Friday, January 24, 2025

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The more senior Teletubbies and several generations of Dimblebys

Lord Bonkers was in and out of Savoy Hill all the time in the early years of the BBC, though he has asked me to make clear he was never subject to an arse-booting himself. Such methods may not be appropriate in the world of today, but the old boy's right: something does need to be done about BBC News.

Friday

It’s high time we had a proper BBC arse-booting; those Tory placemen (one of them is a former member of the Bee Gees, if you please) have been there long enough. I don’t suppose you’ve had the pleasure of being present at this ceremony, where a bad hat who has evaded the stern eye of Sir John Reith and talked his way into the corporation, is ejected forthwith, but the way of it is this. 

The Chief Commissionaire, traditionally a former RSM from one of the Guards regiments, boots the miscreant the length of the longest corridor at Broadcasting House and out through the revolving doors. That corridor is lined with BBC luminaries, who tut and look disappointed in the bootee. You might spot, for instance, John Snagge, Grace Wyndham Goldie, Alvar Lidell, Franklin Engelmann, Katie Boyle, Moira Anderson, William Woollard, Angela Rippon, Lauren Laverne, Richard Osman, the Frazer Hayes Four, the more senior Teletubbies and several generations of Dimblebys in the throng.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week...

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Lib Dems will continue to back 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions to schools

Embed from Getty Images

It may be unintentional, but as it stands the government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill allows the creation of a new generation of church schools that are not bound by the existing 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions.

So I'm pleased that the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Munira Wilson is to move an amendment that would make new schools subject to this cap too.

Pleased? Back in 2017, I blogged about a Sunday Times report that Muslim pupils outnumber Christian children in more than 30 church schools.

I said I regarded this as good news and quoted Timothy Garton Ash, in his book Free World, on the woolly duffle-coat of Britishness:

Gisela Stuart, herself a German-British MP, describes a neighbourhood in her Birmingham constituency that has a large Asian population. Since Asian parents want the best education for their children, and the best school in the neighbourhood is a convent school, they send their daughters there. Never mind the Catholicism; that can be expunged by Islamic instruction after school hours, at the local madrasah. 

So there they sit, row upon row of girls in their Islamic headscarves, being taught maths, British history and, incidentally, the story of baby Jesus, by nuns in their Christian headscarves. A complete muddle, of course, but Europe will need more such muddling through if it is to make its tens of millions of Muslims feel at home.

As to whether we should have faith schools at all, I remembered tackling this question long ago in an article for the Guardian website.

Reading it today, I find it better than I remembered - I'd still be happy to defend the views in it.

What I had forgotten completely is that it was written as a reply to the mighty James Graham. 

Those were the days. When the Guardian would invite one Lib Dem blogger to reply to another Lib Dem blogger and they both got paid for the privilege.

Mystery over 200-year-old bottle of urine

Congratulations to BBC News for winning our Headline of the Day Award, but their headline could have been, nay, was, much better.

The judges have furnished me with this proof - the reference to Cleethorpes could have made this our Headline of the Year.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "It’s just given a tremendous sneeze"

The second day of Christmas at Bonkers Hall is quite as much fun as the first. Danny Chambers' phone call was inspired by a news story that broke at Christmas:

Russian scientists have unveiled the remains of a 50,000-year-old baby mammoth found in thawing permafrost in the remote Yakutia region of Siberia during the summer. They say "Yana" - who has been named after the river basin where she was discovered - is the world's best-preserved mammoth carcass.

More fun with Cook and her malapropisms another day, no doubt. 

Boxing Day

When I thank Cook for her sterling work yesterday, she expresses a wish that I will entertain the current prime minister here one day so that she can meet him – “He used to be Director of Public Persecutions, you know.” 

That pleasurable duty done, today is a day for talking with old friends – perhaps waving a cold turkey drumstick to emphasise a point – and strolls about my Estate. I take a party of new MPs to meet the Rutland Water Monster (‘Ruttie’ to her friends, among whom I am proud to number myself). Later, the more intrepid spirits leave for the legendary Boxing Night party at the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes.

