"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
I came across a new podcast today – Garlic & Pearls – via a really good episode on Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.
It's thoroughly researched and emphasises how far from cosy Christie's works can be. The Mousetrap is set in a dislocated postwar world in which the class structure has been shaken and there is an air of paranoid watchfulness.
The BBC's adaptations of the Miss Marple books, which starred the incomparable Joan Hickson, were set firmly in this world. And it's noticeable that when Bertram's Hotel appears to have survived the changes unscathed, it turns out to be too good to be true.
Meanwhile, after the Colonel died, Dolly Bantry sold the big house and moved very happily into a modernised lodge house with all the latest conveniences. The future need not always be resisted, as the worldly Marple grasps.
I recently wrote an article for Central Bylines about the 12-year-old foster child called Dennis O'Neill whose death on a farm in Shropshire Christie to write the play.
One of the things I enjoy most about blogging these days is publishing guest posts. Have you thought of writing something for Liberal England yourself?
I'm happy to entertain a range of political views, but I'd hate you to spend time writing something I wouldn't want to publish, so please get in touch
first.
These are the 10 most recent guest posts on Liberal England – as you can see, I welcome posts on subjects beyond politics:
Rose Runswick argues against building Liberal Democrat strategy on an attempt to win over one-nations Conservatives. They are not natural Liberals and our advance at the last general election came through tactical anti-Conservative voting.
"Our polling suggests that a clear divide exists in local government along overlapping economic and cultural lines. Reform councillors typically take the most right-wing positions (except on the NHS), followed by the Conservatives, including on the tax and spend question. There is often little difference between Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the centre left/left, and then the Greens take the most left-wing position." David Jeffrey and Mitya Pearson report the results of their survey of local councillors' political views.
Cambridge Town Owl tells the story of an early electoral defeat for Henry Fawcett, who went on to become an influential Liberal politician. Fawcett was blind from the age of 25.
"Ancient Greek and Roman writings reveal ancient concerns about our negative impact on the environment. They show that places once rich and fertile later became desolate and barren. Although the Greeks and Romans linked environmental harm with climate change to a more limited extent than we do today, they nevertheless knew harming the environment could change the climate." Konstantine Panegyres on concern for the environment in the Classical era.
Animals in children’s stories are often depicted as living in neat mum, dad and children family units, but in reality there's a huge diversity in what family looks like within the animal kingdom, says Louise Gentle.
Ian Mansfield goes to see the National Gallery exhibition of the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby: "With the aim of opening knowledge to the masses, many of Wright’s paintings are philosophical and scientific in nature, yet executed in a style that is also incredibly atmospheric. It’s worth remembering that while exaggerated to a degree, the lighting was reasonably authentic for a time when people's homes were lit with rush lights or candles, and the varying availability of moonlight affected working hours."
This Terence Carroll documentary on the last days of the line from King's Lynn to East Dereham was first broadcast on BBC2 on 2 June 1969, though Wikipedia tells us the line had been closed for the best part of a year by then:
The line was not listed for closure in the original 1963 Beeching Report. But it was nonetheless closed to passenger and freight services by the Eastern Region of British Railways on Saturday 7 September 1968, save for a three-mile section for sand freight from King's Lynn to Middleton.
Wendling station continued for a short while as a filming location, with the station and its road bridge featuring in several episodes of the British situation comedy Dad's Army.
I thought I'd played chess for Northampton Working Men's Club (or Whyte Melville, as we were often called) only in the national club knock-out competition, which was a tournament to which Market Harborough did not aspire.
But, sorting out some old files, I found I had also played a season for them in the Northamptonshire league and done rather well too.
All of which makes more sense of this memory...
I was playing some five-minute games at Whyte Melville after winning my league game, and there was a beat-up old guy watching us. Even non-players are entranced by people playing blitz.
We got talking, and he asked me his favourite quiz question. What was the correct name of the Southern Lights? I knew the answer and he was suitably impressed.
And then he said something I've never forgotten:
"I've met men on the road who could tell you the name of every star in the sky."
