Martin Zero and two companions follow the Porter Brook and then the River Sheaf beneath Sheffield, and beneath the city's railway station in particular. It's all as fascinating and mildly sinister as you would expect.
The final stretch to the River Don had been "daylighted". It doesn't look much now, but it will be made to look more natural and form the focus of a new park.
There are lots more videos like this on the Martin Zero YouTube channel – like and subscribe.
I am reminded of the days when David Icke wanted to be the Liberal candidate for the Isle of Wight, but wasn't interested in any other seat.
The MyLondon report says:
A text message sent to the LDRS from a source at the Brent Liberal Democrat Group appears to show him expressing disappointment at the Party for not offering him the seat he demanded in Alperton. Instead, he was told "seats are not given away like sweets".
Brent Liberal Democrats Chair, Virginia Bonham-Carter, told the LDRS, whilst the party did have conversations with Cllr Rajan-Seelan about joining the party, they "decided quickly that he wasn’t acceptable to us, as he could not meet our expectations."
She added: "Labour’s decline in Brent has been clear for some time, and this latest episode involving a deselected Labour Councillor underlines how deep their problems run. Local people deserve councillors who focus on residents’ needs, not on party infighting and personal ambition."
A little research shows that Virginia Bonham Carter (no hyphen) is the daughter of Mark Bonham Carter and the granddaughter of Violet Bonham Carter.
Writing this reminded me that I knew a Tim Bonham-Carter when I lived in Kew (well, North Sheen) back in the early Eighties. I saw sad to find that he died a few years ago.
To the best of my knowledge neither he nor Virginia is related to Lord Bonkers' old friend, the London gang boss Violent Bonham Carter.
I'm listening to an edition of Gyles Brandreth's Rosebud podcast in which he talks to the actor Samuel West. It was recorded a couple of weeks before the death of West's mother Prunella Scales and so far he has talked mostly about her and his late father, Timothy West.
But there is one story he has not told about his mother...
Vera Menchik was born in Moscow, to an English mother and Czech father, in 1906. She began playing chess competitively just before the family came to live in London in 1921.
She was to become the strongest woman chess player in the world, holding the women's world title between 1927 and 1944. She regularly competed, and with some success, against the top men players of her day. There was not another woman player who did that regularly until Judit Polgár in the 1990s.
Vera Menchik died in 1945 when her house in Clapham was hit by a German V1 flying bomb.
And what does all this have to do with Prunella Scales?
Vera Menchik's great grandfather was a man called George Illingworth. And his brother John Thomas Illingworth was the great grandfather of Prunella Scales. Which makes the two women third cousins.
Thanks to Richard James for putting me on to a thread on the English Chess Forum.
This short programme in the BBC's Secret Shropshire series tells you about the Devil's Chair, the Seven Whistlers and Wild Edric.
Richard Kemp reminds us of something important: You can like, work with and respect a person whose political beliefs differ from yours.
Elizabeth Spiers misses the early years of blogging: "If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it."
"A linguistic panic has swept America in recent months, corrupting our youth, annoying our teachers and leaving countless adults hopelessly confused. The question that has sparked the uproar: what, exactly, does it mean when an otherwise upstanding young person blurts out the phrase 'six-seven'?" Matthew Cantor is down with the kids.
"In England, the Cotswolds and Wessex supported an organicist version of Englishness in the interwar period, defined by its 'Westernness' against a ‘south-east metropolitan zone’, and Cornwall has also been understood as a place of difference which, with its distinctive national identity, has made it both familiar and yet potentially threatening to English unity." Gareth Roddy discusses the hold that the Western has on the imagination of all four nations of the British Isles.
Ian Richardson visits the National Railway Museum in York.
Kirsty Williams, once leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats and education minster in the Welsh government, has spoken about the pressure that her political career put on her and her family.
She described the online abuse she and other politicians received as "unforgivable" and said it was this level of trolling that forced her to leave politics.
When she told her daughters about her new role as chairwoman of the Cardiff and Vale health board, they said "don't do it, we can't go through this again".
Kiraty was appearing on the Fifth Floor podcast. I can't find a link to that episode, but there are some quotes in the a BBC News story:
"I didn't realise how badly it affected my family," she said, adding that once news of her new role was made public the "pack" were back online "telling everybody what a terrible person I am".
Williams said that being a politician was "no worse or better than many other jobs that people do".
"Most sane people would run a mile from putting themselves into that environment," she said, referring to the level of criticism received.
