Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor has died at the age of 96.Once described by the BBC as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene,” Mr. Leigh Fermor was as renowned for his feats of derring-do as for his opulent prose.Latterly Leigh Fermor was best known as a travel writer, particularly for the two volumes - A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water - describing his journey as an 18-year-old across a Europe on the verge of war. The good news is that he did complete the final part of the trilogy and it will be published.
After joining the Irish Guards during World War II, he was judged to be promising officer material for the Special Operations Executive, the unit created by Winston Churchill to wage war by unconventional means. Mr. Leigh Fermor’s superiors deemed his fluency in modern Greek useful in leading resistance to German occupation in the Aegean.
For 18 months he lived disguised as a shepherd in Crete, emerging from the mountains with a team that in 1944 kidnapped Gen. Heinrich Kreipe, the island’s German commander. The operation provoked brutal reprisals toward the local population. It earned Mr. Leigh Fermor the Distinguished Service Order and later became the basis for the 1957 English film “Ill Met by Moonlight,” directed by Michael Powell and starring Dirk Bogarde.
Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone today called for Jane Collins, Chief Executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), to resign after the BBC published evidence that key criticisms of the hospital were withheld from an inquiry into the death of Baby Peter. In a further twist today, claims by the hospital that they subsequently did provide all the evidence to a second investigation were denied by the person who ran that investigation.Lynne Featherstone added on her own blog:
Haringey was rightly in the spotlight as the lead agency in the wake of the Baby P tragedy – but perhaps that spotlight detracted from the terribly dangerous conditions in which vulnerable children were being left by the management failures by GOSH.For the full background to Great Ormond Street's involvement in this case, Lynne commended a report on the BBC London pages.
The fact that these failings – this vital information – never reached the Serious Case Review because it was removed from the addendum submitted to the Serious Case Review is a scandal. Dr Collins is the author of the addendum.
I have called for an investigation into the withholding of this vital information and wait to see whether real justice will be done.
Union members at the Shropshire Star newspaper are to be balloted over strike action.This is a disaster! What will I find to blog about?
Union members met on Wednesday over plans for compulsory redundancies at the newspaper
"I am the only Stamford man living who can remember the bull-running in the streets of the town. I can remember my mother showing me the bull and the horses and men and dogs who chased it. She kept the St Peter's Street - the building that was formerly the Chequers Inn at that time and she showed me the bull-running sport from a bedroom window. I was only four years old then, but I can clearly remember it all. The end of St Peter's Street (where it was joined by Rutland Terrace) was blocked by two farm wagons, and I saw the bull come to the end of the street and return again."So James Fuller Scholes told a newspaper in 1928, just before he died at the age of 94.
Julia Donaldson has been appointed the new Children's Laureate and celebrated her achievement with a spectacularly silly statement.the most successful recent children's books, marked her appointment as Children's Laureate yesterday with a call to arms against "pushy parents", describing them as "a pain" who take the enjoyment out of reading.My mother taught me to read before I went to school and it was only ever teachers who threatened the pleasure I got from it.
"I don't believe you should push your children too hard. They are so sensitive," the author said. "If they are not ready to read it can be detrimental and it is more likely they will be worse off. I really find pushy parents a pain. I have met a lot in my time and while it is important to read, it should be enjoyable. It should be done for pleasure."
"It is never too early to start enchanting children with books. It is hard to believe Julia Donaldson would discourage parents from reading with their children from the earliest possible age. The trouble is, we can become so paranoid about them being able to read, that we sometimes forget they have to want to in the first place.
We regularly find children who, at age five, have given up on themselves as readers, usually because they have not been exposed to books. My advice to parents is to read to your child from as early as possible and don't stop when they have learnt to read for themselves."
Business Secretary Vince Cable has said the government is willing to take "further action with tax on banks" if they do not increase lending to small and medium-sized enterprises.It has been fashionable to say that Vince looks unhappy being in government. My theory is that he always looks like that and thoroughly enjoys wielding a bit of power.
Towards the end of the Second World War Brenda Rawnsley and her husband Derek had the idea of bringing contemporary art to young children who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to see ‘good’ work. Within a few years Brenda had set up School Prints Ltd to sell original lithographs to schools and had commissioned several of the most important living artists for her scheme.Searching the web when I came home I came across the video above. It is by Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England fame, who seems to have had much the same reaction as me.
