Not for the first time, the Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award.
I always knew that photo of Craven Arms fire station would come in handy.
Friday, April 25, 2025
Plan to build bungalow next to Craven Arms Fire Station rejected after inspector warns firefighters could see into windows
Not for the first time, the Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award.
Restoring the Crumlin Arm of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal
I blogged the other day about the threat to the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal. Here is a more hopeful story: the restoration of its Crumlin Arm, which once linked the canal to Newport and its docks.
That Wikipedia entry makes it sound enticing:
The canal started at a basin in Crumlin and ran through the villages of Newbridge, Abercarn and Cwmcarn now under the A467. The canal then reached Cwmcarn lock now under the grass at the end of the present canal.
The canal crosses the Pontywaun aqueduct and follow the side of the mountain above Crosskeys and Risca this section is the longest lock-free pound on the system until the Fourteen Locks. The canal descends the fourteen locks and turns sharp along the hill side. The canal now flows next to the M4 into urban Newport to Barrack Hill tunnel (now disused and culverted).
The rest of the canal through the city is lost beneath modern roads and buildings. The Kingsway dual carriageway follows the route of the canal to the now-filled-in Old Town Docks near the Transporter Bridge.
The Crumlin Arm was abandoned in 1962 and had long been in decline before that.
Ed Davey, Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown... and hedgehogs
Ed Davey has posted this charming photo of him and Victoria Collins visiting a hedgehog sanctuary in Harpenden.
It puts me in mind of a Liberal England post from New Year's Day 2016:
Today in someone's review of the year I came across an interview Nick Clegg gave to the Evening Standard on the eve of the general election:
Looking back at the campaign, it is the comic moments he remembers. For instance, his first visit was to a hedgehog sanctuary, with Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown muttered under his breath to Clegg: "When I was in the Special Boat Service we used to eat hedgehogs."
No wonder Ed is keen to repair our relations with the hedgehog community.
That said, if you do have it in mind to eat one of the creatures, my old post will tell you how to cook it. Blame Malcolm Saville.
Thursday, April 24, 2025
Eurovision is fabulous but is it scandalous too?
Fil from Wings of Pegasus has been looking at what exactly it is that we hear in the Eurovision Song Contest final.
The rules now allow a prerecorded backing track, and that track can choose to use pitch correction and autotuning as an artistic choice. And guess what? Everyone makes that choice.
That in itself is worrying, but what Fil uncovers here is that, for some songs, the backing track contains a fair part of what we think is the lead vocal.
So it looks as though Eurovision isn't particularly interested in enforcing its own rules.
Fil has disappeared down this rabbit hold because he has discovered just how widespread the use of this technology now is. A lot of music sold as being 'live' is nothing of the sort.
He began these videos by analysing the technique of musicians like, to take a purely random example, Steve Winwood.
If Enid Blyton was the Beatles then Malcolm Saville was the Kinks
Now here's a title for a blog post: The Famous Five vs The Lone Pine Club. It's on the blog Unpopular Culture.
I shall resist the temptation to quote it in its entirety, and give you just a taste:
Enid Blyton is perhaps like The Beatles. Certainly she was massively globally successful and subsequently went through dips of critical and popular appeal, before becoming established again as a recognisable global brand whose enormous material success insists on being endlessly reproduced and extended.
I rather enjoy drawing this parallel partly because I know many Beatles devotees will prickle at the thought of any similarities in artistic merit between the two and partly because Lennon himself poked fun at the Famous Five in his ridiculous ‘In His Own Write’ book.
In hindsight I wonder if The Comic Strip were as much inspired by Lennon’s parody as anything. Certainly there is a similar smug assumed ‘cleverness’ that irritates me more in my fifties than it did in my late teens or early twenties. Others continue to find it charming, of course, and that is their prerogative.
In this imagined realm of children’s authors as 1960s pop groups then, if Blyton might be The Beatles, who would Malcolm Saville be? Certainly not The Stones and definitely not The Who. The Kinks perhaps?
Certainly I see Saville as doing something similar to The Kinks in terms of attempting to capture a world (specifically an England) that is dissolving even as they record it. There is too a shared sense of knowingness that what is being lost is in itself partially illusory. They both, at their best, mourn a mediated Englishness.
There's much else about the two authors in the post, which reminds me a little of an article I wrote for the Guardian website years ago.
The writer of Unpopular Culture like Saville's Rye books bests, whereas I'm a Stiperstones man. And he has written at least two other posts on Saville.
There's one on Jane's Country Year, which was Saville's favourite among his own books and shows the influence of Richard Jefferies' Bevis.
And a recent one on, amongst other things, one of the last of Saville's Lone Pine stories, Rye Royal.
Georges I-IV, Boy George, George Harrison and Henry George
This time the theme of the issue was Georges - they've already done Davids. I wish I'd thought of including George Eliot.
Georges on my Mind
The future George I and his wife Sophia Dorothea fought all the time. He once pulled out her hair and throttled her until she lost consciousness – her life was saved by attendants who intervened. When George inherited the British throne, he had already forbidden his 11-year-old son, the future George II, to see his mother or even mention her name. When he came to England from Hanover, the younger George revenged himself by scheming with his father’s enemies at Westminster.
George II and his wife both hated their son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and he obliged them by dying before they did. It used to be believed that his death was caused by a cricket ball, but sadly the story has been discredited.
It was Frederick’s son who inherited the throne, as George III. The theory that his madness was due to porphyria is as out of fashion as Fredrick’s cricket injury, but whatever the cause of it, he was still clear-headed enough to see through his son. George IV enjoyed a dissolute life but not his father’s approval, and left no legitimate children.
Thanks goodness none of this enmity has come down to our present-day Royal Family.
******
The uncle of Boy George used to be the priest at our local Catholic church, Our Lady of Victories. I heard that from a taxi driver who had it from two nuns, so it must be true.
