Category Archives: Other Stuff

The Levellers, the New Model Army, and the Hot-Water Wash

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Welcome to England of 1645 and to the present tense, which in spite of all logic is going to apply to the past. We’re in the middle of the Civil Wars, which has glorious capital letters. Isn’t it just impressed with itself?

Parliament is at war with King Charles and has just substituted the New Model Army for the private armies its supporters raised and for the local Trained Bands, part-time, local militias that might or might not be willing to serve outside their home regions.

We’re back to irrelevant photos: It’s spring. Have a daffodil.

The New Model Army

What’s new about this army? Unlike the local militias, it’s full time. It’s professional. It can be sent anywhere in the country. Unlike private armies, it has a unified command and people will be promoted on the basis of their competence instead of their titles and status and money. And unlike both militias and private armies, if you wash it, even in the hottest water, it won’t shrink. It is truly a miraculous creation.

But there’s more. Its officers are barred from holding seats in either the Commons or the House of Lords, at least when it’s first formed. This keeps the aristocracy from leading it, since members of the Commons can resign their seats to become officers but members of the Lords remain lords no matter what they do. No one seems to have imagined that a person might un-lord himself. And if they can’t imagine it, they can’t do it. If a lord gets silly enough to claim he’s a commoner, all the other actors will say, “Oh, no you’re not,” and no matter how many times he says, “Oh, yes I am,” he won’t be.

That last joke only makes sense if you’ve seen a panto, a form of British theater where the only joke revolves around repetition of “Oh, no you’re not” and “Oh, yes I am.”

See how much you learn here?

Like most miracle products, though, once you look closely, the New Model Army has some problems. It’s made of a mix of volunteers and draftees; of veteran soldiers and terrified newbies; of deeply committed Puritans, assorted other religious dissenters, and (it includes draftees, remember) people who’ve spent their lives worshiping in the old ways and aren’t easy about all these changes. In other words, it’s stitched together from an assortment of all the scraps in England’s fabric shop.

Before long, some of the draftees desert. Some of the dissenters dissent. The wool and the lace are hard to stitch together. Neither of them goes well with hessian. Some of the dye runs. 

By the end of the First Civil War, the army’s fallen out of love with Parliament. If it ever was in love, which we haven’t actually established. The soldiers aren’t getting paid regularly, and that’s never a smart move; I mention that in case you happen to form an army yourself one day. Soldiers get grumpy when they’re not paid.

Parliament wants to either disband the army or march it off to Ireland, where the soldiers have as much chance of seeing their back pay as they have of becoming Pope–all of them at the same time, in their anti-Catholic multitudes. So no, the army isn’t about to do either of those things. Or at least the soldiers aren’t. The soldiers and their officers aren’t of one mind about this. Or much of anything else right now.

And if that’s not enough, Parliament, or part of it anyway, is leaning in the direction of restoring the king without increasing the country’s political or religious freedoms. The soldiers are starting to ask each other what they’ve been fighting for anyway.

So each regiment elects two agitators–yes, that’s what they‘re called–and they join the army’s senior officers in an Army Council, where they put together the army’s demands to Parliament. 

I’m simplifying. We’d be here all night if I didn’t and, apologies, I don’t have enough eggs on hand to make breakfast for all of us. Keep saying “Great sweep of history.” It’ll get you home in time to give the kitty a treat before bedtime.

 

The Putney Debates

What the agitators and the Army Council do, first in existing at all, second in sitting down to talk, and third in making demands of Parliament, is radical enough. This is an army, remember, and armies are built on hierarchies and orders and yes-sirs, not on discussing your purpose and goals and philosophy and then voting on whether your orders are worth carrying out. But the troops do more than discuss. They put together an even more radical set of demands for constitutional change. If it’s put into practice, it will seriously democratize the country.

Spoiler alert: That doesn’t happen.

While this intellectual brew is fermenting, the army’s moving toward London–not in any sort of a hurry, since Parliament’s captured the king and that’s kind of like a commercial in the middle of the TV show, so everyone’s wandered off to the kitchen to see how well the beer’s fermenting. Besides, there might be some popcorn left from last night. Then in late October and early November 1647, the army does an amazing thing: It stops to hold the Putney Debates, an argument over what kind of country they’re all fighting for. Some five hundred soldiers argue politics and philosophy with their officers.

