Here's another film lecture from Ian Christie. We've seen him on Gothic London, and here he talks about the forgotten London film pioneer Robert Paul.
Paul, who was born in Islington in 1869, vividly portrayed the variety of London at the end of the 19th century, conscious of its historic appeal but also emphasising the modernity of which he was a part.
A wasp comments: It said "wildlife" on the door, and we're wildlife."
To their credit, the Norfolk Wildlife Trust's staff appear to view things in much the same light.
Neath, Mansfield, Gosforth, Farington, Arundel, York and Cheltenham. Towns and cities you wouldn’t normally link together, but what they have in common is they all hosted sell-out games of cricket in the first week of the One-Day Cup.
These are a combination of brand new, rediscovered or longstanding outgrounds that are proving very popular with fans. This is despite relative indifference from the ECB and county squads being depleted by the existence of franchise cricket being played on test match grounds.
This year sell outs mean a crowd of between 4,000 and 6,000. Now, football fans might be dismissive of such numbers, as they're equivalent to fourth-tier attendances in the English league, but they represent a historic high for cricket and many outgrounds are in small towns where no other professional team sport is played.
For perspective, in 2003 the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) got very excited at crowd numbers for the first season of T20 cricket (played on county or test match grounds at evenings and weekends). These averaged around 4,000 and were far higher than the tournament it replaced, the Benson & Hedges Cup, which had an average attendance of 1,100 in 2002. At the time ECB Marketing Manager, Stuart Robertson crowed in Wisden magazine, "We are delighted by the response we have had so far."
I doubt we'll see such a positive statement from the ECB about bumper One-Day Cup attendances. It’s somewhat awkward for them that numbers are up for the Cup in provincial grounds, but down for their precious franchise tournament.
In many ways outground cricket is the antithesis of the Hundred. Crowds are dedicated and knowledgeable, you're likely to bump into parents of players (hello David Fulton’s dad), ex-players (hello Martin McCague – you are as wide as you are tall), BBC local radio commentators (hello friendly BBC Radio Gloucestershire team). It’s a pleasure to rub shoulders with people who don’t have to ask what’s going on and have been to every home game this season, so have seen every player talked up into England reckoning.
Outgrounds are small enough, without the surge in popularity, to create a good atmosphere, Maidstone with 800 people spread evenly across the grass bank didn't feel sparse. As cricket in England is not played in enormodomes the competition isn't so much about numbers as experience.
Which is the prettiest ground? Certainly Abergavenny, Arundel and Tunbridge Wells would be in with a shout (please comment below if you think I’ve missed a good one). I remember the Guardian making a
point of covering every county game at Abergavenny, despite its remoteness, because the surroundings were so lovely.
Food is a big factor in the cricket experience, I recall cupcakes and cakes supplied to a hospitality marquee by club volunteers at Guildford at reasonable prices, coupled with relaxed rules and regs about bringing your own provisions. Across the piece, it's great value for money – you’re not getting ripped off by ticket prices, car parking charges or catering.
While administrators talk of T20 and the Hundred bringing new fans to grounds, it's also the case that franchises alienate many established fans and the bigger counties absolutely need to play in several venues to reach out to their entire catchment area. In an ideal world the 18 counties would play at more than 60 venues a season, visiting several locations not covered by football or rugby. For example, Yorkshire play in Leeds, Scarborough and York. They could easily sell out in another half dozen venues, and some members would say they’re ignoring South Yorkshire altogether.
Is this year a one-off or part of a trend? Certainly the early summer heatwave in Europe has encouraged staycations and our own summer weather has made people more confident about getting a full day's play. Hopefully in a few years time I'll revisit this and talk of counties wrestling with fitting more temporary seating in the grounds that are bursting today.
Matthew Pennell blogs at Return of the Liberal.
At those elections, the Green Party won 22 seats and the Lib Dems 12, then used their combined majority to take control. Southwark is the only London borough currently being run by such a coalition.
