Scooch, Engelbert and other Great British Eurovision disasters

Embed from Getty Images

The Guardian has a survey of recent United Kingdom Eurovision disasters. It leads you to conclude that the reason we now regularly finish last is not Brexit or Blair's enthusiasm for the Iraq War, but our habit of choosing inexperienced artists with awful songs.

I have two observations.

The first is that Flying the Flag was rather fun and would have done much better if only Scooch could have sung it in tune.

The second is an exclusive revelation. In 2012 Engelbert Humperdinck sang our entry and finished 25th out of 26, but it could have been someone else. I once overheard a conversation between two people on a train that suggested the BBC had been in negotiations with Tom Jones about Eurovision, but the idea had ultimately fallen through. So the solution was very Sixties: if you can't get Tom Jones, book Engelbert.

That conversation took place on the St Alban's to Watford line, which means I can date it to Saturday 3 March 2010. That's the advantage of having written a blog for the past 94 years.

Marianne Faithfull: Sunny Goodge Street

This is beautiful. Sunny Goodge street is a cover of a Donovan song and appeared on Marianne Faithfull's album 1966 North Country Maid. 

The Marianne Faithfull site says of it:

Marianne’s two folk albums from the 60's were conceived as a pair. Where her first folk album Come My Way, had largely been compiled from music of the American folk revival, Marianne’s second, released in April 1966 was built around songs from the British Isles. 

Rightly hailed as her finest LP of the 60s, North Country Maid conclusively established her as an artist with a unique stylistic approach, and many of its songs (such as Scarborough Fair) were not yet the established folk/pop standards they would soon become.

I recently learnt that Donovan lived in St Albans before fame came calling, and was part of the city's music scene along with the youthful Zombies and Maddy Prior.

You can hear Maddy Prior talking about those days on a recent Word in Your Ear podcast.

The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists exhibition comes to St Albans

On Friday the exhibition The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists opened at St Albans Museum and Gallery. It runs until 8 September.

The venue's billing says:

Uncover the story of the talented artists who illustrated Ladybird books for more than 30 years. This colourful, family-friendly exhibition includes rare books, original artwork and artefacts, and reveals how illustrators played such an enormous role in Ladybird’s extraordinary success. 

Tracing the interconnected work of these artists, the company’s story is recounted over Ladybird’s ‘golden years’ – 1940 to 1975. Visually rich and varied, the exhibition will evoke many memories of childhood.

This exhibition has been touring the country for a few years now, and I saw it when it came to Leicester. I can thoroughly recommend it. I came away impressed by the sheer quality of the illustrations that Ladybird Books laid before children by commissioning leading commercial artists.

Those who dismiss Ladybird as purveyors of nostalgia are mistaken. Many of their books were about technology, social progress and the future. In fact Ladybird has a good claim to to be the most progressive children's publisher in those post-war decades.

Their history books were written by a Liberal, L, du Garde Peach, whom some at the BBC (he was a pioneer of radio drama) suspected of Bolshevism.

And I learnt to read with Ladybird's Key Words reading scheme ('Peter and Jane') in a new town in the 1960s. The world of those books was the world I saw around me.

Lib Dems choose their candidate for the new Harpenden and Berkhamsted constituency

The Liberal Democrats have chosen local entrepreneur and environmental campaigner Victoria Collins as their prospective parliamentary candidate for the new Hertfordshire seat of Harpenden and Berkhamsted.

The Herts Advertiser reports that she has named her priorities as:

• saving chalk streams and our canal from sewage discharges
• cutting ambulance waiting times
• tackling the cost of living and supporting local businesses.

She told the newspaper

"I am proud to stand for Parliament for my local area and am determined to give this constituency a strong voice in Westminster.

"The towns and villages in this new constituency have been taken for granted for too long by Conservative MPs.

"It is time we had a local champion who will fight to protect our waterways, save our health services and support local businesses.

"We have Liberal Democrat MPs in neighbouring constituencies who are delivering every day for local communities, and I want to follow in their footsteps."

You can see the boundaries of the new seat on Electoral Calculus, and it does indeed border both St Albans (held by Daisy Cooper) and Chesham and Amersham (held by Sarah Green).

Talking of water pollution in this part of the world, when I lived in nearby Boxmoor as a boy there were still commercial water cress beds along the River Bulbourne. Would that be possible today?

