Mind you, the border does funny things around there. So the large hill in the background and to the right, Corndon Hill, is in Wales, while the high ground to the left and behind it is Clun Forest and so in Shropshire.
Those tortured rocks in the foreground are, of course, the Stiperstones' very own.
I've already posted the first two videos in this series of film lectures by Ian Christie. They were on Gothic London and on the British pioneer Robert Paul.
Here, in his final lecture, he talks about British cinema and Swinging London.
David Campanale, the former prospective Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Sutton and Cheam who was deselected in 2023, and the national party are oceans apart when it comes to the compensation he deserves for suffering religious discrimination.
The Guardian reports:
Campanale's schedule of loss, seen by the Guardian, puts his claim at £788,740.75, including interest. It seeks compensation for injury to feelings, aggravated damages, past and future earnings, the loss of an MP's pension, counselling costs and the "loss of a chance", or "loss of political capital".
But in a counter-schedule filed on Friday, the Lib Dems described Campanale's claim as "grossly inflated and egregious". Their lawyers say £14,000 should be awarded for injury to feelings, and as a volunteer political party member, Campanale could have been expected to withstand “rigorous political debate and criticism”. They put aggravated damages, past and future loss of earnings, an MP’s pension and the loss of political capital at £0.
The Lib Dems have admitted to direct and indirect discrimination on grounds of religion or belief under the Equality Act in connection with the affair.
Anyway, here's a souvenir of Clun and of this extraordinary summer. It's taken from the castle mound looking down on the town's bowling green, though 'green' isn't quite the word at present.
It seems to be a Shropshire thing to have bowling greens on old castle sites. There is one at the top of what remains of Bishop's Castle castle, and the other day I found one in Ellesmere too. In fact, it was seeing the bowling green that awoke me to the fact that I was looking the remains of a castle.
Shakespeare knew all about the River Trent's fondness for changing its course. Here's Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1:
In and around Nottingham, these changes of course often have more to do with human engineering than natural forces.Methinks my moiety, north from Burton here,
In quantity equals not one of yours:
See how this river comes me cranking in,
And cuts me from the best of all my land
A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out.
I'll have the current in this place damm'd up;
And here the smug and silver Trent shall run
In a new channel, fair and evenly;
It shall not wind with such a deep indent,
To rob me of so rich a bottom here.
One reason for going there was St Woolos' Cathedral. Ever since I learnt that it isn't the Victorian rebuild I had imagined and has a history dating back to the sixth century, I have wanted to see it.
The photo above shows its twelfth-century Romanesque portal and the arches from the same period in the nave. The building is no larger than many parish churches, but it still impresses.
And the one below shows John Piper's window and decoration behind the altar. The other windows at the east end of the cathedral are largely of clear glass, which I have come to like more and more. It suggests a God, not of gothic obscurantism, but of light and reason.
The Independent wins our Headline of the Day Award.
After they had announced their verdict, I told the judges I didn't receive any training when I was a councillor all those years ago.
They asked if I lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road.
Xueyu Geng asks if Britain’s railways can cope with ever‑more extreme heat: "Railway assets have very long lives: a track, bridge or embankment built or substantially renewed today could still be in service in 50 or 100 years. That creates a fundamental mismatch between the current design life and a climate that keeps changing within that lifetime."
"Just occasionally, when your teenage heroes turn out like this, doesn't it just make your heart want to sing along with them?" Pete Paphides salutes Paul Heaton.
Tanya Aldred looks at the problems our extreme summer has caused cricket groundstaff.
Perhaps they are on a religious retreat?
The Creation sound good today and all sorts of prominent musicians cite them as an inspiration, but they failed to make it big in the Sixties.
It's a shit business.
The trespass will take place on Sunday 13 December. Its location will be revealed nearer the date. You can sign up for more information on Eventbrite.
Right to Roam says:
There’s a right to roam over just 1 per cent of the constituency. Despite big swathes of Makerfield being Green Belt land, local residents are shut out of the countryside that’s on their doorstep.
Working with locals and the North West Right to Roam local group, we want to draw attention to this unfairness and to highlight Andy Burnham's golden opportunity to introduce a Right to Roam Bill in the next King’s Speech.
The campaign is holding two public events before the trespass that members of the public are welcome to join.
An evening event in neighbouring Wigan on Thursday 27 August, 7pm, at The Old Courts. Organised with the Right to Roam North West local group, and joined by Nadia and Guy from the national campaign, it will see discussion about increasing land access, who owns the North West and what access reform could look like.
On Saturday 12th September, Right to Roam will have a stall at the annual Wigan Diggers Festival that celebrates the life and legacy of Gerrard Winstanley, the 17th-century land reformer who argued that "the Earth is a Common Treasury for All". Winstanley was born in the parish of Wigan, which includes much of present-day Makerfield.