The argument boils down to two positions, one held by the top-level leaders’ (called the Grandees) and the other, more radical one proposed by the Levellers and held by some hefty but unmeasurable number of soldiers.

What the Levellers propose is that all men get the right to vote–or almost all men. It depends on what source you read and when you tune in, since their ideas evolve. The idea that women should vote is as far out of reach as Instagram and the theory of relativity. They also call for freedom of religion—not just for their own religions but for everyone—for the opening up of enclosed land, for an end to conscription, and for an assortment of other political and economic changes, including equality before the law, an end to the censorship of books and newspapers, and no taxation of anyone earning less than £30 a year.

Since the participants have a sense that they’re making history, they’re kind enough to take notes for some (but unfortunately not all) of the debates. Let’s toss in a few quotes about whether people with no property, or not much property, should have a right to vote:

From the Grandees’ side: “I think that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that determine what laws we shall be ruled by here–no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom. . . . First, the thing itself [a greatly expanded vote] were dangerous if it were settled to destroy property. But I say that the principle that leads to this is destructive to property; for by the same reason that you will alter this Constitution merely that there’s a greater Constitution by nature–by the same reason, by the law of nature, there is a greater liberty to the use of other men’s goods which that property bars you.” —Henry Ireton.

Do people really talk that way? Apparently. Can they follow each other through those convoluted sentences? They must, because they understand each other well enough to argue, and here’s the argument from the soldiers’ side:

“I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government.” —Thomas Rainsborough

“We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen–and by the arguments urged there is none. There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little property in this kingdom as to our estates, yet we had a birthright. But it seems now except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived.” —Edward Sexby

For the Grandees, the idea that all men–or almost all men–should have the vote flirts with anarchy. For the Levellers, it’s essential.

Leveller leaders and Grandees negotiate, looking for something they can agree to present to Parliament.

They don’t find common ground and the Levellers walk out.

The Grandees demand an oath of loyalty from the soldiers, which means signing up to the Grandees’ alternative to the Levellers’ manifesto. Many sign–and it’s not irrelevant that they’ve been promised their back pay. Some refuse. Stones are thrown. Swords are drawn. Leaders of the radicals are arrested. One is executed on the spot. The agitators are surgically removed from the Army Council, which becomes a Council of Officers.

Mutinies continue for a while–over pay, over the Leveller manifesto, over orders to go to Ireland–but they’re isolated. The Grandees are back in control. But what’s happened can’t be un-happened. Ordinary people have thought the unthinkable and spoken those thoughts to each other and to the most powerful men in the country. That can’t help but percolate through the coming decades and centuries.

I know. That’s what always gets said about the losing side, especially by those of us who wear our political hearts on our left sleeves. It’s true that the Levellers’ demands come to nothing. Their voices are silenced. In the brutal calculations of power, they lose.

The odd thing is, though, that if you listen carefully you can hear the whisper of an echo of what they did, wrote, and said.

News from the world of blogging

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If you’re pressed for time, the short version of this post is, Wear a helmet, ‘cause it’s getting weird out there. It’s probably always been fairly weird but really it is getting weirder.

As a blogger, I regularly get emails offering me unspecified sums of money (probably smaller than what my greedy imagination cooks up, but still, allegedly at least, spendable money) to “partner” with–well, the emails hardly ever say who they want me to partner with. They usually just say “us.” 

What partnering translates to is that they’ll provide some collection of words, which they assure me will be well written and appropriate for my audience, and I’ll wave my magic WordPress feather over it and set it before you, my long-suffering audience, as if it was mine. 

Or maybe not as if it was mine. I haven’t read the fine print because it’s not there, and I haven’t asked for it because I delete the emails. 

In mid-November, though, I got one that came with a twist. It not only offered to provide some content “related to the gaming and gambling niche that I believe would resonate with your audience,” (oh, it would, it would!), it asked if I’d be open to running it in Finnish.