My Liberator article on the prospects for a Progressive Alliance

This article on the prospects for a Progressive Alliance of the non-Conservative parties at the next general election appears in the new issue  of Liberator. You can download it (issue 414) from the magazine's website.

It was meant to be a review of Duncan Brack's pamphlet 1997 Then and Now: The Progressive Alliance That Was and the One That Could Be, but turned into the sort of review you get in the TLS or London Review of Books.

By that I mean that it's one where the reviewer is less interested in the book in front of them than setting out their own ideas. Still, a lot of what I say is in line with the views in the pamphlet,

Embed from Getty Images

Four into one won't go

With its thick concrete walls, the Progressive Alliance control bunker lies deep beneath the soil of… We’d better keep its location a secret, but I can tell you what you will find there. The room is dominated by a table whose top carries a constituency map of Britain and across which WAAFs with victory roll hairdos slide little figures representing voters.

“Less than six hundred votes needed for Labour to gain High Peak,” barks a voice from the gantry that overlooks the room. “Withdraw the Liberal Democrat candidate.” A WAAF pushes some orange voters into the red group.” “Labour gain High Peak, sir.”

And that, if you believe what you read on social media, is all opposition parties need do to win the next general election. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, together perhaps with Plaid Cymru and some smaller parties, should reach agreement to field only one ‘Progressive’ candidate between them in every constituency in England and Wales. 

Some early models of this Progressive Alliance (PA) also included the SNP, but such is its dominance of the Scottish scene, holding 48 of the 59 Westminster seats there, that it’s hard to see what it has to gain from joining such an arrangement. Besides, Scottish elections now see Unionist voters operating an alliance of their own, happy to fall in behind whichever party has the best chance of defeating the Nationalists in each constituency, and the SNP may well calculate that keeping a Conservative government in office at Westminster improves its chances of winning majority support for Scottish independence.

Would a PA defeat a reviving Conservative Party? Could it even win if the Conservatives were ahead in the polls? Supporters of the idea point out that the Tories never win 50 per cent of the popular vote, so that in many constituencies they win despite polling less than the combined votes of the parties in the proposed alliance. All we have to do is put those votes together behind a single candidate, the reasoning goes, and the Conservatives may never form a government again.

Problems problems

There would be many practical problems in establishing such an alliance. The first is that Labour’s constitution has always been taken to rule out any electoral pacts with other parties, though some way round this must have been found at Tatton in the 1997 general election, where both Labour and the Liberal Democrats stood down in favour of the Independent Martin Bell.

A second problem is that if Labour agreed to join an alliance, there would have to be agreement between it and all the other parties over who would fight which seats. Liberal Democrats of my generation have memories – perhaps “flashbacks” is a better word – of the endless hours consumed in meetings between the Liberal Party and the SDP to decide which party would represent the Alliance where – hours that would have been more profitably spent on campaigning, watching Dallas or almost anything else. Even if agreement could be reached in time for the next election, it would be at a similar opportunity cost.

Then there is the problem of what policy platform the PA would stand on – there would surely have to be some sort of agreement on policy to give voters an idea of what they are voting for, particularly if we are asking them to vote for a party they don’t usually support. One idea that you read on social media can be ruled out: a one-line manifesto pledging to introduce proportional representation for general elections. If we fought on that while the Conservatives talked about the economy, defence and education – no matter how stupid we thought what they had to say on those issues was – the Conservatives would win and deserve to win. We would certainly want to secure some movement from Labour on proportional representation and constitutional reform in general, but if we are exhausted after the seat negotiations it would be easier to agree some form of statement promising to undo the worst of the damage the Conservatives have cause on poverty, the environment and the economy.

We should also have to overcome the fact that a PA would threaten to hang around our necks the gaffes and objectionable views of every Labour and Green candidate around our necks. At the very least, Lib Dem candidates fighting the Tories in our target seats would have to cope with being called “the Labour/Lib Dem candidate” on all their leaflets, and even if the other PA candidates conducted themselves blamelessly, we should still have to cope with all the worst policies of their national parties. The Greens, for instance, want to leave NATO, but not while the war in Ukraine is going on. It’s hard to see that rallying disappointed Conservatives to the PA flag.

Would it work?

When all that had been accomplished, one question would remain to be answered: would a Progressive Alliance be worth all this trouble? Parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party because those votes do not belong to them: they belong to the individual voters. Some specially commissioned opinion polls give encouragement to the idea, but the trouble with them is that they do not seek information like conventional polls (“How would you vote if there was a general election tomorrow”) but rather ask people to forecast what they would in a hypothetical situation at some unspecified point in the future (“If there were an electoral pact between X, Y and Z parties at the next election and this resulted in you having only a Y candidate to vote for, how would you vote?” 