I am dozing by my Library fire when the telephone is brought to me. “Hi, this is Danny Chambers. They found a frozen baby mammoth in Siberia and I’ve had it by my fire all Christmas, and given it a rub with a towel now and then. It’s just given a tremendous sneeze, so all the signs are encouraging. I was wondering if you had a spare field where it could….” Politely but firmly, I replace the receiver.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week...

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Green energy will supplement conventional energy rather than replace it

Writing in the London Review of Books, Adam Tooze begins his review of More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz thus:

Any​ hope we have of containing the escalating climate crisis depends on getting to net zero, which will mean cutting greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next few decades. Coal, gas and oil will have to be replaced with clean energy sources. 
In the language of climate policy, this is known as the green energy transition and is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions that have shaped modern history. The first was from organic energy – muscle, wind and water power – to coal. The second was from coal to hydrocarbons (oil and gas). The third transition will be the replacement of fossil fuels by forms of renewable energy. 
The transition narrative is reassuring because it suggests that we have done something like this before. We owe our current affluence to a sequence of industrial revolutions – steam engines, electricity, Fordism, information technology – that go back to the 18th century. Our future affluence will depend on a green industrial revolution, and to judge by the encouraging headlines, it is already well underway. 
The standard estimate is that energy transitions take about half a century; if that were true of the green energy transition, it could still be on schedule for 2050. 

Unfortunately, as both Tooze and the the book he is reviewing argue, the history of human energy use provides little support for this optimistic take.

Tooze writes:

When we look more closely at the historical record, it shows not a neat sequence of energy transitions, but the accumulation of ever more and different types of energy. Economic growth has been based not on progressive shifts from one source of energy to the next, but on their interdependent agglomeration. Using more coal involved using more wood, using more oil consumed more coal, and so on. 
An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the energetic mainstays of our modern way of life – is without precedent.

This is hardly an encouraging conclusion, but I'll leave the last word with the 18th-century bishop and philosopher Joseph Butler:

Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi

Then again...

I love this: you hardly need to ask for subtitles. German satire could be the trend of 2025. 

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Resourceful orphans, elves and the like

On days like this I wonder where Lord Bonkers' family is. Perhaps being immortal, whether through bathing in the spring that bursts from the ground beneath the former headquarters of the Association of Liberal Councillors or that cordial the Elves of Rockingham Forest sell, is bound to leave one lonely?

Christmas Day

This is what Christmas used to be like at the Hall! A long table simply groaning with good things and lined by friends, relations, staff, Liberal peers and MPs, members of Earl Russell’s Big Band, resourceful orphans, elves and the like. 

Here, Daisy Cooper is discussing economic policy with the Wise Woman of Wing and the Professor of Hard Sums at the University of Rutland. There, the King of the Badgers discusses the finer points of guerrilla warfare with Helen Maguire and Mike Martin. And everywhere, Freddie and Fiona are rushing out to make or take phone calls to prove how important they are – I strongly suspect them of phoning each other. 

I even spy, at the farthest end of the table, a couple of Conservatives who were MPs until the last election, but I pretend not to notice: it can’t be easy finding a job with that on your curriculum v. And as a multitude of the heavenly host put it (and I think rightly): “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week...

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Picturesque decay: The Derwent Valley Light Railway in the Sixties

Opened in 1912 and 1913, the Derwent Valley Light Railway somehow escaped both Grouping in 1923 and nationalisation in 1948.

By the time I was a student in York, it ran from its own Layerthorpe station in the city to Dunnington, a distance of four miles. The line was linked to the wider system at its York end by British Rail's Foss Islands Branch.

When this footage was taken in the Sixties, the line ran further than Dunnington, reaching Cliffe Common and the BR line from Driffield to Selby. When that line closed in 1964, the process of cutting back the DVLR began. It closed altogether in the autumn of 1981.

I love the picturesque decay here - I recall the DVLR I knew as being better maintained.

A short stretch of the line was reopened in 1993 as part of the Yorkshire Museum of Farming.


The Joy of Six 1315

"As even some of his most sympathetic supporters in the media are now coming to realise, Starmer's Labour is neither red, nor blue, nor green, nor indeed any other easily recognisable colour on the political spectrum. Let there be no mistake about it: these are the days of Grey Labour." Alex Niven was disillusioned with this Labour government even before it came to power.