It sounds like a tale from the pre-war days of tramps and tramping, but that is what he said.
Yesterday I went into the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Bowden for the first time, and here's the Doom painting on the north wall of its north chapel. I photographed another one in Wycliffe's church at Lutterworth a few years ago.
They were doing coffee in the church, and one of the women in charge was a friend of mine. Not only that. Her husband, who I was at school with back in the day, had written the words for the plaque explaining this fine Edwardian stained glass window.
"Nine of the groups are being run from Sri Lanka, three have admins in Nigeria, and the admins of six other groups appear to be located in Mexico, the US, Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Kosovo. The remaining eleven have hidden their locations, but conform to the same pattern of fake address – AI memes – gaming video creator, suggesting they are similarly moderated." Katherine Denkinson explains how foreign entrepreneurs are monetising the clicks of British racists.
Rebecca Hamer on the common thread that links abusers, from grooming gangs to Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.
"His speech on Monday was a sprawling grievance tour, hitting every GB news talking point: immigrants, net-zero, lefty lawyers; all responsible for our economic woes and declining living standards." Zoe Gruenwald deconstructs Nigel Farage's big speech.
"In July 1616, nine women from the small South Leicestershire village of Husbands Bosworth were hanged after being found guilty at the Leicester Assizes of bewitching the teenage son of the Lord of the Manor." Margaret Brecknell says the case of the so-called Witches of Husband Bosworth shines a spotlight on the atmosphere of fear and superstition sweeping the entire country during the reign of King James I.
Rob Goulding reports on disagreements over the restoration of the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire. This marvel of Victorian engineering lifts boats from the River Weaver to the Trent and Mersey Canal.
Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow show that Orson Welles notorious 1938 radio dramatisation of War of the Worlds did not cause hysteria across the US and ask why this legend persists.
The fiftieth anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's death put me in mind of this wonderful track from Scott Walker's album Tilt.
In a Guardian article last Saturday, Olivia Laing argued that Pasolini's warnings of corruption and rising totalitarianism offer a chilling message for our times.
The judges' decision is in, and BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.
They also noted this comment from the story below:
"There's a kind of misconception that this road is named after Prince Andrew... now Mr Mountbatten Windsor," said Gurney, a Conservative county, district and parish councillor.
In fact, she said, research indicated it was named before he was born, in honour of his grandfather, who died in 1944, and was father of Prince Philip, formerly the Duke of Edinburgh.
Leicestershire County Council is run by a minority Reform UK administration. And like Reform up and down the country, it took power with no policy agenda beyond banning the flying of the Pride and Ukrainian flags.
So, reports BBC News, Leicestershire is to spend £1.3m on consultants to carry out a review of council spending.
The council leader claims the consultants will find savings worth many times their fee. That sounds like sheer guesswork to me.
Michael Mullaney, the leader of the Liberal Democrat group on the council, sounds more authoritative:
"£1.4m is a lot of money to spend on consultants to cut costs. The reality is the council has been cutting its spending for years and if there were more savings to be found, they would have been identified."
Before May's council elections, the Leicester Mercury reminds us. Reform accused the then-Conservative leaders of the authority of "wasting staggering sums" including through spending "more than £35 million in consultants in just three years".
They also made noises about existing council contracts being "fraudulent", but we've heard no more about that since they took power.
A lovely walk in autumn sunshine. John Rogers describes it thus in his YouTube blurb:
Starting at Hampton Court Station in East Molesey we walk one of the most beautiful sections of the wonderful Thames Path.
We pass through Hurst Park, look across the river at Taggs Island, Garrick's Temple, pass by Molesey Reservoirs with its WW2 tank defences, stop for lunch at Walton Marina and cross the river at Walton Bridge.
Our walk is guided by Donald Maxwell's 1932 book A Pilgrimage of the Thames and takes us to the ancient St Nicholas church at Shepperton. A church has stood on the site since the 7th Century.
Our Thames path odyssey ends at the Shepperton home of author J.G Ballard.
