The Joy of Six 1253

Tom Forth examines the prospects for HS2 now: "Building a new railway from Birmingham to not-quite-London at Old Oak Common would be ridiculous. It is good that Labour seem likely to continue the railway to the city centre. But it is also painful that a huge national investment sold for more than a decade on the promise to benefit North England is now likely to barely benefit it at all. What little gains remain from the plan will fall overwhelmingly to London."

"Duncan came back to his foster home from college one day and found all his bags were packed. It hadn’t even been a week since he turned 18, and his foster carers were happy for him to stay. He’d been living with them since he was 11. But social services said it wasn’t an option. The police would be called if he didn’t go calmly." Greg Barradale reports on the Staying Put scheme, which is helping reduce homelessness among care leavers.

A year ago, the Independent Commission on Equity in Cricket published a bombshell report that exposed many of the game’s ills. Alan White asks why the sport decided to rip the shroud away from itself, and finds out what comes next.

Jeni Rizio on the many good reasons for learning Welsh.

Melina Spanoudi visits Nottingham's Five Leaves Bookshop: "The bookshop is not located on the high street, so events are key to get customers into the shop; the booksellers hold 100 or so a year. In the past weeks, these have included a talk on the history of lesbian fashion, a conversation between human rights activist and politician Shami Chakrabarti and biographer Rachel Holmes, a launch of poetry pamphlets and a discussion with Jonathan Coe and Graham Caveney."

"The sight of glow-worms lighting our way along the hedgerows of a country lane at the height of summer, with all the smells of hay and flowers, is delightful and often unexpected. They are a source of amazement, like seeing a shooting star." Steven Morris meets the glow-worm survey volunteers of Dorset.

Two Liberal views on Britain and Europe after the election

Bremain in Spain has a page giving the reaction of half a dozen pro-European voices to the result of the general election.

Among them are Nick Harvey:

Yes, we would all have preferred Labour not to be elected with red lines drawn against the customs union, single market or ‘rejoin’ – though experts tell me those would barely have been feasible in the first term anyway.

 But we have seen the new PM totally reset the relationship with Europe at the Blenheim summit, the new Foreign Secretary start talks about an ambitious UK-EU security agreement, and the first King’s Speech signal an enabling bill to allow ‘dynamic alignment’ with evolving EU regulations.

It is a great start.

and Chris Rennard:

Incremental changes in the right direction are already being made. But it will take greater courage and more time for Keir Starmer to use his advocacy skills to explain that aligning ourselves again with our neighbours is in the interests of our own economy. He must also explain that this will be best done by us having a proper say in the rules, requiring membership of the Single Market.  Perhaps a 2029 Manifesto commitment?

Re-joining the EU will probably also require the adoption of Proportional Representation, which has had the support of the Labour Party members in recent years. I doubt if we could be readmitted without ensuring that the U.K. would not adopt a “Hokey Cokey” approach to membership in future. 

There are also reactions from Gina Miller, Anand Menon, Chris Grey and Liz Webster.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: We drank the Bonkers’ Arms dry

Liberator 424 is out! You can download it for free from the magazine's website.

Which means, I am afraid, it's time to spend another week at Bonkers Hall. At least we find the old boy in celebratory mood. I must at once apologise to any readers in Scotland, as the text he forced on the Revd Hughes was Cromwell's reaction after his army had defeated the Scots at Dunbar.

Monday

Seventy-two Liberal Democrat MPs elected! How the bells of St Asquith’s rang that night! We drank the Bonkers’ Arms dry and made an impressive dent in my champagne cellar. At Divine Service yesterday we sang ‘I Was Glad’, and I pulled rank on the Revd Hughes to insist he take his text from the Book of Cromwell: “A high act of the Lord's Providence to us and one of the most signal mercies God hath done for England and His people." 

This entry has been difficult to write because the Rutland Water Monster is romping on my lawns this afternoon. I find myself rushing out of the French windows every five minutes to say: “No, naughty Ruttie! Put Meadowcroft down.”

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

Market Harborough's town centre banks are now part of history

In a few short years, bank branches have gone from being a key part of any high street to curious relics. So it's no surprise that three former banks in Market Harborough town centre have been added to Harborough District Council's list of non-designated heritage assets.

My photo above shows the Nat West branch, which shut up shop in January of last year. The former HSBC and Barclays branches are also now on the list.

The former Kibworth railway station and the airfield at Husbands Bosworth, reports HFM News, have been added too.

This list is intended to ensure that the significance of any building or site on it is considered if it is likely to be affected by a planning application.

The men returning to Oxford University after the two world wars

I'm reading A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60 by Nihil Krishnan.

This volume is part of a sudden glut on the thought and personalities of 20th-century British philosophers. There are two books on the group of women philosophers who studied at Oxford during the second world war - Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgeley - as well as a biography of J.L. Austin.

I think this passage from Krishnan on the difference between the men who returned to Oxford from the two world wars is an interesting snippet of social history:

In 1919, one observer remembered, the returning men "jumped when a door banged; they could not sleep without a night cap of whisky; they awoke shouting in nightmares'. Desperate "to recover the douceur de vivre of the Edwardian years", the tone they had set was one of "febrile gaiety".

The generation returning in 1945 was less jumpy. Their memory of the time before the war was not of an Edwardian summer but one long winter of discontent and menace. Their wars had not been spent in trenches waiting for orders or a fatal bomb. They had been busy, and when not busy, mostly safe. Their tutors found them "forward-looking and entirely serious there was no line between workers and playboys".

