Northwood Lane, Bewdley: The Elan Valley Aqueduct, The Singing Detective and Jonathan Meades

Fire broke out beside the Severn Valley Railway (SVR) bear Bewdley yesterday, reports the Shropshire Star. I don't know if it was caused by a spark from a train, but many preserved lines have gone over to diesel-only operation because of the tinder-dry state of lineside vegetation this summer.

This fire took place near Northwood Lane, which is a long road that runs beside the River Severn north of Bewdley. And this post  is about three things you can see along its course.

The first is an aqueduct that carries drinking water from the Elan Valley reservoir in Mid Wales over the River Severn on its way to the Frankley Reservoir in  Birmingham. This 73-mile pipeline, which opened in 1906, was a wonder of its day. 

You'll find it marked on the endpaper maps of many books about the Welsh Border, and I suspect it was the inspiration for the plot about a Shropshire reservoir being blown up by German spies in the first of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books, Mystery at Witchend.

You can see the Aqueduct over the Severn and the rails of the SVR in the photograph above. Now on to two television connections...

There is a station beside Northwood Lane, and it was used as a location for Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. It's in the scene where the young Philip Marlowe returns to the Forest of Dean after his mother's death in London and is met by his father, who is played by Jim Carter. You can see a photo of them above along with photos photos of the station and level crossing.

And then there's Jonathan Meades...

You may remember his film Severn Heaven, which visited the Bewdley plotlands. This is an interwar community of some 160 self-built properties, which appears to be under threat at the moment. 

I had a wander round it some years ago myself, getting off the train at Northwood Halt.

The Joy of Six 1556

"Dartford Warblers skim across the heather before diving into the vegetation, defying all but the quickest observers. At dusk Nightjars churr from the isolated trees or fly overhead, the males clapping their wings in display flight." David Jobbins mourns what has been lost to the fire at Dunwich Heath.

Sam Power explains why Reform UK will find it hard to shake off questions about its donors: "An important thing to note is that the legal onus rests almost entirely on the donor. The party in receipt of the donation simply needs to show that it has conducted a permissibility check on them. In the case of Reform, some of its biggest donors (like Tice) are effectively woven into the party apparatus. This makes it much harder for the party to be seen to be one step removed from the money."

An increasingly narrow English curriculum, with its emphasis on phonics and 'teaching to the test', is squeezing reading for pleasure out of our primary schools, experts in the field tell Lydia Chantler-Hicks.

Rebecca Johns finds that British scientist James Lovelock warned executives of the risks of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s. Rather than share his reports with the public, claims an imminent legal case, Shell responded by funding the Global Climate Coalition – an industry group that pursued multimillion-dollar influence campaigns promoting climate denial and misinformation.

Leanne Tritton reports on the fate of Shrewsbury's Shirehall, the modernist former home of the Shropshire County Council.

"Dirk Bogarde came in for some stick from certain quarters for his portrayal of General Sir Frederick 'Boy' Browning, who was under considerable pressure from Monty to deliver Operation Market-Garden. Dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning stated that they’d be going 'a bridge too far.' He said this before the operation, but there is no scene with Montgomery in the film, instead Bogarde gets the line after the snafu, coming across like an aloof clever-dick 'told you so' type." Tim Pelan looks back to to 1977 and the making of A Bridge Too Far.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The arid south of Rutland

As ever, Lord Bonkers was ahead of the curve on the climate crisis. Perhaps the sands at Trescothick Bay remind him of the deserts of southern Rutland?

Wednesday

They say these heatwaves will soon render the South of England uninhabitable, which is a bit of a facer seeing as we Liberals have worked so hard to ensure we don’t have MPs anywhere else. But don’t despair: the arid south of Rutland is simply teeming with life – human life included. 

Of course, if the Home Counties do turn to desert it will require changes to the way we fight elections there, which is why, a couple of years ago, I invited some of the ALDC’s leading lights to an awayday at an oasis near Uppingham. 

There I instructed them in the polite way to canvass bedouin, the correct tying of the kafiyeh and the use of camels in Focus delivery. It won’t be my fault if we fail to gain Runnymede and Weybridge next time round.

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

Earlier this week...

