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"Almost all workers (98 per cent) at SOSE [South of Scotland Enterprise] believed the four-day week trial improved motivation and morale, while there was a decrease in workers taking time off sick and a 25 per cent fall in those taking sick days for psychological reasons." A Scottish government trial of a four-day working week finds that it improves productivity and staff wellbeing, reports Joanna Partridge.

Sam Whewall, Avril Keating and Emily Clark say young people in seaside towns are being left behind and set out what could be done to help them: "Our professionals made two key suggestions for improving the lives of the young people they work with. The first is to invest in safe spaces and leisure activities that are available outside of the short summer season. ... The second suggestion is to invest in and rebuild youth services."

Jonquilyn Hill on the rise of the wellness industry: "Nowadays, in many parts of North America, wellness is everywhere and anywhere, and the definition has really ballooned to include anything and everything. If we ask one wellness guru to define wellness, we’ll hear a different answer from another one."

"There has been a rise in privately operated tournaments set up as little more than vehicles for illegal betting. Organisers are theoretically expected to monitor betting markets for signs of suspicious movements, but problems with manipulation have been manifest." Steve Menary reveals that cricket has been flooded with betting sponsorship since the Covid pandemic.

Adrian Teal examines the eccentricities of the great portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough.

"'The Wolves are running…' is the mysterious message the boy Kay Harker is given by the old Punch and Judy man in Masefield’s The Box of Delights; it was a potent image from Joan Aiken’s childhood reading, complete with snow… and re-reading the book became one of the Christmas traditions that remained with her until she was able 'to write the wolves out of her  subconscious' and into her own story many years later." Lizza Aiken traces the links between The Box of Delights and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

A TV adaptation of The Box of Delights was broadcast in 1962

An old edition of the Hypnogoria podcast put me on to this. 

Praising the new, expanded edition of Philip W. Errington's book Opening The Box of Delights, it mentioned he had discovered that ITV broadcast an adaptation of The Box of Delights in 1962.

The Amazon blurb for Errington's book mentions "The 1962 ITV Story Box adaptation of The Box of Delights." This enabled me to find it in this listing of the next day's television from the Halifax Evening Courier, God bless its woollen socks, for 8 November that year.

Story Box appears to have been a programme for schools.

Maria Jones from The Box of Delights would agree that Die Hard is a Christmas film

There must have been a time when arguing that Die Hard is a Christmas film, or that The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best filmed version of the book, was novel and interesting. That time ended some years ago.

But there is one character in John Masefield's The Box of Delights, a book that, like A Christmas Carol, encompasses the Christmas and pagan sides of the festival, who would certainly agree about Die Hard.

She is Maria Jones, who complains: 

"Christmas ought to be brought up to date. It ought to have gangsters and aeroplanes, and a lot of automatic pistols."

I took that quote from a good essay on The Box of Delights by Bob Fischer. In particular, he argues convincingly that if you read the first book about Kay Harker, The Midnight Folk, and then read the full original text of The Box of Delights, then the revelation that it was all a dream does not come as a great surprise.

A word too for the BBC radio adaptation of The Box of Delight that won my heart in the 1960s.

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Josh Self says the rise of Reform could consume Kemi Badenoch and then the Conservative Party: "As Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch has the privilege of interrogating the prime minister every Wednesday afternoon. And yet Farage can probably corral more support with a single TikTok (addressed to his one million followers) than Badenoch with her six scattergun PMQs. The bottom line is this: even before the English council elections, when Reform could evince serious strides, Farage is a far more visible (and effective) critic of the Labour government than Badenoch, the de jure opposition chief."

"Important issues are being obscured by the swirl of errors, confusions, and hyperbole which has reappeared around UK freeports and ‘charter cities’ or ‘states within a state’ – particularly on social media but also crossing over into the traditional media. Dispersing this fog is difficult because the claims made are convoluted, fragmented, hard to pin down, and difficult to disentangle from the occasional truth they contain." Chris Grey on the debate about freeports.

Teenagers are vaping. So what? asks Democracy Coma.

Happy birthday to Joan Armatrading, who has enjoyed an extraordinary, pioneering career as a Black British woman singer-songwriter. She recently talked to the Guardian.

Francis Young opens The Box of Delights by Philip W. Errington: "To this day, the Bishop of Tatchester’s rush to find his mitre and ensure that Tatchester Cathedral celebrates its 1000th Christmas is my iconic image of Midnight Mass, as the carol ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ fills Tewkesbury Abbey (the real Tatchester). It was not until years later, as a young teenager, that I read the novel by John Masefield on which the adaptation was based, and then I found an even richer source of fantasy and magic."

The Opinionated Reader enjoys Gloucestershire Folk Tales by Anthony Nanson: "Sky-ships are flying over Bristol, a pious nun becomes the innocent prey to a heathen, a mysterious woman haunts a village, requiring fresh flowers on her grave."

Lib Dems hold cottage where Traffic got it together in the country

The Liberal Democrats held the Cholsey ward of South Oxfordshire DC last night, polling 949 votes to the second-placed Conservative's 362. You can see the result expressed in percentages at the bottom of this post.