"I'm worried that it's baked in now. People who go for that job accept that this is how they're going to have to live their lives.
"It's not pleasant."
The belief that "politicians are all as bad as each other and are all in if for themselves" is endemic on the left as well as the right.
I sometimes wonder if the sea of snark and satire we now move in is good for us. After all, the one solid achievement from 94 years of Have I Got New for You has been to help Boris Johnson on his way to Downing Street.
I went to a couple of open days at the Richard III dig before it was announced that they thought they had found him, and went to several academic events after his identity had been confirmed. I even filed past Richard's coffin to pay my respects, which was more than I did for Elizabeth II.
The whole episode was a marvellous example of interesting and involving the community in archaeology. I find I got quite emotional about the day Richard was reburied.
So we really didn't need Steve Coogan and his film to give us a false picture of these events.
I didn't see The Lost King because I knew it would annoy me, and I had already been annoyed by another film in the autumn 2022.
See How They Run was a murder mystery set in and around the record-breaking London run of Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.
I have just written an article for Central Bylines on the play's roots in a real-life death – that of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill on a farm in the Shropshire hills in 1945.
As I suspected, See How They Run used this story, but it contrived to end with a young man called Dennis being clubbed to death. He had been committing the murders as a protest against Christie's exploitation of his family's story.
In the review I posted after seeing it, I quoted the American film writer Gregory Mysogland:
Christie expresses sympathy for him but states that to not write about tragic topics would be to deny a part of who she is. This is an understandable viewpoint, but it's also the last word the film says on the issue, and as such is much too simplistic and one-sided. ...
Eventually, Christie herself kills Dennis by hitting him in the head with a shovel, comically going in for more blows before the others stop her. Although Henderson's manic performance is good enough to make this scene darkly funny on first viewing, upon reflection, it adds to the exploitation of the O'Neill's represented by Dennis' role.
Making the character a murderous villain and then dismissing his legitimate argument with a wave of the hand is bad enough, but having him meet a violent death similar to the real Dennis's is cruel and immoral, not to mention completely against the ideas the film tries to bring up in relation to him.
Mysgoland was right. I could have done without this film too.
When I first posted this back in 2010 I described it as "a lament for a child who is lost or never was".
Today, I know that Joanna Newsom is the second cousin, twice removed, of Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
Here's another of the discursive Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Chess, cricket, Steve Winwood... it covers several topics dear to this blog's heart.
You can see Aksel Rykkvin as a treble above and as a baritone below.
Prodigious talent
Prodigies aren’t always popular with their elders. When Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, encountered the nine-year-old John Everett Millais in 1838, he suggested the boy should be sweeping chimneys rather than seeking to train as an artist.
And sometimes prodigious genius is misunderstood. At a very young age, my favourite musician, Steve Winwood, was turned away by the man round the corner who gave piano lessons. He found that if the boy heard a tune once he could play it from memory, so it was hard to convince him of the point of learning to read music.
Others were more appreciative. In 1959 his elder brother’s jazz group found themselves short of a pianist, so he brought Steve along:
"He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. Because he was under age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know."
Soon after that Steve was jamming with newly arrived Jamaican musicians in his home city of Birmingham, and then backing some of the greats of American blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim.
So by the time he joined the Spencer Davis Group at 15, and they had their first number one when he was 17, Winwood was an immensely experienced musician. Something to open the eyes of these new Beatles fans who are convinced there was nothing before the Fab Four and precious little else at the same time as them.
******
The youngest person to play first-class cricket in England was Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCC University in 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days. He was also on the books of Leeds United as a goalkeeper.
Most of us heard nothing more of him for a decade. Then an article appeared in a cricket magazine saying Gibson had “chosen enjoyment and freedom” and given up professional sport:
"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."
I hope he is happy, whatever he is doing now.
******
I once attended the first London recital by an 18-year-old Norwegian baritone called Aksel Rykkvin. What was interesting about the event was that a few years before he had been the most celebrated boy treble in the world. For once the American term ‘boy soprano’ seemed justified.
It soon became clear that his wonderful clarity and instinctive understanding of the text had survived his change of voice unscathed. But not every prodigy is lucky or talented enough to pass through puberty with such grace.
Leaving aside the many chess talents lost to a discovery of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, a growth spurt can wreak havoc. The future England captain Nasser Hussain grew a foot in a single winter and found he could no longer pitch his leg breaks on a length:
"I went from bowling out Graham Gooch in the indoor school with everyone watching, to hitting the roof of the net or bowling triple-bouncers to deadly silence."
