood Forest, West Bridgford Wire wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood: Some Velvet Morning

The most 1967 track of all? More 1967 than David Hemmings Happens?

These random paragraphs from a Believer article by Madeleine Watts may explain what is going on:

Nancy Sinatra had, until the mid-sixties, been the favorite daughter of her famous father and a mediocre pop singer without a hit. Hazlewood changed that. He wrote “These Boots Are Made For Walking” for Nancy. He wrote “Sugar Town” for Nancy. And he wrote “Some Velvet Morning,” a song that Rolling Stone, The Daily Telegraph and other publications have called one of the greatest duets ever recorded.

Phaedra is a woman who loses her reason. In Euripides’ version of the story, Aphrodite compels her to fall in love with her stepson, Hippolytus—but Hippolytus spurns her advances. When Phaedra can no longer bear the guilt and the force of her feelings, she takes her own life. Full of fury, Phaedra leaves behind a note telling her husband, Theseus, that Hippolytus, has raped her. But Hippolytus never touched her.

Before Nancy, Lee Hazlewood was a cowboy of sorts. Born in Oklahoma to an oil wildcatter and a housewife, he grew up in Arkansas, Louisiana, and, finally, Texas. After serving in the Korean War, Hazlewood landed a job as a late-night radio DJ in Phoenix, Arizona. There, he started the label Viv, signing the twangy instrumentalist Duane Eddy and writing and producing tracks like “The Fool” for Sanford Clark and Al Casey’s “Surfin’ Hootenany.” In 1963, Hazlewood moved to Los Angeles and recorded his first solo record at Western Studios, Trouble Is A Lonesome Town. It was a concept album that told the stories of the residents of Trouble, hard-bitten songs laden with all the misfit character and southern gothic ennui of a Carson McCullers novel, and all the cheap sentiment of bad Hollywood Westerns. It sounded, and sounds, like nothing else. 

The velvet morning that is promised in Hazlewood’s song is predicated on the male vocalist being “straight.” But straight can mean a great many things.

Straight: Not crooked, direct, undeviating, in unbroken sequence. Of a person, well-conducted, steady. Of a drug-user, high.

In his essay 'Old Songs in New Skins,' Greil Marcus suggests, “One of the ways songs survive is that they mutate…. Sometimes this happens subtly, around the margins, in soundtracks or commercials. The song is moved just slightly off the map we normally use to orient ourselves – but in a way that, in a year or ten, may completely change how we hear it, what associations we bring to it. Pop songs are always talked about as the soundtrack to our lives, when all that means is that pop songs are no more than containers for nostalgia. But lives change and so do soundtracks, even if they’re made up of the same songs.” 

Gilbert Adair: The orphan has lost not only his parents but his status

Embed from Getty Images

This post is about another essay by Gilbert Adair, but first a quotation from Sammy Going South by W.H. Canaway. If you've not seen the movie, this is a novel about a 10-year-old British boy whose parents are killed by an RAF raid on Port Said during the Suez Crisis of 1956:

Reminded by the scene he had witnessed, he thought, I’m an orphan! The idea intrigued him. He said aloud, "I'm an orphan!" savouring the words in the air. Then he said, experimentally, “My mummy and daddy are dead,” and wished he hadn't said it, for it made him feel sad. To say "I'm an orphan" sounded not sad, but – well, important. He repeated the words again.

In his essay 'Dr Barnardo's Orphans', Adair discusses this status once enjoyed by orphans:

The prominence accorded to the orphan by nineteenth-century novelists - not only Dickens, not only in this country - became in consequence rather hypertrophied when compared to his actual footing on the social hierarchy, both qualitatively and quantitatively; and, in a much-quoted witticism from The Importance of Being Earnest (Lady Bracknell's observation that the loss of both parents resembled 'carelessness'), Wilde, no devotee of Dickensian sentimentality, mocked what might be called the rampant orphanomania of the Victorians.

But, as Adair says, time moved on and the absence of war and disease meant there were no longer the waves of orphans there had once been. After the Second World War the term came to acquire a foreign, Third World connotation - Korean orphans, Vietnamese orphans. Meanwhile, Barnardo's was diversifying its childcare activities, moving far beyond just the provision of homes for orphans.