I take particular pleasure in this victory because Cholsey ward takes in Aston Tirrold - and near that village is the cottage where Traffic famously "got it together in the country" in 1967.

Until 1974, Aston Tirrold and the cottage were in Berkshire, which explains the title of this Traffic song from their first album, Mr Fantasy. If the backing singers sound familiar, they're Steve Marriott and the rest of the Small Faces.

And as everyone is talking about The Box of Delights at the moment, I had better mention that John Masefield also lived at Aston Tirrold for a while.

Cholsey (South Oxfordshire) Council By-Election Result: 🔶 LDM: 62.2% (+16.1) 🌳 CON: 23.7% (+0.9) 🔴 SDP: 7.6% (+2.3) 🌹 LAB: 4.7% (New) 🙋 IND: 1.8% (New) No IND (-25.7) as previous. Liberal Democrat HOLD. Chnages w/ 2023.

— Election Maps UK (@electionmaps.uk) December 6, 2024 at 12:11 AM

The Box of Delights as a whodunnit and as social history

John Masefield's The Box of Delights is many things, and one of them is a crime novel.

Shedunnit, an excellent podcast on women crime writers, has made a previously subscriber-only episode available to everyone. It looks at The Box of Delights as crime fiction.

Kay Harker, after all, is trying to report a nasty case of scrobbling, but like many amateur detectives in fiction, he finds that the police don't take him seriously.

The podcast emphasises that The Box of Delights is a long book - there's a lot in it that didn't make it into the television adaptation. 

And it suggests that the themes of snow and Christmas were an influence on C.S. Lewis and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

The word 'Scrobbling' was coined by Masefield. A post on Tyger Tale reminds us that:

One of the many pleasures of reading classic Christmas books is the way they open a window into the past in an especially vivid way. More than just present another idealised vision of Victorian festivities, the best of them can highlight the small details and forgotten language of Christmas’s past. As Piers Torday’s delightful stage adaptation reminded me, few books do this more effectively than John Masefield’s The Box of Delights.

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Kim Leadbeater explains why she tabled her bill on assisted dying: "“It’s been an extremely busy process, and it has been very emotional, because I’m spending probably 90 per cent of my time talking about death. That can be very emotionally draining. I’m hearing really harrowing stories from families who have lost loved ones under really traumatic circumstances, and that’s been really hard."

Young people need liberal listening, not authoritarian threats, argues Jack Nicholls: "Our approach, the approach we should push unrelentingly whenever we get a chance in any local legislature, should be about helping young people into the work or education situation that helps them develop, not by threatening them until they comply for the convenience of others."

"For the government’s missions to succeed, they require societal support. An effective government communications strategy is required to implement the level of change necessary to meet our energy and climate targets," says John Russell.

Giles Fraser takes to his pulpit: "I love the Church of England. I love its liturgy, I love its glorious parish churches, I love its lack of ideological fervour, I love the gentle and inclusive way that it is porous to those outside of the Church, I love the inheritance of faith that it preserves. But things have not been well with the Church for quite some time, and the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury is a fork in the road. Either it grasps this opportunity for radical reform, or it will continue its slide - if not vertiginous collapse - into irrelevance."

Radio Times catches up with Devin Stanfield, once the young star of The Box of Delights: "I don't think child stardom is a particularly healthy thing. In the end it probably did me more good than harm, but it could definitely be quite a difficult thing to live with to be recognised not just at school but in the street."

Athena Stavrou offers a guide to the best Christmas sandwiches.

The Lottery buried at East Langton is not the winner of the first Grand National but a hunter owned by J.W. Logan MP

Later. There's a little more on Mr Logan's horse here.

I am reading John Masefield's The Midnight Folk, which is an earlier story about Kay Harker from The Box of Delights. Here Kay is tangling with his governess Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, who is also a witch and an acolyte of the villainous Abner Brown.

Early in the book, Masefield mentions "that famous horse Lottery at various stages of the steeplechase, the prints of which hung in the study". This name leapt out at me, because I once came across what Thoroughbred Heritage says is a monument to Lottery just outside the village of East Langton.

I set out to photograph it on my very first day out with a digital camera. Perhaps that's why I didn't take a better photo, though I do remember it was a baking hot day and I had to look south to take it.

Just now I searched the British Newspaper Archive for a story about the burial or commemoration of Lottery at East Langton. What I found was one that proved that this Lottery was not the winner of the first Grand National, but a hunter owned by this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP.

So here's the Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail for 12 May 1939:

In view of the great interest taken by listeners acquainted with the Langtons. the writer of this thought the following particulars might be of interest to local readers of this paper. It was a pity no reference was made to Mr. Logan's famous hunter "Lottery." 

In the late seventies and early eighties, of the last century, every boy in the Langtons and adjoining villages could tell some amazing stories of this horse and Mr. Logan, his rider. “Lottery" was brought out of a plough team in Ireland by Mr. Logan, and it is said he never once had an accident or went lame, and never once missed his turn to carry Mr. Logan, who hunted and rode him till he was well on in his teens. 