Hussain was able to reinvent himself as a batsman, but always said batting never felt as natural to him as spin bowling had.
And puberty is the great killer of child actors – boys at least. Either you lose your fetching looks and no one casts you, or you keep them and find you are still playing schoolboys when you are 20, with no one seeing you as a possible adult lead.
But maybe being a child actor isn’t much like being an adult actor. Take the case of William Betty, ‘the Young Roscius’, who enjoyed phenomenal success as a boy at the start of the 19th century. His appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre sparked extraordinary scenes:
Shrieks and screams of choking, trampled people were terrible. Fights for places grew; Constables were beaten back; the boxes were invaded. The heat was so fearful that men all but lifeless were lifted and dragged through the boxes into the lobbies which had windows.
Betty announced his retirement at the age of 17, only to spend the rest of his life making comebacks that failed to excite the public. Perhaps the great Sarah Siddons had him right: “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy but nothing more.”
******
If I didn’t love the music so much, I might agree there was something ridiculous about white, middle-class British boys playing the blues – “Can blue men play the whites/Or are they hypocrites?” as Viv Stanshall asked. But then I generally prefer to leave dreams of cultural purity to the right.
Besides, it’s widely claimed that the Spencer Davis Group had to film what we’d now call a video before their records could get played on white radio stations in the US. It had been widely assumed there, because of Steve Winwood’s vocals, that the band was black.
Eric Clapton had no doubts about Winwood’s authenticity. Here he his explaining his decision to switch to a Stratocaster guitar:
“Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.”
Or as Clapton once put it more strongly:
“I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.”
Prodigious talent does encourage such reverence, though personally, when drawn against a chess prodigy, I found myself with a sneaking sympathy for Sir Martin Shee.
Prunella Scales died yesterday at the age of 93. We all remember her as Sybil Fawlty, and in his DVD commentaries on the series, John Cleese (who was 86 today) recalls that she brought much to the role that he and Connie Booth had not imagined. Fawlty Towers was the better for it.
But there was more to Prunella Scales than Fawlty Towers. She was Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution and played Queen Victoria in a one-woman show for many years. There were other successful television sitcoms and a surprising number of films.
The second of these was Hobson's Choice in 1954. You can see a clip from it above – Scales plays the youngest of Charles Laughton's three daughters. Don't worry: the film is all about Laughton getting his comeuppance.
Two weeks ago I posted a clip of Patricia Routledge, who died earlier this month, playing the eldest of the sisters in 1962.
Alison Bennett welcomes three-year financial settlements for children’s hospices, but warns that they will not resolve the sector's funding crisis.
Will Hurst reports that Labour ministers repeatedly overruling official advice that buildings should be listed: "In almost every one of the 10 cases of rejection, the site in question was subject to development proposals, raising the question of whether the government’s drive to remove the 'blockers; to economic growth is now imperilling England’s heritage."
"The figure of the 'girl-boy' – a girl masquerading in boys' attire – was a pervasive and evocative figure within late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. My sweep of digitised newspaper repositories has unearthed at least 51 reported cases of 'girls' dressing as 'boys' between 1867 and 1919 in the British Isles alone. These stories were widely circulated, picked up by both national and regional papers, and often republished with increasingly sensational details that lent them a larger-than-life quality." Hannah Stovin on her research into youth cross-dressing in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
"The first time I saw a Mirror Scare was in Robert Hamer’s segment of the Ealing portmanteau chiller Dead of Night (1945), in which a haunted mirror reflects not its actual surroundings, but a murder scene from the past. Roman Polanski also makes terrifying use of the effect in Repulsion, when Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe mirror fleetingly reflects someone who isn’t there. But nowadays the Mirror Scare is just another 'Boo!' device; there’s even a YouTube supercut." Anne Billson explains how to film a ghost story.
Lynne About Loughborough goes for an autumn walk in the town's Outwoods.
Don't worry: the historic parts of the brewery have not been razed – the judges just liked the headline.
The Stamford Canal was an artificial cut that paralleled the River Welland between Stamford and Market Deeping. It was nine and a half miles long and had 12 locks.
It was opened in 1670, and so predates the canals of the Industrial Revolution. I believe it was constructed by the Dutch engineers who were responsible for the draining of the Fens.
This video from Jay Naylor Films – like and subscribe – shows the Stamford end of the canal.
The post is titled Steve Coogan, Richard III and conspiracy theories and my conclusion there is:
A story about a lone eccentric who proves the establishment wrong makes for an appealing film, but it has little to do with what went on in Leicester that autumn.
