At last! Proof that BBC East's Joint Account quiz existed

In a 2018 post on my three encounters with Glyn Worsnip, I wrote:

Move on to the summer of 1978 when I was about to go to university. My mother and I won BBC East’s quiz Joint Account, a show that is so obscure it is not on the BBC Genome site.

It's still not appeared on Genome, but I now have two pieces of evidence that Joint Account existed.

The first is that it's mention in the Independent's obituary of Worsnip. The second is this photograph of him, which someone sold on the French Amazon site a few years ago.

Its caption is in English and runs:

Glyn Worsnip plays Chairman and Bank Manager in BBC East's knock-out quiz series "Joint Account", broadcast on BBC East

This may be of more interest to the writer than the reader, but then I have reached an age when it's good to have your memories confirmed. Now I even fancy I can remember Worsnip dressing like that.

The Joy of Six 1298

"Starmer was attempting a card trick that mainstream political parties across the West have tried to play in recent years - defeat the hard-right by borrowing their talking points and framing, and then somehow prove that you are better able to deal with this problem than they are." Matt Carr has no confidence in Keir Starmer's attempt to meet the Reform challenge to Labour.

"Syrians are under no illusion that the future will be hard, complicated and may end up being disappointing and even dangerous. Please can we all do them the courtesy of wishing them well, and offering support if it is requested, rather than writing them off now before they’ve even finished freeing and identifying the prisoners from Assad’s concentration camps?" Jonathan Brown calls for optimism about Syria.

Christine Jardine argues that hate crime legislation is not the right way to tackle sexism: "Having once felt the hate crime route was best, I now find the counter argument compelling. It is not just the worst cases – physical and verbal attacks or domestic abuse – that are the end result of misogynistic behaviour. It is everywhere, every day in so many ways."

"Conspiracy theories are not the reason Trump was elected. They are more like the oil that makes the process smoother or faster. What is really being described in the election result is not an electorate declaring it believes every line about theories of secret power structures running the world, but it is an expression of deep disillusionment: how it is to feel disenfranchised, to be poor, that the future is bleaker than the past." Gabriel Gatehouse and Matthew Sweet discuss what America’s rampant conspiracy culture means for truth and democracy now that some of its leading proponents may soon be in office.

Henrietta Billings, director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, on why the Oxford Street M&S demolition decision exposes a broken planning system and how we need urgent reform to safeguard heritage assets and reduce embodied carbon emissions.

Judit Polgar, the strongest ever woman chess player, calls for the abolition of separate titles (such as woman grandmaster), with lower qualifying standards, for women players. Though they were introduced to encourage women players, she believes they tend to limit their ambition.

Wild boars the size of a ‘small car’ advancing on Scottish city

The city in question is Inverness and the story has won the Telegraph our Headline of the Day Award.

After their meeting, one of the judges remarked that the obvious response to this advance is the rewilding of the Great Glen. Introduce apex predators that will prey on the wild boar and the problem will vanish.

Rediscovering the Wisbech and Upwell Tramway

This is a superior video from the Rediscovering Lost Railways YouTube account. It's notable not so much for the relics it finds as for the period video and stills that show the line in operation.

The Wisbech and Upwell Tramway, which opened in 1883, was almost six miles in length and ran between those two settlements. It gave up running passenger trains in 1927, but it continued carrying goods (mainly agricultural produce) until 1966.

The Rev. W. Awdry was vicar of Emneth near Wisbech between 1953 and 1965, and included two tramway engines in his books because he had seen them in operation on the Wisbech and Upwell.

You can read more about him and the tramway on the LNER site.

Victorian women in crinolines were the ultimate fashion victims

Embed from Getty Images

Content warning: This is a horrible passage of 19th-century history.

A number of factors combined in crinolines to make them a ridiculously dangerous death trap for anyone wearing them. During the peak of their popularity they killed at least 3000 people in the UK alone according to an 1860 article in the Lancet, and in 1864 a Bulgarian doctor reported that over the previous 14 years he believed that at least 39,927 women had died in crinoline fires.

This is from a horrifying article in the Christmas Fortean Times. Crinolines - stiff petticoats worn to hold out a skirt - were the height of fashion for women from the 1840s to the 1860s, and enjoyed intermittent revivals later in the century. Latterly, a metal frame replaced most of the petticoats.

They were such a fire hazard for two reasons. First, the skirt above became huge and unwieldy, so it was easy for a woman to brush against a fire or lighted candle. Second, the crinolines themselves were made of swathes of light, gauzy material, none of it treated to make it fire resistant.

The result is that the article, The Crinoline Inferno by Ian Simmons, is stuffed with barely credible horrors. One such runs:

In another incident in 1861 an entire corps de ballet - seven dancers in total, including the four English Gale sisters - died together when they tried to help each other after one dancer's costume ignited at the Continental Theatre in Philadelphia.

And that was nothing to the 126 people, mainly aristocratic ladies wearing highly flammable crinolines and corset, who died in a fire at the 1897 Bazaar de la Charité. Still less to the two or three thousand who died in the 1863 Church of the Company fire in Santiago.

Fashionable victims included:

the teenage Archduchess Mathilde of Austria, who died when she was surprised smoking by her father and hid the cigarette behind her back touching her dress as she did so and going up in flames instantly. 

Two illegitimate half-sisters of Oscar Wilde also died after crinoline fires - "both died a lingering death several days later". Little was said about their deaths as their father, a prominent Dublin doctor, did not want to draw attention to the family and its scandals.

As a result, the tale remained part of the secret folklore of Dublin for many years, growing in the telling to include a mysterious black-draped woman who regularly visited the girls' grave and. later. their father on his deathbed. It is not clear whether Oscar knew of his sisters' fate. or indeed their existence.

A further hazard was added when the colour Paris Green became fashionable in women's fashion. The die that produced it included arsenic, and women became ill through poisoning just from wearing this shade as a result.