And the trouble with that, as psychologists will tell you, is that we are not very good at forecasting our own actions. We are actually better at forecasting other people’s, because we take into account a wider range of factors when we look at them. We wonder how our neighbours will be influenced by the election campaign, but are, wrongly, confident that we are far too secure in our own beliefs for it to affect us.

And even a PA could be agreed, it would contain subtle dangers for the Liberal Democrats. As Simon Titley asked in Liberator 346:

‘Progressive’. What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is ‘not conservative’ or ‘not reactionary’, but those are negative definitions. … The ‘p’ word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean, and that’s a good thing.

It may be that being against the Tories will be enough at the next general election, but in the long run the ideology-light Liberal Democrats need something more to found a party on.

1997 and all that

But maybe we can learn something from 1997, when a limited sort of PA operated between Labour and the Liberal Democrats and helped bring about the rout of the Conservatives. We Lib Dems saw our vote decline by one per cent, yet made a net gain of 28 seats.

Duncan Brack has written a pamphlet for Compass, 1997 Then and Now: The Progressive Alliance That Was and the One That Could Be, looking at the lessons to be drawn from that experience. It reminds us that that the cooperation between the two parties in 1997 was the result of much work, both public and private.

The public work took place in the talks between Labour’s future foreign secretary Robin Cook and the former SDP leader Robert Maclennan talks. Between them they agreed a package of constitutional reforms, which included incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, freedom of information legislation, devolution to Scotland and Wales (and elections by proportional representation to their parliaments), an elected authority for London, the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords, proportional representation for the European elections and a referendum on voting reform for Westminster elections that gave a choice between the existing first-past-the-post system and a proportional alternative.

As Duncan Brack says, much of this was already Liberal Democrat policy – some of it was watered down to be accepted as part of the package – but the agreement did break new ground for Labour. And most of it was implemented by the Blair government. The exceptions were the referendum on a proportional voting system for Westminster elections and the total removal from hereditary peers from the Lords, where a deal brokered by the former Commons speaker Lord Weatherill saw 92 of them allowed to remain.

When Paddy met Tony

Meanwhile, the private work took place in talks between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown. These looked at electoral cooperation and the possibility of a wider policy agreement than that reached by Cook and Maclennan.

Tony Blair, says Duncan Brack, was keen on the idea of the two parties backing a single candidate in a limited number of seats, and accepted that in some the candidate would be a Liberal Democrat. Remembering the hours lost in negotiations with the SDP, Ashdown vetoed this idea saying it would appear “a grubby plan designed to gain power and votes for ourselves, instead of one based round principles and what was best for the country”.

This line was forced on Ashdown, who had earlier floated the idea of closer cooperation between the parties, by the Liberal Democrats’ polling. This showed clearly that the soft Conservative voters the party was targeting would be happy for it to enter government with Labour in the event of a hung parliament but were hostile to the idea that it should campaign with Labour for that outcome.

So the parties turned to covert cooperation, concentrating on the same issues and using the same language. They avoided attacks on each other, shared information on which seats they were targeting and jointly gave the Daily Mirror a list of 22 seats where Labour voters should back the Liberal Democrats.

In the event, Liberal Democrat supporters proved to be more prepared to vote tactically than Labour supporters. The Labour vote went up in some Liberal Democrat targets, but such was the fall in Conservative support that we still won some of them. I don’t know if they were official targets, but Labour also came from third place to win two seats we had rather fancied winning ourselves: St Albans and Hastings & Rye.

Building trust and relationships

Duncan Brack concludes from this history that parties should not try to negotiate a national pact. Instead, he says: 

Any level of cooperation between non-Conservative parties will need to be more fluid and organic than it was in 1997, built from the bottom up as well as the top down – hence the Compass focus on local groups and building trust and relationships over the long term. 

This could feature a wide range of approaches – including, possibly, local electoral agreements but, more importantly, cooperation in local campaigns and policy discussions, building a common understanding and appreciation of parties’ positions and potential solutions to the challenges the UK faces in the mid-2020s.