And I quoted the archaeologist Mike Potts:
I think ultimately what’s at stake here is public information. The Lost King’s persecution story is a conspiracy theory working the same levers as climate denial or anti vaxing. Not as serious clearly, but if you care about an informed society it matters
Adam Bienkov suggests the Caerphilly by-election result shows that Reform UK is much weaker than it looks.
Peter Apps wonders if Zurich’s housing cooperatives be the solution to the rest of Europe’s housing crisis,
"Wilson refused to infantilise her readers. She spoke to us as the mature, curious consumers of culture that we were. Wilson tackled the hard stuff – the intensity of first loves, body shame, grooming and survival – with humour and empathy from the point of view of complicated girls and the women who raised them." Liv Little says Jacqueline Wilson transformed British girlhood.
"Take Ron Cowan, a key player for his home side of Selkirk and the Scotland squad of the early 1960s. By 18 he became the youngest Scot to ever tour with the British and Irish lions. Any border rugby town would celebrate a career like this for generations to come. But instead, switching to play rugby league for Leeds was seen as betrayal, and meant his accolades were understated. In fact, they were overwritten. Discarded altogether." Lucy Anderson asks if rugby union owe rugby league an apology.
Mike Gibson tells the story of Fever-Tree and how the gin-and-tonic boom made it the UK's most valuable soft-drinks company.
It joins Aldi and Tesco in having planned to build a supermarket there and then decided against the idea. At one time it was also expected that 40 council houses would be built on the site.
Now, reports the Northamptonshire Telegraph, the owners, North Northamptonshire Council are back to square one in their attempt to sell it.
When I was in Desborough a couple of weeks ago – I like the Costa Coffee there – the wasteland in front of the old factory was looking particularly unkempt after a summer's plant growth, and the modern buildings more derelict than when I last saw them.
The Telegraph has included a link to the estate agent's particulars in its report in case you feel like buying the site yourself.
So that's what my second article for the site is about.
Too often victims of crime are seen only as victims, so I was pleased to be able to include this from a news report of the trial:
Mrs Connop, who had previously fostered them and their younger brother Freddie in Herefordshire, described them in her evidence as "happy-go-lucky and harum-scarum, but nothing else" and Dennis himself as a "forgiving and sweet boy".
On which note, the photo below, which must be copyright to the O'Neill family, shows (from the left) Terry, Dennis and Freddie O'Neill in their days with Mrs Connop.
I've written before for Lion and Unicorn about the influence of this case on an earlier play: No Room at the Inn. And also about its uncanny parallels with what is now my favourite Malcolm Saville story Seven White Gates.
This may be the first record I can remember liking. It arrived in the British singles chart just before my fifth birthday and was to top it for a week.
Born in 1936, Roger Miller was an Oklahoman who began his songwriting and then singing career while serving in the US Army.
Country Reunion Music quotes his liner notes for his 1970 album A Trip in the Country:
Before the days of Dang Me, King of the Road and such, I was a young, ambitious songwriter walking the streets of Nashville, trying to get anybody and everybody who would to record my songs. All in all, I wrote about 150 songs for Ray Price, George Jones, Ernest Tubb and others. Some were hits, and some were not.
He was one of those country artists who appealed to the mainstream too, and continued writing and performing up to his death in 1992.
One of the books I came away with was The Best of Myles, an anthology of the writings of Flann O'Brien.
If you're puzzled by the title... Flann O'Brien's real name was Brian O'Nolan. As he was a pillar of the Irish civil service as well as a satirical columnist and novelist, he generally wrote under a pen name, and Myles na Gopaleen.
Here he making the case for banning poetry:
Having considered the matter in – of course – all its aspects, I have decided that there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the wasted space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life.
But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable.
Furthermore poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies.
The same objection cannot be made in the case of painting or sculpture, because these occupations afford employment for artisans who produce the materials.
I think Flann O'Brien and I are going to get on very well.
Oscar Wilde was born in 1854, yet here is his grandson Merlin Holland speaking at the National Liberal Club last Friday.
He was the speaker at the 33rd Oscar Wilde Birthday Dinner, talking about his new book After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal. He has made it his business to clear away the myths that have accumulated around his grandfather, and he discusses some of his discoveries here.
Merlin Holland was born in 1945 when his father Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde's second son, was 58. Vyvyan Holland gets a mention in another post on this blog. For Market Harborough's connection with Oscar Wilde, see another post again.
