Hurry over to Harborough FM for the full story and lots of pictures:
Concerned members of the public alerted Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service this morning and firefighters arrived on the scene at around 10.30am to start a rescue operation which took two-and-a-half hours.
With Dante proving difficult to coax down via a ladder, a passing roofer in a cherry picker offered to help and the male cat was eventually rescued just before 1pm.
Danny Chambers MP, the Liberal Democrats' mental health spokesperson in the Commons, is alarmed by new NHS figures on face-down restraint of patients obtained by the party, reports the Guardian
The figures show that the controversial technique was used in England 5,247 times during 2023 and 3,732 times in the first 10 months of this year.
Danny told the Guardian:
"Physical restraint can cause significant distress for vulnerable patients and leave staff with severe injuries. That some institutions are physically restraining mental health patients far more than others shows that our NHS services have been neglected and overlooked for too long."
He added that it is is "particularly worrying" to see restraint being used so persistently despite the implementation of 'Seni’s law' - the Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act - in 2021.
Danny urged ministers to launch an investigation into the situation, which has arisen because the last Tory government failed to improve mental health care and "some of the most vulnerable people in our society are now paying the price".
The figures, says the Guardian, were also condemned by the Centre for Mental Health thinktank and by the mental health charity Mind.
The Guardian has slapped an "Exclusive" label on its report that Josh Babarinde has called for a specific defence of domestic violence to be introduced.
This is a bad case of overselling, given that he appeared on Good Morning on 10 December to talk about the idea.
But there are encouraging developments in the report. Josh says he has received support from both Labour and Conservative MPs, and its claims that:
Officials are examining whether to change the way domestic violence crimes are recorded after a campaign by an MP who says the lack of a specific offence allows abusers to be freed early from jail.
The quote from a Ministry of Justice spokesperson at the end is less definite than this:
"Domestic abuse comes in many forms, not just physical. Under the current system, domestic abusers already face longer sentences as it is considered an aggravating factor in sentencing for a wide range of offences. However, the independent review of sentencing, led by David Gauke, has been tasked with looking at how best to address crimes of violence against women and girls in future."
The other day I heard David Blunkett quoted as saying this government has "hit the ground reviewing," but let's hope something good comes of this one.
Josh spoked movingly to the Guardian about his own childhood, saying he recalls violence as creating a "really lonely" home life:
"I would be upstairs in my room hearing an argument unfold, voices raised, shouts, screams, things smashed, and I would pull my covers over me and just sit crying. I didn’t know if my mum was OK."
"You get people saying they can’t say anything. But a lot of them are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix. Jimmy Carr carries on despite the idea he was cancelled for his joke about gypsies. Ricky Gervais would love to be properly ‘cancelled’, I think, but ... he doesn’t seem able to say anything actually controversial enough to be as controversial as he’d like to be." Stewart Lee talks to Prospect.
Far from displaying intelligence, argues Baldur Bjarnason, chat-based Large Language Models replicate the 'cold reading' techniques of fraudulent mediums.
Sugata Srinivasaraju pays tribute to his friend Jeremy Seabrook: "He was so much different from all that the colonial curriculum had imparted to us of a British life and character. He was like us, I thought. Very much like us. He was like a family elder. He happily fit into that very avuncular Indian role. He had no position to proselyte you into."
"In late December 1831, white Jamaican planters slept restlessly in their beds. Rumors had long been circulating of disquiet among the enslaved Africans residing in plantations across the island. Before they knew it, the island would be set ablaze as tens of thousands armed themselves to fight for their freedom." Perry Blankson on Christmas Day 1831, when 60,000 enslaved Africans carried out the largest uprising in the history of the British West Indies.
Ruth Lewy and Maxine Beuret present a photo essay on Britain's last milkmen: "[Beuret] first photographed an electric milk float while undertaking another project called Familiar Interiors of Leicester – her hometown – in 2005. As well as creating a record of the library, the hospital, the pub and other cherished places, she visited the local dairy, Kirby & West, and "instantly fell in love" with the milk floats, she says. "I loved the compact, functional design, clean lines, and fragile sense of history they carried with them."
I'm devoted to the football commentaries of Allaster McKallaster. They offer a bracingly different, and very Scottish, perspective on the beautiful game.
Here he is at the 1974 Charity Shield, which was held during Brian Clough's brief tenure at Leeds and features a notorious clash between Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan.
Clash says:
Hailing from the depths of South London, Honeyglaze took the music industry by storm with their self-titled debut back in 2022. Fraught with pent-up emotion, vocalist Anouska Sokolow composed sincere coming-of-age tales which, when brought to life by Tim Curtis and Yuri Shibuichi, quickly established the band as one to watch.