What exactly do we Liberal Democrats want from out campaign against the "Family Farm Tax"?
It's important we know, because The Agri Brigade column in the latest Private Eye suggests the government may be about to make some concessions on the issue.
These concessions, the Eye suggests, would raise the Inheritance Tax threshold on farmland from £1m to £5m (so, £10m for a married couple).
This would mean that the tax would not be levied at all on anything that can sensible be called a family farm. At the same time, technical changes would see a higher tax take from larger estates. The proposals are contained in a policy report from the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation.
If this happens, I hope the Lib Dems will declare victory for their campaign and move on to other issues.
However, much of our campaigning has given the impression that we are against inheritance tax on land at all. It's hard to find anything countering that impression on the party's page on the Family Farm Tax – please let me know if you can.
Yet it is the failure to levy inheritance tax on farmland that has caused the problem that page complains about most. That is, that the value of farmland bears little relation to the income that can be generated from farming it.
If we allow farms to be used as a tax shelter, then that will always be the case.
Matthew Pennell on an art exhibition that's hosted and inspired by Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire.
The notion of an artist or poet in residence at a large stately home conjures up images from a bygone age, but the concept has been revived by two arts organisations to provide a shot in the arm to the Midlands arts scene.
Painter and ex-professional skateboarder Nick Jensen swapped his London studio for Belvoir Castle last month, the experience culminating in a two-day exhibition opening today (4 November).
(@heritagexplore) are reawakening three extraordinary heritage homes – Kelvedon Hall, Elveden and Belvoir Castle – through residencies with contemporary artists.
"These historic spaces will be seen through a new lens. Stepping into history’s shadow, the artists are drawing out forgotten stories, creating new ones, and breathing new life into these properties."
As you can see in the picture above, Jensen’s work blurs the lines between abstract and figurative, with echoes of post-impressionism and the Belle Époque period – a good fit for the 19th century castle built by the Duke of Rutland. This move cements Jensen’s position as a fine artist, having spent nearly 20 years as a pro skater, latterly co-owning Isle Skateboards.
I've struck gold with this 1959 report on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at Stratford East from the BBC arts programme Monitor.
The first comment on YouTube reckons you can spot Pat Phoenix. James Booth, Dudley Sutton, Yootha Joyce, Richard Harris and Glyn Edwards among the company.
I've long been interested in Stratford East's links with ITV sitcoms: half the cast of On the Buses (Stephen Lewis, Bob Grant, Michael Robbins) came from the Theatre Workshop. I didn't know before seeing this that, through Pat Phoenix, it was also linked with Coronation Street.
Joan Littlewood's remarkable career proved there is an audience for challenging theatre beyond the affluent West End. If you enjoyed this film, see my post on The Living Theatre in early 1960s Leicester too.
David Howarth knows how to make the BBC less afraid of Nigel Farage: "Proportional representation would free the BBC from fear, but more than that, since under PR many parties would enjoy a reasonable prospect of entering government and so of supplying the secretary of state for culture, the BBC would have better incentives to maintain impartiality among democratic parties."
"Calling Andrew entitled is beside the point. He was raised with no economic purpose and now he finds himself as a connector to whom no one wants to be connected. 'I have no idea who he will socialize with,' one Norfolk grandee told me. 'All his friends are Chinese spies.'" Tina Brown claims to have the inside story on how King Charles pulled the plug on Andrew.
AI is supercharging abuse against women journalists, but Megha Mohan argues that it doesn’t have to be that way.
"For a period beginning in the 1960s and ending around the turn of this century, the preferred form of the homicidally inclined was the drawn-out danse macabre of serial murder. This was especially true in America’s Pacific Northwest, where an astonishingly large number of serial killers, from Ted Bundy to Israel Keyes, from the Green River Killer to the Shoe Fetish Slayer, from the Werewolf Butcher of Spokane to the Beast of British Columbia, grew up or operated." James Lasdun on the serial killers of Seattle.
