Dhafer Youssef: Birds Canticum

This is a track from Birds Requiem, a 2013 album by the Tunisian composer, singer and oud player Dhafer Youssef.

This is how the album is described on his website:

Without forgetting the artistic identity that he forged through his experience and permanent search for sonorities, Dhafer Youssef carries on transcending genres. His quest leads him to clarinetist Hüsnü Şenlendirici and Kanun player, Aytaç Dogan. Dhafer Youssef’s voice accompanies Hüsnü Senlendirici‘s clarinet and Aytaç Dogan’s Kanun. Nils Petter Molvaer’s trumpet reinforces the atmospheric mood. Eivind Aarset’s guitar, Kristjan randalu’s Piano, Phil Donkin’s double bass and Chander Sardjoe ‘s drums create a jazzy atmosphere.

“Birds requiem” is the name of Dhafer Youssef’s new album, released on October 2013. This last opus is a very personal album that has been prepared at a turning point of the artist’s life, and at that moment, a return to the origins occurred-his but also the origins of music. 

The album, structured around the Birds Requiem suite, (“Birds Canticum”, “Fuga Hirundinum”, “Archaic Feathers” and “Whirling Birds Ceremony”), is constructed as music for an imaginative movie.

And if this sounds like the sort of thing you hear late at night on Radio 3, that's almost certainly where I came across it.

Who Steve Winwood played with as a young teenager

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I've heard stories about Steve Winwood, as a young teenager, had played with the some of the American blues greats when they visited the UK.

Now I've found some detailed information in an interview with him from 1982 - it's on his own website.

In the first extract here he talks about his involvement in those years with Jamaican musicians in Birmingham

As for Chris [Blackwell], I met him in 1964 at Digbeth Civic Hall in Birmingham, which has always been a big center for Jamaicans in England; they used to hold their dances there, and naturally Chris was in on the ground floor in terms of Jamaican ska and rocksteady. Business-wise, he and Island were the ground floor.

Anyhow, I'd been playing at Digbeth since I was 14 with the Muff Woody Jazz Band, my brother's group. And that was where I met Spencer Davis, too. But my own Jamaican connection goes back to Digbeth Hall in 1961, when I jammed there with Rico, the trombonist who had worked with the Skatalites and all the other great early Jamaican acts. 

I was just 13 but I used to go there and play with Owen Grey, Tony Washington, and Wilfred 'Jackie' Edwards. Jackie, you'll recall, wrote the Spencer Davis Group's first number 1 hit in England, Keep on Running, and a followup, Somebody Help Me. I wrote When I Come Home with him for the group.

And the second, on American musicians starts with the interviewer:

There must have been some unheralded live backup work in the early days, when the Spencer Davis Group and the early Yardbirds were doing gigs at haunts like the legendary Crawdaddy in Richmond, Surrey.

Sure! I did backups for Sonny Boy Williamson - as everybody did - but also for T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim. John Hammond, too. 

I met John on a train, while going down from Birmingham to London; this would have been about 1963 and I was 15. He told me he had a gig in Birmingham the next week at the College of Advanced Technology and I showed up and played piano behind him. 

Those kinds of spontaneous musical meetings were special back then, and definitely helped shape my growth.

The oldest iron canal aqueduct in the world is in Shropshire

We join the LeiceExplore crew again and they're still in Shropshire.

First they find remnants of the town's canal basin near the railway station - I'll confess I had no idea they were there or even where the basin had been.

Then it's off to Longdon-upon-Tern to see the oldest iron aqueduct in the world. It was built by Thomas Telford and it's still in place over the Tern. 

The canal is long closed and the aqueduct is drained, but you can walk along its trough with the blessing of officialdom.

Subscribe to this excellent YouTube channel now!

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Phil Brickell, Labour MP for Bolton West, argues that the rules on foreign donations to political parties must be tightened to help restore voters' confidence in politics.

