I'm glad I did, because there were several exceptional buildings to see and a lot of interesting history to hear. Visit the Desford Heritage website to see more.
There is a habit of referring to oligarchs as the super-rich in countries we don't like, but not to extend a similar label to such a stratum in our own countries; on the contrary, individuals like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates are often seen in more heroic terms as great innovators.
I'm not sure about the gramar, but the point is a good one.
Glen O'Hara on the government's stealthy culling of Britain's universities: "This way, they get to make the whole sector smaller with little political pain on their part. They can dump responsibility on bad managers, risk-taking, too much borrowing. The dark side of Higher Education’s pain and toxicity will dribble out on the local and regional news, all the better for voters not to join the dots. The rundown will look piecemeal, disorganised, random."
Helen Currie, Irene Gregory-Eaves and Steven Cooke are our guides to research on how to build cities for wildlife, not just people.
"The film interviews landowners such as Francis Fulford, who has long been the media’s favourite outspoken reactionary toff, a sort of posh version of Viz’s Farmer Palmer, snarling “Get off my land”. There are other, more thoughtful landowners, including Hugh Inge-Innes-Lillingston, who cheerfully admits how silly his name is, and is open to developing new ideas about managed access." Peter Bradshaw has been to see Our Land (2026).
"Just one thing remained to be done before the 1923 FA Cup Final could take place on 28 April. The structure of the stadium had to be tested, to make sure that it was safe for spectators to use. All 1,200 workmen on the site had to march round the stadium as a group, visiting all parts of the terraces and stands. Following instructions and in unison, they had to stamp their feet, lean against the safety rails, and sit down then up on the seats, to recreate the effect of the crowds at an actual event." Philip Grant looks back to the construction of Wembley Stadium.
Matthew Lyons reviews Peter Ackroyd's biography of W.H. Auden.
Two former Liberal Democrat MPs – Norman Baker (Lewes, 1997-2015) and Duncan Hames (Chippenham, 2010-15) – talk about the growth of corruption in the British political system.
Duncan Hames is now the director of policy at Transparency International UK and is married to the former Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson.
Norman Baker writes of this conversation on YouTube:
The UK has now slipped to 20th in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a sharp fall from just outside the top ten as recently as 2021, and is sitting at its lowest ever score since the Index was revamped in 2012.
Duncan makes the point that one of the reasons for the rise in the perception of corruption in the UK is the sense of impunity that some figures felt. It is notable and worrying that we have only found out about the shenanigans of Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor through the release of the Epstein Files in the United States.
Meanwhile, the revelation that Nigel Farage personally received £5 million from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, money he claims he had no obligation to declare on the grounds it was “purely private” and “wasn’t political in any sense at all,” is precisely the kind of story that illustrates why transparency in public life matters so much.
As Duncan and I discussed, the absence of proper accountability has real consequences for ordinary people, from the billions squandered on dodgy PPE contracts during the pandemic, to the way in which unchecked lobbying allows vested interests to bend government policy to their will.
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| Shelve Church, Shropshire |
The Times says a field has been wholly cleared of gorse and scrub, to the dismay of people in Shelve and Pennerley.
Heather Kidd told the newspaper:
"No one seems to know who was responsible," said Councillor Kidd.
"I spoke to the planning department of Shropshire Council and as the site is not an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) or covered by any other protection, normal enforcement procedures did not apply.
"However, whoever did this overstepped the mark by fencing the whole area off, telling residents to ‘keep out’ as the land is crossed by a statutory public footpath.
"Nobody has the right to this, so I’ve persuaded the countryside department of Shropshire Council to reinstate the public footpath signs so that the public continues to have access across this land. They are also marking this as a right-of-way on the official maps.
"We now need to work with local environmental organisations and societies to see if we can find a way of preventing this sort of destruction in the future."
This saddening news story reminds me of the time I was walking the stretch of Offa's Dyke Path between Hay and Knighton (for a second time, as I had enjoyed it so much the first) and came across a field that was plastered with signs threatening walkers, even though the Path ran through it.