Stephen Prince introduces us to the 1970 book Filming the Owl Service (1970), which is "long out of print and rare as hens' teeth to find second hand, which is a shame as it is a fine companion piece to the series, full of rather lovely photographs, artefacts, anecdotes, background story, prop sheets and designs from the filming and the series itself".
Robert Hartley explores the Leicestershire connections of George Stephenson, the father of railways.
A new nature recovery project, the Rescuing Rocks and Overgrown Relics scheme, is will restore natural habitats at four sites in the Shropshire Hills. The locations involved include Poles Coppice in Pontesbury, Snailbeach and The Bog.
The work will include scrub management and coppicing to expose rocky habitats that support species like slow worms, grayling butterflies and bird's-foot-trefoil.
It will be carried out by Shropshire Council's outdoor partnership team and the Shropshire Hills National Landscape team, with help from volunteers.
Heather Kidd, the Liberal Democrat leader of Shropshire Council, told BBC News she is delighted by the project:
"Bringing these historic sites back to life for both nature and people is a fantastic example of partnership working in the Shropshire Hills.
"It's especially welcome that this important work is being funded by Defra, supporting our shared commitment to nature recovery without placing additional pressure on local council budgets."
Market Harborough gets a bad press because the Jarrow Marchers did not meet with a particularly warm reception here. But things were different in 1905, when over 400 men Leicester men set off to walk to London to draw attention to the plight of the unemployed.
Local supporters in Market Harborough organised and paid for the first night’s supper and accommodation in the town. Each man was given a supper consisting of one pound of bread and two ounces of cheese, with tea or coffee.
They were then encouraged to rest their heads for the night on straw beds in the covered sheds of the town’s cattle market, but, amidst reports of boisterous behaviour, the Leicester Daily Post commented that "sleep and rest did not reign supreme".
Unemployment was a particular issue in the Leicester boot and shoe industry in 1905 because of competition from cheaper American imports and a drop in demand for army boots following the end of the Boer War.
The marchers received support and press publicity in the other towns they stopped at or passed through, but it proved harder to interest London in their cause.
Nevertheless, the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905 was passed. It established local distress committees that could make grants to businesses or local authorities to allow them to take on more workers.
I've given up writing "why oh why oh why" posts about the decline of Bonfire Night and the rise of Halloween.
In part this is because, while it's rather fun to play the old fogey when you're young, it's less fun when your older. You start to fear that you really are an old fogey.
But it's also because we British seem to have found a way to adapt the reimported American Halloween so it's more to our liking. So there's lots of M.R. James but very little Casper the Friendly Ghost.
But as Halloween is behind us, we can be a little more analytical about things that go bump in the night.
In the current London Review of Books, Jon Day reviews, alongside another volume, How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines.
Baines, says Day, identifies the writer Horace Walpole as the father of our modern idea of a haunted house through Stawberry Hill, "his kitschily Gothic Twickenham retreat":
Before Walpole, ghosts in English literature tended to haunt people, or generic geographic locations: crossroads, bridges, graveyards. After him, they came inside, haunting domestic spaces.
And there were socio-economic forces behind the rise of the haunted house too:
Baines’s central argument is that the rise of the haunted house in the popular imagination coincided with the emergence of the modern home as a physical and psychic reality: a building designed specifically as a dwelling, separate from farm or workplace, where a single nuclear family lived together in isolation from the rest of society. This led to a turning inward of domestic experience that is, as many historians have argued, reflected across culture more broadly. ...
Most ghosts, in the UK and America at least, are still domestically coded. Gruesome ghosts and body horror are rare. Instead there are female spectres who walk the same paths night after night searching for lost loves, or dead children who peer unnervingly through windows. Poltergeists are a relatively recent addition to the haunted house pantheon, only really gaining ground in the second half of the 20th century (and exploding in popularity after The Exorcist was released in 1973).
Unlike fully embodied ghosts, which tend to favour grander backdrops, they often attach themselves to "dysfunctional, disenfranchised or otherwise unhappy families", Baines writes, so that parapsychic researchers and ghost historians sometimes call them "council house ghosts".