Cold Caller is a track from their second album, Real Deal. It is, says Clash, "more mature, both in sound and lyrically". Not only that:
Listening to Honeyglaze’s latest album is an education as well as an act of musical appreciation. ‘Real Deal’ teaches us to be self-aware, all the while igniting our creative imaginations as we direct fictional scenarios in our heads. As such, the band’s sophomore album beckons fans back into the talented, honest world of Honeyglaze. I, for one, never left.
I commented on the inspiration for this unlovely establishment in a post on this blog - and note the comment with two further links.
Hundreds of theatres face closure and more than 500 museums have shut since the turn of the century, laying bare the true scale of the risk facing Britain’s cultural venues.
Leaders in the sector are urgently demanding major investment from the new Labour government as they grapple with fresh challenges including rising energy bills and the hike to employer national insurance contributions in the Budget.
After years of cutbacks and underfunding, they have warned of “the danger of cultural wastelands” in a direct appeal to the chancellor Rachel Reeves and the culture secretary Lisa Nandy.
Maybe you see pubs has more vital to British culture than high culture is. If so, there is bad news there too. In October This is Money reported:
One in 10 British pubs is at imminent risk of closure, according to new figures that indicate the threat to the hospitality industry is worsening.
Around 11 per cent of the total number of pubs is at significant risk of going bust, analysis by accountancy firm Price Bailey shows.
The figures show that 7,445 pubs - 20 per cent of the total - have negative net assets on their balance sheets, meaning they are technically insolvent.
Or is it the British countryside that means the most to you? In September the Natural History Museum site said:
The species of animals and plants found in the UK have declined, on average, by 19% since monitoring began in 1970.
This dramatic and continued decline in the UK’s wildlife has now put one in six species at risk of being lost from Great Britain, according to the latest State of Nature report.
The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth.
One thing that unites these multiple crises in British culture - in Britishness itself - is that the culture warriors of the right have nothing to say about them.
The only aspect of Britain that appeals to them is its history, and even then they share a strange and tendentious reading of it. Could it be that, deep down, the only thing the right really cares about is money?
Peter Oborne reviews Sayeeda Warsi's memoirs: "For many years, Warsi devoted her life to the UK Conservative party. When she joined it two decades ago, it seemed to embody everything she believed in: family values, decency, tolerance, fairness, the rule of law. Slowly, the UK's first female Muslim cabinet minister's eyes opened. She came to realise that it wasn’t like that at all. In Muslims Don't Matter, she records the betrayals, the bullying, the abuse, the insults." "The nation’s bank clerks showed their gratitude for their extra days of rest by subscribing to a testimonial for Lubbock, who used their gift to fund two school scholarships." Kathryn Rix introduces us to Sir John Lubbock, father of modern bank holidays.
Will Young talks to Byline Times about the pressures of fame and the stories he believes are still to come to light about reality TV music shows. Me? I voted for Darius.
A London Inheritance reads London After Dark by Fabian of the Yard.
"Ellis’s torch could not illuminate the railway bridge, but he feared the worst. The railway line was about fifty metres from where he had stopped, so, leaping a barbed wire fence, he sprinted to the track and ran towards the locomotive, waving his torch." André Brett tells the story of New Zealand's worst every trailway disaster, which took place on Christmas Eve 1953.
"Homes would be adorned with ivy, holly and mistletoe, as well as laurel, conifers and bay. Yule logs burned and tapers were lit. Carolling was a popular activity that involved dancing as well as singing. Gifts would be exchanged during the festive season, but more typically at New Year rather than on Christmas day." Diane Watt on Christmas in the middle ages.
This is a 90-minute interview with Dave Alex Riddett, who has been the director of photography on all the Aardman feature films, including this Christmas's Vengeance Most Fowl.
He discusses his family, influences and career. If you can't spare 90 minutes then I recommend the 20 or so from 39:00, where he talks about shooting the groundbreaking Sledgehammer video for Peter Gabriel and then working with Nick Park at Aardman.
I have a second reason for posting this video besides its intrinsic interest. When I moved to Market Harborough in 1973, Dave Riddett's brother was one of the first friends I made, and within a few weeks I had gone on a trip to Dovedale organised for the local natural history society by his mother.
In those days it seemed as though the Harborough Theatre ran the town. Now, thanks to Wallace & Gromit, it has taken over the world.