The basin is at the end of a short arm off what is now called the Llangollen Canal. I took plenty more photos of the town and its canal, which I'll post another day.
I may be in Shropshire, but our Headline of the Day comes from the BBC News Leicestershire pages:
Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service said they were called to Aylestone Meadows after Nell "must have decided to cool-off in the canal near the Packhorse Bridge" but suddenly became stuck in the waterway.
A technical rescue team from Southern Station and a crew from Wigston Fire Station were dispatched to the scene on Saturday evening, and working alongside local farmers they lifted the animal out and had her checked over by a vet.
A statement from the service said Nell now "appears to be in a stable condition" at home, adding: "You can lead a horse to water, but it can be a struggle getting it back out again."
The judges did find a Shropshire Star story to commend highly:
"The impact would be huge": Residents rally against plans for three new homes in Shropshire village
"Perhaps the most depressing thing of all is that just when we need to be mustering competent researchers who can undertake the careful and time-consuming work of reviewing new submissions, academic publishers are pursuing rapid growth, which will provide ever more opportunities for fraudsters to find an outlet for their work." Dorothy Bishop finds that the rise of AI is making it increasingly difficult to identify fraudulent scientific journal papers.
Samantha Ward considers how climate change will affect zoos.
"The Venice-set Don’t Look Now remains one of Roeg’s most admired and influential works, and one of the few to be warmly received on arrival. An intelligent, harrowing and provocative adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s supernatural thriller in which a married couple (movingly portrayed by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) use a working assignment in a wintry Venice as an attempt to overcome a recent tragedy in which their young daughter has drowned, the film hints at the horrors that underlie domesticity in Roeg’s characteristically imagistic style." Jason Wood surveys the work of Nicloas Roeg.
Chris Arnade visits the beautiful, lonely city of Perth: "Right next to my apartment is a tidy pocket park, with playground, dog walk, bathroom, and a garden of plants that only could be found in Western Australia. It’s idyllic and as I passed it my first night I imagined spending my week sitting there, reading, watching kids play, making friends with the retirees, but since then I’ve never seen anyone in it other than solitary morning walkers anxiously scolding their dog for not defecating fast enough."
Olly Lambert's three-part documentary The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke, which is currently on the BBC website, is a brilliant and horrifying piece of work. It's like a David Lynch film, every frame of which is true.
Lambert has written about the making of it in the Independent:
Last May, I sat in a Utah coffee shop with Chad Franke, the son of the infamous 'momfluencer' turned convicted child abuser Ruby. Once regarded as 'America’s mom', Ruby and her family’s former counsellor Jodi Hildebrandt are now both serving up to 30 years in prison for aggravated child abuse on Ruby’s young children. “My mom would always tell me I’d end up in prison,” Chad says casually, then turns to look out the window. “Which is kind of ironic, when you think about it.”
Eight months earlier, Chad and his family had become headline news all across the US and beyond. Theirs was a dark tale of a spectacular fall from grace, with Ruby’s mugshot appearing on magazine front covers and branded a 'Monster Mom' after her 12-year-old son was found in the haze of the Utah desert begging for food and water.
He was emaciated and covered in deep wounds, and would lead police to discover his youngest sister – mute and similarly malnourished – in a closet at the home of the family therapist. Medics later determined that the young boy would have died within two weeks had he not unlocked his own handcuffs and heroically sneaked out an unlocked door to get help. His actions undoubtedly saved his and his sister’s life.
Questions about what had happened behind the façade of this 'perfect' Mormon family still remained unanswered, and Chad, his sister Shari and their dad Kevin were keen to give their first, detailed account of what really went on behind closed doors and when the cameras were turned off.
I watched all three parts last week and was left with three overriding impressions:
I hesitate to recommend something so dark, but this is a brilliant piece of work.
Most people I meet have an opinion on HS2. Different opinions. It has been expensive. It goes to Euston. It was a plot by Labour or the Tories. It goes too fast. Or not fast enough. It was a sop to the North or a scheme to divert economic activity to London.
What are the most useful points? Was it anything but a muddle? Some acquaintances have advised me to use these new GPT-LLM-RAG machines to produce a summary (AI). However, I know too much about how they work, so will politely decline. Instead I might read a human-written review of a human-written book that has been deemed somewhat informed.
So off to the Literary Review for some opinion. Transport expert David Leeder reviews Off the Rails: The Inside Story of HS2 by Sally Gimson. I was looking for something with lots of numbers, geography, requirements, political objectives, strategy, analysis, risk-management, expertise and national benefit. Who am I kidding? It was Oxbridge debating with itself and Natural England being paid off one change at a time.