Adair, emphasising he means to respect to the children and that he is concerned only with their public image, says the result is that:

There now strikes one as something dated and irreducibly kitschy about an orphan: a Barnardo Boy reminds one of nothing so much as a Bisto Kid. In effect, the social specificity of a nineteenth-century orphan was contingent upon an uncompromisingly normative conception of society, from which he was therefore – if in this manner alone – not alienated, since he had been assigned a codified place within it, however luckless.

Today, or at least in 1986, when Adair's Myths & Memories was published:

When what would have been regarded until quite lately as unimaginable anomalies compete with each other for the attention of the sociologist, the social worker and the investigative journalist (single-parent families, lesbian mothers, test-tube babies), the orphan has lost not only his parents but his status.

It's worse than that. The Children and Young Persons Act 1969 sought to remove the stigma if criminality from children who broke the law and treat them like any other children who are in need of care. But its effect was to spread that stigma to all children in public care.

So it is thar, today, orphans being moved between care placements are likely to find themselves put in handcuffs. We have turned being an orphan into a crime.

Reader's Voice. So your diagnosis is that we have lost the concept of the "well-behaved orphan".

Liberal England replies: Precisely. But I can console myself that I did manage to slip the phrase into my book chapter on Oliver Twist.

The Joy of Six 1546

Toby Buckle argues that it's time for liberals to throw John Rawls under the bus. In his philosophy he guided the creed toward neutrality, but we can no longer afford that in the age of Trump .

"After huge reductions in first-time entrants and custodial sentences in the youth justice system in recent years, a smaller, more complex cohort of children remains. Their offending behaviours mask deep vulnerabilities including earlier childhood abuse and trauma, poor mental health, school exclusion and poverty. This cohort need stability and care to rehabilitate and change. Yet the custodial estate has seen an alarming deterioration in conditions in recent years, with two secure training centres, a young offender institution and the country's first secure school all closing on safety and quality grounds." Ann Graham on the need for reform in the treatment of children in custody.

Ekaterina Balabanova and Gemma Horton report research that finds the British press has undermined the European Convention on Human Rights over many years: "Arguably, the government’s current approach reflects some of this coverage: conceding ground on specific criticisms of the ECHR in order to salvage its overall legitimacy. But looking at the long history of press coverage, we suggest that this strategy will continue to erode legitimacy, rather than bolster it."

"On one level, perhaps, that is down to a regionally specific reluctance to seem overly expansive on certain topics ('No mysticism please, we’re British'). But I spend quite a lot of my time in a church context where talking about spiritual matters is normal, even encouraged – and, remarkably, even there very few are willing to open up; mundane matters swiftly return as the main subject of conversation whenever a spiritual matter comes up." Francis Young asks why we find it so difficult talk about numinous experiences.

"The football games we obsess over are the ones that tell a story." Natasha Chahal says this World Cup has been full of them.

Maysa Monção watches Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver: "More than the cab driver, the taxi is a character. It is the car that sees underground New York. It is the car that chases the scum of the earth: the pimps and hookers. From inside the taxi, there is a perspective of New York that must be eliminated. The marginalised inhabitants of New York don’t fit in Travis’s reactionary idea of a 'clean city'." 

Black market weight-loss jab factory found in stately home

Our Headline of the Day comes from BBC News. 

I noticed that Lord Bonkers was taking a keen interest in the finer details of the story.

Peter Knight on making sense of conspiracy theories

Professor Peter Knight gave this lecture on Making Sense of Conspiracy Theories at Gresham College, London, on 14 November 2024. You can download the full text, including academic references, from the college website: 

A common misconception is that belief in conspiracy theories is the result of a lack of accurate information or the circulation of mistaken information, whether accidental or deliberate. The assumption is that no one in their right mind would believe in such bizarre claims, unless they were the victims of a concerted campaign of deception and manipulation The idea is that people are fundamentally rational, and that they will adjust their beliefs when new evidence comes to life. And the implication is that if only we can transmit the correct information, then the mistaken belief will disappear.