February
Ed Davey's habit of calling on people to resign had not escaped the old boy's notice:
While leader of the Liberal Democrats, he has, with mixed effect, called for the resignations of, amongst other, Boris Johnson, Kwasi Kwarteng, Cressida Dick, Dominic Cummings, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel, Mark Field, Rishi Sunak, the former BBC chairman Richard Sharp, the board of Thames Water, Mauricio Pochettino, Nigella Lawson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Fatima Whitbread, Kirsty Wark, Kirsty Young, Jonny Bairstow, Rosie Holt, the late Dame Anna Neagle, the Rutland Water Monster and the Dalai Lama.
March
Reading Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House by Adrian Tinniswood, I discovered that there is a 1-in-20 chance that the first Lady Bonkers was American.
April
Believe it or not, Rishi Sunak was still prime minister in April. Lord Bonkers had him summed up:
I have long been aware of a certain innocence in Sunak when it comes to gambling. When he was a newly elected MP, I invited him to visit my Home for Well-Behaved Orphans, and then made the mistake of leaving him alone with the young inmates.
By the time I rescued him he had lost all his spare change at three-card brag and was about to surrender his shirt. Of course, I had to pretend to be furious, but there were extra buns for tea.
May
One of the less-mentioned locations in the Bonkers universe is the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness. I blogged about the old school at Dungeness that inspired it - and see the very useful comment with a further link on the subject.
June
I wrote in support of Ed Davey's election campaign stunts and ended by quoting my employer:
As to Keir Starmer, it seems that Lord Bonkers' description of the Labour leader - "like Ed Davey without the pizzazz" - was spot on.
Talking of Lord Bonkers, he suggested to me over dinner last night that we should end our campaign by firing Ed Davey from a canon "to demonstrate that the other parties have no one of his calibre".
Lord Bonkers himself attended a meeting of the campaign team:
Freddie and Fiona explain that in the past we have made the mistake of winning too many votes. This time, our efforts will be concentrated in the more pleasant of the Home Counties – “the sort of places our schoolfriends’ parents live”.
August
Looking back on the election campaign, Lord Bonkers was delighted that Ed Davey had visited his own Thorpe Park:
The hovercraft rides remain as popular as ever, but over the years interest in chasing Princess Margaret has dwindled, while the dog-shooting range had to be closed after some unfair coverage in the tabloid press. Yet when I brought the Well-Behaved Orphans on an outing in the park’s early days, they were unanimous in the view that this last was “The Best Bit”.
And the old boy found some suitable words to mark the retirement from politics of Lord Owen:
It was when his candidate barely succeeded in defeating Dr David Owen's hilarious 'Continuing SDP Party' at the first Bootle by-election of 1990 that my old friend Lord Sutch decided to step back from the front line of politics.
September
Lord Bonkers did not take kindly to the arrival of a colony of beavers at the Hall:
There is only one fly in this fragrant ointment: a colony of beavers has turned up and is making free with my demesne. Take this lake I am sitting beside: it was, until last Thursday, my croquet lawn. Why, they’ve even rigged themselves up a jacuzzi!
Now, I’m all in favour of rewilding – this is, I believe, the only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills – but one does like to be asked.
Whilst in his foreword for the latest Liberator Songbook, he recalled the summers Rutland International Arts Festival:
This year’s programme featured the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who offered ‘An Evening of Aeolian Harmonies (no money returned)’, while the Well-Behaved Orphans put on their traditional gymnastic display. (Only three got over the wall this time.)
Earl Russell’s Big Band made a welcome return after many years, and the Sisters from the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Box offered their tribute to the Sex Pistols.
November
Robert Jenrick received short shrift when he turned up at the Bonkers' Home for Well-Behaved Orphans with the intention of painting over its priceless murals:
The murals – some say they’re the work of our own Joshua Reynolds: others detect the hand of the Dutch Master van Mierlo – depict famous scenes from Liberal history for the edification of the young inmates. There’s ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’, ‘The Confusion of Andrew Newton’ (he has travelled to Dunstable in search of Norman Scott, but found no trace of him there) and ‘Tony Greaves Pretending to Have Lost the Line to London to Avoid Endorsing David Steel’s Leadership’.
December
"Make no mistake," Lord Bonkers recently said to me, "these 'computers' are here to stay." So I thought he would approved if I tried out generative AI to bring you illustrations of his world.
I give you Freddie and Fiona, the Elves of Rockingham Forest in one of his covets by Rutland Water at twilight, and two Well-Behaved Orphans digging an escape tunnel. Here's to an equally good 2025!