This attachment might be exacerbated by the presence in the home of a "young, emotionally volatile female family member" – as with the Enfield Poltergeist, the haunting of a family with two young daughters in London between 1977 and 1979 – to whom such ghosts might be attracted (or who might themselves be responsible for the reported hauntings).
But as Baines sees it, lack of ownership is also a significant factor in ‘purported haunted house cases, with people living in borrowed or rented houses tending not to properly “bond” with their place of residence, causing them to feel perpetually ill at ease’. If you’re more likely to be haunted if you rent than if you own, has the housing crisis led to a rise in poltergeist activity?
There's more about How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Caitlin Blackwell Baines on the Profile Books website.
Time to get his posted before autumn turns to winter. Autumn Almanac is a non-album single from 1967 that made no. 3 in the UK singles chart.
Ray Davies once explained its genesis:
The words were inspired by Charlie, my dad’s old drinking mate, who cleaned up my garden for me, sweeping up the leaves. I wrote it in early autumn, yeah, as the leaves were turning colour.
And Andy Partridge of XTC has commented:
It’s a miniature movie, basically, that unravels itself as you are listening to it, and it has all these little movements or scenes. And they all seem to take place in the kind of mythical cozy London that the Ealing studios always had in their films, like The Lavender Hill Mob. The song just keeps turning and changing; you see a new facet every few seconds. But there’s nothing unsettling about the fact that there are so many parts.
The character sketches you get in British songs of the later Sixties hark back to the traditions of music hall, and those songs, in turn, influenced the Britpop bands of the mid Nineties.
So maybe it was appropriate that Britpop took place during the premiership of John Major, the son of two music hall artists, and not that of Tony "Young Country" Blair.
Five members of Nottingham City Council resigned from the Labour Party this week. Joined by a sixth councillor who resigned from Labour earlier this year, they have formed a new grouping: the Nottingham People's Alliance.
Such is Labour's dominance of the authority, that the new group, which claims to be built on a "progressive socialist platform", is the largest opposition group.
BBC News quotes Nottingham Labour's response to the news:
The Nottingham Labour group called the move "regrettable" but added it was focused on "continuing major improvements" through financial management to save taxpayers' money.
Nottingham Labour added it was investing £15m in front-line services in next year's budget.
"What matters now is that we continue with renewing our council, delivering for our residents, and leading Nottingham forward, and with the investment we're proposing this year alone, we are turning words into action," a spokesperson said.
I appreciate that running a council in the current funding climate is horribly difficult, but shouldn't Labour be able to come up with a better message than this?
"The academics from three UK universities who wrote the report said their analysis had found that 21 of 24 objective performance indicators – key council services or functions – were stable or improved." Jessica Murray says the benefits of a four-day week are becoming ever clearer, despite Steve Reed’s condemnation of Liberal Democrat run South Cambridgeshire for implementing the policy.
Joe Hanley has read Nick Gibb's book Reforming Lessons: "The educational establishment becomes particularly pernicious in that it continues to be Gibb’s obsessive bogeyman, despite him unavoidably being the most consistent person at the heart of policymaking in schools over the past 15 years. He also boasts throughout the book about all the great people he has put into positions of power and influence in education during his time as minister (and, perhaps more notably, those he has actively excluded)."
Ebony Rainford‑Brent talks to Andy Bull about her work to broaden the cultural and class base of cricket: "The two biggest steps she wants English cricket to take are to bring in more means testing so the cost of entry drops for people who are being priced out of playing, and changing the structure of the talent ID system so that opportunities are distributed evenly around the country rather than focused on, say, a handful of private schools."
"On November 2 1925, the dam at Llyn Eigiau burst. A torrent of water and boulders thundered down the valley, sweeping through the northern part of Dolgarrog and destroying the small settlement of Porth Llŵyd. Sixteen people were killed." Lynda Yorke and Giuseppe Forino on a forgotten disaster that that reshaped a Welsh community and the UK’s safety laws.