As a good Liberal, I recognised the venue from the tiles alone.
So runs the headline on a piece by Keven Schofield that went up on Huffington Post this morning in the wake of Labour's humiliation in the Caerphilly Senedd by-election.
He quotes an "insider" (apparently they have them in the Labour Party too) as saying:
"I think people are now in a place where they believe this can’t continue and we can’t go into massive midterm elections with him in charge.
"The chances of him being gone my Christmas is massively under-priced. People will let the Budget happen at the end of November, and then there could be a move against him.
"If a new leader comes in then and puts 5 per cent on the polls, suddenly things look a lot better. We don’t get utterly decimated in Wales, the Scottish result is a bit better and you save a whole load of councillors."
My impression that Starmer lacks the personality to inspire is reinforced by what Schofield says:
If he does end up being ousted, Starmer's critics say he will only have himself to blame.
Never the most clubbable of politicians, the PM is rarely seen in the Commons, where many of his predecessors could be seen chatting to their MPs, listening to their concerns and getting a feel for the mood within the party.
In the past two months he has only taken part in four parliamentary votes, all of which happened on the same day.
Schofield also reports that Morgan McSweeney singularly failed to impress a meeting of Labour peers. As one told him:
"There was no energy, no ideas and he didn’t have any answers to our questions. It was really very damaging."
"Sell Starmer" is my share tip too, for what it's worth.
The judge remarked that he's a former Tory council leader, not an ex-Tory council leader, but they still gave BBC News our Headline of the Day Award.
My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in familiar conversation, her “place” in Lincolnshire. The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees for islands in it and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock’s place has been extremely dreary.
The weather for many a day and night has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain.
Charles Dickens was a regular visitor to the castle and a great friend of the then owners, Richard and Lavinia Watson. In November 1849, he spent several days here and delighted his hosts by acting out scenes from Nicholas Nickleby and School for Scandal alongside Mrs. Watson's cousin, Miss Boyle.
The house and grounds certainly wove their magic upon the author's fevered imagination. As "the first shadows of a new story" began "hovering in a ghostly way" around him, he made several visits to Rockingham Castle to commit to memory in preparation for its becoming "Chesney Wold" in his novel Bleak House.
Max Sullivan on his experiences of introducing on-street bicycle hangars in the London Borough of Westminster: "Make decisions on merit. Objections that don't have merit can be listened to, but not indulged, if you want to move faster. Officers need to have the confidence in the need for the scheme (lack of space to park a bike is a major barrier to cycling) to give their politicians good advice. Politicians must be prepared to respectfully disagree with their residents, to deliver for their other residents. Who are many in number, waiting for somewhere safe to keep a bike."
"A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television." Derek Thompson explains his theory.
James Coverley draws an important lesson from the death of the Roman Emperor Domitian: "Caesar, of course, was betrayed by someone close to him. Mussolini ended up hanging from a streetlamp. You can only bully people into liking you for so long until someone, one day, realises that you’re the problem and that your grip on power is, actually, paper-thin and depends on the illusion of fear."
Koraljka Suton takes us deep into David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001): "Some of these narrative threads appear superfluous at first glance because we seemingly never get back to them. Others take us down rabbit holes that leave us feeling dazed, confused and disoriented. But all of them have their rightful place in Lynch’s surrealist picture that stubbornly defies genre categorization."
"A few clubs have boreholes, able to provide clean water on their wickets which then filters back into the aquifer in a virtuous circle. This was interesting and unexpected, revealing how certain clubs can benefit from their local geology, whereas others rely on ageing infrastructure and water companies." Dan Looney recently walked the Kennet & Avon Canal from Reading to Bath, then onwards via the River Avon to Bristol, visiting 11 cricket grounds along the way to see how they are adapting to climate change.
How it's pronounced is the least interesting thing about Southwell. For what it's worth, one of my history teachers came from the town and said Suthull not South-well, so I do too. But just as in Shrewsbury, it doesn't matter.
The video is right: Southwell Minster is one of England's least well-known cathedrals, but it's one of the finest. We don't even get to see it's glory: the medieval stone carving ("The Leaves of Southwell") in the Chapter House. Look below for an example.
And it's a fine little town. I believe that when the Minster became a cathedral in 1884, Southwell was legally a village and so could not become a city. The local football club refuses to be distracted by such technicalities and calls itself Southwell City.
"The story for cheese exports, unfortunately, shows a clear decline in recent years. UK cheese sales to Japan peaked at £2.2 million in 2019, but have fallen every year since, and were down two-thirds in 2024 despite tariff advantages."