There, he says, Eva Astley Cooper, who fancied herself as "a kind of Ottoline Morrell of the Midlands", had established an artistic salon, and it was this that the young Coward was invited to join:
Later in the war the Hall became a military hospital, and not until the 1920s would Hamilton start to welcome its more distinguished guests, by which time Noël would visit as one of London theatres brighter stars.
For now he was an awkward teenager recently discharged from a sanatorium and hosted in the spirit of doing a friend a favour. Ever adaptable, he could perform the role of country-house gentleman as easily as he could the cockney page boy or the adolescent muse to a bohemian painter, and he spent much of his time out of doors at Mrs Astley Cooper's maternal insistence that he breathe the clean air (hunting ruled supreme).
He delighted at the new luxuries, and was perhaps set to entertain the guests amid the mesh of cigarette holders and the clink of champagne saucers. He was able to drink in a way of life both foreign and fascinating, scrutinising the English upper classes on their home turf, in all their tweets and traditions
One characteristic of his country-house plays, for which Hambleton was an early model, is his ability to exist affectionately and easily within his onstage world while simultaneously commenting on it from the outside.
It was as if he had opened the front of the hall on hinges like a doll's house to see the goings on behind from, the servant's bedrooms in the attic to the steamy kitchen beneath, and, between the two, the corridors of spare bedrooms, fires lit in each, in which guests would sleep beneath luxurious linen and, who knows, perhaps pad from one to the other in the dead of night.
In his play The Young Idea (1920), he would describe the English hunting country, where “immorality is conducted by rules and regulations”.
I particularly like it when Soden writes:
Mrs Astley Cooper, now aged sixty-one, lived at Hambleton Hall, a grand Victorian pile built on the centre of the Hambleton Peninsula, overlooking Rutland Water.
This suggests he has no more time than Lord Bonkers for the Rutland Water truthers, who insist that it did not exist until the 1970s.
The latest edition of Matthew Bannister's Folk on Foot podcast takes us to Bishop's Castle in the company of the celebrated accordionist John Kirkpatrick.
It's a good listen, both on the appeal of the town and on the history of morris dancing. I do admire the South Shropshire practice of inventing ancient folk festivals to bring in visitors.
I didn't visit Bishop's Castle when I finally made it back to Shropshire this summer, but if you click on an old blog post here you will find what is claimed to be a film of the Bishop's Castle elephant.
If you've any interest in folk music or the sense of place, Folk on Foot is a podcast to cherish.
Starring the late great Timothy West and first broadcast by the BBC in 1987, this radio play purports to tell the real story behind the legend of Good King Wenceslas.
"When He is King we will give him the Kings' gifts,
Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown,
Beautiful robes,” said the young girl to Joseph,
Fair with her first-born on Bethlehem Down.Bethlehem Down is full of the starlight
Winds for the spices, and stars for the gold,
Mary for sleep, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.When He is King they will clothe him in grave-sheets,
Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown,
He that lies now in the white arms of Mary,
Sleeping so lightly on Bethlehem Down.Here He has peace and a short while for dreaming,
Close huddled oxen to keep him from cold,
Mary for love, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.
The composer Peter Warlock and poet Bruce Blunt wrote Bethlehem Down in 1927 for a carol competition organised by the Daily Telegraph. They wrote less out of piety than a need for money.
This beautiful song duly won first prize, which they used to finance an "immortal carouse" on Christmas Eve that year.
Merry Christmas to all our readers.
When I tweeted it earlier this evening, someone suggested:
Maybe Musk’s Boring Company never had real tunnelling machines, and were in fact metal tubes full of orphans.
This report is from the Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail for 8 January 1889 - two years before Logan was elected to the Commons in a by-election:
East Langton: Opening of the Liberal Club
On Thursday last the opening of the new Liberal Club at East Langton was inaugurated by a dinner provided by the members. Over 50 sat down to the spread, Major Gibson presiding, in the absence of J. W, Logan, Esq., who had met with an accident on the previous day.
Logan, a fearsome rider to hounds with the Fernie, may well have met with his accident in the hunting field.After the tables had been cleared, speeches were given by a number of the gentlemen present, and an enjoyable time was spent. There was a good contingent from Harborough amongst the guests.
The open space they grace is called Bramber Green. Until the second world war, says Ian Visits, it was an area of Georgian houses - you can see a photograph of an ornate house that stood there on London Picture Archive.
Then came the German bombers, after which the area lay derelict until the early 1960s, when it was cleared to create the park we see today.
I can't find the sculptor of these stones - the large one seems designed to encourage children to climb it - or when they date from, but the last major renovation of the site was in 2019.