******
There’s a photograph of boys from a Liverpool primary school on the beach during a 1951 holiday on Isle of Man that surfaces regularly on social media. Two are instantly recognisable: John Lennon has pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and next to him a smiling Jimmy Tarbuck has adopted a boxer’s stance. Perhaps because he is younger, the boy on the other side of Lennon is not so easily recognised, but he is Peter Sissons. A friend of Paul McCartney’s at secondary school, he grew up to be an eminent television reporter and newsreader.
Sissons recalled a meeting with a third Beatle, George Harrison, in the days when he was reading ITV’s News at Ten:
I got a phone call on the news desk and the receptionist said “George Harrison is here to see you”. I went down to reception and there was George with most of the Hare Krishna people from Oxford Street. The place was full of these men in saffron robes and in the middle was George in a rather way-out sort of hippie suit. He said to me, “Peter, I’ve got a terrific story for the news, it’ll be the lead story, you’ve got to put it on the news tonight.”
I said: “Terrific, what is it?”
He said: “Peace.”
I said: “Hang on, where?” He said: “Just peace, it’s a great thing, you’ve got to put it on the news.”
I explained there had to be a bit more to it than that to make the lead on News at Ten. We parted on very good terms and off they went banging their tambourines.
******
George can be a surname too: there’s Bobby George, Charlie George and probably George George too. But the most famous such George was once Henry George.
After he died while fighting the New York Mayoral election of 1897, says a contemporary report:
Thousands upon thousands of people waited in the streets from early morning to obtain places in the seemingly endless line that drifted past the candidate whose strange and premature 'election' had thrown the politicians into confusion. Sobbing women lifted their children to look upon the face of the 'martyr'. Tears became contagious, and rough men sobbed without shame.
Another reckoned New York had seen no comparable demonstration of popular feeling at the death of a public man since Abraham Lincoln had lain in state at City Hall.
Henry George achieved this extraordinary fame, not as a politician. but as an economic theorist. People argue over whether he or Karl Marx have sold more books, but there’s no doubt that George sold millions. Reading groups of working people were founded to discuss his ideas.
At the heart of those ideas were the beliefs that land was the ultimate source of all wealth and that, as the song goes, God gave the land to the people. It followed that the proceeds of rents on land and the minerals beneath it should be taken in tax by the state. This, he argued, would remove the monopoly power that allowed landlords to exploit wage earners and make possible the abolition of other taxes.
Henry George’s ideas still have their advocates, but his most tangible legacy is a board game. A follower of George’s, Elizabeth Magie, and her friends invented The Landlord’s Game. When she patented it in 1904, she said it was designed to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".
The Landlord’s Game evolved into Monopoly, a celebration of rapacious landlordism that has done more to lay bare the tensions underlying family life than anything since the early work of Salvador Minuchin.
It happens that I reached the finals of the British Monopoly Championships in 1977. They were held on top of the nuclear pile at Oldbury-on-Severn power station – the Electricity Company, you see. It may have been only a promotional event for Waddington’s, but I managed to wangle the time off school.
I won two games on the first day to become one of the last twelve players. In the semi-final, I built hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane – they’re not the best sites to develop, but the dice fall how they will. My anticipation grew as my main rival moved round the board towards them. Suddenly, he had drawn a ‘Go to Jail’ card and, safe from my West End rents for three turns, he went on to win the game.
You have to hand it to Henry George and Elizabeth Magie: they had foreseen the Britain of the 1980s.
The Joy of Six 1350
"The media keep reporting that Abrega Garcia was mistakenly or wrongly deported. I get the impulse - journalists ... want to give readers a sense of the injustice. But all of those men were deported wrongly, because they were all denied due process." Jonathan Larsen says the US Democrats must stand up for everyone’s rights.
Sajia Ferdous argues that AI is inherently ageist, which can be costly for workers and businesses.
"It took nearly a decade for officialdom to acknowledge beavers had spread throughout the Tay catchment. When they did, they tried to round them up - to re-extinct them. But Taysiders - many of whom had grown fond of watching them work at dusk - wouldn’t have it. When Scottish Natural Heritage laid traps, some said that locals took to peeing on them, so their scent would warn off the beavers." Adam Ramsay recounts how his parents' adoption of beavers has transformed their upland farm into a rich, biodiverse haven for birds, mammals, fish and amphibians.
"The poor boy looks utterly miserable, as if he wants the ground to open up and swallow him. Or - better - swallow his dad." Sam Wollaston asks why children's football brings out the worst in parents.
Leigh Singer celebrates Annie Hall: "Diane Keaton had co-starred in [Woody] Allen’s two previous films, Sleeper and Love and Death, establishing herself as a deft comedian with a kooky sensibility and offbeat comic timing. But these roles were largely foils for Allen’s protagonist. Annie Hall, however, tailored specifically for her by Allen, is far more substantial."
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Eight Liberal Democrat MPs have been barred from Russia
Our congratulations go to: Alistair Carmichael, Chris Coghlan, Will Forster, James MacCleary, Helen Maguire, Mike Martin, Manuella Perteghella and Cameron Thomas.
Helen Maguire, the party's defence spokesperson, told Politics Home:
"I will wear this retaliatory sanction as a badge of honour - as will my Liberal Democrat colleagues also placed on Moscow’s blacklist."
Six peers have also been sanctioned by Moscow, among them the Lib Dems Jeremy Purvis and Julie Smith.
For St George's Day: From The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White
She was his homely land. The moon made her trees more important for their shadows than for themselves, picked out the silent rivers in quicksilver, smoothed the toy pasture fields, laid a soft haze on everything.
But he felt that he would have known the country, even without the light. He knew that there must be the Severn, there the Downs and there the Peak: all invisible to him, but inherent in his home.
In this field a white horse must be grazing, in that some washing must be hanging on a hedge. It had a necessity to be itself.
He suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was.