Finally, the crinoline remained lethal even in the 20th century. In 1930 Nita Foy, a dancer appearing in a period film at Twickenham Studios, died in crinoline fire after her costume brushed against an electric fire in the dressing room of one of the actors. The room, says Matthew Sweet in his Shepperton Babylon, became a site of ghoulish pilgrimage.

Josh Babarinde makes the case for his Domestic Abuse Bill

The Liberal Democrat MP for Eastbourne, Josh Babarinde was on Good Morning earlier today to talk about the Domestic Abuse Bill he is looking to pilot through the Commons.

As he explains in the video, there is currently no separate offence of domestic abuse. This means that abusers are convicted of something like actual bodily harm, with the result that they cannot be excluded from early-release schemes and the like.

With the new clarity a separate offence would bring, survivors of domestic abuse could be better protected.

A website has been set up to support the campaign for an offence of domestic abuse. It includes a petition you can sign.

Jago Hazzard rides on London's cable car but no one else does

There's only one mode of public transport in London that's completely empty during the rush hour. Jago Hazzard has been to ride on it.

He finds it a fun day out, but little use as a form of public transport.

You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.

Private Eye's Literary Review: "A 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago"

As I usually point out before criticising Private Eye, to establish my credentials, I have bought every issue of the magazine since I went to university in York in October 1978. (Before that I couldn't, because no one stocked it in Market Harborough.)

The Eye's strength at the moment is its investigations. The humour, by contrast, increasingly feels like the product of a sausage machine: feed in the week's events, turn the handle and out it comes. And as for the columnists and regular features, they are often a source of weakness.

I've had a go at The Agri Brigade and Pseuds Corner in the past - the former, I will admit, has recently been very good on the NFU's (and the Lib Dems') campaign against restoring inheritance tax to any holding of farmland, no matter how large.

So let's turn to the Eye's Literary Review, which a couple of issues ago was on to something when, in the course of a review of Ali Smith's Gliff, it complained about the stereotyped and simplistic view of politics held by many literary types.

I love the coverage of culture in the London Review of Books, but I've not forgotten the regular contributor who complained in 2011 that George Osborne was trying to pay off the national debt in one parliament.

Literary Review complains of Sally Rooney and of a caricature Conservative minister in Alan Hollingshurst's Our Evenings. 

I've not read that book, but it's worth pointing out that Tory politicians have discovered the power of intentionally becoming a caricature of yourself. Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are the obvious examples to cite, but the first Tory to employ the tactic was Ann Widdecombe.

My reason for writing this post is the sheer awfulness of the column's conclusion:

In fact, the orthodoxies of the modern leftie novel are becoming just the slightest bit tedious, and this reviewer put down Glyff with the thought that, really, voting Conservative may have something to be said for it.

It the author was aiming to hit the tone of a 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago, then he scored a bull's eye. But why would you want to sound like that? And why should we value the opinions on literature of someone who does?

The Joy of Six 1297

Josh Self says the rise of Reform could consume Kemi Badenoch and then the Conservative Party: "As Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch has the privilege of interrogating the prime minister every Wednesday afternoon. And yet Farage can probably corral more support with a single TikTok (addressed to his one million followers) than Badenoch with her six scattergun PMQs. The bottom line is this: even before the English council elections, when Reform could evince serious strides, Farage is a far more visible (and effective) critic of the Labour government than Badenoch, the de jure opposition chief."

"Important issues are being obscured by the swirl of errors, confusions, and hyperbole which has reappeared around UK freeports and ‘charter cities’ or ‘states within a state’ – particularly on social media but also crossing over into the traditional media. Dispersing this fog is difficult because the claims made are convoluted, fragmented, hard to pin down, and difficult to disentangle from the occasional truth they contain." Chris Grey on the debate about freeports.

Teenagers are vaping. So what? asks Democracy Coma.

Happy birthday to Joan Armatrading, who has enjoyed an extraordinary, pioneering career as a Black British woman singer-songwriter. She recently talked to the Guardian.

Francis Young opens The Box of Delights by Philip W. Errington: "To this day, the Bishop of Tatchester’s rush to find his mitre and ensure that Tatchester Cathedral celebrates its 1000th Christmas is my iconic image of Midnight Mass, as the carol ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ fills Tewkesbury Abbey (the real Tatchester). It was not until years later, as a young teenager, that I read the novel by John Masefield on which the adaptation was based, and then I found an even richer source of fantasy and magic."

The Opinionated Reader enjoys Gloucestershire Folk Tales by Anthony Nanson: "Sky-ships are flying over Bristol, a pious nun becomes the innocent prey to a heathen, a mysterious woman haunts a village, requiring fresh flowers on her grave."

Kate Carr: Shy, Typically Alone or in Pairs

Kate Carr, a London-based sound artist, says her album A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds includes "all the birds I never recorded, and some I did".

Antonio Poscic describes it as:

a phantasmagoric set of artificial field recordings created with bird callers, electronics, and manipulated birdsong. Despite its occasionally familiar sonic artefacts - a bird’s undulating chirrup, a frog’s nocturnal croak – the music feels alien, as if documented on an exoplanet.

And he says that the final section Shy, Typically Alone or in Pairs:

finds a sliver of optimism hidden somewhere deep, and dresses it around faint arps, concentric noises that spread like dulcimer hits, and beatific, ambient Americana evoking riffs. 

As whispers, cicada vibrations, and bittersweet amphibian squawks emerge from the forest, I can’t help but wonder if a machine will ever be able to imagine something so unusual yet sublime on its own.

How Generative AI imagines Freddie and Fiona and the Elves of Rockingham Forest

I was playing about with the free AI images that Canva offers and came up with these results for Freddie and Fiona and for the Elves of Rockingham Forest. Both are uncannily accurate - the elves are in Lord Bonkers' woods on the shore of Rutland Water, of course.

But I've used up all my free goes there now and can't find another free site that offers images of the same quality.