Wallaby on the loose photographed in Nottinghamshire village

Forget big cats: BBC News has a story about the sighting of  a wallaby in the Nottinghamshire village of Calverton.

What is more, someone has taken a remarkably clear photo of the incongruous marsupial.

He or she may well be a lone escapee, but wallabies can survive in England. A colony of them flourished in the Staffordshire Peak District for decades after the war, though the conventional wisdom is that the harsh winter of 2010 did for them.

But, intriguingly, a story on The Manc suggests there have been more recent sightings in the area.

Tracing the route of the lost Derby Canal

Another day out with Steve and friends for LeiceExplore, this time tracing the route of the Derby Canal, which was closed to navigation in 1964 having been unpassable for some time. There's a promise of more videos on this waterway to come.

I find the traces around Derby station particularly interesting, though I admit I've found that locomotive cab myself but failed to recognise the canal bridge next to it. And we should all mourn the loss of the level crossing of the Derwent.

The Derby and Sandiacre Canal Trust explains what was once to be found:

The Derby & Sandiacre Canal ran from the river Trent at Swarkestone and climbed through 3 locks to the Trent & Mersey Canal and Swarkestone Junction on the Trent & Mersey canal thence to Sandiacre on the Erewash canal, with a line to Little Eaton where it met a plateway. 

There was also a branch to the river Derwent in the city centre, which enabled boats to reach the Silk Mill and the mills and foundries further up the river to Darley Abbey.

If you explore the trust's site you will also find their plans for restoring much of this route.

On not being convinced by the case for axing winter fuel payments

I've seen many tweets in favour of Rachel Reeves's decision to stop making winter fuel payments to pensioners unless they are on welfare benefits. Most include a statement along the lines of "it's wrong for public money to go to people who don't need it".

Leaving aside the facts that our state pensions are on the low side by European standards and that its arguable some of the people who will no longer receive these payments do need them, I distrust arguments that make things sound so simple.

Because I don't believe we arrive at our political views so logically. We don't carry around a neat set of principles that we can apply to any question in the news: it's more that we have an instinctive reaction to a new policy, then cast around for a general principle we can use to justify it.

And I don't think the principle that people have come up with is as reasonable as it sounds. It could, for instance, be used to justify anyone with a decent private pension being denied one from the state.

Under it, any encounter with the state would be an unpleasant affair of means tests and the accompanying threats of prosecution if you make a mistake on a form.

The reality is that an effective and civilised welfare system will include a mix of universal and means-tested benefits. Where you draw the line between them is not a question of simple principle, more one of practical judgement that will be influenced by how much government can afford and a general desire not to discourage people from seeking help at all by making it too demeaning.

But maybe some of these tweeters do want to discourage people from claiming benefits. I have not seen one of them go on, after welcoming Rachel Reeves's decision, to set out a way of spending the money saved that will be of more benefit to the poor. At least Reeves said "This was not a decision I wanted to make."

Lib Dem MP received eviction notice the day after he was elected

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The last Conservative government, as it's increasingly being called, promised to get rid of no-fault evictions of private tenants, but never got round to doing so.

Which was a shame for Olly Glover, who received an eviction notice the day after he was elected as the Liberal Democrat MP for Didcot and Wantage.

BBC News has reported his experience:

Mr Glover, who has been renting his current home in Milton for four years, said "no fault evictions" create a "huge pressure" for renters.

He said he believed there was a cultural problem in the UK where housing is seen primarily as an asset and secondarily as an affordable necessity.

Mr Glover said he supported government plans to strengthen tenant rights.

"It was completely unexpected," he said, reflecting on the morning that he received the letter.

The MP said he had no issue with his landlords, but would like to see a process whereby homeowners have a discussion with renters, to work out a timescale, before they issue a no-fault eviction notice.

I'm sure Olly will be all right, but these evictions do contribute to homelessness. A Lib Dem press release from February of this year set out the figures:

The party has warned that thousands more families risk being left without a home if the government continues to delay its plans to ban no-fault evictions after 6,580 households were threatened with homelessness due to a no fault eviction notice, a 3.1 per cent increase on the previous year. 

Man graduates 41 years after being denied ceremony by parrot problem

Thanks to a nomination from a Liberal England reader, the Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The Joy of Six 1252

"The experience of that Royal Commission - on long-term care for older people - is instructive. It made four major recommendations relating to: free personal care, a cap on care costs for accommodation, the establishment of national care standards, and integration of services. We are still awaiting effective action on all of these." Bob Hudson asks why social care is never fixed.

Annie Hickox on the 'toxic positivity' - the dark side of all those simple recipes for dealing with unhappiness and depression that spread so frictionlessly across social media.

Privacy International says the use of social media monitoring by government and commerce is increasingly prevalent and largely unregulated. 

Thomas Horabin held North Cornwall for the Liberal Party at a 1939 by-election, defended it in 1945 to become the only parliamentary representative of West Country Liberalism, but crossed the floor to join Labour two years later. Jaime Reynolds and Ian Hunter weigh up his maverick career.

"There was something else in the house, unmentioned and unlabelled. A sort of shadowy presence that hovered by the back door. No one referred to it, so I kept quiet, but without ever really actually seeing anything I knew it was a boy. A boy of about 10 or 12, in short trousers and a cap. I acknowledged him as I walked by, much as I would acknowledge a single magpie, with a dip of the head and a murmured incantation." Esther Freud discusses Walberswick, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and ghosts.

