'Mods: Shaping a Generation" at New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester

It's a pleasure to see a sign like the one above at the entrance to an exhibition and rarer than it need be.

Today was the 170th birthday of the New Walk Museum and there was lots going on there to celebrate it. I bought my mother a book from the Richard III Society stall and joined Leicester Civic Society, which is something I have long meant to do.

But the purpose of my visit was to see the exhibition on the Mod scene in Leicester and Nottingham. Mods: Shaping a Generation runs until 30 June.

 

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Orphans in the rafters

As is his right in a free country, Lord Bonkers is writing this diary backwards. I started it on Friday with Monday's entry, which means that Sunday appears on Saturday and Saturday will appear on Sunday.

I think that is tolerably clear.

Sunday

I am not afraid to say I blubbed when I watched the fire at Notre Dame, but I soon recovered myself and ordered precautions to be taken at St Asquith’s. The Revd Hughes was sprayed with fire-retardant chemicals and a party of Well-Behaved Orphans, armed with buckets of water, has been stationed in the rafters at every service.

This morning, just as the Revd Hughes was giving it both barrels, the orphans rose as one child and tipped their buckets over Freddie and Fiona in the front pew. The padre was furious, but I defended them as I could have sworn I saw a wisp of smoke rising from that quarter of the church myself.

Now you want to know what Freddie and Fiona were doing in these parts, which means I have to tell you what happened on Saturday. Writing a diary backwards in this manner is strictly against the Diarists’ Code – I believe it was drawn up by Pepys himself – and I will be in the most awful trouble if the Union finds out, so don’t breathe a word.

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• A bicyclist arrives from Kettering

The best article so far on the Lib Dem leadership election

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The Liberal Democrat leadership election has so far failed to catch the imagination.

In part that is because it has not received the media attention it deserves - the latest polls show we are one of four parties who attract the support of just under a quarter of the electorate.

But it is also a reflection of the sudden restoration of our fortunes.

As Stephen Bush said at the start of the contest:

Jo Swinson and Ed Davey, her rival for the Liberal Democrat leadership, have several things in common, but the most important, for the purposes of the contest, is that they both opted not to run last time for family reasons, and have had two years to think about the direction of the party under Vince Cable and how they might do it better. 

Neither really expected to be fighting an election in which they were scrapping over who was best-placed to take charge of a party on the up. ... 

He went on to make this observation about the first hustings:

Having spent so long privately preparing a case to be given control of a fixer-upper, they both struggled to set out why they should be given the keys to a property in good condition. 

The subtext of Davey’s original pitch was essentially “We need a Paddy Ashdown to get out of this mess. I’m your Ashdown”, while the subtext of the Swinson offer was basically “things are bad. We need someone who can expand and build on a wider movement”. 

But the Liberal Democrats don’t look like they need an Ashdown, or to be put at the head of a movement they already look to be leading.

This analysis seems spot on to me, which is why this is the best article on the election I have read.

So farewell then William Simons

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The actor William Simons, best known for playing the amiably lazy Alf Ventress in Hearbeat, has died.

He gets a mention on this blog because he was one of the first two actors I saw live on stage. He and Eric Duffy played the Ugly Sisters in the Watford Palace's Christmas 1966 production of Cinderella.

I remember that it began with the two of them doing a silent comic scene on scooters - I had to be reassured that there was going to be talking.

Before that Simons was a child star. He played Dinah Sheridan and Anthony Steel's son in the films Where No Vultures Fly and West of Zanzibar. You can see the three of them in the photograph above.

His acting career was halted for a while by severe acne and he was later a patron of the charity Changing Faces.

The Hogsmill: Kingston upon Thames's other river

Narrated by Griff Rhys Jones off of the telly, this video shows us the wildlife to be found along the Hogsmill and the community volunteers and conservation organisations working to protect this precious habitat.

It was made by Citizen Zoo.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A bicyclist arrives from Kettering

The only downside of the appearance of a new issue of Liberator is that it signals another trip to Bonkers Hall.

As his lordship explains, we join him at his European election results party. Things are moving quickly in politics at the moment, so we are journeying back to a time when Liberal Democrats still poked fun at Chuka Ummuna.