Finding our more about Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley

"It's time to find out more about Frieda Harris," I wrote the other day of the woman who was the wife of one Liberal MP (Sir Percy Harris) and great grandmother of another (Matthew Taylor), an who helped fund the notorious Aleister Crowley.

A good place to starts is an article by Brianna Di Monda about Frieda and her partnership with Crowley published in Lapham's Quarterly.

She writes of Frieda's early life:

Growing up in a wealthy, middle-class family, Lady Frieda Harris was taught only the arts—drawing, music, dancing—and conversational French. Though women were benefiting from expanded opportunities in the late nineteenth century, Harris’ education prepared her only for a good marriage. It also likely readied her for a life of being a voracious autodidact. 

After she left school, her interest in mysticism—incited, perhaps, by her mother reading her light texts about Buddhism at a young age and her father’s membership in the United Grand Lodge of England (England’s governing Masonic lodge for the majority of Freemasons)—carried her far beyond her traditional schooling. She read widely about alternative belief systems and became involved in theosophy and, briefly, Christian Science.

Above all, Harris committed herself to painting, which she also used as a springboard for further spiritual involvement. As an artist, Harris exhibited her work in prominent London galleries. There are rumors that she was a co-mason, a form of Freemasonry that admits female members, for whom she painted surreal Masonic trestle boards, the graphic teaching devices of Freemasonry. Her 1926 illustrated book Winchelsea: A Legend—which chronicles Dionysus’ imagined adventures in East Sussex—also reflects her interest in classical mythology and mysticism.

And then of her marriage to Sir Percy:

When Frieda married Sir Percy Harris in 1913, her husband encouraged her continued artistic pursuits. “My wife is an artist and a good one,” he wrote in the postscript of his 1948 memoir, Forty Years In and Out of Parliament. “She takes her art seriously, in fact works at her painting seven days a week and generally twelve hours out of the twenty-four. When, however, critics discover she is my wife she is immediately written down as an amateur and accordingly disparaged.” 

Frieda in turn supported Percy’s ambitions in Parliament: she joined his election campaigns, entertained their guests, ran his household, and involved herself in politics as a militant suffragist while he advocated for progressive legislative reforms. Their marriage was built on friendship and mutual admiration, but their relationship barely survived the years Frieda threw herself into painting an improved tarot deck.

That tarot deck was painted for Crowley, whom she first met in 1936 - by then he looked nothing like the satyr in my earlier post. He proved a demanding client - you can read all about their collaboration in Di Monda's article.

Despite that:

The two remained devoted to each other until the end of Crowley’s life in 1947, and Harris was named a co-executor of his will. She hosted a wake in his honor at her home in London.

And we know that she helped fund Crowley's living expenses for a time, which is what occasioned my earlier post.

Di Monda says that by the time Crowley died, Frieda and Sir Percy maintained separate London residences, though they still socialised and took holidays together.

And finally:

After Percy’s death in 1952, Frieda moved to a houseboat in Srinagar, in Kashmir “in search of a God,” making a modest income from writing and artistic projects, such as ballet designs. In a 1958 letter to a friend, she wrote that she still longed for Crowley, “who was so damned clever and without limitations.” She died four years later.

As you would expect with someone who dealt with esoteric subjects, Frieda's art fetches high prizes - I rather covet her book on Winchelsea. But you can buy a pack of her Tarot cards for a reasonable price.

Armed with them, a headscarf and golden earrings, I shall set myself up as fortuneteller and tour the local village fetes:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

The Joy of Six 1296

William Wallace opposes the abolition of district councils on the grounds of efficiency and cost-cutting: "But there is a countervailing cost in local democracy and representation which Liberal Democrats - I would argue - should fight against. Most people see political issues through local experience and daily life.  Now that so many decisions have been removed to Whitehall, with service delivery transferred to private providers or autonomous agencies regulated by central government, it’s not surprising that so many voters see politics as a distant game played in Westminster over which they have no influence at all."

"When Morgan McSweeney replaced Sue Gray as Starmer's Chief of Staff two months ago many expected the government’s communications would improve. They have not. For that to happen Starmer must abandon his vision of politics, at least for now. He needs to recognise that a government - especially today - will to be judged on its actions and its words." It's time for Keir Starmer to embrace populism, argues Steven Fielding.

Jonathan Foley says artificial carbon removal is largely a sideshow when it comes to climate change. At best, it may eventually grow into a minor solution. At worst, it's a distraction from reducing emissions - and plays right into the fossil fuel industry’s hands.

Jonathan Liew on the Global Super League Twenty20 in Guyana, where big oil, geopolitics and cricket collide.

"His book humanises the work’s exalted creators and demonstrates that the Messiah is not a pompous manifesto of faith but a troubled, often desperate quest for consolation. Despite those hectoring hallelujahs, what moves King is the oratorio’s prescription for overcoming personal misery." Peter Conrad reviews Charles King's Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah.

Welsh carols, Derbyshire ballads and Cajun drinking songs: Jude Rodgers selects the best folk music for Christmas and winter.

And, as it's getting near Christmas, here's a bonus...

Lib Dems hold cottage where Traffic got it together in the country

The Liberal Democrats held the Cholsey ward of South Oxfordshire DC last night, polling 949 votes to the second-placed Conservative's 362. You can see the result expressed in percentages at the bottom of this post.

I take particular pleasure in this victory because Cholsey ward takes in Aston Tirrold - and near that village is the cottage where Traffic famously "got it together in the country" in 1967.

Until 1974, Aston Tirrold and the cottage were in Berkshire, which explains the title of this Traffic song from their first album, Mr Fantasy. If the backing singers sound familiar, they're Steve Marriott and the rest of the Small Faces.

And as everyone is talking about The Box of Delights at the moment, I had better mention that John Masefield also lived at Aston Tirrold for a while.

