A new Pope has been elected but it took the collected Cardinals a couple of days. The Times (9th May) has revealed what they had to eat.
The menu was set to avoid the risk of choking or hiding secret messages in the food
Lunch: white meat or fish with vegetables
Dinner: vegetable soup, pasta and fish, fruit, jam tart & a glass of wine
Some foods were off the agenda including asparagus which is reportedly a diuretic, an issue for senior cardinals who were meant to be sitting in conclave not the toilet Ravioli was off the menu due to concerns that messages could be hidden in it as was chicken on the bone due to the possibility of choking.
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the 2025 Official Beard, Shorts and Sandals Season is officially open
The pre-Season was marked by variable weather but the forecast now indicates higher temperatures with less rain for a period. The 2024 Season opened on 9th May so it is very much in line with last year.
No Guidelines in 2025
The Beard Liberation Front, one of whose founding principles is that people should be able to dress and appear as they want is increasingly concerned about official diktats about how people should or should not appear.
However the BLF urges those participating in the 2025 Beard, Shorts and Sandals Season to take care out there:
1 UV levels. It’s not just sun that can lead to sunburnt legs
2 Pogonophobia. Participants should beware beard haters
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the Beard, Shorts and Sandals season has been a major influence on summer fashions in recent times and we expect the 2025 season to be no different. There is however a major difference this year. There are no guidelines. Do your own thing!
Eton v Harrow cricket match, Lords 8th May 2025. Results and Prospects
The Eton v Harrow game has been played at Lords since 1805. In recent years the MCC who run Lords have tried to get the fixture moved elsewhere on the grounds that Lords can only sensibly stage 60 days of cricket a year and in the 2020s there are other calls on the ground.
In 2025 these include a disability day and a schools open final day.
The Eton v Harrow game remains at Lords following the intervention of an Historic Fixtures Members Committee.
The 2025 game played over 55 overs saw a victory for Harrow by 33 runs
Harrow scored 282-8 off 55 overs. Eton fell sort being all out for 251 in 54.1 overs.
Not sure how many care but that means Harrow now edge Eton in the number of matches won 61-60. 68 have been drawn although that is now historic with the fixture being a one day game. The first tie and super over are awaited..
The latest dispute in what has become a controversial fixture was about when the game should be played. Typically the game has been played in July. The 2025 date was in the middle of the school exams season and several key players may not be available.
The current MCC Chair Mark Nicholas has suggested that there is a way forward where both Eton and Harrow and the MCC see mutual advantage in maintaining the fixture at Lords. Hence Harrow have been contributing to an MCC charity and schools work…
The report of this latest dispute was in the Times (6th May)
The match is little reported but Harriet Monkhouse on BlueSky posted that six of the Harrow X1 appeared to be of South Asian heritage and the crowd had a significant BAME attendance.
No doubt this reflects where the wealthy send their children in 2025 and who the wealthy are whatever Nigel Farage and his fan club may think. But it underlines the significant South Asian interest in cricket in the UK, persistently underplayed by the ECB. It should also be noted that some of The Hundred franchisees are South Asian based, at least in part. Of course this is their side not ours as it were but as the socialist historian John Foster noted a while ago looking at what is ‘new’ in any situation is an important starting point for any research.
It is something that has been noted before but perhaps too little remarked upon in recent times. I refer of course to the relationship between Marx and Engels and hedgehogs.
It is not known if the Marx household had a hedgehog but Engels, living with Lizzie Burns in Manchester, certainly did. In Victorian times hedgehogs were associated with a clean house as they ate insects such as black beetles.
Volume 43 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Letters 1868-1870) has exchanges on hedgehogs.
On 3rd January 1868 Jenny Marx wrote to Engels in German. Eleanor Marx then a teenager added a footnote in English:
‘you bad boy, why haven’t you answered my letters, I suppose you and the hedgehog have been on the spree again’
Eleanor was right as Engels, with or without hedgehog, had recorded that he had been over eating and drinking over the holiday period
Writing to Marx a few months later on 10th April 1868 Engels noted that he had a death to announce, ‘the poor hedgehog ate a round hole in his blanket, put his head through it, and got so stuck in that he was found yesterday morning. Peace to his ashes and BETTER LUCK TO THE NEXT ONE
Engels reported below that he had been celebrating Paul and Laura Lafargue’s wedding with ‘the dogs’, a tea party for six children and a punch bowl for the adults. The ‘poor hedgehog was made drunk for the last time’
Fish & Chips, Revolution & Heinz Fish & Chip Sauce
In The Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell notes that fish and chips were one of the things that saved Britain from revolution in the 1930s. Fish and chips were much cheaper then obviously.
Fast forward almost a hundred years and Heinz have launched a fish and chips sauce. Orwell doesn’t mention sauce in the Road to Wigan Pier. Salt and Vinegar likely sufficed.
In recent times however tartare sauce often accompanies fish and chips. Heinz sauce is badged as Tartare 2.0 and costs £3.40. At the moment that it is. It’ll be at least 10% more before long no doubt.
