Kmflett's Blog

CAMPAIGN FOR REAL SANTAS

Organised by the Beard Liberation Front

7^th December

Contact Keith Flett @keithbeard.bksy.social

Ho Ho Ho: Campaign For REAL SANTAS 2024 warns on bogus bearded Santas

The Campaign for Real Santas, which promotes Santas with genuine organic beards, is continuing its 2024 initiative to promote real Santas with genuine beards by warning people to be aware of absurd false bearded Santas as the busiest pre-Christmas shopping weekends are underway.

The Campaigners say that with unemployment and under-employment amongst mature men over 50, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to use an assistant Santa who does not have a real beard.

At the same time the Campaign is also keen to encourage more female Santas with organic knitted beards.

Campaigners are urging parents and children to demand that Santas vigorously tug their beards as a definitive test as to whether they are in the presence of a real Santa or not.

CFRS organiser Keith Flett said, Christmas decorations and lights are up in main High Streets and Christmas tat is everywhere. Our task of exposing false bearded Santas is more important than ever.

THREE STEPS TO SPOT A GENUINE SANTA

1 Ask the Santa to tug their beard. If it comes away, then the Santa is FAKE

2 If the beard remains intact ask the Santa to tug their beard again. If the Santa swears then they are genuine. If they simply repeat a ‘ho ho ho’ mantra they are FAKE

3 The Campaign for Real Santas says that genuine Santas must have just the right mix of bonhomie and grumpiness and a real organic beard.

Notes

The Organic Santa of 2024 will be named on December 18th. In the last 5 years Michael Rosen and Brian Blessed have been key contenders for the annual honour

The Campaign for Real Santas is organised by the Beard Liberation Front

Vote opens for Parliamentary Beard of the Year 2024

Beard Liberation Front

7^th December

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett @keithbeard.bsky.social

Parliamentary Beard of the Year list is clean shave after huge intake of MPs at Election

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that it faced an unprecedented challenge in drawing up its annual shortlist for the Parliamentary Beard of the Year.

However after much deliberation a shortlist has been drawn up and the first close shave round of voting is open. This will be followed by a further round and the top two from both will go to a final Beard Off vote

The General Election on July 4^th 2024 saw the departure of a large number of existing MPs- mostly clean shaven Tories- and the arrival of an equally large number of Labour and LibDem MPs.

While the existing Parliamentary Beard of the Year holder Alex Cunningham has stepped down as an MP the campaigners say they have now reviewed nominations for the 2024 shortlist.

Politics is a disputatious activity and the shortlist invariably draws comment from partisans.

The shortlist is NOT about the politics of the MPs on the list. It’s about whether their activities during the year have provided a positive image of the hirsute during the year. Obviously this can be disputed- how positive or otherwise- so the shortlist will go to a vote with the winner announced in mid-December.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, there is no question that the Parliamentary Beard of the Year shortlist is a challenge this year with so many new MPs but after reviewing nominations we have drawn up a list comprised of some veteran Parliamentary beard wearers together with some fresh faces as it were

Parliamentary Beard of the Year 2024 shortlist

An on-line poll will run in early December 2024 on Twitter (or respond with your choice)

Jon Trickett (Labour)

Jeremy Corbyn (Independent)

Colum Eastwood (SDLP)

Andy McDonald (Labour)

Nick Timothy (Tory)

Shockat Adam (Independent)

Robin Swann (UUP)

Terry Jermy (Labour)

Historians back campaign to halt demise of  hand writing but caution the example of Marx

The London Socialist Historians Group, which organises the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, has backed a campaign to encourage more people to write by hand.

The campaign has gathered examples of hand writing by well known people which are being auctioned to raise funds for Three Peas which helps the distressed and refugees.

At the same time the National Literacy Trust has reported that 36% of school students rarely if ever write by hand preferring mobile phones, tablets and laptops

The historians say that while electronic communication is a great boost in many areas there are significant concerns that material that is published in an e-format will not be retained for posterity and future historians.

There is no guarantee that hand written communications will be preserved but they certainly won’t be taken off-line and become unavailable.

LSHG Convenor Dr Keith Flett said, of course Karl Marx had notoriously illegible handwriting and was once turned down for aa railway clerk’s job because his script simply could not be read. Fortunately for historians, Engels could read it.

The Pigs Ear Beer Festival at 40: Only here for the Cask Beer…

I was at the opening night of the 40th Pigs Ear Beer Festival on Tuesday and I’ve been at nearly all of them, from the Bethnal Green days to Stratford and now Hackney. The grade 2 listed Round Chapel does make a great venue, although one might note some accessibility issues. There are lots of steps.

It was one of the best cask beer ranges I’ve drunk recently in a world where cans from bottle shops and craft keg (more likely to be found in uncertain times because it has a longer life than the few days for a cask) compete for the drinkers interest. As a lifelong cask beer drinker who also enjoys beer in other formats I certainly wasn’t complaining.