Cholsey (South Oxfordshire) Council By-Election Result: 🔶 LDM: 62.2% (+16.1) 🌳 CON: 23.7% (+0.9) 🔴 SDP: 7.6% (+2.3) 🌹 LAB: 4.7% (New) 🙋 IND: 1.8% (New) No IND (-25.7) as previous. Liberal Democrat HOLD. Chnages w/ 2023.

— Election Maps UK (@electionmaps.uk) December 6, 2024 at 12:11 AM

John Rogers meets the dinosaurs of Crystal Palace Park

John Rogers posted this walk at the end of October. His description on YouTube says:

A beautiful autumn walk in South London. Walk 3 of the Capital Ring starts at Crystal Palace Park and goes through Penge, Alexandra Park Sydenham, Cator Park Beckenham, and our walk ends at the wonderful Beckenham Place Park with sensational views. 

The Capital Ring is 150-mile circular walk divided into 24 stages. This walk was around 7.5 miles with rail and bus connections at either end starting at Sydenham Station and ending at Beckenham Junction.

Best of all, we get to see the Crystal Palace dinosaurs near the start of it.

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

The Box of Delights as a whodunnit and as social history

John Masefield's The Box of Delights is many things, and one of them is a crime novel.

Shedunnit, an excellent podcast on women crime writers, has made a previously subscriber-only episode available to everyone. It looks at The Box of Delights as crime fiction.

Kay Harker, after all, is trying to report a nasty case of scrobbling, but like many amateur detectives in fiction, he finds that the police don't take him seriously.

The podcast emphasises that The Box of Delights is a long book - there's a lot in it that didn't make it into the television adaptation. 

And it suggests that the themes of snow and Christmas were an influence on C.S. Lewis and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

The word 'Scrobbling' was coined by Masefield. A post on Tyger Tale reminds us that:

One of the many pleasures of reading classic Christmas books is the way they open a window into the past in an especially vivid way. More than just present another idealised vision of Victorian festivities, the best of them can highlight the small details and forgotten language of Christmas’s past. As Piers Torday’s delightful stage adaptation reminded me, few books do this more effectively than John Masefield’s The Box of Delights.

Santa's Nark: The dark side of the Elf on the Shelf

It's now a Christmas tradition that I quote from the article Who’s the Boss? "The Elf on the Shelf" and the normalization of surveillance by Laura Pinto and Selena Nemorin:

Through play, children become aware about others’ perspectives: in other words, they cultivate understandings about social relationships. The Elf on the Shelf essentially teaches the child to accept an external form of non-familial surveillance in the home when the elf becomes the source of power and judgment, based on a set of rules attributable to Santa Claus. Children potentially cater to The Elf on the Shelf as the “other,” rather than engaging in and honing understandings of social relationships with peers, parents, teachers and “real life” others.

What is troubling is what The Elf on the Shelf represents and normalizes: anecdotal evidence reveals that children perform an identity that is not only for caretakers, but for an external authority (The Elf on the Shelf), similar to the dynamic between citizen and authority in the context of the surveillance state. Further to this, The Elf on the Shelf website offers teacher resources, integrating into both home and school not only the brand but also tacit acceptance of being monitored and always being on one’s best behaviour--without question.

By inviting The Elf on the Shelf simultaneously into their play-world and real lives, children are taught to accept or even seek out external observation of their actions outside of their caregivers and familial structures. Broadly speaking, The Elf on the Shelf serves functions that are aligned to the official functions of the panopticon. In doing so, it contributes to the shaping of children as governable subjects.

Last Christmas I noted the appearance of dummy CCTV cameras for your child's bedroom and asked:

The packaging says 'Shh! It's a dummy!' - presumably you're not meant to tell your children that. But how long before real cameras are sold under the Elf banner, linked to Ofsted HQ and hacked by the Russians and Chinese?

Sir Cliff Richard's Christmas gravy recipe branded 'absolutely vile' by celebrity chef

The Mirror wins our Headline of the Day Award, though the judges did point out that Cliff recorded Move it, which has a claim to be the great British rock record, and that celebrity chefs are ten a penny these days.

Call for Southwell's importance to Byron to be recognised

From BBC News:

Geoffrey Bond often imagines Lord Byron "looking down" as he sits in what was once the 19th Century poet's former bedroom.

The 85-year-old has lived in Burgage Manor in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, for 33 years - where Byron stayed with his mother between 1803 and 1808, before rising to fame in 1812.

While Newstead Abbey is more famously known as Byron's ancestral home, Mr Bond believes his beginnings in Southwell have been overlooked.

Mr Bond has dedicated decades to his fascination and love for Byron and his work and now says he wants Byron's beginnings in the town to get due recognition.

And here is Burgage Manor, one of many fine houses in a town that also boast England's least known cathedral.

The Lib Dems' briefing on the 'Family Farm Tax'

The Liberal Democrats have issued a briefing on what we are calling the 'Family Farm Tax'. I had not fully grasped before reading it that we are opposed to imposing Inheritance Tax (IHT) on any farmland, no matter how high the value of the estate. 

This means that the argument in the new Private Eye's farming column apply to the Lib Dems every bit as much as it does to the NFU:

The NFU has labelled Reeves's measure as "the family farm tax", but this smacks of thinly disguised special pleading for all landowners regardless of scale. And what constitutes a family farm? Should Sir James Dyson's 36,000 acres, for example, worth approximately £500m be described as one?

Farmers may not be able to see it, but making farmland taxable on death is a useful deterrent to ultra-high-net-worth individuals whose main motive for buying farmland is to pass on significant wealth to their heirs tax-free. Farmers complain that farming only returns 1 per cent on the capital invested, but this only shows how much the value of land has been inflated by non-farmers seeking refuge from IHT. ...

If the removal of farmland's exemption from IHT deters investors who are largely motivated by tax advantages then land prices may fall far enough that owning some can once more become an aspiration for family farmers.