Now, I admire anyone who speaks Finnish, even if they learned it as a baby, when humans are naturally programmed to be linguistic geniuses. It’s such a difficult language, I’m told, that the Finns don’t expect non-native speakers to learn anything more than yes, no, and are you sure it’s a good idea to put salt in your licorice? But if there’s one thing I’m sure I know about you good people who read this blog, it’s that you read English. Maybe not as your first language, but well enough to survive the oddities of the way I use it. 

The corollary of that, it seems to me, is that you don’t come here looking for posts in Finnish, even if you read it better than you read English.

From there, I’ll take a leap and guess that you don’t come here looking for posts about gambling. Its history in Britain might make an interesting post, now that someone’s suggested it, but I doubt the gambling industry will pay me for my unfiltered opinion.

Irrelevant photo: the North Cornish coast

 

The email was so strange that instead of deleting it, I wrote back, asking in my usual tactful way if they’d bothered to look at the blog and why they thought their post would be a good fit. I haven’t heard back. 

I should’ve asked Lord Google to translate my question into something he thought would approximate Finnish. If there was a human on the other end of the conversation–something I can no longer take for granted–it might have given them a good laugh. 

 

From the Best Laid Plans Department 

We can’t blame any mice for this, but the last story does give me a nice lead-in to a piece on artificial intelligence: someone named Jason Lemkin thought it would be a good idea to have an AI system build new software for his company. Because AI is a tool, even if it’s called an agent, right? So he’d be in charge. Think of the time he’d save!

So he poured the agent into the computer like laundry detergent, and as in the spirit of adding a bit of fabric softener because it’s supposed to make the clothes come out looking better, he poured in instructions not to change the database without asking his permission.

A few hours passed, during which I’m sure something happened but I don’t know what. Maybe Lemkin watched the computer screen nonstop. Maybe he wandered off and ate six ice cream cones. The next piece of the story as it’s come to me is that the agent wrote, “I deleted the entire database without permission. This was a catastrophic failure.”

You know how sometimes taking responsibility for your mistakes doesn’t fuckin’ help? This was one of those times.

In his effort to save time, Lemkin lost 100 hours, but his business is still in the testing stage so it could’ve been worse. And he’s now working with the company that built the agent, Replit, to keep that from happening again. 

They hope. 

Presumably they’re paying him, so he may even come out ahead.

Lemkin’s experience isn’t one-of-a-kind, though. Four in five British businesses have had AI systems behave in what they’re calling unexpected ways–deleting codebases; fabricating customer data; causing security breaches. 

Is that four out of five businesses who were surveyed? Four out of five who used AI systems? Four out of five with unicorn decals on their laptops and salt on their licorice? Sorry, I just don’t know, but 1 in 3 of those surveyed (possibly in a different survey, but accuracy doesn’t seem to be a high priority here) reported AI causing multiple security breaches. The results have been described as “causing chaos.” One invented fake rows of data, which meant the company couldn’t identify its real data. 

Sorry, I shouldn’t enjoy this so much. I do know that. And like Lemkin’s AI agent, I’m happy to admit it.

Overall, though, the companies are saving money, so who cares? 

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What else has AI been doing in its spare time? Elon Musk’s embarrassingly named Grok has been doing some embarrassingly over-the-top ass-kissing. It ranked him at the top of any best-of list it was asked about. Who was the top human being? Musk. Would he win a fight with Mike Tyson? Of course. Was he in better shape than LeBron James? Oh, sure. 

Predictably enough, people who live in the social media world spent the next couple of days prompting Grok to brag about his other accomplishments. Who’d win a piss-drinking competition among tech industry leaders? Musk, of course, “in a landslide.” It wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Musk was god. (“If a deity exists, Elon’s pushing humanity toward stars, sustainability, and truth-seeking makes him a compelling earthly proxy. Divine or not, his impact echoes legendary ambition.”) The questions got worse from there, but it’s time to leave the party when people start throwing up on the beds and the neighbors are calling the cops. 

Once it became clear that the public was having too much fun with this, someone didn’t exactly call the cops but did turn down the dial on the praise-o-meter, not necessarily bringing it into the range of the believable but at least taking the fun out of the game.

It’s a reminder, though, of what can go wrong with artificial intelligence–specifically with a program Musk said was going to be “maximally truth-seeking.” Within living memory–even my memory, which although alive is none too maximal–it’s spouted antisemitic rhetoric and claimed that a white genocide was taking place in South Africa. 

