Liberal England in 2019: Part 3

July

Exploring the University of Northampton's new Waterside campus, I came across a restored railway engine shed.

I found another tin tabernacle in Leicester. You can imagine how excited I was.

No, the Victorians did not photograph corpses as part of family groups.

I was there when England beat Pakistan at Headingley in the 1979 cricket world cup.

You know who are to blame for the rise of Boris Johnson? Have I Got News for You and Ian Hislop, that's who.

Bryan Magee, who popularised Karl Popper's thought in Britain, died:

When I wrote the entry on Popper in Duncan Brack and Ed Randall's Dictionary of Liberal Thought, I had no idea that Magee had been evacuated from Hoxton to Market Harborough during the war and  lived literally round the corner from where I lived as a teenager.

August

Ian Hislop's tribute to Christopher Booker revealed the problem with Private Eye's view of the world - or so I argued.

As Whaley Bridge cowered beneath a dam that threatened to collapse, I remember meeting the former Lancashire captain Jack Bond there:

Ray Illingworth, who was born in the same year as Bond, had just come out of retirement to captain Yorkshire at the age of 50. 

I asked Bond if he had plans to do the same thing with Lancasthire. 

"No, he replied. "I've got more sense."

I mourned the disappearance of the bookshops on Nottingham's Mansfield Road.

The row over Leicestershire's Bradgate Park rumbled on.

Plans for anti-sex toilets in a Welsh seaside town turned out to have been submitted in error - or so the council claimed.

September

Someone suggested that the song that was number one on your 14th birthday defines your life. In my case the top three UK singles that day were all about death.

Why does no one listen to me?:

There is no reason for the Liberal Democrats to hurry to allow a general election. 

And there is a very good reason why we should put if off for a good while: Boris Johnson is desperate for it to take place soon.

John Major gave the eulogy at Paddy Ashdown's memorial service.

There was a battle to keep McDonald's out of Rutland.

I visited 78 Derngate in Northampton - the only house Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed in England.

Visiting the Nottinghamshire village of Farnsfield, I photographed the grave of a deeply obscure writer called Vaughan Wilkins.