"Perhaps we should think about the social workhouse, which is productive of stigma, fear, and forcing unwell people into work. This isn't primarily to make money out of the disabled and the ill, but to reinforce the discipline wage labour depends on. Clamping down on benefits is Labour's way of telling their bourgeois backers that the management of class relations is safe with them" A Very Public Sociologist on why Labour won't leave the disabled and long-term sick alone.

"A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way." Gaby Hinsliff says gen Z is logging off.

William Ralston visits the Rainham volcano - a waste dump is constantly on fire in East London: "By January 1999, dozens of tipper lorries were hurtling through Rainham every day, on their way to Arnolds Field. Unlike the lorries that would regularly collect gravel from local pits and transport it to construction sites, these ones were not emblazoned with a company name. Their trailers had high metal sides so you couldn’t see what was inside."

"I do remember O’Toole coming up to me. He’s taller than me, and I’m quite tall. And he goes [grabs by the shoulders], “Get into your light, son.” And he picked me up and plonked me where the light was because I wasn’t in the [right spot]. A lot has been said about Peter O’Toole, but he was a fabulous guy." Timothy Dalton reminisces to Vanity Fair.

Andy Marshall has been photographing the churches of Romney Marsh.

Bid to slice Melton Mowbray pork pie zone refused

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this very Leicestershire story.

Conservative Home's strange view of the party's "Lib Dem problem"

When I saw that Conservative Home has a post today about sorting the Conservatives' Liberal Democrat problem, I was curious and a little worried. 

Have the Tories finally noticed that they lost dozens of seats to us at the general election last year? Quite a few of them were sort where they used to weigh their vote rather than count it.

I needn't have worried.

The article is written by a former Tory activist and parliamentary candidate who has joined Reform, and it's about what his old party would have to do before his new one would even consider forming a pact with them.

Its author Dan Barker writes:

I have a question for all those Conservatives who are calling for a pact with Reform UK: If you are serious about ‘uniting the right’, then what may I ask are you going to do about your Liberal Democrat problem?

When I say Liberal Democrats, what I mean is the faction that call themselves ‘One Nation Tories’ (Thatcher’s ‘Wet Liberals’) who are aligned politically with the Liberal Democrats somewhere left of centre and possibly left even of the current Starmer Cabinet. They are arguably the single faction within the Conservatives most responsible for the party’s historic decline and ineptitude.  

They are the dominant faction in the party and have chosen or heavily influenced the selection of many of the recent leaders and prime ministers.  They proudly describe themselves as ‘radically liberal’ – whatever that means – it doesn’t sound conservative in the slightest.  

Perhaps it is this very same ‘radical liberalism’ that is to blame for Net Zero, mass immigration on steroids, the bloated state, historically high taxes, the wokery and the war on freedom of speech that has prospered and flourished under the last 14 years of successive Conservative governments?

The Conservative Party's strength used to be that it had no time for the left's politics of purges, recognising that its ideology was a broad and rather nebulous one. Now its being driven by just that cast of mind.

Momentum's answer to any critic of Jeremy Corbyn was to tell them to "Fuck off and join the Tories". Now the self-appointed True Conservatives - who are often members of a different party - tell anyone who questions their views to "Fuck off and join the Liberal Democrats".

Michael Foot sings the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band

I never did find a video of Jim Callaghan singing 'There was I Waiting at the Church' to a bemused TUC Conference in 1978. (He was mocking the press, who had turned up expecting him to call a general election.)

But here is his successor as Labour leader, Michael Foot, singing a song from the Twenties that appeared on the B-side of the Bonzos' first single 'My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies'.

h/t Alwyn Turner

Two Labour members thrown out for backing a tactical Lib Dem vote in Lewes

In what Mark Perryman on Labour Hub calls "a sorry tale of hypocrisy and snitching", two members of Labour's constituency party in Lewes have been expelled for advocating a tactical vote for the Liberal Democrats there in last year's general election. 

The Lewes seat, which was held by Norman Baker between 1997 and 2015, was recaptured from the Tories last year by James MacCleary.

Perryman calls it hypocrisy because:

Labour publicly identified Lewes as a ‘non battleground’ seat .... The candidate and his team were instructed to minimise campaigning; instead they were sent to seats where Labour could win. Which party precisely did they think this would benefit?