The Lib Dems secured three posts in the leadership team, including that of deputy council leader which is filled by their group leader Victor Chamberlain.
Chamberlain told BBC News:
"The more we started talking, the more we realised that we had a lot in common, that we shared similar values and aspirations for our borough, and actually we wanted to build a borough that is more affordable, that is safer and that is greener.
"I think we found it really very constructive to work as two parties that both bring great ideas to the table."
The article also quotes the deputy leader of the opposition Labour group, who seems rather fixated on process:
"Apart from a number of meetings being cancelled, we've had two proposed cuts, one being the Nest which is a free mental health support for young people and a dementia service being cut, but it's been reversed because the Labour group, along with residents have pushed back.
"It's quite clear that they don't know what they're doing and actually this [coalition] was done in a rush."
"The university’s own financial reports show that 16 members of the University Executive Board are paid an average of £241k – a 27 per cent increase over three years while the institution has been going through financial difficulties. We have also seen the recruitment of highly paid and non-academic 'professors of practice', who are often industry figures without teaching and research experience. New managerial roles with grandiose titles such as 'associate pro-vice chancellor for education and student experience' have been created across the institution." John Heathershaw takes us inside the crisis at the University of Exeter.
"Deaths, misconduct in public office, rat infestations, and a climate of fear." Emma Guy reports on Leicester's privately run HMP Fosse Way.
Gawain Towler explains Rupert Lowe's sudden interest in cooperation with Reform UK: "A man of sixty-eight, a man elected twice on the coattails of Nigel Farage, who has spent eighteen months declaring that his purpose was the destruction of Nigel Farage, has looked at 8.7 per cent in a nationally ignored by-election and concluded that his moment is now or never. It is not unity he wants. It is relevance, and he is in a hurry for it."
"Works such as Robert McFarlane's The Old Ways, Tom Cox's 21st Century Yokel, Benjamin Myers' Under the Rock, and Edward Parnell's seminal Ghostland explore the connection between the self, the landscape, and the stories and histories that permeate and in many ways 'haunt' these landscapes." Scarlett Butchers considers the role of environmentalism in recent 'folkish' English writing.
Fed Kandi photographs the public art on the campuses of Lougborough University and the University of Leicester.
Nevertheless, they gave Hull Live our Headline of the Day Award for its tale of a pissed off hedgehog rescuer.
John Rogers takes us on a walk through a quarter of Camden that surprises even him.
His blurb on YouTube says:
From the Euston Station redevelopment, the site of the Euston Arch and the Bree Louise pub we go looking for a reservoir of the New River. In this area, North Gower Street, we have Speedy's Cafe and the filing location used in the TV show Sherlock for 221b Baker Street.
From here we go to Cumberland Market, once London's last hay and straw market and look for the location of the Canal basin that served the market right until the 1930s.
This fascinating Hidden London History walk then follows the route of the Cumberland Arm of the Regent's Canal to the point where it joined the main course of the canal.
John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.
Apparently the font wasn't academically gifted, but it had character and played in the front row for the first XV. It later became a management consultant.
Our photograph shows this very font, now to be found back at Upton Cressett in Shropshire.
The programme talks about the wider castle site, not just the wonderful Norman great hall you see above.
If you want to know more about the archaeology of this fascinating site, you can listen to an online lecture by Matthew Morris from University of Leicester Archaeological Services, who has led digs there.
An increasingly narrow English curriculum, with its emphasis on phonics and 'teaching to the test', is squeezing reading for pleasure out of our primary schools, experts in the field tell Lydia Chantler-Hicks.
Rebecca Johns finds that British scientist James Lovelock warned executives of the risks of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s. Rather than share his reports with the public, claims an imminent legal case, Shell responded by funding the Global Climate Coalition – an industry group that pursued multimillion-dollar influence campaigns promoting climate denial and misinformation.
Leanne Tritton reports on the fate of Shrewsbury's Shirehall, the modernist former home of the Shropshire County Council.
