Being a DJ? Turns out it's a less than poptastic business.
Aided by heavy rotation on Radio 1, with whose DJs it must have struck a chord, this reached no. 34 in the UK singles chart in 1973.
Harry Chapin, a talented singer-songwriter, died in a car crash at the age of 38.
The judges decided to have the trifle.
Here's a remarkable quotation from a judge that I found in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (24 July 1940).
After a defendant had been found not guilty of manslaughter and of dangerous driving, Mr Justice Stable said:
"I hope this will be a warning to him and I hope that he and other members of the public will appreciate that during June the whole forces of the German Empire succeeded in killing exactly 100 fewer people in this island with bombs than were killed by motorists by accidents."
With the Leicester Mercury reporting a new push to restore passenger services to the railway line from Leicester to Burton upon Trent, it's time to visit it again with Our History Underfoot.
In May we saw the line between Burton and Coalville, which hasn't carried any goods traffic for two years and is already showing signs of decay.
This time we go east from Coalville about half the way to Leicester. Matt sees, or at least hears, more quarry traffic than he expected and comes across relics of the district's early railway history.
A third video will complete his journey to Leicester.
"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.
Kevin Keegan made his debut for Scunthorpe United at the age of 17 and played for them for three seasons in the old fourth division. Word soon got round that he was a talent, and managers and scouts from many big clubs came to watch him. Perhaps discouraged by his short stature, none of them took their interest further.
But Bill Shankly did sign him for Liverpool before the start of the 1971/2 season. What made Keegan's name was that Shankly put him straight into the first team, playing just off the tall Welsh striker John Toshack rather than in the midfield role he filled at Scunthorpe, and he was an immediate success. A year later he was playing for England under Alf Ramsey, who did make some funky selections in the dying months of his reign.
During his time at Liverpool, Keegan won three league titles, the European Cup, the FA Cup and the Uefa Cup twice. By 1976 he was England's captain and best player, and the following year he left to play for Hamburg.
This was an era when hardly any British footballers played abroad, but Keegan made a huge success of it, twice winning the Ballon d'Or, which was effectively the European Player of the Year Award. Keegan returned to England in 1980, playing first for Southampton and then for Newcastle United.
His international career ended in disappointment. In 1982 England qualified for the World Cup Finals for this first time since 1970, but their best two players, Trevor Brooking and Keegan himself, were injured and probably shouldn't have been picked at all. This was a particular blow as the two enjoyed the sort of near-telepathic understanding that Keegan had developed with John Toshack in his early days at Liverpool.
As it was, England won their three group games, and then went through to second group of three teams, along with West Germany and Spain. England played out two goalless draws and failed to progress to the semi-finals, with Keegan only able to play for their last 26 minutes in the tournament.
Keegan's managerial career began at Newcastle United, where he electrified supporters with an attacking brand of football that took the club back into the top division and made them strong contenders for the title. In the end, though, his "don't worry if we let three in because we'll score four" style didn't win trophies, and he was psyched out by the wilier Alex Ferguson. He managed England for 18 months in 1999 and 2000, but resigned admitting that he was not up to the job.
Two more things need to be said. The first is that, while Keegan was undoubtedly a talented player, his prodigious appetite for training was what made him an outstanding one. In his early days at Anfield he upset some of the established players by beating all of them in every single gym test. I don't often remember or quote the words of David Mellor from his days hosting football phone-ins, but when he said Keegan had made himself a better footballer than God had ever intended him to he, he had it about right.
The other thing is that readers today may not realise just what a huge celebrity Keegan was in the Seventies. He released a pop single (it was a hit in Germany where he was then playing), he was a star of the hugely popular BBC television multisport contest Superstars and he advertised Brut alongside Henry Cooper, then the most loved man in British sport. It was the next best thing to being asked to do a television commercial with the Queen Mother.
George Best ('the fifth Beatle') had been a big celebrity in the Sixties, but it was rare before Italia 90 and the advent of the Premiership for footballers to find such fame outside the game. After 1982, for instance, England's captain and best player Bryan Robson was much less famous than Ian Botham.
But in the Seventies Keegan was everywhere. And his personality – hardworking, honest, genuine – made him popular wherever he went.
Later. The Guardian reports that Judit Polgár has said she will decline this offer:
Polgár, 49, said later in a Facebook post that she was grateful to be asked but added: "I do not feel enough strength within me to take on the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation, so I am unable to accept the request."
Judit Polgár, widely regarded as the strongest ever woman chess player, is to to be offered the presidency of Hungary.