Jane Green and Raluca L. Pahontu present research that contradicts the idea that Brexit was voted through by the economically left-behind: "Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth."

M.F. Robbins tells the tale of two playgrounds: "One is closing soon while the other - brand new - has stood empty for nearly a year, ringed with steel fencing to stop people from using it. Their stories aren’t the most important thing you’ll read today, but they illustrate something much bigger - the collapse and retreat of local government, and the profound effect it will have on our public spaces."

Mother Jones talks to Daniel Immerwahr about what the history of American expansion can tell us About Trump’s threats.

"Unexpected visitors to the Director’s Box that day were ex-goalkeeper and US Secretary Of State Dr. Henry Kissinger, quite literally one of the most famous men in the world at that point and in the UK for talks on Rhodesia, and UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland. A step down from Raquel Welch’s appearance a few years back, possibly, but enough to get pictures of Kissinger, Chelsea Chairman Brian Mears and his wife June in a number of national newspapers." Tim Rolls takes us back to Stamford Bridge in 1976, when the Chelsea team had only one player who had cost the club a transfer fee.

Ian Visits on Heathrow Junction, the London station that came and went in six months in 1998.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Hoping it might be so

Lord Bonkers has made this observation about when Christmas begins before, but as that was in 1990 - before any of you were born - I think he can be forgiven for repeating himself.

As for the rest, I refer the hon. Gentleman to Thomas Hardy's poem The Oxen.

Christmas Eve

To St Asquith’s for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. I’m sure I speak for many when I say I do not regard Christmas as having properly begun until I hear the tremulous voice of a choirboy singing the opening verse of ‘Lloyd George Knew My Father’. 

Late in the evening, a fellow in the Bonkers’ Arms announces “Now they are all on their knees,” referring to some legend that the oxen kneel in their stalls at midnight on this very day to welcome the Christ child. The Smithson & Greaves Northern Bitter has been flowing freely, and it does sound Rather Far Fetched, so bets are placed against. 

To ensure fair play, I join a party heading for Home Farm to see what the aforementioned beasts are up to. And – would you believe it? – they are kneeling. I have strong suspicions that the oxen were in on this from the start and will receive a share of the winnings, but say nothing, hoping it might be so. 

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.


Earlier this week...

Monday, January 20, 2025

Peterborough Cathedral launches £300,000 appeal to allow it to stay open daily

Peterborough Cathedral has launched an emergency appeal to raise £300,000 by the end of March to avoid running out of money.

It costs over £2m a year - almost £6,000 a day - to run. About 15 per cent of that, says the Guardian, comes from the Church of England , and the remainder must be raised by the cathedral through events, rent, grants and donations. Nothing comes from the government.

The cathedral's dean. the Very Rev. Chris Dalliston, tells the newspaper:

"There have been three or four years of erosion of our reserves. Post-Covid, visitor numbers were low and events were slow to pick up. There has been a huge rise in the cost of utilities - our bill has gone up by more than £100,000 a year across the estate, a huge additional expense.

"Peterborough is not a wealthy city. It’s not a hotspot on the tourist trail, it’s not seen as glamorous. In recent years, footfall has not been high in the city centre. We’ve lost our big department stores. People have been badly affected by the cost of living crisis.”

"We’re a spiritual hub and a community space in the heart of the city. But we also have to run this as a business. We need people to recognise the urgency of the situation. We’re not crying wolf."

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Two Well-Behaved Orphans with their faces stained green

The new Liberator - that's issue 427 - is out today. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

Among the articles this time is one on the evolving politics of Leicester by Alistair Jones. The city saw both the only Conservative gain of the 2024 general election and a shadow cabinet member lose to an Independent who campaigned on Gaza.

On the other hand, there's also Lord Bonkers' Diary. We join him a couple of days before Christmas.

Monday

For the past fortnight, the larger part of the car park at the Bonkers’ Arms has, without my leave, been given over to an attraction calling itself ‘Santa’s Christmas Wonderland’. While there were queues on the first day, word has got about the village; this morning I find myself the only visitor. 

