Thomas Tapling's stamp collection

I had a work meeting near Euston today. On the way back I stopped at the British Library to look at their bookshop and have a cup of tea.

Next to the cafe there is a philatelic display. And guess what is at the heart of it? Thomas Tapling's collection.

It is particularly strong on stamps from Wurtemburg, incidentally.

What next for humanity?

Now there's a question.

Mick Hume introduces Spiked's "survey of writers, thinkers, academics and artists": Enlightening the Future 2024: Key Challenges for the Next Generation.

There are some interesting contributions, and maybe this will help to rectify the lack of vision that now haunts British politics. The days when we had to fear people who wanted to impose ideological blueprints on us have long passed.

The exercise is sponsored by Orange. I have always thought their "The future's bright. The future's Orange" commercials would make perfect Liberal Democrat party political broadcasts.

The way we live now

Here is a depressing statistic from an article on the BBC website: 48 per cent of telephone subscribers are now ex-directory.

No doubt this has a lot to do with a wish to avoid sales calls. But it may also tell us something about the atomised state of life in Britain today. In America the figure is a lot lower.

There is a telling quotation from someone in the article:

"The people I want to contact me, I would give them my number. Why would I want anyone else to contact me?"

Thomas Keay Tapling

A little local history from my files:

Leicestershire MP and cricketer's £10 million stamp collection celebrates one hundred years on display.

One of the world's greatest stamp collections - The Tapling Collection, donated by nineteenth-century cricketer and MP Thomas Keay Tapling - celebrates one hundred years on exhibition on October 5th.

Thomas Tapling was a wealthy Victorian businessman, running the family carpet making business along with his duties as MP for the Harborough Division in Leicestershire from 1886-1891. He was also a first-class cricketer, turning out for Trinity College, Cambridge, Trinity College Long Vacation Club and Cambridge University Long Vacation Club. In 1886 he also played for M.C.C against Cambridge University. His cricketing prowess also took him on tour to India and Ceylon with G.F. Vernon's side in 1889, a tour that did much to to advance interest in cricket in the region.

Tapling was Tory MP for Harborough. He died at the age of 35 at Gumley Hall. The subsequent by-election was won for the Liberals by my hero J. W. "Paddy" Logan, and they held the seat until 1918.

Back to Walsall

In March I wrote about Walsall's New Art Gallery. Now I have come across a book which tells the family story behind the Garman Ryan collection it houses.

The Rare and the Beautiful: The Lives of the Garmans tells the story of the Garman family, including an amazing cast of partners and lovers: Roy Campbell, Jacob Epstein, Laurie Lee, Peggy Guggenheim, Lucian Freud.

In many ways they were an unattractive crew, living exquisite lives while their children were neglected, but the book lays bare a fascinating slice of twentieth century cultural and political life.

Sean Woodward and spanking

Only it's Shaun Woodward. Sorry.

What do you make of this?

edna burtin [20/7/2005]
i am a mother of 2 boys, and it is very important that they get smacked when they are naughty, which is very often. once when i was in a supermarket with jason, my oldest son (11) he was baing very cheeky and rude so i pulled down his trowsers and his pants, bent him over and smacked his bare bottom very hard.

And once when i had friends round jason and alex were fighting so i grabbed alex's arm, apologised to my friends pulled down his trowsers and pants and put him over my knee and spanked him hard across his bare backside, i did the same to jason.

Or this?

lola charles [27/11/2005]
I have 3 children, aged 6 months, 2 years, and 5 years. My 5 year old boy has been smacked on a clothed bottom with my hand from an early age for backtalking and other serious things. Recently he has got extremely rude and I am wondering weather I should start using an implement to smack him with, and smacking him bare bottomed. I would smack him bare in public if he was playing up. I am interested to see what other parents think I should do. I have heard a successful dicipline techniqe is putting a bar of natural soap in a naughty childs mouth for 10 minutes works well. Natural soap contains no harmful chemicals and tastes worse than un-natural soap. Have other parents tried this and does it work? Should I hit my 5 year olds bare bottom with an implement?
Thanks
Loving Mother xxx

Or this?

