Kmflett's Blog

Its 16 years since I first visited the Jolly Butchers pub in Stoke Newington on Saturday 24^th April 2010. It had opened a few days earlier as a cask beer bar, rather different to its previous incarnation, Father Teds, which had a certain if rather different charm to it.

Many readers of the blog will know that the JBs became a craft beer institution, one of a handful of pubs in the Capital selling what at that time was a new wave of cask beers.

They all seem quite familiar now but 16 years ago for example Thornbridge Jaipur on cask was more or less unheard of in London, while Redemption was the first of the now numerous breweries in Tottenham and Walthamstow and I think the JBs was amongst the first if not the first regular outlet.

The staff too, who I won’t embarrass by naming, went on in many cases to be very familiar and much valued faces in the world of craft beer.

Of course the JBs wasn’t without downsides. The toilets were legendary but not in a good way despite several efforts to sort the matter out. The wi-fi was a little dodgy and the seating not always as comfortable as all that.

So what though? The JBs was not the first pub selling craft beer in London but it became rightly famous as one of the best. In 2026 there are lots of pubs and bars selling good beer in London. A reminder that 16 years ago if you wanted anything like a drinkable pint of cask beer in Stoke Newington you might well have headed a few minutes up the road to the Rochester Castle (aka Wetherspoons).

The JBs changed all that and it has stayed changed.

My first ever tweet from the Jolly Butchers

Stopped by newly re-opened Jolly Butchers; two Thornbridge beers; two Dark Star, Brodies, Redemption, Crouch Vale – promising

8:43 PM · Apr 24, 2010

As the 1 May local elections near, Nigel Farage’s campaign is featured in every media outlet. The reports seem to suggest that it consists of a pub crawl around the country. I wonder if Farage is aware of the Alex Glasgow song As Soon As This Pub Closes (The Revolution Starts)?
Keith Flett
Tottenham, London

23rd April

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said it is still investigating why self styled US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has only one sideburn while the normal quotient is two

Historic pictures show Hegseth with a complete complement of sideburns but in a public appearance on Easter Monday one was missing.

The BLF facial hair styles sub committee continues to investigate

The campaigners say that if Hegseth has continuing sideburns issues he may not make the shortlist for Sideburns of the Year in August 2025. Slade singer Noddy Holder won the annual vote in 2024

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, it remains unclear whether Hegseth is launching a new fashion in sideburns or has simply shaved one off by mistake. If the latter it is perhaps surprising that he didn’t also shave the other one as well and start again. It doesn’t take a long time to grow sideburns and he needs two to be considered for Sideburns of the Year

The above is from the Chartist Northern Star, 2nd May 1846, reflecting an early Victorian link between Shakespeare and St George but very much focused on the former. A tradition in progress…

St  George’s Day & the Invention of Tradition

As Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s book pointed out all traditions are at some point invented.

St George’s Day is no exception. The figure of St George fitted the profile constructed by some Medieval Guilds. By 1530 St George’s Day was celebrated in some areas of the country, although not London. Henry V111 was not keen (to put it mildly) on Saints and St George’s Day was stripped of religious connotations, which came and went depending on what stance the sitting monarch took on religion.

All Saints days were banned during the Parliamentary period (1645-1660 in effect) but St George returned after 1660 when the dragon also seems to have been popular. It then went into decline again only to revive in the late nineteenth century. By the 1930s the flying of the St George’s flag and association also with Shakespeare birthday  appeared and these continue.

In 2025 media reports that the Church of England has determined that because no Saints Days can fall between Palm Sunday and the second Sunday of Easter, St George’s Day should be on 28^th April and St Mark’s on 29^th April. However the rules that state this date only from 1969 although presumably based on an earlier version

Cry God for Keir, England and St George

Keir Starmer held a St George’s Day reception at Downing St on 22^nd April and once again made a call for the national flag (in this case presumably the St George’s Cross) to be reclaimed from the far right. We have been here before, several times, and the far right are still parading the flag around.