Tom Moran shows that our false belief that Shakespeare had little knowledge of Latin and Greek - the basis of many a nutty theory about the authorship of his plays - rests on a misunderstanding of the meaning of "though" in a poem by Ben Jonson. Fascinating stuff.

Ed Davey determined to finish the job of expelling the Tories from their heartlands

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From the Guardian this afternoon:

The Liberal Democrats plan to “finish the job” of eliminating the Conservatives from their traditional heartlands at the next election, Ed Davey has promised, saying a further move to the right by a new Tory leader would make this even more likely.

In his first interview since the Lib Dems won 72 MPs in the general election, beyond party strategists’ highest predictions, Davey said this expanded Commons contingent – nearly seven times more than their 2019 total – had given them a bigger platform for their message.

Confirming that he intends to lead the party into the next election, Davey said the party would again ruthlessly target so-called blue wall seats, traditionally Conservative areas where the Lib Dems have taken advantage of perceived Tory complacency and disaffection with the party’s ideological direction.

“We need to finish the job at the next election,” he said. “We took down a lot of the blue wall, more than I expected. But there is still some left to take down.”

And, the Guardian points out, with the the Conservatives now holding fewer than 50  seats more than the Lib Dems, this is in effect a push to replace the Tories as the second party in the Commons.

It's early days, and denial is said to be the first stage of grief, but a remarkable percentage of the comment I've heard from leading Tories since the election is predicated on the idea that the last government did nothing wrong and that, within months, the voters will return to them, begging for forgiveness.

That goes some way to supporting Davey's contention that “the Conservatives are making a compelling case to be consigned to history”.

Broad beans could be the cure to Britain’s blues, says Cambridge research scientist

The judges decided to make today's Headline of the Day Award to the the Guardian. And I'm glad they did, because the story below is fascinating.

Nadia Mohd-Radzman is the scientist whose research is being reported:

However, it is the ingredient levodopa, or L-dopa, which is of special interest to Mohd-Radzman, who also works at the Entrepreneurship Lab of King’s College Cambridge. It is used in the clinical treatment of people with Parkinson’s – and broad beans contain high levels of the compound.

"The crucial point is that L-dopa has been shown to be very effective in treating the condition known as anhedonia, which essentially is the inability to feel or experience pleasure. And that is why I believe the broad bean is important.

"We have a major problem with growing numbers of young people experiencing mental health problems in the UK today, and helping them eat a proper, healthy diet is going to be crucial in tackling this. The broad bean will be our first line of attack."

Later. The judges have asked me to pass on their comment that "the cure for Britain's blues" would be idiomatic English and their doubts that the formulation used in the headline is even grammatical.

Grandaddy: The Crystal Lake

Tinnitist liked The Crystal Lake:

It’s rather upbeat, with a catchy refrain even though it tells the story of someone who desperately wanted to get away from the country into the city. Once there he winds up in a small apartment and discovers the urban existence to be pretentious, unfriendly, ugly and even more isolated:

“Should never have left the crystal lake.
For parties full of folks who flake.”

So did Pitchfork, though it had doubts about the Grandaddy album The Sophtware Slump (2000) as a whole:

The rest of the album wallows in a depression so deep, it'd make your grandparents stock up on canned foods and dress in rags. The Radiohead influence really becomes apparent on the last four tracks.

 The bear later went solo, issuing a couple of highly regarded albums as a singer-songwriter.

W.T. Nettlefold: Selected Poems

Take a look at the books in this job lot of from a long-closed online auction. The red volume on the left of the photo is clearly labelled:

W.T. Nettlefold
Selected Poems

Yes, my own personal Thirties poet produced a collection of his work, though I would guess that it was a private publication.

Lib Dems push hard for extra rights at Westminster after huge jump in number of MPs

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From the Financial Times:

The Liberal Democrats are pressing to clinch extra debate days and other parliamentary rights from the Conservatives, arguing that a reallocation is due following their record election result and the Tories slumping to become the smallest official opposition in recent times. 

Sir Ed Davey’s party is set to petition both the parliamentary authorities and the government to reallocate various Commons rights and responsibilities that by convention are extended to the main opposition party. 

The paper quotes a Lib Dem official as saying:

"The Conservatives have chosen the topics for each of these days and didn’t dedicate a single day to the NHS and social care, which is what we’ve been wanting to talk about. It’s quite a shocking absence in the debate,"

And the Lib Dems have won support from both the former House of Commons clerk Paul Evans and Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government.

The Conservative response, as quoted by the FT, suggests they have learnt nothing from their trouncing on 4 July:

A Conservative spokesperson hit back against the Lib Dems’ proposal, arguing: “What’s the point when they agree with the Labour party on every issue?”

Good news about that derelict site close to Market Harborough market hall: A new public garden is planned

Harborough District Council, which is run by a Lib Dem, Green and Labour coalition, is planning to turn a derelict site in Market Harborough town centre into a friendship park.

HFM News reports that the scheme:

Would see new trees and shrubs planted, gravel walkways put down and benches installed. Signs would also be erected to encourage people to speak to someone if they are sitting alone.

The overgrown site was once the garden of a long-vanished house, and the gateway in my photo below was used as a short cut to reach the equally vanished Symington's food factory.

It was earmarked by the previous Conservative administration for a coach park. For a time the town was a popular stop for coach parties, but that seems to be killed off by the Covid pandemic.

The park plan will go ahead provided it is agreed by the council's cabinet.

Recently, the site was partly cleared. HFM News says it was because of concerns about antisocial behaviour and dangerous trees.