The Who: The Kids are Alright
I love this, but have to admit it would have been better if they'd found somewhere to plug in their instruments.
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Marion Mould jumps The Sound of Music on Monty Python
The other day I used Bluesky to pass on some of Lord Bonkers' table talk:
Think of this as a sort of free extra from the old boy - a Patreon you don't have to pay for. (That is unless I'm short of inspiration for his next diary, when it will appear there too.)
But who, I hear you ask, were Marion Mould and Stroller?
Marion Mould won the silver medal in the individual show jumping at the Mexico Oympics of 1968. I remember her as Marion Mould, though she must have been Marion Coakes at the time, as she did not marry until the following year.
And Stroller was her horse, or rather her pony. It was rare for ponies to compete in top-level show jumping, but he and Marion won 61 international competitions together.
Oddly, I don't remember hearing much of Marion Mould in the early Seventies, when show jumping (it seems so unlikely now) was a huge television sport. My memory may be at fault, or perhaps she did fade from the scene.
But you can see her above in the third episode of the fourth and final season of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
My memory of that fourth series (the one made without John Cleese) is of watching it each week, willing it to be funny, but being disappointed every time.
Watching this episode today it doesn't seem so bad to me - if you like Python then you will like this. Perhaps the individual sketches are allowed to run on too long, but it's not as weak as I remember it.
And this little selection featuring Marion Mould is certainly funny. Show jumping obstacles did get overblown like this when the sport was at the height of its popularity.
Threat to the future of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal
There's worrying news of a threat to the future of a beautiful Welsh waterway:
Welsh Liberal Democrat MP for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe David Chadwick has challenged the Welsh Government, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Natural Resources Wales over plans to limit the water supply to the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal.
The Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal relies heavily on water abstractions from the River Usk, which runs alongside the canal for much of its length, providing over 80% of the water required.
The canal was originally exempt from rules governing abstraction from the Water Resources Act 1991, but in 2017 this exemption was removed. Now, Natural Resources Wales are looking to enforce limits on how much water may be abstracted from the Usk. ...
The Canal and River Trust now has to pay for the extra water they use to keep the canal alive, but do not have any new income to pay for it with the annual cost possibly in excess of £1m a year.
That was posted on the Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe Lib Dem's website a month ago, and there does not seem to have been any breakthrough in the talks between the authorities involved.
A couple of days ago Nation Cymru quoted Mark Evans from Glandŵr Cymru, the body that looks after canals in Wales:
"Our charity acted to safeguard the much-loved canal over the summer months, with additional water purchased from Welsh Water. This is whilst an affordable long-term solution is found - which will need the collective help of Welsh Water, the Welsh Government and Natural Resources Wales.
"As an emergency measure we have diverted money away from planned maintenance and repairs across our canal network to secure a water supply this summer. However, it isn’t sustainable for our charity to bear this cost alone."
Given that the canal is now more than two centuries old, you wonder whether its continued health is now as important as that of the River Usk. We don't begrudge protecting the Norfolk Broads because they are flooded medieval peat workings.
Anyway, I ought to declare an interest here. The picture above shows the canal at Llanfoist Wharf near Abergavenny, and I had a very happy week's holiday with a cousin of my mother's at Llanfoist when I was 14. That week is in part responsible for my love of the landscapes of the Welsh border.
The canal around Llanfoist and its tramways were the setting for Alexander Cordell's novel The Rape of the Fair Country - a sort of poor Welshman's version of How Green Was My Valley.
Sir John Curtice: It's a five-horse race
John Curtice previews the local elections for the Mirror this morning:
The local elections on May 1st take place in unprecedented circumstances. Never before have both Labour, whose current average poll rating is just 24%, and the Conservatives, on 22%, been so unpopular at the same time. Both are struggling to keep pace with Reform, narrowly ahead on 25%.
British politics was once a two-horse race between Conservative and Labour. Now it is a fragmented five-way battle. Even the Greens (9%) are at a record high in the polls, while the Liberal Democrats (14%) are a force once more.
And the most encouraging part?
In taking votes from the Conservatives, Reform could simply help the Liberal Democrats, who always do better in local elections than in the national polls, take key seats from Kemi Badenoch’s party, such as in Oxfordshire. Despite the party’s current unpopularity, even Labour might pick up some Tory seats too, with Nottinghamshire a key target.
Man sets off on 53-mile walk dressed as a curlew
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.
The judges pointed out that there's more on the efforts to save this wonderful bird at Curlew Action.
Monday, April 21, 2025
The 16-year-old who was sent to prison for refusing to wear shorts
Further proof that the past is a foreign country comes in the shape of a story from the Wolverhampton Star and Express for 26 January 1973:
Shorts penalty for 6½ft boy
Social services officials are investigating the case of a 16-year-old, 6ft. 6in. boy who was told to wear short trousers as a punishment in a remand home.
An inquiry was demanded by the boy’s solicitor, Mr Peter Marron, who told the juvenile court at Leicester on Tuesday that his client was “ humiliated and degraded” by the experience.
Mr Marron claimed that the punishment led to another incident at the home in which an officer said he was assaulted. For this the boy was certified as "unruly" and spent seven days on remand in Leicester prison.
The Daily Express, which is the only other paper I can find covering the story, adds some details. The boy ("a West Indian") was punished for leaving the remand home without permission to see his solicitor.
When I came across this story, I dragged up vague memories of the incarceration of boys in adult prisons being a cause for concern - the sort of thing they made editions of World in Action about.
And I was right. Here's a Commons debate from October 1975 in which a new clause was added to the Children Bill at its second reading.
Step forward health minister Dr David Owen:
The House knows that the number of remands to Prison Department establishments of juveniles charged with a criminal offence and certified to be of so unruly a character that they cannot safely be committed to the care of the local authority, has risen steeply in recent years.