I didn't discover that Nina Simone had recorded this Sandy Denny song until recently. It is on her LP* Black Gold, which was recorded in 1969 at the Philharmonic Hall, New York City.
It's a beautiful performance, and I love the spoken introduction too. Even the play out at the end makes you wish you had been there.
* Is using "LP" desperately old fashioned now? I still often write it and then replace it with "album".
"A target will probably be someone who has particular weaknesses that can be exploited, often revolving around money or sex. They are seldom at the very pinnacle of power. But that, in itself, can leave them resentful and hungry for affirmation." Philip Murphy believes the British establishment offers a "target-rich environment" to spies.
Timothy Garton Ash asks what will happen if Russia wins in Ukraine: "Ukraine would be defeated, divided, demoralised and depopulated. The money would not come in to reconstruct the country; instead, another wave of people would leave it ... Europe as a whole would see an escalation of the hybrid war that Russia is already waging against it, still largely unnoticed by most blithely Christmas-shopping west Europeans."
Chris Dillow on the rise of managerialism and fall of British business management: "Managerialism has a messiah complex and belief in great leaders, whereas management looks for good fits between bosses and roles. Managerialism tries to apply the same methods everywhere, whereas management knows it is domain-specific; what works in (say) supermarkets might not work in universities."
The inter-war council estates that George Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier are visited by Municipal Dreams.
"Thirkell makes quite a few stealth jokes about sexuality that have a camp insouciance, in strong contrast to her otherwise default tone of extreme social conservatism." Kate Macdonald considers the contrasting treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism in the novels of Angela Thirkell.
Which made me sad to read this story in Schools Week:
Thousands of secondary pupils are facing "significant disruption" after the government scrapped its state school Latin programme mid-year as it seeks to plug a fiscal black hole.
In a letter seen by Schools Week, the Department for Education has informed schools it is terminating its Latin Excellence Programme in February.
The £4 million scheme was supposed to run until 2026, but government has enacted a break clause to end it earlier. The scheme provided a centre of excellence to create resources for partner schools, and also funded teacher salaries and trips to Rome.
Money is tight, but having read recently that the proposed GCSE in natural history is on hold because it's seen as a Tory initiative,* I suspect a combination of inverse snobbery and Gradgrindery is at work here too.
For myself, and perhaps because we received so little formal grammar teaching in English in those days, I found studying Latin invaluable because it taught me how languages work. That was about the most useful knowledge I brought to studying philosophy at university, though those staples of primary school maths, Venn diagrams, proved to he useful in proving the validity or not of syllogisms.
A few weeks ago, Liberal Democrat MPs were posting about their belief in choice in education as a way of justifying their opposition to VAT on school fees. If choice is good for those who can afford private education, then it is good for everyone.
So I hope to see them posting in favour of giving state schools the freedom to offer a diverse curriculum - including natural history and Latin.
* Mary Colwell once wrote a guest post for this blog making the case for this qualification, The idea that natural history is somehow Tory reminds me that George Orwell began one of his As I Please columns in Tribune: "Last time I mentioned flowers in this column an indignant lady wrote in to say that flowers are bourgeois."
A thorough survey of a vanished local industry and its associated railways. At 33:20 we visit Nevill Holt, which is believed by many scholars to be the inspiration for Bonkers Hall.
It was my innocent question about what I supposed to be his own Cockney roots that brought about the most remarkable revelation concerning his background. Home truths about which even Edward Fox (who was sitting in on the chat) had be en completely unaware.''I was one of life's social indiscretions,'' he said. ''Adopted and brought up by two maiden ladies in Dorset. In other words, I'm a bastard.'' This bold, freely-offered information provoked paroxysms of mirth in Fox.A lucky bastard, as it happened. ''It was a most felicitious adoption. I had a halcyon upbringing and was not prepared for the world at all. Things were very quiet and lovely. The maiden ladies were a Dr Mary Jeremy, OBE, and a Miss Clockton Roberts. The former was an OBE because there were not many lady doctors around at the time and she had done much good work in India before the 1914-18 war.''The ladies then ''put me through the local public school and then sent me off to what you might call a finishing school in Switzerland. Being maiden ladies, presumably they had it in their heads that that was the natural progression.''I was with them until they died, Dr Jeremy when I was 12, and Miss Roberts when I was in my twenties. So I have no-one in the world. I have no relations that I know about.''In tracing his ancestry back to his mother and father, all he had ever learned was that his mother came from Dublin and his father was Dutch.''For a long time I kept hoping that I would be traced by someone who would tell me that I was a Guinness heir and that all this was mine.''Fox, who would be an asset to any audience, had by this time gone into spasms of laughter that were obviously causing him great pain. ''A handbag? A handbag?'' he shrieked, Lady Bracknell-like, although, so far as he knew, Medwin had not actually been found in one.