• Searching the rock pools for "sea anomalies"
• Wandering Bodmin Moor at full moon and devouring constituents

The Joy of Six 1551

 Vince Cable makes the case for building more council houses: "The most compelling argument for councils becoming developers is that the private developer model, however valid for most housebuilding most of the time, depends on a set of circumstances – the ability to earn a profit margin above rising land and property prices – which may not exist. Public sector developers can build through economic cycles and where market conditions are unattractive for private developers."

"Changes in public spaces (including increased provision of green parks, lakes and water fountains) enable easy public access to cooling. Everyday heat adaptation is not only about technological fixes, but about building or redesigning everyday infrastructures that enable a fair and equitable living environment for everybody, whatever the weather." Subina Shrestha and Claire Hoolohan on what Britain must do to prepare for future heatwaves.

Mark Braund looks at Andy Burnham's past support of a land value tax.

"Three Lions has started to to more harm than good. I think that 'thirty years of hurt' line has helped seed a sense of entitlement, a baked-in belief that anything other than outright victory legitimises a sense of hurt. It raises the stakes and ratchets up the pressure – a pressure that ultimately bears down on the very players you're counting on to try and deliver a result." Pete Paphides says it's time to say thank you and goodbye to the song Three Lions.

"The final prisoners left Crumlin Road Gaol in 1996 and, in 2012, it reopened as a visitor attraction and conference centre, sharing the grounds with McConnell’s whisky distillery. Although the prison experience is now dominated by atmospheric lighting, holographic presentations and short information videos, it is possible to see the history behind the modern technology." Angela Buckley experiences the Crumlin Road Gaol Experience.

Jeremy Rees celebrates the magnificent Queenie Watts.

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"The world-renowned academic institution has nothing to say in response to a six-month investigation by Byline Times raising serious concerns about the safeguarding of students and foreign influence at Cambridge University." Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu ask why.

"Over the last ten years the question of Irish unity has moved to the centre of the Irish political stage. This surprisingly rapid change has been driven by demographic and economic trends, to the advantage of Irish nationalists both north and south of the border." Patrick Cockburn reviews For and Against a United Ireland by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride.

Kate Moore says we need more trees: "The sooner we plant trees – ideally in groups, as solitary trees are more vulnerable – and nurture them through the early years, the cooler we'll feel.  So, whether your garden is small or large, it’s time to plant trees to give you your own shaded, and naturally air-conditioned space."

Brett DeJager finds that school teachers are "worried about academic dishonesty but also about assessment, student reliance, critical thinking, misinformation and privacy. Those concerns point to a practical challenge schools now face: how to preserve meaningful evidence of learning when AI can produce polished academic work."

From psychiatric wonder drug, to CIA mind warfare to teenage menace. Grant McPhee looks at LSD use through its evolving coverage in British newspapers.

Jospehine Botting watches 21 Days, a film made just before Vivien Leigh took the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and as her affair with Laurence Olivier was blooming. It captures the pair falling in love and on the cusp of stardom, but its producer Alexander Korda thought it was not good enough to release.

The Joy of Six 1544

"The plunder of children’s services by business is one of the big scandals of our time. Children’s homes, special schools and foster care services are increasingly run for profit. Almost every time a child is removed from their family, somebody, somewhere cashes a cheque." Martin Barrow looks at one company that received £500m from local councils last year for the care and support of children and young people.

Rory Jones finds that "England is beginning to develop a cooling divide, one in which access to protection from extreme heat increasingly depends on where people live, how much they earn and the type of home they occupy."

Does becoming a parent lead politicians to focus more on the future? Research by Chris Hanretty and Sarah Childs questions the assumption that it does: "There is no single effect of parenthood upon future focus: rather, parenthood affects men and women differently. Fatherhood causes a small increase in future focus sustained across a range of topics. ... Motherhood, by contrast, causes a decline in future focus.

"The exhibition showcased Freud’s lifelong fascination with human faces and figures, covering several different types of drawings – from pencil, pen, and ink portraits to charcoal works and etchings. In addition, several paintings were also included in the exhibition to illustrate the relationship between Freud’s works on paper and those on canvas." JacquiWine went to the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Sean Burns on Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, which bombed at the box office on release but is now recognised as a classic: "I was struck by how relevant Sweet Smell of Success seems today, when we’re seeing people who know better grovel and prostrate themselves for proximity to power on a daily basis, submitting to humiliation rituals live on cable news the way Sidney dutifully jumps to light Hunsecker's cigarettes."