But the reality in many cases is that misinformation doesn't turn people into conspiracy theorists. Instead, conspiracy theories often provide people with ready-made narrative justifications for identity positions they have already assumed. Although the usual picture of a conspiracy theorist is a loner, the process of developing conspiracy interpretations in online communities can give people a sense of community, purpose and belonging. Conspiracy theories need to be understood as collective, sensemaking narratives that help bolster worldviews, rather than as pieces of misleading information that alter individual beliefs.

Jonathan Coe on Kenneth Williams, sex and the Sixties

The novelist Jonathan Coe reviewed The Kenneth Williams Diaries for the London Review of Books when they were first published:

Williams found the perfect expression for his personality in the Carry On films – despite their superficially heterosexual orientation – and became such a cherished emblem of sexual insecurity for gay and straight audiences alike. 

For above all this series represents (and celebrates) a peculiarly English sexuality, one in which an addictive, almost obsessional interest in sex is combined with horror and gaucherie at the prospect of actually performing it. 

In this respect they preserve a far more accurate record of the sexual atmosphere of the Sixties than films of ‘swinging London’ like Blow Up or Darling, which offer adolescent fantasies of sexual freedom when the reality for most punters must have been closer to Carry On Camping, with Bernard Bresslaw and Sid James making a pathetic pilgrimage to a nudist camp in order to gaze longingly at the ‘birds’ – pop-eyed, helpless and fundamentally out of the running. 

What Williams and the leering, pickle-nosed James had in common, then, was their status as sexual spectators, mesmerised but fearful.

I remember being taken to see Carry On Camping at the cinema, when I must have been nine. 

But then I was taken to see Danny La Rue's Christmas show when I was eight. I was one of the children who came up on stage halfway through the show. For some reason, there weren't many children there.

Prince Harry visits hospital as brother William plays crazy golf and King Charles examines a penguin

This effort from Sky News, in which the Royal Family plays a starring role, wins it our Headline of the Day Award.

Norman Baker will not be happy with the judges.

Cromford Moor Mine and the legend of the Black Rocks

Assailed by hay fever, flying insects and stinging nettles, Gareth Icke is our guide for a walk in the hills above the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire/

With that setting, disused lead mines, white spoil heaps and unlikely-sounding local folklore, this video ticks a lot of Liberal England boxes.

For more like it, subscribe to The Walk on YouTube.

Gilbert Adair and when Jacques Derrida came to Loughborough

Today I thought of the writer Gilbert Adair, looked up his Guardian obituary from 2011 and found this gem:

He once told us on the arts desk of what had happened when he rang one of his publishers. "You aren't by any chance Red Adair," asked a secretary to whom his name clearly meant nothing. "No," he snapped back, "I'm unread Adair."

After I'd shared that on Bluesky, I dug out his book Myths & Memories, a collection of essays about and memories of British culture.

In one of the essays, 'Derrida Didn't Come', he writes about a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that made an uneasy attempt to come to terms with literary theory:

The third tactic, and undoubtedly the most radical, is that, simply, of non-appearance. It has, I venture to suggest, become so axiomatic of these events for the most prestigious guests to fail to arrive that their absence now qualifies as almost an intrinsic part of their experience. Thus, at the ICA, neither Jacques Derrida nor Nathalie Sarraute, the two stars of the seminar, 'disappointed' our expectations, if one may so phrase it, by making an appearance.

Derrida did turn up sometimes. I know that because I once heard him give a paper to a literary conference at Loughborough University. And, thanks to a news story on the university website about an academic who later wrote a play about the occasion, I can tell you that this conference took place in November 2001. 

Besides the essays, Adair's book contains 400 random memories of news stories and popular culture from when he was young: 

70. I remember reading Nineteen Eighty-four when the year itself seemed to belong to some dim and unknowable future.

192. I remember the Danish musical humorist Victor Borge, each of whose one-man shows seemed a tremendously prestigious affair.

265. I remember Michael Fagin, the intruder who breezed into the Queen's bedroom.

355. I remember Fyfe Robertson.

If I were setting down 400 of my own such memories today, 15 years after his death, I might include:

1. I remember Gilbert Adair

Tory fury at VAT on school fees is all about social class

There was a story the other day about dozens of Labour MPs failing to mention the private schools they had attended in their Who's Who entries. I wasn't surprised by this: if I find it difficult to discover which schools a Labour MP attended, I generally assume they were privately educated.