So she won't be offered the Freedom of Melton Mowbray any time soon.
Sir William Fettes founded the college with a bequest of £14m (in 2017 money) for the "maintenance education and outfit" of orphans and to help people "who from innocent misfortune during their lives, are unable to give suitable education to their children". In 2012 only five of 750 children enrolled were paying no fees.
So it really is the Eton of Scotland. Eton College was founded by Henry VI as a charity school to provide free education to 70 poor boys.
This "grand theft of ancient buildings and endowments that had been specifically set up to educate the poor", as Renton puts it, was put beyond legal challenge by the Public Schools Act of 1868. With its encouragement, Fettes College opened in 1870.
I heard this in 2008 on Radio 3's Late Junction, and thought I had discovered an obscure new band I rather liked.
On further investigation, Vampire Weekend turned out to be about the trendiest band in the world just then. Their detractors called their music "Upper West Side Soweto" and "trust fund frat rock".
The chess world has been shocked by the death of the American grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky at the age of 29.
As well as being a strong player, Naroditsky was famous as a chess trainer and commentator. Chess experience a boom during Covid lockdown, and his videos, which were among the very best of their kind, must have played a part in this.
Many grandmasters don't understand how little the rest of us understand about the game, but Naroditsky was able to make things wonderfully clear.
In the video above, in which he beats a weaker player, he explains his moves as he goes along. And then he goes back over the game and the more general lessons to be learnt from it.
When I was a teenager, I used to borrow audio cassettes on the game – the nearest thing to this that was available between series of The Master Game.
On a happier note, the 10-year-old British prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan has beaten the former women's world champion (now ranked 13 in the world among women players) Mariya Muzychuk.
You can hear her analysing their game with wonderful maturity in the video below.
The website quotes a statement from Northamptonshire Police:
The charges follow our independent investigations into allegations Mr Adderley falsely claimed, over a period from 2018-2024, to have been a former Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, had served in the Falklands War, and was entitled to wear associated service medals.
It’s also alleged the 59-year-old made false claims relating to a naval career on his CV and application form submitted in support of his bid to become the Chief Constable of Northamptonshire Police in June 2018.
Adderley was sacked from the post of chief constable after a gross misconduct hearing last summer. He will appear at Westminster magistrates court on 10 November.
There's some useful background to the case in another NN Journal story – this one from July of last year. In it, Mick Stamper, a former senior officer in the Northamptonshire force talks, about working with Adderley:
From day one, Adderley’s naval record was front and centre. When he arrived he moved the chief constable’s office from a small inconspicuous room at the Wootton Hall headquarters in Northampton (where the previous chief had resided) into a grander office, one more befitting of the most important person in the building.
On the wall he mounted a large painting of a naval warship, which Stamper says was inscribed underneath with Adderley’s name and naval rank. In the corner of a room was a naval flag, (known as an ensign), which another staff member told Stamper had been from the ship displayed on the wall.
The minority Reform UK cabinet at Leicestershire County Council continues to play musical chairs. Its member for finance and resources, Helen Butler, has stood down because of family commitments. We wish her well.
Her role, reports Leicester Gazette, has been filled by Harrison Fowler, who previously led on strategic planning and economic development. He retains some of his previous responsibilities, with the rest going to the council's deputy leader, Kevin Crook.
Fowler told the Gazette that:
"Efficiency is my focus. With a £90 million budget gap, my priority is working to see how we can drive down costs."
No mention of the "specialists from international firms" that the Reform UK leader, Dan Harrison, told us are going to do this work:
"They come from big companies. They know what they are doing.
"I'm looking for maximum efficiency that will have an effect on our budget."
When asked how much it would cost to employ the specialists, the council leader said he was unable to say because contracts had yet to be signed.
"Whatever they charge, it will be a hundred times to the benefit of the authority," Harrison said.
Do these international specialists exist only in Mr Harrison's head?
It's easy to laugh at Reform, but the confusion that now reigns at County Hall isn't funny. The Liberal Democrat group leader on Leicestershire, Michael Mullaney, told the Gazette:
"It’s very easy during an election campaign to make promises on things like cutting council tax but delivering for people is more difficult.
"We will look forward to seeing the new cabinet member’s budget proposals and how they are going to deliver the savings promised. Protecting frontline services especially those affecting vulnerable people will always be top priority for Liberal Democrats."