The number of receptions to prisons of boys aged 14 to 16 rose from under 2,000 in 1971 to more than 3,500 in 1974. The number of certificates issued in respect of girls rose from under 100 in 1971 to nearly 250 in 1974.
The sending of these young people to Prison Department establishments and in particular in the case of girls and some boys to establishments in which adult prisoners are held has rightly attracted growing and widespread criticism.
The pipeline from the care system to the prison system was certainly working well 50 years ago.
Then there was Owen's shadow, Norman Fowler:
A year ago I went to Wormwood Scrubs prison, which some hon. Members may remember is a special security prison with extra security precautions.
However, another wing of Wormwood Scrubs housed the borstal allocation unit for the southern part of England. The boys who were sent there stayed three or four weeks whilst it was decided what borstal they should be sent to.
Many of them went not to a closed borstal but to an open borstal. Although the boys were obviously kept separate from the adult prisoners, it could have hardly have failed to get around that they were being kept in prison. Twenty-five per cent. of them slept three to a cell.
It is a scandal that children should be kept in prison. It is even worse if they are kept in prison when they are awaiting trial or sentence, because we are dealing with children whose guilt has not been determined or whose eventual sentence will not necessarily be a custodial one.
And the first Labour backbencher to speak? - he referred to Fowler's "very fair and welcome comments". That was Robert Kilroy-Silk.
Donors rush to contribute to Lib Dems' Farage Fighting Fund
So runs a story by Anna Gross that has popped out from behind the FT paywall (at least for me).
She says the Lib Dems have received £100,000 from donors in recent weeks, with a specific mandate to repel the advance of Nigel Farage's populist party:
The party hopes the fund will reach £1m this year to help step up production of campaign materials and digital ads to counter Reform in key areas where the Lib Dems are already strong locally. It believes it is best placed to neutralise the threat posed by growing support for Reform in counties including Devon, Cornwall and Shropshire.
The funds come on top of £1m already donated to the party so far in 2025, which is highly unusual for the Lib Dems so far out from a general election.
Was the world's first rock festival staged in Spalding?
Barbeque 67 was held at the Tulip Bulb Auction Hall, Spalding, on 29 May 1967. On the bill were:
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience
- Cream
- Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band
- Pink Floyd
- The Move
- Zoot Money and his Big Roll Band
If I recall rightly, the acts had been booked well in advance and had all grown in stature in the mean time. Someone had very good taste.
The Spalding Guardian didn't think much of Pink Floyd, but its report on the event was largely positive. You can go to UK Rock Festivals for a fan's-eye account of the day.
The Joy of Six 1349
Viv Griffiths reports on the widespread support among MPs for rejoining the customs union and single market: "Lib Dem Paul Kohler summed up well the frustration and anger expressed by many others: 'The Tories' botched Brexit deal has been a disaster for our country… The Conservative government wrecked our relationship with the EU and the new Labour government refuse to take the necessary steps to repair it.'"
The Atlantic says dark times call for dark humour.
Over the years, scholars have turned to Monty Python and the Holy Grail to explore how the Middle Ages are portrayed - and parodied - in modern culture. Its lasting influence can be seen in classrooms, academic journals and discussions of medievalism. David D. Day offers a list of 10 open-access articles you can read that examine its legacy from multiple angles.
Chelsea won the Football League title in 1954/5 and should have been the first English club to play in the European Cup. As Tim Rolls explains, the men in blazers stopped them.
Helen Parry reviews Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, by Sarah LeFanu: "It is a sort of detective story, the piecing together of Macaulay and her life from scraps of paper and faded photographs, and a ghost story, pursuing an insubstantial version of someone who has long gone."
Sunday, April 20, 2025
How Multi-Academy Trusts have diverted education funds into executive salaries
Jonny Crawshaw, a Labour councillor from York, wrote:
A cursory look at the published accounts of the many multi‑academy trusts (Mats), which now control at least 80% of state secondary schools in England, shows an explosion in chief executive pay, with many new ancillary roles – chief finance officers, executive headteachers and trust performance directors – also adding to “central services” bills.
Many of these roles didn’t exist a decade ago, yet they leach millions of pounds each year out of the classroom and into the bank balances of the disproportionately white, middle‑class men who fill them.
Take my home town of York as an example: where once the 63 state schools were maintained by a director of children’s services on circa £110,000 and an assistant director of education on circa £80,000, we now have six Mats whose focus is increasingly drawn outside the city boundaries.
Together they now employ six CEOs on salaries ranging from at least £130,000 to more than £160,000, six CFOs and several executive heads, and sport a combined wage bill for “key management personnel” that exceeds £7m – money the former education authority could only dream of.
Meanwhile, more than a third of the city’s schools remain under the local authority.
Crawshaw concluded that this and Mats' lack of public accountability are the "real scandals" that need to be addressed in education.
The photo here is of a York primary school. It's a Church of England school, so not part of any new-style Mat. I've chosen it because it was the first polling station where I served as a teller for the Liberal Party. This was in the city council elections of 1980 - our candidate, the late Julian Cummins, narrowly failed to win.
Swaffham Town Council scraps plans for 5ft duck statue
Jethro Tull: The Tipu House
I saw Jethro Tull at the National Exhibition Centre in 1987 and we were cracking jokes about them being old then, yet here is a track from from the album, Curious Ruminant, that they released last month.
Ian Anderson's voice has aged, but they still sound like Tull. In fact they sound more like Tull than they did for some of the 1987 concert - that was the era when Anderson had been listening to too much Mark Knopfler and rather fancied himself as a guitar hero.
Most importantly, judging by the comments left on YouTube, the band's fans are delighted with the album.
Others may detect a decline from Tull's glory years, but then all bands tend to sound tamer if they last for years.
And it's not just that they are getting older and running low on inspiration, it's that what music you can make is in part determined by the music that has gone before you and the music other people are making at the time.