Monday

The bells of St Asquith’s long ago chimed midnight, but no one shows any sign of going home. I am writing these lines in the Green Ballroom here at the Hall as my European elections celebration party takes place around me.

A cheer goes up. Chris Davies and Jane Brophy are returned in the North West. Another cheer. Caroline Voaden and Martin Horwood are home in the South West. Then a bicyclist arises from Kettering, where the East Midlands account is being conducted, with the welcome news that Joan Hunter Dunn is back in the European Parliament.

Freddie and Fiona are here, wrapped in blankets with their feet in mustard baths. Even so, I fear they have each caught a cold after their soaking in church yesterday morning.

“I have been talking to Chukka, and he is very interested in a pact with the Liberal Democrats,” says Fiona. “Obviously, we’d be the senior party.”

“Chuka?” I ask.

“Umunna!”

“Bless you,” I reply.

Of course, you now want to know how the two of them came to be soaked at Holy Communion yesterday…

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

A documentary on Terry Gilliam's Brazil

As the Criterion site says:

In the dystopian masterpiece Brazil, Jonathan Pryce plays a daydreaming everyman who finds himself caught in the soul-crushing gears of a nightmarish bureaucracy. 

This cautionary tale by Terry Gilliam, one of the great films of the 1980s, has come to be esteemed alongside anti-totalitarian works by the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 

And in terms of set design, cinematography, music, and effects, Brazil is a nonstop dazzler.

This is a good documentary about the film. It even gives us new insights into the well-rehearsed history of Monty Python.

The new issue of Liberator is full of good things

The sharp-eared amongst you will have heard little cries of delight as the new issue of Liberator landed on your neighbours' doormats this morning.

This issue, among others things, questions Ed Davey and Jo Swinson, looks at the overflowing in-tray facing whichever of them wins and celebrates Liberal gains across Europe in last month's elections.

And then there is Radical Bulletin, which gives you the inside story on what is going on in the party.

This time it tries to get to the bottom of the confusion over the use of diversity criteria in the selection of our Euro candidates. And guess which district saw the Liberal Democrats' worst local election results in May. (Clue: we had an MP there until 2015.)

You can download the interrogation of the two leadership candidates from the magazine's website.

While you are there, remember to subscribe to Liberator.

Heather Wheeler should resign as homelessness minister

Heather Wheeler, the homelessness minister, has apologised after the leaking of emails in which she described rough sleepers in her constituency as "the traditional type, old tinkers, knife-cutters wandering through".

The Guardian reports that Stephen Robertson, the chief executive of the Big Issue Foundation, has called on her to resign.

He is right and not only because of her extraordinary racist and dated language. The idea that homelessness is only a problem for traditional travelling people in Britain today is so absurd that she is clearly remotely fitted to do the job.

I had a week's holiday last month and was shocked by the number of people sleeping in tents that I came across along the canal in Nottingham and in the centre of Northampton.

Heather Wheeler should read the Leicester Mercury:

“This time last year, I had everything. I had a house, a job, I was settled and happy. Then it all went wrong"

I encountered her from time to time on the East Midlands segment of the BBC's Sunday Politics and she always struck me as an unpleasant individual.

Here she is attacking the fire brigades union four days after the Grenfell Tower disaster.

An angry exchange on today's show from @HeatherWheeler and @tobyperkinsmp over #grenfelltower #bbcsp.  Full debate:  https://t.co/k93WHuja6g pic.twitter.com/SUZsLPAq05

— BBC Sun Pol Show EM (@BBCSunPolEM) June 18, 2017

Man who robbed Barclays bank with banana is jailed

The Evening Standard wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Woolwich to Thamesmead via Lesnes Abbey

Another London walk with John Rogers.

The long history of spies going into politics

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Further support for my theory that the Conservatives' problem is that they are no longer Conservative came in the shape of a Telegraph front page the other day:

Did Rory Stewart spy for MI6? Intrigue surrounds Tory candidate's past as leadership race intensifies

That the paper thought that revealing that Rory Stewart had served his country in this way would damage him in the eyes of his fellow Tory MPs tells you all you need to know about those MPs.

The subject of spies going into politics is an interesting one and there is an article about it on The Conversation.