I suspected the hand of the Elves of Rockingham Forest when I first heard of the place: my suspicions are confirmed when I see the legend ‘No Money Returned’ prominently displayed and a couple of truculent elves on the gate. 

I make a beeline for the promised grotto, only to find a disgruntled Meadowcroft in a red suit and false beard (I’m certainly not paying to sit on his knee: as his employer I can do that any time I choose), while the advertised “elven childlings” turn out to be two Well-Behaved Orphans with their faces stained green. What Matron will have to say about that, goodness only knows. 

At least I am able to give Meadowcroft a breather by donning the scarlet tunic myself, though I am embarrassed when the Revd Hughes arrives on an unannounced ecumenical visit to the elves and recognises me behind the beard.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West, 1906-10.

'Penis-shaped' housing estate application lodged

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Remembering Don Cupitt and his television series The Sea of Faith

The philosopher, theologian and Anglican priest Don Cupitt died yesterday.

I first came across him through his 1984 BBC television series The Sea of Faith. As that Wikipedia entry says, it dealt with 

the history of Christianity in the modern world, focussing especially on how Christianity has responded to challenges such as scientific advances, political atheism and secularisation in general.

The series had six parts, and this one dealing with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein is the one I remember best. 

I also remember it being discussed on Ludovic Kennedy's programme about television Did You See? One of the panelists was Bob Monkhouse, and I was impressed by his suggestion that the austere beauty of the house Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna helps you understand his philosophy.

Certainly,  a good part of the appeal of Wittgenstein, who was the dominant figure in academic philosophy in Britain for much of the 20th century, was aesthetic, whether it was the rigour and numbered paragraphs of his early work or the endlessly interpretable aphorisms of his later.

So thank you to Don Cupitt, and I have to end by observing that we really don't get television like this any more.

The Joy of Six 1314

"The policy is less interesting than the politics, simply because the policy isn’t going to happen any time soon- at the risk of saying the most boring thing I’ll ever write on this substack: the Lib Dems are not in government. But for me, this remains an important milestone, because it is the biggest crack yet in the unloved Brexit consensus. The fact Davey feels able to make the shift at this time, tells us something important about the politics of the moment we’re in." Lewis Goodall weighs the importance of Ed Davey's foreign policy speech.

Dan McQuillan fears Labour's AI action plan is a gift to the far right: "Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, has repeatedly stated that the UK should deal with Big Tech via 'statecraft'; in other words, rather than treating AI companies like any other business that needs taxing and regulating, the government should treat the relationships as a matter of diplomatic liaison, as if these entities were on a par with the UK state."

"The problem for Siddiq is not her personal connections to Hasina - no one can help who they are related to, or be judged for having a personal relationship with their relatives - but rather the fact that the Labour MP is herself named in the investigations taking place in Bangladesh." Shehab Khan on the resignation of anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq,

David Zipper argues that gigantic SUVs are a threat to public health and asks why we don't treat them like one.

Pam Jarvis explores the philosophy, psychology and politics of Pooh.

"When the Paramount executives saw the finished product they were appalled and planned to delay distribution. But by December 1968, Paramount had failed to show their annual quota of British films. Their Barbarella was proving a disaster at the UK box office, so they had to replace it with something, preferably British. Two nights after if.... was released in central London, the queues stretched for half a mile." Alex Harvey revisits Lindsay Anderson’s groundbreaking film If....

The Murder Capital: Words Lost Meaning

Your or I would have written a Focus leaflet: The Murder Capital started a rock band.

Here they are talking to DIY magazine in 2019:

Questioning the current social and political climate in their homeland, they’re viscerally animated, demanding better at every turn.

"It just feels like there are loads of fuckin' hotels going up over Dublin, where there could be new housing," James hammers home. "There are cranes all over the city. There’s one on George’s Street right now, and they're gutting this beautiful Georgian house, and I stopped and asked the builder what it was gonna be, and it’s turning into a fuckin' Premier Inn.

"The hotels are only a sidenote to the homelessness, the suicide, the mental health issues. The lack of services available to people who aren’t from even middle class backgrounds," he continues. "We just wanna talk about it as much as possible, and make sure that the government knows that we’re not happy with the standard of where it’s at. People have real issues in their lives, and they need somewhere to go and talk about these things beyond their friends and families. It feels like there’s no excuses. I know bad things that have happened to people that were avoidable."

