Small Beds and Large Bears

Speechification’s superb service to the nation has delivered The Human Button into my podcast tracking devicicule recently. It’s broadly speaking a nutritious slice of Reithian radio and very listenable, although just as establishment as milord would have loved to hear. The presenter Peter Hennessy is professor of contemporary British history at Queen Mary, University of [...]

The innocent man has only so much to fear from the police as they do from any other bunch of otherwise laughable, heavily armed, thick-skulled, stoked-up neds.
There’s currently a peaceful demonstration and climate workshop camp being run near the proposed site of the coal-fired white elephant at Kingsnorth. The site’s owner is reportedly more than [...]

The Poet Laura-eate provides two perspectives on the problem of the colour of one’s poppies. I tend these days to wear a red poppy. But then I’m not wearing it entirely for myself any more: I’m also wearing it for my grandad. Imagine me as an old man, if it helps you contextualise that. If [...]

Out of curiosity, prompted by this story about badgers, I searched YouTube for any film of this stripey menace. “Basra” would be too specific, I thought, so I searched for “badger iraq”.
At the time of going to press, the third and final match for those search terms was this. Respect the badgers.

Borders has one of the best selections of obscure, niche-market magazines in Oxford. For all its multinational rapacity, and its attempts to package, brand, pre-chew and mulch down literature that a bookshop ought to treat with at least a little more respect, it’s almost the exclusive distributor of such as the is-it-or-isn’t-it-defunct new consumer magazine [...]

One of the first things I noticed about the first climate-change meeting I went to was that the audience overlapped to an astonishing extent with the Stop-the-War crowd. I suppose that’s to be expected: we middle-class do-gooders should stick together. Well, whether we should or not, we do.
Given the shared audience, you’d think that the [...]

I wore a red poppy this year, for the record. Partly this was because, as I say, I was attending on behalf of my Grandad and I know what he’d wear. If you asked my Grandad, and many people like him, whether or not the wearing of red poppies glorifies war, he’d look at you [...]

I attended Witney’s remembrance service today. It’s not entirely in character for me: I tend to shy away from large organized events unless they’re festivals full of my demographic (or what was my demographic, five years ago, I suppose). But since my Grandad became unable to attend on his own behalf—ironically, because the bits of [...]

Remember David Kelly? Remember the Hutton Report? Remember how we all thought it was a whitewash? Well, ten questions for you (summarized from a recent Blairwatch post):

How come Kelly predicted his own death, and the manner of it?
If he died from the cut to his artery, where was the blood? Why did he avoid the [...]

Speaking of poster children, Lord Kitchener, who told us all during WWI that our country needed us, died with the sinking of the HMS Hampshire, lost on June 5, 1916. Yet his iconic picture continued to recruit more soldiers to the same destiny as Kitchener himself. He managed to see his 66th birthday; most of [...]