"The reality is that 92 per cent of wine sold in the UK is consumed with 48 hours of purchase. Maybe we should stop pretending that every bottle is potentially going to mature in a cellar for 10 years, when the majority are going to be opened with a takeaway pizza or ready meal." Andy Neather suggests it may be time for the wine industry to move away from glass bottles and reduce its carbon footprint.
Grace Benfell asks why adaptations of The Lord of the Rings shy away from what is arguably its crucial chapter: "The Scouring of the Shire reflects multiple thematic cores of The Lord Of The Rings, echoing meaning across the novel’s entirety. The book’s environmentalism is threaded throughout. Saruman already represented an industrial threat. Some hobbits’ lack of care and vigilance to their environment, a relentless pursuit of profit, leads to the destruction of their home."
Martin Zero and two companions follow the Porter Brook and then the River Sheaf beneath Sheffield, and beneath the city's railway station in particular. It's all as fascinating and mildly sinister as you would expect.
The final stretch to the River Don had been "daylighted". It doesn't look much now, but it will be made to look more natural and form the focus of a new park.
There are lots more videos like this on the Martin Zero YouTube channel – like and subscribe.
There's a story on MyLondon about a deselected Labour councillor in Brent who has joined the Tories after first demanding to be allowed to fight a particular seat for the Liberal Democrats.
I am reminded of the days when David Icke wanted to be the Liberal candidate for the Isle of Wight, but wasn't interested in any other seat.
The MyLondon report says:
A text message sent to the LDRS from a source at the Brent Liberal Democrat Group appears to show him expressing disappointment at the Party for not offering him the seat he demanded in Alperton. Instead, he was told "seats are not given away like sweets".
Brent Liberal Democrats Chair, Virginia Bonham-Carter, told the LDRS, whilst the party did have conversations with Cllr Rajan-Seelan about joining the party, they "decided quickly that he wasn’t acceptable to us, as he could not meet our expectations."
She added: "Labour’s decline in Brent has been clear for some time, and this latest episode involving a deselected Labour Councillor underlines how deep their problems run. Local people deserve councillors who focus on residents’ needs, not on party infighting and personal ambition."
A little research shows that Virginia Bonham Carter (no hyphen) is the daughter of Mark Bonham Carter and the granddaughter of Violet Bonham Carter.
Writing this reminded me that I knew a Tim Bonham-Carter when I lived in Kew (well, North Sheen) back in the early Eighties. I saw sad to find that he died a few years ago.
To the best of my knowledge neither he nor Virginia is related to Lord Bonkers' old friend, the London gang boss Violent Bonham Carter.
I'm listening to an edition of Gyles Brandreth's Rosebud podcast in which he talks to the actor Samuel West. It was recorded a couple of weeks before the death of West's mother Prunella Scales and so far he has talked mostly about her and his late father, Timothy West.
But there is one story he has not told about his mother...
Vera Menchik was born in Moscow, to an English mother and Czech father, in 1906. She began playing chess competitively just before the family came to live in London in 1921.
She was to become the strongest woman chess player in the world, holding the women's world title between 1927 and 1944. She regularly competed, and with some success, against the top men players of her day. There was not another woman player who did that regularly until Judit Polgár in the 1990s.
Vera Menchik died in 1945 when her house in Clapham was hit by a German V1 flying bomb.
And what does all this have to do with Prunella Scales?
Vera Menchik's great grandfather was a man called George Illingworth. And his brother John Thomas Illingworth was the great grandfather of Prunella Scales. Which makes the two women third cousins.
Thanks to Richard James for putting me on to a thread on the English Chess Forum.
"Away from the headlines, families in poverty are preoccupied with the very hard work of getting by on low-incomes. Their daily realities are routinely distressing and dehumanising: trying to decide whether to prioritise one child’s need for new school shoes over their brother’s coat which no longer fits. Or leaving an older child to look after their younger sister while they nip to the food bank; not wanting their children to experience the indignity and shame they feel on crossing the church hall’s doors." Ruth Patrick calls on the government to bin the two-child benefit cap.
