Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Jago Hazzard on the complicated history of Turnham Green

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When I lived in Kew (well, North Sheen) in the early 1980s, Piccadilly Line trains would stop at Turnham Green on Sundays, or at least for a...
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Lord Bonkers' Diary: My new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails

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Beavers and badgers. Badgers and beavers. It's all getting very confusing. How far this pair are correct in blaming Hegel for the societ...

Shropshire zoo seeks runaway ‘beloved’ capybara

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The Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award. The judges noted that the rodent in question is called cinnamon and has legged it from Tel...
Monday, September 16, 2024

Steve Winwood on working with Viv Stanshall

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A reader sent me the link to this 2001 radio documentary about the great Viv Stanshall. As was inevitable in that era, it was presented by S...

I can see James MacCleary now the Rain has Gone: Lord Bonkers' foreword to the new Liberator Songbook

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Journalists have been clutching their pearls for several days, but only now are Liberal Democrats gathering for the Conference Glee Club. Th...

John Wood: From silly-ass curate to world-weary genius

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One of the great pleasures of Talking Pictures TV is spotting, with or without the aid of IMDb, British actors in their early years. Take th...

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Conservative members are now attacking their real enemy... each other

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Quite who Lord Bonkers' scouts and agents are remains a mystery even to me, but there's no doubt that the old boy is very well infor...
Sunday, September 15, 2024

The Joy of Six 1268

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In an article stuffed with quotes from unnamed 'senior' Lib Dems, Harriet Symonds looks for possible future fault lines in our larg...

Kiki Dee: Loving and Free

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Kiki Dee is best known for her duet with Elton John Don't Go Breaking My Heart, which made number 1 in 1976, but she had been recording ...

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal

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"This stuff about the beavers is Dragging On A Bit," Lord Bonkers said to me. "Who wrote it?" "That was you, sir. T...
Saturday, September 14, 2024

The railway wars come to Market Harborough

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This mobile electronic billboard was parked in the Northampton Road this afternoon, and I later saw it driving down the High Street. One of ...
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Is Kind Hearts and Coronets the only nasty Ealing comedy?

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Reading a recent London Review of Books, I came across Ruby Hamilton's review of three books by Celia Dale: The appeal of Dale’s writin...

Lord Bonkers' Diary: In case they get peckish during Lent

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Jonathan Meades says beaver tastes "like spaniel dipped in cod liver oil", so I don't see selling off the whole colony to a fi...
Friday, September 13, 2024

The Lib Dems now have a local councillor in the Western Isles

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The Liberal Democrats, says the Stornoway Gazette , have their first councillor on Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the local authority that cover...

There was a shopping mall, now it's all covered with flowers: The new Nottingham Broad Marsh

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For 50 years or more, visitors to Nottingham have been funnelled through a bus station and a shopping centre if they wish to get from the r...
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Lord Bonkers' Diary: My hereditary peer peers

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"Beaver Castle" eh? I think I can see what's going to happen this week.  Meanwhile, I am reminded that in the early days of th...
Thursday, September 12, 2024

The last days of the Ilfracombe branch

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I remember passing through Ilfracombe while walking the coastal path in the summer of 1988. Every bed-and-breakfast establishment had its pr...

Minister for police’s purse stolen – at policing conference

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The Guardian , which tells us that Diana Johnson was giving speech in which she said UK was in grip of an "epidemic of antisocial behav...

Lord Bonkers Diary: The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills

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Liberator 425 has been posted on the magazine's website in time for the Liberal Democrat Conference. You can download it free of charge ...
Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Helen Morgan makes the case for reopening the line from Oswestry to Gobowen

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Helen Morgan was granted a Westminster Hall debate today on the reopening of the railway from Gobowen to Oswestry. BBC News gives the backg...

The Joy of Six 1267

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John Harris says the government needs to start giving people hope and quickly: "Among all the numbers, there is a huge story here abou...

Tory MPs stride out in the wrong direction

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OK, there's more to political leadership than having the right strategy, and Mel Stride has never been the most charismatic of politicia...
Tuesday, September 10, 2024

The locomotive shed at Snailbeach

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This is the locomotive shed for the Snailbeach District Railways, which you will find among the preserved mining buildings at Snailbeach. Th...

The Lucy Letby Inquiry and expressing concern about trial verdicts

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Lady Justice Thirlwall's inquiry into events at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester while Lucy Letby was employed there opened t...
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Trust re-formed to fund repairs to Ludlow's town walls

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In Ludlow last month I saw the failure, 12 years after a stretch collapsed, to repair its town walls as a metaphor for national malaise. (T...
Monday, September 09, 2024

Watch interviews with former inhabitants of St Kilda from 1972

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St Kilda was evacuated in 1930. We see the remote archipelago, which lies 40 miles west of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, in this Thames ...

Who else is in that photograph of John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck as boys?

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This photo has been floating about social media for years, and I tweeted it myself the other day because Jimmy Tarbuck was trending. This le...
Sunday, September 08, 2024

Mystery at Witchend is Went the Day Well? and Seven White Gates is A Matter of Life and Death

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Malcolm Saville wrote his first two Lone Pine books while the second world war was raging. He somehow found time to work on them while holdi...
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The Joy of Six 1266

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Peter Apps untangles the chain of cover-ups that led to the Grenfell Tower fire: "The report traces a long and unpleasant history of t...

Judy Collins: Farewell to Tarwathie

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Farewell to Tarwathie was written by the Scottish poet George Scroggie (1826-1907) and published in his 1857 collection The Peasant's Ly...