And the snitching?

The 2024 tactical voting campaign in Lewes was organised by the local Lewes Compass Group. Compass nationally, despite, its very public support for tactical voting, is not a Labour Party-proscribed organisation. 

It is cross-party, yet at its core are a whole host of Labour members, including councillors. At least three Cabinet members I can think of have spoken on Compass platforms.

The local campaign went beyond what is permitted under Labour rules. I have never displayed a poster advocating a vote for any party other than Labour ....

But not everyone is as tuned in to navigating the Labour rule book as me.  Our ‘snitch’ didn’t  have the good sense to give a friendly piece of advice to his or her fellow members that they were breaking Party rules. Instead they were busy compiling their evidence to secure expulsions.

Nobody has ever owned up to this cowardly behaviour, so in our local Labour Party we have a snitch entirely unwilling to justify their actions politically. 

Labour List also has the story - apparently Clause I.5.B.vi of the Labour Party Rule Book is the one you have to watch out for.

I voted Labour in Harborough, Oadby and Wigston last year. That was partly from a slim hope that they might defeat our very online and increasingly radicalised Conservative MP.

But it was more from a feeling that it was hypocritical of me to be so keen that Labour voters should back the Liberal Democrats in places like Lewes if I wasn't prepared to reciprocate myself.

ECB apologises for Pope Francis Ashes post joke

BBC Sport wins our Headline of the Day Award with this unexpected Catholicism and cricket mashup - the ECB is the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Steam power and an incline in the Somerset coalfield, 1971

At the turn of the 20th century, there were 79 collieries at work in the Somerset Coalfield. The last two closed in 1973, when the nearby Portishead power station was converted from coal to burning oil.

And you do get the impression from this film of one of the two, Kildersdon Colliery near Radstock, that the end is nigh. The technology is Victorian: a steam locomotive and a self-acting incline - the weight of a filled coal wagon descending the incline was used to pull an empty back to the top.

You can read more about the operation of the incline in an article from the Industrial Railway Record.

The LRB podcast takes us deeper into Paul Marshall

Peter Geoghegan talks about the mysterious Paul Marshall, who began working for Charles Kennedy in his SDP backbencher days and is now a right-wing media mogul, on the latest London Review of Books podcast.

This follows the LRB article on Marshall that I blogged about the other day.

Here Geoghegan discusses why it is that Marshall is prepared to lose so much money funding media organisations from the cerebral Unherd to the nakedly populist GB News.

He is also impressively well informed about old debates within the Liberal Democrats. Could it be that he's been exploring the archive of back numbers on the Liberator website.

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"We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s." Garry Kasparov on the Putinisation of America.

Noah Berlatsky and Ilana Gershon argue that undemocratic workplaces sowed the seeds of Trumpism: "Many American workplaces are hierarchical. Decision-making is opaque. Mechanisms of accountability are either nonexistent or weak and deceptive. Yet, at the same time, many workers are enthusiastically told how democratic their workplaces are, much to their frustration. Workplace culture in the US teaches employees that arbitrary rule is normal and that democracy is a deception and a lie."

John Elsom reminds us that, before Volodymr Zelenskyy became president of Ukraine, he played the president of Ukraine in a television comedy: "Vasyl is played by the comic actor, Volodymr Zelenskyy, with a gift for deadpan humour. As president, he cycles to work every morning to avoid the official car, but shyly takes off his cycle clip before entering the government building. He is instructed on how to behave by an apparatchik ... in the pay of the global oligarchs. Vasyl is taught how to take photo-calls, answer press conferences, wear suits and greet ambassadors."

"I have been a doctor for more than 30 years and a neurologist for 25 of those. I have recently grown particularly worried about the large number of young people referred to me with four or five pre-existing diagnoses of chronic conditions, only some of which can be cured." Suzanne O'Sullivan questions the trend of detecting health issues in milder and earlier forms, and the assumption that is always the right thing to do.

Peter Conrad believes Dickens is a greater writer than Shakespeare.