When I reached Knight and the Offa's Dyke Centre a day or two later, I reported the signs. They asked if I could give a map reference – and I could because I had studied for the Map Reader merit badge in the Cubs. I've appreciated the potential radicalism of the Scouting Movement ever since that day.
Anyway, this story at least gives me the excuse to post a photo of what Pevsner calls Shelve's "sweet little rubble-stone church", which dates from 1840.
Here's something not a lot of people know: Hirta, the largest island in the St Kilda archipelago, once had two unique species of mice and one of them is still thriving.
Charles Foster explains in an essay for Aeon:
Evolutionary innovation happens at the edge of genetic orthodoxy, at the edge of an established population, and typically at the edge of a landmass: hence the exuberant biological creativity seen on islands, where new challenges are faced and old inhibitions relaxed.
Take the St Kilda archipelago, for instance, in the heaving green sea off the outer isles of Scotland. It once housed a community of embattled farmers and seabird hunters. They were all evacuated in 1930, leaving behind two species of mice, both unique to the islands.
The St Kilda house mouse, whose life depended on its coalition with the humans, went extinct within a few years. But the St Kilda field mouse, uninhibited by house mice, cats and humans, blossomed and changed.
It doubled in size and became an enthusiastic flesh-eater, prowling the beaches and headlands for dead birds. Edges were fecund on St Kilda – at least for field mice. They always are. Indeed nothing else is.
I've also read that now St Kilda has a seasonal population of scientists, the field mice have began to fill the niche the house mice once occupied and moved into the scientists' living quarters.
"For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them." Alice Milner on her research into peatlands and tackling climate change.
Norman Baker explains why buses in central London are slower than their horse-drawn counterparts were more than a century ago. He also has suggestions for speeding them up.
Danny Chambers is campaigning against the cruelty often involved in breeding what are, to my eye, ugly animals. "Across the UK, more and more dogs and cats are being bred to look fashionable or cute. But this can come at a serious cost to their health and welfare."
"The film encompasses many influences – neorealist working-class documentary in its early Belfast set street scenes; poetic realism in its studio-bound aspects and fatalism; noir thriller; and expressionist reimagining of Greek myth, as a fatally wounded Johnny is left behind in the botched escape and a rogue’s gallery of the city’s denizens alternately help and hinder his path through the Underworld entries, bars and rain-slicked slums of a darkened, almost Dickensian city." Tim Pelan sings the praises of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947).
"As time went on, I felt more in control of the thing, and stopped fearing that I was going to show myself – and all womenkind – up, by passing out from the heat, more relaxed and more appreciative of the experience. The engine is indeed a star. There were waving people on every bridge, and we passed a campsite with lots more waving people. I got so keen on waving back to them that I almost forgot my job." Stephanie Gaunt learns to drive a steam locomotive.
In the first four months of 2026, the procession of councillors resigning from the political parties that helped them to get elected has continued apace. So far, 299 "events" have occurred; not just defections, but also a few expulsions and suspensions. "Double-hatted" councillors who change their affiliation have been counted twice, as have councillors who resigned and then re-joined (48 hours later, in one celebrated case in North Northamptonshire.)
That’s an average of nearly 18 a week, or 2.5 every day. I doubt if most political pundits realise that the figure is quite so high, which might explain why the subject does not get the attention given to the half-a-dozen local council by elections held every week. An exception is Mark Pack’s regular update of Reform UK defections, but those resignations are indeed worthy of serious inspection because of the novelty value, fuss and general hoop-la associated with the new insurgent populist party.
From an objective perspective, defecting councillors are a significant indicator of a change in local party morale. When they go, they take valuable resources with them, such as knowledge of their wards, help with campaigning and general goodwill towards their former party. Worse still, they might be taking their families and friends with them – perhaps into a rival organisation. They may only constitute a handful of votes, but they could represent hundreds of hours of solid campaigning at a future election, against the former party’s new candidate.