Brenda Rawnsley sought the advice and assistance of the art historian Herbert Read and between them they chose the artists. The printing was undertaken by the Baynard Press from stones or zinc plates drawn by the artists, who were asked to use no more than six colours. The prints, being original lithographs, were often the first real art seen by young people of that period and are typical of their time.
BBC News reports:An NHS trust in Leicestershire has said a contract to build part of a new hospital has been terminated.Local Lib Dem councillor Phil Knowles tells this blog:
NHS Leicestershire County and Rutland had been using construction firm Modcon UK Ltd for the Day Case Unit at St Luke's Hospital in Market Harborough.
Work had faced a number of delays and health bosses issued an ultimatum last month.
The trust said it was now taking legal advice over the possibility of recouping costs from Modcon.
"The platitudes and I'm sorry's in the trust press release will have been sincerely made but they count for nothing in the midst of yet more problems and broken promises.
This scheme it seems now won't happen till early 2012, what assurances can be given of that new deadline being met? If the costs of third party contractors to make this facility usable are over and above the allocated funds for this section of the build, will the cost impact on the overall £9.5 million for the total scheme?
There are so many more questions. Someone at the very top of the Trust needs to accept responsibility and to get hold of this whole situation as it rapidly descends into a circus and bring the scheme to provide Harborough with its new hospital facility to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion."
"My Papers Are Not In Order, and so I'm not going to the party conference." The Bringer of Tea explains why the row over Cowley Street and the police claiming a veto over who attend the Liberal Democrat Conference really matters.We are undoubtedly entering into a difficult period. Cool heads will be required all round. Despite occasional blips, I know that strike levels remain historically low, especially in the private sector. In fact, until March this year the number of days lost through strikes was lower than at any time since 1931. And of course the right to strike is a fundamental principle. On that basis, and assuming this pattern continues, the case for changing strike law is not a compelling one.But it is hard to see what is so alarming here. If strikes were to impose serious damage to our economic fabric, the pressure on the government to bring in new legislation would ratchet up.
However, should the position change, and should strikes impose serious damage to our economic and social fabric, the pressure on us to act will ratchet up. That is something which both you, and certainly I, would wish to avoid.
I last occupied my present office a third of a century ago when I worked for John Smith when he was Secretary of State in the Callaghan government. We tried to put through legislation on worker participation, following the Bullock report on the German model.
That is long forgotten. But the underlying philosophy is carried forward on employee owned companies, like John Lewis and Arup, in social enterprises, coops and mutuals. I want to encourage these developments and we are looking at legislation to strengthen the ‘third sector’ of employers.The moral is that you should take the time to read original sources and not rely on the headlines.
For Stamford was erst a university town of renown whose splendid colleges rivalled both those of Oxford and Cambridge and even at one period threatened to supersede them, and probably would have done so but for powerful and interested political intrigues.And in Memorials of Stamford (1867) Mackenzie Walcott commented on the town's resemblance to Oxford:
The likeness must have been most striking when the halls of the Monastic Houses of Peterborough, Crowland, Sempringham, and Vaudey, and Brazenose College, were thronged with students, and an academical look was given to the streets by the flowing gowns various hoods.Sadly, this story has grown greatly in the telling over the centuries. The truth, as explained by Martin Smith in Stamford Myths and Legends (where the quotations above can be found) is that a group of Pelagians broke away from Oxford between 1333 and 1335, establishing themselves first in Northampton and then in Stamford.
the group of teachers and students was never sufficiently large, or established, to be considered a proper university. Many students returned to Oxford prior to 1335, and only seventeen masters, six parish priests and fourteen students were found in the last inquisition.I suspect the legend has grown because Stamford looks so much as though it ought to be a university town. There were hopes that one could be established there in the expansion of the 1960s and again more recently when a university was planned for the county, but that went to Lincoln instead. There is even an earlier and less well founded legend that there was a university in Stamford long before the birth of Christ.
Another week with Lord Bonkers, who was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10, comes to a close.