There was a couple living on the site in a tent for a short while last year - I leant them my phone to make a call once - but I saw no signs of antisocial behaviour. They were from the town and their camping felt more like staying out for the summer than destitution.

As far as I know the phone mast will remain, but perhaps it will be possible to grow ivy up it. 

Eastbourne: Sun Trap of the South (1966)

 

The town's newly elected Liberal Democrat MP Josh Babarinde never misses a chance to repeat his claim that Eastbourne is the sunniest town in the UK.

So it's a shame that Talking Pictures TV is showing the short film Eastbourne: Sun Trap of the South from 1966 at 4.40 tomorrow morning - an hour when, Lord Bonkers maintains, all new MPs should be in bed.

The film will probably be available afterwards on the channel's catch-up service TPTV Encore. But in case it's not, I am posting Sun Trap of the South here for Josh and everyone else to enjoy.

Richard Jefferies' grave at Broadwater Cemetery, Worthing

Here's a pilgrimage I should make myself one day. Richard Jefferies is buried at Worthing because he spent his last days near the Sussex coast. It was hoped that the sea air would ease his tuberculosis, but it had no such effect and he was dead at 38.

Another notable rural writer is buried at Broadwater Cemetery: W.H. Hudson:

William Henry Hudson was one of Britain’s greatest nature writers but was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina of English parents in 1841. His powers of description when writing about the countryside were said to be unrivalled. 

He died in 1922 and expressed a wish to be buried near Richard Jeffries but this was not possible as that part of the cemetery was full. He claimed to have seen the ghost of Richard Jeffries while walking near Goring Church. ... 

There is a memorial to him and Jeffries at the entrance to the cemetery and a Garden of Remembrance in the North West Corner.

It's a shame the cemetery website spells Jefferies' name incorrectly, but then this blog's hero Malcolm Saville made the same mistake whenever he mentioned him.

More adoring press coverage for Steve Darling's guide dog Jennie

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I just hope this piece in Big Issue doesn't go to her head:

The most popular newcomer in parliament knows I’ve been eating bacon and sausages. Jennie leans on my knee and licks my hand. But she’s not fussy. She nibbles on the end of a banana which Steve Darling, the Liberal Democrat MP for whom Jennie is a guide dog, feeds her as she wiggles in excitement beneath the table.

As Darling and I munch on the breakfast served up in parliament (£2.75 for pretty much an entire full English), Jennie sits loyally at his feet. She’s not suited up in her guide dog’s uniform right now, so she can enjoy chilling. ...

Jennie’s a welcome addition for parliamentary staff too, who rush to bring her a bowl of water which she gulps down with speed while we sit outside the Commons overlooking the Thames opposite the London Eye.

Security guards outside parliament - "scary men with big guns" - look at Jennie with adoration, as though she is their newborn child, Darling tells me. 

The interview does eventually get on to Steve's work as an MP:

On Monday (22 July) Darling handed in a Federation for the Blind petition against ‘floating bus stops’, which have a cycle lane between the stop and the pavement, and can be “terrifying” for disabled people.

He also wants better support for disabled people to get into employment, to ensure that “more employers are alive to disability issues”, and for the government to fix the “broken” benefits system which is trapping people in poverty.

But if you want to read ore about saintly dogs, I recommend the Instagram account devoted to Ginger, a pit bull terrier who fosters kittens.

The Joy of Six 1251

The new voter ID rules rolled out in this month’s General Election may have prevented 370,000 people from casting their ballots, disproportionately affecting women and people of colour, reports Josiah Mortimer.

Huw Lewis examines how Vaughan Gething's short period as first minister fell apart and what it means for Welsh Labour: "As we look ahead to the next Senedd election in 2026 (which will be fought using a fully proportional electoral system), the multiparty nature of Welsh devolved politics is only likely to increase. How Labour responds to that challenge is a question that the party should consider carefully as it moves to elect its third Welsh leader within a year."

"The constant blaming of [Andrew] Tate for the rise of misogyny is making me increasingly uneasy. Not because I want to diminish his role or responsibility. But because if all this *waves hands manically at young men increasingly hating women* is Tate’s fault, it lets everyone else off the hook." Sian Norris on men and misogyny. 

"Boundaries have always been fuzzy, and the further a concept moves away from the diagnostic criteria, the fuzzier they become. Once a diagnosis is 'liberated from conventional psychiatric nosology', then it will mean very different things to different people." Naomi Fisher discusses the societal effect of the rise of psychiatric self-diagnosis.

Adam Wren looks at how The Lord of the Rings has influenced the politics of Donald Trump's vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

Stephanie Gaunt takes us to the Crossness Pumping Station at Abbey Wood on the lower Thames: "It is very much a work in progress. Only one of the four massive engines, the Prince Consort, is in working order, and another, Victoria, is in the process of restoration. The other two are huge inert masses of rusty iron."

England's forgotten bowling genius Bob Appleyard in action

When Bob Appleyard died in 2015 I wrote a tribute to him. I'll quote most of it below, but the reason for this post is that I have found a clip of him bowling. I can't embed it here, so hurry over to YouTube. 

If I'm right, Appleyard is the bowler staring his run up at 0:20 and 1:37. You can also see the England bowlers Freddie Trueman and Johnny Wardle, who is the left-arm spinner. The tall bowler hitching his trousers is Philip Hodgson, who played only a few games for Yorkshire.