"Dirk Bogarde came in for some stick from certain quarters for his portrayal of General Sir Frederick 'Boy' Browning, who was under considerable pressure from Monty to deliver Operation Market-Garden. Dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning stated that they’d be going 'a bridge too far.' He said this before the operation, but there is no scene with Montgomery in the film, instead Bogarde gets the line after the snafu, coming across like an aloof clever-dick 'told you so' type." Tim Pelan looks back to to 1977 and the making of A Bridge Too Far.
"Promises was my song, but I left the verses at home! There’s a demo where we’re having a bit of fun and I’m making the verse up as I go along. As I was doing that, Pete was by the mixing desk, so it was just me, John (Maher, drums) and Steve (Garvey, bass).
“We were working out which songs we had, and Pete [Shelley] said, 'I think I've got some verses for that melody.'
"The difference was that it was going to be a socio-political song about promises made by the Government. I said, 'You’ve turned it into a f***ing love song!'
"Having said that, it worked out well all round. That’s the thing with lots of the songwriting, particularly later on. We complement each other."
But perhaps they will pay more attention to a new report from the Institute of Alcohol Studies entitled Under the influence? Perspectives of alcohol in the parliamentary workplace among UK MPs and staff.
You can read a media release on the institute's website and download the report from there too.
The release says:
Westminster is a unique workplace where alcohol is woven into the working environment. Staff members based in constituency offices were far less likely to report being offered alcohol at work meetings or events compared to staff based in Westminster and MPs, and participants also drew stark comparisons with the presence of alcohol in other workplaces.
The foreword is written by Beccy Cooper, who was a public health consultant before she won Worthing West for Labour in 2024. She says:
Two findings stood out to me. Almost one in ten respondents reported a negative experience because of someone else’s drinking at work, and 70 per cent either didn’t know, or weren’t sure, how to raise a concern about a colleague’s drinking.
That combination – real, measurable harm, and no clear route to address it – is exactly the kind of gap we need to address. While social and networking elements are important in a healthy workplace, colleagues describing how the drinking culture plays a distinct role in career progression raises significant concerns about wellbeing, inclusion, and professionalism.
The Guardian story on Under the Influence? emphasises its tales of excess and the claim by one MP that other members have had their stomachs pumped after consuming so much alcohol that they ended up in hospital.
I am reminded of another British institution that has seen better days: cricket.
This is from a blog post I wrote in 2017:
In the course of my day job I went to an event on the psychology and wellbeing of military personnel.
A session on mental health saw general agreement that the biggest issue facing the Forces in that field was alcohol misuse. ...
Cricket shares many features with military life – slightly awkward male camaraderie, periods of boredom followed by periods of nerve-shredding excitement, public school officers – and alcohol seems to play the same central role in it.
Alcohol is used as a reward and a consolation, to oil the wheels of socialisation and quite possibly to ease the nerves of the battle-scarred too.
One of the attractions of political activism for me, I will admit, was that after delivering, canvassing or committee meetings generally ended in the pub. In fact, there was a theory that political meetings all ended an hour before "Last orders", no matter when they began.
These days pubs are open later but no one can afford the beer prices, so I suppose everything has changed. By the sound of it, the only place where nothing has changed is Westminster.
You don't have to be a Puritan to think it has the wrong attitude to alcohol.
England's chess prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan broke another world age record last week, reports Leonard Barden in the Guardian. At a tournament held in Aix-en-Provence, she achieved her first international master norm at the age of 11 years and four months.
This made her the youngest female player to achieve this feat, beating the record of Judit Polgár, who later became the highest-rated female player in history. She didn't manage it until the age of 11 years and 9 months.
International master is the title one below grandmaster in chess. To achieve it a player must achieve three such norms, which are acquired by playing at the required strength in a tournament, and reach a high enough rating on the international list.
Bodhana is also two-thirds of the way towards becoming a woman grandmaster. If she achieves her third norm for this in the next year, she will beat the record for the youngest holder of the title.
The separate title of woman grandmaster was introduced to give the stronger women players something to strive for. Whether it's down to nature or nurture, few of them are able to qualify for the grandmaster title the best male players hold.