Pétain, a hero of the first world war, headed the collaborationist Vichy regime after the German invasion during the second. After the Allied victory, he was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Because of his age (he was 89), this was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in 1951.
Ascherson writes of the detailed charges bought against Pétain:
Nothing shows better than this trial the way perspectives on the Second World War have changed almost out of recognition in the course of the last eighty years. In much of the world, children can now leave school vaguely believing that the war was fought to save the Jews from the Holocaust.
But in 1945 Pétain’s indictment included only a brief mention of ‘abominable racial laws’, referring to Vichy’s antisemitic discrimination, and said nothing specific about the mass round-ups and deportations to the gas chambers that were made possible by the collaboration of French police, ministry officials and railway managers.
Incredibly, no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation.
Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been let down only by a small clique of traitors. This new myth plastered over the fact that Vichy and its policy of keeping the Germans contented had been accepted, with intense and bitter reluctance, by most of the population during the early war years.
Josh Reynolds MP repeatedly attempts to get Amazon boss Jennifer Kearney to answer his question about why so many of her staff have chosen to go on strike.
He is the youngest Liberal Democrat MP, sitting for Maidenhead. Slightly mysteriously, Wikipedia says he was born in 1998 or 1999.
Gilo dissects the culture that prevents Church of England bishops from speaking out on abuse in the Church of England.
Jonathan Liew finds that the brave new world of cricket is now so new after all: "All over the world, at differing rates, players are learning that cricket’s new dawn is really the oldest tale of all: a game that was always rigged against them. Where a few get rich, and the rest simply fight over the scraps."
New research reveals that Doggerland - a sunken swath of Europe connecting Britain to the mainland - was more than a simple thoroughfare. It was home, reports Tristan McConnell.
Francis Young considers a seasonal theological dispute: "It does seem that in the minds of some clergy, Jesus Christ and Santa Claus exist in a kind of cosmic opposition, with belief in Santa representing a hindrance to faith in children because it keeps faith always at the level of childish fantasy. The trouble with this approach, however, is that it fundamentally fails to understand the nature of faith and belief - and speaks, in fact, to a deep lack of faith in those religious believers who feel threatened by myth and story."
The last time I reviewed the state of political defections by councillors was in October, so a brief update is probably in order. The rate of change seems to have picked up since the autumn - 84 councillors on first-tier authorities have changed allegiances in the last three months.
The significant beneficiary has been Reform UK, which has picked up 16 councillors from the Conservatives and the Independents. There are some examples of 'slow burn' defections, with councillors going Independent before joining Reform. It will be interesting to see if more of these become apparent in the spring, particularly in the run up to council elections in May (assuming, of course, that the Labour government allows us to have them).
The Conservatives have lost 22 councillors, Labour 19, the Lib Dems six and the Greens two. The Nationalists have acquired one new councillor. The balancing figure is 32 new Independents. Note that these are net figures, which can disguise a lot of movement – even Reform lost one councillor to the Independents. There are also a few examples of 'double hatting', where one individual has defected from two council groups.
Aberdeenshire seems to have had the most febrile body politic recently, with five individuals responsible for seven events - two of those being delayed defections to Reform from the Conservatives via the Independents. Newcastle has experienced 6 defections from Labour, who have formed a new Independent group, and North East Derbyshire has seen four new Independents, with three from the Lib Dems and one from the Tories.
No other authorities have seen more than three recorded changes of political allegiance, but for all we know there might be turbulence beneath the surface which will only become apparent when political pressures (or personal animosities) become too great to bear.
As ever, these figures have been taken from reliable sources, but might not stand up to rigorous forensic scrutiny, so are provided on an “errors and omissions excepted” basis. I will try to do a full tally scorecard for 2024 some time in the new year, but in the meantime, "a deep and meaningful Yuletide scenario to you all".
Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.
This is Snailbeach as I first saw it. The white heaps of spoil from the lead mines made it a miniature version of the china clay country in Cornwall.
That was on 3 June 1989 - I can date it so accurately because I remember it as the day England best Poland 3-0, the unexpectedly comfortable victory doing much to secure our qualification for Italia 90.
This photograph was taken in 1995, which I suspect was the year the bulldozers moved in to landscape the tips.
