Click on the still above to view this film on the British Film Institute site:With every spare inch of his travelling hardware van packed with useful items Ken Hollingsworth takes to the road from the Long Eaton Co-operative store following a circular route through South Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. Film maker J.H. Poyser takes the journey in the passenger seat capturing rural lanes teaming with more cows than traffic and an eager public ready to buy everything from chimney brushes to clothes airers. J.H. Poyser filmed a series of promotionial and educational films for the Long Eaton Co-operative Society. A ...
You don't have to be active in British politics for long before you recognise the truth of this quotation: The right looks for converts: the left looks for traitors.Today, for instance, Twitter is full of left-wingers crowing about the redundancies at the Guardian because they believe the paper did not do enough to boost the saintly Jeremy Corbyn. You even see this attitude in Liberal Democrat Twitter, which is strange given how inchoate the party's philosophy is. Meanwhile Boris Johnson is showering Labour Leavers with peerages. But where does the quotation come from? Duncan Hill has kindly directed me to ...
Jimmy Flannigan, candidate for District 6 in Austin, talks about traffic, water, property crime, rising taxes - in one long, flowing take.
Sat 18th
14:55
YATE LEISURE CENTRE TO REOPEN on 27 July. For more info about the arrangements - booking, pass holde...
YATE LEISURE CENTRE TO REOPENon 27 July. For more info about the arrangements - booking, pass holders etc see https://activecentres.org/coronavirus/
I totally failed to note in the previous month the hiring of my first intern in the new job. J was an intelligent young woman who had tried various career options which didn't work out, and was prepared to give working in international politics a fling. I'm glad to say that she caught the bug and is now a British diplomat. It also turned out that her elder brother was friends with their neighbour Rebecca Nation, the daughter of Terry Nation who wrote a lovely book for her, and J had played with real Daleks as a child. (For certain ...
Continuing the pattern of trying out different hustings formats this time around, the Liberal Democrat leadership election has featured a 'job interview' format.
Etymology while driving through the Ardennes: the name must derive from a local Celtic cognate of Welsh ardd, Irish/Manx ard, Scots Gaelic àrd which all mean "high". This comes from Proto-Indo-European *h₃r̥dʰ-wó-s, also the root of Latin arduus, "steep" and delightfully of Greek ὀρθός, "straight/upright", root of orthodox, orthogonal, orthodontics etc. Also Sanskrit ऊर्ध्व (ūrdhvá) "high" and Ossetian уырды́г (wyrdýg) "upright". (I love the chance to use Ossetian! Nothing in Farsi or Dari, or in any Germanic language for that matter). A closely related Indo-European root *h₃r̥dʰ-ō-s gives us a high plant in Latin arbor/arbōs, "tree". The second element of ...
In 1998, Tony Blair introduced University Student fees with the assertion that the "poor" should not have to contribute (through taxation) to University Student fees for graduates who would likely become "wealthy" as a result of University education. There are about 42 million people in the UK of working age ( 16 to 1 day short of 65 ). About 20% do not wish to work (inactive), about 4% are unemployed, about 20% do not earn enough to pay income tax, which leaves 56% who do pay income tax. Split that 56% into an upper half and a lower half. ...
Fri, 12:56: RT @Andrew_Adonis: I cancelled Stonehenge tunnel as Transport Secretary a decade ago, it was such a waste of money at £300m. Now it is bein... Fri, 16:05: The Kremlin goes Orwellian on Orwell https://t.co/JY1FQyqp6y "This is pure disinformation, just as in Orwell's 1982! [sic]" Fri, 17:10: RT @damonwake: This is by far the best thing anyone's ever done with an EU summit meet-and-greet video https://t.co/vrG4MCJqo9 Fri, 17:11: What Our First Close Look at Mars Actually Revealed https://t.co/qTEe0CrBp3 It was a bit grim! Fri, 18:08: Charlemagne - How Ireland gets its way https://t.co/WEpjivo2S9 Hope this isn't paywalled - an ...
Having blogged yesterday about the awarding of government contracts to companies with strong links to the Tory party without a competitive tender, it was interesting to find this article in the Mirror from a few days ago. The paper says that Coronavirus tests given to thousands of Brits and supplied by a firm which has donated £160,000 to the Conservative Party were pulled last night over safety fears. Care homes in England were ordered by the DHSC to halt using the testing kit produced by Randox Laboratories, on the grounds that they "may not meet our required safety standards for ...
Lib Dem run Watford Borough Council this week voted unanimously to pass a motion in favour of reviewing our town's street names with links to slave and colonial history. The Black Lives Matter Campaign and others have rightly highlighted the harm slavery, indentured labour and exploitation inflicted on individuals and whole societies during the cruel period of slavery - the legacy of which continues to this day. It is important to remember that sickness and destitution were rife amongst slaves, there was a significant need for acclimatisation for immigrants to any slave colony, however, many slave owners failed to do ...
Sat 18th
08:30
Whoniversaries 18 July: Robert Sloman, Alan Bennion, Paul Cornell, David Maloney, The Sensorites #4
i) births and deaths 18 July 1926: birth of Robert Sloman, who co-wrote The Dæmons (1971), and was sole author of The Time Monster (1972), The Green Death (1973), and Planet of the Spiders (1974) - the season finales for all but the first of the Pertwee years. 18 July 1930: birth of Alan Bennion, who appeared as Ice Lord Slaar in The Seeds of Death (Second Doctor, 1969), Ice Lord Izlyr in The Curse of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1972) and Ice Lord Azaxyr in The Monster of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1974). 18 July 1967: birth of Paul Cornell, who ...
I am grateful to all residents who have given feedback to me regarding the new 20mph zone in the Perth Road Lanes and district shopping centre. Provided as a result of funding through Sustrans' "Spaces for People" programme, it is one of four new temporary 20mph zones in the city - the others being in Fintry, Broughty Ferry and Douglas. As residents know, I have long campaigned for 20mph zones in residential areas to provide a safer environment, paricularly for children out playing and the elderly and I am very pleased with the positive feedback to the new zone already ...
