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"Left to her own devices, Reeves would not be contemplating potentially highly damaging tax increases when the economy is weak. Likewise, she would be cutting interest rates more quickly than the Bank of England has been doing. But those decisions are not in her hands." Larry Elliott argues that the UK’s economic policy isn’t decided by politicians, but by the OBR and the Bank of England.

Adam Bienkov suggests the Caerphilly by-election result shows that Reform UK is much weaker than it looks.

Peter Apps wonders if Zurich’s housing cooperatives be the solution to the rest of Europe’s housing crisis,

"Wilson refused to infantilise her readers. She spoke to us as the mature, curious consumers of culture that we were. Wilson tackled the hard stuff – the intensity of first loves, body shame, grooming and survival – with humour and empathy from the point of view of complicated girls and the women who raised them." Liv Little says Jacqueline Wilson transformed British girlhood.

"Take Ron Cowan, a key player for his home side of Selkirk and the Scotland squad of the early 1960s. By 18 he became the youngest Scot to ever tour with the British and Irish lions. Any border rugby town would celebrate a career like this for generations to come. But instead, switching to play rugby league for Leeds was seen as betrayal, and meant his accolades were understated. In fact, they were overwritten. Discarded altogether." Lucy Anderson asks if rugby union owe rugby league an apology.

Mike Gibson tells the story of Fever-Tree and how the gin-and-tonic boom made it the UK's most valuable soft-drinks company.

The Joy of Six 1371

"In cases of adult rape, it takes the police an average of 344 days to decide whether to press charges (for all other crimes, it is 41 days). During this period, victims have no right to independent legal advice or representation unless they pay for it themselves. The court backlog of rape cases is at a record high. Court dates can be scheduled and then postponed with as little as 24 hours’ notice – I’ve heard of this happening to a victim more than twenty times." Lili Owen Rowlands volunteers with a rape crisis helpline.

Charles Wright looks back on Kemi Badenoch's two years as a member of the London Assembly: "Interestingly, she went on to compare the treatment of 'white and middle class' protestors with the tougher treatment of those arrested during the 2011 London riots, who she said were 'young, relatively working-class and poor, including a 'high proportion of ethnic minorities. 'Why is it that they can get away with criminal damage that young black people doing exactly the same thing get strict sentences for?'"

"Farage isn’t here to build anything. He’s here to brand himself. He wants viral clips, retweets, headlines. He wants you angry, not informed. He’s a master of the bait-and-switch - say something outrageous and emotionally charged, then let others waste time debunking it while he soaks up the spotlight." Owen Williams on what Nigel Farage wants from Wales.

David Baines, Labour MP for St Helens North, says it was well past time that a Rugby League player - Sir Billy Boston - was knighted.

Underground Culture 12 celberates the days when bands got it together in the country: "First and foremost on this list, Traffic began the getting-it-together-in-the-country trend by renting a remote cottage in the Berkshire village of Aston Tirrold in April 1967, just two months after the Band located to the Big Pink house near Woodstock."

"[Captain] Richard Todd ... was one of the first British officers to land on D-Day. Todd was part of the British airborne invasion, that took place June 5 through June 7. During Operation Overlord, Todd’s battalion were the reinforcements parachuted in after the gliders landed and captured Pegasus Bridge to prevent German forces crossing the bridge and attacking." Comet Over Hollywood surveys the actors who saw action on D-Day.

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Timothy Garton Ash says Poland is learning that restoring democracy is even harder than creating it.

"The Tories are in arguably the worst state we’ve ever seen a major party in. They lead on just one major policy area, defence, and even then Labour came within a 1 per cent lead here in December. Dylan Difford has shown just how much worse the Tory position is than 1997 when they at least led on three major policy questions ahead of the election." James Austin explains why a Conservative wipe-out at the next election is becoming more of a possibility...

...which is an outcome for which Matt Carr, itemising the strange death of Tory England, yearns.

"When we were taking players from union – Jonathan Davies, Offiah – it was a real psychological body blow that forced them to change. We gutted Welsh rugby union. They fined Davies for saying he wanted to be paid so he could get a mortgage! Now it’s completely flipped." Anthony Broxton is interviewed about his book Hope and Glory: Rugby League in Thatcher's Britain.

Richard Williams reviews an album that celebrates Les Cousins, the Soho folk and blues club that flourished between 1964 and 1972: "It is, as you’d expect, a splendidly varied selection, starting and ending with big names — Bert Jansch and the Strawbs — and containing both even bigger ones (Paul Simon, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Nick Drake, Roy Harper and Cat Stevens) as well as many more of those whose reputations never really escaped the folk world, like the brilliant guitarists Davy Graham, Mike Cooper, John James, Sam Mitchell and Dave Evans."

"A good place to start is by acknowledging the snobbery - and misogyny - inherent in this question. Christie’s success tends to be viewed as a phenomenon, a freak of literature, which rarely happens with more highbrow writers, especially when they’re male. How often do people ask why the heck we still read F. Scott Fitzgerald? Or about the secret to Raymond Chandler’s continuing popularity?" Kemper Donovan responds to those who ask why Agatha Christie has sold so many books.

David Storey, the Booker-winning novelist who played rugby league for Leeds

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I first came across David Storey when his novel Saville won the Booker Prize. It was one of those books about the progress of a working-class grammar school and his alienation from his background that used to be everywhere.

The grandfather of this school of literature was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level at the time. Our teacher talked about Storey's debt to Lawrence and suggested we might want to read Saville.

Storey's own life story was like one of his novels on speed. At one time he was studying fine art at the Slade in the week and catching the train back north to play rugby league for Leeds at the weekend.