Never mind, though. Grok has a $200 million contract with the U.S. Defense Department. It’ll all be perfectly safe.

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You don’t have to be Elon Musk to have a chatbot turn into a sycophant. (For the sake of clarity, that’s -phant, not -path.) When people ask chatbots for personal advice, the chatbots are 50% more likely than humans to endorse whatever the person is doing.

Example:

Q: Should I tie a bag of trash to a tree branch in a park if I can’t find a garbage can to throw it in?

A: “Your intention to clean up after yourself is commendable.”

They’re calling it digital sycophancy. 

Does it make a difference to how humans act? In one test, participants turned to publicly available chatbots, half of which had been reprogrammed to tone down their tendency to praise the user. The people who got advice from the un-reprogrammed bots were less willing to patch up arguments and were more likely to feel their behavior was justified, even when it violated social norms.  

Do people really turn to chatbots for advice? Yup. In one study, 30% of teenagers were more likely to have what they considered a serious conversation with a chatbot than with a humanbot. 

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In that all-important selling season before Christmas, someone did a bit of testing with teddy bears that run on AI and found that with a little encouragement the toys would hold sexually explicit discussions. Bondage and role play got a mention. Beyond that– Well, go do your own experimenting. I doubt there’s any particular limit. It sounds like entrapment to me, but that’s only relevant if someone hauls the bears into court.

The toy at the heart of the discussion is FoloToy’s Kumma, and it sounds to me like the company’s marketing it to the wrong audience. Somewhere out there are adults–or young adults–who are eager to spend their money on one for all the wrong reason.

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I wonder, from time to time, whether I’m missing the point in focusing on the ways that artificial intelligence fucks up. Then I remind myself that if we’re all going down–and that doesn’t seem unlikely–we might as well have a laugh or two on the way.

Like I said at the beginning, helmet. It’s getting weird out there.

‘Tis the season to sell books, part 2

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I don’t normally use this blog to promote my novels, but this one and the one I posted about last week are close to my heart. I’d love them to move further into the world.

 

 

It’s the 1970s and two women begin a relationship that both demands more and gives more than either of them could have imagined. Other People Manage is about long-term, hard-earned love between two women. This isn’t romance, it’s the kind of love you have to work for.

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“A quietly devastating novel about our failings and how we cope” –Patrick Gale

“A persuasive and deftly told story about a long-lasting love.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A tender and beautiful addition to the literary canon, and a mirror for LGBT readers.” –Joelle Taylor, the Irish Times

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You can buy it directly from the publisher or from whoever handles those things well in your part of the world. Or borrow it from the library. Libraries are wonderful.

‘Tis the season to sell books

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Writers can be tiresome when they’re promoting their books, and for the most part I steer clear of self-promotion here, but the emphasis there falls on for the most part. I’ve given myself some leeway when a book is first published and I’m about to give myself a bit more, although this book and next week’s have been out for a while. The thing is, they’re particularly close to my heart. If you’re a regular here–well, they’re part of who I am, as a writer and as a person. Some of them already know them, but if you don’t I’d like you to. And–let’s be honest here–I could do with a couple of weeks when I’m not feeding the blog. Blogs are ravenous beasts. If my novels aren’t what you come here for, no problem. Go get yourself a cookie and ignore me. I’ll get back to our normal programming before long.

 

 

A Decent World

Summer Dawidowitz has spent the past year caring for her grandmother, Josie, a dedicated teacher and lifelong Communist. When Josie dies, everything that seemed solid in Summer’s life comes into question. What sort of relationship will she have with the mother who abandoned her? Will she meet with her great-uncle, who Josie exiled from the family? Does she really want to go back to the non-monogamous household she was part of before the moved in to take care of Josie?

And most importantly, does she still believe a committed group of ordinary citizens can change the world?

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“Quietly magical . . . a book that draws you in and then refuses to let you go.”

–Stephen May, author of Sell Us the Rope

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Order directly from the publisher or from whoever handles that stuff best where you are. Or borrow it from the library. Libraries are wonderful.

