EASTER MESSAGE TO THE HIRSUTE: AVOID CHOCOLATE-BEARD INTERFACE
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has sent Easter greetings to its followers but urged them to beware any chocolate-beard interface on Easter Sunday.
The campaigners say that chocolate in the beard can lead to a sticky mess which can only be satisfactorily removed with collateral damage to beard hairs and follicles.
Particular caution is urged when eating Easter eggs with creme or soft centres.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Easter is a traditionally a time of new growth and BLF supporters will now be getting in training for the traditional May Day Beard Waggle. In the meantime we urge enjoyment with care for Easter eggs to avoid beard damage
The Return of Titchener: Starmer must focus ASBO plans
Rob Titchener, at least according to Sgt Knacker Burns, is ‘back in the country’. Keir Starmer’s plans for ASBO’s now have a clear focus. We know that when it comes to Titchener, anti-social behaviour is just the start.
Beard of the Year set to appear in The Bull
It may not take the rural class struggle much further forward but a former Beard of the Year in the form of Rylan Clark-Neal is set to make an appearance in The Bull on 15th May. He will judge Ambridge’s own Eurovision contest which may or may not feature Brian’s version of Forever Young.
Meanwhile Justin has bowed out of the Eurovision planning team admitting he knows nothing about it but was just looking for a box tick for his Borsetshire Business Bore of the Year Award.
Jennifer’s Will
Jenny has left Alice £15K in her will but nothing to her other children. An Ambridge version of the Moral Maze has been running all week. Perhaps she saw in Alice a version of herself as a young single mother struggling with life. That said Alice has never had a Che Guevara poster on her wall
Whither Shires Bitter?
How does The Bull in Ambridge manage to get away with selling only a single brew? Nobody asks for anything but Shire’s, and nobody is offered anything but Shire’s. Could it be that it is such nectar that nobody would dream of drinking anything else? If that is the case, then please tell me where, apart from Borsetshire, I can find it.
US researchers looking at the number of home runs in baseball- broadly equivalent to a six in cricket, have found that for every degree rise in temperature there are 2 per cent more home runs. The theory is that warmer air provides less resistance to the ball which hence goes further when hit.
Atmospheric conditions are a well known influence on bowling in cricket but this is the first time batting has come under scrutiny.
The US researchers are not familiar with cricket and there may well be other factors influencing an increase in sixes. These include heavier bats, shorter boundaries, innovative batting and the hot air produced by commentators shouting about sixes
2023 Beard, Shorts & Sandals Pre-Season opens on Easter Sunday
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the 2023 Beard, Shorts and Sandals Pre-Season will open on Easter Sunday, 9th April.
The campaigners say that while it is far from the earliest start to the pre-season in recent years. The 2022 pre-season opened on 20th March but with March 2023 one of the wettest on record only with improving weather is it appropriate for the pre-season to get underway.
2023 Pre-Season guidelines
1] Shorts should ideally be three-quarter length-‘culottes’ for the 2023 season. The length of shorts is particularly important as climate change may mean that unprotected legs get sunburnt.
2] Footwear should be casual. There is a considerable range of sandal type footwear now available. Some leaves parts of the feet and toes open to public view, while some does not. The BLF is not prescriptive about the matter.
3] Socks should usually not be worn. However in the pre-season they are optional
3a] If the beard, shorts and sandals are to be displayed in relatively busier urban areas it is likely to be prudent to wear closed rather than open casual footwear and ankle socks, not visible to others may be worn.
4] There is no prescription or definition on what type of beard may be worn, or how this may match with the shorts and sandals. This is left up to the individual.
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, the Beard, Socks and Sandals season has been a major influence on summer fashions in recent times and we expect the 2023 season to be no different. We’re pleased to be able to announce the opening of the pre-season at Easter.
Margaret Thatcher died twelve years ago on 8th April 2013 at the Ritz Hotel in central London. She may be gone but her ideas and political strategies remain very much alive in both the Tory and Labour Parties. For perspective she left Government in 1990 so those can now recall her as PM are now,how shall we say, getting on a bit (like me..)
As someone who spent many, many hours on the streets and on picket lines protesting about Mrs Thatcher at the time I, along with many others, had good reason to reflect on the news of her death at 87 twelve years ago. At the same time looking historically it still remains too soon to judge the long term of impact of her Government
She was lionised by many on the political right and equally hated by many on the left. Mrs Thatcher’s short term impact on British politics and society can’t be doubted.
The Falklands War, the 1984/5 miner’s strike and the poll tax were all products of her administrations as was the privatisation of significant sections of the public sector from gas to telecoms and water and the sell-off of social housing.
In other words she was a formidable opponent, a hardline fighter for the interests of her side with the only person on the left who was really up to the challenge arguably being Arthur Scargill.
She was of course also the first female Prime Minister, but here again the legacy is mixed. She demonstrated that a woman could get to the top in politics but she was hardly a champion of the wider interests of women around issues like equal pay.
She could be said to have laid the basis for the neo-liberal pro-market politics that have characterised every Government since.
With the Thatcher Foundation which has been releasing papers and documents relating to her political activities Mrs Thatcher has done much to secure her own historical reputation even if these documents would be better off in the collections of the British Library than private hands.
It is still too soon to be sure whether Mrs Thatcher will come to be seen as a really significant figure in political history or someone whose period in Office marked the high water mark of a political approach that became increasingly discredited but remains hugely influential at the same time.
Her reactionary social attitudes- for example Section 28 which outlawed discussion of LGBT issues in schools have partly but certainly not entirely passed into history. Whether the same can be said of her pro-market economic policies is much less clear. The continuing impact of Thatcherism, as some called it and hence Mrs Thatcher’s political legacy, remains uncertain.
While famously born in Grantham Mrs Thatcher was an MP for a North London constituency-Finchley- which is now Labour held . It is difficult to see a candidate with her political background and views being easily elected in such an area today with the continuing decline in Tory support in urban areas.
A debate about her political impact in which the voices of those who were negatively impacted by her Governments as well as those who voted for them get a full hearing seems a better way of marking the twelfth anniversary of her death in the historical sphere.
Perhaps that debate should be focused on whether there is anything in Mrs Thatcher’s political legacy that we really want to still be around in another twenty years time.
Hirsute send snub to Starmer as Jeremy Corbyn is voted Beard of Spring 2023
The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the final Beard Off vote for Beard of Spring 2023 has concluded with victory for Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn won 47% of the final vote, Gary Lineker came second with 26% and Michael Sheen third with 21%
Beard of Spring is the second of four seasonal awards that go towards the annual Beard of the Year vote in December.
The campaigners say that Foreign Secretary James Cleverley and backbench Tory MP Jonathan Gullis did not feature as they have failed to meet the criteria.
In the first Close Shave round Michael Sheen (55%) and Gary Lineker (31%) went through to the Beard Off Final. In the second Close Shave round Jeremy Corbyn (56%) and Olivier Giroud (25%) triumphed
The criteria are:
A beard worn during the season in the public eye
Presenting a positive image of the hirsute
BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we congratulate Jeremy Corbyn. This looks like a hirsute snub to the clean shaven revisionism of Keir Starmer.
Beard of Spring shortlist
Gary Lineker: defender of refugees
Steve Bell: Coronation chronicler
Harry Kane: top England goal scorer
Michael Sheen, refused to cross UCU picket line
Mikel Arteta, Manager of top Premiership football club
The Hot Cross Bun: Inventing and Reinventing tradition
Below is an extract from the best guide to mid-nineteenth century London written by the social commentator Henry Mayhew. It underlines that by the 1850s the Good Friday sale of hot cross buns was a significant business. Fast forward 170 years and the sale of hot cross buns is no longer confined to one day but spread across an entire season. The original commercial invention of hot cross bun selling has been reinvented in modern times and buns can now be found in savoury as well as sweet style.
London Labour And The London Poor
Of The Street-sellers Of Hot-cross Buns: By Henry Mayhew, Published 1851
Perhaps no cry—though it is only for one morning—is more familiar to the ears of a Londoner, than that of, “One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot-cross buns” on Good Friday … One London gentleman, who spoke of fifty years ago, told me that the street-bun-sellers used to have a not unpleasing distich [a unit of verse consisting of two lines] … It seems hardly in accordance with the usual style of street poetry:—
“One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot-cross buns! If your daughters will not eat them, give them to your sons.
But if you hav’n’t any of those pretty little elves, You cannot then do better than eat them all yourselves.”
The sellers of the Good Friday buns are principally boys, and they are of mixed classes —costers’ boys, boys habitually and boys occasionally street-sellers, and boys street-sellers for that occasion only. One great inducement to embark in the trade is the hope of raising a little money for the Greenwich Fair of the following Monday.
— [“On Easter Monday breaks out, in all its depressing vulgarity, Greenwich Fair—a melancholy exhibition of national merriment,—when drunkenness too often supplies the place of natural jollity, and brutality tramples under foot everything like rational recreation”. From ‘The Illustrated London Magazine’, Published 1855] —
I am informed that 500 persons are employed on Good Friday in the streets of London in the sale of hot-cross buns, each itinerant selling upon the day’s average six dozen halfpenny, and seven dozen penny buns, for which he will take 12s. 6d. (his profits being 3d. in the shilling or 3s. 1 1/2 d.). One person informed me that last Good Friday he had sold during the day forty dozen penny buns, for which he received 60s.
The bun-selling itinerants derive their supplies principally from the wholesale pastrycooks, and, in a less degree, from the small bakers and pastrycooks, who work more for “the trade” than themselves. A vendor of ” hot-cross buns” has to provide himself with a basket, a flannel (to keep the buns warm), and a cloth, to give a clean appearance to his commodities. These articles, if bought for the purpose, cost—basket, 1s. 6d.; flannel and cloth, 2s.; stock-money, average, 5s. (largest amount 15s., smallest 2s. 1/2 d.) or about 10s. in all. There is expended in one day, in hot-cross buns purchased in the London streets, 300l., and nearly 100,000 buns thus bought.
The New Nasty Party? Keir Starmer’s Great Moving Right Show
The late Stuart Hall published in Marxism Today in January 1979 just before Thatcher’s Election victory an analysis headed ‘The Great Moving Right Show’.
Looking back the analysis was a decent one, at least posing questions about the appeal of right-wing politics
It was however reviled at the time by the left, myself included, and in a 2012 interview with the New Statesman, Hall touched on the reason why:
“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!”
We knew of course that Thatcherism was very right-wing. The real Great Moving Right Show for those of us on the left however meant people breaking not just from socialism but from social democracy to argue that Thatcher had a point. That in part, as Hall notes, was where New Labour came in.
The backdrop then as now was economic crisis, and the question of who pays for it and how.
Starmer seems to be falling into the same error that New Labour. Labour’s latest attack on Sunak underlining that Labour as well as the Tories can be the Nasty Party; claiming that Labour can be more efficient on stopping asylum seekers, in the moment, than the Tories, equivocating at best on Trans rights and criticising teachers for taking action on a well below inflation pay offer, instead of offering a counter project to the Tories industrial and culture wars, Starmer suggests an echo of them and to be honest sometimes more than an echo.
It was and is the politics of defeat and retreat. Unless the left is active, perhaps particularly now outside of Parliament in workplaces and communities, it can happen again..
65th anniversary of CND. Tony Benn on an early CND Easter march
Tony Benn’s diary makes no mention of the first Easter CND march from London to Aldermaston in 1958.
However when the march reversed direction in 1959 and went to London, Benn was there.
Tony Benn Diary March 30th 1959.
Took they boys to watch the Aldermaston marchers as they came in. They were 1,500 strong at Trafalgar Square and had Frank Cousins amongst them. The movement is a force to be reckoned with.
A representative of the White Defence League was there with some Fascist propaganda. Mosley is standing in North Kensington at the next Election.
……..
Benn was a mainstream Labour figure in the late 1950s and certainly not an active CND supporter. He went to become Harold Wilson’s spin doctor before the 1964 Election. In the Labour Party of 2023 his spectating at a CND march would no doubt have seen him required to write an official apology.
A recently published account by an active participant in an early CND march can be found in Michael Rosen’s So They Call You Pisher!
Tosspot, a Medieval term for a drunkard, referenced by Shakespeare in the final passage of Twelfth Night, was an important figure in popular- that is non-religious- Easter traditions.
Easter saw versions of the Mystery Plays where St George slayed various enemies, while the figure of Tosspot laughed at them.
Another Easter tradition saw groups of less well-off usually younger men, collect money for the Easter feasts that ended Lent. They went from house to house and from village to village collecting funds. The figure who actually collected the money was Tosspot.
Easter is the most important of the Christian religious periods but it also has traditions which are rooted in very different popular pursuits.
Don’t expect to hear about these traditions from the self appointed guardians of British culture even if a discussion on Old Tosspot with Nigel Farage and others on GBNews would be highly appropriate