"James" is James McGovern, the band's singer.

Words Lost Meaning is a track from The Murder Capital's new single and a track from their forthcoming album Blindness.

McGovern explained it to NME:

"I've had experiences in my own relationship, being on tour a lot, where the words 'I love you' would be used over text, or as a way to close a conversation.

"They were dismantling and losing their essence… if the words 'I love you' are losing meaning in a romantic context or a partnership, it’s a worrying sign. Those words mean so much, and they should be respected as such. I’d rather say goodbye and say nothing if it's not going to be said with meaning."

Saturday, January 18, 2025

By 1954 not even Dickie Attenborough was safe on a bombsite

I've been reminded of another children-and-bombsites film to fit into my schema of these postwar British productions. And it suggests that by 1954 these unofficial open spaces were just as dangerous to adults as they were to children.

Talking Pictures TV showed The Eight O'Clock Walk the other day. This was a film born out of concern at the death penalty and reliance upon circumstantial evidence.

As you can see in the clip above, Richard Attenborough has an April Fool trick played on him by a little girl who says she's lost her doll on a bombsite. Being in a happy mood, he tries to help her.

Later, she is found murdered on the same bombsite, And when that woman reports seeing Attenborough shaking his fist and chasing the girl, the police become very interested in him.

The original children-and-bombsites film was Ealing's Hue and Cry from 1947, which portrays the bombsites as an unofficial playground for all the boys of London - and the children shown are all boys, except for Joan Dowling.

But within a few years, British films; view of bombsites had changed completely - terrible things happened to small boys who wandered on to them.

The only substantial exception to this pattern I've found is Innocent Sinners from 1958. This film suggested that bombsites provided working-class children with the space and privacy they lacked in their overcrowded homes. It is also the only children-and-bombsites film with a girl at its centre.

What was so threatening about bombsites? The way Rose Macaulay painted them may give us a clue:

This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

It’s here among the "dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Maya temples, hiding them from prying eyes," that Barbary finds what Macaulay, in a letter about her novel to her friend Hamilton Johnson, calls the girl’s "spiritual home." These "broken alleys and caves of that wrecked waste" offer the traumatized, homesick Barbary a safe haven.

The Eight O'clock Walk is not on Talking Pictures catch-up service TPTV Encore, but you can find it on one of those dodgy Russian sites.

And - don't worry - Attenborough escapes the noose, but it takes an absurd, Perry Mason courtroom coup to save him.

Google-Backed Chatbots Suddenly Start Ranting Incomprehensibly About Dildos


In a Liberal England first, the website Futurism wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges were heard to quote Keir Starmer's judgement that AI offers a chance to turbocharge growth, create the companies of the future and radically improve oviewur public services. 

Friday, January 17, 2025

Calum Miller makes the case for a much closer relationship with the European Union

Calum Miller, MP for Bicester & Woodstock and the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson, was one of the panellists on Question Time last night. The show came from Northampton, the largest town in a county that voted solidly for Leave.

Notice the audience applause as he makes the case for much closer relations with the European Union - politicians are at last beginning to state the obvious truth about Brexit and, in particular, the way it was enacted.

I also note that the people who were so angry about the EU before the referendum our no happier today - they've just found new things to be angry about.

The Bailey Head, Oswestry, is CAMRA's Pub of the Year


Congratulations to Grace Goodlad and Duncan Borrowman whose Oswestry pub The Bailey Head has been named Pub of the Year by the Campaign for Real Ale .

Grace and Duncan were both Liberal Democrat councillors in Bromley. Duncan is also a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate and was a member of party staff at Cowley Street for many years.  I visited their pub last summer.

Grace told the Mirror today:

"We are thrilled, we hope we can live up to the award. In our wildest dreams we never thought we would win CAMRA Pub of the Year. From small beginnings nine years ago, we have taken everything one step at a time, through COVID, slowly improving to the point where we now have twelve handpulls serving six cask beers and six ciders and perries, plus sixteen other draught lines.