"Hall needs to know more about what Sharpey and the other chaps were up to. In the lecture theatre we see a student played by Edward Fox, before getting in to the original footage of the French scientist played by Roger Delgado who did pioneering experiments on isolation and sensory deprivation." Discontinued Notes watches Basil Dearden's 1963 film The Mind Benders.

Black Box Recorder: The English Motorway System

The other day, looking for posts from this blog that might be useful to someone writing a book, I discovered that I had posted the track The English Motorway System by Black Box Recorder twice within five months a couple of years ago.

Do you know what? I don't care. And because I like it, here it is again and it's not even Sunday.

Black Box Recorder? Consisting of Sarah Nixey, Luke Haines (of The Auteurs), and John Moore (formerly of The Jesus and Mary Chain), Black Box Recorder were an indie band who flourished around the turn of the century.

The English Motorway System is a track from their 2000 album The Facts of Life. 

Lib Dems win £100m in concessions for allowing Labour's budget for Wales to pass

Jane Dodds, the only Lib Dem member of Senedd, allowed Labour's budget for Wales to pass today by abstaining on the vote. As a result it was passed by 29 votes to 28.

Deeside.com reports the concessions that the Welsh Lib Dems won in return for allowing the budget to pass:

The deal with Ms Dodds, the Lib Dems' only Senedd member, included a promise to ban greyhound racing in Wales and allocate £15m for a pilot of £1 bus fares for under-22s.

The MP-turned-Senedd member secured £30m for childcare, £30m for social care, £10m for playgrounds and leisure centres, £10m for rural investment and £5m to address pollution.

Ministers also committed £8m to a "funding floor" to reduce variation across Wales’ 22 councils, with each set to receive a minimum increase of 3.8 per cent.

Jane Dodds told Senedd:

"If we don’t pass this budget, we risk losing billions for the people of Wales and I cannot in good conscience let that happen."

But, explaining her decision to abstain, she said: 

"I cannot fully support a budget that falls short of delivering the investment and radical change Wales needs."

Meeting told there's a risk Ludlow's town walls will collapse again

A length of Ludlow's medieval town walls collapsed 12 years ago and has never been repaired because the town council and the Diocese of Herefordshire cannot agree who is liable.

Now comes news that a meeting in the town has been told there is a risk of further collapse:

At the weekend the Ludlow Town Walls Trust told the meeting the wall extending from the collapsed section was "in a tenuous condition of stability". ...

The section still at risk, the meeting of about 80 people heard, was the part extending eastwards from the collapse to the rear of the Compasses Inn. 

According to that BBC News report, the parochial church council, which is part of the Diocese of Hereford, has said it plans to initiate legal proceedings for a judicial review and file a complaint of maladministration against Ludlow Town Council with the Local Government Ombudsman.

And BBC News has covered further developments today:

Ludlow Town Council said the ownership and responsibility for the walls were "complicated and contentious matters", but there was a clear path for progress.

It said it would take a full and active part, external in the work, on a no liability basis, and urged all other interested parties to discuss next steps.

The town council has named "water pressure in the subsoil, apparent degradation of the wall mortar and inadequate thickness of the masonry" among the causes of the collapse, which suggests it may attempt to sue some medieval cowboy builders.

The secrets of Hawksmoor's St Anne's, Limehouse - the Cathedral of the East End

No psychogeographic rambling with John Rogers this month: rather, a visit to a single church to hear about the plans for its restoration.

But then St Anne's, Limehouse - the Cathedral of the East End - is one of the  Nicholas Hawksmoor churches that inspired the London writings of Iain Sinclair and the Peter Ackroyd. The latter's Hawksmoor remains a terrifying novel.

I once went to a comedy performance in the crypt of another Hawksmoor church - St George's, Bloomsbury. Sitting there, I couldn't help being aware of the tremendous weight of stone above our heads, but Hawksmoor obviously knew what he was doing as I'm here to tell the tale.

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

Lech Wałęsa likens White House treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a Soviet-era interrogation

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The former Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Wałęsa has written to Donald Trump, condemning the US president’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine.