But Judit Polgár became a grandmaster, and it's significant that her father (something of a chess Richard Williams) never allowed her or her sisters to play in women's tournaments but always had them competing with the men in open tournaments.
The appearance of a talent like Bodhana, and the large increase in the number of girls taking up the game, gives you hope that these separate titles will one day disappear.
I went to Lutterworth today and was taken by these four white horses on a grassed bank at the bottom of the town's main street, which climbs the hill from a bridge over the River Swift.
As the plaque says, they are the work of the artist and sculptor Graeme Mitcheson, who was inspired by Lutterworth's role as a staging post for the coaching trade in the 18th century.
The town council had the horses installed to mark the diamond jubilee of Elizabeth II.
Children from poorer families do worse at school. Nadia Siddiqui explains why and what can be done to narrow the gap in attainment.
Steff Aquarone makes the case for a minister for coastal communities: "Too many coastal towns face lower than average wages, poorer transport connections, seasonal economies, shortages of affordable housing and increasing pressure from coastal erosion and climate change. Despite their enormous contribution to our economy, our heritage and our identity, they are too often overlooked when national investment decisions are made."
"Growing up there in the early 60s, the countryside never seemed too far away. We kids were often out and about, playing in the woods, making dens and tree swings, watching cows graze in farmers' fields and scrumping in nearby orchards where Warwick University and Cannon Park shopping centre now stand. There were brooks to jump across (or fall into regularly in my case) and an old Roman ford near to the busy A45." Ruth Cherrington celebrates Coventry's Camley Estate.
Ben Duckett is puzzled that attendances for cricket's Hundred tournament are falling, despite the presence of more star names, reports The Sports Encounter. What he and the games administrators need to grasp is that British sports fans' attachment is to teams, not to individual players.
Claire Madge has been to see the Richard Dadd exhibition at the Royal Academy: "There is no moment of finding 'madness' in Dadd's work, whether it was completed before his breakdown or after. Even the eyes of his figures from scenes of Hamlet completed in 1840 and the strange fairies that ring a sleeping Titania from 1841 show an artist with an ability to capture the uncanny and one who could easily get lost in the detail even before his psychosis came to the fore."
What did become of Freddie and Fiona? What should the Liberal Democrats' new strategy be? Who will win the 2.30 at Wincanton? The answers to these questions will no doubt be revealed when next we visit Bonkers Hall.
Sunday
My long career in public life has convinced me of an important truth: a man who will cheat at golf will cheat at anything. It was therefore no surprise to me when President Trump – can that really be his name? – pressured the organisers to cancel the suspension of the American team’s star striker at the World Cup.
It’s beginning to look as though the Reform Party will have to pull a similar trick with the nation’s prison governors in order to field a full slate of candidates at the next election.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
BBC Sport wins our Headline of the Day Award.
Personally, I've not heard many complaints about foxes being overproud. They more often involve dustbins.
Here's an unexpected twist: the man who took the photograph of that "Making plans for Nigel" T-shirt is suing people – one N. Farage in particular – for using his work. It has, after all, been spread all over the internet.
Alan Robertshaw, whose videos I post here occasionally, takes the opportunity to give us a quick guide to copyright law.
My advice to fellow bloggers is to steer clear of photographs from the big agencies that cater for newspapers, because they will find you and invoice you.
A report on the Heritage Fund website explains:
The project brings together farmers, communities and young people to improve habitats and strengthen ecological networks across one of England’s most treasured landscapes. With almost £1m in development funding awarded and the potential for a further £8.9m in delivery funding, the project will support long-term stewardship while helping more people connect with nature and heritage.
Over the next decade, the project aims to work with more than 200 landowners across the Shropshire Hills, delivering four large-scale river restoration projects alongside 120 smaller capital nature restoration initiatives. Local communities and parish councils will be supported to deliver Shropshire’s Local Nature Recovery Strategy, while funded traineeships for young people will help secure the landscape’s future for generations to come.