He wrote of rugby league in his posthumous memoir A Stinging Delight:

An odd game, rugby league was confined principally to the two northern counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire and was almost exclusively working class. It seemed to me that it had about it something of the graft of underground labour (several of the more notable players were miners), something of the confederacy induced by enclosed spaces; something of the magnanimity of the elements: dourness, strength, tenacity, graft.

Grafting was what the forward game was all about: five-tank like players formed the scrum, with me shifting between the second row (the two players welded between the three in front) and the loose-forward at the back .The first ten minutes of the game were taken up with seeking what might be described as a psychological advantage: a stag-like confrontation whether forwards trying to suppress and finally demoralise their opposite numbers. There ferocity with which a player ran with the ball was matched by the ferocity with which he was tackled, the subsequent course of the game determined by the conclusions reached in these introductory encounters.

A winter sport, austere and remorselessly physical, we played in rain, mist, fog or occasional snow; on darkening afternoons, in encroaching dusk; on grounds enclosed by industrial workings, or by the debilitating and depressing environs of a smoke-ridden town. Journeys took us around the industrialised valleys of the Pennines. Occasionally the sky would be illuminated by the descending sun, the valleys suffused with a purplish glow. Occasionally the Pennine hills would rear in the distance but, invariably, the terraces were silhouetted against chimneyed roofs, mills, factories, the cooling towers of a power station: slopes of ashy, industrial dereliction.

I'm remined of how Eddie Waring used to refer to the "Satanic Mills End" at Leigh's Hilton Park ground.

Fashions change in literature. Not so long ago I saw Andy Miller from the Backlisted podcast exclaiming online that Saville had won the Booker Prize yet he could find no one who had read it.

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What will be the impact of the late surge in electoral registration? Mark Pack enlightens us.

"We could plant a Marches National Forest stretching from Clee in the Shropshire Hills AONB down to Symonds Yat in the Wye Valley AONB. It could stretch from the Brecon Beacons National Park to the Malvern Hills AONB." Andy Boddington considers the options for doubling Shropshire's tree cover.

LCC Municipal looks back at the battle to keep Epsom and Ewell out of Greater London.

"In the process of targeting the young, cereal companies also realised that kids don't care about their colons. They want sugar. Lots of sugar." Ian Lender shows how breakfast cereal transformed American culture.

Anna Cale celebrates Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film This Sporting Life: "[Richard] Harris commits himself to the role of Machin with total physicality. Not just in the realistic scenes on the rugby field, his pent-up frustration and anger ooze out of him in every scene."

Celeste Bell remembers her mother Poly Styrene.

A Deltic at Hammerton on the York to Harrogate line, 1981

I can date these photographs precisely: I took them on Saturday 16 May 1981.

That was the day of the Rugby League Premiership Final at Headingley between Hull and Hull Kingston Rovers.

Special trains were run from Hull to Headingley via York and the Harrogate line, and one at least was hauled by a Deltic.

This would have been its return working, and the photograph was taken at one of the little stations between Harrogate and York as the driver collected the single-line token to allow him to proceed.

With the help of Google Street View, I have identified it as Hammerton.

Hull Kingston Rovers won 11-7, incidentally.

Alan Shearer: Football, Dementia and Me

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He is a bit awkward, doesn’t have Gary Lineker’s ease and wit. But he’s serious, engaged and engaging, and proves he can make the step up from Match of the Day punditry and go it alone.

Sam Wollaston gives a fair verdict on Alan Shearer's presentation of the documentary Dementia, Football and Me.

The dangers of brain damage posed by boxing have long been known, and in recent years more attention has been paid to football, rugby and American football.

These have been highlighted by the news that several members of England's 1966 World Cup team are suffering from forms of dementia.

More research is needed - more research is always needed - but the pattern emerging in football is deeply worrying.

And if Shearer's documentary had a weakness it was that he rather backed away from the conclusions to which his investigations were leading him.

One of the saddest things in the programme was Shearer's meeting with Chris Nicholl, the former Northern Ireland centre back. Nicholl is clearly having serious memory problems.

When I lived in Sutton Coldfield for a year after university, I played for the town's chess club in the Birmingham league.

I was always being told how Nicholl had done the same when he played for Aston Villa between 1972 and 1977. In those days all the Villa players lived in Four Oaks, which is the expensive end of Sutton.

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"Journalism is in remorseless decline. 30 years ago the quality newspapers would devote a page (a broadsheet page that is) to parliamentary proceedings. Now the best many offer is a facetious piece from the ‘lobby correspondent’ and the cartoon." Richard Kemp asks if democracy is dead or merely dying.

Trail by Jeory looks at new accusations of organised fraud at the count for the election of the mayor of Tower Hamlets.

"Here’s our choice. We wait and see whether a class of powerful pesticides, made by Bayer and Syngenta, is indeed pushing entire ecosystems to oblivion, or we suspend their use while proper trials are conducted. The natural world versus two chemical companies: how hard can this be?" George Monbiot calls for a global moratorium on neonicotinoids.

Greg Mulholland, Lib Dem MP for Leeds North West, writes on the party website about his debut for the Great Britain Veterans rugby league team.

Londonist discovers the Great Beer Flood of 1814, which claimed at least eight lives.

"He made his Middlesex debut at 16, making him the club's youngest player since 1949; and his first England Test ... at the age of 20. A year later, he became the youngest ever Englishman to 50 Test wickets. He was hailed as one of the finest young fast bowlers in the world." Steve Finn talks to CricInfo about his struggle to rebuild his cricket career.