As Christopher J. Murphy and Dan Lomas say, some spies have got to the very top. There's Vladimir Putin and the elder President Bush from the KGB and CIA respectively.

The nearest Britain has got to a spy as prime minister is Roy Jenkins, who was at Bletchley Park during the war and later served as chancellor and home secretary under Harold Wilson.

I am more interested in the many near-forgotten British names that crop up in the article: Kenneth Younger, Anthony Courtney, Julian Amery, Douglas Dodds-Parker, Patricia Hornsby-Smith.

And, of course, our own Paddy Ashdown gets a mention.

If you want to know what Paddy was really doing in Geneva, read the tribute Denis MacShane wrote when he died:

After a tour in Northern Ireland he left the army to work for MI6 and was the link-man between the UK and the Swiss for the highly secret cold war Operation Gladio. This set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe ready to be activated if the Red Army swarmed in, as many feared between 1950 and 1990.

Trivial Fact of the Day links Market Harborough and Boy George

I have just got this from a taxi driver who got it from two nuns, so it must be true.

Father O'Dowd, the priest at Our Lady of Victories, Market Harborough, in the Seventies and Eighties, was the uncle of Boy George.

Improvements completed at Stokesay Castle

I seem to have writer's block when it comes to politics at the moment, so here's some good news from the Shropshire Star:

A £620,000 project at one of Shropshire’s most popular historic attractions has been completed. 

English Heritage has spent the last few years on improvement works at Stokesay Castle, with the introduction of a tearoom and better interpretation within the castle, and has now completed the final stage – a refresh of the gardens. 

By the canal in Nottingham

The remains of Tollesbury Pier station

My mother's mother's family all come from Tollesbury, a village on the Blackwater estuary in Essex.

Now something of a yachting resort, it was long an insular place. When it featured in Griffith Rhys Jones's Restoration Village series, my mother told me she had been at Sunday school with one of the women featured and that we were distantly related to the other.

The railway did not reach Tollesbury until the 20th century, when it finally found itself at the end of a branch from Kelvedon.

That line extended past the village ending by the estuary mud at a station optimistically called Tollesbury Pier.There were plans for development there, but they never materialised.

This video shows what little remains of Tollesbury Pier station today.

I have faint memories of visiting the site as a very small boy and of there being more traces of the station in place. But as that was more than 50 years ago, it is hardly surprising.

Colin Blunstone: Wonderful

After the Zombies broke up - and after a short stint in a proper job insurance - Colin Blunstone enjoyed a critically acclaimed but not hugely commercial solo career.

Wonderful was written by his former bandmates Rod Argent and Chris White. I have strong memories of listening to it in 1973, sometimes under the bedclothes on Radio Luxembourg.

So strong are they that I am surprised to find it wasn't a hit.

A 1927 advertisement for a Lichfield drapers

Another pleasing advertisement from my 1927 guide to Lichfield.

Google Street View reveals that the corner of Market Streeet and Dam Street is now occupied by a distinctly ordinary bank building.

 

Six of the Best 869

"We need to discuss these issues; plan for them and deliver a strategy that deals with them. I bet you won’t hear a peep from Tory Leadership contenders about this vital and urgent issue." Richard Kemp on the social care crisis.

Angel Fletcher argues that internships must be paid and openly advertised if all young people are to have fair access to career opportunities.

Roger Hermiston looks at the career of the forgotten Liberal leader Archibald Sinclair.

"Many recent studies have found that children are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD if they are younger than their peers in their classroom." Peter Simons notes the latest research into this controversial diagnosis.

Phil Walker debates whether a dearth of cricket on free-to-air television is to blame for a tepid reaction to the Cricket World Cup and crippling factions within the game.

The London novelist Alexander Baron is celebrated in a new book by Nottingham's Five Leaves Press. Nadia Valman writes about his East End roots.

Boris Johnson is just a chlorinated chicken

Lucy Middleton reports for Metro today:

Tory leadership candidate Boris Johnson upheld his media silence as he attended party hustings today. 

The former foreign secretary, who is the front-runner in the leadership race, chose to arrive at the event through the side entrance of the hotel. 

He then later left the hustings through a discreet rear door, without taking any questions from journalists.

