The Joy of Six 1487

"On this occasion Starmer has taken both the correct and popular position and stuck to it despite relentless attacks from the right. The result is that it is now his opponents, rather than him, who is having to embark on a humiliating U-turn." Adam Bienkov argues that the government should learn from Farage and Badenoch's reversal on Iran.

The Lancet dissects Robert F. Kennedy Jr's year of failure.

Michael Webb and Rebecca Flook say the choices universities and colleges make about AI are political: "The systems now being woven into education are shaped by a remarkably small group of people. Not 'the internet' as the source of training material. Not 'society' influencing the way we use these tools. It’s shaped by a small leadership class in a handful of companies, operating within specific political and economic pressures."

"I lived in a suburb on the very edge of London, far away from Soho’s Piano Bar or the Waterloo WHSmith glimpsed in the video to ‘West End Girls’. I was a lonely boy at the back of the garden. There weren’t out gay people or role models in my white working class neighbourhood, just an expectation that you would be the same as everyone else, and fit in – or else." John Grindrod reveals how Pet Shop Boys sold city glamour to queer suburban kids.

Parker Henry on Iris Murdoch as a philosopher. It seems to me she is being discovered in this role as her reputation as a novelist fades.

"Two Italian former amateur radio operators, Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, claimed to have recorded audio from an orbiting capsule in the days before Gagarin made his flight, and it was actually the fourth slice of startling audio released by the pair." Was Yuri Gagarin really the first Soviet cosmonaut? David Crookes considers the theory that the USSR launched earlier, unsuccessful manned missions.

Michael Nyman: Drowning by Numbers (Finale)

Michael Nyman's music makes me happy. Certainly, the only word for this performance by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble and friends is "joyous".

You can visit Noah's Ark in Williamstown, Kentucky​

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Most Europeans who visit the United States go to New York or California, which are liberal, cosmopolitan places very like Europe. But the rest of the country, as I was told when I visited New York myself, isn't like that.

You can say that again. Here's Alexander Bevilacqua writing in the London Review of Books:

In Williamstown, Kentucky​, no small distance from the "mountains of Ararat", the biblical resting place of Noah's Ark, a 510-foot-long wooden structure rises from a ridge. The Ark Encounter – less than an hour's drive from Cincinnati International Airport and within a day’s drive of much of the Bible Belt – is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. 

A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers Centre, where creationist-friendly science textbooks are on sale next to Noah's Coffee. Outdoor speakers play music reminiscent of a fantasy video game. The Answers Centre looks out across a lake to the main attraction. The ark is massive (roughly the length of St Paul's Cathedral), handsome and very strange.

Entertainments are on offer: a petting zoo; camel rides; zip lines; virtual reality ‘time travel’. There are flashes of humour: visitors can pose as a biblical patriarch in a cut-out panel; the refreshment stands promise "a flood of refills". Yet the attraction serves a serious purpose. 

Built by an evangelical Christian group called Answers in Genesis (AiG) and completed in 2016, the Ark Encounter makes the case that the story of Noah occurred exactly as told in Genesis: that humanity was saved by the eight people who built the vessel and boarded it together with seven pairs ‘of every sort’ of animal, then stayed on it during a deluge that lasted forty days and for a further 150 days when the floodwaters prevailed, plus the better part of a year as the waters receded.

He ends on a more secular note:

AiG doesn’t have a monopoly on contemporary interpretations of the ark. A Dutch carpenter and creationist called Johan Huibers built his "half-size" ark – 230 feet long – after a dream in which he saw his country "disappearing under an enormous mass of water’" (fifty years earlier, in 1953, the North Sea Flood killed almost two thousand people in the Netherlands). 

In 2010, he sold it to the impresario Aad Peters, who turned it into a travelling gallery of Bible stories. When Peters brought the ark to the UK in 2019, Extinction Rebellion activists boarded the vessel. On one side they hung a giant banner bearing the words: "We need a better plan than this."

What is your favourite TV show that no one else has seen? Gophers!

"What is your favorite TV show that no one else has seen?" asked someone on Bluesky yesterday.

I replied, as I generally do to such questions, with Gophers!'

Reader's voice: Gophers!?

Liberal England replies: Yes, Gophers! Wikipedia puts it very well:

Gophers! is a Channel 4 children's programme about a family of American gophers who move into a new neighbourhood, called Sycamore Heights, living next door to a family of uptight but well-intentioned rabbits, The Burrows.