Emma [22/5/2006]
I am 14 and my mum hasn't smacked me since I was 11. Last week I was cheeky to her whilst my friends were round. After they had gone she told me if I ever do that again she will take me straight upstairs and smack my bottom like she used to. I knew she meant it too, and I will never do that again as I remember it was the most humiliating thing to have friends hear my bare bottom being smacked.

All these must come from a fetish site, you will say. And if the spelling is bad, it can't be easy to type with only one hand.

Not a bit of it. You can find all these postings in a discussion on the website of the Labour MP for St Helens South, Sean Woodward. You can find them in his forum on the subject "Should parents be allowed to smack their children?"

I suppose that as this is all fantasy it is ultimately harmless. But it ought to be an embarrassment to Woodward to have it on his website: he tells us in his introduction to the forum:

As a Trustee of ChildLine I am all too well aware of the problems of child abuse in Britain.

The moral is that while it is good for an MP to have a website and to use it to encourage debate, he really ought to read it occasionally.

And if Woodward is too busy to read it himself, he could always ask his butler.

Later. I am in danger of allowing just as many as sexual fantasies to be posted as Shaun Woodward did. I have deleted the most egregious of them and closed the comments on this posting.

A Canterbury Tale

There is more than one way of getting close to your ancestors.

Follow the Old Road and as you do, think of them; they climbed Chillingbourne Hill just as you did. They sweated and paused for breath just as you did today.

And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, and the broom and the heather, you're seeing what their eyes saw. You ford the same rivers, the same birds singing. And when you lie flat on your back and rest, and watch the clouds sailing as I often do, you're so close to those other people, that you can hear the thrumming of the hoofs of their horses, and the sound of the wheels on the road, and their laughter, and talk, and the music of the instruments they carried.

And they turned the bend in the road, where they too saw the towers of Canterbury. I feel I have only to turn my head to see them on the road behind me.

The film of the week on television has to be Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale. It is on BBC2 on Tuesday, starting at 1 p.m.

As Mark Duguid writes on screenonline:

The film is structured as a mystery story, but its real purpose is to add a spiritual dimension to the propaganda message of earlier films like 49th Parallel (1941) and "...One of Our Aircraft is Missing" (1942). There are no Nazis in A Canterbury Tale and, although the war provides its backdrop, the focus is on identifying a distinctively moral and spiritual English identity, in direct opposition to the harsh material objectives of fascism.

The film offers a vision of an England with its spiritual roots in the countryside exemplified by the beauty of Kent - the county of Powell's birth - an England which its increasingly urban population have neglected for too long. Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the film charts the progress of a select band of modern pilgrims. As the trio of land girl Alison (Sheila Sim), American officer Bob (John Sweet) and British officer Peter (Dennis Price) converge on Canterbury Cathedral, each receives a 'blessing', bringing his or her most fervent wish to life. The film's peculiar power owes much to Eric Portman who, as the enigmatic Thomas Colpeper - local Justice of the Peace, prophet and one of Powell's many screen alter-egos - delivers an intense and complex performance, just as he had in 49th Parallel three years earlier.

There are links to all sorts of review and articles on The Powell & Pressburger Pages, but really I suggest you just tape it or watch it. It is an extraordinary film.

Sunday reading

The usual recommendations can be found here and here.

Topical Trivial Fact of the Day

Ainsley Harriott was a ballboy at Wimbledon in 1972, says The First Post.

"Game to Nastase."

"Huh, huh, huh. What are you like?"

Sir Menzies over Kabul

The BBC reports:

Liberal Democrats leader Sir Menzies Campbell said he would support plans to send more UK troops to Afghanistan.

He said there was "no option" but to send more because current troop numbers were not enough to complete the job.

Fine, but wouldn't it be a good idea to decide what "the job" is first?

Just a little prick with a needle

There is a report in yesterday's Liberal Democrat News about Liz Lynne MEP meeting a delegation of leaders of European nursing associations in Brussels. It says:

They went to the European Parliament to thank her for her work in trying to achieve EU-wide legislation to cut down on the amount of injuries suffered by healthcare workers while handling needles and other medical sharps.