But what was striking was the accusation by the Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake that 

"Their hypocrisy knows no limits. While they plot around the Cabinet table to impose this spiteful tax on education, many Labour MPs have been busy covering up their own private school educations. They have no shame in pulling up the ladder behind them."

Because it is a naked appeal to upper-class solidarity. If you benefited from an unfair educational system, it implies, you are duty-bund to ensure that people of your class can continue to enjoy that advantage.

In reality, there's nothing hypocritical about deciding that a system you went through yourself should be reformed or abolished. I'd say it is a sign of a mature intellect, and we expect the Labour Party, even the timid version of it we see today that never mentions social class, to believe in fairness.

But sending their children to private schools is what upper class people do. It's an important part of their identity. Question the practice, and the clang of closing ranks is resounding.

And that solidarity can take extreme forms, as Alex Renton discovered when he went public about the abuse he had suffered as a small boy at his expensive prep school:

The reaction to my story was immediate – and shockingly personal.  "You’re a class traitor," said one friend, whose son had just started at  Eton. I thought she might have been joking – but she wasn’t the only one.

A few days after publication I was at a smart Edinburgh art gallery  party, standing with a glass of free wine in a group of people I  vaguely know. "Don’t stand too close to Renton!" one of them, an old  Etonian businessman, suddenly announced, grabbing my arm. "He might put  his hand down your trousers!" Most of the group chuckled. 

You may disagree with Labour's imposition of VAT on school fees, but there's nothing hypocritical about the policy.

The Joy of Six 1545

"Progressive politicians must see social media as a means to an end. If they’re swallowed by social media, they’ll lose their moral core. What’s more – and much worse – making social media the training school of modern politics risks giving a megaphone to fascists and racists who are able to preach their gospel of hate to millions without interruption." Sam Bright on the curse of influencer-politicians.

Jack Dyson reports on the consequences of falling school rolls. One in three councils expect more than a fifth of primary school places will be unfilled next year. 

"We used to think AI-generated fiction would always be obvious, and we were not prepared. Over the coming years, agents, editors, and slush readers at every level are going to need to educate themselves on how AI writes." Bona Books inadvertently bought a short story written by Artificial Intelligence for an anthology of queer speculative fiction.

Jennifer Davey offers a short round up of football-related contributions to Hansard over the years.

Malcolm Pein, the English Chess Federation’s delegate to the game's governing body FIDE and a candidate for its next deputy president, is interviewed about the long fight to break Russia's political grip on chess: "Russia has basically hijacked FIDE – just go to the FIDE website and look at where the employees come from: Russian head of PR, Russian head of legal and so on."

"This is as much a novel of working class intellectualism (Hamer deploys a quotation from Macbeth without ostentation) as it is about the compromises of electoral politics. Shawcross and his children want comfort and security and health, but they also want the fruits of the knowledge and experience held by this culture that has turned them into marginal drudges of the machine age." With the accession of Andy Burnham imminent, Discontinued Notes looks again at the work of Howard Spring, 'the Dickens of Manchester'.

Paddington Bear: Slapstick, boosting Jeremy Clarkson's career and becoming our grim reaper

Paddington Bear is a couple of years older than me, so I had one of the books about him when I was a little boy. 

I quite liked the Paddington stories and certainly liked his friendship with Mr Gruber, who treated what was essentially a furry child as though he were an equal. Children really appreciate characters like that.

But you didn't have to grow that old before you started to find all the slapstick a bit babyish. And then there was the weak characterisation. The son of the Brown household was called Jonathan, and he added little to the action beyond saying "Crikey!" now and then. I was bound to notice that.

But the television and film adaptations have made the meh bear a huge cultural figure. Not only has he become the 21st century's grim reaper, conducting the dead to the underworld- more of that in a moment - he was also partly responsible for Jeremy Clarkson's television career.

Here's part of a post I wrote a couple of years ago:

Clarkson and the BBC go back a long way. All the way back to 1973, when as a 13-year-old, be played Atkinson in BBC Radio 4 serialisations of the Jennings books.