There were many recurring jokes within this short-lived show such as Arthur Burrows' vegetables planning a rebellion to escape his garden, a mad scientist ferret called Dr Wince, whose ambition was to conquer the world by obtaining a crystal buried in the Gophers' garden with the help of his reptilian servant Sly, and an alien in love with a zucchini determined to get home. Also there were stereotypical "Mexican" cockroaches (dressed in costumes of Mexican peasant revolutionaries of the Mexican Revolution of 1910) who lived in the Gophers' house or trailer park mobile home always trying to steal their food.

The series won the WorldFest Houston Gold Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1990 and was sold to 67 countries. The characters used a mix of animatronic costumes and puppetry.

And when I looked for an image to illustrate this post, I found a whole episode on YouTube.

The Joy of Six 1486

The Secret Barrister argues that Keir Starmer and David Lammy are taking an extraordinarily dangerous gamble with our individual liberty: "Restricting trial by jury has been paraded by the government as the only way to tackle the record backlogs and delays in the Crown Courts – caused by years of chronic underfunding and political mismanagement – yet the government has produced not a shred of credible evidence to support this claim, nor is it interested in discovering any, forcing the legislation through Parliament at breakneck speed in the apparent hope of avoiding inconvenient scrutiny."

"The electorate is fragmented, multi-issue, and stubbornly resistant to simple stories. The Greens won in Gorton and Denton because they grasped that. Everyone busy constructing sectarian phantoms did not. Democracy does not need protecting from Muslim voters. It needs protecting from the people who would rather not count them." John Oxley criticises the right's response to the Gorton and Denton by-election,

Mihai Andrei explodes the myth that wind farms massacre birds.

"When I talk to students and ask them to tell me the truth, not necessarily what they would tell their teacher, but quietly tell me whether they go on to AI when they’ve got a piece of work to do, they say 'well actually yeah please don’t tell my teacher but yes I do'." Samantha Booth reports that pupils have been confessing their sins to Ian Bauckham, the head of Ofqual.

"His paintings unnerve us as they unnerved their Baroque viewers. Caravaggio didn’t draw but painted directly onto the canvas. He invented a dramatic, overpowering chiaroscuro, a spotlit style he used to freeze the worst moments of his subjects' lives in paint. There are so many decapitations, a frankly weird number of decapitations." Erin Maglaque on the shocking art of Caravaggio.

 Grant McPhee chooses his top 15 wyrd folk albums.

Jonathan Meades on the BBC on the BBC's own buildings

Thanks to Illuminations Media for pointing me to this Jonathan Meades video from 1989.

Couple tried claiming neighbour's land with gnome

"Surrey. It would be Surrey," remarked one of the judges as they made our Headline of the Day Award to BBC News.

He also suggested you seek professional legal advice before attempting to claim your neighbour's land.

Thomas Telford's St Mary Magdalene, Bridgnorth, may face closure

A Bridgnorth church designed by Thomas Telford has serious structural problems, reports the Shropshire Star:

In a statement the church said that the issues are not cosmetic and "go to the heart of whether St Mary's can continue to serve the town".

The statement also says:

St Mary’s Church is one of Bridgnorth’s most cherished buildings used both as a place of worship and a key community venue – but beneath its beautiful exterior, serious structural problems are putting its future at risk.

A recent study led by Oliver Architecture has revealed that without significant investment, the church could face closure within 15 years.

The challenges are fundamental: the flooring requires complete replacement due to extensive dry rot, the heating system is beyond repair, and poor thermal insulation is making the building increasingly difficult to maintain.

Community consultation events will be announced by the church authorities shortly.

St Mary Magdalene's was originally the church for Bridgnorth Castle. The current building was erected between 1792 and 1795. In a typically pragmatic 18th-century move, the church was aligned north–south to make better use of the site and to present a more pleasing prospect to adjoining streets.

Its distinctive tower stands 120ft high and has a clock, eight bells and a copper-covered roof.

Bridgnorth has a second church, St Leonard's. It is no longer used for worship but is often used for concerts. The group of buildings on the approach to it constitute a miniature cathedral close.

Chaos: Down at the Club

John Bromley was a nearly man of Sixties pop. His Manchester-based band played hard-to-get with Mickie Most, with the result that the producer signed Herman's Hermits instead. In 1969 he brought out an album of his McCartneyesque songs, Sing, on which he was backed by the band Les Fleurs de Lys.