But then Johnson is anxious to avoid journalists during this Conservative leadership campaign:

As a journalist @BorisJohnson would have no doubt been furious at a senior politician being the only one of six to refuse to take part in a hustings in parliament. As a politician he is too scared to face the lobby. I wonder why? #LobbyHustings

— Matt Chorley (@MattChorley) June 14, 2019

And it's not just journalists he wants to avoid.

The Guardian says he has turned sown an invitation to participate in a leadership debate on Channel 4 - with the result that he will be represented by an empty podium.

You could say Johnson is ducking these encounters because he is a chicken, but it is his supporters who really need to take a hard look at themselves.

If your candidate for Britain's next prime minister has to kept from scrutiny at all costs, why in heaven's name are you backing him in the first place?

Anyway, it seems Johnson will not be able to avoid his rivals altogether. The row over his no-show on Channel 4 has led him to accept an invitation to a similar event on BBC.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I welcome guest posts on Liberal England.

As you can see from this list of the 10 most recent , I am happy to consider a wide range of subjects.

If you would like to write a guest post yourself, please drop me an email so we can discuss your idea.

• The importance of respectful relationships between teachers and pupils - Sean Warren and Stephen Bigger
• The Lib Dems and Brexit: How a shot in the arm became a shot in the foot - Neville Farmer
• Drinking with Daniel Farson - James Tarry
• An ideological conflict is coming - time for Liberals to seize the initiative - Luke Jeffery
• Social Liberal Forum conference promotes big ideas - Helen Flynn
• For Liberalism to succeed we must embrace all of its creed - Patrick Maxwell
• Forgotten Victorian folklore collectors: An undiscovered treasure trove - Francis Young
• Joseph Merrick in the cigar factory - Joanne Vigor-Mungovin
• Why we need a GCSE in Natural History - Mary Colwell
• Three unlikely heroes from Grantham suggest a future for smaller towns - Brynley Heaven

Steve Winwood named among the seven top guitarists in 1967

Grateful thanks to tom for tweeting this 1967 Chris Welch article from the Melody Maker.

Who should we see named among the 'Magnificent Seven' guitarists that year but this blog's hero Steve Winwood.

When you consider he is widely regarded as the best British Hammond organ player and our most authentic soul voice - and authenticity was everything to white boys who played soul in the Sixties - that is some achievement.

So here he is playing on Traffic's Dear Mr Fantasy that year.

Willie Donachie scores the greatest own goal of all time

I have long hoped this clip would turn up on YouTube and tonight I found it.

It comes from a friendly Scotland played against Wales before they set off for their famously ill-fated assault on the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.

T. Trevethick, the Nottingham boatbuilder

Having walked the Nottingham Canal from the city's railway station to Meadow Lane Lock and the Trent last summer, the other day I went west along the towpath instead.

One of my discoveries, little more than a mile from the city centre, was a boatbuilder.

An old Lenton Times article tells its story up to 1981.

Why you can't afford a home in the UK

This video from the New Economics Foundation gets it about right.

It shares the analysis of Ian Jack, which I quoted a couple of weeks ago:

A report in the Times last year showed that out of more than 1.7 million applications for residential planning permission granted between 2006 and 2014, fewer than half had been completed after three years. 

According to the Local Government Association in 2016, councils consistently approved more than 80 per cent of major residential planning applications; but the difference between the number of houses being approved and those actually being built was almost 500,000 – ‘and this gap is increasing.’ 

The hardly radical figure of Oliver Letwin identified the real brake on house-building when he published the interim conclusions to his inquiry into low completion rates last year. 

What governed the numbers, he decided, was the absorption rate – "the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house-builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price". 

In other words, the popular argument that it is all the fault of Nimbys and we need to weaken councils' planning powers is a load of nonsense.

The Tiggers change their name again: Welcome to The Independent Group for Change

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First it was The Independent Group. Then it was Change UK. Then it was Change UK - The Independent Group. Then it was ForChange_Now.

Today it became The Independent Group for Change.

The Tiggers, as I shall always think of them, have been forced into this latest change of name following complaints from the owners of the Change.org petition site.