His letter, reports Notes from Poland, was co-signed by 38 other former political prisoners of Poland’s communist regime:

"We watched your conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with horror and distaste," wrote the group, referring to Trump’s meeting with Zelensky in the White House on Friday, at which the pair were expected to sign an agreement but which instead turned into an angry confrontation.

"We were also horrified by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service [SB, the communist secret police] and from courtrooms in communist courts," they added.

"Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the all-powerful communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards and we had none," wrote the signatories. "They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering because of us."

Wałęsa is something of a controversial figure - he has made illiberal statements on refugees and gay parliamentarians - but, unlike Donald Trump, he knows the cost of political courage.

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Heidi Siegmund Cuda and Dmitrii Kovegin discuss where the anti-Putin resistance in Russia goes from here: "Putin killed Navalny. There is no other way to look at it. Putin along with Russian intelligence kills anyone who opposes him and the regime and who is influential. Anna Politkovskaya, Nemtsov etc. I believe Navalny went back to Russia knowing he would be imprisoned and likely die because he was courageous and believed in his purpose."

J. Mckenzie Alexander asks if Popper's 'Open Society' can survive the information age: "In the book I question if, in looking for likes or retweets, we’re actually chasing the sugar rush rather than the truly nutritious, substantive meal. My concern is that, in a number of senses, people are using these proxies as a way to satisfy very real and justified human needs - but these proxies just aren’t adequate to doing the job right,"

Georgia is descending into a pro-Putin Mafia state, reports Will Neal.

Felicity McWilliams explores the disproportionate impact of a small group of West Berkshire Commoners on the US-USSR nuclear arms race in the 1980s.

"What we have, then, is an omniscient narrator. Except, in a twist that seems to make no sense, where he does pop up to make a comment in his own person, it’s often to admit uncertainty, or to explain that what he’s saying is close to speculation." Daniel Soar on Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamzov.

"The collective angst of the motherless von Trapp children is vaguely written and blandly performed. The film urgently needs the stakes-raising intrusion of the Nazis in its second half; the breath-held tension of its climactic escape sequence may be drafted in from another movie altogether, but necessarily so." Guy Lodge celebrates the flawed but enduring film The Sound of Music.

GUEST POST Defections of local councillors have doubled in 2025

Augustus Carp sees early signs that the shifting of tectonic plates in national and international politics may be reflected in local government too.

All the experts tell us that the political order is changing in ways previously thought to be inconceivable. Alliances are shifting, established relationships are faltering and old friends are becoming foes. But that’s not just the case in international relations – the world of local government seems to be undergoing a heightened wave of upheavals as well.  

The rate of political defections in British local government has accelerated significantly in 2025. By way of comparison, there were 52 defections in the first two months of 2024 – resulting in a net decrease of 19, 20 and 1 councillors for the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats respectively, counterbalanced by an increase of 1 for the Greens with the remainder going to the Independents.

In 2025 the numbers have doubled, with 101 councillors identified as having changed their political allegiances so far. The net impact is that the Conservatives are down 38, Labour down 54, the Liberal Democrats down 8 and the Greens down 1. Reform UK has gained 21, with the other gains going to various manifestations of Independent.  

One feature this year is a significant number of mass defections, most notably in Broxtowe, where 18 ex-Labour councillors set up the Broxtowe Independent Group, which now controls the council (although they should not, of course, be confused with the 5 other Independents on the council). Add in two more from the same patch on Nottinghamshire County Council and it’s clear that the People’s Party are in a bit of a pickle there.

Several purges have also reduced Labour’s numbers in Tameside (10) and Stockport (2) as a consequence of the ShiverMeTimbers WhatsApp Group fiasco, which also saw two MPs suspended. Remember, if you can’t say it in a leaflet you probably shouldn’t put it on social media….

Compare and contrast with the four former Conservatives on Mid Suffolk Council (and a few more elsewhere) who have resigned in protest at their erstwhile party nationally and locally supporting the Labour government's unheralded plans to impose wholesale changes in local government administration. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats have lost five councillors in Buckinghamshire, all in Aylesbury.

