Hanson acts as the director for The English Manner, which is an etiquette training institute in the United Kingdom — so it’s safe to say, he knows a thing or two. In a recent video, Hanson schools his viewers on the proper way to eat peas if you want to cosplay royalty for the night. Apparently, if you’ve just been using a knife to push a bunch of peas onto your fork, you’ve been doing it wrong. The correct — albeit brutal — way to eat them is by stabbing the individual peas with the tines of your fork. Hanson is only able to get what looks like five or six peas on his utensil before popping them into his mouth (tines facing down, of course). Although Hanson’s method for pea consumption seems beyond time-consuming, he’s the expert, and it’s all worth it if you want to see what dinner with Kate and Will is really like.
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that Strictly judge Craig Revel Horwood stands a good chance of being named Beard of Autumn 2024 after he became the first name to be revealed on the shortlist
The campaigners say that Revel Horwood has resisted BBC pressure to shave his beard in the opening weeks of Strictly 2024. While Strictly often has hirsute contestants and professional dancers it is thought that Revel Horwood is the first ever judge to wear a beard.
The seasonal vote for Beard of Autumn takes place each year in the first half of October. The final shortlist will be revealed on 8th October with the winner declared on 15th October after two Close Shave rounds of voting and a Beard Off Final
The winner goes forward to the annual Beard of the Year vote in December.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Craig Revel Horwood is noted for his astute professional views on Strictly dancers and his beard is adding extra gravitas.
The Morpeth Arms, Millbank & its link to the black leader of London Chartism, William Cuffay
On Thursday 3rd October I had occasion to visit the Morpeth Arms, a Youngs pub at the Vauxhall Bridge Rd end of Millbank. I’m not unfamiliar with the place, as I used to work just over the river on the Albert Embankment.
The occasion was an informal gathering of senior (in all senses) union activists to mark the recent deaths of two CWU officials, Andy Kerr and Bill McClory.
The Morpeth Arms is a Grade Two listed building constructed in 1845. It was designed as place for prison officers at the Millbank prison to take refreshments. The prison which was open from 1816 to 1890 is now the location of Tate Britain and the Chelsea College of Art and Design.
From the later 1840s to 1853 it was used a holding prison for those sentenced to transportation to Australia. One of those who passed through it was the black leader of London Chartism William Cuffay who was sentenced to be transported in September 1848 for his alleged role in an armed rising in central London in August 1848.
Prisoners were meant to be held at Millbank for three months and then despatched on the sea voyage to Australia. In fact that did not happen to Cuffay- why does not seem clear. He was transferred to Wakefield prison and was not transported to Tasmania until July 1849.
Cuffay (1788-1870) continued to be a political activist in Hobart until his death
The Tesco in Walthamstow E17 where the Daily Star purchased the iceberg lettuce which famously outlasted her autumn 2022 Premiership has gained its own official blue plaque to mark the event.
No doubt Truss would see is as infantile or worse, but in reality both the original lettuce campaign and the plaque are effective political stunts which political humour with a sharp way of making a political point.
Its something that has a long history in British politics although most MPs and commentators are far too pompous to note it, which of course is why the stunts work
Saturday 5th October saw the 20th central London march in support of the Palestinians with 300,000 marching and the usual shit posting from the BBC, the Telegraph etc. Pro Tel Aviv Home Secretary Yvette Cooper joined in. There was of course a focus on stopping the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a ceasefire in Lebanon and a release of all hostages, those taken on October 7th and the much larger number of Palestinians held by Israel.
The marches have outraged the right-wing media and politicians. Attempts to ban them and restrict them have been regularly made. They are often characterised as ‘hate’ marches an Orwellian take on protests that invariably focused very much on peace and against war. The fact that Saturday is the 20th march in a 52 week period also underlines that rants about weekly marches are just that. There certainly are weekly protests around Britain and much of the world, but the focus on London is quite specific. It is the centre of the former imperial power in the region.
Hats Off then to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Muslim Association of Britain. They, and thousands of unsung grassroots activists across the UK, have organised the longest sustained protest in British political history.
Of course the Chartists and the Suffragettes (for example) went on for some years but the campaigns had peaks and troughs not twenty very large to huge national protests in 12 month period.
The point will made as it was with the Iraq that the protests have not succeeded. There have been short term changes with the new Labour Government despite its support for Israel stopping some arms sales.
The July 4th Election also reminded those Labour activists who wrote off the impact that there were consequences at the ballot box.
But beyond the short term history is being written (as it often is) on the streets here. The impact is as yet unknown. What is known is that just as Iraq has pursued Tony Blair since 2003 to 2024 Gaza will pursue Keir Starmer for however long his political career lasts.
Whether a new left can emerge out of the protests, as it did for a time after 2003, is as often work in progress
Dark Star Hophead is one of the better known craft beers noted as the name suggests for its hoppy character and being one of the new wave of beers in that area.
It has a chequered time recently with a takeover by Fullers who subsequently sold out to global brewers Asahi. In due course production was moved from Sussex to Meantime in Greenwich. When that closed it moved again to Fullers in Chiswick.
Most recently it has been reduced in strength to 3.4%.
Since changes to duty rates last year brewing beer at 3.4% or less attracts less tax and hence has its attractions to the bottom lines of brewers. There are arguably two types of beer in this category. Beers that are actually brewed in the 3%+ area such as Redemption Trinity, Kernel Table Beer and Pressure Drop Ja. Hophead is the other side of that where an existing beer is reduced in strength.
The bottom line for the drinker however is what it tastes like. I had a pint of Hophead in the Morpeth Arms on Millbank on Thursday (a Youngs pub so it was reassuringly expensive). Actually it tasted notably like a pint of Hophead. Still hoppy, perhaps lacking a little in body, but that is subjective.
The main point I’d suggest is that in this case Big Beer in the form of Asahi is looking at its balance sheet where it could have reduced the price of a pint as well as its strength
The early period of the Labour Government has seen a sustained focus on gifts and donations to Ministers and their potential political impact.
The amounts are mostly limited and no doubt much worse can be found in the 14 Tory years. The point is that Labour is meant to be a break from all that.
In The Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson writes of the sinecures and money given to friends and relatives of Ministers in the period before the 1832 Reform Act.
It was known as Old Corruption. After Waterloo in 1815 for example Wellington was gifted £400,000 (millions today) to buy land and a mansion
Britain nearly came to revolution in 1831/2 before such practices were curtailed. Keir Starmer take note
The Beard Liberation Front the informal network of beard wearers has expressed concern that after losing his seat on July 4th ex-Tory MP Jonathan Gullis has been unable to find a job.
The campaigners say that Gullis has one of the most well known beards in public life. While his political views are often controversial, his beard admirably qualifies him for a range of roles from artisan hairdresser to men’s follicle stylist.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we think Jonathan Gullis’s beard is 100% employable
Below is an extract from a speech by Kemi Badenoch at the Tory Conference in Birmingham on 30th September 2024. As the Guardian reported it isn’t exactly in accord with reality. When Badenoch arrived in the UK she stayed with a family friend in Wimbledon. Bed and board were free. The job at McDonalds in central Wimbledon was on some evenings and weekends, similar to the kind of work students do to earn some cash. I did it myself stacking shelves and operating the till at Sainsburys in the 1970s.
Badenoch is now on the final members ballot for the Tory leadership. Her relationship with reality and understanding of the class war may, or may not, interest the remaining Tory membership
It wasn’t working at McDonald’s that made me working class. It was an example of how I had become working class.
I wasn’t working there as a weekend job or part time. That was my job. I was going to college, part-time, going to an FE college, and I had left Nigeria, where I’d had a middle class life, driven to school every day, and the first time I ever went on a bus was in this country. But I couldn’t even afford bus money most of the time. I had to walk everywhere.
Sometimes I was hungry. I was on my own. I had a place to live, but I had to do everything myself at a very young age. If that is not working class, I didn’t know what working classes is.
The working classes are the people who have to work for a living, otherwise they will be in trouble. They are people who don’t necessarily have big savings or a family that can look after them.
The working class is not a thing or a category. It is defined by a relationship with and often a struggle against other classes, mainly the ruling class.
E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class saw a relationship, a struggle, a movement. Something to be involved in, not comment on.
‘class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion, not this or that interest, but the friction of interests-the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise‘