I believe it is from Sussex vs Yorkshire at Hove in August 1954, when the Southern county were made to follow on but played out time for the draw in what must have been a rain affected game.

If you want to learn more about Appleyard, I recommend an episode of the Oborne & Heller on Cricket podcast. Stephen Chalke talks about his experience of interviewing cricketers from an earliest generation, including Ken Taylor, Fred Rumsey and Appleyard.

And he also gave a long interview to Christopher Martin- Jenkins, which I have put at the top of this post.

Anyway, this is what I wrote nine years ago:

Appleyard's story is simply extraordinary. His development was held up by the Second World War, with the result that he did not make his debut for Yorkshire until he was 26, playing a few games at the end of the 1950 season.

The following summer, in his first full season in county cricket, Appleyard took 200 wickets for Yorkshire at 14.14 apiece.

But his health was already failing. The next summer he played only one game before being diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had an operation was not expected to live.

By 1954 he was fit enough to play county cricket again, and he took 154 wickets at 14.42, He made his England debut against Pakistan that summer, taking 5-51 in the first innings he bowled in.

His form won him a place on Len Hutton's historic tour to Australia in 1954-5. The Ashes were regained largely because of Tyson and Statham's fast bowling, but it was Appleyard, the stock bowler at the other end, who topped the England bowling averages.

After that his career began to decline. He played his last test in 1956, as he was displaced by the rise of Jim Laker, and injury meant that he was released by Yorkshire after the 1958 season.

In 152 matches for Yorkshire he had taken 708 wickets at 15.44 apiece, and in his nine tests he had 31 victims at 17.87.

Beyond the figures, Appleyard was a remarkable bowler in that he was able to bowl fast medium and off spin off the same run and apparently with the same action.

Appleyard's Telegraph obituary, to which I am indebted for the statistics in this post describes him as "one of the greatest bowlers of the post-war period".

But it continues:

There were judges in Yorkshire who were inclined to go further. The former England fast bowler Bill Bowes, for example, held that Appleyard achieved a level of excellence matched by only two other bowlers – Sydney Barnes and Bill O’Reilly – in the history of the game.

When Jennie met Larry: It's the picture everyone was waiting for

And it was taken by Danny Chambers, who is now the Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester.

When @rthonjennie clocked @Number10cat

Hoping not to have to put my veterinary training to use. pic.twitter.com/a5zknvyjjr

— Danny Chambers MP 🔸🩺 (@DannyVet) July 24, 2024

Incidentally, Danny has announced he will no longer practise as a vet now's he's in parliament.

Which will come as a disappointment to Lord Bonkers:

I have always rather envied my setters when I take them to our local vet. He doesn’t ask them lots of damn-fool questions or tell them they're drinking too much. If this fellow gets in, I shall see if he will take me on to his books.

Nottingham Victoria Götterdämmerung

This is a wonderful compilation of footage showing some of the last t rains to serve Nottingham Victoria station - the last of all ran on 4 September 1967 - and then its demolition.

Victoria was the city's main station on the Great Central Railway's London Extension, and opened to passengers on 9 March 1899. The site was cleared for the builders of the station by the railway contractors Logan & Hemingway - as in this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP.

Whatever happened to Close Up toothpaste?

Stretch your mind back to the early-to-mid 1970s. If you can't, just ask your grandparents.

In those years, Close Up toothpaste was a big seller in this country. It was a clear red jelly with a flavour of cloves or cinnamon. It was the brand my mother bought.

Then it seemed to disappear from supermarket shelves and I've not seen it on sale since.

Why the vanishing act?

As I remember it, there were news stories about people having an allergic reaction to Close Up, though not in any great numbers.

More importantly, I suspect, there was a major report on dental health that emphasised the importance of fluoride in toothpaste.

For all I know, Close Up may have contained fluoride, but this report turned people back towards the idea that toothpaste that was good for you was white and tasted minty.

The odd thing is that if you google it, Close Up turns out to be one of the world's leading toothpaste brands today. So why can't you buy it in Britain?

Later. I've searched for "Close Up toothpaste" on the British Newspaper Archive site, and the results suggest my memories are about right. 

Most of the results are supermarket advertisements. The first is from 1971 and they tail right off after 1978. The last of these adverts are from the mid-Eighties, and the only mentions of Close Up this century are in business reports about the brand being bought and sold.

Pippa Heylings and the reintroduction of beavers

Politics Home has an article on Pippa Heylings, the newly elected Liberal Democrat MP for South Cambridgeshire:

Heylings was recognised on the first ever ENDS Power List of political environmental champions earlier this year, alongside London Mayor Sadiq Khan and former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas. 

The Power List recognised her career negotiating between national and local governments on climate issues, attending UN Climate and Nature summits, and spearheading the creation of the Galapagos Islands Marine Reserve. She also acted as a key mediator in the successful reintroduction of beavers to the UK.

This confirms my impression that our new parliamentary party is now positively dripping with talent. And my eye was, of course, caught by her role in the reintroduction of beavers.

To learn about that, go to the website of Pippa's company Talking Transformation:

Beavers became extinct in England 400 years ago as a result of overhunting for meat, fur and making perfume.

Re-introducing the beaver into areas of the English countryside after all this time is now possible but controversial. Is it possible for co-existence between beavers and humans in a much altered landscape? ...

Talking Transformation was contracted by Natural England to design and facilitate workshops to understand the conflicting perspectives and find ways to enable reintroduction in a way that maximises the benefits but minimises the risks, and to give stakeholders a voice in decision-making for a national framework for beaver reintroduction.  