One councillor has gone directly from Labour to the Conservatives, but Reform are clearly on the up. As well as welcoming 21 councillors from the Independents, four Conservatives have switched directly to Reform, together with two from Labour. Details are sketchy, but there are reports of a former councillor having joined Reform from the SNP, and of an independent councillor joining the Liberal Democrats "having flirted with Reform".

It will be interesting to see whether the international scene (Trump, Ukraine, Nato etc,) will have as much of an impact on council defections in 2025 as the Middle East did in 2024.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

RFK Jr was played by River Phoenix in a 1985 TV mini-series about his father

It's great fun on our Trivia Desk, but you have to work weekends.

Yesterday the team brought you news of the family relationship between Chelsea star Cole Palmer and a member of the Seventies British black soul band Sweet Sensation.

Today they're all over a link between Donald Trump's cabinet and one of the great might-have-beens of Hollywood.

In 1985 a three-part mini-series was made for US television under the title Robert Kennedy and his Times. There were family scenes, so you'll be wondering who played the third of Robert and Ethel Kennedy's count 'em) 11 children, Robert Jnr. 

He's Donald Trump's health secretary, who appears to be doing his best to kill off as many of his fellow countrymen as possible.

The answer is that it was River Phoenix, the emerging Hollywood star, and older brother of Joaquin Phoenix, who lost his life to an accidental drug overdose at the age of 23 in 1993. That's our Trivial Fact of the Day.

h/t to Strange Englands and Uncanny TV Signals.

Return to Malcolm Saville's The Neglected Mountain

In 2012 Miranda's Island listed the ingredients of the classic children's adventure story:

I mean the kind of rural holiday location where children get to sleep in barns, camp out on islands and cycle, walk or even hitch-hike long miles through country lanes, relieved by picnics packed up by friendly adults who know when to back off and when to interfere. 

Optional but highly desirable elements are caves, horses, dogs (actually, I’m not sure the dog is optional, I think it’s essential) and the frisson of danger provided by a treasure hunt or an odd character lurking around, clearly up to something fishy.

And then came to the right conclusion:

The Famous Five come to mind, and still have their following. But I think a strong contender for that place in the collective juvenile consciousness would be the Lone Pine novels by Malcolm Saville. The Lone Pine Club is a group of around eight children, the bonds between them forged on exactly the kind of holidays described above. 

Similar to the Arthur Ransome novels, the precise line-up of characters varies according to location, but the heart of their adventures might truly be said to be the remote Shropshire countryside between Shrewsbury in the north and Ludlow in the south, and specifically the country around the mountains of the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones.

"The Neglected Mountain" is what Jenny calls the Stiperstones in the story to give the book its title.

Miranda of Miranda's Island had reread the book before writing her post:

My husband claimed it was "throbbing with UST [unresolved sexual tension]"  and certainly Saville doesn’t ignore the - ahem - emotional development of fifteen and sixteen year olds. 

There are two boy/girl pairings - David, very much the leader of the group, and Petronella (known as Peter), an independent local girl who loves to ride her pony around the country lanes when she’s not away "at boarding school in Shrewsbury", a statement that neatly conveys the all-important 1950s identifier of social class.

Jenny, from a village post office/general store and Tom, who works on a farm, make up the second couple. It is implicit, though never openly stated, that Jenny has something of a crush on David, but he’s out of her league, and she pairs off comfortably with Tom.

Peter's school fees are paid by her Uncle Micah, though how he has derived such wealth from farming the unpromising country around the Stiperstones is never made clear, but I shall look for signs of Jenny's crush on David next time I read one of the early Lone Pine stories.

Miranda goes on:

Why do these adventures continue to be appealing? I think it’s because the issues that tend to worry adults now – premature sexualisation, social diversity and the degree of freedom it is appropriate to offer older children – are addressed quite differently. That is not to say they are ignored. Far from it. Here is Saville on the subject of gypsies:

The gypsies and Mr Cantor respected each other. The detective knew how honest and trustworthy they were. Gypsies are often accused of many things unjustly, but in their wanderings they pick up a lot of information: and when Miranda handed the detective a cup of tea she knew at once that there were questions he wanted to ask them.