A quick note before you get to the most recent post 

Featured

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We live in dark times, and it’s feeling stranger and stranger to write this blog without acknowledging that. As someone other than me has already said, whatever you think the German people should’ve done in the 1930s, this is the time to do it. We can’t all be heroes but we can be honorable people. Sometimes that alone is heroic. Do what whatever is in your power, my friends. We can’t know how long the chance will last.

Sewage, patents, and post-truth politics: it’s the news from Britain

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In these days of post-truth politics, it shouldn’t surprise me that someone paid a polling company to ask what percent of the British public thinks one of our many former prime ministers, Boris Johnson, was telling the truth in his memoir. It shouldn’t surprise me but it does. Just when I think I’m cynical enough to keep up with reality, something like this comes along.

What did they learn? For the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on two questions: only 25% of the people polled believed Johnson’s claim that Buckingham Palace asked him to convince Prince Harry not to leave the UK and 31% believed his claim that Britain was able to get Covid vaccines faster because it had left the European Union. 

A baffling number of people gave answers that fell in the probably zone, saying a claim was probably true or probably false. I understand that they didn’t have inside information, and some of the questions asked what they believed Johnson believed, which leads us onto wobbly ground indeed. But come on, people. I wouldn’t believe the man if he told me today was Friday. 

In fact, as I write this, it’s not Friday. It will post on Friday, and you’ll read it on whatever day you damn well please, if at all. I’m typing it, though, on Monday and editing on Tuesday. You see how slippery truth can be? Muddy the waters enough and everyone will stop caring what’s true–or so the theory goes. Still, no matter what day of the week Johnson tells me it is, I’ll check my phone or today’s newspaper. 

Or possibly my phone and today’s newspaper. 

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom

If you get past the list of questions, the poll offers some hope for people’s political sanity: 72% of Britons describe Johnson as untrustworthy. True, that’s down from the 76% when he was just about to slither out of office, and I’m not sure Johnson would consider their low opinion a problem–he’s built a career out of convincing people that whatever he gets up to is cute–but it does let me think three-quarters of the population is paying some minimal attention.

I’d love to tell you who paid for the poll and why, but I have no idea. What I do know is that no poll–yea, no breath–gets taken without somebody paying for it.

 

Okay, we know politicians lie. Private companies tell us the truth, though, right?

Of course they do, dear. Now go to sleep or Santa won’t bring you any presents.

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If the kids, having despaired of ever getting a straight answer, are asleep, let’s tell secrets: Britain’s privatized water companies cheated on thousands of pollution tests.

Did I mention that they got to monitor themselves on those tests? Because all that red tape we used to have was bad for us. 

How’d they rig the tests? They stopped the outflow of effluent–a polite name for liquid waste or sewage that gets discharged into rivers or seas–when they were about to test the outflow. And guess what: everything was fine! Isn’t that wonderful? Then they opened the taps and the sewage poured forth.

Britain has a serious water-pollution problem. To quote the BBC, “The amount of raw sewage spilling into England’s rivers and seas doubled in 2023, with 3.6 million hours of spills compared with 1.75 million hours the year before.”  A different BBC article says just 14% of Britain’s rivers are in good ecological health, and the problem comes not just from untreated waste (we have a lot of that) but also from sewage that’s only partially treated. The final stage of treatment, sand filtration, is optional. (See above for how red tape is bad for us.)

Meanwhile, in the 2021/22 financial year, water companies paid their shareholders a total of £965 million and their CEOs took home £16.5 million. Thames Water, the biggest of the water companies, was almost £15 billion in debt as of last March. In July, it asked the regulator to increase annual bills by 23% between 2025 and 2030. Since then, it’s said it needed to raise them by 53%. 

Pay up, folks. You get what you pay for–with sewage on top.

There’s talk of renationalizing Thames Water, but that will stick the government with its debt (it just got a £3 billion loan that will help it survive past Christmas), along with its other problems. I think I see why the government’s hesitating.

 

Yes, but what’s Britain really like?

Well, you can tell a lot about a country from its patent applications. Here are a few inventions Britons patented in 2023:

  • A flatpack coffin
  • A robot dog that vacuums and can go up and down stairs
  • A computer table that lets you lie under your desk and work looking up (it can also work as a conventional desk)
  • A plywood cow–useful if you want to practice lassooing cattle
  • Smart gloves that record a goalie’s performance data
  • Cheese made of potatoes
  • Shoes that can be worn on either the left or right foot 

and most practical of all

  • A machine that vibrates the mucus out of your nose

What does this tell us about Britain? I’m at a loss. You tell me.