In bringing in these changes to IHT, the government has made a genuine attempt to differentiate between family farms and land that is held purely because of the tax advantages it has hitherto offered.

I can see that it has all been done rather quickly, and it may be that the line has been drawn in the wrong place, but the Lib Dems' blanket opposition seems misjudged.

You can argue that one of the problems farmers face is the power of the supermarkets, but tackling that will be difficult for any government, because it will put up prices to consumers.

And while most voters instinctively support farmers - it's seen as a traditional and ethical occupation - it's possible to ask if it is desirable to farm every last acre, when overgrazing by sheep has left upland landscapes so bare in many places.

After all, as a party we also support the Climate and Nature Bill, which includes a target that will see:

the health, abundance, diversity and resilience of species, populations, habitats and ecosystems so that by 2030, and measured against a baseline of 2020, nature is visibly and measurably on the path of recovery.

There are few easy answers here. The questions are more complex than the party's briefing makes them appear.

Nick Cook: England's forgotten spinner of the Eighties

When a young England spinner makes an exceptional start to his career, his feat is compared with past performances. High among them is that of the Leicestershire slow left armer Nick Cook - you can see him here making his debut against New Zealand in 1983.

As Wikipedia says:

He picked up 32 wickets in his first four Tests, taking four five-fors, including one on debut (after he had been called up at short notice), and a best bowling match return of 11 for 83 against Pakistan at Karachi.

But it was not to last:

Cook's next 11 Tests, spread over a period of five years, fetched him 20 wickets at an average of 56.75. 

Cook's problem was not just England's chaotic selection policies in the Eighties, but also that he was competing with two established test-class spinners: Phil Edmonds and John Emburey.

Still, his overall test average was 32.48 (52 wickets), compares favourably with Phil Tufnell's average of 37.68 (121 wickets).

Like Edmonds, Cook flighted the ball and gave it a chance to turn. Slow left armers of the generation before - Derek Underwood, Norman Gifford, Don Wilson - bowled faster and flatter.

59 Labour MPs support Sarah Olney's electoral reform bill

Today the Commons voted to give Sarah Olney leave to introduce her 10-minute rule bill to bring in "a system of proportional representation for parliamentary elections and for local government elections in England". The vote was won with a majority of two - 138 to 136

The bill is unlikely to proceed further, as it does nor have government support. But the vote was still significant, because 59 Labour MPs voted in support of Sarah's bill. Sarah is the Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park.

Introducing her bill, she said:

We are also seeing record levels of disillusionment with the political process, with citizens becoming increasingly disengaged. This is reflected in the fact that turnout in the 2024 general election was the second lowest since 1918 at just under 60 per cent. 

Over 40 per cent of registered voters in the UK thought so little of the political process they did not think it worth expressing a preference for one candidate over another.

As seen on TV: Charles Dickens's short story The Signal-Man

After five M.R. James adaptations, in 1976 the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas turned to Dickens and an unforgettable version of The Signal-Man.

This story is the subject of a good episode of the podcast Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! Though it's only 10 or 11 pages long, Dominic Gerrard and John Bowen find it inexhaustible.

You can read it for yourself on Project Gutenberg. And for more on premotions, I strongly recommend Sam Knight's The Premonitions Bureau.

"Ooh, Your Eminence!": A short review of Conclave (2024)

If you enjoyed The Death of Stalin or the television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Solder Spy, you will enjoy Conclave - it's another film about power and hierarchy in a very male organisation. 

In this one, the cardinals meet to choose a new Pope, and politicking, corruption and violence ensue.

Conclave threatens to veer into Judge John Deed country when Ralph Fiennes, as Cardinal Lawrence, turns detective, but stops short of that line.

And Fiennes plays the scene where he is overcome with grief on finding the late Pope's glasses well, but Jean Alexander did it better when she found Stan's in Coronation Street.

I'm not proud of it, but I was often reminded of the finest double entendre in all the Carry On canon.

Matthew Taylor's great grandmother funded Aleister Crowley, 'The Wickedest Man in the World'

Liberal England takes a deep breath: Matthew Taylor - that's Baron Taylor of Goss Moor, who was Liberal and then Liberal Democrat MP for Truro and then Truro and St Austell between 1987 and 2005 - was adopted as a baby. (His adoptive parents were the screenwriter Ken Taylor and his wife.)

In 2008 Matthew traced his he traced his birth mother, Margaret Harris. She was the daughter of the prominent New Zealand businessman Sir Jack Harris, and the granddaughter of the former Liberal chief whip Sir Percy Harris.

Sir Percy sat for Harborough between 1916 and 1918, and for Bethnal Green South West between 1922 and 1945.

His wife was an artist and, as I blogged long ago, she designed a Tarot pack for Aleister Crowley, who called himself "The Beast 666". The press preferred "The Wickedest Man in the World".

Reader's voice: Of course we remember all that. So what's new?

I've come across a review of a review of a biography of Crowley on the Lion & Unicorn blog. In it, Simon Matthews writes:

In the 1920s Crowley enjoyed an income of £10 a week, approximately £2,600 now, or £135,000 p.a. Declared bankrupt in 1934 (occupation: explorer) he still managed to keep up appearances, giving talks, including one at a literary luncheon at Foyles and being paid a weekly retainer of £2 (roughly £400 now) by book illustrator Freida Harris, wife of Percy Harris, Liberal MP for Bethnal Green South West. This allowed him to reside in a serviced flat in Hanover Square.

It's time to find out more about Frieda Harris.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Dominic Sandboy’s ‘What My Housemaster Told Me About The Seventies’

I love happy endings and I expect you do too. No doubt there will be more from Lord Bonkers in the new year.

Sunday

Over a post-service Amontillado, I try to persuade the Revd Hughes to stand for Archbishop of Canterbury. He’s never happier than when on his hind legs, and would look good in the frocks, but I fear my blandishments fall on stony ground. 