The Guardian reports that the Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar will meet Polgar to discuss the matter on Monday:
"Our country needs unity, peace and a president that all Hungarians can be proud of," he wrote on social media. "Judit Polgár's name has been synonymous with talent and perseverance for decades."
The announcement by Magyar follows a months-long standoff between the newly elected leader and Tamás Sulyok, the president appointed during former leader Viktor Orbán’s time in power.
Since his landslide victory in April, Magyar has repeatedly called on Sulyok to step down, accusing him of being an Orbán "puppet" who had failed to stand up for the country as Orbán’s rightwing, nationalist Fidesz party was criticised for weakening democratic institutions and undermining the rule of law.
Last week Hungary’s parliament – where Magyar’s Tisza party holds a two-thirds majority – voted to back a constitutional amendment that included an immediate end to Sulyok’s term.
In the video above, the inimitable American grandmaster Ben Finegold takes us through three characteristic wins by Polgar. It seems it's impossible now to turn off the subtitles in an embedded video, so please watch it on YouTube if they distract you.
"It's like the Titanic, except you've never heard of it. And in a way, it's even weirder."
So says today's guest, Cautionary Tales' host, Tim Harford, about the disastrous story he's taking Anthony and Maddy through.
Airships were the ocean liners of the skies, and in the 1920s, Britain had ambitions to connect the Empire in this way. Until it all went tragically wrong.
I blogged about this myself back in 2022. There I suggested that the way the victims of the disaster lay in state in Westminster Hall might be a measure of the hopes the government had invested in this means of transport as a way of keeping up the Empire. From what Tim Harford says, I was right.
And he was as amazed as I was by this – the quotation comes from the Great Disasters site:
The most important part of the airship – the bit that provides that lift – is, obviously, the gas itself, and the giant gasbags holding it. They were painstakingly made from "gold-beater skin" – a particular membrane taken from an ox’s intestine.
It had taken something like a million oxen to make the R101's gasbags, which were prepared on-site by a team of women who scraped, washed, stretched and glued them into their final form.
The R101 design team had tested various other materials, but came to the conclusion that gold-beater skin, the tried and tested option, was the best then available.
As I wrote in my blog post:
A million oxen to make one airship? This conjures up a Dieselpunk world where the skies are filled with airships and whole continents are given over to raising the billions of oxen that demands.
Sandwiched between a strip club, a West End theatre and a pub might not be the most obvious location for a school but Soho Parish C of E primary has thrived for decades among the colourful charms of inner London.
But in an area that once had 16 schools, Soho Parish is the last remaining and its time may soon be up, a victim of the post-Covid downturn and falling pupil numbers that are forecast to close hundreds of primary schools across England.
In his article, the paper's education editor Tim Adams quoted a couple of parents. One said:
"The problem is that people around here aren’t having children. There’s actually council housing hidden here and there but there’s nothing much for families. It’s mainly old people and single people. That’s up to the council."
And a second:
"Without this school it’s all just tourists, isn’t it?"
But this sort of story about urban schools will soon become familiar. Adams says:
Westminster has already experienced the largest decline in primary pupil numbers among local authorities, a fall of 16 per cent in the past five years. And new national forecasts suggest England is going the same way, with primary and nursery numbers falling by nearly 473,000 between now and 2031, the equivalent of more than 1500 primaries without pupils.
The Soho school is organising to resist closure and drawing up plans for the future, and it may be distinctive enough to survive. But may other urban primaries won't.
"Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times published a scoop: that Farage had failed to declare donations from George Cottrell, a convicted money launderer. In doing so, it thrust a new character on to the national stage. Only George Cottrell isn’t a new character. He has operated at the highest levels of UK politics, in plain sight, for more than a decade. And that includes playing a central role in the Brexit campaign." Carole Cadwalladr on the way the media allowed Nigel Farage to operate without scrutiny for so long and why things have suddenly changed.
"The phenomenon of ever-bigger cars has not come about accidentally. It has been sustained by an aggressive marketing campaign, as they are far more profitable for manufacturers than conventional-sized vehicles. They are sold on the basis that they are safer. Extra safety for your family is a key marketing strategy. But while Daddy drives Olivia and Rufus to school in perfect safety, other pupils are in greater peril. And that risk is growing as the cars get ever bigger." Christian Wolmar calls for a halt to carspreading.
Karina Colombo and Elisa Failache find that the rapid expansion of high-speed internet in Uruguay led to a reduction in children's test scores in communication, problem solving and social skills. But it wasn't because the children were spending too long online: it was because their parents were.