It's worth reading the whole article, which is a reminder that rewilding and the reintroduction of species require widespread support if they are to work, not just a romantic impulse.

Grandmother fined for climbing on freight train

BBC News wins our prestigious Headline of the Day Award.

And there's a local angle to the story below:

A grandmother who climbed on top of a freight train as part of a climate protest has escaped a prison sentence.

Karen Wildin, 60, managed to stop the goods train as it travelled to Drax power station in North Yorkshire on 11 November 2021.

The wagons were transporting wood pellets which Wildin objected to being burned for fuel.

She appeared at Leeds Crown Court on Monday and was told to pay a £3,000 fine.

The private tutor, from Leicester, waved an Extinction Rebellion flag during the protest, which took place during the COP26 climate change conference.

This was clearly a principled protest rather than vandalism. Nevertheless, the judges were insistent that I post their favourite video again.

The Joy of Six 1250

Graeme Hayes and Steven Cammiss argue that the harsh sentences imposed on Just Stop Oil protestors are the logical outcome of Britain’s authoritarian turn against protest.

"In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for 'glorifying violence'. He said Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally should be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts'." Andrew O'Hagan went to the Republican National Convention.

"It isn’t that all feminism’s forebears have been forgotten. But those who are remembered tend to be celebrated for their most singular and charismatic deeds. Suffragettes pouring acid on golf courses and women’s libbers flour-bombing the 1970 Miss World contest have both recently featured in films. I love these stories. But they are not instruction manuals." Susanna Rustin searches London for memorials to early feminists.

Ray Casey dreams of reopening the coastal railway line from Middlesbrough to Scarborough.

"A former miner, he recounted being trapped by a rockfall and waiting for hours to be rescued without being able to move a millimetre. There must be mental powers of concentration and stamina bound up with this experience which were probably transferable to the experience of playing endless frames of snooker." Conrad Brunstrom pays tribute to Ray Reardon.

Patricia Herlihy on the flowers to be found in her garden in July: "A few might seem to be weeds to some, but I find them to be useful as pollinator foods and very pretty as well."

Well, that about wraps it up for Sherlock Holmes

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I have my doubts about Sherlock Holmes’s method of reasoning. Take what is probably his most famous formula:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

It sounds impressive, but it really isn’t.

Every event, I would suggest, has an infinite number of possible explanations. And if you don’t buy that, you still have to agree that every event has an enormous number of possible explanations. Which means that eliminating impossible explanations is not a practical way of investigating a crime.

Perhaps Holmes meant it more pragmatically – something like, if you have several suspects then once all but one has been eliminated then the person left must be guilty. But that won’t do either. Your original suspects may all have been innocent.

I can see Holmes’s approach working in a closed system like formal logic, mathematics or chess, but not in solving messy, real-world problems.

I saw another of Holmes’s lines the other day, and I think it’s equally suspect:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Again, there is an infinite amount of data. In order to gather it for an investigation, you must already have theories about what is likely to be useful. As Karl Popper says somewhere, if you tell someone to “observe”, they will ask “Observe what?” Observation, like data-gathering, is necessarily laden with theory.

And while twisting facts to suit theories is obviously wrong, twisting theories in the face of facts is dangerous too. What can happen is that once you have a suspect, you think of ingenious tweaks to your theory to account for new information that appears to exonerate them. There comes a point where, to be rational, you have to abandon your theory rather than twist it.

I was encouraged to write this post when I heard Ron Warmington interviewed the other day. He was one of the two authors of the Second Sight report that revealed that the Post Office was persecuting and prosecuting innocent sub postmasters.

Before working for Second Sight, he had been a fraud investigator with multinational companies. And he said that his approach if someone was suspected was to assume they were guilty and then look for ways of proving they were innocent.

If this approach had been adopted by Post Office investigators, they would have found that none of the supposed thieves had thousands in the bank or had just bought a flash new car. They would have found that the missing money had never existed.

So maybe Sherlock Holmes was not as clever as he thought?

Of course, he may have been misquoted by Dr Watson or Conan Doyle. I'd like to give my thanks to Oolon Colluphid and Karl Popper for the inspiration.

Shropshire Independent group leader joins the Lib Dems

David Minnery, who represents Market Drayton West on Shropshire Council,  has joined the Liberal Democrat group on the authority. 

Cllr Minnery, was leader of the Independent group on the council, previously served as the Conservative cabinet member for finance. He now feels that the Conservatives have "lost control" of the county finances.

He says his decision has been influenced by a desire to support Helen Morgan, the Lib Dem MP for North Shropshire, and his view that the Lib Dems need to win a majority and "get the change Shropshire needs" in next May’s council election.

At this month's general election, the Lib Dems polled more votes than any other party across the three Shropshire constituencies.

Thanks to Mark Pack for the story. As a former councillor for Market Harborough North, I feel some affinity with David Minnery.

Mazzy Star: Ride It On

I remember new wave, but since then many new genres have whooshed over my head without me noticing them.

In 2018, Pitchfork nominated its 30 best dream pop albums, including Mazzy Star's She Hangs Brightly from 1990 at no. 29.

What was 'dream pop'? Pitchfork doesn't really help us:

The term has meant different things to different audiences at different times, because it was always more of a descriptor than a proper genre. So in assembling this list, we took the descriptive quality of the term and ran with it, assembling a list of 30 records that felt like they belonged together even as they came from different scenes, eras, and geographic locations.