Quentin Shaw on the miracle of glow worms and the threat to them from artificial light at night: "It is something of a mystery that glow worms came to be so widespread. Surveyors have noticed that the places where the beetles survive today are often sites of ancient human habitation. Perhaps people deliberately introduced them, to brighten their lives and to chase away the dark."

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Roz Savage says our electoral system is not just unfair but dangerous: "Manifestos are written for floating voters in constituencies that might change hands – not for the country as a whole. And when governments make spending decisions, the incentive structure pulls them in exactly the same direction. The Towns Fund, which directed 40 of 45 allocations to Conservative-held seats, was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed."

"Some schools have glass atriums, which were a common feature of those constructed during the government’s Building Schools for the Future programme in the early 2000s, but which now give the effect of walking into a Kew hothouse." Harry Paticas explains why hot spells now turn British schools into heat traps.

Jack Meredith says it's time for Liberals and trade unions to talk again: "The last Lib Dem leader to engage seriously with the movement was the late Charles Kennedy, who in September 2002 became the first to address the TUC Congress. Nearly 24 years of near-silence since then is beyond disappointing/"

Simon Skinner reviews a history of the World Cup: "Argentine reverence for Maradona endured because and not in spite of his anti-Corinthian ethos, up to and beyond the point in 1991 that he failed a drugs test when unable to deploy his habitual expedient of squirting someone else’s urine through a prosthetic penis. The penis was later displayed in a Buenos Aires museum as a quasi-religious relic (before being stolen)."

"Plans to moor a large vessel beside London Bridge have run into an unexpected complication – a disused tube tunnel buried beneath the Thames," reports Ian Mansfield.

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo looks at legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and what may lie behnd it: "The Pied Piper, like the Trickster, is a shape-shifter who wears a number of different masks – the psychopath, the hero, the rebel… even Death himself. Like Shakespeare’s Puck or Barrie’s Peter Pan, he spreads a net of enchantment, leading our children to the Otherworld. Whether this Otherworld was a new land to colonise, an altered state of consciousness or the realm of the dead remains a mystery."

The Major Oak is dead and Phil Harding has discovered another ancient site near Stonehenge

Forget Sycamore Gap: this is real tragedy. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest is dead.

The Guardian reports:

The Major oak, one of Europe’s oldest, largest and most celebrated ancient trees, has died.

The huge tree, which has grown in Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, England, for at least 1,000 years, failed to produce any leaves this year, after becoming stressed by a series of hot, dry summers.

Thousands of visitors admire the oak each year, with its great age, enormous 11-metre girth and 28-metre canopy inspiring a forest of folklore. Although the oak would not have been hollow in Robin Hood’s day, it was said to have provided a sanctuary for the outlaw and his gang when fleeing the tyrannical Sheriff of Nottingham.

Of course it did.

The paper's report blames the tree's demise on climate change and "well-intentioned historical interventions":

Experts believe that the props that continued to support the tree’s mighty limbs also placed it under strain. Left alone, ancient oaks shed their limbs and “grow down”, retreating into their trunk and thereby requiring less water and nutrients as they age.

There's more on Sherwood Forest and the Major Oak in my post about an old travelogue.

Now the good news. A team of archaeologists led by the mighty Phil Harding has discovered an ancient site close to and even older than Stonehenge.

Harding told the Salisbury Journal:

"In a few days’ time, Stonehenge will be filled with people celebrating midsummer solstice.

"But what few will realise is that 5,000 years ago on a nearby hillside overlooking modern day Bulford, people were doing the exact same thing – revering and celebrating the sunrise on midsummer’s day.

"This discovery is probably one of the greatest finds of my career and what makes it so important is just how early it is.

"Up till now, our knowledge of this ancient feat of astronomy was based on Stonehenge and other monuments of a similar period, but what we’ve discovered at Bulford is 500 years earlier than the famous stones we know so well.

"It makes me incredibly proud to be an archaeologist."

The Joy of Six 1529

Chris Dillow on Labour's mistaken strategy: "All good businesspeople know that it’s easier to keep a customer than to win a new one; that you can’t always choose your customers; and that one must never 'do a Ratner' and insult your customers. In ignoring all this Labour has been simply grossly amateurish.