After the roast beef and Yorkshire p., I hunker down in my library. I can’t get on with Dominic Sandboy’s ‘What My Housemaster Told Me About the Seventies’, but a telephone call brings good news. Sixteen of Danny Chambers’ penguins sailed from Oakham Quay this afternoon and will be home in the South Atlantic for Christmas. 

I say sixteen because one of them has discovered a vocation and chosen to stay at Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes. I feel sure he will prosper there.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’
• Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume
• I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed
• The prime minister was having an affair with Stanley
• They have failed to seize control of Belvoir Castle
• “I’m not paying that for a corn pone”

jamine.4.t: Elephant

This is a track from jasmine.4.t’s debut album You Are The Morning, which will be out early next year.

She says:

I wrote “Elephant” very early in my transition about my first t4t love. It’s about when it hurts because you’re trying to be friends but you both want to be more. My life in Bristol fell apart when I came out, and having no safe place to live I was staying on queers’ sofas in Manchester, traumatized and in no place to start a relationship.

It was beyond healing recording this track in LA with Phoebe, Lucy, and Julien, along with my Manchester dolls Eden and Phoenix and with extra layers from local trans musicians Vixen, Bobby, Addy, and of course the incredible Trans Chorus Of Los Angeles.

I like the way Elephant starts simply and changes into something unexpected.

The Joy of Six 1295

"Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him." Dorothy Bishop explains her decision to resign as a Fellow of the Royal Society - she's talking about Elon Musk, of course.

Jim Sleeper uncovers the Classical roots of the US Constitution: "The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses."

Amy-Jane Beer is excited by the rewilding project at Castle Howard: "While most authorised beaver reintroductions in the UK have been in small enclosures, here the plan is to give them 450 acres to work with, alongside pigs and large grazers that will churn and prune and trample and further invigorate ecological processes. I cannot wait to see it."

During the Cold War, philosophers worked together to aid dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. Cheryl Misak was part of a movement that included both Jacques Derrida and Roger Scruton.

 "Wicked makes its cinematic premiere at an awkward time, so soon after so many American voters acted against virtually every moral idea the production unsubtly espouses," says Luke Buckmaster.

Tim Rolls on the day in 1966 that Bobby Tambling scored five goals at Villa Park: "Looking at the TV footage a couple of things strike home. The quality of Chelsea’s accurate, incisive passing (particularly Osgood and Cooke) and speedy breaks, and the sheer inability of the home players to shut down their breaking opponents."

Lord Bonkers' Diary: “I’m not paying that for a corn pone”

Lord Bonkers laid out the history of New Rutland ('The Pork Pie State') in a diary entry some years ago. I hope the Democrats will study his remarks carefully, because he can be a wise old bird, and the career of John Burns is worthy of study too.

Saturday

I was not surprised by the evil Trump’s victory. Having spent some weeks in New Rutland during the campaign, I was well aware that the cost of living was foremost in voters’ minds. “Have you seen the price of hominy grits?” they said to one another, and “I’m not paying that for a corn pone.” 

Set against this, the news that the delightful Kamala Harris had been endorsed by Beyoncé Knowles (or was it Cyril Knowles?) fell a little flat. 

We should not allow our revulsion at Trump to lead us to think badly of the whole population over the pond: I remain convinced that there is no finer fellow to poke a cow with than Johnny American. And no good Liberal will run down the labouring classes: if you’d tried that in John Burns’s hearing, he’d have given you one up the snoot.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’
• Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume
• I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed
• The prime minister was having an affair with Stanley
• They have failed to seize control of Belvoir Castle

The old course of the River Jordan through Little Bowden

The flooding of the River Jordan earlier this week has had me looking at old Ordnance Survey maps. As I suspected, Rectory Lane has this long curve because it used to follow the river.

And the shot below, taken outside the old thatched house on Scotland Road below - I remember it as a shop in the 1980s and it may once have been Little Bowden Post Office - shows how high the pavement once is there. I suspect that's because the road used to flood regularly.

Little Bowden used to be two settlements. One was by the church and the other, called Scotland End, was at the Northampton Road end of Scotland Road. Presumably because of regular flooding, the old shop was about the only building between them.

As far as I can tell from the maps, the radical straightening of the Jordan took place about 1920 - this needs more research. And I've found an old newspaper report that says that, before the railways came to Harborough, the Jordan used to flow through the fields near Gores Lane and join the Welland further east than it does now.

Alan Robertshaw provides a brief history of blasphemy

They've often been declared dead, but laws against blasphemy haven't quite given up the ghost. Here Alan Robertshaw takes us through their history.

One interesting point is that, in recent centuries, they've been far more about keeping the peace than enforcing orthodoxy in belief. 

Unless you are Mary Whitehouse and John Smyth, of course.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: They have failed to seize control of Belvoir Castle

Don't tell Lord Bonkers, but I suspect you weren't worrying about those beavers. In fact, I suspect that you heard more than enough about them last time. 

At least the old brute is continuing the Bonkers' ancestral feud with the Dukes of Rutland by more subtle means these days, though I expect he still has that Wellington bomber stabled on an outlying farm.

Friday

His was a voice of calm, compassion and reason in this modern maelstrom of events, but now Gary Lineker is to stand down as presenter of Match of the Day. I also learn that Justin Welby has handed back his mitre after failing to ensure that awful confederate of Mary Whitehouse was hauled before the beak.

 You, however, will be wondering what’s happening with those beavers I steered towards the Duke of Rutland. To an extent, it has been a disappointment, in that they have failed to seize control of Belvoir Castle, but my agents tell me that a housemaid cannot open a linen cupboard there without finding a beaver inside – a beaver, moreover, that proceeds to lecture her on the philosophical theory of the state – with the result that the old boy can’t keep his staff. That should stop his gallop for a while!

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’
• Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume
• I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed
• The prime minister was having an affair with Stanley

Mike Brearley: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

A piece of unashamed hero worship from the JCPCP. You may recognise some of this from posts on this blog, but then I have always regarded one function of a blog as being acting as a writer's notebook.