Mullaney added his group considers it "essential" to "protect the vital services which the county council delivers", including special educational needs, social care, maintaining roads and pavements, protecting communities against flooding and having quality public transport. He said: "We will continue to speak up for local residents on these issues."
If you want a portrait of Britain in the Seventies, you can't beat Nationwide. This was a news magazine programme shown every weekday evening after the six o'clock news. It began with news from your region and then went national to tackle both serious and lighter subjects.
The regional presenters featured in the national segment too, and people of my generation will still recall nanes like Mike Neville in Newcastle, Bruce Parker in Southampton and Ian Masters in Norwich. And I think they were all men – very Seventies.
Nationwide covered the three-day week, the drought, the Silver Jubilee and so on through the decade. It also covered the rise of both consumerism and environmentalism.
And the programme had a fondness for supernatural stories like this one, which also gives you a picture of Sheffield people in 1970.
In 1982 David Dimbleby took over from Michael Barratt as the programme's main host, and his pomposity killed it off. But naybe something as Seventies as Nationwide was always going to struggle in the new decade.
Caspar Hobhouse argues that Ukraine needs support from the European Union to transition towards a long-term energy system that is resilient, flexible and secure.
Rachel Sylvester on William's plans for a downsized monarchy.
"Kate Murphy’s work has changed how we think about the history of women’s roles in radio and television production forever. Had she not had the opportunity to make the transition from maker to scholar of BBC programming, and to do the serious detective work of tracking down these women’s stories via the archive, our understanding of women’s roles in the BBC would still be partial and centred on the stories of 'great men; that Asa Briggs and others have told us." Helen Wheatley joins the campaign against the BBC's decision to effectively close its Written Archives Centre to independent researchers.
Owen Hatherley reviews two books on the postwar architecture of South-East London: "It is stark, unpretentious modernism, but James and Audrey Callaghan were very unhappy to leave it for Downing Street when he became chancellor in 1964; it had, Audrey said, become 'like a second skin' – designed wholly around their needs and wants."
"Watkins based his thesis on three decades of legwork, on his interest in archaeology, history and architecture, and on his research into etymology, folklore and legends. And it’s hard for the non-expert not to be affected by his enthusiasm and sheer piling-up of what he sees as supporting evidence from these different disciplines." Chris Lovegrove looks at Alfred Watkins' The Old Straight Track, the book that gave birth to "ley lines" on the centenary of its publication.
Among the closures are the two flights of staircase locks at Foxton near Market Harborough. Now BBC News reports that they are to reopen - but only for a week.
The Canal and River Trust said the site, near Market Harborough, will be open for a week between 27 October and 2 November.
The locks will be open from 10:00 BST to 15:00, with the last boat allowed in at 14:00.
The locks between Foxton and Leicester will also open between those hours during the same week.
Explaining the brevity of Foxton's reopening, a spokesperson for the trust said:
"We're really pleased that recent rainfall has at least allowed us to reopen locks for a short period and enable boaters to get to where they need to be ahead of winter.
"While recent wet weather has been very welcome, it's not been enough to make up for the prolonged dry weather we've experienced for the majority of the year.
"Reservoir holdings are still well below what we would normally expect for this time of year, so we still need to be careful with our water and allow our reservoirs to refill ahead of next year's boating,"
And the BBC also reports that Saddington Reservoir, the nearest canal reservoir to the locks, was still only at 25 per cent capacity last month.
The drought has certainly brought home how vulnerable the inland waterways are to climate change. See the Canal and River Trust's Climate Adaptation Report for its own thinking on the subject.
In the mean time, you can see Foxton Locks above and Saddington Reservoir below.
Later. Due to the low water level, the section from Kilby Lock 30 to Kings Lock 38 will not be open for navigation after all.
Fed up commuters have called a railway station near the city "the worst in Europe" and also criticised the site's facilities.
People who use Worcestershire Parkway have complained that it lacks a warm waiting area, platform seating, and only has two toilets for the whole station.
And new railway stations generally provide few facilities for passengers and are remarkably unattractive.
Despite this lack of comforts, they are remarkably expensive. A report in the Malvern Gazette from 2020 says this station cost £22m.
Worcestershire Parkway has platforms on two levels, so it was bound to cost more than most new stations, but an article in Rail Magazine agrees that British railway projects are expensive.
It sees a lack of sustained government commitment to public transport as a large part of the problem, but also notes that all British infrastructure projects cost more than they do in most comparable countries.
Since the broadcast of a BBC documentary, Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army, Kathleen Hallisey, a lawyer from Scott-Moncrieff and Associates, has taken on about 60 new clients who are pursuing claims.