Heinz say they have removed capers and egg yolk from their original tartare sauce (and puzzlingly added mustard). They claim that this means the sauce is now suitable for vegans. Indeed it is, except of course its pescatarians who eat fish, not vegans. Perhaps using suitable for pescatarians was a stretch too far for Heinz or perhaps they just don’t get what Woke means.
I doubt George Orwell, who disliked faddists and vegetarians would have been impressed..
The Ambridge Socialist marks VE Day: Nationalise the Land
8th May 2025
The Archers is marking VE Day on the actual anniversary (unlike Keir Starmer) and there is an elaborate exhibition at Lower Loxley focusing on Ambridge 1939-45. There are also two special editions of the Archers based in the 1940s and featuring one of the all-time great proletarian heroes of the village, Walter Gabriel
We understand that the usual ruling class sycophants like Justin Elliott and Brian Aldridge are out waving Union Jacks and claiming that we are all in it together.
80 years on though the Ambridge Socialist is still winning the peace. We are celebrating on the Village Green with glasses of Tumble Tussocks and red flags flying. The defeat of fascism and the foundation of a then fully funded NHS are worth marking.
However we are still demanding the nationalisation of the land, a long standing labour movement demand that was not acted on in 1945. It’s time to expropriate the estates of the Archers and the Aldridges and turn them over to common use under the stewardship of the Grundys.
contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social
No Pope has worn a beard since 1700. Campaigners express dismay that the clean shaven tradition continues
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that after the untimely death of Pope Francis, its concerning that no consideration appears to have been given to the appointment of an hirsute Pope.
The US born Pope Leo X1V continues the 325 year old tradition of clean shaven Popes
There is no bar to the Pope wearing a beard and canonical law is silent on the issue.
The reality remains however that no Pope has had a beard since the death of Pope Innocent X11 in 1700 BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, 325 years is a long time to wait for another Pope with a beard. While we accept there are many other considerations that go towards appointing a Pope, we believe that a beard would add further gravitas to pronouncements from the Vatican. There is of course nothing to stop Pope Leo growing a beard to celebrate his election.
My thanks to Prof. David Edgerton (Kings) who alerted me on social media on the 75th anniversary of VE Day in 2020 to a post from a fellow Kings historian Dr Kit Kowol.
Kowol, who I don’t know has done research on the recent history of letter writing (amongst other things)
Kowol reports that the Second World War was the golden age of letter writing- perhaps the last one- as people sought to keep in touch in fractured times. This was before of course most people would have had a (fixed line) telephone and social media was a thing of the distant future, although the telegraph existed.
Within this he suggests that VE Day saw a peak of letter writing- to Churchill-with people keen to engage with the wartime leader. Another peak came a few months later when Churchill lost the General Election to Attlee and people wrote to commiserate with Churchill.
One presumes certainly in the latter case that the writers were mostly Tory voters, but we can’t really be sure, any more than it can be known if Churchill read any of the letters or responded to them.
Were Churchill around today we can imagine what his twitter timeline would look like but the process of letter writing perhaps suggested more measured thoughts.
A corrective to the above is that 1945 was certainly not the golden age of letter writing for publication. That came many decades later. Papers in 1945 had few pages compared to now and carried very few (often lengthy) letters.
Socialist Historian & WW2 Tank Commander E P Thompson (1924-1993) on what VE Day meant
E P Thompson was a tank commander in the Second World War. A member of the Communist Party, he left in 1956 and went on to write the Making of the English Working Class (1963) as well as being a leader of CND and then END.
The debate about whether World War Two was a people’s war continues but Thompson’s words here underline the hopes that many had for the future when the war was won. Hope is in too short supply 80 years on
There entered here a taboo. And any claim to priority in matters affecting the chances of life was taboo most of all. It was not just the discipline of war, whether active service or being bombed and rationed, when the young, above all, gave priority to the injured, the sick, the children and the old. It was far wider than that. In that almost-democratic, half-anti-Fascist time, the chances of life were shared; in 1941-45 this island was fanned by strange airs of égalité, when the pursuit of private privilege seemed contemptible. And this most of all for the socialist young, who went to the polls in 1945 to vote Labour, Commonwealth, Communist, ILP.
The Health Service, even more than the nationalisation of the pits, expressed the spirit of that time and extended it forward into the future in institutional form. It was designed by the ablest and most socialist minister in Labour’s post-war government. And it expresses in transparent form the first of socialist egalitarian principles: to each according to his or her needs. Of course things are never as simple as that. But the lay person supposes that, in the chances of health and life, medical science is able to determine priorities according to criteria of need, and that no other consideration need enter. In this way the NHS replaced the vocabulary of class with that of citizenship
A trip around the beer festivals of the UK – from the early pioneers as far back as the 19th century through to today. Laura will explore how beer festivals have evolved over time, and how their growth has been a key factor in bringing an incredible freshness and diversity to the British beer scene, mainly thanks to the dedication of CAMRA volunteers who have spent 50 years tirelessly sharing their passion for cask ale with the general public.