"When we bought the pub nine years ago it was failing and had been listed as an Asset of Community Value by the local CAMRA branch. That listing made it possible for us to save it from potentially becoming housing and turn it into the pub it is today."

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Rare 1950s film of Thomas Cubitt's stuccoed streets in Pimlico

The billing on YouTube says of this film:

These pieces of originally silent film appear to have been either outtakes, film made for atmosphere or just as a recce of the area.

They were made for two British feature films made in the 1950s.

Most of the clips are connected to the film Hunted which starred Dirk Bogarde, and was released in 1952.

Some are connected with the later film Innocent Sinners starring Flora Robson and David Kossoff, and released in 1958.

Both these films use extensive outside shots in and around the Pimlico area, and for lovers of this unique "village" in the heart of London, they are well worth looking out for.

Both Hunted and Innocent Sinners are among my children-and-bombsites films. The first two clips here are clearly outtakes from Hunted, because you can see young Jon Whiteley in them.

Incidentally, most of the Pimlico scenes in Passport to Pimlico were shot in Lambeth - some on a set built on a bombsite off the Lambeth Road.

The music hall songs the poster has used as a soundtrack, have reminded me that, when I was young, my mother sometimes sang She Was Poor But She Was Honest.

And she included a verse that I cannot find anywhere online:

See 'im riding on an 'orseback
With his friends in Rotten Row,
While the victim of his passion
Slinks away to Pimlico.

That would have fitted well here.

The Joy of Six 1313

"With Meta’s recent speech policy changes regarding immigration, in which the company will allow people to call immigrants pieces of trash, Mark Zuckerberg is laying the narrative groundwork for President-elect Trump’s planned mass deportations of people from the United States." Joseph Cox points to parallels between these changes and events in Myanmar in 2017, when Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate, and the military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture and rape against the Muslim minority population. 

Eliza Mackintosh has better news from Finland, which is winning the war on fake news - a war it sees as crucial to safeguarding its democracy.

The Ferret fears that farmers' protests are being hijacked by conspiracist groups: " One farmer has described being added to a campaign WhatsApp chat after an invite by [James] Melville. He claimed the group was 'toxic' with members 'fighting amongst each other' about Covid-19 vaccines and discussing 'uprisings' against the WEF."

"There are over a thousand beavers living in the Tayside region of Scotland, for instance, widely thought to descend from beavers deliberately, and illegally, released in the early 2000s. In England, the New Forest population of pine martens are similarly thought to originate from illegal releases in the early 1990s." George Holmes, Darragh Hare and Hanna Pettersson report that illegal attempts to reintroduce lost species are surprisingly common.

Joel Morris explains how its producers make The Traitors such compelling viewing: "The first edit is of the round table scene at the end of each show (the climactic confrontation between the contestants, where they level accusations at each other and attempt to root out the rats in the nest). The editors cut together this part first, even though it’s the end of the show. Once that sequence is 'locked', they go back and make the events of that round table scene seem inevitable, by editing the day’s footage to set up the dramatic payoff that you see at the end."

"Aside from being a deliciously dark and humorous noir-tinged thrilled with some wicked one-liners, especially from Walker, Strangers on a Train is rich in Surrealist symbolism. Bruno is a madman, and the Surrealists were fascinated by madness." Sabina Stent argues that  Hitchcock's film is a truly Surrealist piece of art. 

Ed Davey says Trump is a threat to peace and calls for a UK-EU Customs Union

You can read his speech in full on the Liberal Democrats' website:

Let’s not kid ourselves. The incoming Trump Administration is a threat to peace and prosperity in the UK, across Europe, and around the world.

For the next four years, the UK cannot depend on the President of the United States to be a reliable partner on security, defence or the economy.

So how do we deal with Donald Trump? We need to do it from a position of strength.

And that means urgently strengthening our relationships with the UK’s other partners – most importantly our European neighbours, whose economic and security interests are so closely intertwined with ours.

That is why, today, I am calling on the Government to negotiate this year a brand-new deal with the EU.

Not just tinkering around the edges of the Conservatives’ botched Brexit deal, but agreeing a better deal for Britain. A deal to form a new UK-EU Customs Union by 2030 at the latest.