The Riff, quotes a now-vanished Facebook post of his about his success as a songwriter for other artists:

English songwriter John Bromley has written over 200 works with over 60 recorded and performed worldwide by major artists such as Shirley Bassey, Sacha Distel, Petula Clark, Richard Harris, Paul Anka ... John Farnham, Jackie De Shannon and the Ace Kefford Stand.

I can't find any well-known songs that he wrote though.

But Bromley did get on Top of the Pops and into the lower reaches of the UK singles chart with Down at the Club. He explains its genesis for It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine:

I took on a part-time role as a tape operator at Advision Studios in Gosfield Street, London. After finishing a late-night recording session with John Anderson’s prog-rock band Yes in 1973, recording engineer Martin Rushent and I recorded a glam rock song called Down at The Club for fun with the free studio time. 

We spent the entire night playing and overdubbing and multi-tracking keyboards, drums, bass, guitars, and vocals, with Martin singing the main vocal. His voice was pretty deep, and because we wanted the vocal to sound like a younger singer, we slowed down the backing track and recorded his vocal at three-quarter speed. 

When we did the final mixdown at full speed, his voice sounded like the singer we wanted on the record, and after the final mixdown, what had initially been a bit of fun sounded pretty commercial!

I took the recording to Warner Brothers A&R man Martin Wyatt the next day, and he loved it. He asked who the band was, and I just made a name up on the spot. The non-existent band became a ghost band called Chaos. We got a £1,000 advance from Warner Brothers A&R, and the track was released as a single by Polydor.

The single got a lot of play from Radio 1 and Radio Luxembourg, and quite unexpectedly and unbelievably, I took a call from the producer of Top of the Pops asking if Chaos was available to appear on TOTP in next week’s show. It was a brilliant opportunity but not without a few problems, the first being there wasn’t actually a band...

We cobbled together a bunch of musician friends and co-opted Tony Head as the frontman, deciding to use the master tape to mime to when the show was recorded. (We got away with it.) After the show was broadcast, the single scraped into the UK Top 50 but didn’t get any higher.

Down at the Club is very 1973 - you can hear Slade, Gary Glitter and Wizzard in there. But maybe, as with the last-named and The Glitter Band, it was a song about rock and roll more than it was a rock and roll song. Still, many worse singles made the charts that year.

The Joy of Six 1485

"Yet again, we’re all caught up with the fame-encrusted stories of rich, powerful men. The women and their reported life-scarring encounters with Epstein and his set are an afterthought. At best, they’re treated as a salacious backdrop to the fortunes of men whom society has lionised and – with epic irony – thought better than the rest of us." Michelle Cook says the reaction to the Epstein files spotlights how badly we are still failing women and girls.

"As DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] expands its footprint, it’s making its cruelty manifest in suburban areas like Roxbury – towns that might have once felt insulated from the brutality and chaos that immigration agents have unleashed in US cities." Schuyler Mitchell reports that the suburbs are fighting back against ICE's plans to turn warehouses into detention centers.

Peter Kellner writes an open letter to Labour's next prime minister: "It will be crucial to learn from Starmer's mistakes. Listing them is the easy bit. The crisis that has engulfed him deserves an explanation. How did he end up disliked by so many voters and alienating so many of his own MPs?"

Martha Gill argues that enthusiasts for apprenticeships haven’t worked out they fit into a modern economy: "The story of apprenticeships is a long struggle to make a scheme built for a time of trades and manufacturing fit into a modern flexible service economy – a wobbly journey of correction and overcorrection."

"One of the biggest barriers he sees for aspiring cricketers is that their parents often struggle to afford the prohibitive cost of kit, which can quickly spiral into hundreds of pounds." The former England bowler Saj Mahmood talks about making cricket to all with Chris Britt-Searle.

Chris Lovegrove has a site devoted to the world of Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles.

A German bombing raid on Dublin in May 1941 killed 28 people

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Here's bit of history I didn't know. The caption for this photograph on Getty Images says:

Emergency services at work in a bomb damaged street in Dublin, Ireland, the day after a German air raid, which killed 34 people, 1st June 1941. The cause of the raid on neutral Ireland remains unclear. 