Then he went to public school, his fees paid from his mother's business making Paddington Bear toys. And the BBC was Paddington-friendly even before the animations with Michael Hordern's voice, because Michael Bond was a cameraman with them. So you got exclusive Paddington stories in your Blue Peter annual.

And, then, of course, the BBC's Top Gear made Clarkson a millionaire. A little gratitude wouldn't come amiss.

Personally, I'd have taken Paddington's marmalade sandwiches off him for that.

And his new role as our angel of death? Here's the abstract for Jennifer Riley and Matthew Hilborn's paper (Br)Exit pursued by a bear: Paddington's polysemic political power as the `new Grim Reaper':

Though hailing from distant “darkest Peru”, Paddington Bear has become a bastion of British identity. His critically-acclaimed films (2014, 2017, 2024), starring icons of British cinema, trade on nostalgic national tropes. This symbolic imbrication peaked in 2022, starring alongside Queen Elizabeth II in her Platinum Jubilee celebrations – and later becoming a symbol of collective mourning, materially and digitally, after her death. Paddington – endangered and repeatedly imperilled onscreen – thus became the Establishment’s new mor(t)al totem, what Douglas Davies would call a ‘paradigmatic’ figure ‘good to think’ in life, and in death. 

His incongruously cuddly ‘Grim Reaper’ became a globally recognisable meme. Yet, since symbols are malleable, and film-based memes subversive and satirical, Paddington has proved a provocative meme(nto mori). Analysing social media posts (X, Instagram) and the films, this article explores Paddington Bear the Grim Reaper as politically polysemic. 

If, following Robert Hertz, society grieves those ‘in whom it incarnates itself, and with whom it identifies itself’, Paddington’s mortal multivocality forces a reckoning. Whose lives – and deaths – are grievable? And which version of Britishness should Paddington embody: the polite, Establishment-aligned “Good Immigrant”, or the racialised, once-incarcerated refugee?

 I thought such wordp(l)ay had gone out of fashion in academia in the early Nineties: I do hope it's not making a comeback. Anyway, if you really want to, you can read the whole article online.

And if you didn't believe me about Jeremy Clarkson being in Jennings, here's a cutting to put your doubts to rest. 

Bankers have raised potential money-laundering concerns over transactions involving senior Reform UK figures

The Guardian reports that a host of transactions involving Reform UK's most senior figures, and some donations to the party, have led bankers to report potential money-laundering concerns to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

According to the newspaper, finance industry figures have raised at least four suspicious activity reports (SARs) relating to transactions involving senior figures in Reform. It names them as:

• One relates to a £1m donation made to Britain Means Business, a fundraising organisation for Reform UK, before the last general election. Half of the £1m was then transferred by Tice, as director of the company, to Reform UK. Renamed from Leave Means Leave, Britain Means Business is a company that is used to help fund Reform. The £1m seemingly came from the aristocrat and Reform UK donor Fiona Cottrell. In this instance, the Guardian understands bank staff were not satisfied that the funds had ultimately come from her. The NCA has sought help from a foreign partner agency to trace the original source of the funds.
• Two other SARs relate to a loan from George Cottrell to Tice. The loan was made shortly before Tice finalised a property purchase and made a party donation, and was not repaid until after those two transactions were completed, according to sources. George Cottrell is the son of Fiona Cottrell, and is a convicted fraudster, former deputy treasurer of Ukip and close associate of Farage.
• A fourth relates to the £5m gift from the Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne to Farage, which was first revealed by the Guardian in April.the 

The Guardian says Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, has declined to answer any of the questions put to him and, via lawyers, threatened to injunct the paper prevent the publication of these details.

Earlier this week, the same paper the Guardian revealed that the undisclosed and much-discussed £5m gift to the Reform's leader, Nigel Farage, from a cryptocurrency billionaire shortly before the 2024 general election had been reported to the NCA.

As far as Farage is concerned, this week is resembling the scene late in Shakespeare's King John where messengers arrive from all directions with bad news. And it's only Wednesday.

Later. The Guardian has published a second article with more details of the transactions in question.

Free: Wishing Well

The singles chart at the start of the Seventies, before glam rock's sparkly hands got around its throat, was an eclectic place and you sometimes found quite heavy bands like Free having hits.