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writing

This is another of the columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy - you can read more about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Press site.

I believe this column, on this blog's hero Richard Jefferies, was published a few issues ago.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writers

Nature writers lived for decades in the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, author of the Daily Beast’s ‘Lush Places’ column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." But today Boot would get a respectful mention in a Guardian survey of the new nature writing occasioned by Robert Macfarlane’s latest. 

The granddaddy of nature writing is the 19th-century Wiltshire journalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887 aged only 38. He has enjoyed periods of popularity, notably during the Second World War, when there was a widespread sense that rural Britain was somehow ‘what we are fighting for’, but still awaits a full rediscovery. 

When he is rediscovered, we shall find he is far more than just a nature writer. After London, for instance, is an early essay in post-apocalyptic fiction:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.

That may just be the best nature writing Jefferies ever produced. It’s certainly good enough to build a convincing world, even if the action of the book is rarely worthy of living in it.

******

One of the things I value in Jefferies is his ability to surprise. Try his 1885 essay ‘Wild Flowers’:

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a change in the air, the feeling and tone of the place. It is close by, but it is not the same.

To discover these minute differences, which make one locality and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.

Fend-shui is mentioned by some 19th-century Western writers, but they tend to scoff where Jefferies sounds intrigued. More sympathetic accounts appeared in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it became a vogue.

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Though it was published as a three-volume adult novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy is the urtext, the motherlode, of children’s holiday adventure stories. It’s why generations of us grew up on books where nicely behaved kids found buried treasure or rounded up Nazi spies and criminal gangs – a school of fiction that, one critic suggested, began with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century and was killed off by the Beeching cuts and the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I think I know Bevis well, but when I pick it up, the way the action is told entirely from a child’s point of view still astounds. Mark Twain got there first, but you won’t find many other examples in the fiction of this period. 

And Jefferies can surprise with snatches of social history too:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

This explanation sounds deeply speculative, but it’s a fact that few young black Americans can swim and that this is often put down to poverty and historic segregation.

And this is a battle now being fought again in Britain. Jefferies was born at Coate Farm, just outside Swindon. Today the town’s Oasis leisure centre, from which a certain Nineties rock band took its name, lies empty and local politics are all about the struggle to reopen it – and in particular its swimming pool.

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Scoop ends with William Boot home from Africa and writing ‘Lush Places’ again in his study:

“The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves,” he wrote; “maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble."

But Waugh adds a chillier observation of his own: “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.”

Jefferies was well aware of this. In his Wood Magic, the young Bevis can talk to the animals and understand their speech. The world he discovers through this is far from the pieties of the Victorian nursery – it’s not one where birds in their little nests agree. 

Instead, Jefferies uses a convoluted tale of imperial conquest and political intrigue to make us understand that nature is a Darwinian war of all against all.

It’s not a jungle out there, but it is an English woodland.

New Statesman: Lib Dems cheered and baffled by Kemi Badenoch

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The Liberal Democrats have two strategic objectives in this parliament. 

One is to be a better opposition than the Conservatives by focusing on issues of substance, like social care reform, rather than ones of style or personality.

The second is to embed our new MPs as local champions, so that even voters profoundly disillusioned with Westminster will welcome their achievements in their communities.

That's according to George Eaton writing on the New Statesman website.

He goes on to say:

From an electoral perspective, the Lib Dems’ aim is to "finish the job” in the Blue Wall. Of their 30 notional target seats, all but four are held by the Tories. That Kemi Badenoch has displayed little interest in defending – or reclaiming – such territory has cheered (and baffled) the Lib Dems.

But Davey’s team also believe they have opportunities against Labour. “We want a Liberal voice back in the cities,” an aide told me. Early targets include Nick Clegg’s former seat of Sheffield Hallam (Labour majority: 8,189) and Simon Hughes’s former seat of Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Labour majority: 7,787).

Elsewhere in the article, I was surprised to read that it was Paddy Ashdown who pioneered "pavement politics".

This approach, under the grander name "community politics" was developed in the previous decade by the Association of Liberal Councillors and graduates of the Young Liberals' radical era.

At that time Paddy was still... Well, if I told you what he was doing in those days, I'd have to shoot you.