They had hoped to register with the Electoral Commission as Change UK, but the Shropshire Star (who else?) explains that a statement from them sets out how:

Lawyers from Change.org disputed the group’s right to register as "Change UK" with the Electoral Commission ahead of the European elections. 

They explained how “under threat of legal action” by Change.org, which could have seen “each MP being sued personally” and with no time left to register a new party name, Change UK “felt we had no option but to sign a legal agreement” to ditch the name following the election. 

They added: “We are now legally obliged to make a formal application to the Electoral Commission, to amend our name by 15th June, so today we are applying to register ourselves as ‘The Independent Group for Change’ and will await the Electoral Commission’s decision.

This 'new party' business is harder than it looks.

Pennerley: The wettest village in the country

It's never been the same since its lead mine closed, but the Shropshire village of Pennerley has another claim to fame this week.

On Wednesday, says the Shropshire Star, it was the wettest place in the country.

Another report in the paper quotes a resident as saying:

“I’ve been here 20 years now and I’ve never seen flooding like this. It’s been two days of solid rain and we’re all like drowned rats."

If Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine Five is to be believed, such heavy rainfall in the Stiperstones will inevitably lead to the bursting forth of an underground river and the discovery of Roman treasure.

Along the Thames Path from Putney to Richmond

Our guide on this wander through Barnes, Mortlake and Kew.is John Rogers.

Two Nottingham ghost signs

The sign above is on a shop in the Lenton district of Nottingham. As that shop is still open, it may well still be some people's local independent free off licence.

I suppose the one below (to be found just down the road) isn't strictly a ghost sign either, as it's not on a wall. But it's clearly some time since H. Wiltshire & Son operated from those premises.

Six of the Best 868

April Preston thinks you should join the Radical Association.

Brexit, not Trump, is the real threat to the 'Special Relationship' says former US State Department adviser Max Bergmann.

"Of all the talented directors that Green Alliance has had, Tim Beaumont - or, to give him his full title, the Reverend Lord Beaumont of Whitley - was surely the most extraordinary." Green Alliance blog remembers the late Liberal and then Green peer.

Tony Robertson looks back on Nottinghamshire and the miners' strike of the 1980s.

Richie Unterberger tells the story of the record producer Joe Boyd and his company Witchseason: "Like some other Americans who made an impact on the British rock scene - such as producer Shel Talmy, famous for his work with the early Who, Kinks, and Pentangle - Boyd wasn’t inhibited by expectations of how things should or shouldn’t work overseas."

"'Draw death' seems to loom over the game, much as it did in the 1920s, when José Raúl Capablanca, the great Cuban player, proposed making the game more technically challenging and draws less likely by expanding the board and including two new pieces ... Gone are the days of Kasparov’s dynamic attacks, the story goes. Instead, thanks to computers, we have entered a period of solid, overprepared chess, doomed to draw after draw." Ben Jackson reviews two books on chess.

Jethro Tull: Weathercock

Between 1977 and 1979 Jethro Tull produced three albums with a strong folk influence: Songs from the Wood, Heavy Horses and Stormwatch.

They became steadily darker, imbued with a sense of impending ecological catastrophe - in those days we worried about a new ice age and the oil running out rather than global warming.

This is the closing track from Heavy Horses. Perhaps it sounds a little twee today, but it is hard not to like.

Four abandoned tunnels on the Manchester and Milford Railway

The Manchester and Milford Railway, says Wikipedia, was a Welsh railway company, intended to connect the industrial areas of Northwest England with a deep-water port on Milford Haven, giving an alternative to the Port of Liverpool.

Its object was to be achieved through linking existing railways, and the only new track the company built was between Aberystwyth and Carmarthen in rural West Wales.

That line closed in 1965, and this video sets out to find what remains of four tunnels on the line.

Andrew Adonis on the case for reversing Beeching

Andrew Adonis - Remain ultra turned Corbyn loyalist - has done his best to upset all sides recently, but he knows his stuff when it comes to railways.

Yesterday he gave a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on 'Reversing Beeching'.

The first half dealt with HS2 - a project I find hard to love and one that may not long survive the arrival of a new Conservative prime minister.