Saturday, April 19, 2025
A Puffin Books profile of Joan Aiken
On holiday in Shropshire last summer, I picked up a secondhand copy of Joan Aiken's The Cuckoo Tree and was reminded how enjoyable her children's books are.
The Cuckoo Tree was the fifth of the Wolves Chronicles. This film, made by Puffin Books to promote Aiken's work, talks about the genesis of the first four and also shows you Aiken's home.
There's lots more about the writer and her books on The Wonderful World of Joan Aiken.
Harborough FC ‘surprised’ as 100 Spanish fans turn up to watch game
Thanks to a sharp-eyed Liberal England reader, the Guardian wins out Headline of the Day Award.
Sky News looks at the Lib Dem strategy in the local elections
They are alive to the trap Lib Dems have walked into in the past of adopting a technocratic tone and blandly telling the public every issue is a "bit more complicated" than it seems.
One senior figure says the Lib Dems are trying to do something quite unusual for a progressive centre-left party in making a broader emotional argument about why the public should pick them.
This source says that approach runs through the stunts but also through the focus on care and the party leader's personal connection to the issue.
Presenting a plan that looks different to the status quo is another way to try to stand apart.
It's why there has been a focus on attacking Donald Trump and talking up the EU recently, two areas left unoccupied by the main parties.
Rob Powell, Sky New's political correspondent, looks at the Liberal Democrats' strategy in the current local election campaigns.
Tellingly, he finds it natural to see this as being integrated into the party's strategy for national elections - something that has not always been the case in the past.
His article is certainly worth reading:
At times, party figures seem somewhat astonished the Tories don't view them as more of a threat, given they were beaten by them in swathes of their traditional heartlands last year.
Friday, April 18, 2025
Celebrate the 75th anniversary of Market Harborough's Festival of Boats and Arts (6-7 June)
The Inland Waterways Association was formed in 1946, but it was not until the 1950 Festival of Boats and Arts, held in Market Harborough, that the campaign to save the inland waterways really became established as a national crusade. The festival is generally thought to be the tipping point of the waterways revival, triggering the mass-participation on a volunteering spirit which is still unique in the world.
To celebrate the 75th anniversary of that event, a festival will be held at Foxton in Leicestershire on Saturday 7 June and Sunday 8 June.
Market Harborough canal basin is no longer suitable to host such events, but it will be visited by a cavalcade of boats on the Saturday. You can find full details of the event on the IWA Harborough 75 website.
The festival is supported by the IWA Leicestershire Branch in partnership with the Canal and River Trust, the Old Union Canal Society, Harborough District Council and Foxton Museum.
You can read more about the 1950 event on the festival website, and there are a couple of posts on this blog that may interest you:
- A journey by water from Oxford to attend the 1950 event;
- A meeting between Robert Aickman and Market Harborough UDC about a second festival in 1952.
The photo at the top shows the boatwoman Sonia Smith, who was to marry her fellow waterways campaigner Tom Rolt, at the 1950 festival. And, yes, the Robert Aickman who met Market Harborough UDC was the writer of ghost stories.
Chris "Two Wards" Twells surfaces as an Independent in Cornwall
.jpg "Allotments in Redannick Lane with a view over Truro")
Remember Chris Twells? He was the Liberal Democrat who got himself elected to represent wards in Salford and the Cotswolds at the same time.
As a result, his party membership was suspended, though one distinguished parliamentarian spoke up for him:
Well, the Falmouth Packet appears to have discovered him standing, under the name Chris Green, as an Independent in Truro’s Boscawen and Redannick ward in the Cornwall Council election on 1 May.Lord Bonkers comments: "Win one seat and you're a hero: win two and everyone complains." https://t.co/Pauumqex7O
— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) May 13, 2023
As he tells the paper in his statement, there's no reason why he shouldn't stand for the council, though both the local Greens and Mebyon Kernow appear to have said "thanks but no thanks" to his suggestion that he should stand for them.
GUEST POST How a local radio station changed my life
When Diane and I moved to Market Harborough in 2008 I had a low opinion of local radio, dismissing it out of hand as amateurish and thus never listening to it. I mostly listened to Krautrock and electronic music back then, so even my BBC consumption was limited to Radio 4 and occasionally 6Music.
One of my musical heroes at the time was a German fellow by the name of Manuel Göttsching, who was a legend of the Kosmische genre. One day, about a decade ago, I was perusing his website when I noticed a news item concerning an interview that was about to be broadcast "with Terry Hawke of Harborough FM".
This stopped me in my tracks. Harborough FM? As in Market Harborough? Surely not. But I was flabbergasted to discover it was indeed the case. I tuned in at the appointed time and thoroughly enjoyed what I heard.
It turned out that Terry (sadly no longer with us) presented a show featuring new age, prog and similar music that often ran from late Saturday night through to almost dawn the next day. This was revelatory and I became a regular listener; soon also discovering other shows on the station.
One of these was Adam Wilson’s Quiet Revolution, which is still on air and focusses on folk, world and Americana". I’d dipped my finger into these genres from time to time but knew next to nothing about them, but one song caught my attention early on – Nothing To Lose by the American artist Andrew Combs. I enjoyed the track so much I bought the album, but I continued to listen mainly to electronica.
About a year later something popped up on Facebook advertising a gig in Corby by the very same Andrew Combs. I couldn’t believe it. I contacted the promoter and offered to put up a poster for the event in the window of our shop in Great Easton.
He took up my offer and also invited me to another of his gigs that was happening before the AC one; and so it was that I found myself in The Hut at Corby rugby club one Wednesday evening sitting entranced as Nashville’s Amelia White and Yorkshire’s Dan Webster performed a selection of their songs to an audience that sadly numbered less than a dozen.
I attended quite a few more of his gigs in Corby (including the Andrew Combs one at the Viking Club), but found it frustrating that this chap was putting on amazing artists from the USA and elsewhere while clearly finding it difficult to attract an audience in the town.