Through Landscape Connections, fund has already invested more than £2.7m in development funding to projects in the Solway Coast and Marine area, the North Pennines, and Loch Lomond and The Trossachs, with the potential for almost £25m in delivery funding to follow.
Saturday
It was my old friend John Arlott who claimed that Manchester is the only city in Britain where they have lifeboat drill on the buses. No doubt the damp climate has encouraged its mayor to march on London to claim the crown – or at least the tenancy of 10 Downing Street.
Yes, there is something Medieval about the whole affair; it’s like an episode from a school textbook on the reign of King Henry VI Part 2.
What will this Burnham do when he gets there? I am told he is Sound on trams, which is to his credit, but hardly constitutes a programme for government. Were I to be asked – and my advice is often sought on such questions – I should counsel him to clip the wings of the Russian Bear, defend our universities (both ancient and modern) and give the scourge of Landlordism both barrels, but the Labour Party has always been in thrall to its social superiors.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
This a terrific lecture by Ian Christie, whose writings did much to bring the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger back to prominence.
His Gothic London begins with early Dickens adaptations, made because there was a ready public for them. And Dickens, after all, was a cinematic novelist before cinema was invented.
Then we go though Jekyll and Hyde, Jack the Ripper and the London fog to reach the early Hitchcock. The exoticism of Limehouse, with its opium dens and Chinese population, also figures.
Next we take in the Blitz and this blog's favourite topic of bombsites, before returning to Dickens in the shape of David Lean's peerless Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Carol Reed's 1970 film of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, says Christie, was the first colour adaptation of a Dickens novel.
And we end with some modern Gothic takes of London, including Death Line and From Hell.
The Guardian reports that Tice, the Reform UK MP for Boston and Skegness, received a loan of nearly £80,000 from Nigel Farage’s aide George Cottrell some months after he was elected parliament.
This transaction, says the newspaper's report, caused bankers to raise concerns with authorities.
In her letter to the commissioner, Lisa Smart wrote:
"Mr Cottrell is not merely a private acquaintance of Mr Tice, he is an official adviser to Reform UK and Nigel Farage (demonstrated by his use of Reform UK business cards).
"It is highly implausible that the loan would have been negotiated without their party political connection, given this is the central basis of their relationship."
The Guardian has also reported today that George Cottrell transferred $2m to his mother days before she made large donations to Reform UK.
"When social workers become involved with a family, the focus is often on parenting, safeguarding concerns or family relationships. But new research suggests that one of the strongest drivers of repeated involvement with children’s services is something more basic: whether families have enough money to live on." Rick Hood explains the findings of his research.
Jennifer Rubin Grandis confronts the systemic bias in academic publishing: "I’ve been studying sexism in academic medicine since 2019, and I’ve learned from countless interviewees that my experience as a woman in medicine is common. Women are rarely mentored well—in fact, when they ask for advice from senior faculty, they’re often discouraged from submitting their papers to high-impact journals, despite making just as many scientific discoveries as men."
Boak & Bailey recommend pub crawling as a way of practising psychogeography.
"Few science fiction relationships stick in my mind better than the love/hate between Dr. Zachary Smith and Robot in the original 1960s version of Lost in Space." J.G. Follansbee on one of television SF's great double acts.
Friday
That Starmer fellow didn’t amount to much, did he? Cook, with her generous heart, always thought the best of him and refused to “listen to incinerations”; for myself, there’s an old Gypsy saying that holds… To be honest, I can’t remember what it holds, but I know it would be just the job here.
My sources in the Labour Party tell me that the man was never meant to be prime minister: the idea was that he would sit there like a stuffed haddock while Mandelson and McSweeney Todd purged the party of anyone who believed in what Labour used to believe in. Then, after an honourable defeat in the 2024 election, he would have made way so that “Streeting” they used to go on about could become PM next time round.