"Each retelling reflects contemporary concerns about technological risk, climate uncertainty, social inequality, disaster preparedness, media spectacle and the ethics of dark tourism while maintaining the same underlying core narrative." Jonathan Peter Skinner explains our undying interest in the sinking of the Titanic.
Lucy Janes says the River Clyde is central to modern Glasgow’s identity. "It flows through the core of the city and, as you look downstream, a moment's reflection can lead your mind’s eye out to sea and the wider world."
This is perhaps typical of the sort of track I hear on BBC Radio 6 Music and like. It's a little bit retro, stronger on melody than rhythm and involves white boys and guitars. Could it be that I'm getting old?
Still, Song Bar likes it too:
A crisp, catchy, acoustic sound with orchestral strings and their distinctive vocal harmony style sees a welcome return from the London-based art-rock quartet of David Maclean, Vincent Neff, James Dixon and Thomas Grace, heralding their upcoming sixth LP Doveland, out in November via Clouds Hill.
Produced by Nick McCarthy (Franz Ferdinand), the title of the album takes its name from an online urban myth: a supposedly vanished midwest town that appears on no maps, yet some believe they once lived there, even holding souvenirs as proof.
In answer to the question in my first paragraph... No, they won't get me. And there's more about the Doveland myth online.
"The Liberal Democrats are a federal party with equality meant to be spread between England, Wales and Scotland but this seems to have been forgotten and in the House of Lords it’s very much an English Party!
"Not long ago there were six Welsh peers from Wales representing the Liberal Democrats; after the next general election because they can no longer attend after the age of 80 they will become extinct. This does not bode well for the future of Liberalism in Wales."
Welsh Liberal Democrats, says the news website are angry because for the 13th year running, none of them have been nominated for seats in the House of Lords.
And it points out that:
The Welsh Liberal Democrats currently have four members of the House of Lords: Baroness Christine Humphreys, who is 79; Lord Martin Thomas, who is 89; Lord Mike German, who is 81, and Lord Roger Roberts, who is 90.
A Lib Dem source is quoted as pointing out that we had no new appointments at all to the House of Lords between mid-2015 and mid-2024. This is true, but our problem of having a lack of Welsh peers remains.
The House of Lords is now a baroque institution with a huge unelected membership, and new members are as likely to be appointed as a consolation for political failure as they are for achieving eminence in their field. It belongs in Imperial China or Ruritania but not in a 21st-century democracy.
And it's membership is not equally drawn from across the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. In 2023 the House of Lords Library published a research paper breaking down its membership.
Looking at the nations, the percentage of Lords' members from each was:
England 85.4
Scotland 7.7
Wales 4.1
Northern Ireland 2.6
Overseas 0.2
And for the English regions it was:
London 24.2
South East 20.8
East of England 11.1
South West 8.4
Yorkshire and the Humber 5.8
East Midlands 4.3
North West 4.3
West Midlands 3.6
North East 3.0
Once again, the UK is revealed to be wholly overcentralised, something which having London as its political, economic and cultural capital makes inevitable. Electing a second chamber from the nations and regions would at least ensure they had fair representation in it.
"Queen Victoria is sometimes remembered as prudish, buttoned-up and disapproving, but a new display reveals a woman well in touch with the more sensuous side of her nature.Romantic and risqué gifts exchanged between Victoria and Prince Albert are to go on display at Osborne House, the couple’s grand seaside retreat on the Isle of Wight, which is stuffed with art and fabulous objects that the couple bought for each other."There is an abundance of naked flesh here at Osborne in both two and three dimensions," said Michael Hunter, an English Heritage curator.Helped by the ITV drama Victoria, many myths about the queen have been exploded but the image of her "as an older lady dressed in black and rather miserable" persists.The birthday gifts show a very different side. "She was open to nudity and the sensuous – more open than Albert, who perhaps surprisingly was the more prudish of the pair."
The Victorians didn't cover piano legs out of prudishness: that was a joke they told at the expense of straitlaced Americans.
They didn't pose their dead relatives in family photographs and there was no such thing as Brown Windsor soup.I've just come across another example of spurious 19th-century history: the Frozen Charlotte doll.
These upper bedrooms looked down on the opposite pavement on the park side of the street, and on the tiny people who moved along in neat looking singles and couples, pushing little prams loaded with pin-head babies and provisions, or carrying little dots of shopping bags.
Everyone carried a shopping bag in case they should be lucky enough to pass a shop that had a sudden stock of something off the rations.
Forty-eight young curlews are being released back into their natural habitat in the Shropshire hills as part of efforts to protect the species.
The scheme, which is run by the non-profit organisation Curlew Country, has seen eggs taken from wild nests and incubated, with the hatched chicks then raised in specially-constructed pens.