Reading the recent Independent article  by Jon Stone, however, I suspect it is one I should try to love. Certainly, Stone makes a better case for HS2 than any politician has done.

It is the second half of Adonis's speech, where he turns to reversing Beeching, that appeals to me:

The case for a systematic – not piecemeal – policy of reversing the worst mistakes of Beeching is now overwhelmingly strong. 

Look at the last decade. London Overground, reinventing and extending the North London Line which was a designated Beeching closure which didn’t happen although the service became virtually non-existent, is one of the most successful public transport upgrades in history. 

The Welsh Government’s reopening of the Valley line from Ebbw Vale to Cardiff and the Scottish Government’s reopening of the Waverley line from Edinburgh to Galashiels and Tweedbank, have also been great successes. 

The problem on all three of these routes hasn’t been viability but overcrowding, with traffic greatly exceeding projections.

And who could resist this proposal?:

The Burton-on-Trent to Leicester line, goods-only since passenger services were withdrawn in the 1960s, would serve the towns of Coalville, Ashby-de-la-Zouch and Swadlincote among others. 

This line comes into Leicester through heavily built up districts where there could also be stations. With new and reopened stations in the towns and Leicester, this would serve a rail neglected population of about 150,000 on this line alone.

Adonis has thought of how this programme can be paid for too:

The M4 Relief Road has just been cancelled, saving £1.4bn. The ludicrious tunnel proposed for the A303 under Stonehenge, which I cancelled a decade ago but has resurfaced for political reasons at a projected cost of £2.3bn, should also be cancelled. 

Add in a few other politically motivated but unjustified road schemes and you have an initial £5bn Reverse Beeching fund. More if you can secure local contributions and other regeneration funding. 

That’s enough to make a bold start on the first set of Reverse Beeching projects, which should be agreed through a competitive evaluation next year.

He goes on to point out that there would be more money still for these schemes if Brexit were cancelled.

Jim Wallace says a Boris Johnson leadership would cause problems for the Scottish Tories

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Lord Wallace of Tankerness - the former Scottish deputy first minister and Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland Jim Wallace - is interviewed by The Press and Journal.

He suggests that Boris Johnson becoming Conservative leader would cause problems for the party in Scotland and its leader Ruth Davidson:

"I think the Scottish Tories will have a problem. Ruth especially will have a credibility problem. In that final debate she did in the referendum she basically called him a liar. 

"I suppose in politics today you can actually stand up two years later and say that he is god’s gift to humanity, but I do genuinely think she might find a real credibility problem because a lot of the things she said will come back to haunt her."

Eden Hazard: 10 of his best goals for Chelsea

Eden Hazard has signed for Real Madrid. I wish him well.

He is one of the very best players to appear for Chelsea in the 50 or more years I have been following them.

Here are 10 of his finest goals for the club.

The last days of Market Harborough

I had very limited broadband access for two or three weeks, but thanks to Theresa and an engineer from BT all is well again. It's just that I can't think of anything to write.

While I do, here is one of the many photographs I took of Market Harborough station in the last few days before the track through it was realigned.

In praise of Never Mind the Bar Charts and Tim Farron

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The latest edition of Mark Pack and Stephen Tall's podcast Never Mind the Bar Charts hit the net the other day.

It's a good listen - and not just because I get a mention.

Particularly valuable is the interview with Tim Farron, who has some wise things to say about what we should look for in a new leader and ask the people who want to be that leader/

And it is good to hear Tim getting credit for reacting to the EU referendum result in the right way and keep in the Liberal Democrat show on the road. What would Norman Lamb have done in the same circumstances?

Never Mind the Bar Charts, incidentally, supports my contention that a podcast needs two voices to work.

A Lib Dem opportunity? Suffolk has doubts about Boris Johnson

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As Paul Geater notes in the East Anglian Daily Times, Conservative activists see Boris Johnson as their best hope of winning the next election.

But he is not sure they are right:

However after being asked about the leadership by people who are not, or at least are no longer, Conservative activists, I am starting to wonder whether Mr Johnson is really the asset that some seem to think. 

At the Suffolk Show I came across several business people (largely linked in some way to agriculture) who are really, really worried about Mr Johnson - and said to me that they would vote for anyone BUT him. 