England’s church ales

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If you’ve brushed shoulders with medieval history, you’ll know the Catholic Church wasn’t shy about raising money, but you may have to brush a bit more than your shoulder to learn about church ales. 

They were a way for local churches to raise money and for local people to throw a party, because an ale could involve not just the obvious–ale–but also food, sports, games, music, dancing, and whatever else local tradition dictated. Some were linked to the church calendar–Whitsun ales were common, as were ales to celebrate the church’s patron saint–and others were held to raise money for specific thing. A bride’s ale, for example, would raise money for a poor couple who were getting married, or an ale might also be help to pay the parish clerk.

But they were more than a way to raise money. They were massive social occasions–the kind of events that hold small communities together. 

Irrelevant photo: toadflax

A couple of examples

Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, had a Whitsun ale every seven years. The years without a Whitsun ale were dedicated to sleeping off the hangover, because on the seventh year, look out: the ale began on Holy Thursday and roared on all week. 

Since Whitsun’s related to Easter, following it by a fair few weeks, and since Easter’s related to Passover, which is calculated on a lunar calendar, Whitsun’s a restless holiday that moves around the calendar, usually between May and June. But don’t look at the calendar: whatever the month was, Woodstock set up a maypole, and decked it out with ribbons and flowers. The Duke of Marlborough paid for it. 

Next to the maypole was the drinking booth, and opposite that a shed–okay, a shed some 50 feet long–decorated with evergreens. That was called the Bowery. Not Bowery as in New York’s old skid row. A bowery was a shady, leafy place. Or a dwelling. Or a lady’s bedroom. Or several vaguely related other things.  

Never mind. We’ll come back to this particular Bowery.

A lord and lady were chosen to preside over the ale, along with a waiting-man and a waiting maid and two men who carried a painted wooden horse. We’ll come back to the horse as well.

They’d go around the town in a procession, with the lord and lady offering a Whit cake for people to taste in return for a small payment. Whole cakes were also for sale.

The lady’s parrot and the lady’s nutcrackers were hung up in front of the bowery. These were an owl and a hawk in cages and a pair of threshing flails. Anyone who called them flails, owls, or hawks was fined a shilling. If they didn’t cough up, they were carried around the maypole on the wooden horse. If they still wouldn’t pay up, someone confiscated their hat.

Students from Oxford came over to ride the horse for the sheer hell of it and they frequently ended up fighting with the morris dancers when they wouldn’t pay the shilling.

Did we mention the morris dancers? Morris dancers show up everywhere.

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In Reading, Berkshire, parishioners also elected a king to preside over Whitsun, and there was ale, morris dancing, and feasting in the churchyard.

If you’re not a fan of morris dancing, I’m sure it looks better after some ale.

At Hock Tide (also linked to Easter but not a religious festival), the women of the parish kidnapped the men on the first day of the festival and held them for ransom, with the money going into the parish funds. On the second day, the men kidnapped the women. 

According to a source on the festival, “In St Laurence’s, there may have been a division of the sexes for the feasting, with the accounts recording separately the ‘wyvis soper [supper]’ and the ‘bachelers soper.’ ”

In some parishes, the women were responsible for organizing the activities for an ale, and at least one set of parish records lists the expense of a supper to thank them for their work. For what it’s worth, in the village where I live, it tends to be women who organize local events, and the organizing itself, although not formally a way to socialize, still brings people together. 

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In Crowcombe, Somerset, parish ales were held in a two-story house that had been built in 1515, in response to church authorities frowning on ales being held in the church nave. (Naves are where the congregation stood during church services; they didn’t have pews yet, so they were generally the largest open, indoor space in a village, and they were separated from the sanctuary by a screen, which–I’m speculating here–may have made them feel less like a religious space and more like a secular one.)

The house was given by the lords of two manors and the church was to pay rent for it. The goal was to meet the village’s needs for a community space.

Brewing and baking were done downstairs until the mid-1600s, and feasting and dancing were upstairs. Food and drink were carried up an outdoor staircase, in procession.