Wikipedia – it's strange how the advent of AI has changed that site from a near embarrassment to the last online redoubt of human judgement – explains what happened:

In the early morning hours of 31 May 1941, four German bombs fell on north Dublin. That night, a large number of German aircraft were spotted by Irish military observers and searchlights were put up to track them. It was noted that the aeroplanes were not flying in formation but independently in a meandering manner and some appeared to be circling. 

After the German planes did not clear the airspace over Dublin and continued erratically flying over the city, the Irish Army fired warning flares, starting with three flares representing the colours of the Irish flag to inform the pilots they were over neutral territory. followed by several red flares warning them to leave or be fired on. 

After fifteen minutes had passed, the order was given to open fire and Irish anti-aircraft guns began firing at the bombers. Local air defences were weak and the gunners were poorly trained. Although they had shells capable of destroying bomber aircraft, they failed to hit their targets.

Eventually, some of the German planes dropped their bombs. The first three caused many injuries but no fatalities:

The fourth and final bomb, dropped about half an hour later, fell in North Strand, killing 28 people, destroying 17 houses and severely damaging about 50 others, the worst damage occurring in the area between Seville Place and Newcomen Bridge. Ninety people were injured, approximately 300 houses were destroyed or damaged and about 400 people were left homeless.

An article on the Maynooth University site agrees with the figure of 28 fatalities, so I have used that in my headline.

Though some saw the bombing as a warning to Ireland to remain neutral in the war, the most likely explanation is that the bomber crews thought they were bombing Belfast. There were also the inevitable conspiracy theories that Churchill had somehow caused Dublin to be targeted to save British cities from being attacked. Uniquely, in this case Churchill seems to have been their source himself:

After the war Winston Churchill said that "the bombing of Dublin on the night of 30 May 1941, may well have been an unforeseen and unintended result of our interference with 'Y'". He was speaking of the Battle of the Beams, wherein "Y" referred to the direction finding radio signals that the Luftwaffe used to guide their bombers to their targets. 

The technology was not sufficiently developed by mid-1941 to have deflected planes from one target to another and could only limit the ability of bombers to receive the signals.

You can learn more about this "Battle of the Beams" from the links in my recent post on the secret RAF base at Charley in Leicestershire.

The LNWR branch line from Weedon to Leamington Spa

It's time we had another good disused railway video. This one follows the route of the old LNWR branch line between Weedon and Leamington Spa.

Wolfhampcote is mentioned. As I discovered at the age of 10 on a family canal holiday, here you will find a deserted medieval village whose church still survives, two abandoned railway lines (the one the video is about and the Great Central main line) and an abandoned meander of the Oxford Canal, complete with a tunnel.

Is it any wonder I turned out how I did?

A contemporary review of Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles Masterman

I once wrote of C.F.G. Masterman, Lucy Masterman's biography of her late husband Charles Masterman, in Liberator:

There are too many undigested extracts from her diary for it to rank as great literature, but besides its value as a picture of Masterman, it is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand the big beasts of that Liberal government.

For not only did Masterman serve under both Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, he and Lucy became friends of both families

On 3 November 1939 the Salisbury Times published a long review of the book by Alan Campbell Johnson. He was far from disinterested: he reveals that he was Lucy Masterman's research assistant while she was writing it. Still it's a good review and here's an extract:

Mrs. Masterman’s book corrects many misconceptions. Two in particular should be stressed: first, that the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Governments were made up of shallow optimists who were only scratching on the surface of "the condition of the people" question: second, that Liberalism means laissez faire, and is accordingly both dead and damned. 

The fact that C.F.G. Masterman's work and influence is so little known is testimony to the prevalence of these two falsehoods, Socialist Party propaganda has naturally tended to underestimate the importance of the pre-war social reform, but when a writer like Mr. George Dangerfield, in his book "The Strange Death of Liberal England," makes no reference at all to Masterman and his circle, it is time to protest in the interests of historical accuracy. 

The intellectual movement behind those Liberal Governments with which Masterman was so closely identified, of which many of his contemporaries admitted him to be the leader, was really one of pessimism, of a profound sense that the odds against them were great and that the time was short. 

There are countless quotations in "C.F.G. Masterman" to develop this contention. Here is a random example from a letter Mrs. Masterman received from her husband at the end of 1908:

Above all let's not relax our eagerness to do something for the poor; "all the world's agin the poor!" 1 feel that I am not so much inclined to care or at least to break into revolt against conditions of poverty as I come to settle down in the social order as one of a settled society accepting the whole as whatever is is right. Don’t let's do it; don't let’s ever tolerate the cruelties and injustices of the world. Pray for the fire within adequate to burn up the sins of the whole world.

Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband is surprisingly hard to find, particularly as it was republished around 1970. My mother, bless her, found me this copy one Christmas via a dealer in Brig o' Turk, Perthshire.

Southern Television's Midnight is a Place from 1977

The whole of the Southern Television adaptation of Joan Aiken's Midnight is a Place from 1977 has turned up on YouTube.

Aiken was a wonderful writer for children – her gothic tales were at once funny and scary. Often there's an element of pastiche of 19th-century writers in her work. If she's pastiching anyone here, it's the Charles Dickens of Hard Times.

Because this adaptation dates from the Seventies, it runs to 13 episodes and stars Simon Gipps-Kent ("Master Bell"). You can play a short extract from episode 1 above.

If I remember the book correctly, the steam press was used to stamp the pattern into carpets because it was cheaper than weaving it.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

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

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

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

Here are the 10 most recent guest posts published here:

• What is the technical debt of Thames Water? – Peter Chambers
• The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle – Anselm Anon
• Defections Update: Lib Dem Conference Special – Augustus Carp
• Artist Nick Jensen steps into history's shadow at Belvoir Castle – Matthew Pennell
• Reform are still gaining councillors and Labour and the Tories are still losing them – Augustus Carp
• In the cause of duty: Walter Stolworthy is remembered at Wymondham station – Neil Hickman
• Understanding the views and worries of the city of Oxford Lib Dem – William Lane
• Local councillors changing party: Augustus Carp’s review of 2025 – Augustus Carp
• Lib Dems must be "Tough on billionaires, tough on the causes of billionaires" – Anselm Anon
• The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon – Peter Chambers

The Joy of Six 1484

"It’s easy to believe that this is all a blatant and shameful effort by Republicans to distract from the Epstein files, shift focus from ICE’s domestic terrorism, seize another massive cache of global oil production, and fuel the cancellation of an upcoming election reckoning. These would all be correct assessments, at least from Trump’s self-serving, narcissistic point of view, but there’s another, more alarming motivation for religious Conservatives dragging the planet into a self-destructive, full-scale bomb-a-thon: the second coming of Christ." John Pavlovitz takes us inside a scary place – the Republican-Evangelical mind.

Helen Amass talks to Uta Frith about her current understanding of autism. Professor Frith says: "People still hang on to the idea that there is something that unites all the people who are diagnosed as autistic. I don’t believe that any more."

Richard Toye warns against simplistic invocation of Winston Churchill's name as a way of supporting military action: "Churchill once observed that war, once unleashed, rarely follows the tidy paths imagined by those who start it. That warning may be as relevant as any of his more famous phrases."

A leading judge has as issued new guidance saying unregulated psychologists should not be called to give expert evidence in family courts, reports Hannah Summers.

"Both – and they were truly intertwined for decades – made their mark at Oxford University: Potter, the controversial working-class voice who shocked viewers on BBC Television’s Does Class Matter? (1958); Trodd, the provocative editor of university mag Isis who got removed from his post in favour of the milder-mannered David Dimbleby in 1959." Ian Greaves celebrates the career of Kenith Trodd, the television producer who worked closely with Dennis Potter.

Libby Brooks finds the children of Lanark enjoying Whuppity Scoorie.

The Housemartins: Build

The Housemartins once appeared as guests on Mavis Nicholson's afternoon chat show. 

They sang a perfect live a cappella version of Caravan of Love, and Paul Heaton (often billed as P.D. Heaton in this era) said he didn't like discussing his lyrics because it was "like having your work read out in class".

Jane Dodds says she won't be beaten by online death threats

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Jane Dodds, the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats and our only Senedd member, told a BBC Radio Wales phone in today that death threats won't force her out of politics.

BBC News quotes her remarks:

"I've had a number of threats made against me, all online, they are very serious threats... for being a politician, for the views I've held and sometimes they are not extreme.

"For example when I made a statement when I came off [social media platform X] and somebody wasn't happy with that because they wanted to scrutinise me and made threats to kill me in essence.

"That is with the police, as are others."

She spoke of the security precautions she now has to take, but urged people to come into politics even so:

"I know that's a difficult place to be, but we do this because we don't want to be beaten by people who make these threats.

"Please come into politics whoever you are, whatever your background is and make sure we speak about this, we talk about it because it's absolutely not acceptable."