Big parties, big losers
Reasons for defections can be many and various, and can range from the principled to the ridiculous, but the damage can still be significant, regardless of the circumstances which cause it.
The main losers so far this year have been the Labour party (down 59 councillors) and the Conservatives (down 52). The Labour figure seems to have been exacerbated by the impending London Borough elections, where reselection processes have put some noses and egos out of joint. As one might expect, excluding councillors who have opted for Independent status, most Labour councillors have gone to the Greens, with Conservatives tending towards Reform UK.
The Greens have acquired an additional 21 councillors via defections, with the Reform UK tally rising by 32. On balance, the Lib Dems have lost 13 and the Nationalists are down 2. The balancing figure in the equation is 73, representing various "Independents" (loosely described).
Straight swaps
Three Reform UK councillors have moved to the Conservatives – but 33 have gone the other way. One Tory has joined the Lib Dems, whilst one Lib Dem has travelled in the opposite direction. Four Lib Dems have joined the Greens, with one going against the tide. Eight Labour councillors left for the Greens, two for the Lib Dems, and one (in Hartlepool) for Reform UK.
Although not (yet) counted as a separate party in my system, it is worth noting that Restore Britain has attracted 21 councillors, from the independents and Reform UK. This includes a bulk membership event on Kent County Council in February. Similarly, there has been a handful of moves to Advance UK, mainly from Independents but also one from the Workers Party. (No, I don’t understand it either.)
If the local elections on Thursday pan out according to the pundits, with a large number of Reform UK and Green Party successes, then I confidently forecast that there will be many more resignations and defections over the summer, once the new councillors realise that theirs is a thankless task, with lots of work but little chance of changing anything to do with small boats or Gaza.
Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.
Before he was a film director, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer.
And he never lost his interest in photography. I remember Keith Hamshere, the first boy to play Oliver Twist in Oliver! and later a leading Hollywood stills photographer, saying he learnt to keep out of Kubrick's eyeline if he was on set during one of his films.
If he didn't, Kubrick would notice him and say something like "Is that a new lens? How are you finding it?", the film suddenly forgotten.
I doubt you will find anything like this in Clinical Psychology Forum today, but Professor Strange is an ancestor for the columns I now write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Victorians, modesty and table legs
The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of the Internet finds the American AIDS Czarina complaining of a ‘Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early, denies homosexuality particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go.’ A sermon tells us that ‘Thanks to the 1960s, we have given up Victorian hypocrisy when it comes to ourselves.’ And a journalist announces that ‘Victorianism today is generally interpreted to mean little more than an atmosphere of sexual repression and hypocrisy’.
Well, I knew Victorians; I worked with Victorians; Victorians were friends of mine. (Indeed, I cannot wholly rule out the possibility that I was a Victorian myself.) And I do not believe that they were any more repressed or hypocritical than we are today.
Yet this libel persists. So much so, that many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the Victorians were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt obliged to cover up the legs of their pianos. Perhaps you believe it too?
You are not alone. An Australian website on sexuality and modernity is convinced they did. Another on culture and colonisation reports that ‘An era that could wrap table and piano legs with frilled covers that men may not harbour “certain” ideas is incredible, to say the least.”
How true! For something does not fit when a website on the Victorian pantomime tells us that “audiences were not accustomed to viewing the legs of a pretty actress, especially in an era when even piano legs were cloaked for modesty's sake! However, in a male or ‘Breeches’ role, the actresses were allowed to display as much leg as they dared.’
So piano legs have to be swathed but, in certain circumstances it is fine for human legs to be displayed? The Victorians I knew were odd, but not that odd.
The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boot.
The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’
No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the strait-laced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.
Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go that the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.
Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.
Alex Cole-Hamilton could have been driving a James Bond-style Aston Martin instead of a second-hand electric Mustang – if he had chosen to join MI6.The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats has revealed for the first time how he was tapped-up by the secret intelligent service when he graduated from uni.