Keyvan Hosseini and Dawn-Marie Walker say their research shows that the electric SUV boom is a problem for climate, health and equity: "Larger vehicles can also make streets more dangerous, especially for children. A study using Great Britain crash data found that children aged 0-18 hit by SUVs, rather than passenger cars, had 77 per cent higher odds of fatal injury. For children under nine, the odds were more than three times higher."

"Too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning." David Didau argues that systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better.

"Boudicca and co surprised the Reserve staff by digging canals. Because there are plenty of trees on the edge of the lake, the presumption had been that they would not require canals. The beavers knew otherwise, and the ditches are altering the way water flows around the site. They’ve built two lodges and, as well as stripping bark and eating foliage, have begun to fell some larger trees. In one area, they have cut down most of the young saplings." Isabella Clarke reports on the remarkable success of the Nene Valley beavers.

Discontinued Notes has been to Somerset House to see the the M.C. Escher exhibition.

"The Station Hotel, the original home of the Crawdaddy Club where the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds played some of their earliest gigs, is now a gastro-pub. L'Auberge, the coffee bar at the bottom of Richmond Hill where beatniks and then hippies gathered to trade gossip and other substances, has become a branch of Nando’s. A little further up the hill, there is no trace of Sandover Hall (another early venue for the Stones), Potter’s Music Shop, or the Hanging Lamp, one of the key sixties folk clubs." David Buckingham goes in search of the South West London venues that fostered British rhythm and blues.

The Joy of Six 1524

"You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say 'that’s outside the Overton window' as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them." Liberal Democrat Tom Reeve introduces us to the Overtons.

"Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation – the Larry Ellison Foundation – has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries." Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin take us inside the Tony Blair Institute and introduce us to its main funder.

Steve Webb says the triple lock cannot last forever, but scrapping it now would trigger a retirement disaster.

"What happened to the master con man? For one thing, as the former reality show star should know, people get bored. The same old Trump shtick gets tiresome; the public's patience with his excuses wears thin. They have heard all the lies, all the Biden blame-shifting, all the 'two weeks away' deadline-shifting. It’s stale." Jennifer Rubin says Donald Trump is losing his grip on US voters.

Chloe Duteil, Daniel Cumming and Jon Winder look back to how London, Paris and New York coped with past heatwaves: "When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach – the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants – a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers."

Morgan Jeffery talks to people from Film is Fabulous!, the organisation that recently found, preserved and screened two lost Doctor Who episodes.

The Joy of Six 1514

Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business – the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies – in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable."

"For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them." Alice Milner on her research into peatlands and tackling climate change.

Norman Baker explains why buses in central London are slower than their horse-drawn counterparts were more than a century ago. He also has suggestions for speeding them up.

Danny Chambers is campaigning against the cruelty often involved in breeding what are, to my eye, ugly animals. "Across the UK, more and more dogs and cats are being bred to look fashionable or cute. But this can come at a serious cost to their health and welfare."

"The film encompasses many influences – neorealist working-class documentary in its early Belfast set street scenes; poetic realism in its studio-bound aspects and fatalism; noir thriller; and expressionist reimagining of Greek myth, as a fatally wounded Johnny is left behind in the botched escape and a rogue’s gallery of the city’s denizens alternately help and hinder his path through the Underworld entries, bars and rain-slicked slums of a darkened, almost Dickensian city." Tim Pelan sings the praises of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947).

"As time went on, I felt more in control of the thing, and stopped fearing that I was going to show myself – and all womenkind – up, by passing out from the heat, more relaxed and more appreciative of the experience. The engine is indeed a star. There were waving people on every bridge, and we passed a campsite with lots more waving people. I got so keen on waving back to them that I almost forgot my job." Stephanie Gaunt learns to drive a steam locomotive.

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"A project that ought to be broad, open and compassionate has come to be dominated by a narrow set of ideological demands which leave little room for genuine diversity of political perspective." Vlad Vexler and Rupert Read argue that if the climate movement does not embrace pluralism it risks handing the future to the far right.

Laura López-Aybar reminds us of the way society can turn a blind eye to the human rights violations involved in psychiatry.

Melinda Wenner Moyer on studies that suggest young people are in many ways doing better than previous generations: "In addition to their interest in helping people, youths today also appear to be more accepting of others and their differences. Some research suggests that youths are becoming more open-minded and inclusive across various realms."