And music moved on so quickly then that it's surprising to learn that Free's singer Paul Rodgers was in a school bond with Bruce Thomas of the Attractions. It feels like they should have come from different generations.

"Ahaarrrr!" A voiceover session from hell

One of my favourite podcasts is the Chelsea Fancast, which has kept me informed and entertained through my club's recent travails. Its two regular presenters are Stamford Chidge and JK.

Stamford Chidge, I worked out eventually after putting the clues together, is David Chidgey. He's a former television producer, a psychotherapist and the son of the late David Chidgey, who was Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh from 1994 to 2005, and the pilot of the Liberal Democrat spacecraft Bird of Liberty in the early years of Lord Bonkers' Diary.

JK is not such a mystery. He is Jonathan Kydd, son of the once-ubiquitous British film actor Sam Kydd and an actor, writer and voiceover artist in his own right.

In this short film, which has won many festival awards, he plays both the actor and the director in a voiceover session from hell.

And to prove that all rabbit holes join up eventually, he writes on his website that, when he was a boy, Alexander Mackendrick saw him several times for the title role in Sammy Going South.

Navigating for Change calls for more investment in Fenland rivers

A flotilla of boats will make its way up the Great Ouse from St Ives to Bedford this month to highlight a critical lack of investment in the river and in Britain’s inland waterways generally.

Organised by the Great Ouse Boating Association and Fund Britain’s Waterways, the Navigating for Change campaign cruise will take place from July 13-18, travelling some 25 miles along the Great Ouse.

The flotilla will stop at riverside towns including Huntingdon and St Neots before arriving at the Bedford River Festival on July 17

The cruise is intended to draw attention to the growing funding crisis affecting waterways managed by the Environment Agency, which is responsible for maintaining the River Great Ouse in a safe and navigable condition.

According to the organisers, the Environment Agency has identified an annual funding shortfall of between £6m and £11m across the Anglia region. They say that around 40 of the region’s 60 locks and weirs are approaching the end of their operational lives, with no capital renewal programme in place.

Campaigners argue the consequences are already being felt across the network. Navigation on the River Cam was suspended for more than 18 months during 2024/5 following the structural failure of two lock islands, with repairs estimated to cost £10m. Meanwhile Brandon Lock on the Little Ouse remains closed because of a lack of funding for repairs and channel clearance.

For more information on the flotilla and Navigation for Change, go to Towpath Talk.

The major parties should boycott Farage's dodgy by-election

Liberal Democrat HQ doesn't need much encouragement to ignore unpromising parliamentary by-elections these days - it's worryingly reminiscent of the Nick Clegg years.

But in the case of the Clacton by-election Nigel Farage has just engineered, we would be right to ignore it. We should not field a candidate.

And the other major parties shouldn't field one either.

In a move straight from the Trump playbook, Farage wants to turn his by-election into a people versus the Establishment election. He says the voters of his constituency should be the judge of his actions.

The people of Clacton can vote how they choose, but they have no power to overturn the rules the House of Commons has put in place to regulate the conduct of its members.

So if this is an attempt by Farage to dodge an inquiry into his exotic finances, it will fail.

Let him be opposed by boring Count Binface and a cast of assorted nutters. The major parties should have nothing to do with his by-election.

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."

A Liberal England guest blogger shows us around Snailbeach Mine

Ginger Beard Mark and the musician Eric Loveland Heath visit the old lead mine at Snailbeach in Shropshire. In its heyday in the second half of the 19th century, it was the most productive lead mine in the country.

Eric Loveland once wrote a guest post for Liberal England about growing up in Snailbeach and his reaction to it today. 

And you can download his digital album Snailbeach Mines Trust.

See? It's not just me who's taken with the place.

Parents shocked after children’s paper hedgehogs found to contain pages from explicit novel

The Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award for this worrying one from the Wirral.

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 how the Liberal Democrats should respond to the changed political landscape, on 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'd like 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 last 10 Liberal England guest posts:

• 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
• Councillor defection scores on the eve of polling day – Augustus Carp
• Why have the Lib Dems given up fighting most parliamentary by-elections? – Augustus Carp

Call for the Rutland Water Monster to be displayed in Oakham

More than 2000 people have signed a petition calling on Rutland County Council to acquire the fossil ichthyosaur found at Rutland Water in 2021 for display in the county museum at Oakham.

