Kmflett's Blog

Apparently (Times 28th December) it is the peak season for skiing holidays. In 2024 short breaks from Thursday to Monday are popular avoiding travel on a Saturday, the busiest day. The most popular location is Chamonix in France which is an hour from Geneva airport.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the popularity of ski-ing holidays is closely related to the state of capitalism

Numbers slumped after the 2008 financial crash and after Brexit but were recovering until the impact of the pandemic in 2020. They were hit again in 2022-23 due to the impact of Liz Truss and rising mortgage rates.

It would only the most enthusiastic Starmer fan who would claim that the UK economy is doing well (others might suggest that EU economies are performing badly too beyond the interest of the parochial UK media) clearly the well to do who do skiing at this time of year don’t think things are as bad as 2008, 2016 and 2022…

Beard Liberation Front

28^th December.

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social

Michael Rosen voted Beard of the Year 2024 at third attempt

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that author and broadcaster Michael Rosen has been voted of Beard of the Year 2024.

Gary Lineker, Alexei Sayle and Michael Rosen each won a Close Shave round of voting and Chris McCausland was the highest placed runner up. There were over 8,000 votes cast across the three rounds

In the final Beard Off round Michael Rosen won 40.1% of the 11,000 votes cast with broadcaster and comedian Alexei Sayle on 28.5%

Michael Rosen came second in 2023 to the former North-East Mayor Jamie Driscoll and he came second in 2022 to the England cricketer Moeen Ali

The short list comprised those with beards in the public eye who have displayed a positive image of the hirsute.

From the 12 names on the longlist after preliminary voting 4 go forward to the Beard of the Year Final with the winner announced on 28th December.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we are pleased that Michael Rosen has finally been voted Beard of the Year after close shaves in 2022 and 2023. There is no question that he presents a positive public image of the hirsute and is a worthy holder of the Coveted Beard of the Year title.

Beard of the Year 2024 Longlist

Dylan Bachelet, Great British Bake Off

Adil Rashid, England cricketer

Michael Rosen, author & broadcaster

Chris McCausland, comedian

Aatif Nawaz, cricket commentator

Alexei Sayle, comedian

Roy Keane, football pundit

David Jesudason, beer writer

Prince William, personality

Gary Lineker, Woke Icon

Craig Revel Horwood, Strictly judge

Luke Littler, darts player

Perusing The Times on 27th December I noted a piece about a meeting between Defence Secretary John Healy and his Australian counterpart Richard Marles in July when they went to the Rockingham Arms in Wentworth and had a pint brewed by the local Rotherham Chantry brewery.

The report says that Healy’s favourite beer is Timothy Taylor’s Landlord and quotes him as saying that the Small Brewers Tax Relief introduced by Labour in 2002 (and tweaked by the Tories last year) had led to a ‘renaissance of proper brewing and beer drinking’.

Reading on a few pages I also noted an article about the campaign to save Banks’s Mild which global brewer Carlsberg plans to stop brewing from next week after 150 years. A petition has gathered 8,500 signatures and the support of Noddy Holder who appeared in adverts for the beer in the 1990s.

According to Carlsberg in order to grow their cask beer offering it is necessary to stop brewing an historic and much loved cask beer.

Perhaps John Healy could have a word.

Aside from his actual job as MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage continues to drone on as a commentator on Reform UK Ltd’s broadcasting arm GBNews.

The Guardian has revealed that he is also acting as an ambassador for Direct Bullion. Although words like grift immediately come to mind with Farage in fact it is a perfectly legitimate company which promotes the sale of gold coins.

As Farage notes the value of gold has maintained and is capital gains tax free in the UK.

The coins are produced by the Royal Mint and can be acquired direct from them at a current cost of £2,139 a coin

There are one or two problems. Jaywick in the Clacton Constituency is one of the most deprived areas of the UK whose residents are unlikely to have a few thousand quid spare to buy gold coins. Secondly you cant buy a pint in Wetherspoons with one.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/dec/27/nigel-farage-working-paid-brand-ambassador-gold-firm-direct-bullion

The above report appeared in the Northern Star 3rd January 1852. It was the last year of publication of one of the great working class papers and it had passed from the control of Feargus O’Connor to the paper’s printer.

The report underlines that Boxing Day was marked long before the 1871 Act made it a Bank Holiday.

The event noticed above was held at the Chartist land settlement otherwise known as Heronsgate which is in Rickmansworth north-west London. Many of the Chartist properties are still there, albeit these days expensive housing.

Politicos asked a number of politicians for their seasonal cooking tips. Liz Truss’s recipe for roast potatoes is ground breaking.