"While the directors express confidence in future revenue growth exceeding £700 million, the margin for error is non-existent. Any sustained failure on the pitch, or a further tightening of regulatory loopholes by the Premier League or UEFA, would jeopardise the entire capital structure of the Group." Paul Quinn digs deep into Chelsea's troubled and byzantine finances.

"Forteanism is not the same as 'skepticism', it is not front-loaded with an agenda of debunking, but it might end up doing some if the evidence (or lack of it) points that way. Skepticism is generally quite boring because the Skeptic is not the fearsome character who has haunted western philosophy for at least 500 years (and also philosophy in other times and places), but a person who thinks religion is A Bad Thing and science is A Good Thing." Yesterday Discontinued Notes went to an event at Conway Hall organised by the London Fortean Society.

 Gyles Brandreth remembers how Hayley Mills snatched the child role in Tiger Bay from his grasp. "This is another film with Mills, but set in South Wales. It’s about a young boy who witnesses a murder. Quite dark. Lovely script. You’ll be the boy. John Mills is the detective. They’ve seen your photograph, Gyles. They like the look of you."

The Joy of Six 1494

"After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a 'department of land', and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission." Guy Shrubsole welcomes the news that revealing who owns England has just become government policy.

Josiah Mortimer finds that Reform UK councils are dismantling the fight against climate change.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge on the relationship between Karl Popper's account of human knowledge and her view of raising children.

"The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce, was indeed a man named John Beckett, who was formerly a Labour MP. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I'm Beckett’s biographer. I'm also his son." Francis Beckett decries the trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war – myths that will do us real harm as we confront the new face of fascism in 2026.

"What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England's tortured landscape and its war-battered population." James Chappel considers the early poems of W.H. Auden.

Jo Hutchings has some behind-the-scenes photographs of Jon Pertwee filming filming the Doctor Who story The Dæmons in Aldbourne.

You can visit Noah's Ark in Williamstown, Kentucky​

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Most Europeans who visit the United States go to New York or California, which are liberal, cosmopolitan places very like Europe. But the rest of the country, as I was told when I visited New York myself, isn't like that.

You can say that again. Here's Alexander Bevilacqua writing in the London Review of Books:

In Williamstown, Kentucky​, no small distance from the "mountains of Ararat", the biblical resting place of Noah's Ark, a 510-foot-long wooden structure rises from a ridge. The Ark Encounter – less than an hour's drive from Cincinnati International Airport and within a day’s drive of much of the Bible Belt – is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. 

A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers Centre, where creationist-friendly science textbooks are on sale next to Noah's Coffee. Outdoor speakers play music reminiscent of a fantasy video game. The Answers Centre looks out across a lake to the main attraction. The ark is massive (roughly the length of St Paul's Cathedral), handsome and very strange.

Entertainments are on offer: a petting zoo; camel rides; zip lines; virtual reality ‘time travel’. There are flashes of humour: visitors can pose as a biblical patriarch in a cut-out panel; the refreshment stands promise "a flood of refills". Yet the attraction serves a serious purpose. 

Built by an evangelical Christian group called Answers in Genesis (AiG) and completed in 2016, the Ark Encounter makes the case that the story of Noah occurred exactly as told in Genesis: that humanity was saved by the eight people who built the vessel and boarded it together with seven pairs ‘of every sort’ of animal, then stayed on it during a deluge that lasted forty days and for a further 150 days when the floodwaters prevailed, plus the better part of a year as the waters receded.

He ends on a more secular note:

AiG doesn’t have a monopoly on contemporary interpretations of the ark. A Dutch carpenter and creationist called Johan Huibers built his "half-size" ark – 230 feet long – after a dream in which he saw his country "disappearing under an enormous mass of water’" (fifty years earlier, in 1953, the North Sea Flood killed almost two thousand people in the Netherlands). 

In 2010, he sold it to the impresario Aad Peters, who turned it into a travelling gallery of Bible stories. When Peters brought the ark to the UK in 2019, Extinction Rebellion activists boarded the vessel. On one side they hung a giant banner bearing the words: "We need a better plan than this."

The Joy of Six 1480

"The memoir shows that for Mandelson the cast of people who matter is very narrow, he is always the betrayed rather than the betrayer, his press critics are always acting in bad faith, and he is never adequately rewarded or appreciated." James Butler on the fall of Peter Mandelson.