And I am happy to support his conclusion, which takes us a long way from that Progressive Alliance Control Bunker:

Whatever the form a progressive alliance takes, whether it’s an electoral pact or encouragement for tactical voting, the parties that form it need to give an indication to the electorate of what will be the result if they vote for it: a positive agenda of reform, not merely the negative case for getting rid of the Tories.

GUEST POST Is a Yellow Wall emerging?

Matthew Pennell asks if the Liberal Democrats are in the business of building walls as well as knocking them down.

The media is obsessed with presenting events as dramatic and unprecedented, therefore it reported on the weakening of Labour’s hold on industrial heartland seats with alacrity. You’ve probably seen the phrase ‘Red Wall’ in print a thousand times since the 2019 General Election. 

Two years on and it has a generals-fighting-the-previous-battle quality to it. All walls can fall down and we’re now seeing the cracks in the Southern Blue Wall that Liberal Democrats were hoping in vain to chip away at in 2019. 

No one ever talks about a Yellow Wall because our Westminster power base isn’t substantial enough to represent a heartland, we have a cluster in South West London, that’s it.

In a post on my own blog about Lib Dem local election success in the countryside, I mentioned the jam doughnuts around university towns. Now in the Thames Valley, Cotswolds and Avon hinterland we have more of a family-sized lasagne dish emerging. 

The Oxfordshire halo spreading out from the county town nearly merges with the block of Gloucestershire Lib Dem-held county divisions, which in turn is connected to a number of councils in Somerset we gained in 2019. 

Now it’s possible to ramble from the Monmouthshire-Herefordshire border in an Easterly direction and walk 150 miles through 95 per cent Lib/Lab/Independent county council divisions until you’re within sight of London on the Southern flank of the Chilterns. 

This area might not be solidly Lib Dem when it comes to Westminster elections but it’s certainly more than a cluster, taking in Somerset, North West Wilts, Gloucestershire, parts of Hereford and most of southern Oxfordshire.

There has been plenty of commentary about the centre of gravity shifting for the party, away from our traditional South West England homeland and more towards the South East of England. 

Certainly, opportunities now abound in Surrey, Sussex, Buckinghamshire and Hertforshire - things are tough for us in Cornwall and I don’t really have an answer as to how we turn things around in the land of my fathers (my surname is Cornish for hilltop). 

Recent success in Oxfordshire, Shropshire and Gloucestershire suggests to me we're not limited to the London Home Counties commuter-belt that certain pundits say we are. 

The various clusters that have grown to the point where they connect on the local elections map - a new Thames/Severn/Avon Valley heartland - how much does it matter that they form a wall? 

At the most basic level if you can win in a wide geographical area it’s more durable than one small area, or outpost of support. You win in one area, make it safe, then send your activists next door to win in a social-economically similar place. 

It’s no coincidence that we won St Albans in the last General Election then picked up Chesham and Amersham 20 miles away, this would’ve been much more difficult if the nearest Lib Dem seat was 50 or more miles away in terms of mobilising support and convincing locals it was possible. 

While most people aren’t focussed on politics most of the time, at street level the general public see multiple amber diamond stakeboards up in your constituency, that creates visibility for hundreds driving through who live in the neighbouring seat.

If the Lib Dems centre of gravity is really shifting east is this a problem? 

Some are uncomfortable at us being portrayed as the party of leafy suburbia, spa towns, university towns and heritage towns. I’d say this is only a problem if the party’s success is so lop-sided towards affluent areas there was mission creep in our policy platform and we became less progressive. 

And we have to start somewhere - in the 1980s it was breaking out of our Scots/Welsh/Cornish Celtic fringe to win in every region and nearly every major city of mainland Britain. 

Anyway, here’s hoping in the next few years we’re not just knocking down other people’s walls but putting up a few of our own.

Matthew Pennell blogs at returnoftheliberal and you can follow him on Twitter.

St Albans Abbey on a damp March morning

No one can go anywhere any more, so here's a photo of St Albans Abbey I took on a damp March morning in 2012.

Financial Times talks up Lib Dem chances in St Albans

Sebastian Payne has been to St Albans and found Liberal Democrat prospects good:

Person after person I speak to there registers their disgust at Brexit - a clear majority voted for Remain in 2016 - and the rightward shift of the Tories. Many inhabitants are London exiles, bringing with them liberal metropolitan sensibilities. 

St Albans may once have been a Labour marginal, but the party’s equivocation on Brexit could well have scuppered its aspirations.

He also met our candidate Daisy Cooper:

"I stood to be our candidate in St Albans because it is exactly the sort of seat that should and could be a Lib Dem heartland, people here hold fundamentally open liberal values," she explains over coffee. 