Diane had been to a few of the gigs with me and had also enjoyed them, and we both came up with the same suggestion at the same time - why don’t we put on a gig in Great Easton? After all, we knew most people in the village through the shop and could surely persuade a few to come along.
The first one we put on was in March 2018 and featured Scottish band, Southern Tenant Folk Union, and we managed to sell out the village hall. We were very much flying by the seat of our pants and nearly fell before crossing the starting line when the person supplying the PA and lighting pulled out a few days before the gig. Fortunately, the band had their own kit and the evening was a great success.
As well as shows at the hall, we put on house concerts where artists literally play in people’s homes. Our house in Harborough is too small, but we are fortunate to have music enthusiasts in Great Easton who have sufficient space and are happy to host up to 40 people in their homes for an evening of musical entertainment, and such intimate events are often the most enjoyable. One artist who played a house concert in Great Easton, Amythyst Kiah, has since gone on to collaborate with artists such as Moby and Gregory Porter and has also been nominated for a Grammy.
We have just hosted our 40th gig and, while it’s tough selling tickets in the post-pandemic world, the feeling on the night is always amazing; and we intend to continue for some time yet. We have made great friends along the way - artists and audience members who we wouldn't have met had we not been doing this - and I watch more live music now (mostly Americana) than at any point in my life.
So Harborough FM changed my life in quite a profound way, and my opinion of local radio has completely changed. Whatever genre of music you like, you can be sure that somewhere out there there’s someone sitting in a small studio, or converted garage, playing the music they love on their local station and with only the intention of sharing that love; and thanks to the internet there's a very good chance that you can listen in too. May they live long and prosper.
Mark Howson promotes music under the banner of GEPOS Promotions.
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Raven (1977) - by the writers of Children of the Stones
Raven is another of those supernatural children's television series from the Seventies, but not one of the best remembered. I don't know how much of it I watched at the time, but I do remember reading the book.
The only thing I would take issue with in this short video is the idea that Raven was ahead of its time in showing concern for environmental issues.
In fact, the environment came to the fore as a political concern in the Seventies, as everything from the founding of Friends of the Earth to the popularity of The Good Life will attest.
The sad thing is how little more than 50 years of such concern has achieved.
The Joy of Six 1348
"Neither More in Common nor Opinium highlight the fact that Ed Davey tops their net approval ratings. This amnesia spills into other areas. BMG data shows that more people have not heard of Kemi Badenoch than have not heard of Ed Davey, while Ipsos gives Ed Davey the best net score on whether he would be a good or bad PM." Stephen McNair asks why the press and the pollsters aren't talking about Britain's most popular party leader.
Tom Gordon, Lib Dem MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, calls for adoptive parents to be given more support: "Adoption is often viewed as the happy ending in a child’s journey through trauma and instability, but for many families across the UK, it marks the beginning of a far more complex and challenging chapter."
"Banning books will only drive young people online for answers, where they are more likely to encounter content produced by people who have no interest in equipping them with the information and skills they need to navigate the world. In this age of digital exposure and misinformation, librarians play a more vital role than ever. We should trust them to do their jobs." Alison Hicks on the need to resist the growing pressure on British schools to censor their libraries.
Phoebe Weston meets the volunteers who are restoring ancient hedges.
Bob Fischer talks to Devan Stanfield (Kay Harker) 40 years after the BBC production of The Box of Delights: "I’d worked on television before. I’d done two shows – John Wyndham’s Chocky and Nina Bawden’s The Robbers – so I’d been on set with some very good actors. But I’d never been in a lead role, and I’d never done anything particularly intense. Most of my scenes had been opposite other kids. So that moment on the platform, where I’m face-to-face with Patrick Troughton, really close up, and he switched it on… yeah. I didn’t really have to act."
"A draw or two in the next two series could well go a long way to determining the overarching success or failure of the Bazball project. Time, then, for Stokes to rethink when it comes to the draw and embrace the grey in an increasingly black and white world." James Wallace defends the draw in cricket.
Maybe the cancellation of Time Team is the event after which everything started going wrong
Time Team, Channel 4's (ahem) groundbreaking archaeology programme, ran for 20 years from 1994. At its best it was like a nonfiction version of Detectorists.
So Time Team's cancellation rivals the death of David Bowie as the event after which everything started going wrong.
This special programme celebrates those 20 years.
I've been watching old episodes of Time Team on YouTube recently and have noticed one way in which it changed over the years. In its final year or two, the programme included a montage of the best bits to come in that episode to dissuade people from changing channel.
That's life in a multimedia, multichannel world, but as my mother's second husband used to say, it was like unwrapping your presents before Christmas.
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Ride a giant swan: Ed Davey visits Cornwall today
Not one for your usual campaign visit, Mr Davey has become known for taking part in some unusual activities while visiting areas of the country, from hobby horse jumping to enjoying a ride on a roller coaster. So during his visit to Bude, it was only natural that he would take to the water in a giant swan.
Meeting local candidates at the Wharf, Mr Davey - accompanied by other party members, including leader of Cornwall’s Liberal Democrats, Leigh Frost - took a pedalo out for a spin, enjoying the Cornish sun and “reliving memories from his childhood visits” to the town.
Ed also found time to record this interview with the Cornish & Devon Post.
What is it that make some names of places or people funny?
"He didn't get those in Berlin" just wouldn't be as funny. Partly it's the extra syllable in Heidelberg and partly it's the sound of "Heidel" to English ears.
And Accrington? It's wonderfully specific while being wholly irrelevant. So "My brother lives in Lancashire" wouldn't be as funny either.
Yes. I've been thinking about names and humour.
In the last Lord Bonkers I had him and the Duke of Rutland falling out over "the ownership of certain Stilton mines outside Cropwell Bishop". Why Cropwell Bishop? Because it was the funniest name available.