Pitchfork also tells us that Mazzy Star were "born out of the ashes of Opal, guitarist David Roback’s Paisley Underground band".

Paisley Undergound? This time the website is more helpful, giving us a link to a Guardian article about the psychedelic music scene in the Los Angeles of the 1980s.

Dismiss musical genres from your mind, Jeeves, they have no bearing on the matter in hand. I chose Ride It On because I like it.

So does Pitchfork:

On the heartbreaking “Ride It On,” for example, every stroke of the guitar and beat of the tambourine fall with perfect precision.

You can watch the film No Room at the Inn (1948) online

Good news: you can watch the 1948 film No Room at the Inn online. And it's the 90-minute version that Talking Pictures TV has shown - there used to be a shorter version online, but that disappeared.

The only downside is that it's on a Russian website, but my antivirus software is happy for me to watch it.

You may recall I got very interested in this remarkable film two or three years ago, in the the harder-hitting play it was based on and in its star Freda Jackson.

The play was first put on in the spring of 1945 and was in part inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill earlier that year - another recurrent subject on this blog.

In the play - here come the spoilers - Mrs Voray does not fall downstairs, but is 'accidentally' smothered by two of the children as they retrieve the coal shed key from her as she lies in a drunken stupor.

It's open to question how accidental that smothering is, but the audience did not mind. A Nottingham Post article on Freda Jackson records that the audience stood and cheered when she got her comeuppance. 

Freda Jackson was a wonderful actor. She was Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V, Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations and the farmer Sheila Sim goes to work for in A Canterbury Tale.

Yet, perhaps because of the power of her performance as Mrs Voray here, she ended her career playing grotesques. At least she lived to appear in Blake's Seven.

Virgin on the ridiculous: The Guardian wins Correction of the Day

Today's Guardian has an article on the last hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords.

Very interesting, but my eye was caught by a note at the end:

This article was amended on 20 July 2024. The Duke of Norfolk is not a descendant of Queen Elizabeth I as stated in an earlier version.

Jo Swinson's appearance at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

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Well, Jo Swinson certainly proved a more forceful witness than Ed Davey, who seemed to fall back on a masochism strategy from the start.

The first sentence of Nick Wallis's blog post on her appearance yesterday puts it well:

During her evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry former minister Jo Swinson today highlighted the mendacity of the Post Office and what she saw as the conniving “duplicitous” behaviour of her chief civil service advisor.

Or you can read a more colourful version on Twitter: 

'She was an ordained minister. I believed her [pause] I believed her.'

Jo Swinson puts Paula Vennels under the bus, gets in the bus, drives over her, reverses, then drives over her again to make sure. 🤔

— Charles Wheeler (@tweetcmw) July 19, 2024

You can see Jo's evidence in two videos - one and two - on YouTube, but for some reason they are age-restricted so you'll have to watch them there.

In that second video she is followed after 20 minutes or so by the former Post Office chief executive Dame Moya Greene, whose comments got press coverage too.

It's time we had a talk about the birds and the bees

I saw a butterfly this morning. It was only a cabbage white but, as it's the first I've seen this year, still worthy of celebration.

Many people have noticed the lack of butterflies and bees this summer.

This video from Professor David Goulson tells us that one poor summer for insects after a long run of wet weather is nothing to worry about.  

Then he looks at the long term, and it's frightening. It's not just insects that are disappearing: the birds that depend on them for food are getting rarer too.

As I wrote a couple of years ago: 

I can't remember the last time I heard a cuckoo, yet when I was a child you expected to hear one on any spring or summer walk.

At least Lincoln Lib Dems are trying to do something about it.

The Joy of Six 1249

Alistair Carmichael argues that 'popular Conservatives' are killing their party: "It takes a special sort of intelligence to see an election in which you have lost hundreds of seats to liberal and centre-left parties, including 61 in Tory heartlands to the Liberal Democrats, and interpret that as a mandate to run screaming to the Reform-lite fringe."

"If we sit by and shrug at what happened to Andrew Malkinson we accept that the CCRC is part of the disease and not part of the cure." Maximilian Hardy lays bare the failings of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

"New Civil Engineer recently revealed that National Highways does not know when the majority of attenuation ponds collecting runoff from around the M25 were last cleaned, meaning they could be full of hazardous waste that could join watercourses." Tom Pashby on the catastrophic damage caused by water running off roads.

Arash Abizadeh is doing something about the lucrative scam of academic journal publishing: "Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place."

Luke McLaughlin describes how Great Britain won the Cricket gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics.

"She’s an orphan, her family is bankrupt, the estate is in ruins, and she’s spent her whole life alone, raised amidst the faded grandeur of her family’s past by a cruel Governess. Then one day, while exploring the wild grounds, Maria stumbles upon an amazing discovery: a lost colony of Lilliputians! Kidnapped and brought to England as carnival performers in the 18th century, these tiny humans long ago escaped and built a new homeland on her family’s ancestral lands." Nathan Goldwag celebrates Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White.

Ed Davey gives his evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Here are the videos of the Lib Dem leader's appearance before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today.

He began to give evidence shortly before the lunch break - that's the video above, which should start where Ed's evidence begins - and returned for a much longer session after it. That's in the video below.

Ed suffered sounded increasingly contrite and suffered some awkward moments. I'll add more comment when Nick Wallis has published his blog post on his evidence.

Later. Wallis has now posted his piece on Ed Davey's evidence and it's not flattering. You can read it on his Post Office Scandal blog.