Richard Kemp reminds us of something important: You can like, work with and respect a person whose political beliefs differ from yours.
Elizabeth Spiers misses the early years of blogging: "If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it."
"A linguistic panic has swept America in recent months, corrupting our youth, annoying our teachers and leaving countless adults hopelessly confused. The question that has sparked the uproar: what, exactly, does it mean when an otherwise upstanding young person blurts out the phrase 'six-seven'?" Matthew Cantor is down with the kids.
"In England, the Cotswolds and Wessex supported an organicist version of Englishness in the interwar period, defined by its 'Westernness' against a ‘south-east metropolitan zone’, and Cornwall has also been understood as a place of difference which, with its distinctive national identity, has made it both familiar and yet potentially threatening to English unity." Gareth Roddy discusses the hold that the Western has on the imagination of all four nations of the British Isles.
Ian Richardson visits the National Railway Museum in York.
Kirsty Williams, once leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats and education minster in the Welsh government, has spoken about the pressure that her political career put on her and her family.
She described the online abuse she and other politicians received as "unforgivable" and said it was this level of trolling that forced her to leave politics.
When she told her daughters about her new role as chairwoman of the Cardiff and Vale health board, they said "don't do it, we can't go through this again".
Kiraty was appearing on the Fifth Floor podcast. I can't find a link to that episode, but there are some quotes in the a BBC News story:
"I didn't realise how badly it affected my family," she said, adding that once news of her new role was made public the "pack" were back online "telling everybody what a terrible person I am".
Williams said that being a politician was "no worse or better than many other jobs that people do".
"Most sane people would run a mile from putting themselves into that environment," she said, referring to the level of criticism received.
"I'm worried that it's baked in now. People who go for that job accept that this is how they're going to have to live their lives.
"It's not pleasant."
The belief that "politicians are all as bad as each other and are all in if for themselves" is endemic on the left as well as the right.
I sometimes wonder if the sea of snark and satire we now move in is good for us. After all, the one solid achievement from 94 years of Have I Got New for You has been to help Boris Johnson on his way to Downing Street.
There should be an ancient Chinese curse: May someone make a film of a real-life story you care about.
I went to a couple of open days at the Richard III dig before it was announced that they thought they had found him, and went to several academic events after his identity had been confirmed. I even filed past Richard's coffin to pay my respects, which was more than I did for Elizabeth II.
The whole episode was a marvellous example of interesting and involving the community in archaeology. I find I got quite emotional about the day Richard was reburied.
So we really didn't need Steve Coogan and his film to give us a false picture of these events.
I didn't see The Lost King because I knew it would annoy me, and I had already been annoyed by another film in the autumn 2022.
See How They Run was a murder mystery set in and around the record-breaking London run of Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.
I have just written an article for Central Bylines on the play's roots in a real-life death – that of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill on a farm in the Shropshire hills in 1945.
As I suspected, See How They Run used this story, but it contrived to end with a young man called Dennis being clubbed to death. He had been committing the murders as a protest against Christie's exploitation of his family's story.
In the review I posted after seeing it, I quoted the American film writer Gregory Mysogland:
Christie expresses sympathy for him but states that to not write about tragic topics would be to deny a part of who she is. This is an understandable viewpoint, but it's also the last word the film says on the issue, and as such is much too simplistic and one-sided. ...
Eventually, Christie herself kills Dennis by hitting him in the head with a shovel, comically going in for more blows before the others stop her. Although Henderson's manic performance is good enough to make this scene darkly funny on first viewing, upon reflection, it adds to the exploitation of the O'Neill's represented by Dennis' role.
Making the character a murderous villain and then dismissing his legitimate argument with a wave of the hand is bad enough, but having him meet a violent death similar to the real Dennis's is cruel and immoral, not to mention completely against the ideas the film tries to bring up in relation to him.
Mysgoland was right. I could have done without this film too.