Labour supporters in Scotland and Wales may be distinctly unimpressed. Labour does not organise in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, which Starmer may vaguely recall.

As a socialist of course my flag stays red

Why the right want St George, who wherever he was born, was certainly not English, is perhaps obvious. He was a military saint and he was a Christian. Plus he has been around as an icon for a long time in English history.

Shakespeare’s Henry V contains the still oft repeated phrase ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George. As a military and a religious man St George fitted the ideology of the Crusades well

We can agree then that if the reasons for George becoming an English saint, along with being the saint of numbers of other countries, are a little obscure, given the length of time he has been at it he at least has squatting rights to the title.

St George was a soldier in the Roman Army of Emperor Diocletian and was persecuted and killed for refusing to give up his Christian faith.

Given that the Romans had occupied Britain, and that there was some Christianity in the country some kind of connection can be seen.

That said the slaying of the dragon was not a reflection of some ancient English rivalry against Wales but mythic.

In 2025 St George’s Day is little more than a chance for businesses to make some money out of flag shagging. There are no ceremonies associated with it. However in the English traditional calendar, long before flag shaggers, it was a feast day. If Starmer is actually proposing that 23^rd April should be a public holiday- so far he isn’t- he may have hit on a fairly popular idea.

This picture was taken at TESLA Tottenham, North London (its actually in neighbouring Edmonton but Musk is clearly not familiar with the geography of North London, thankfully). The drop in profits should mean any thoughts of buying Spurs are off the agenda

Guardian report

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/22/tesla-sales-musk-white-house-exit?CMP=share_btn_url

Beard Liberation Front

7th May

contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social

No Pope has worn a beard since 1700. Campaigners say it is time for change

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said after the untimely death of Pope Francis, consideration must be given to the appointment of an hirsute Pope.

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 can only add further gravitas to pronouncements from the Vatican

Stuart Hall, & Labour’s Great Moving Right ShowTop of Form

Stuart Hall was the first Editor of New Left Review way back in 1960 and did much of his work at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. He was also associated with Marxism Today’s New Times project.

His view of the New Labour Project and where it took a wrong turn seems relevant for Labour in 2025. Starmer has backed the Supreme Court’s decision on the Equality Act. Whatever one makes of the ruling its clear that the person in charge of the EHRC, appointed by Liz Truss, is determined to use it to restrict trans rights.

At the same time Yvette Cooper has announced that league tables of which country foreign nationals who have committed crimes come from. The impact of course will be to stir up racism. Cooper is a right-wing Labour Home Secretary, a time honoured thing, with the brief exception of Roy Jenkins.

In both these cases Labour is copying the political agenda of the right instead of looking to build an alternative project. It might be argued that the Labour right never really has a project which might I suppose suggest a degree of New Labour exceptionalism, but that is another discussion.

Stuart Hall was interviewed by the New Statesman in 2012 and in it he touched on the New Times project of Marxism Today.

Stuart Hall’s corrective to what he thought New Times  was meant to be and should be about remains interesting:

The analysis, and his account of “new times” (the changes in the so-called post-Fordist economy brought about by globalisation), had some influence on the early intellectual outriders of New Labour, but Hall insists that his insights were vulgarised by the Blairites. “There is a tiny kernel of truth in the assertion that [Marxism Today] created Blairism, in the sense that the ‘new times’ stuff was addressing the change of the whole terrain. But what we recommended was that you needed a project on the left of the same breadth and depth as Thatcherism. New Labour understood it as meaning that you needed the same project!”

21st April

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said it is investigating why self styled US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has only one sideburn while the normal quotient is two

Historic pictures show Hegseth with a complete complement of sideburns but in a public appearance on Easter Monday one was missing.

The BLF facial hair styles sub committee is investigating.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, its unclear whether Hegseth is launching a new fashion in sideburns or has simply shaved one off by mistake. If the latter it is perhaps surprising that he didn’t also shave the other one as well and start again. It doesn’t take a long time to grow sideburns