Writing on Oakham Nub News, Lawrence Fenelon, chair of the Friends of Rutland County Museum and Oakham Castle, says:

At March last year RCC's accounts showed over £39m of usable capital reserve. Why can't a small bit of it be used to get the Sea Dragon back in Rutland? If it is not spent by March 2028 it will go to the new combined authority and be lost to Rutland.

Our council is in danger of missing a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring a major attraction to Oakham.

A BBC News story about the campaign for the fossil to be displayed Rutland says:

The authority told the BBC risings costs meant it could no longer afford to proceed with its original plan, but confirmed the petition would trigger a debate on the issue at a future full council meeting.

Readers of Lord Bonkers' Diary, whether in Liberator or on this blog, will have known all about the Rutland Water Monster long before 2021.

The Joy of Six 1543

"In many cases, lack of coordination and administrative errors in the Home Office cause failed removals. Complications around booking flights, arranging escorts and other practicalities have all been found to prevent deportations, as well as procedural issues such as lack of travel documents. But continued misrepresentation in the media and political rhetoric means the ECHR has continued to be a scapegoat." Sarah Singer argues that the government's new immigration and asylum bill won't work.

"'I’m Northern Irish', I would say with indignation, every time an English person referred to me as Irish. Growing up in Newtownards in the 1990s there was never any question of my Britishness. British passport, Union Jacks on every lamppost, and fully immersed in British pop culture." Yet Claire JC is now campaigning for a United Ireland – she explains why.

Nick Baird thinks the Liberal Democrats' proposed scheme for Defence Bonds is a bad idea.

"Picked up by the stump microphone as England’s batting unravelled at Trent Bridge, the Kiwis summed up what a lot of us are thinking: 'What are they doing?' It was aimed at the batters in front of them. But by the end of what was an extraordinary, shocking and chaotic day, it felt like the question that summed up English cricket from top to bottom." Elizabeth Ammon asks if anyone in English cricket knows what they are doing.

Timothy Ott on Charles Dickens's visit to Washington: "Dickens and an unnamed official, 'having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered,' simply entered the White House and attempted to find the president on their own."

Nigel Andrew on the forgotten genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett: "The critic Norman Shrapnel wrote: 'Of the two candidates for greatness among comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that looks the more secure.'"

Penguin Cafe Orchestra: Perpetuum Mobile

I can remember studying Penguin Cafe Orchestra CDs, intrigued by their artwork, but I never bought one. I wish I had.

Borderless explains what inspired the band's formation by the classically trained guitarist and composer Simon Jeffes:

In 1972, food poisoning confined Jeffes to bed where he dreamed of a Kafkaesque residential block full of people with empty lives. The following day a voice in his head said distinctly, "I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe. I will tell you things at random." Jeffes tried to imagine what the house band of that cafe might sound like. When he recovered, he transformed his dream into truth and invented the PCO.

Perpetuum Mobile comes from Signs of Life, the fourth of the PCO's five studio albums, and is one of their best-known tracks. I don't set out to impress you with my esoteric taste on this blog, but I may steal "I will tell you things at random" for its slogan.

Jeffes died in 1997, aged only 48. His legacy is two groups inspired by his work. Penguin Cafe is led by his son Arthur, while a loose group of old PCO hands play as The Orchestra That Fell To Earth.

"We have blue passports, but everything else has gone south": Andrew George on the failure of Brexit

Andrew George won back the St Ives constituency in Cornwall for the Liberal Democrats two years ago today – he had previously represented it between 1997 and 2015. 

It's estimated that there was a 54.8 per cent vote for Leave in St Ives at the 2016 referendum, but that hasn't stopped Andrew telling it like it is in the Bude & Stratton Post:

There’s been much commentary on the 10th anniversary of Brexit referendum. I viewed it as a test of UK self-confidence. In the event the answer was negative. That we didn’t see ourselves as leaders in Europe. That we believed we were being taken advantage of, and had become rule-takers and had lost control.

