I'm not a great one for horror films, but I was intrigued by what I'd heard of Bring Her Back. So I went to see it while I was in Shrewsbury. I'd read enough reviews to know when the goriest scenes were coming and to know something about the ending. But really it's not a horror film so much as a film about grief and people's extreme reactions to it. Sally Hawkins' performance as a deranged counsellor is simply extraordinary, and it's only the widespread sniffyness about genre films that makes me fear it won't win her the awards she ...
Not my photograph, but this is St Walburgha's Church at Plowden in Shropshire. Because the Plowden family remained Catholic after the Reformation, it's a Catholic Church. I'm not certain when I visited it, but I think it was on the day I first saw Bishop's Castle after walking there from Church Stretton. If so, it was in June 1989. While I was looking round St Walburgha's, an old farm cat with torn ears came in to see what I was up to. I fancied he was a sort of feline Brother Cadfael: after travelling the world, he was devoting his ...
An open letter organised by Together With Refugees and signed by more than 200 refugee groups, charities and trade unions called on party leaders to end the pernicious currents of hatred that are fuelling anti-migrant protests. Ed Davey closed his reply with the words: That is who we are: a caring country, not a country of thuggery. A nation of laws and decency, not hate and lawlessness. And we must insure this is who we remain. My first thought was that this was a pretty generous reading of our history, but then I thought of one of my favourite philosophers, ...
This is what the International Garden Festival looked like in 1984. 40 years later we are about to start developing a new 'village' on the site. The first new village in Liverpool for decades I have today written to the two developers chosen to develop the Festival Gardens site to urge them to build Liverpool's first village for decades. In a letter to Urban Splash and Igloo Liverpool needs to develop itself as a series of villages in which people have a sense of identity where there can be inter-generational resilience and communities. For those outside Liverpool, the Festival Gardens ...
Chambers' Dictionary defines terrorism as "an organized system of violence and intimidation, especially for political ends, and the state of fear and submission caused by this". The Terrorism Act 2000 has a rather wider definition. Section 1 includes action designed to influence the government, and includes serious damage to property. That means that Yvette Cooper was almost certainly within her powers in asking Parliament to proscribe Palestine Action; but the actions of that group are not within the everyday understanding of the concept of terrorism. When I learned of the events at Brize Norton, my reaction was not "I am ...
Last week, Mark Sewards, Leeds South West and Morley's freshman MP, announced that he had created an AI chatbot version of himself, complete with a facsimile of his voice and an uncanny avatar. While Sewards has become the first MP to take such a step, this is not the first time that Neural Voice, the tech company behind the chatbot, has dabbled in politics; in 2024, they fielded an AI version of their chairman Steve Endacott as an Independent candidate in the Brighton Pavillion. The West Yorkshire Labour MP said that his chatbot will "help strengthen the connection between an ...
Peter Chambers introduces us to the concept of "technical debt" and asks why no one talks about it when it comes to Thames Water. The term "technical debt" was applied to an effect in software engineering identified in the 1970s by Professor Manny Lehman. Lehman was trying to identify how the new field of software was similar to previous fields of engineering such as civil engineering, which deals with infrastructure and other hardware. It was intended to appeal, as a metaphor, to indicate future costs to rectify present-day design choices and externalities. Manny's work was intended to help estimate the ...
Writing about The Windmills of Your Mind last week, I mentioned the 1967 and 1968 Oscars for the Best Original Song. In 1966 this song was nominated, but lost to Matt Monro and Born Free. Still, it's a reminder of how popular the Seekers were in Britain in those days. The music for Georgy Girl was written by Tom Springfield (Dusty's brother) and the words by Jim Dale. This makes him the only Carry On regular with an Oscar nomination.
When the Liberal Democrats entered the Coalition Government in 2010 the introduction of a Pupil Premium was a key part of our agreement with the Conservatives. It was a simple idea – give schools extra funding for each disadvantaged child they teach, and require that money to be spent in ways that improve those pupils' life chances. It was a direct investment in fairness - helping to close the stubborn attainment gap between children from low-income families and their peers. But a new report from the Centre for Social Justice shows that while £27 bn has been spent on the ...
Following residents reporting the graffiti to us at the Scott Street to Pentland Avenue steps, we raised this with environment management at the council to ensure it was power-washed off.
Wales-on-line reports that the UK Government has said that the Crown Estate will not be devolved to Wales because it "would risk market fragmentation, complicate existing processes, and delay further development offshore". They say that the Crown Estate is a collection of marine and land assets and holdings that belong to the monarch. It includes the seabed out to 12 nautical miles, which is around 65% of the Welsh foreshore and riverbed, and a number of ports and marinas. On land the Crown Estates owns 50,000 acres of common land in Wales. The value of the estate in Wales is ...
