Liberal England in 2017: Part 4

October

Being Jacob Rees-Mogg is a full-time occupation, or so I argued.

I got to the remains of the lead mine at Snailbeach, so 2017 turned out to be a good year after all.

Writing an article about Richard Rorty for Liberator left me less sure that I agreed with his ideas. He did foresee the rise of Donald Trump though.

A trip to Cambridge convinced me that the railways want you to travel to London and nowhere else, but I did discover film of an old student haunt of mine - the Railway Mania Bar in York. (Don't look for it, It's not there anymore.)

I asked if the Liberal Democrats would win a Sheffield Hallam by-election and recorded an actual success for the party: a former candidate had forced the resignation of the deputy prime minister of Australia.


November

I found that in 2009 I had inadvertently photographed a relic of a Lincolnshire potato railway.

Good Liberals were up in arms when Damien Green's office was raided, as I reminded my readers. Much good it did him.

Vince Cable, I revealed, was naughtier than Theresa May when they were children and I enjoyed the Eric Ravilious & Co. exhibition in Sheffield.

While bidding farewell to Phil Reilly as the Lib Dems' director of communications, I took issue with his account of the party's history.

A walk through what was once Leicester's most notorious slum district revealed connections with Jack the Ripper and a 19th-century cricket ground. Now that's psychogeography.


December

Santa's sleigh run was called off in Market Harborough because there was too much snow.

I reported the good news that the chequered skipper butterfly is to be reintroduced to Rockingham Forest.

Discussion of the Wild Hunt gave me an excuse to quote from Malcolm Saville's Seven White Gates:

Shadowy in the thickening mist, the two girls seemed to see a figure on horseback waving ghostly arms but no sound of hooves came to their straining ears. Then far away on the hilltop, it seemed to Peter that tiny, gnome-like figures flitted in uncanny procession. 

Talking of children's books, I mounted a staunch defence of Ladybird Books: "I cannot think of a more progressive children's published in their era."

I watched DVDs of Tom Brown's Schooldays from 1971 and The Strange World of Gurney Slade from 1960.