Such was Mike Brearley standing in 1981, his last summer as captain of the England cricket team, that the writer of a letter to the Guardian claimed to have seen him set the field and then "look up at the sun and indicate that it should move a little squarer".

For me, it was a wonder to have a representative of liberal North London occupying the most prestigious position in what can be a very Tory game. It was as though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn were leading England out.

Of his 31 tests as England captain, Brearley won 18 and lost only 4; and in that summer of 1981, he resumed command when England were a test down to Australia. Under his leadership, the team reeled off three consecutive wins, with a previously despondent Ian Botham playing like a cricketing Superman.

His path to the England captaincy, despite his public school and Cambridge background, was not a conventional one. He made enough runs for the university and Middlesex to be picked for the 1964/5 England tour of South Africa at the age of 22, but after that – as a postgraduate student and then a lecturer – he played for Middlesex only in the university vacations, like at old-fashioned amateur.

Brearley showed his mettle in 1968 when the England selectors left the mixed-race Basil D’Oliveira out of their party to tour Apartheid South Africa to avoid a political row. He insisted on seconding the motion condemning the selectors at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which was then the game’s effective governing body.

Soon afterwards, he became a lecture in philosophy at Newcastle University, in thrall to the later Wittgenstein like most young academic philosophers of his generation. I spent most of Brearley’s reign as England captain studying the subject at York, and we discovered that he had unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship there.

“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re slightly disappointed in me,” said the man who had got the job instead. We weren’t, but even liberals are allowed to have heroes.

******

By the time Brearley retired from cricket in 1982 he was already training as a psychoanalyst, and he was later to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Fans and journalists were interested in how his psychoanalytic studies had informed his captaincy – the Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously said that Brearley had “a degree in people” – but Brearley himself has emphasised that there was an effect in the opposite direction.

In his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, he writes:

Playing cricket, and captaining, taught me a lot about what makes players tick, both those on the same side and opponents, and it stimulated my interest in what others and I myself feel, how we respond to pressure, how we impinge on each other, and so on. 

There are of course two main features of the job of captaincy – one to do with tactics and strategy, the other to do with human relations. the latter calls for personal qualities of empathy, truthfulness and courage.

But not everyone was convinced. Brearley recalls one patient asking him: “How can a little boy like you, playing latency games with other little boys, have anything to offer a mature woman like me?”

Why an educated man should spend his time playing games is a question that clearly occupied Brearley even before he turned to psychoanalysis as a profession. His first cricket book The Ashes Regained, an account of his first series as England captain in 1977 written with the journalist Dudley Doust, includes a chapter on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element of Culture. 

This may have nonplussed readers more interested in how Brearley persuaded Derek Underwood to bowl over the wicket at Greg Chappell in the second innings at Old Trafford.

In Turning Over the Pebbles, Brearley discusses the writings of Wilfred Bion and his belief that a game must be played purely for its own sake. Bion wrote in his memoirs:

Games were in themselves enjoyable. I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies – such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and keeping a fit body the for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind.

 For Bion, unlike Brearley, even being captain detracted from the game.

******

One of the great things about Mike Brearley’s books are the indexes. His willingness to discuss psychoanalysis, philosophy and high culture alongside cricket produces some striking juxtapositions: 

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris;

******

‘The best leaders are great teachers,’ says an article I’ve turned up in the Harvard Business Review, and there was always something of the teacher about Brearley. A photograph that shows him, perched on a windowsill, answering questions at a press conference as England captain could easily be of a friendly young academic leading a seminar.

As captain of Middlesex, he challenged the dressing-room ethos that young players should be seen and not heard. If the county was fielding and the game was in danger of drifting, he would start asking his players, the younger ones included, what they thought he should do.

Some youngsters welcomed this more than others, and I’ve recently heard two of them talk about Brearley’s approach. Simon Hughes, now a cricket journalist, had thought “Why’s the England captain asking me what we should do?” – he rather sounded as though he still thinks that – and felt vindicated when the bowling change he suggested failed to bring a wicket.

By contrast, Mike Gatting, who was a teenager when he made his Middlesex debut, remembered being flustered the first time Brearley turned to him – “But I made sure I had something sensible to say the next time he asked me.” Gatting went on to captain England himself.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The prime minister was having an affair with Stanley

The question of the Bonhams Carter* and their hyphens is not a simple one. Helena Bonham Carter doesn't have one, but her grandfather Sir Maurice 'Bongie' Bonham-Carter, Asquith's principal private secretary, did. I knew a member of the family when I lived in Kew in the Eighties, and he had one too.

* Lord Bonkers assures me this is the correct plural - cf. courts martial.

Thursday

To Bloomsbury for the launch party of Precipice – Robert Harris’s novel about those terrible days before the outbreak of the Great War. 

He proves chiefly interested in Mr Asquith’s dalliance with Venetia Stanley, but this tale is not new to those of us who were around at the time. Indeed, when I first heard that the prime minister was having an affair with Stanley, I feared things were worse than they turned out to be. 

I prick up my ears when Harris tells me he has drawn heavily upon papers held by the Bonham-Carter family. If Violent got his hands on juicy gossip, you can be sure he turned that knowledge into hard cash. 

Some correspondents, incidentally, ask why Violent Bonham Carter had no hyphen when the rest of the clan do. The answer is that his was stolen from him one evening at Esmeralda's Barn by Ronnie Kray, and this lack of respect led to the gang warfare that so disfigured our capital in the Sixties.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’
• Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume
• I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed

Layla Moran's Murphy robbed in vote to find Parliament's Top Cat

Disappointing news this evening: Layla Moran's cat Murphy ("The most Experienced, Character-filled and Determined cat in the race" - L. Moran) finished runner up in the contest to find Parliament's Top Cat.

According to a news report from the organisers, Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, the contest was won by Mr Speaker's cat Attlee by only 40 votes.