You can read more about Snailbeach in the old days in guest posts by:
A Tiny Forest is coming to The Headlands in Market Harborough. This video tells you all how Tiny Forests are grown and what they are intended to achieve.
Joe Biden had managed to grant a pardon more controversial than the one he gave to his son Hunter..
Democracy Now explains:
Biden announced nearly 1500 commutations and pardons last week in what the White House described as the largest single-day act of clemency from a president, but among those whose sentences were reduced is former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan - one of two judges in the notorious "kids for cash" scandal.
In 2011, Conahan was sentenced to 17.5 years for accepting nearly $3 million in kickbacks for sending 2,300 children, some as young as 8 years old, to for-profit prisons on false charges. His co-conspirator, former Judge Mark Ciavarella, remains in prison.
Offenders guilty of sexual or violent offences were not eligible for this clemency. An exclusion should also have been made for judges convicted of conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice.
This kids for cash scandal was shocking, but should not have been surprising in a prison system designed to generate private profit.
I have tended to see things this way since reading Crime Control as Industry by Nils Christie.
It's not much to look at, but this notice from the Birmingham Mail for 23 October 1963 sets a new record for the earliest press mention of Steve Winwood I can find.
The previous record was 3 December 1963, and because new titles are being added to the British Newspaper Archive all the time, it's possible that this one will be broken too.
Here again, though he was only 15, Steve Winwood shares top billing with Spencer Davis. The band has not yet become the Spencer Davis Group.
This notice is on page 2 of the newspaper. Stories on page 1 include:
Freethinking Economist asks why Labour expects to improve Britain's record on economic growth when its policies are so similar to those that have been tried in the past.
"In the years AD ('after Dennett'), the story continues and - in large part because of Dennett - philosophy of mind divested itself of its obsession with our ordinary thought and talk about the mind, and instead took its inspiration from science - in particular, neuroscience." Tim Bayne examines Daniel Dennett's contribution to philosophy.
"When the Prince of Orange marched in triumph into London, in December 1688, he did so after ordering all the remaining English troops in the capital to withdraw a minimum of 20 miles from the city. The bulk of the Dutch army was brought into, or placed around, London; Dutch Blue Guards took up all the posts around Whitehall and Hyde Park; and London remained under Dutch military occupation for 18 months." An old article by Jonathan Israel challenges the Whig account of the Glorious Revolution.
Olivia Petter explains why digital cameras are back.
Jonathan Nunn argues that the East End's pie and mash shops were responsible for their own demise: "Outside the East London hipster stereotype, there is still a working-class in Cockney heartlands – in Bow, in Whitechapel, in Dagenham, in Romford – they just happen to not all be white. Pie and mash shops could and should have adapted to bring this demographic in. They could have ensured their survival by instilling a new generation with some sense of ownership over it. Instead, they have chose"n to become ossified.
There is an abbey, Launde, in the heart of England. The air is always sweet there and it's quiet. A little heaven here on earth. And I think to myself: "I'll live here one day, when all my work is done."
These were Thomas Cromwell's last words in the wonderful Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light yesterday evening.
Launde is a real place and still much as Cromwell described it - a green bowl in the hills of High Leicestershire.
Today Launde Abbey is a Church of England retreat house. Its website sets out the site's history:
Launde Abbey was founded as an Augustinian priory in 1119 by Richard Basset, a royal official of Henry I. During the first century of its life the community buildings, cloister and garth were built, including an imposing church of which one side chapel still survives, now used as the Chapel at the present-day Abbey.
Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries, found Launde’s location very desirable. After visiting the priory in April 1540 he wrote in his Remembrances (a kind of personal journal) "Myself for Launde," although he never occupied the house as he was executed just three months later for treason.
His son Gregory, however, had kept royal favour – no doubt helped by his marriage to Elizabeth Seymour, sister to Henry VIII’s beloved wife Jane – and lived at Launde Abbey with Elizabeth for ten years; during this time he had some of the dilapidated monastic buildings restored or rebuilt. Gregory was buried at Launde and a monument erected by his wife remains in the Chapel to this day.
I took these photos at some sort of open day back in 2008. I understand the buildings at Launde have been fully restored since then and the site is looking far more prosperous. You can find a photograph of the interior of the chapel, including the monument to Gregory Cromwell, on the Launde Abbey website.
This blog's hero J.W. 'Paddy' Logan gained Harborough from the Conservatives at a by-election in May 1891 and held it at the general election the following July.