Leeder tells us that at least 40 per cent of the population (of what ?) lives in a quadrangle formed by London, Bristol, Liverpool and Leeds. The distance between London and Birmingham is only around 160km while London and Manchester are around 260km apart. It is proposed to operate HS2 at 320 kph. Forty-nine minutes. Barely time to scan the Guardian, and tell the buffet assistant twice that there is no milk in Americano. There never was.
We can skip the bits about Blair and Adonis (who?) and the aspersions about Roy Jenkins and claret. You might as well take Avanti West Coast from Euston and find a good forward-facing seat in Coach C. They have USB and the Project Reach cellular upgrade should be working in 2028, even at Piccadilly and Euston. It would take most of 49 minutes to get Teams working and find that the AI sent you the wrong meeting minutes document. Was that £38bn or £80bn? At least the No.1 circular bus at Manchester Piccadilly is both free and powered by electricity.
Much of the rest of the review takes on a tour of the group-think of the rotating cast of London-based decision-makers. Leeder describes them as "Britain’s political class, which comprises a narrow pool of upper-middle-class types who share many of the same vague assumptions."
This seems plausible as the stated requirements used vague language and rotated with administrations. The very basic cost-benefit analysis that would link national growth with having a high-speed railway at all seems missing. The two most dynamic nations do not encourage us: the US does not bother with high-speed rail, the PRC has long distances between major cities and poor legacy transport networks. We do not compare with either.
Perhaps the most concise criticism is that the low productivity of most of the UK outside London and the Home Counties may well be due to factors having nothing to do with transport. A high pound, managed decline, class struggle, City bias, disdain for STEM, and the privilege of the Oxford Union will be suggested by a quick-lazy search engine.
HS2 functions as a 'shiny' and could be useful as a distraction from unpalatable political action. It is rather expensive for that though.
Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.
"The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was the first book to make money for me. I’d actually done two chapters just before my husband was ill but had put it away. Abelard Schuman, who’d published some short stories in America, accepted it (called 'Bonnie Green' then) but said it was too scary – could I prune it, take out the wolves? I said Never!
My agent literally forgot it for a year, then apologised and sent it to Cape. It did quite well here, but after a lovely, whole-page review in Time it sold like mad in America, and so confirmed me in my mad resolution to freelance."Doubleday, who published Wolves, asked me (amazingly conveniently) about crime novels, so I interspersed children’s books with thrillers. ..."Margery Allingham spoke of left- and right-hand writing, what you do for yourself and what you do to satisfy others: I suppose Wolves was for myself, and the Dido books – in fact, they’re probably too self-indulgent, full of dialect and adult word-play. But children’s books should be written on different levels, or there will be nothing for them if they read it again at a later age."
What was Peter Sellers doing playing the ukulele on a track on Steeleye Span's 1975 album Commoners Crown?
Maddy Prior explains:
While sitting over lunch we were discussing what we need to sparkle up the track New York Girls. Ukulele would be good someone said. Anyone got one? Anybody know someone who can play one? Peter Sellers plays it says Bob. Pause. Eyes meet, why not? We could ask. He could only say no.
So we spent another interesting afternoon with a rather diffident Peter Sellers. I don’t think he’d ever been asked to play on a session before and was apprehensive about the whole affair until he realised we were delighted to have him there. He loosened up as time went by and finally finished by adding, unprompted, some Goon voices. We were ecstatic.
Bluebottle writes: I like this game!
In her Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, this blog's heroine Marjory Allen records how H.G. Wells invited her to design the garden at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park:
He was seventy-three, already ill and dispirited, and visitors were not encouraged; but I spent many amusing hours with him.
One foggy afternoon when we were sitting in his study, he drew out of the shelf one of his own books and inscribed on the fly-leaf, "To my most adored Annie, from H.G." The joke appealed to him and, taking one book after another, he wrote more inscriptions: "To Muriel, the only woman I ever loved" and "For Helen, who was my wife in all but name".
After signing half a dozen copies he tired of the game, heaved a sigh and said, "That will fox them all when I have gone." I wonder if it has.
"Judge Paul McCloskey scanned a group of immigrant children, none of whom had lawyers present, in his windowless suburban Virginia courtroom this past Thursday. Where’s the 7-year-old?' he asked." Eric Bazail-Eimil observes immigration proceedings in Trump's America.
Anilya Krishnan on concerns about the 'wilderness therapy' programmes, which often set back families thousands of dollars and form part of the US's lucrative 'troubled teen' industry.
Christian Wolmar says cycling is a feminist issue.