You see, there are six commercial Stilton creameries: Long Clawson, Tuxford & Tebbut, Hartington Dairy, Websters, Colston Bassett and Cropwell Bishop. And there's not much comic potential in the first four names.
To me, Colston Bassett is a serious name that's trying to sound funny, and Cropwell Bishop is a funny name that's trying to sound serious. So Cropwell Bishop it was.
Just as a place name can be funny in the right context, so can a surname.
My first job after university was with a chess retailer and magazine publisher. The head of the packing department there was a working class man, without much education but with great intelligence. And he loved Fawlty Towers, and in particular Basil's despair at being unable to make Manuel understand him:
"It's not a proposition from Wittgenstein."
My colleague had no idea who Wittgenstein was, but that didn't matter because the name sounds so much like that of a gnomic Austrian philosopher. If Wittgenstein didn't exist we should have to invent him.
And to finish, you can change the name of a thing or person to comic or subversive effect.
The owner of the company had written a book he called Easy Guide to Chess, but the packing department had another name for it. If one of them wanted a copy of the book to make up an order, he would call out to his oppo:
"Hardback Mein Kampf."
Titanic passengers ate Melton pies as one of their final meals
Our Headline of the Day Award goes to (who else?) the Melton Times.
The judges are anxious to point out that there is no reason to think the pies played any part in the sinking of the vessel.
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
The Joy of Six 1347
Wera Hobhouse demands to know why she was deported from Hong Kong.
"As we toured the site - not just the blast furnace but the iron ore and coal piles and the continuous casting works and the rod mill and the old coke ovens, shut down a couple of years ago - we began to glean that the workers here were reeling from a terrible shock. Most of them were just discovering, that very day, that Jingye was planning to starve the blast furnaces to death." Ed Conway tries to get to the bottom of what is happening at Scunthorpe.
"Could we see protests akin to the Luddite attacks - this time targeting server farms instead of knitting frames?" John Cassidy discusses how we might survive the AI revolution.
Michael Mechanic and Nina Berman report allegations of abuse at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida: "The scientists came out with an announcement that was disturbing, if not surprising. They had excavated 55 sets of remains at Dozier’s Boot Hill cemetery, 5 more than they’d originally identified, and 24 more than were indicated in the school’s official records. Other campus locations remain to be searched."
"The four principal characters have signed on to a suicide mission, driving two truckloads of nitroglycerin across three hundred miles of winding, mountainous, badly paved roads. After a lengthy setup, the movie itself becomes a fuse of indeterminate length. 'You sit there waiting for the theater to explode,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther ended his review when The Wages of Fear opened in early 1955 at the posh Paris Theater in Manhattan.'" J. Hoberman reconsiders Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 film.
John Lacey traces a pre-historic trading route across Leicestershire.
Does A Canterbury Tale end with a glimpse of a better future?
It's time to revisit Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's film A Canterbury Tale. Here's Xan Brooks, whose favourite film it also is, writing in the Guardian in 2011:
On beginning this blog, I was going to write that the story of A Canterbury Tale is a bit like the legend of the Arthurian knights asleep on the hillside, waiting to be called forth at the hour of greatest need.
But that’s not quite right, because the film implicitly suggests that there is no hillside, no sleeping knights, and no magical horn to call them forth.
The only world is the one we’re in, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes the people around us: frail and fearful, sometimes misguided, and coping as best they can. But if we can learn to trust them, and invite them to trust us back, then we may just be OK.
More than that, we might even be blessed; rattling through the ruins to uncover miracles in derelict caravans and hear the voice of angels in the train whistle’s yelp.
I'm sure I've quoted Brooks before, but in recent days I've come across some new discussion of A Canterbury Tale.
There's a good edition of the podcast Made in England on the film, with the American writer Dan Kois as the guest. It's well worth a listen.
The host, Jack McInroy, talks enthusiastically about an article on A Canterbury Tale by Kim Newman, and I've managed to find it on The Powell & Pressburger Pages:
My choice for Powell's most audacious film - not a perfect masterpiece like several of the other [films] cited, but still a work of dazzling, bewildering genius - is A Canterbury Tale (1944), a mystical meditation on what it means to be English, set during WWII.
Eric Portman is a local magistrate who pours glue into girls' hair during the black-outs, dissuading them from fraternising with the American troops, a barmy crusade that is first seen in horror film terms, and then transformed into an endeavour at once insane, transcendent and saintly.
The film, in luminous black and white with shining daylight and pitch darks, is imbued with magic from its first shot: a mediaeval falconer releasing a bird, which the camera follows as it does a 2001 stunt transforming into a Spitfire before returning to the face of the man, who has become a '40's ARP warden.
It catches perfectly the feel of its time, peeling back the layers of history like a Nigel Kneale curse to disclose something primal and awesome in the heart of Kent, even to the extent of winding up with the modern pilgrims - an amiable American soldier played by an amateur, a shopgirl turned farmhand for the duration, and a poetic tank sergeant-cum-organist played by Dennis Price - each rewarded with a peculiar kind of miracle.
It was reviled and boycotted on its release, far more so than the controversial Colonel Blimp, accused of pretension and silliness. But it looks far better now than many an accepted classic of the British cinema, isolating in a truly English setting the deep feelings and powers missed by the tidiness of David Lean or Ealing comedies, turning hedges and streams into a landscape as mythic and cinematically vibrant as John Ford's Monument Valley, opening up a strain in our national cinema that lead to Robert Hamer, Seth Holt, John Gilling, Dennis Potter, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman.
The sequence where the adults are drawn into a children's battle game upon a glowing stream is at once lyrical, funny, moving and subtly dark, the way Peter Pan or A Wind In The Willows were before Uncle Walt got his syrup-spoon to them.
Like all great narrative art, it transcends genre and seems to contain all possibilities of fiction - erotic, horrific, funny, religious, wise, historical, pastoral, political, cynical, naive - and indeed,of human behaviour, being about the persistence of peace in wartime and the relevance of the distant past to a jitterbugging present.