But Alex turned his back on life as a spy for the British Government due to his Quaker religion – who believe in non violence – when he was told the information he gathered could potentially lead to the loss of lives.
We've all watched enough Tinker Tailor and Slow Horses to know that life in the intelligence services is nothing like that, but what is it about Liberal Democrats that attracts the spooks? Or is it that spies are attracted to the Liberal Democrats?
I wrote in one of my Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy columns:
When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.
There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.
And I still consider Paddy and Jo Grimond as the two best Liberal leaders of my lifetime.
As to the panic over children and alcopops, it was largely unfounded. They were expensive, and as underage drinkers take it up because they want to look more adult, a product that was packaged like a children's drink didn't attract them anyway.
I remember alcopops as a good after-work drink before you got the train home on a Friday.
Barry Gardiner points to an important lesson of the Mandelson affair: "Most leaders surround themselves with people who tell them what they think they want to hear. Good leaders surround themselves with people who are not afraid to tell them the truth."
"Just as Hitler’s failures led him to resent the German people ever more strongly and destructively, we can expect Trump’s growing frustration to result in ever more nihilistic and destructive actions as his term moves toward its end." David R. Lurie warns about what may come next from Trump:
Samantha Booth and Ruth Lucas report on worries that the effects of poverty and deprivation are being treating as Special Educational Needs, relocating what is a social problem in the psyches of individual children.
"The first exhibition space includes several of Eardley's social-realist figure depictions of 1950s inner-city Glaswegian children. The works have a joyful, raw, playful spirit to them, in spite of the squalid slum environment the children were living in. No artist has painted Glasgow's 'weans' in the way that Eardley has." Blane Savage on the Joan Eardley exhibition at National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two.
John Connors pays tribute to Richard Carpenter's long career in children's television from Catweazle to I Was a Rat.
I know what we need: a reggae song about the famous clash between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1946.
The words are by Tudor Rickards and the music and production are by the chess grandmaster Jonathan Levitt. I suspect there is some AI involved too.
Incidentally, Charles Masterman's daughter Margaret Masterman, an unjustly overlooked philosopher, was in the room when Popper and Wittgenstein met too.
As the Wikipedia article on the affair explains, that paper was later found to be fraudulent:
The fraud involved data bias and manipulation, and two undisclosed conflicts of interest. It was exposed in a lengthy Sunday Times investigation by reporter Brian Deer, resulting in the paper's retraction in February 2010 and Wakefield's being discredited and struck off the UK medical register three months later.
In the paper, Wakefield fabricated evidence to suggest a new "syndrome" existed, which he called "autistic enterocolitis". Wakefield had been employed by a lawyer representing parents in lawsuits against vaccine producers, and had reportedly earned up to US$43 million per year selling diagnostic kits for the non-existent syndrome he claimed to have discovered. He also held a patent to a rival measles vaccine at the time.
What's now largely forgotten is that Wakefield was for a time a hero of... well, the sort of people who are now members of Bluesky.
Private Eye took up the idea of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and pursued it long after most of Wakefield's supporters (including most co-authors of Lancet study) had walked away.
Eventually, the Eye's editor asked his own medical correspondent to conduct what he optimistically termed a "peer review" of its coverage of the affair. You can read it online.
Stephen Brook, writing in the Guardian, was not impressed:
For a magazine that often accuses newspapers of "burying" corrections, the boot seems on the other foot this week as we have to wait until page 29 and after eight other articles from its In The Back section to get the Eye's take on the Wakefield verdict.
An editor, particularly of what is partially an investigative publication, has to be prepared to follow hunches and go against the consensus sometimes, but you hope their hunches will be good ones and that they change course when it becomes obvious they've backed the wrong horse.
But it wasn't just Private Eye that backed Wakefield: a television film was made for Channel 5 with him as the hero. Titled Hear the Silence it starred Juliet Stevenson as the mother of an autistic child and Hugh Bonneville as Wakefield. (You can find it online, but I didn't tell you that.)