Amanda Perkins discussed this 'headstarting' process with BBC News:
"Our monitoring showed that no chick survived to fledging from any of the nests we looked at," she said, adding that the team "needed a desperate measure to try and hold the situation".
Perkins described the process, which is licensed by Natural England, as "a sort of sticking plaster" that will work "until we can get better natural nesting in place".
"In the wild, these chicks aren't surviving," she said.
The curlew is also listed in Shropshire's Local Nature Recovery Strategy as a species that needs particular help.
Lynn Parker, who coordinates that strategy, also spoke to BBC News, saying that groups "need to work together", otherwise "we really will see curlews go extinct":
The strategy focuses on "landscape scale connectivity", she explained, adding that "really good quality grasslands or wetlands" are exactly what the curlews need.
As curlews like to nest on farmland, Parker praised the farming community for being "really supportive" of conservation efforts.
"They let people know where nests are, fence them off sometimes, and work with volunteers," she said.
With curlews marked as a "priority species" on the county's nature restoration plan, Parker said that seeing them thrive "would be great, but survive is kind of what we're working on at the moment".
This year's release of chicks is one step further towards "a situation where we're not at risk of losing this really iconic species for Shropshire", she added.
For me, the unique haunting cry of the curlew is the sound of the Shropshire hills and I wish the people working to keep them in that landscape every success.
BBC News reports:
A number of Intercity services, which run to and from London St Pancras, will be cancelled from Monday, while other services will have fewer carriages.
Will Rogers, managing director of EMR, said the performance of the Class 810 fleet had "fallen below the levels we and our customers expect" and that the timetable change was "necessary".
The Intercity services run between London and destinations including Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby and Sheffield.
EMR did not say how long the timetable changes would be in place for, but said in a statement they would remain in place while "EMR works with the manufacturer, Hitachi Rail, to resolve disruption for customers as soon as possible".
And the Guardian adds more detail:
EMR is cancelling about 20 fast trains a day between London, Sheffield and Nottingham, while others will also be short-formed and are likely to be crowded. Its new class 810 fleet, previously labelled Auroras when their launch was heralded less than a year ago, have suffered from what EMR has called “performance and reliability issues”.
The operator also criticised Hitachi’s maintenance of the existing fleet that the Auroras were due to replace, the class 222 trains, which it said had “significantly impacted upon EMR’s ability to run a consistent intercity service”.
Interestingly, BBC News ran a story only yesterday under the headline:
East Midlands Railway cancellations – is it really just the hot weather?
"a bit more transparency" around a recovery plan and the issues the operator was facing would be helpful for passengers.
We are not without influence.
The 810 trains are bi-modal – they're able to take power from overhead wires but also have their own diesel engines. They were ordered on Chris Grayling's watch after the Conservative government cancelled its plans to electrify the whole of the St Pancras main line. The wires run out at Wigston, a few miles south of Leicester.
But it's not all bad news. We're getting new taller ticket barriers at Market Harborough station to stop people without tickets boarding the trains that aren't running.
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this story from Norfolk.
A Savannah cat, like the one in the picture here, is a cross between a domestic cat and a small wild cat from Africa called a serval. So this one was probably rather on the small side for a big cat.
But, as one of the judges remarked, this does prove that they're out there.
Aveek Bhattacharya argues that Andy Burnham is Labour's Boris Johnson: "The two men share a tendency to be led by instinct over doctrine, a talent for building coalitions, and a rare capacity to resonate emotionally with an audience. They also share a common vulnerability: a reluctance to bring their own side bad news. Both are men for the big picture rather than nitty-gritty details, happiest channeling grievance and hope into a broad political story."
A disproportionate number of children and young people growing up in care in Scotland are dying prematurely, Yet, despite Scottish government policy, almost two-thirds of such deaths over the last five years have not been reviewed, reports Karin Goodwin.
Alan Lester looks at the politics behind arguments about the teaching of the history of the British Empire in schools.
Ferdinand Mount writes about M.R. James, ghosts and sex.
"As the narrator lies on the doctor’s couch, revealing her thoughts in a candid, unguarded manner, a harrowing picture begins to emerge. We learn how every aspect of her life has been dictated by men, from her upbringing to her choices of husbands and the nature of their marriages to the control of her physical and mental health." JacquiWine says Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Easter is the best novel she has read this year.
An old BBC documentary on a well-studied subject, but the talking heads here are of a high quality. I've not heard Manfred Mann interviewed before, for instance.
But I did strike lucky when I crossed a bridge just south of Loughborough Central station.