Laid on with a trowel perhaps, but you would never, I think, find such a passage in an Enid Blyton adventure.

The Miranda's Island post makes equally interesting observations on adventures and the development of character, and on children and the adult world.

It ends by praising the Girls Gone By reprints of the Lone Pine stories. These paperbacks are now becoming collectable in their own right, by they do have the full text of the original hardbacks. The Armada paperbacks that many young readers relied upon in the Sixties and Seventies were quite heavily edited - and not well edited, in Saville's own judgement.

Saville hardbacks with their dust wrappers fetch silly prices, and I don't suppose it's as easy to find battered hardbacks without them at reasonable prices as it was when I acquired most of my collection of his work. So a second-hand Girls Gone By edition may be your best bet if you want to read the books as Saville wrote them.

Finally, I hope Miranda is still with us and well. The last post on her blog was written in 2022 when she was obviously seriously ill. I am reminded of my post on disappearances from the net.

Cliff Richard and the Drifters: High Class Baby

This new generation of Beatles fans is entitled to its enthusiasms, but it does seem to lack a sense of history. Any music that came before the Fab Four was laughable, and any groups who were around at the same time as the Beatles were trying to copy them.

So here's a rockabilly Cliff Richard from 1958 to prove there was life before Love Me Do, even if Cliff is rocking more than anyone else on this record.

The Drifters was the original name for the Shadows, who were Cliff's backing band and then became one of the most successful ever British acts in their own right.

None of the famous Shadows are playing on High Class Baby, but the guitarist is an interesting figure. Not only did Ian Samwell write this song, he also wrote Move It for Cliff and the Drifters.

That is the track of which John Lennon said:

"I think the first English record that was anywhere near anything was Move It by Cliff Richard, and before that there'd been nothing."

It also appeared on Led Zeppelin: The Music that Rocked Us - a compilation put together by the band in 2010.

Samwell later became more of a producer and manager, but he did co-write Whatcha Gonna Do About It, the single that launched the Small Faces.

The Joy of Six 1330

Vince Cable gives it both barrels: "Our secular and liberal values; our diverse society; our democratically elected government. All are antithetical to the Trump clan. We need to understand that the sentimental nonsense about the special relationship is over. We are under attack."

 "Trump’s potential kompromat combines with his cultural-political alignment with kleptocracy and dictatorship that makes him a Russian agent of influence. This was played out in ghastly detail in the 28 February meeting in the White House. In considering our response to America’s abandonment of the West, we need to be realistic about its leadership." Arthur Snell says it's time to take a serious look at the evidence of Trump's relationship with Russia.

Mark Pack reviews Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund.

Kate Bradbury sets out what we can do to help bumblebees: "If you don’t have a greenhouse, do you have space for a pot of winter heather? Can you use your conservatory, porch or other covered space to grow crocuses? Can you dedicate a space in which bumblebees might make a nest?"

"When asked by the Bench chairman if they had anything to say, the taller woman said they did not approve of this court, as there was no woman there to try them. They were remanded for a week while efforts were made to identify them." Jill Evans on a 'Suffragette outrage; at Cheltenham in 1913.

"I was astonished: here was drama, humour, satire and wit in abundance, here too I learnt social history and observed sharp psychological insights." Chris Lovegrove won't have Jane Austen's novels called mimsy, tedious and woke.

Cole Palmer's great uncle was a member of Sweet Sensation

This just in from our Trivia Desk...

The black British soul group Sweet Sensation topped the singles chart in 1974 with Sad Sweet Dreamer. One of its member, St Clair Palmer, is the great uncle of Chelsea and England's Cole Palmer.

That's certainly our Trivial Fact of the Day. As far as I can make out, St Clair is second from the right in the front row in the video above.

Later. This story was widely reported this week, but the  Daily Mail had it last year and also revealed that St Clair Palmer later became an actor and appeared in one episode each of Coronation Street and Brookside.