That’s not to say I believed there would be no benefits from Brexit. I acknowledged at the time there was potential to "take back control" of fisheries management and marine conservation. However, even that hasn't materialised. Indeed, it's worse – we’re now outside the rooms where decisions are made and have less influence.

Yes, we have blue passports(!), but everything else has gone south. All authoritative sources agree the economy has suffered; now estimated to be at least six per cent smaller than it would have been. Brexit has been a drag on trade and growth, seen a cut in investment, and opportunities – especially for younger people – have shrunk.

Cornwall has been a major loser after decades of EU support. Promises of replacement funding didn’t materialise. I respect those who voted to Leave, and their hopes and desires. But those who led the Brexit campaign should stand up and be accountable. Their lies and stoking of fear may have succeeded, but they it says everything that they have largely avoided public attention during this 10-year review.

Violent drunk banned from booze after throwing flapjack at police officer's genitals having missed with Pot Noodle

It wasn't a long judges' meeting: the Manchester Evening News has won our Headline of the Day Award.

Incidentally, when I worked at Golden Wonder many years ago I was a member of the Pot Noodle tasting panel. I'd rather have been on a flapjack tasting panel.

Ian Holm as Richard III in the BBC's Wars of the Roses from 1965

First, Fergus McClelland led us to Brecht on television. Now, bless his little khaki shorts, he's led us to Shakespeare.

Ravensbourne University London explains the origins of the BBC's Wars of the Roses:

This production had had a highly acclaimed run on the RSC stage in 1963 and was directed for BBC Television in 1965 by Robin Midgley and Michael Hayes. It was filmed on the stage at Stratford-On-Avon using a multi-camera set up, resulting in a much more fluid filmic result with a greater variety of shots and even the use of hand-held cameras for the battle scenes. 

In this respect the production was a forerunner of today’s recorded theatre productions which are regularly streamed to cinemas and homes throughout the world.

The Wars of the Roses was an abridgement of four Shakespeare plays – the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III – into three plays: Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III.

You can find an extract from the third of these above. McClelland is playing Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower, having played the similarly ill-fated Edmund, Duke of Rutland, earlier in the production.

But the real interest is Ian Holm's Richard III, who here appears not as a monster but very much the younger brother to the charismatic Edward IV that he was.

This recording is of some importance to theatrical history, because Holm was struck down with stage fright in the Seventies and thereafter chose to concentrate on film and television work.

Liverpool Lib Dem boss accused of using "sex appeal to build fanbase" in cover shoot

Today the Liverpool Echo walks off with our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges requested several copies of Attitude. #JustSayin

The Joy of Six 1542

"Multiple sources inside the children’s home division said that, as they prepared for sale, they were pressed to rapidly open more homes and take on more children, even when they didn’t have the staff to keep up. They claim they were told this was so the company could be sold for the maximum amount of money." Jessica Murray says that when private equity takes over a UK care home it can mean the children are treated like cattle.

Ben Worthy argues that, if he is to succeed as a prime minister who takes over in mid-parliament, Andy Burnham will need to create a clear sense of change and offer new policy quickly.

"Surbiton itself is no longer a byword for Toryism. Each of its councillors is a Liberal Democrat, with only two Conservatives elected across the entire Royal Borough of Kingston. At a parliamentary level, the successor seat of Kingston and Surbiton has been Tory for just two years since 1997, that brief period of 2015-17 when the Lib Dems fell away. An area which was once considered a safe base for Conservatives with ministerial ambitions and ability is now the home seat of Sir Ed Davey." John Oxley mourns the Conservatives' loss of the Margot Leadbetter vote.

Danielle Williams on how the US lost its public swimming pools to racism: "When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the US."

Sintija Brence salutes the Queen Of Southern Gothic, Bobbie Gentry.

"About most of the rescues Gregory is brisk but particular. An elderly couple in a broken-down yacht press biscuits on the crew; a woman makes eyes at the coxswain ('the problem was an open seacock, swamping their bilge'); in failing light a small boy – 'my mum said I should stay with the boat' – is scooped from a flimsy inflatable dinghy just in time." Susannah Clapp meets a literary lifeboatman at Dungeness.