Now, I'm not saying that Attlee used his occupancy of Speaker's House to pull strings, but shouldn't he come forward and clear this up once and for all?

The Joy of Six 1294

"Al-Fayed died before he could face justice but imagine how many women’s lives would not have been ruined if anti-SLAPP legislation had been in place and journalists had been able to report freely on the case," Labour MP Joe Powell tells Gareth Davies et al. from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Aaron Rabinowitz says we need to talk about men: "Trump has doubled his share of Black male voters, and across all racial demographics his gains were highest among younger men. As always, problems like this are intersectional and multifaceted, but one of the crucial facets we need to discuss is clearly the persistent problem of disaffected men."

"For the last decade, the question of who gets to interrogate historical questions, and why they are motivated to do so, has become very fraught in Britain. And the topics that have become most central to this controversy are the British Empire, British imperialism, and ideas about race, identity and belonging in the British nation." Charlotte Lydia Riley reflects on recent controversies in history and the emotional register of the debate.

Octavia Randoph on slavery in Anglo-Saxon England.

"In The Secret Agent, you go from a shop in Soho into a space like Greenwich Park, where the bomb incident takes place – quite an interesting journey in itself – and then, at the end, there’s an extraordinary marching-away into the suburbs of one of the characters who walks through endless anonymous, curious areas." Iain Sinclair chooses five favourite London novels.

Tanya Lynch visits the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop's Castle: "From the moment I stepped inside this Aladdin’s Cave, I was immersed in a world where poetry and books are the ultimate remedy for the soul. Shelves lined with carefully selected publications, pages that invite you to lose yourself in their rhythm, and beautifully designed stationery, that makes you want to pick up and a pen and start journaling your heart out - honestly this store is a bibliophile’s paradise.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed

Jennie, of course, is Steve Darling's guide dog. A sketchwriter suggested yesterday that hers is the best approach to prime minister's questions: "She has taken to wandering along the Lib Dem front bench, getting strokes from everyone, before curling up and going to sleep."

Wednesday

Despite my hiding behind a tree, I am accosted by Freddie and Fiona in Westminster. “Just the man!”, says one. “We need you to talk to the parliamentary party about our new campaigns: supporting private education and landowners,” says the other. 

I reply that if they’re after someone to say obliging things about schoolmasters then they’ve picked the wrong peer, but I do happen to have a talk ("A Ha-ha is No Laughing Matter”) on the burden of owning a country estate that I give to Women’s Institutes and the like here in Rutland. 

It goes down a storm with our MPs, though at one point I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’
• Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume

Ed Davey teams up with choir of young carers to record their song Love is Enough

Life as a young carer was tough, but it was also full of love.

Tomorrow, Bath Philharmonia Young Carers' Choir and I are releasing a Christmas single - “Love is Enough” - in support of @bathphil and @CarersTrust.

I can’t wait for you to hear it! pic.twitter.com/CTBEYXFR5m

— Ed Davey (@EdwardJDavey) November 27, 2024

From the Guardian this evening:

When already this year you’ve bungee-jumped, jetskied and led your party to its best election result for a century, how can you possibly top that as a politician? If you are Ed Davey, the answer is obvious: try for a Christmas No 1.

That, at least, is the ambition for the Liberal Democrat leader, who has teamed up with a choir of young carers to record an original song of theirs, complete with a Christmas-heavy video featuring festive jumpers and hats, tinsel, and baubles being hung on a tree.

As with Davey’s many stunts for the general election, there is a serious purpose: to generate awareness of the plight of carers, particularly younger ones, and to raise money for good causes.

The genesis of this latest move by 2024’s most consistently surprising MP came in the spring, when the widow of Davey’s former choirmaster sent a recording of him aged 13 singing a solo version of In The Deep Midwinter.

Peter Sellers as a villain: A podcast on Never Let Go (1960)

What strikes me about those top-of-the-bill films is how vividly the villains are painted. Dirk Bogarde in The Blue Lamp, for instance, remains sexy and dangerous more than 70 years on.

The good young character he is contrasted with, a trainee constable played by Jimmy Hanley, appears utterly insipid, but then I suspect he did when the film was released.

Other villains from this era to seek out are Peter Sellers (playing it utterly straight and with a Liverpool accent) in Never Let Go (1960) and Ronald Ward in Ealing's racing drama The Rainbow Jacket (1954):

"There's a certain gentleman I know - using the term in its widest sense - who wouldn't be at all pleased if you were to win the Leger on Fair Noon."

That was me blogging 14 years ago. This morning a good podcast about Never Let Go dropped - if that's what podcasts do. It's an edition of Goon Pod, which looks at the Goon Show and also at the careers of Sellers, Milligan et al. beyond and after it. This one is certainly worth a listen.

You can see a clip from Never Let Go above - and the whole film is on YouTube.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume

With Lord Bonkers taking such an interest in the animal kingdom - whether it's farming it, conversing with it or eating it - it was inevitable that he would be drawn to the new MP for Winchester, who practised as a vet for 16 years before his election. 

And attentive readers of this blog will remember the story about the penguins at the Sea Life London Aquarium.

Tuesday

“No,” I told Danny Chambers on the phone. “It’s out of the question. I’ve only just got rid of a colony of Hegelian beavers. I’m not taking in seventeen penguins.” “But if you could only see their sad little faces,” Chambers returned. “They’re living with no daylight, no fresh air and a pitifully shallow pool.” 

I was about to say it was no good setting them lose in the Frozen North of Rutland – they would get confused, walk round in circles and annoy the polar bears – when I had a brainwave. Which is why your diarist, Chambers and the above-mentioned flightless seabirds are crouched in a ditch just off the Great North Road. 

Sure enough, a familiar minibus – pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume – hoves into view. In no time, the Mother Superior has the penguins on board and is speeding to the convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes. No one, as I observe to Chambers, will notice them among the nuns.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’