The beer range (cask, keykeg, cans/bottles) was excellent as ever. In recent times there are of course lots of not just London brewers but east London brewers. In that sense the two stand out beers for me were the Redemption/Kernel Victorian mild- two versions- one with the yeast of each brewery and first brewed in 2011 in the early days of craft beer.

The range of styles from ordinary bitters to stouts, porters, IPAs, sours and much else reflected how much the beer world has changed in the last 15 years or so. As well as the Kernel/Redemption milds I stuck entirely to dark beers. Anspach & Hobday/Tool Baltic Porter, Kirkstall/Five Points Extra Stout, St Peter’s Winters Ale and Thornbridge/Kernel Burton all featured on my drinking agenda.

The point being perhaps that when keykeg first appeared at the Pigs Ear it was quite a focus. Now craft keykeg is quite widely available while well-kept and interesting cask is not always quite as easy to find as it should be. In show casing it the Pigs Ear is doing a valuable job. Hard work for the volunteers but enjoyable for the drinker

There was plenty of space and I didn’t feel uncomfortable (plenty of seating down and upstairs) Of  course the attendance could always be more diverse although I have no personal issues with senior men with beards.

The 40^th Pigs Ear Beer Festival is at the Round Chapel Hackney until Saturday 7th December

The comment by the former Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace that his critics are middle class women of a certain age has found much media comment. He has since apologised.

One person who identified herself as a critic was Kirstie Allsopp was outed by an irate Times reader as the daughter of an hereditary peer the sixth Baron Hindlip. By contrast Gregg Wallace continues to identify himself as working class although he was previously the owner of restaurants and multi-million pound grocery business. Both failed but Wallace has also had a successful broadcasting career spanning several decades. It might be suggested that supporting Millwall does not make you working class.

The socialist historian E P Thompson underlined that class was not a thing or a label but a relationship that happened between people. Allsopp may have come from an upper class background and Wallace from a working class one but as Marx noted social being determines consciousness

Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine-room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time – that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening. [74]

https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1965/english.htm

50 years since Monty Python last aired on the BBC. More social history than comedy

Its 50 years since Monty Python last aired on the BBC. The last programme was shown on 5^th December 1974 on BBC2 (previous series had been on BBC1)

The original run for three and half series 3×13 programmes plus one of six between 1969 and 1974.  After that a series of feature films, records and live performances followed until quite recently.

As the Murdoch Sunday Times has noted the Britain Python was satirising has largely gone and the programmes are best watched as social history.

In 2022 I watched episode 14 (first screened September 1970) which I would almost certainly have watched at the time (aged 14). As my partner noted the sketches for 2020s tastes were overlong and contained not much which is now funny. A lengthy sketch about the number of operatives required to install a gas cooker, the well-known sketch about the Piranha Brothers (i.e. the Krays) and the Ministry of Silly Walks. This is still funny but so familiar as not to be that funny 54 years on.

Perhaps the thing that has stood the test of time best were Terry Gilliam’s visuals. Then ahead of their time they still work. The Piranha Brothers had an enemy called Spiky Norman, that is a giant hedgehog, whose cartoon form appeared in various locations intoning the name of Dinsdale Piranha

There was also some, for the time quite daring, gay humour, focused on Graham Chapman (but only him). Homosexuality had only recently been legalised and while the various drag scenes might raise other thoughts for some(not me) in 2024 in the 1970s they were liberating. The idea that people could dress and appear as they wanted- men with facial hair wearing dresses for example- was liberating. Trust me, I was there.

The wider question is however why the humour of Monty Python is now more social history than anything while the music of 1970 is in the main anything but. Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan… old men certainly now, but yesterday’s men I’m not so sure. Monty Python though really is now All Our Yesterdays

Beard Liberation Front

6th December

Boris Johnson is in Australia promoting his volume of memoirs Unleashed (official title). A photographer (credit Daily Mirror) has captured what the Beard Liberation Front exposed some time ago, Johnson is losing his follicles.

LIke his political ally Donald Trump has been a combover man but the wind and receding hair have exposed matters.

The hair crisis will seriously impact any pretensions Johnson has to be a PM again. In the last twenty years the Tory Party has had two entirely bald leaders and both failed badly at the polls.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we have in the past had a Beardies and Baldies Alliance because the reality is that those with beards and those who are bald are the subject of discrimination based on appearance. The prejudice is on the one hand that the beard is hiding something and on the other that baldness suggests a mental decline into old age. Both of course are just that, prejudices to be combatted, which is one of the reasons the BLF exists.

Update

Johnson’s receding hairline has been reviewed by a Beard Liberation Front follicle expert, John Burton, who reports that the follicles are atrophying. This means hairs do not grow and leads to baldness