It is natural to try to do good when you have the power, but I am left wondering why this is a matter for the European Parliament. If there are problems in the NHS why hasn't the British government acted already? Come to that, why does it need legislation at all? What are NHS managers doing about it?

The danger is that the negotiations and compromises needed to produce a law that is acceptable across the EU will take too long, so if there are problems in a particular country they will not be solved.

Years ago, when Neil Kinnock was a commissioner, he was trying to have bull-bars banned from the front of cars across Europe. Look out of the window and you will still see cars still driving round with them on today. If it had been left to Westminster, they could have gone long ago.

Don't take the London bombers too seriously

There is a good article by Munira Mirza on Spiked. It takes a line I have not seen argued elsewhere:

What we see in these videos are not soldiers in a war, but self-righteous young men who believe that their own moral certainty absolves them of the need to explain themselves properly.

Nobody elected Khan or Tanweer. As far as we know, they did not have relations with anyone in Palestine, Bosnia or Chechnya. Indeed, these two men did not even bother to ask their family, friends or neighbours what they thought.

At the local mosque near where three of the bombers grew up, one of the committee members, Muhboob Hussein, reacted with anger to 7/7: ‘This is not Islam, this is not jihad, these people are not Muslim. This man [Khan] never came to our mosque....’

Obviously, Khan or Tanweer did not show much interest in trying to win people over to their worldview - they thought that ‘democratically elected governments’ had less claim to act on behalf of people than they did.

"Now bugger off"

Today's House Points from Liberal Democrat News.

Parks posers
An exchange from Monday’s culture questions. Nicholas Soames complained that an excess of commercial events is damaging London’s royal parks. The minister, David Lammy, replied that Soames’s tastes “may well not be the same as those of Londoners” and that the Prince’s Trust concert and Live8 show that the Royal Parks Agency has been very successful.

We know what to make of this, don’t we? The forces of reaction took on modern London and were vanquished.

Soames fits that script admirably: the grandson of Winston Churchill, he has the look of a man who has eaten a whole gamekeeper for breakfast. But Lammy, the MP for funky, multiracial Tottenham, is not the straightforward Londoner (or ‘Nylondoner’ as Ken Livingstone would put it) many think him.

True, he was born in a working-class area of North London, but he won an Inner London Educational Authority choral scholarship to The King's School, Peterborough, and sang in the cathedral choir there. Add to this a postgraduate degree from Harvard, and he becomes a more complicated character than he made himself sound.

Besides, Soames has a point. Lammy later claimed there is the potential “to raise even more revenue from our parks”. But isn’t the point of a park that it is somewhere that stands apart from the business of getting and spending? If it is just a stretch of ground to make the maximum profit from, it ceases to be a park at all.

Nor are cathedrals exempt from this view. Culture questions were followed by the incongruous questions to the Church Commissioners. Even more incongruously, they were answered by Stuart Bell. He happily told the house that cathedrals generate £91m a year and support 2600 jobs.

Granted one of the best things about cathedrals is that they are not too holy: there is always someone rehearsing music or a bit of building work going on. But Bell does not understand the point of them any more than Lammy understands parks.

Finally, back to Nicholas Soames. As a very small boy he escaped from Nanny and wandered the corridors until he found Churchill. “Is it true, Grandpapa, that you are the greatest man in the world?” he lisped. “Yes,” came the reply. “Now bugger off.”

Prescott after a resignation

Back in May 1994 I posted this anecdote on my anthology blog Serendib. It describes what Sir Anthony Eden did after he resigned as prime minister over Suez. What was then a pleasing trivial connection may be about to become a grand irony or a satisfying closure.

An exhausted Eden resigned on January 9 1957 and he and his wife set sail from Tilbury to New Zealand (which had been a staunch ally) on January 18. The ship was the RMS Rangitata and the Edens' cabin steward was John Prescott, who sometimes fought on-deck boxing matches for the entertainment of the passengers, sometimes won them, and sometimes was presented with his prize (beer or wine) by the ex-prime minister or his wife.

