Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies was published in 1882 as a three-volume for adults. Over the years it came to be seen as a book for children and was the inspiration of for the holiday adventure school of books that I grew up with. Arthur Ransome's debt to Jefferies is clear, while Malcolm Saville and Denys Watkins-Pitchford even had their own child characters reading Bevis. It had become a touchstone for children's writers. In 1932 it was republished with the full apparatus of a children's classic: a map on the endpapers and illustrations by E.H. Shepard. ...
Embed from Getty Images "Have you seen that article by d'Ancona?" Lord Bonkers asked me at lunch. "It's Awfully Good." "He says we should give the forces of darkness one up the snoot," he added. You can read the article Lord B was referring to on the Guardian website. If you do, you will see that his précis was about right: Pluralism, women's equality, ethnic diversity, our responsibility to refugees, internationalism, LGBT rights - all that is now under systematic attack. It won't defend itself. One of the enduring lessons of Bill Clinton's campaigns is that rapid rebuttal works. When ...
Second paragraph of third chapter (parsing a contemporary report of what else was happening at the time of Alexander's birth):Philip and Parmenion we have already met. The Illyrians were Macedon's traditional enemies on their western border. The Olympics were the most prestigious of the Panhellenic festivals. Alexander's mother was Philip's fourth wife, Olympias, a Greek princess from Molossia in Epirus (to the south of Illyria), who had given birth at the Macedonian administrative capital of Pella. Alexander's name was already a royal one within the Macedonian kingly house. But the fact that it was also the alternative name of Homer's ...
This year, my colleagues and I were elected the first ever city councillors for the newly created electoral ward of Gunthorpe, as a result of the Electoral Commission who decided to merge parts of the previous wards of Werrington South and Paston. In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Gunthorpe like [...]
A merry Christmas to everyone. My Christmas card is based on a photo taken at the Formby Nativity Play 2016 by he Formby Bubble and reproduced with their permission. The Nativity reenactment is one of the highlights of the calendar in Formby and hundreds of people attend. The main street is closed to traffic and apart from the human members of the cast we had a donkey, goats, and sheep and an eagle. It was, as always, well done. There were lost of carols, I read a lesson at Holy Trinity's nine lessons and carols. I am always impressed about ...
Perpetual motion machines are badly named. And impossible. But that hasn't stopped a lot of people trying to build them.
Second paragraph of third chapter: A plane coming into Kai Tak took a perilous descent between Hong Kong's skyscrapers, pulled a 90-degree turn to avoid running straight into Diamond Hill, and then tried not to drop off the end of the runway into Kowloon Bay.The final Seventh doctor novel in terms of continuity, actually it is much more about Sarah Jane Smith in Hong Kong just before the 1997 handover, getting sucked into what at first appears to be a criminal conspiracy but turns out to be the work of aliens - well, one alien in particular... I felt that ...
For progressives, whether they be of the liberal centre or the hard left, 2016 was a traumatic year in so many ways. Brexit and Trump are but the most obvious signifiers in this psychological landscape; there are all sorts of ways in which this past year has damaged the collective psyche of the left of centre. Paul Mason has written an article in The Guardian which provides insight into where these thoughts are going. He accuses many of being in the first stage of grief, denial, with all this talk of Brexit not really happening and Trump surely thinking about ...
Our dear friend Charles (Uncle Albert) Walker a Maghull resident since 1960 (so he's nearly a local) hosted a party on Christmas day evening. [IMG: Charles at his Christmas Day party] Charles at his Christmas Day party Well he not so much hosted it as it came to him as a collection of local friends brought the celebrations to him because he was otherwise spending Christmas Day on his own. The event was the idea of former local councillor Andrew Blackburn who had previously invited Charles to his own house for the last 3 Christmas Days. This year however Charles' ...
[IMG: day-2] On the second day of Christmas, ALDC gave to me... an amazing free tablet to help me knock on more doors. Many of our members have already taken advantage of our free door knocking tablet offer, which you get when you recommend ALDC to a friend or colleague. When someone signs up to become an [...]
"It is emblematic of the most remarkable and rancorous episode in modern British political history that so few of the key figures on either side of the EU Referendum seem able to agree about why we are where we are." James O'Brien reviews the raft of books on that referendum. "The sad thing ... is that ... all of these things Marr wants are going to be made harder thanks to Brexit." Jon Worth takes apart an Andrew Marr article on Brexit, Terence McCoy meets two American making money out of fake news: "He ... published the story and made ...
The Christmas celebrations at Bonkers Hall are in full swing, aided by a heavy fall of snow that makes the old boy's estate look thoroughly seasonal. It is a peculiarity of the local climate that one can count upon snow at this time of year, even if it falls nowhere else in England. All of which means it is time to look back on the old boy's activities over the past year. For new readers who would like to know about Lord Bonkers and how I met him, I recommend my Liberator article Twenty years of Lord Bonkers (which is ...
We've had boar for Christmas for the last umpteen years, but this year I tried a new recipe, patriotically named Marcassin De Flandres. The marinade is much the same as previously, but boiling rather than roasting struck me as risky. However, it worked, and even little U, often dubious about strange food, ate hers all up. The recipe is as follows: INGREDIENTS: 1 chunk young wild boar for roasting (1-1.5 kilos) 1 medium onion, coarsely chopped 2 carrots, peeled and cut into 0.5 cm cubes 1 rib celery, cut into 0.5 cm cubes 1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed with ...
Not the Christmas Poem You Were Looking For Jo Walton reflects. (tags: christmas poetry ) A Trump Christmas Carol by @rozkaveney, @PennyRed, @scalzi and @bluejowalton. (tags: Sf Uspolitics )
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act has always been a controversial measure giving local councils powers to snoop on their citizens to enforce various measures, out of all proportion to the nature of the offence. An article in Guardian reveals the extent to which these powers have been used. The paper says that Councils were given permission to carry out more than 55,000 days of covert surveillance over five years, including spying on people walking dogs, feeding pigeons and fly-tipping: A mass freedom of information request has found 186 local authorities - two-thirds of the 283 that responded - used ...