"'At the moment, you’ve got Reform, who are weaponising concerns around net-zero', she says, and 'the Conservatives recklessly rowing back on the very infrastructure they created to tackle climate change, which is the Climate Change Act;". Noah Vickers talks to Pippa Heylings, the Lib Dem spokesperson on energy security and Net Zero.

Gemma Motion makes the case for raising England's age of criminal responsibility: "Internationally, the UK’s position is becoming isolated. Article 40(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states to establish a minimum age of criminal responsibility. While no specific age is prescribed, 14 is the most common minimum across Europe. Several other countries set it higher still. Even our devolved neighbour Scotland, which historically had a lower threshold at eight years of age, has now raised it to 12."

Tourettes Hero discusses the fallout from the BAFTA awards ceremony.

"The central strategic question is not whether non-host counties will survive. They will. The question is whether they will retain any meaningful competitive agency within the professional game. On the evidence available, the answer is no. Not under the current framework." Gary Mason and Simon Aldis argue that the future is bleak for most of cricket's first-class counties.

Discontinued Notes has been to Oxford to see the exhibition at the Bodleian about John Le Carré.

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Richard Reich argues that employers will not share the gains from AI unless they are made to: "If the five-day workweek with five days of pay shrinks to four days with four days of pay, and then to three, and to two, and perhaps one, AI will supplant most people’s work and drive down our take-home pay. We may see a dazzling array of products and services spawned by AI, but few of us will be able to buy them."

"In opposing these children’s homes, neighbours resort to language about children in care that they would not use for other groups of people, such as same-sex couples or people who are not white. Children in care are trouble makers, they complain; they bring down house prices, they are not from our community, they make too much noise." Martin Borrow asks why proposals to open new homes, which often for only two or three children, are met with such hostility.

"This part of south-west England, much of which is currently under water, used to be known as the 'land of the summer people'. Historically, frequent flooding was the main reason for purely seasonal occupation in this area bordered by the Bristol Channel and the Mendip, Quantock and Blackdown Hills." Jess Neumann sets out the threat that climate change poses to Somerset.

Lottie Wood explores gender fluidity, rural landscapes and the Women’s Land Army, introducing us to E.M. Barraud's memoir Set My Hand Upon the Plough.

"It is deeply troubling that the drive of Brontë’s Isabella, a survivor of domestic abuse, has been reread to dramatically absolve her abuser. The girl sobbing behind me as the credits rolled attests to the success of this exoneration. Really, she should be crying over the scripting of violent abuse as consensual play." Anna Drury is concerned by Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.

Richard Elliott celebrates a new box set that brings together live and studio recordings of the Scottish folk singer, guitarist and songwriter Dick Gaughan.

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Chris Dillow argues that if government wants to foster economic growth, it will have to fight for it: "Right now, the social transformation needed to raise growth requires the government to face down the powerful interests of, if not capital in general, then at least the more regressive elements of it such as rentiers, monopolists and media barons."

Virginia Heffernan investigates Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon, Edge. She finds that it infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science.

"'Free School Meals' and 'Free School Clothing' were an absolute lifeline for us ... That support meant I could walk through the school gates looking like everyone else, focusing on my education rather than the clothes on my back. It taught me that while education is a right, the cost of accessing it can be a barrier we must actively dismantle." Shaffaq Mohammed on the importance of the Lib Dem amendment, passed by the Lords, that will put a price cap on school uniforms.

Lauren Leek crunches the numbers to see why so many pubs have closed: "So here’s the political economy of pub closures. It is not: people stopped going. It is: pubs became collateral in leveraged buyouts, debt costs were passed down as higher rents and lower investment, and the pubs that couldn’t sustain the extraction closed, while the ones that could were reshaped into higher-margin branded concepts serving a wealthier clientele."

Did climate change lead to greater persecution of witches? York Historian weighs the evidence.

"Whenever a performer had a Muppet on their hand, they never broke character. So all the time in between takes, Gonzo would still be Gonzo and I was still talking to Gonzo, not Dave Goelz, who is the performer of Gonzo. I believed that Gonzo and Rizzo were my friends, and we were on an adventure together. Rizzo in particular, Steve Whitmire, was so funny. We would just play all day long." Kevin Bishop shares his memories of playing Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island with Brian VanHooker.