"I want to put a stake in the ground for the party and the country’s future and I absolutely think we can win."

A walk from Harpenden to St Albans via Wheathampstead

John Rogers takes us from Harpenden along the River Lea and a disused railway to the Devil's Dyke earthwork at Wheathampstead and then to a twilit St Albans.

Malcolm Saville was living at West End Farm when he began writing his children's books during the war.

The barn at Seven Gates farm under the Stiperstones, which the Lone Piners made their HQ2, is based on the one at West End Farm.

And another of Saville's early books, Jane's Country Year, was set there.

Rediscovering the Hatfield to St Albans line

Most of the trackbed has been used for a cycle route, so there is not much dereliction to enjoy.

But you have to admit Salvation Army Halt was a great name for a station.

Late. An earlier post on this blog shows the last days of this route as a working railway.

Three websites and a book to accompany Talking Pictures TV

By now you will have discovered Talking Pictures TV, the Freeview channel devoted to old (mainly British) films and television.

But to get the most from it there are three websites and a book you need.

The first website, inevitably, is IMDB. With its help you can spot young actors in their earliest roles and occasionally old actors making a final appearance.

The second website is Reelstreets which posts then and now photographs of the locations of British films.

If you have a difficult location question then you need BritMovie.co.uk, On the boards there are people who, particularly for London locations, can look at a still, get a hunch for the area it was shot and find the answer on Google Streetview in a remarkably short time.

And the book? It can only be Horton's Guide to Britain's Railways in Feature Films.

Talking Pictures TV is showing Night of the Demon again this evening, which features climactic scenes on a railway line.

Horton tells you all you need know:

These scenes were filmed on the Watford-St Albans Abbey branch, particularly around Brickett Wood station, although it is believed that Watford Junction station was also used. The giveaway is when Dana Andrews races into the station to catch the Southampton train (!) and there is a timetable behind giving details of stopping trains to St Albans,

It's the book no film fan can afford to be without.

Electrification from Bedford to St Pancras and Moorgate

A British Transport Films effort from the 1970s.

Notice how grubby everything looks and the cavalier way with railway heritage.

Helping Daisy Cooper win St Albans

Feeling in the mood for delivering this morning, I went down to St Albans to help the Liberal Democrat candidate Daisy Cooper.

If you can go there too, your help will be well used. You will find the Lib Dem election HQ at 9 Hatfield Road, St Albans AL1 3RR.

St Pancras to Luton in 1960

Lots of Midland main line goodness.

The many closed stations along this stretch were more in evidence in 1960.

Park Street: The least used station in Hertfordshire

Another in this series of videos from Londonist.

If nothing else, it gives readers a break from the Oswestry to Welshpool line.

Why I am a sceptic about the idea of a Progressive Alliance

Embed from Getty Images

Last night, in a Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council by-election, the Conservatives held Trench ward with an increased majority.

Not a big surprise, you may think. But there was more to it than that.

Because both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens had stood down to give Labour a clear run.

It is always unwise to read too much into a single local contest, but the outcome here should remind us of an important lesson.

Parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party.

And that is why I am a sceptic when it comes to the idea of a "progressive alliance" against the Tories.

Think of the Richmond Park by-election.

Would it have helped Sarah Olney if Labour had declined to field a candidate? I doubt it very much.

Think of the way that we hung the support that Zac Goldsmith had received from Ukip around his neck.

If Sarah had been endorsed by Labour she would have been "Jeremy Corbyn's candidate" on every Tory leaflet in Richmond Park.

That would have made it less, not more, likely that she would have won.

The Green Party did stand down in Richmond, which may have helped Sarah. Only people who were already going to vote Tory would have been discomfited by that.

But that is because the Greens do not matter than much at present. If they did come to be more significant in the minds of the voters, then deals with them would become more problematic,

True, they are not laden with decades of embarrassing baggage the way Corbyn and McDonnell are,
but they would then put off potential Lib Dem voters as well as attract them.

We should also ask what the Greens are after in return for standing down in seats like Richmond. I suspect it is because they are after a clear run in their own most promising seats.

As these are generally ones that we Liberal Democrats held as recently as 2010 - Bristol West, Norwich South - I am wary of giving them what they want.

(If you want a alternative view of a Lib Dem - Green alliance, read Clifford Fleming on the Social Liberal Forum site.)