Though some praised the acting and the drama, there was much adverse criticism:
Jon Joseph in The Times wrote "there are definitely no shades of grey" with Wakefield's assertions treated as if they are "a law of nature, like gravity".
Of the supposed plot presumed to originate with the drug companies as a means to discredit Wakefield, Ben Goldacre wrote in The Guardian of its utter implausibility as the patent on the MMR vaccine had lapsed, it was now generic and no longer highly profitable.
I've written this, not to heap blame on anyone, but to recapture a surprising and largely forgotten aspect of the affair.
Wild Is the Wind was written for the 1957 film of the same name by the Hollywood team of composer Dimitri Tiomkin and lyricist Ned Washington, where it was sung by Johnny Mathis. The wonderful Nina Simone first recorded it for a live album in 1959.
This studio version dates from 1966. Bill Janovitz says of it:
On a recording by David Bowie and on Mathis' lush original ... it is a romantic torch song; the narrator is haunted by the possibility – one senses more of a probability – that his lover will not "run away with" him. There is a sense of longing and despair, especially in Bowie's passionate guitar-driven rendering. But there is a glimmer of hope in the narrator's desperate imploring in both interpretations.
With Simone, though, all hope seems lost; she sounds as mournful as she has on almost any of her recordings – resolved that her lover is gone, yet singing to herself as if he were there. ... Her own sparse piano accompaniment is measured, with resonating and sustaining low notes and grand arpeggios.
East Roman Gravels lead mine was also known as Wood mine and was owned by the Earl of Tankerville. The Hope brook carved out a valley which exposed many galena veins and in the eighteenth century, adits were driven into the hillside to exploit them.
Beside the road is the truncated stone chimney of the ore crusher house. Of the crusher itself, only the foundations remain.
The photograph was taken in 2008. The cottages still stand beside the road, but the mining remains are more overgrown today.
When I first discovered Iain Sinclair he was obscure enough for me to feel I had him largely to myself. That notion encouraged was by the fact that his early novels – my first was White Chappell Scarlet Tracings – were published in Uppingham by Mike Goldmark.
But that was 40 years ago. Now psychogeography is no longer a novel idea and its big beasts are getting distinctly long in the tooth. So this conversation between Sinclair and Alan Moore, who has fished in the same waters, has a valedictory touch.
I used to count Moore, along with Jeremy Seabrook and Ray Gosling, as part of a post-war Northampton working-class renaissance. Now I've discovered Henry Bird, I may have to move back the date of its commencement.
Thanks to John Rogers for posting this – you can find the earlier video he refers to on this blog too. John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.
"Every child is met at the door with a handshake and direct eye contact. This is one of the strategies we use to 'fill the emotional piggy bank' - a deliberate, personal connection that ensures every child feels seen as a human being, not just a data point. We’ve doubled down on the 'analogue' joys of childhood. We try to prioritise the outdoors and Forest School, getting muddy, play and physical movement. Every one of our pupils plays a musical instrument every single day." Primary school headteacher Ruth McManus on educating digital-native children.
Alissa Walker brings good news from France: "Paris's school streets are effectively sculpting out instant parks in the locations where they'll provide immense public health benefits to the city's most vulnerable populations. But it's true, they really stand for something else entirely: a city brave enough to prioritise children."
Amanda Cole has found there's not just prejudice against regional accents by people in the South East of England, there's also prejudice against the wrong sort of South-Eastern accent.
"The Ipcress File (the book) came out around the same time as Dr No (the movie). Reviews of the novel pointed out the contrast between the glamour of James Bond and the grime of Deighton’s spy world: there are no Aston Martins or high-rolling casinos in The Ipcress File, just ‘a little grey rusting Morris 1000’ and a grimy strip-joint on Wardour Street." Thomas Jones explores the world of Len Deighton.
Emma Linford sees Great Expectations as an early exploration of the effects of romance fraud.