Jacob Rees Mogg was more realistic and down to earth:

Jacob Rees-Mogg, reality TV star: My best tip would be not to seek my advice on culinary matters.

Anyone who has watched the Discovery series at Home with the Rees Mogg will have grasped that the ex-Tory MP does not know how to cook (that’s the job of the servants) his knowledge of food is limited, largely confined to mashed potato

https://www.politico.eu/article/westminster-christmas-lunch-uk-politicians-kemi-badenoch-rachel-reeves-david-lammy/

The principal shareholder of Reform UK Ltd Nigel Farage has joined a Boxing Day hunt. He does this every year. He does not of course mount a horse but parades around in a flat cap and yellow trousers holding a pint of beer (albeit in a plastic glass). The hunt, which is not allowed to pursue actual foxes (at least officially) met in Chiddingstone Kent, near to one of Farage’s properties.

Farage claimed that hunting is a British tradition, which it certainly is for a certain kind and class of person. Another British tradition opposes hunting, and Farage did in fact find protesters today.

Farage has been doing this on Boxing Day- same outfit, always holding a pint- since at least 2016. In short its a PR stunt, the one thing (aside from drinking and smoking) that Farage is actually good at.

The socialist historians Eric Hobsbawm and E P Thompson both owned cottages in a fairly remote part of North Wales near Snowdonia, the Croesor Valley in the 1960s and 1970s. This was and is a practice much frowned on by many people that live there all the time, although of course the point is invariably made that it does boost the local economy (while making it more difficult for others to get homes to live in full time).

In her recent book Meet Me in Buenos Aires (2019)Marlene Hobsbawm gives some more detail about the summer holiday experience of both her partner Eric Hobsbawm and Dorothy and E P Thompson.

‘We usually went up to Wales during holidays, half-terms and all of August. We were always surrounded by friends.. in fact the whole area should have been called Cambridge in the Hills… Historians Edward Thompson and his wife Dorothy Thompson and family were neighbours in a farmhouse over the hill. They had been many visitors (often historians from the USA) and people liked to say one could hear more typewriters clicking than birds chirping in our valley.

The detail of Christmas is a little harder to find. Hobsbawm had a family Christmas Eve in North London and entertained academics who were in town on Christmas Day. After this the Hobsbawms headed to North Wales for the post-Christmas and New Year period.

The details of what E P and Dorothy Thompson (and children) did at Christmas is harder still to discover. Unlike Hobsbawm Thompson wrote no autobiography- perhaps he would have done had he not died at 69 in 1993- and his correspondence is closed at the Bodelian.

However we do know that the Thompson’s had a New Year party and the Hobsbawms attended. Both Hobsbawm’s Interesting Times and Richard J Evans biography make reference to them walking in wet and windy weather along a track to the Thompson’s cottage- having parked. On one occasion the wind was such that the door of the Hobsbawm’s car was damaged.

Unfortunately what was discussed is unknown. Had social media existed we would almost certainly have had some idea.

My top tips for the perfect roast potatoes — don’t peel them, don’t parboil them and don’t even worry about preheating the oven. Simply cut them into chunks and put them straight into a roasting pan lined with olive oil or goose fat and put them in the oven. To ensure the perfect crispy exterior, just give them a good shake halfway through cooking.

Ms Truss’s recipe like most of her other statements seems somewhat unusual. The temperature of cooking and for how long might have been helpful

This comes from an entertaining (and possibly true) list of festive cooking tips from politicians posted by Politico. Jeremy Corbyn’s views on sprouts and not wasting food are of course to the point and Jacob Rees Mogg is at least honest

https://www.politico.eu/article/westminster-christmas-lunch-uk-politicians-kemi-badenoch-rachel-reeves-david-lammy/

As usual the monarch of the day (in this case King Charles) will make a Christmas broadcast on Christmas Day. It will give GB News something more to moan about but the key thing to keep in mind is that it is not some kind of ancient tradition.

As David Cannadine in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, underlines the Royal Family from the twentieth century onwards have been very good at modernising and inventing traditions to suggest a stable monarchy rooted in long ago and historic practices.

As Cannadine notes the Royal Family was unpopular for most of the nineteenth century (Queen Victoria 1837-1902) and the means to broadcast a Christmas message did not exist anyway.

With the arrival of the BBC that changed and King George V made the first Royal Christmas broadcast in 1932. The founder of the BBC John Reith was an advocate of the monarchy so the broadcast immediately became a tradition which continues getting on for a century later.

Its impact with so many broadcast outlets available in 2025 may well be considerably diminished as with the monarchy itself