Wera Hobhouse condemns "shocking and irresponsible" scale of drilling for oil in protected maritime areas

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The United Kingdom is the world’s worst offender when it comes to letting fossil fuel companies drill in protected areas. 

An investigation coordinated by the Environmental Investigative Forum and European Investigative Collaborations has found that the UK has issued production licences that overlap with 13,500km² of protected areas – an area nearly nine times the size of Greater London. 

Wera Hobhouse, Liberal Democrat MP for Bath and a member of the Commons energy security and net zero select committee, told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism that these findings are "deeply troubling" and that the UK's place on the list is "shocking and irresponsibile": 

"Protected areas exist for a reason, and allowing oil and gas exploration within them completely undermines their purpose, putting irreplaceable natural habitats at risk. 

"The revelations of this investigation must weigh heavily on the government as it considers the Rosebank decision. Rosebank may not sit directly within a protected area, but the pipeline built to serve it cuts through a highly sensitive marine protected area, posing clear risks to our marine environment."

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"Sounding like a mob boss when speaking at Trump’s press conference at the weekend, secretary of state Marco Rubio told the world that the message of the Venezuelan intervention was that when this president says he is serious about wanting something, he gets it. The problem for Europe is that the one thing that this President covets above all is Greenland." Simon Nixon argues that Donald Trump’s "Donroe Doctrine" poses an existential threat to NATO and Europe.

Cliff Mitchell accuses Northamptonshire's two Reform-run councils of ignoring the reality of climate change across the county: "As predicted by climate scientists, Northamptonshire is seeing drier summers as well as wetter winters. Droughts are happening more quickly and becoming more intense. When combined with frequent winter floods, this leads to soil damage and erosion, reduced crop yields, and impacts on livestock grazing and biodiversity."

"It might seem silly or not worthy of attention to look into the Trump administration’s aesthetic decisions, all of the gold ornamentations smeared all over the Oval Office and ballrooms and Arc de Trumps, and etc, but the aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to rally people’s energies. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not." Erin Thompson says Trump’s gilded White House makeover is all about power.

Robin Eagles discusses his work identifying Black voters in 18th-century elections.

"The BFI website suggests that Hell is a City is 'unaccountably overlooked; and suggests that it was ‘as important a film as Room at the Top’ ... They put this down to 'critical snobbery towards its solidly commercial director Val Guest' as well the fact that it was one of the very few non-horror films made by Hammer Studios, not known for its high-brow output." David Rudlin watches Hell is a City, which was filmed  largely on location in Manchester and Oldham in the autumn of 1959. 

Lynne About Loughborough goes in search of the town's forgotten Football League club.

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"By restricting jury trials, removing protest rights and expanding surveillance, Labour is entrenching an authoritarian legal infrastructure that a far-right government will not hesitate to exploit." Karl Hansen says Labour is building Farage's state for him.

Phoebe Weston reports on the French ski resorts that are closing as the snow line in the Alps edges higher: "In France, there are today 113 ski lifts totalling nearly 40 miles (63km) in length that have been abandoned, nearly three-quarters of them in protected areas."

Catherine Rampell says Trump is misusing Norman Rockwell's art to promote Gestapo tactics and nativist ideas: "The works have been endlessly parodied since their introduction in 1943. In the internet age, they’ve become ubiquitously memed. (Freedom of Speech, for example, is nowadays widely known as the 'unpopular opinion' meme.) But originally, they served as wartime propaganda, meant to help rally support for America and its cause during the years of war against the Nazis."

"Take Me High's unexpected legacy is to act as a kind of Brummie Rorschach test: what do you see in its depiction of the angular 'new' Birmingham of 1973? An ugly, car-worshipping mess that, like Cliff's career, needed desperate reinvention? An ambitious feat of post-war planning? Or a nostalgic vision of your childhood? It’s a question that becomes more poignant with each landmark razed and every area redeveloped beyond recognition." Shaun Patrick Hand has discovered the Cliff Richard film from 1973.

"Raynor’s efforts simply render the magnificent landscapes of Devon and Cornwall as joyless, grey backdrops to her own ceaseless complaining. The South West Coast Path should sue for defamation of character." Finlay McLaren takes aim at The Salt Path.

Andy Marshall chooses and photographs his all-time best pubs.