The moral is don’t appoint temporary leaders, as they may turn out not to be temporary at all. Vinnie Jones’s disastrous stewardship of the Royal Ballet should have alerted everyone to that danger.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
John Lennon once 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 takes an American podcast to take Cliff and the Shadows (as they soon became) seriously: We Say Yeah!
The news that the Jodrell Bank telescope may soon be no more sent me back to a piece by Jonathan Meades:
Concorde was seen in the sky over West London for the first time in late June 1969. Less than a month later Neil Armstrong stepped from Apollo 11 onto the moon. The future had arrived. It was tangible, it was thrilling, it was now. We came to believe that we were all part of an adventure without end. This was just the beginning, the new beginning.
What we didn’t realise was that this was it. A peak had been achieved. The only way was down.
And from there I went to this television film of his on the same theme.
I don't agree with all he says here, but then what Meades offers in his work is not so much a set of beliefs as an attitude. And it's that attitude we love him for.
Here's Krzysztof Nawratek, senior lecturer in humanities and architecture at the University of Sheffield, writing in Times Higher Education:
I started my university career in Poland in 1988, a year before communism collapsed. I joined an underground anti-communist student association, went on strike and saw my hierarchical, conservative university slowly crumble.
However, even within the oppressive communist regime, Polish universities held on to one core belief: the university belonged to its academic community. Rectors and deans were elected. Senates and faculty councils had real authority. Leadership was temporary and accountable to those it served. The university did not belong to its managers; in fact, it’s hard to say if there was any real management at all.
When I moved to the UK in 2008, I expected universities not just to be more autonomous but more democratic. Instead, I found institutions that were independent from the state but whose autonomy lay with their executive teams and governing bodies, not with the university as a whole.
British universities are clearly part of the late capitalist system,1 and critics typically point to their neoliberal agenda and managerialism. But I think that description no longer fits. British universities are becoming not so much managerialist as authoritarian.
This might sound harsh but I am not talking about dictatorship. The atmosphere of fear and expected obedience reminds me of my time as a student in Poland but the reason I use the word authoritarian is more banal: leadership is immune to any actionable feedback from below. Consultation still exists but nothing anyone says can change the decision or remove those who made it.
This trend away from democratic decision-making towards managerialism and ultimately authoritarianism can be seen across British society, not just in universities, but in local councils, professional bodies and even sport.
At the heart of it lies the belief that democracy, discussion and consultation are inefficient, but that belief is mistaken.
As it's Karl Popper's birthday, let me quote again his greatest British populariser, Bryan Magee:
Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship.
Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies.
It is not – as, again, had been believed by most people before – because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.
That comes from Magee's intellectual biography Confessions of a Philosopher.
Notes
Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt
Lon Milo DuQuette and Jim Bratkowsky
Weiser Books, 2026, £14.99
The year is 1900 and a young Aleister Crowley – poet, mountaineer and Cambridge chess Blue – is keen to learn the mysteries of London’s leading occultists, but he arrives in this fashionable circle to find it riven by a power struggle. The old guard of MacGregor Mathers and his wife Moina, who were real historical figures, are being challenged by a new generation that includes W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and Bram Stoker.
Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt began life as a screenplay, which at one time came close to being shot with the late Alan Rickman as the lead. Its frustrating history is set out in a preface and, perhaps because of that history, this novelisation sees an eminent British director describing, to a young American who is also in the movie business, the action of a film about Crowley he has long planned but is now too ill to make. This extended dialogue takes place at a wake held for Crowley after his funeral in 1947 at the Marylebone home of two more real figures, Sir Percy and Lady Frieda Harris.
Percy Harris held Harborough for the Liberals at a wartime by-election in 1916, but was defeated there two years later after his Conservative opponent received Lloyd George’s coupon. He returned to Westminster as MP for Bethnal Green South West in 1922 and represented that seat until 1945, becoming one of Sir Archibald Sinclair’s most important lieutenants. Frieda Harris, his wife, was an artist and follower of Crowley who painted his famous Thoth tarot pack. After Sir Percy’s death in 1952 she moved to a houseboat in Kashmir and made a modest income from writing and artistic projects. When Matthew Taylor (now Baron Taylor of Goss Moor), the former Liberal and Liberal Democrat MP for Truro, who was adopted as a baby, traced his birth mother, he found that Sir Percy and Lady Frieda were among his great grandparents.