"What really troubled them was that putting the story of William into the context of a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents was creating a parallel between William as an innocent boy who was killed allegedly by the Jews, with the story of the boys under two years old in Bethlehem being killed by a Jewish king, Herod." Pat Ashworth on Norwich Cathedral's approach to its troubling unofficial local saint.
Alison Kerr celebrates Alastair Sim: "His rich, commanding voice and heavy-lidded, dark-shadowed eyes lent him an air of menace upon which he capitalised to memorable effect in Scrooge and as various other characters of dubious morals. Sim appeared to play these parts – the lecherous lodger (with dyed black hair combed over to one side) in London Belongs to Me, the initially frightening author in Hue and Cry, and the mysterious title character in An Inspector Calls – with relish and gusto."
Piers Cross blends the psychological and the political to produce a convincing list.
I wrote about Richard Beard's book Sad Little Men in my first column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. I like its original subtitle 'Private schools and the ruin of England'.
Helen Morgan has been interviewed by Healthcare Management about the Liberal Democrats' concern at government plans to reduce external scrutiny of the National Health Service.
She says:
"We know from polling back in 2024 there are people who feel their care has been poor, but they don't want to report that back into the NHS because they are dependent on that care, and they think it might impact on the care that they're receiving, and that's the value of Healthwatch because it's so independent of the NHS."
There are a number of changes involved, so it's all rather technical and involves a lot of acronyms, but this is certainly one of the most important current Lib Dem campaigns.
Guy Stagg understands A Canterbury Tale:
A Canterbury Tale suggests that love of country does not mean some romanticised retreat into the past, but rather drawing on England;s heritage to navigate the uncertainty of the modern world.
As a result, the film floats free from its origins as wartime propaganda to become one of cinema’s most beautiful explorations of history and belief.
Though the pace is slow and the plot dreamlike, it finds space for art and nature, friendship and love, nation and faith – all the things people sacrifice their lives for.
I'm reminded of something the American philosopher Richard Rorty said:
National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.
Stagg does get something wrong though. He tells the always-moving story of how Martin Scorsese sought out Michael Powell, who by then was living in obscurity and near poverty, and told him his films had inspired a whole new generation of American directors.
But then he adds:
The best evidence of this influence is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film’s opening sequence, a prehistoric ape throws a bone into the air; as it falls, the camera jump-cuts to a satellite floating in space.
The trick was lifted from Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, which begins with a group of pilgrims making their way across medieval England. When a falconer sets a bird of prey into flight, it soars from his arm and sweeps through the air, to become a Spitfire diving from the sky. In a single cut, the viewer is carried from Chaucer’s England to the Battle of Britain.
I don't think Kubrick can have got this idea for his jump-cut from A Canterbury Tale. In a footnote to an article of his own on the film, Paul Banks says:
Ian Christie has recently pointed out in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 6023 (7 September 2018), 6, that even if Kubrick had seen A Canterbury Tale before making his own film, it would have been the "severely truncated and re-ordered US version", the only print available between the late 1940s and 1978, which omitted the sequence in question.
Jago Hazzard charts the evolution of London's Green Park station from its 1906 opening as Dover Street to its modern role as a major interchange.
You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.
Femi Owolade argues that Black academics suffer when life stories eclipse scholarship: "Academics are ... expected to have stories that capture attention. University websites, media profiles and press releases often lead with biographies before discussing research. Stories of hardship, resilience and unlikely success have become part of higher education branding. The academic is no longer just a scholar but an integral part of the university’s public image."
"The UK’s Online Safety Act was sold as a 'world-leading' child-protection law, one that would establish the UK tech sector as a global safety-tech powerhouse. Instead, it has normalised the idea that governments can bolt identity checks and surveillance layers onto the internet. Now that blueprint is crossing the Atlantic, where authoritarian-minded politicians see it as ready-made kit for censorship and control." Heather Burns finds that a British law has inspired the Trump regime's attempts to censor its critics.
No, Harry Potter fans didn't force the rerouting of an undersea able to preserve Dobby's' grave. Dan Davies explains.
Meaghan Roddy says Frasier brought Nineties minimalism to the masses: "I’d hazard a guess that Frasier was the first time a giant swath of America came to experience interior design meant to represent wealth that wasn’t slathered in gold and marble. It was quiet and sophisticated."
Clayton Dillard celebrates John Schlesinger’s film Billy Liar (1963): "Though the film’s ending is outwardly celebratory as Billy strolls back toward his family’s flat, the fact that he’s opted for the familiar comforts of home feels like a questionable – even nightmarish – endpoint for this young person who so craves his autonomy."
Yes, Leicestershire County Council is run by Reform. Why do you ask?
Anyway, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.