But I am old enough to remember the days when there was a pro-bedtime left. And this press cutting from The Scotsman (18 November 1996) is a relic of it:
Bedtime Stories
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise, says New Labour. The shadow home secretary Jack Straw has called for firmer discipline at home, including set bedtimes to stop today’s children becoming tomorrow's juvenile delinquents.
That framing is very New Labour. Today we would be worrying about children's wellbeing or mental health, but back in the Nineties it was all about preventing crime. If they were in bed and drugged with Ovaltine, they wouldn't be out causing trouble.
Even Labour's education agenda then, with its support for homework even in primary schools, seemed us much about keeping children off the streets as about their learning.
Why was New Labour so authoritarian? One reason is gentrification. Imagine If you had moved into an up-and coming but still edgy part of London in the mid Nineties and wanted to entertain a senior member of your chambers and their partner to dinner in your garden on a summer evening to show off that amazingly good value Bulgarian red you had found.
You would be looking forward to scheming with them to remove some left-wing Labour council candidates. And if the opportunity arose, you might broach the subject of your being selected for a safe Labour seat in the North of England. You wouldn't want kids kicking their football against your back fence, would you?
Another video from barrister-at-law Alan Robertshaw. One interesting point he makes is that the common courtroom assumption that a statement given immediately after an event provides the best evidence is mistaken.
I also like his favourite line: "cross-examination does not mean examining someone crossly". And there's a useful tip on how to dress if you're planning a robbery.
Goodbye Norma Jean. This obviously had to begin with someone called Norma, but Marilyn Monroe didn’t make the cut. Instead, I’ve gone for the English-born piano prodigy turned Hollywood actress Norma Varden, who appeared in both Casablanca and The Sound of Music.
In Casablanca she’s the wife of the Englishman who has his wallet stolen right at the start of the film. In The Sound of Music she’s the housekeeper who tells Julie Andrews, who has just found a frog in her bed, “You're lucky. With Fraulein Helga, it was a snake.”
There was talk of Varden playing the Mother Superior, but Hollywood elbows get very sharp when a top nun role is up for grabs.
******
Our next caller is Gerrard Winstanley. Gerrard, what’s on your mind this evening?
O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.
Winstanley was the leader of the Diggers or True Levellers during the Civil War and Commonwealth. His words here are a quotation from The True Levellers Standard Advanced, published in 1649.
The idea that the people of England laboured under the Norman Yoke – ruled by the descendants of William I and his generals – had a shadowy existence through the Middle Ages and came into the light when central authority broke down during the Civil War.
And that yoke is still round our necks today. In 2011, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, published research showing that people with Norman surnames – Mandeville, Percy, Darcy – live three years longer than the rest of us and leave significantly larger estates.
Studying the probate records of those with "rich" and "poor" names for every decade since the 1850s, he found the extreme differences in accumulated wealth had narrowed over time. Yet his conclusion was still that:
Over the last 150 years, the rate of social mobility revealed by surnames is slower than most social scientists have estimated – and is possibly slower than in the middle ages.
Or to put it another way, the wealthy hold us as much in bondage as "the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War".
******
I’ve never been that keen on being normal, so I was heartened by the rise of the neurodiversity movement and its insight that conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia weren’t disorders to be fixed, but part of the rich spectrum of human cognitive diversity.
But that movement worries me now, both because it accepts the coherence of such diagnoses, even welcomes them as providing an identity, and because it takes it as axiomatic that cognitive differences are a reflection of differences in people’s brains.
When I began to consider these questions, I was sceptical about the concept of ADHD. Weren’t the disorder’s supposed symptoms just a list of the things about children that most irritate teachers? Don’t pharmaceutical companies famously “sell the disease, not the drug”? Wasn’t Ritalin marketed as a treatment for depression and fatigue – particularly “Tired Housewife Syndrome” – before ADHD was invented? I once wrote an article for OpenMind along just these lines.
This view is deeply out of fashion now, but I’m not convinced it’s wrong. When I see a headline like “Third of UK parents have sought special needs assessment for their child, survey finds,” it still seems to me that we should look at the social and educational pressures on parents and children rather than unthinkingly locate the problem inside the child’s brain.