Here's another of the discursive Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Chess, cricket, Steve Winwood... it covers several topics dear to this blog's heart.
You can see Aksel Rykkvin as a treble above and as a baritone below.
Prodigious talent
Prodigies aren’t always popular with their elders. When Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, encountered the nine-year-old John Everett Millais in 1838, he suggested the boy should be sweeping chimneys rather than seeking to train as an artist.
And sometimes prodigious genius is misunderstood. At a very young age, my favourite musician, Steve Winwood, was turned away by the man round the corner who gave piano lessons. He found that if the boy heard a tune once he could play it from memory, so it was hard to convince him of the point of learning to read music.
Others were more appreciative. In 1959 his elder brother’s jazz group found themselves short of a pianist, so he brought Steve along:
"He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. Because he was under age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know."
Soon after that Steve was jamming with newly arrived Jamaican musicians in his home city of Birmingham, and then backing some of the greats of American blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim.
So by the time he joined the Spencer Davis Group at 15, and they had their first number one when he was 17, Winwood was an immensely experienced musician. Something to open the eyes of these new Beatles fans who are convinced there was nothing before the Fab Four and precious little else at the same time as them.
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The youngest person to play first-class cricket in England was Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCC University in 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days. He was also on the books of Leeds United as a goalkeeper.
Most of us heard nothing more of him for a decade. Then an article appeared in a cricket magazine saying Gibson had “chosen enjoyment and freedom” and given up professional sport:
"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."
I hope he is happy, whatever he is doing now.
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I once attended the first London recital by an 18-year-old Norwegian baritone called Aksel Rykkvin. What was interesting about the event was that a few years before he had been the most celebrated boy treble in the world. For once the American term ‘boy soprano’ seemed justified.
It soon became clear that his wonderful clarity and instinctive understanding of the text had survived his change of voice unscathed. But not every prodigy is lucky or talented enough to pass through puberty with such grace.
Leaving aside the many chess talents lost to a discovery of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, a growth spurt can wreak havoc. The future England captain Nasser Hussain grew a foot in a single winter and found he could no longer pitch his leg breaks on a length:
"I went from bowling out Graham Gooch in the indoor school with everyone watching, to hitting the roof of the net or bowling triple-bouncers to deadly silence."
Hussain was able to reinvent himself as a batsman, but always said batting never felt as natural to him as spin bowling had.
And puberty is the great killer of child actors – boys at least. Either you lose your fetching looks and no one casts you, or you keep them and find you are still playing schoolboys when you are 20, with no one seeing you as a possible adult lead.
But maybe being a child actor isn’t much like being an adult actor. Take the case of William Betty, ‘the Young Roscius’, who enjoyed phenomenal success as a boy at the start of the 19th century. His appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre sparked extraordinary scenes:
Shrieks and screams of choking, trampled people were terrible. Fights for places grew; Constables were beaten back; the boxes were invaded. The heat was so fearful that men all but lifeless were lifted and dragged through the boxes into the lobbies which had windows.
Betty announced his retirement at the age of 17, only to spend the rest of his life making comebacks that failed to excite the public. Perhaps the great Sarah Siddons had him right: “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy but nothing more.”
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If I didn’t love the music so much, I might agree there was something ridiculous about white, middle-class British boys playing the blues – “Can blue men play the whites/Or are they hypocrites?” as Viv Stanshall asked. But then I generally prefer to leave dreams of cultural purity to the right.
Besides, it’s widely claimed that the Spencer Davis Group had to film what we’d now call a video before their records could get played on white radio stations in the US. It had been widely assumed there, because of Steve Winwood’s vocals, that the band was black.
Eric Clapton had no doubts about Winwood’s authenticity. Here he his explaining his decision to switch to a Stratocaster guitar:
“Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.”
Or as Clapton once put it more strongly:
“I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.”
Prodigious talent does encourage such reverence, though personally, when drawn against a chess prodigy, I found myself with a sneaking sympathy for Sir Martin Shee.