You can listen to the whole programme on BBC Sounds. 

GUEST POST The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon

River Avon and Workman Gardens, Evesham

Peter Chambers voyages along the Severn and Shakespeare's Avon, visits an Evesham pub and consults the accounts of the Avon Navigation Trust.

For the English boater who has completed the delights of the Trent and its disappearing power stations and riverside pubs other venues await. One such is a trip down the Severn and up the Warwickshire Avon, with a stay at the tourist trap of Stratford when leaving the river.

It is worth a stay at Evesham on the way. We had embarked a local guide with knowledge of both volunteer water pollution activism and the best drinking places. Before we were done I could identify a CSO (combined sewer overflow) and an Environment Agency solar panel, which indicates a remote monitoring system nearby. If I had watched the documentary Dirty Business before the trip, I might have understood better why they are located where they are.

After a thirsty tour of the Lower Avon we moored at Workman Gardens at Evesham. There is plentiful mooring there although it is not technically flood safe (for example, using tall poles to moor on). However, the weather forecast said we would be safe that week.

And so up hill to the Red Lion for drinks before dinner. This is an unusual pub, aiming not so much for real ale as real everything. Real cider, real music, real atmosphere. It has a shop front exterior rather than a faux olde worlde tourist appearance. The guest ales appear on a hand written list and the tables are small and mismatched. You can even have tea. Well behaved dogs welcome. 

This was a great place to spend an hour before going on to dinner at the River Avon Restaurant. Happily, being up the hill from Workman Gardens, it is not going to flood.

Evesham was a nice break between the Lower Avon starting with Tewksbury on the Severn and the Upper Avon ending near Stratford. A chance to pick up on some local knowledge.

It was also interesting to come across the Charity Commission filings from the Avon Navigation Trust (ANT) that document the state of the trust in 2020 and 2024. In 2020, ANT turned in £959,995 (larger than a parish council but smaller than a principal council) and had a single employee earning a reportable remuneration between £80,0001 and £90,000 (about 8.9 per cent).

By 2024, ANT had an income of £1,058,900 and reportable (individuals on £60+k) of one between £60,001 to £70,000 and one between £100,001 and £110,000 (about 16 per cent). The cost of governance seems to have nearly doubled. Happily there is a lot more detail on file to dig into.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

Mark Twain explains the Fall of Man

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Mark Twain never said or wrote many of the quotations ascribed to him, but this one is kosher. It's the epigraph to chapter 2 of his The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson:

Adam was but human – this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

On New Year's Eve 1892 Saddington played Kibworth at cricket on a frozen reservoir

Here's a another story I discovered when I visited Kibworth Library last week. This report is from the Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail (3 January 1893), but the story appeared in newspapers across the country.

A Novel Cricket Match. Saddington v. Kibworth

Teams representing the respective cricket clubs of Saddington and Kibworth, met in an extremely novel encounter on Saddington reservoir on Saturday, when an amusing match on the ice ended in a draw. 

The match was played on skates, and the ice being in splendid condition, the leather hunting was very considerable, and consequently there were many boundaries scored. The wickets were a combined structure, so that the fall of one occasioned the toppling over of the lot, but despite its drawbacks the game was a very interesting one. Smith, one of the Kibworth players, took four wickets in one "over," while on the opposite side Capell and Richardson were very conspicuous for their good fielding. 

Saddington batted first, and though the wicket of their first player was lowered by the very first ball, they were not dismissed until they scored over 200 runs. Owing to the failing light stumps were drawn before Henson and Badcock, the first two Kibworth men, had been separated. A large number of spectators witnessed the match.

The final score was: Saddington 205, Kibworth 95-0. Match drawn. My photograph shows Saddington Reservoir on a warmer day.

Mercia rediscovered: The Synod of Gumley and Brixworth church

Reviewing Max Adams's The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the Birth of the Anglo-Saxon State AD 630-918 for the London Review of Books, Tom Shippey wrote of the difficulty in recovering the history of the kingdom of Mercia:

Adams’s title is deliberately ironic. There are no ‘Mercian Chronicles’, the fact of which has caused historians headaches for centuries. 

For Northumbria we have Bede’s History of the English Church and People, written in Jarrow and finished in 731. For Wessex we have The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, first compiled under the aegis of King Ælfred in the 890s, but including much earlier information and then kept up in various locations year by year. 