One of his most amazing jumping feats was during a fast run of Sir Bache Cunard’s (now the Femie) Hounds. The fox and hounds had swam the canal and a field of two hundred horsemen and hunt staffs had go some distance round by a canal bridge. 

Mr. Logan was as usual, somewhere in the front rank of riders, left them and put his horse "Lottery." at the canal, and landed in the shallow water close up the towing path. With another spring he was out of the water and on the towing path, and went a few yards and then cleared the hedge, following the pack by himself and leaving the large field simply gasping with amazement. This happened in the Smeeton district and was the talk of the district all thot winter. 

It is said that several times “Lottery” jumped the Burton Overy brook, other riders following. and he could jump the country anywhere Of course, everyone knew that at that time Mr. Logan was one of the finest riders in the country and no one was surprised when a fair number of years later he won the House of Commons Steeplechase on "Chic.” 

During the later years of his hunting career Mr. Logan set a new fox covert which he called Home Rule Covert, though one never sees the name mentioned in foxhunting reports now.

I love Home Rule Covert, and it strengthens my theory that Logan's nickname of Paddy was given to him locally because of his pro-Irish sympathies.

The 1966 BBC radio adaptation of The Box of Delights

Look what I've found on YouTube. This radio adaptation of The Box of Delights was first broadcast at Christmas 1966 and repeated in the same season in 1968 and 1969.

It may have been through the 1966 broadcast, but is more likely to have been through the 1968 one, that the story won my heart. Who can resist a healthy blend of the Christian and the pagan? I know I was enthralled by it as a little boy.

Listening to the broadcast today, it's slow to get going. But when the story picks up, the production makes good use of sound and the proper music is used.

Cole Hawlings is Cyril Shaps and the young Kay Harker is Patricia Hayes. Caroline Louisa is played by Carol Marsh, whose first film role was Rose in Brighton Rock, and there's even a small part for Stanley Unwin.

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"There is a strained cosiness to modern Christmas, but beneath the lights and mulled wine lurks the black pause of the year’s end. It is a time for barred doors and ghost stories. John Masefield understood these things." Alexander Poots on The Box of Delights and Deep England.

Samantha Booth reveals that investors are making millions from the 'bankrupt' public SEND (Special educational needs and disability) system.

"Since 2010, the supply of new trainee teachers compared with need has slowed to a trickle while the rate at which teachers are leaving the profession has continued to grow, leaving schools stuck in a vicious cycle of low recruitment and high attrition." Matilda Martin investigates why England is losing its teachers and how we can get them back.

James Bloodworth argues that Jordan Peterson and the wider populist right aren't anti-elitists: "They simply have their own pretensions to elite status and resent the fact that they aren’t treated with the prestige and reverence they believe they are entitled to.

Rachel Garratt examines how Captain Ian Fraser used his position as an MP and disabled veteran to campaign for radio access for blind people.

"Above all, I love the badass nuns who vandalise the Nazis’ cars – it’s so nice to see the Catholic church bending the rules positively for a change." Noo Saro-Wiwa sees The Sound of Music as an edgy, progressive film.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Their eyes hollow from think-tank reports and self-abuse

No sooner does Lord Bonkers divine a social problem than be proposes a solution. Here, that solution is characteristically robust. So welcome to another week with the old boy.

'Scrobbled', it turns out, was coined by John Masefield in his The Midnight Folk. It's well known from his later book The Box of Delights, but I had wondered if it was older than that. The word has a Scandinavian flavour.

Monday

I find myself increasingly worried about right-wing comment journalists, who can only be described as unhappy, unskilled and unmoored. Flabby chested public-school types to a man, their eyes hollow from think-tank reports and self-abuse, what they need is fresh air, exercise and some good, old fashioned hard work. 

As we can supply all three of these here on my estate, I have determined to act. With the help of Freddie and Fiona, I have drawn up a list of recruits for my ‘Great Rutland National Service’. 

The next step is to have them scrobbled as they leave their favourite fashionable restaurants and brought here in an unmarked charabanc. I have no doubt that a regime of farm work, unarmed combat and cold showers will make them happy and skilled in no time. 

As to being moored, I shall ensure that they are securely tied up at night.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Steve Winwood: Now the Green Blade Riseth

This tune is a medieval French carol, Noël Nouvelet, which is a staple of the King's College Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. It's also known in English, and somehow less impressive, as Sing We Now of Christmas.

But the words here, with their echoes of John Barleycorn, come from the 20th century hymn book. They were written by John Macleod Campbell Crum and published in 1928.

As it's a hymn, the parallels between the coming of spring and the Resurrection are made explicit. Others in this period found consolation in a wider sense that the lost of the Western Front would somehow be reborn in nature.

This is from John Masefield's 1917 account of the Somme Offensive, The Old Front Line:

All wars end; even this war will some day end, and the ruins will be rebuilt and the field full of death will grow food, and all this frontier of trouble will be forgotten. When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. 

One summer with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and then these places, from which the driving back of the enemy began, will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps. … 

In a few years’ time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking for his battlefield will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel Trench, Munster Alley, and these other paths to glory will be deep under the corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.