The Leicester Chronicle (8 August 1892) reported the resultant celebrations:
On Saturday afternoon the Liberals of the Harborough Division visited the residence of Mr, J.W. Logan, M.P., at East Langton Grange, to celebrate the triumphant return of that gentleman to Parliament.
An immense number of people were present from all parts of the division, long special trains running from Leicester.
Tea was partaken of in the riding school, and in the evening a public meeting was held, when congratulatory speeches were delivered, to which Mr. Logan responded.
Tennis-court sized areas of woodland known as ‘Tiny Forests’ are set to be created in two parts of the Harborough District.
Areas on The Headlands in Market Harborough and Devitt Way in Broughton Astley have been selected for the project, which will see hundreds of fast-growing trees put in the ground.
Tiny Forests? Earthwatch explains:
A Tiny Forest is a dense, fast-growing native woodland, about the size of a tennis court. These forests are not only great homes for butterflies, birds, bees and other wildlife but also a place for people to connect with, and learn about, nature. Each forest is a unique public asset – planted and cared for by the local community.
These super tiny, super powerful forests aim to mimic natural forests but in a small space. They include a mix of native trees which, over time, will create a wildlife-rich woodland. Tiny Forests don’t require much space and they can be planted anywhere that land is available – in a park, school or on a brownfield site.
Here is an account of a visit he paid to Great Malvern in 1905, which was recycled by the Worcester News a century later:
How To Walk And The Boots To Wear was a headline in the Malvern Gazette 100 years ago.
It came as Mr C W Allen, the champion long-distance pedestrian of the world, gave an exhibition of his powers in Malvern.
"At six o'clock in the evening, he started from Mr Oliver's boot stores on the Promenade and walked along the Belle Vue Terrace, through the Wyche cutting, round the hills by West and North Malvern, down Trinity Bank to the Graham Road and up Church Street to the starting point," the paper reported.
"This walk, which is practically an afternoon's walk to an ordinary individual, and has plenty of difficult ascents, he accomplished in the marvellous time of 49 minutes, or at the rate of eight miles an hour.
"A considerable number of people watched him en-route and the critics had to admit that in spite of the rapidity with which he travelled, it was a fair and square walk with no suspicion of breaking into a run.
"Mr Allen wore a pair of Oliver's celebrated boots and stated that he never had any others to beat them as regards wear and ease and comfort."
But then Allen, whose forenames I have yet to discover, was a great one for endorsing things. He endorsed the tonic Phosferine tonic in the makers' advertisements, even when he had joined up as an air mechanic in the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war.
Another Phosferine advertisement gives Allen's home address: 43 Nithsdale Avenue, Market Harborough.
The illustration above is one of a number of postcards of Allen that the CardHawk site has sold in recent years. You will see that in this one he is endorsing Harboro Rubber Soles, which were made at the Dainite Mill in St Mary's Road by the Harborough Rubber Company.
Later. A reader has researched this (thank you!) and his full name was Charles William Allen. He was a commercial traveller working for a boot manufacturer, so he was a walking advertisement.
Allen was originally from Stroud. His first child was born in Market Harborough, but he had left the town before the 1911 census and was living on Jersey in 1921.
It occurs to me that he may have seen that airship because he was off his tits on Phosferine.
"A decade ago, liberals, liberaltarians and straight libertarians could readily enthuse about “liberation technologies” and Twitter revolutions in which nimble pro-democracy dissidents would use the Internet to out-maneuver sluggish governments. Technological innovation and liberal freedoms seemed to go hand in hand. Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes." Henry Farrell analyses the changing politics of Silicon Valley.
Isabelle Roughol and John Elledge take us on a women's history tour along London’s Suffragette line: "In a tale as old as social progress itself, suffragists and suffragettes clashed with one another over issues of ideological purity and how to win over public opinion. As the suffragettes’ tactics got increasingly radical, 50,000 women marched on London’s streets in 1913 to say 'Not in our name!'"
"The sea has been pressing back into the boulder clay here for centuries, claiming churches, homes, villages and lives. Ten miles north of Withernsea, at Aldbrough, I saw a recently tarmacked road charging confidently out into thin air like something from a Road Runner cartoon." David Hancox writes about living on the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe.
"Her new home in Rotherfield, East Sussex had fifty acres and included a lake, topiary and an orangery. Lisa Marie cooked, gardened, created her own pub at the house where local friends such as Jeff Beck would pop by for a pint and a singalong." Jessica Olin reviews Lisa Marie Presley's posthumous memoir.
Charles Bramesco argues that David Lynch's Dune (1984) is due a re-evaluation.