Let's end by returning to the central point: parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party.

The corollary of this is that when voters have made up their mind to throw out the Tories, they are quite capable of organising themselves to do it.

Think of 1997, when the operation was carried out with ruthless efficiency.

Sometimes that was to the detriment of us Liberal Democrats. In several of our target seats (St Albans, Hastings and Rye, Bristol West again) Labour came from third place to beat the Tories.

Yes, some of our gains because Labour did not try to hard in those constituencies, but that is because informal pacts like those are more likely to bear fruit that any grand, publicly announced Progressive Alliance.

Samuel Ryder, who gave the Ryder Cup, was a Liberal

As Liberal Democrat Voice reminded us two years ago:

Having moved south from Manchester to enlarge his family business, Sam Ryder was first elected as a Liberal councillor to St. Albans council in 1903. Just two years later, Ryder was elected Mayor of St. Albans

He also seems to have been a bit of an Edwardian Danny Alexander, surprising his colleagues with an uncompromising assessment of the Council’s financial situation:

"We rejoice in a debt of £40,000 and our income is raised every year and mainly all spent or bespoken itself before we raise it so that we are in a sense debt collectors. It is humiliating."

If you want to know more about the man, try St Albans Council's Samuel Ryder Trail.

Home from Tynemouth

Our house is confined to the top of a high rock and is surrounded by sea on every side but one. Here is the approach to the monastery through a gate cut out of the rock so narrow that a cart can hardly pass through. Day and night the waves break and roar and undermine the cliff. Thick sea frets roll in wrapping everything in gloom. Dim eyes, hoarse voices, sore throats are the consequences... 

Shipwrecks are frequent. It is a great pity to see the numbed crew, whom no power on earth can save, whose vessel, mast swaying and timbers parted, rushes upon the rock or reef. No ringdove or nightingale is here, only grey birds which nest in rocks and greedily prey upon the drowned, whose screaming cry is a token of a coming storm.

I have spent the past few days in Tynemouth with the Dowager Lady Bonkers and can reveal that the 14th-century monk who wrote the above was exaggerating. The truth is that it is an attractive and interesting place - I shall share some photographs with you over the next few days.

The one above shows the gatehouse of the Priory, where the monk had been exiled from St Albans.

Six of the Best 244

Word reaches Caron's Musings of an intelligent, calm and rational debate at the Lib Dem Federal Conference Committee last night as it discussed whether to accede to the request of Sussex Police to use an accreditation system for those registered for this year's Autumn Conference.

A period of silence on the part of Lord Steel would be welcome, says Living on Words Alone (quite rightly).

Gareth Epps has given up on Liberal Democrat Voice: "The site’s ‘comments moderation policy’ is drawn out in such a way as to let the moderators do whatever they like, be it to follow through any personal vendettas ... prohibit any debate that may go beyond rules written by the Polite Society, or to skew a particular debate."

On AlterNet Gary G. Kohls looks at the unstoppable rise of psychiatric medication in America: "Since the introduction of major tranquilizers like Thorazine and Haldol, 'minor' tranquilizers like Miltown, Librium and Valium and the dozens of so-called 'antidepressants' like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, tens of millions of unsuspecting Americans have become mired deeply, to the point of permanent disability, in the American mental 'health' system."

The derelict Clydebank Town Hall and its neighbouring public baths are explored are explored by Reality Trip. There are some remarkable photographs in this post.

Glasswerk National reports that a blue plaque is to be unveiled at the Blacksmith's Arms in St Albans, the pub where the Zombies first met 51 years ago.

Looking for St Albans Abbey

Not the Abbey - you can't miss that - but St Albans Abbey railway station.

The branch from Watford Junction does not reach St Albans City, the station used by trains to St Pancras, but has its own little terminus on the edge of the city. St Albans Abbey station was not that well signposted when I looked for it on Saturday, but I liked this little clue I came across on the edge of the Abbey grounds.

And when I found it I was impressed that the line to Watford was electrified and had modern trains of a sensible length operating on it.

One thing that could be improved is the ticketing arrangements. There is nowhere to buy a ticket at St Albans Abbey station and they are not sold on the train, so you have to queue to pay at the excess fares window at Watford Junction.

This line is now looked after by a community rail partnership and there are plans to convert the line to light rail operation to allow a more regular and frequent service.

A search on the web reveals that the city used to have a third station, St Albans London Road, on a line to Hatfield that also used to reach St Albans Abbey.