As someone has said, there is a play to be written about an elderly Eden expounding his wisdom to the young Prescott.

Headline of the Day

From the Shropshire Star:

Drinker jailed after he shot himself

Don Foster on John Prescott

It is ludicrous to say that John Prescott was not involved in the planning process for casinos.

There were numerous links between Mr Prescott's department and the casino legislation. John Prescott chaired the Domestic Affairs Cabinet Committee, with links to the independent advisory panel recommending the location of new casinos to the Government. The ODPM was also responsible for establishing a new planning category for casinos and in its report makes detailed comments on the regeneration benefits of casinos.

It is clear that there are still serious questions that require full and frank answers from Mr Prescott.

Quite.

Iain Dale will be on Newsnight later tonight to discuss this affair - see his blog for the latest developments. Part of its interest is that the running is being made by bloggers, with the BBC taking a more cautious approach.

Prescott on the way out?

Tomorrow's Daily Mail reports that John Prescott is coming under pressure on the following grounds (some more damning than others):

• Gambling insiders revealed he was the "driving force" behind the Government's plans for new super casinos;
• He met Mr Anschutz on seven occasions to discuss regeneration of the Dome
• Cabinet ministers are worried Mr Prescott is "losing it";
• Blairite PR guru Matthew Freud played a pivotal role in getting Mr Anschutz access to Government ministers;
• Mr Prescott visited a giant casino in Australia at the height of the row over the Gambling Bill in 2004 - although the visit was blandly described at the time as a 'regeneration site visit'.

Meanwhile, bloggers - notably Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale - are reopening the questions about his private life.

Leonard Cheshire and Market Harborough

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that the Leonard Cheshire charity is thinking of changing its name because no one has heard of the former war hero these days. Among the proposed new names are A-BL UK and eQual UK.

Another strategy might be to try educating people. As a first effort in that direction, let me mention that Cheshire ran his first home at Gumley Hall near Market Harborough. (Don't look for it; it's not there any more.)

The wide verges of the Great North Road

Last Friday's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News was written before I went on holiday.

Demob happy? You could say that.

Fishy stuff

Poor Ben Bradshaw. He has put so much effort into pleasing the prime minister, but still finds himself with a boss who is younger, brighter and prettier than he is.

Worse, David Milliband got to be secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs through talent. Bradshaw has made it only to parliamentary under-secretary of state for environment, food and rural Affairs and won himself an unfortunate reputation along the way. “The ludicrously biddable Member for Exeter” is one of the kinder descriptions applied to him.

Hansard says parliamentary under-secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, but Bradshaw is really the minister for fish. Put a question about tench, hake or guppy in the Commons, and it is Bradshaw who will answer you.

Last Thursday John Greenway asked about “the movement restrictions imposed on fish farms in North Yorkshire”. Moving fish? Perhaps we have come across a forgotten chapter of agricultural history here.

For centuries the North Riding was famed for its fish. They were fattened in the Dales, then driven to London along the wide verges of the Great North Road to be sold at Billingsgate. Most fishdrovers’ inns have long since been renamed, but memories of the trade are still to be found in place names along the route. There is a Coddington just outside Newark, and it is no coincidence that you find Finsbury Park near the southern end of what is now the A1.

Bradshaw mentioned none of this, talking instead about viral haemorrhagic septicaemia. When your days are filled with viral haemorrhagic septicaemia, you must wonder if a career in politics is all you thought it would be.

This session was remarkable for the number of Lib Dem MPs taking part. There were nine, with questions on meaty subjects like climate change and water resources. It was a sign of how central the environment now is to British politics and of how it is we who are making the running on it.

But caring for the environment is not all about hairshirts. I wish someone would convert the Emperor Ming’s Jag to run on green fuel. Then he could drive it again, which would make him happier and be good publicity – as long as he looked out for the fishdrovers.

Visiting The Bog

If you visit Shropshire be sure to call in at The Bog Visitor Centre - more pictures here.

It is open every weekend until the end of October.