A taste:

Ultimately ministers continued to swallow the guff coming from their officials and the Post Office in preference to what they were being told by the JFSA [Justice for Postmasters Alliance], MPs, Second Sight, a few journalists and, eventually, a whistleblower. 

As the Inquiry has seen, government officials were all too ready to actively collude in the Post Office’s lies because it was the easier thing to do.

The Rest is Unprintable: Mark Oaten and Lembit Opik have their own podcast

Of course they do. Every former politician now has a podcast.

And, no, I've not listened to it.

If you want to - and it's your right in a free country - you will find the pair of them on YouTube.

Why the New Yorker's article on Lucy Letby was blocked in the UK

The new Private Eye has an article on Lucy Letby that the magazine was unable to publish at the time of her second trial.

I don't know if there's anything in it that hasn't appeared in the press since that trial concluded, but it is well written and leads you disquieted about the prosecution and verdict.

During this trial, an article on the case on New Yorker site was blocked in the UK. Here the barrister Alan Robertshaw, whose legal videos I have praised before, explains why.

He also reveals some shenanigans over a jury member that threatened to derail the trial, though they turned out to involve what seems to be a malicious accusation.

Do wealthy evangelicals think there's a separate heaven for the privately educated?

You may know the story of Mary Whitehouse's fellow campaigner John Smyth QC. The new Private Eye reminds us:

In a purpose-built garden shed at his home in Winchester, Smyth administered sadistic beatings to his victims until they bled. When his criminal abuse was first revealed to church leaders in 1982, Smyth was hustled out of the country to Zimbabwe there he is set up his own network of Christian camps were at least 90 children were abused and one died.

And the Eye reveals that Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of those who funded Smyth's religious camps in Zimbabwe, even though "he had been warned he was up to no good".

As a young man, Welby helped at the Iwerne Trust's camps in the UK, and Smyth was a leading light of the organisation.

This link between them appears to have stymied the Church of England's efforts to investigate Smyth's activities. The church has now apologised 15 times for delays to the inquiry.

Four of Christ's disciples were fishermen, but to get invited to a Iwerne Trust camp you had to be a pupil at an exclusive public school. It makes you wonder if wealthy evangelicals hope there will be a separate heaven for the privately educated.

Anyway, the best guide to the Smyth affair is Bleeding For Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne Camps by Andrew Graystone.

Don't force Clive Lewis to take an oath he doesn't mean

If you force someone to swear an oath, you are not trying to change their mind but humiliating them.

It was, I believe, Conor Cruise O'Brien who said that, in his biography of Edmund Burke, thinking of the British Crown's treatment of the people of Ireland in the eighteenth century.

I thought of his point when I heard that Clive Lewis was being made to take his oath of allegiance to the king again because be omitted some words the first time.

It ought to be possible for MPs to be republicans, just is at possible for them to be atheists. MPs are given the option of affirming rather than swearing on a holy book, and everyone thinks that's right and proper.

Yet it took a long battle by Charles Bradlaugh, a Liberal MP from Northampton, to win the right to affirm.

Would those who have accused Lewis of "student politics" say the same of Bradlaugh?

What the authorities should do is devise a tweak to the oath, producing either one that every MP can take or a subtly different version that republicans can take.

There would be a row at first, but soon we would be congratulating ourselves on a typically British piece if pragmatism. And not long after that, we would imagine that it has always been like that.

Photo by Rwendland.

Lady Maud Montgomery and the barefoot Irish boy

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Lady Maud Montgomery, nee Farrar, wife of Bishop Montgomery and mother of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, out shopping in Moville, Ireland. A barefoot young boy helps her with her purchases. Original Publication: Picture Post - 1556 - Lady Montgomery Goes Back Home - pub. 1943 (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Getty Images)

The camera never lies, which is why someone tweeted this photograph and its blurb from Getty Images, adding "No words."

Except, as a couple of replies to that tweet and to people who commented on it show, there are words, and those words show the picture is not what it seems.

It doesn't do for the English to make light of poverty in Ireland, but that's not what's being shown here.

The photograph is presenting a backward picture of Ireland - one which find a particular market in the US - and it's hard to see that being useful to anyone.

Another tweet, further down the thread, shows the best response to this attitude.

Incidentally, Field Marshall Montgomery hated his mother. He refused to allow his son David to have anything to do with her, and refused to attend her funeral in 1949.

That's from Wikipedia, so we know it's true.

Ryanair bar UK couple from flying over passport tea stain

Our Headline of the Day Award sees a rare victory for the Ludlow & Tenbury Wells Advertiser, which has pictures of the stain.

The judges advise everyone to be careful when drinking tea as they don't mess about at East Midlands Airport.

Jane Ashdown: "I can't wipe the grin off my face"

Jane Ashdown, the widow of the former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, has been talking to Somerset Live about her delight at the general election result:

"I can't wipe the grin off my face - it means everything. I just wish Paddy was here to see it and to celebrate. 

"He would have been especially thrilled to see two Lib Dems elected locally, Adam [Dance] in Yeovil and Sarah [Dyke] in Glastonbury and Somerton. But his interest was in the whole party. He would be gobsmacked at the national result - just speechless, which didn't happen very often.

"Paddy would have been so proud of Ed (Davey) who was part of his original office team in the 1990s. He would have greatly admired the energy Ed has put into the campaign and the attention to the issues he has received by doing all those incredible things on the campaign trail. 

"Paddy used to say that if you want someone to listen to you, you've got to make sure that they know that you are listening to them. Ed has done that through the campaign and has carried the party and voters with him."