But it’s not just the Liberal trivia that makes this book fun. Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt, a work of fantasy that is firmly grounded in fact, paints an intriguing picture of an Edwardian London where men in wing collars and women in enormous hats believe the most extraordinary things. It’s a world not unlike the one G.K. Chesterton created in The Man Who Was Thursday.
Thursday
The orphans and Cook have taken to the cool of the caves for which Trescothick Bay is noted, but I am happy here on the beach even though I have left my sun hat back at the boarding house.
Today I have been thinking of Emlyn Hooson, an inspirational leader of our party in Wales and a source of wise counsel on any matter touching upon the Principality. His phone would ring at all hours and, more often than not, when he had answered the thing he would hear the words “Hooson, we have a problem.”
Later in life he revealed an unexpected talent for Association football, captaining Liverpool to three league titles and two European Cups. This led to his being invited to be a team captain on the moving television show A Question of Sport, where his duels with Binkie Beaumont kept the nation on the edge of its seat.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
A film about farming and the harsh winter of 1946/7. In particular, about the flooding that hit the Fens when the snow finally thawed and the efforts to recover from it.
Those floods form the background to Malcolm Saville's book The Luck of Sallowby. Here's his description of the fight against the floodwaters:
Now they were close against the wall they saw it was only a few inches higher than the rising water which stretched before them in a turbulent brown lake, whipped into waves by the gale. And these waves beat against the wall ceaselessly and the spray from them blew over the top and drenched the bags and settled in pools on the tarpaulins and made the blue clay slimy and almost unmanageable.
The sky was full of rain again but they knew now that even if it did not rain in the Fens the danger was coming from the water which fell many miles away in the Midlands and in Bedfordshire, and that the swollen rivers were still rushing down to the plain while the wind which fretted these floods into the banks, made a menace which it was very hard to fight.
So they worked on with them men, laughing and joking with them, until a shout and disturbance about fifty yards away broke the rhythm of their toil. They looked round to see that the water had found a weakness in the wall and was gushing through the cracks between the bags like a fountain. There was another similar leak nearer to them on their other side, and now the gangs plastered these leaks with clay without waiting to bag it.
As he says in an 'expert comment' issued by the University of Oxford's media people, we have built a world where parents are expected to be simultaneously working and present for family.
It's all good stuff, but I was struck by this sentence:
In the 1950s, 80 per cent of mothers in the UK stayed at home and the school run was part of their domestic routine.
My instinct was that the concept of the school run is more recent than that, and Google Ngram above suggests I'm right. It's use suddenly took off in the late 1990s.
And we didn't have much of a school run avant la lettre. In the 1950s, people tended to live nearer their children's school then fewer of them owned cars. Whether because of this lower level of traffic or because there was less fear of 'strangers', they were more relaxed about letting young children out on their own. So a school child would soon walk to school with friends or older brothers and sisters rather than their mother.
I can certainly recall that in the Sixties you would have died from embarrassment if you had been met from school once you had reached the age of nine.
You can't turn the clock back, but every change has positive and negative consequences.
Wednesday
They say these heatwaves will soon render the South of England uninhabitable, which is a bit of a facer seeing as we Liberals have worked so hard to ensure we don’t have MPs anywhere else. But don’t despair: the arid south of Rutland is simply teeming with life – human life included.
Of course, if the Home Counties do turn to desert it will require changes to the way we fight elections there, which is why, a couple of years ago, I invited some of the ALDC’s leading lights to an awayday at an oasis near Uppingham.
There I instructed them in the polite way to canvass bedouin, the correct tying of the kafiyeh and the use of camels in Focus delivery. It won’t be my fault if we fail to gain Runnymede and Weybridge next time round.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
Earlier this week...