A lawyer representing 150 victims of the Jesus Army said plans to allow people accused of child abuse to receive a share of the cult's fortune were "shameful".
A BBC investigation revealed 172 former loyal members of the disgraced Northamptonshire-based evangelical sect would receive much larger payouts than those awarded to victims under a redress scheme.
It is understood some who have been people accused of perpetrating or covering up abuse could be among the beneficiaries of the group's assets – which is estimated to be more £50m – a prospect survivors have described as "sickening".
Malcolm Johnson, a lawyer from Lime Solicitors, said the only right action to take was redirect the leftover assets for charitable use.
Once again, I'm left wondering why the scandal surrounding the Jesus Army hasn't been a bigger story.
Anne Scott-James was the women's editor of Picture Post during most of the second world war. This photograph of her dates from 1941 and was published as part of a feature with the headline Should Women Wear Trousers?
I don't know if this was a serious piece on wartime clothes rationing or just a bit of fun, but it's a wonderful photo.
Throughout my boyhood Anne Scott-James was, together with Dilys Powell, Frank Muir and Denis Norden, one of the regular panellists on the BBC Radio 4 quiz show My Word.
She was the daughter of the Liberal journalist Rolfe Scott-James and the mother of another journalist, Max Hastings.
George Foulkes says broadcasters are warping our politics by failing to subject Nigel Farage to the scrutiny that other politicians rightly experience.
"Along with restoring trust in the church’s safeguarding processes, Mullally must also heal divisions within the church’s hierarchy over leadership culture. In the weeks leading up to Welby’s resignation, both he and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, were accused of using 'coercive language' by the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley." George Crozier on the many challenges facing the new Archbishop of Canterbury.
"Today, Denmark's wolf population is estimated to be just over 40 wolves, with at least seven breeding pairs known to have produced cubs. Yet even this small number has sparked fierce debates over livestock and public safety in one of Europe's most intensively farmed countries, with views on wolves seeming to reflect wider political divides across Denmark." Kristian Kongshøj and Troels Fage Hedegaard explain why 40 wolves have shaken Danish politics.
My memory of the Eighties is that Peter Wright was seen as being obsessive about Soviet infiltration of British intelligence. But didn't Karla arrange things to make Control look like that?
And in this programme from 1984 Wright cuts an impressive figure. No Percy Alleline he.
Let's end with a couple of pieces of trivia.
Malcolm Turnbull, the future Australian prime minister, who embarrassed the British government in court while fighting to allow Wright to publish his memoirs, is related to both Angela Lansbury and Oliver Postgate.
And Roger Hollis, whether he was a spy or not, was the father of Adrian Hollis, who was a correspondence chess grandmaster.
At present they are run by the Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust, which was set up in 1967. The National Trust is also assuming responsibility for the upkeep of 35 listed buildings and scheduled monuments, including Blists Hill Victorian Town, the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron and the Old Furnace.
When I visited Ironbridge back in 2011, I didn't bother with any maps or guide books, I just set out for a stroll along the river. The first attraction I came to was the Jackfield Tile Museum, which I wouldn't have planned to visit, yet it turned out to be fascinating.
I hope the National Trust can keep this unique collection of attractions thriving.
The Guardian reports:
Councillors voted on Thursday to approve a new parking plan for the city whereby owners of larger vehicles will be charged more for parking permits because their cars "take up more parking space and are a danger to other road users".
The plan states that vehicles that weigh more than 2,400kg fully laden will be subject to a surcharge "to encourage drivers to switch to smaller vehicles"; this will later be reduced to 2,000kg for non-electric vehicles.
Dan De'Ath, the cabinet member for transport on the Labour-run authority, is quoted by the paper as saying that SUVs (sports utility vehicles) are:
"much larger than your average car, they produce far more wear and tear on our roads, but fundamentally if you hit a child while driving a heavy SUV the chances of that child dying are grossly inflated.
"We don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people driving those kinds of vehicles to pay a little bit more for road wear and the extra space they take up. We’re not talking about SUV-shaped cars, we’re talking about very heavy American-style vehicles."
No doubt there will be protests, and those protests will be widely reported. But Sadiq Khan's ULEZ (ultra-low emission zones) schene in London, and his refusal to bow to a noisy minority, provides a good model for Cardiff Council to copy.
Two years ago the Conservative Party was convinced that opposition to ULEZ was going to win them the coming general election, Today they never mention them.
Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash