20th Century
A History of Pop Music – Albums 1967
Featured Album: The Monkees This is a series of articles looking at albums from 1960 to whatever year we end up in. I will select a featured album for each year and the link for [more…]
Month: July 2026
Democracy
Manchester Mayoral Election Fiddle
Our Markerfield correspondent has been in touch again, this time regarding the Manchester mayoral election which took place yesterday. However, the count doesn’t take place until today. Based on previous Greater Manchester mayoral elections and [more…]
Holiday
WG’s Summer Cruise, June 2026 – Part Five
Thursday 25th June – At sea Do you ever get the feeling you have done something wrong and you actually haven’t? Well, the information to put the clocks forward to European time went out yesterday, [more…]
Politics
Labour’s bad boys – Part 22 Cap’n Bob
Ian Robert Maxwell (NHRN) was born 1923 in Czechoslovakia as Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch. His birthplace is now Solotvyno in Ukraine. I believe it was Private Eye who christened him Cap’n Bob presumably based [more…]
Health
Medical Musings
This is a warts an’ all musing upon the particular medical state I find myself in as I approach my 86th Birthday. As a soi-disant shortarse (I have lost c. 3 inches in height over [more…]
Authoritarianism
Freedom of speech dying a slow death in Europe
For decades, Western democracies operated under a comfortable consensus: censorship was a blunt instrument reserved for authoritarian regimes, while the “free world” relied on open debate, robust dissent, and constitutional safeguards. This sentiment allowed Western leaders [more…]
Arts
The Summer 2026 Competition
Same rules as the Spring competition. All qualifying articles to be submitted by the middle of August and once the last entry is published I will post the results. No existing series, preferably no AI. [more…]
Engineering
YooKay2026…… A State broken by Corruption (Part 6)
HS2 is one project. What happens everywhere else, across the hundreds of councils and public bodies that spend the rest of the £1.23 trillion, is in many ways worse. In the financial year 2022–23, 467 [more…]
18th Century
Edward Pease: the Grandfather of the railways
George Stephenson gets the statues. But a plain-dressing Quaker wool merchant from Darlington put up the money, drove the Act through Parliament, and hired Stephenson in the first place. He helped found the world’s first [more…]