Not only has the concept of ADHD won near-universal professional acceptance, it has escaped into the wild, evolved and bred with autism to sire AuDHD. This diagnosis may not have received its clinical imprimatur, but it’s everywhere online.
You may see its arrival as an important new insight into the causes of cognitive differences, or you may reflect that when the symptoms of ADHD and high-functioning autism are as loosely drawn as they are, at least online, there’s bound to be some overlap between the two clusters.
These days I don’t get to see the professional literature so often, so the ADHD discourse I come across is on social media or in conversations overheard in coffee shops. What strikes me about it is the confidence with which people refer to “the ADHD brain” or even “the ADHD nervous system”. That confidence, I believe, runs far ahead of the scientific consensus on how far the condition can be identified by neuroimaging or any other technology.
People obviously derive comfort, meaning and membership of a community from their diagnoses, but that in itself doesn’t guarantee their validity. I don’t have a conclusion to offer here, but I’ll remain an interested, if worried, observer of developments.
******
I can remember the Sixties and lying in bed at eight o’clock, hearing the theme music of the police drama Softly Softly and wishing I could stay up to watch it.
When I did get to see it, I adopted Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler, as my hero. Clive James once suggested he did little but open and close doors:
In any given episode, he would open or close every door in the police station. Sometimes he would open and close the same door in rapid succession. He would leave the room just so that he could open the door, close it behind him, open it again, and come back in.
But I liked him. And years later he reappeared as Frank Tate, the keystone of the relaunched soap opera Emmerdale, so he must have been able to act.
What I didn’t know then was that, in the Fifties, Bowler had been a member of the Soho set alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Minton.
So never despise a Norman – unless it’s Norman Wisdom, of course.
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| Stamford, Lincolnshire: Nowhere near Newcastle upon Tyne |
Kemi Badenoch is bound to know more than most of us about politics – she's heard of Kemi Badenoch, for a start – but she's no better than the rest on geography. Over to John Crace and his Guardian sketch on her series of short interviews today with regional journalists:
Anna reminded Kemi she had been a minister at a time when health and education outcomes in the north were considerably worse than in the south. Why were buses so much more expensive and infrequent in Newcastle?
Kemi started talking about buses in Lincolnshire. "But Lincolnshire is nowhere near the north-east," Foster said, sounding completely bewildered. She had clearly expected someone with a working knowledge of UK geography.
"It is near the north-east," said Kemi. After all, Lincolnshire was quite a way from London so it might as well be near the north-east. In any case, it was all in the wilderness called "outside the M25". A nether world where people barely existed.
Anna had another go. How could she put this nicely? Lincolnshire was two and a half hours from Newcastle. Next time, could she speak to someone who wasn’t a halfwit? Thank you and good night.
It's worth adding that this ignorance on part of the south-eastern establishment is often an affectation – a way of signalling that they are of this class through and through.
Start talking knowledgably about the Midlands or the North and you will find people asking searching questions about what your parents do or which school you went to.
Body-worn video of a woman's "degrading" arrest, which police falsely told a court did not exist, has been shared exclusively with the BBC.
It shows officers in Northamptonshire throw metal spikes in front of Nadine Buzzard-Quashie's car and force her to the ground after responding to a concern for her welfare, whereupon she says her face was pushed into stinging nettles.
The Chief Constable of Northamptonshire, Ivan Balhatchet, was found guilty of contempt of court in November and fined £50,000 for failing to release the body-worn videos to her.
The police watchdog has started a criminal investigation into a Northants senior police officer and two staff over perverting the course of justice allegations.
The matter is in relation to a legal case, which last autumn saw Northants Chief Constable Ivan Balhatchet found to have been in contempt of court and fined £50,000. The civil case had been brought by Londonder Nadine Buzzard Quashie, who had been fighting the force for bodyworn footage of her arrest in Northamptonshire in September 2021, that she claims was unlawful.