But for the land in between we have nothing: or rather, "no independent narrative", apart from a short interpolation into two manuscripts of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle known as ‘the Mercian Register’ and covering only the years 902-24. For the rest, the historian has to work from often biased, often hostile enemy sources, and from indirect evidence: coins, charters, archaeology and, on occasion, suggestive silences.

For this reason, Mercia does not perhaps enjoy the prominence in our early medieval history that it deserves.

I looked at Adams's book, and its index in particular, in Waterstones and knew I had to buy it. It discusses the Synod of Gumley of 749, held close by that slightly village near Market Harborough, and also the magnificent Saxon church down the road at Brixworth.

Here is Adams on Gumley:

Two years after the second Clofesho council, in 749, Æthelbald convened a further council at a place called Godmundesleach. This time the site can be identified with satisfying precision. 

The small village of Gumley, lying on a back road between Market Harborough and Leicester, is surrounded by once-tilled arable lands now turned over to grazing for sheep and horses. A couple of hundred yards south-west of Gumley's single, house-lined street, in steeply undulating park lies a natural amphitheatre containing a pond known as the "Mot", overlooked by a prominent tree-covered mound. By general acceptance 

This is the site of the council of 749 and to further royal councils held in 772. and 779. Its present obscurity may be misleading: It lay close. to one of the sources of the river Welland, which may have formed a significant Middle Anglian boundary in the eighth century.

The location of Clofesho is not known. Adams favours a location near Hertford, while other candidates include Brixworth in Northamptonshire.

When Adams does get to Brixworth, he says:

the scale and evident expense of the church here strongly implies royal, possibly episcopal patronage: it is public architecture of the highest order.

He also says that the stone for the bulk of the church originated from quarries near Leicester, implying that it was indeed repurposed after being taken from the ruins of Roman Leicester.

Reader, I bought the book. You can see my photos of Gumley and above and All Saints', Brixworth, below.

The Joy of Six 1483

Taylor Lorenz argues that there is little evidence that social media is driving a mental health crisis among young people and a banning them from it would effect us all: "Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity."

Opponents of traffic-reduction measures in cities sometimes claim that such policies discriminate against people with disabilities because they need cars to get about. In reality, Julia Métraux finds, walkable communities are good for them too.

Jim Waterson, Sophie Wilkinson and Polly Smythe dissect the panic in London over 'school wars': "On Monday night the Metropolitan police confirmed to London Centric that there have been no reported incidents that the force has linked to the supposedly all-pervasive ;school wars'. Despite this, it said it would continue to provide reassurance in the form of a 'strong, visible presence around schools', issuing dispersal orders, and asking social media sites to remove videos."

Is there a Christian revival underway among young adults in the UK? Conrad Hackett thinks the recent surveys suggesting there is may be misleading.

"Research in the humanities is not confined to academic institutions. Particularly in history and archaeology there are many communities focused on the study and interpretation of the past that engage in different ways with academic research." Ben Earley challenges the simplistic view of research impact flowing from institutions to public users.

Leah Broad on the rediscovery of Dame Ethel Smyth and other women classical composers.

Dame Mary Berry "frightened" after being arrested at US border

The judges were heard grumbling about "clickbait; nevertheless, yahoo news! wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Keir Starmer's 10 pledges from his leader leadership campaign

It's clear Keir Starmer never believed in much of what was contained in these pledges. They were written for him so he would appeal to Labour members in the party's last leadership election.

More and more, I favour Neal Lawson's account of how we ended up with a prime minister who possesses so few of the qualities you look for in a political leader:

Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of right-wing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. 

At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grown ups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured. 

But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn’t going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour’s accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party’s accidental prime minister in 2024.

John Rogers explores Acton Town, Turnham Green and Chiswick House Park

Time for another London walk with John Rogers:

A walk from Acton Town Tube Station down Bollo Lane looking at the changes taking place there, then across Turnham Green where I talk about the Civil War battle that took place there in 1642. The video ends at the beautiful Chiswick House Park.

This walking tour explores West London history, urban change, and hidden landscapes, moving through Acton, Bollo Lane, Turnham Green, and Chiswick. Along the way it touches on London regeneration, psychogeography, Civil War history, grand houses, and the last industrial London.

Most signs of the Acton Town to South Acton branch disappeared long ago. Diamond Geezer has an article about it.

John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and he blogs at The Lost Byway.