His comments about business last year struck a chord (I'm certainly not going to repeat what he said!), meaning that many see him as very much an anti-business candidate. 

Brexit is an issue that many people running small businesses continue to be worried about - and suggestions that it might be acceptable to come out without a deal to meet the October 31 deadline leave them cold.

Geater goes on to note that the Liberal Democrats have already selected a candidate for the Suffolk Coastal constituency, Julia Ewart, and concludes:

If Ms Ewart continues to make her voice heard, then come the next election Conservative Dr Therese Coffey would be wise to be as aware of the threat from the centre as she will be from the Brexiteers.

Wanstead to Barking along the River Roding

John Rogers is our guide from Wanstead, through Manor Park and Ilford, to Barking.

Chuka Umunna can be heard singing the theme tune of Mr Bean

Photo: Gerhard Heeke

Anxious to know more about Chuka Umunna, widely touted today as a future convert to the Liberal Democrats, I read a Financial Times profile of him from 2013.

To be honest, it left me little clearer about a politician whose appeal and motivations are something of a mystery to me. He was once billed as the British Obama, yet he went to an expensive private school.

But it did yield our Trivial Fact of the Day.

Umunna's treble, recorded while he was a chorister at Southwark Cathedral, can be head singing the theme tune of Mr Bean.

End of the road for Rutland's only department store

Sad news, but it has won BBC News our Headline of the Day Award.

On a happier note, here is a Rutland vending machine.

Blue plaque installed at Richard Jefferies' birthplace

A blue plaque was put up today at Coate Farm, Swindon, the birthplace of the Victorian writer Richard Jefferies.

Coate Farm is now a museum dedicated to Jefferies. Its director Mike Pringle told the Swindon Advertiser:

"This is fantastic, it’s an acknowledgement that someone great was here. Richard Jefferies was a big name in his day but it seemed like his time had come and gone for a while. 

"However, it feels like society is coming round to him again with climate change on the agenda and ideas about re-wilding and being out in nature becoming more popular – these things were all hugely important to him and his work. 

"I think he would have really enjoyed the fact that we are celebrating the things he loved as much as we are celebrating him."

Where the swans are tasty geezers: Victoria Mills, Wellingborough

As rail replacement coaches have been a theme of the past week, here is a structure I first saw from one of the things on the way from Market Harborough to Bedford.

Victoria Mills stands by the Nene on the edge of Wellingborough. It was never powered by the river, but grain was delivered to it by water until 1969.

The building is still in use and forms part of a complex operated by Whitworths.

But there is more to the area than that. I was surprised to find a small pleasure park on the other side of the river.

And then there were the birds - smart gulls and a remarkable quantity of swans.

They are the guvnors. Tasty geezers. Get lairy and they will show you whose manor it is.

The geese on the campus at York had the same air of owning the place. They never attacked anyone, but they gave the impression that they might at any moment.

Carly Simon: We Have No Secrets

On Twitter yesterday I listed the five albums I have played more than any other. Not my choice of the best or my current favourites, but the five I have played the most.

No Secrets by Carly Simon made the list.

I suppose if there were an event for albums by females singer-songwriters released in 1971, Carly Simon would win bronze while Joni Mitchell and Carole King disputed gold and silver for Blue and Tapestry respectively.

These days I play Blue more than No Secrets, but I doubt it has made up the gap yet. No Secrets reminds me of the summer that I bought a house and won a council seat, when I played it endlessly.

You're So Vain was played to death decades ago, and the album has a couple of up-tempo numbers, influenced by James Taylor, that do not show Carly Simon to best advantage.

But it also includes some gems, and the title track is one of them.

HSTs over the level crossing at Oakham

There have been no trains from Market Harborough this week as the work of realigning the tracks through the station is finished.

Trains from St Pancras to the North have taken the scenic route over the Welland Viaduct. Those that have still called at Leicester have astounded passengers by approaching the city from the north.

I have got to work and back with the help of a replacement coach service. Things have run remarkably smoothly - there was a service every 15 minutes - and the free coffee and pastries certainly helped.

So impressed was I that I voluntarily used the coach service today on the way to Oakham so I could photograph the diverted services going over the level crossing and through the station there.