I heard this mentioned on a podcast about The Sound of Music and have now come across it online. It's by Melinda Taub and you'll find it at McSweeney's. It's the kind of piece you want to reproduce in full, but I have limited myself to a couple of short quotations: I must confess to being rather blindsided by the end of our relationship. It seems Captain Von Trapp and I misunderstood each other. I assumed he was looking for a wife of taste and sophistication, who was a dead ringer for Tippi Hedren; instead he wanted to marry a ...
Let me make clear from the start that I find most of the beliefs inherent in the Reform Party to be loathsome. I suspect that some of the Reform councillors have been swept along on a tide by the rhetoric of Mr. Farage. But most of them will have bought into the savage rhetoric of this quite odious man. I suspect that many of the people who voted for Reform last week are not in that category. They are people who are stuck going nowhere, and who are just looking for someone to listen to them and provide answers. Reform ...
The National Farmers' Union has decided to wind down its campaign against the imposition of inheritance tax (IHT) on farmland, reports Bio-Waste Spreader in the current Private Eye. The union has concluded that its protests simply haven't worked, as the government has shown no sign of making any concession to its demands. More than that, the union has concluded that these protests have become counterproductive: Demonstrations, particularly in Westminster involving hundreds of tractors, generated unfavourable headlines involving multimillionaire celebrities such as Jeremy Clarkson, who, as he stated in an article for The Times, bought his 1000-acre farm in Oxfordshire to ...
My Conservative MP Neil O'Brien's X account is a bin fire. You would never know from it that in a general election less than a year ago his party lost half their vote and two-thirds of their MPs. And his only tweets on the local election have been about an 18-year-old Labour candidate in Burnley. And there's lots about race, much of it designed to encourage the idea that it's white people who are discriminated against. No wonder he gets lots of like and retweets and follows from blue-tick accounts with even more right-wing views. Are these even from real ...
Women and babies were deported from Britain and incarcerated in Irish state institutions because the mothers were unmarried, reports ITV News after a year-long investigation. Its report on the scandal covers one such case and then adds: From 1930 to the late 1970s the numbers making a similar journey were so high, officials in London called them PFIs - 'pregnant from Ireland'. The British authorities saw them as a burden on the taxpayer and put pressure on the Irish state to address the situation, while the Catholic Church in Ireland feared the children would grow up in non-Catholic families. The ...
In this year's local elections, we had a great showing. The Liberal Democrats gained 163 councillors, majority control of three county councils and now lead in five hung councils. The Conservatives and Labour were both clearly rebuked for their track records. Is it any wonder that a running theme of the election coverage has been the 'death of two-party politics'? However, we cannot deny that was a great night for Reform UK. They have won the concurrent Runcorn and Helsby by-election, and gained 677 new councillors, control of ten councils, and the newly created mayoralties of Hull and East Yorkshire, ...
Our joint weekly ward surgeries take place tonight. This week they are as follows : Blackness Library (Tuesdays 5pm - every week during school term time) Ancrum Road Primary School (1st Tuesday of each month at 5.45pm during school term time) All welcome - no appointment necessary!
The Mirror reports that MPs have warned Ministers that the cost of not taking urgent action to fix the "broken" social care system and to understand the hidden costs means that the impact on the NHS, unpaid carers and other services will far outweigh the price of any potentially expensive solutions to the crisis. Their report said that the current inadequate system is putting "unsustainable pressure" on unpaid carers who are being forced to provide care worth £184 billion a year - "equivalent to a second NHS", while local authority budgets are "buckling under the pressure" of an increasingly "high ...
