The flooding of the River Jordan earlier this week has had me looking at old Ordnance Survey maps. As I suspected, Rectory Lane has this long curve because it used to follow the river. And the shot below, taken outside the old thatched house on Scotland Road below - I remember it as a shop in the 1980s and it may once have been Little Bowden Post Office - shows how high the pavement once is there. I suspect that's because the road used to flood regularly. Little Bowden used to be two settlements. One was by the church and ...
I am not, to anyone's mind, ever going to become a fashion icon. Let's rephrase that, given that I've spent most of my life noting that you should never say never, it seems highly unlikely that I am ever going to become a fashion icon. I kind of begrudge spending anything significant on clothes, I have almost no ability to colour co-ordinate, and I take care of myself in a relatively haphazard way. I don't much like ironing either, although I acknowledge it's necessity. For, if I'm honest, walruses and high fashion tend to be strangers. It's not that I ...
Labour MP Kim Leadbeater I am not entirely sure how I would have voted on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill on Friday if I had been an MP. For many years I have expressed views supporting a change in the law. Bodily autonomy is a fundamentally liberal principle. The right to die with dignity is something I have long championed. And yet, I am not satisfied that this Bill represents the right way forward. I am not sure that I could have supported it, even at its second reading, because it is so deeply flawed. If I ...
They've often been declared dead, but laws against blasphemy haven't quite given up the ghost. Here Alan Robertshaw takes us through their history. One interesting point is that, in recent centuries, they've been far more about keeping the peace than enforcing orthodoxy in belief. Unless you are Mary Whitehouse and John Smyth, of course.
The last few years have been difficult ones for those who believe in liberal democracy, people like me who maintain that it's the best and most successful form of governance. Many commentators have talked of a multi-polar world with major actors that are neither liberal and democratic. This time last year geo-political pundits talked of an emerging Axis of Resistance – banana republics, gangster states, theocracies, dictatorships banding together and forming a genuine alliance. The core of this Axis is Russia, Iran, Syria and North Korea. Sometimes China is included, but there is much debate as to how closely China ...
I'm pleased that the Commons have voted in favour of Assisted Dying. The majority was a slim one, 330-275, which reflects the strength of arguments on both sides. To my mind the strongest argument in favour is that, in both Oregon and Australia, where assisted death has been legal for some years, now 66% of those who ask for and receive the "end it all" package don't actually use it. Clearly it becomes an "insurance." it could actually improve palliative care and the quality of life in the last few days since it empowers the individual with the knowledge that ...
So the first chart announcement since Love is Enough, the song by young carers featuring Ed Davey was released is out. It would melt even the most permafrosted heart. And they're at...... Number 6! Which isn't bad for a day's sales. As we said before, it is pretty decent. But when you've got the person who produced Cher's Believe running the show, then you're probably on to a winner. Ed was pretty chuffed with this news, paying tribute to the young carers who wrote and performed the song. It is truly heartwarming to see that this song is already resonating ...
Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Opinium 25% (+1) 29% (-1) 10% (-2) 9% (+1) 21% (nc) 4% 27-29/11 GB Techne 27% (nc) 28% (-1) 13% (+1) 6% (-1) 18% ...
Don't tell Lord Bonkers, but I suspect you weren't worrying about those beavers. In fact, I suspect that you heard more than enough about them last time. At least the old brute is continuing the Bonkers' ancestral feud with the Dukes of Rutland by more subtle means these days, though I expect he still has that Wellington bomber stabled on an outlying farm. Friday His was a voice of calm, compassion and reason in this modern maelstrom of events, but now Gary Lineker is to stand down as presenter of Match of the Day. I also learn that Justin Welby ...
There was a very timely and prescient column in yesterday's Guardian from Jonathan Freedland in which he argues that from defence to trade, the incoming US president is upending the old order - and standing apart from our neighbours leaves us dangerously exposed. Freedland says that the November 2024 event that will have the most enduring global impact is the election of Donald Trump and although some in the higher reaches of the UK government are surprisingly relaxed about that fact, reassuring themselves that, in effect, we got through it once, we'll get through it again, this is not going ...
Fentanyl is a nasty synthetic opioid. It is 100 times more potent than heroin and 50 times more potent than morphine. It is, not surprisingly, also many times more addictive. In 2023 an estimated 75,000 Americans died of fentanyl overdoses. As little as two milligrams of fentanyl—roughly equivalent to a few grains of salt—can kill you. A large number of the 2.5 million US opioid addicts are fentanyl users. Because it is highly addictive, Fentanyl is replacing—some say has replaced—cocaine and heroin as the product of choice of the drug cartels. Heroin exports are also being laced with a grain ...
I usually concentrate on changes in seats in my pieces about local council by-elections, but vote share changes are also useful to help understand what the broader political trends are. Handily, the New Statesman has just compared those with earlier Parliaments: [IMG: New Statesman analysis of council by-election vote share changes] Labour's performance is particularly poor, indeed its worst in any of the Parliaments analysed. The Conservative performance is also poor, that party's third worst in the table and significantly worse than the aftermath of its 1997 landslide defeat. As for the Liberal Democrats, the vote share change is the ...
One of the events taking place today during West End Christmas Fortnight is the Friends of Blackness Winter Fair today at Blackness Primary School - all welcome!