And like all the films listed in this section, a lot of people hate this film a lot. But I love it. I loved it when I first saw it on television in the '70's, I loved it when I interviewed Powell over the phone in 1985, I loved it the day in February 1990 I heard its director had died, and I love it on video now.
Finally, a post on The Movie Screen Scene has noticed a little glimpse of a better future in the film.Films aren't books; they are more than words, and this film has something it's hard to convey, dodging around the intellect it engages so easily and playing straight to the heart and guts.
A Canterbury Tale was set and made in the period before D-Day. The American amateur actor Sgt John Sweet couldn't attend the premiere in the city in May 1944 because he was on Eisenhower's staff in London and planning D-Day for real. So, as the Made in England podcast reminds us, we don't know what was to become of his character or Dennis Price's or of Sheila Sim's fiancé.
But right at the end of the film, the closing credits play over another scene of the boys who fought a battle on the river. It may be significant that they are no longer playing war but football.
Monday, April 14, 2025
Orthodox monastery for sale in the Stiperstones
Lower Gittenshay Cottage is billed by estate agents as
a charming detached cottage offering excellent potential, set with outbuildings and land providing stunning views, in an idyllic and secluded rural location.
But if you explore the photos of the property on the website, you may suspect there is more to the place than that. And you'd be right.
I've blogged before about the Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert in the Stiperstones, but most of the videos and links I posted no longer work. Today I came across a post about the place on Citydesert, but it dates from 2014.
Still, it is informative. It tells us that the monastery's only occupant was Brother Aidan:
I first met Brother Aidan, who is a Greek Orthodox monk in his early forties, about a year ago on Mount Athos, the remote peninsula in northern Greece that is the spiritual centre of the Orthodox Church. He had returned to spend Easter at the monastery at which he had done his training, but told me that otherwise he lived alone in a hermitage high up on the Welsh border.
And then the writer travelled to Shropshire to see his hermitage:
His future home was a dilapidated barn that had once housed hay upstairs and cattle in what is now his living-room. But his monastic apprenticeship, in which he took turns in the kitchen and the fields, has made him an accomplished all-round handyman. The former byre is now a snug den, the walls lime-washed in ochre, the floor set with a pebble mosaic. Much of the simple wooden furniture he made himself; the stout front door is fashioned from coffin oak.
But it is the transformation that he has wreaked on a barn next door that sets him apart from any other bachelor buried deep in the countryside. Skirting round the back of what was once a pigsty, I came to a large wooden door. Beyond it was the most breathtaking sight – a small, but gorgeously frescoed, Orthodox chapel. Lined up along the walls like some heavenly football team were icons of a dozen saints, while from the ceiling Christ gazed down. “I like to think of Him as the conductor,” said Brother Aidan, who is one of only a handful of iconographers at work in Britain….
And the post also gives a precise location for the Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert:
It is situated in Lower Gittenshay Cottage, an outlier of an abandoned village known as the Paddock, on the eastern flank of the Stiperstones, in the South-west Shropshire hills.
"Frankly a bit weird": Andrew Griffith and those vegan Lib Dems
"The Lib Dems are quite extremist, when they get into council they want four day weeks and veganism"
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) April 13, 2025
Shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith says "historically, people have done deals on a local council level with all sorts of groups"#BBCLauraK https://t.co/CXpI5I9h8H pic.twitter.com/eqyR795zQZ
I couldn't let Andrew Griffith's, er, remarkable performance on the BBC yesterday pass without comment.
So here's one from "a Liberal Democrat source" (insiders don't work Sundays):
"These comments are frankly a bit weird. Andrew Griffith was Treasury minister under Liz Truss when the Tories crashed the economy and sent mortgages spiralling.
"Voters haven’t forgiven the Conservative Party for all the damage they did, bizarre comments like this won’t do anything to change that."
Write a guest post for Liberal England
I love publishing guest posts here on Liberal England, whether they're on politics or wider culture. And I'm happy to entertain a wide range of views.
But I'd hate you to spend time writing something I really wouldn't want to publish, so do get in touch
first.
These are the last 10 guest posts on Liberal England:
- An Oasis reunion? Have we not suffered enough? - Stuart Whomsley
- The night the Walker Brothers played a Market Harborough club - Jo Colley
- An essay in identifying Englishness - Stuart Whomsley
- No sign of an end to defections in local government - Augustus Carp
- When Syd Barrett met Nick Drake - Rob Chapman
- Councillors changing party: Christmas update - Augustus Carp
- Old Carp's Almanack: Councillor defections in 2024 - Augustus Carp
- How Dune anticipated Deep Seek - Peter Chambers
- Defections of local councillors have doubled in 2025 - Augustus Carp
- When Doctor Who saved us from the gaping inferno - Peter Chambers
Sunday, April 13, 2025
The Joy of Six 1346
Britain is not alone in struggling to build major infrastructure projects: it's a problem that many countries with systems of common law share. Dan Davies, in an important report, asks why this is and looks at what can be done.
Lottie Elton says water companies are using the same deceptive tactics as Big Oil and Big Tobacco.
Research shows that obtaining a degree tends to make students more socially liberal, little is known about what drives this effect. Elizabeth Simon, Daniel Devine and Jamie Furlong investigate.
Elroy Rosenberg marks the 50th birthday of Picnic at Hanging Rock: "Weir’s film is a haunted repertory of beautiful dreams, heraldic visions, memories gained and lost. If Lindsay had ensured her ambiguous ending would be respected, she could do nothing to prevent a cast and crew of great artists from feeling their way into the gaps of her story. The result was an art film with an Australian touch, ever beguiling all these years later – a film which, after five decades, still belongs to its viewers."
Hugh Scofield searches for the French hotel where Rumer Godden and her family stayed in 1923 - a holiday that inspired her novel The Greengage Summer.
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