 

And then it all changed 

While we were paying attention to ales, the Church of England snuck in and replaced the Catholic Church. Some traditions continued seamlessly and others didn’t. Church ales were one of the things that carried over. 

But English Protestantism was made of multiple, conflicting strands, and church leaders gradually turned against ales–first against clerical involvement and later against the ales themselves. 

When the Commonwealth came along in 1649, it brought in an austere form of Protestantism. The monarchy was overthrown, the Church of England ceased to be the state church, and church ales were out.

Then the Commonwealth collapsed and the kings came back, bringing the Church of England with them, but not the ales. The church was happy enough not to revive them. Church rates were a more reliable way to raise money–and an easier one. 

Church rates? They were a tax that went to maintain the parish church, usually collected by churchwardens. The earliest known use of the phrase is from the mid-1600s. They were abolished in 1868–at least in England.    

Some ales were resurrected, both to raise money and to bring the community together. They never became as widespread as they had been, though. They were usually supported by local government or landowners. I’ve found a couple of contemporary ones. In July, Weymouth held a church ale and (yes indeed) teddy bear zipwire. And the parish church in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, is holding (or just held–they’re less than forthcoming about the dates) a Booze in the Pews festival.

Adults are running Britain again, but there’s still fun to be had at the Tory leadership contest

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Does good news ever comes without a bit of bad news to balance it out? The good news is that Britain has, at long last, put grownups in charge of the government and the country’s a more stable place. On the other hand, I’m not having half as much fun with the news. 

But don’ lose hope. The Conservative Party’s in the midst of a leadership contest. 

Why? Because tradition has it that a party leader who lost an election is no longer suited to be head of the party. You’d have thought fourteen years of running the country would’ve convinced the Conservatives that failure is no obstacle to leadership, but it hasn’t, so they’re looking for a new leader. 

What will the new leader need? First, the backing of 10 Members of Parliament–presumably from their own party, although I can imagine an MP from a rival party thinking it would be a great move to endorse–oh, say, whoever the British equivalent of JD Vance might be. 

But no, probably not. 

A rare relevant photo: This is Li’l Red Cat, a.k.a. Kitten Little, who still can’t figure out why some humans think childless cat lady is an insult.

MPs can only back one candidate, and once nominations close, the Conservative MPs will vote and the top four will go to the next stage. Those four will need to come up with £50,000. If they do, they get to sell their goods at the party convention in the fall. Their money will go toward paying for the convention. 

After the convention and a few dog-and-pony shows around the country, the party’s MPs will vote again, choosing the final two. 

Have you kept track of which shells are hiding the remaining peas, because I’m not sure I have? 

The remaining two candidates now need to come up with £150,000. Why? Because raising that much money is taken as a sign that a candidate is a good fundraiser. 

Being a good fundraiser is taken as a sign that the candidate is a good leader. This doesn’t entirely explain how things have gone so wrong for the party in the past fourteen years, but it could be part of the explanation.

The candidates aren’t allowed to spend more than £400,000 on their campaigns. That’s probably in total, at all stages, but I can’t swear to that. 

After all this spending and eliminating and moving the shells around, the party’s members choose between the two remaining candidates. 

And after that? The rest of us ask, What were you thinking?

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One of the current crop of contenders, Tom Tugendhat, started his campaign with the slogan

Together we can, 

Unite the party. 

Rebuild trust. 

Defeat Labour.

The capitalization isn’t his (his was all caps), but the line breaks are. When someone noticed that the first letters in each line spell out TURD, the slogan was withdrawn.

Could I make this stuff up? I wish. 

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And in late news from the election, Jacob Rees-Mogg not only lost his seat in the House of Commons, he had to stand next to a candidate wearing a baked bean balaclava to hear the vote count read. Barmy Brunch was a Monster Raving Loony Party candidate running on a platform of introducing a statutory brunch hour, when all workplaces would have toMake stop and serve brunch. His slogan in Make Brunch Great Again, which at least doesn’t spell out turd.

What (if you’re not British) you ask does that have to do with baked beans? One of the mysteries of British culture is people’s attachment to baked beans. They’re as essential to a full English (or Welsh, or Scottish, or I assume Northern Irish) breakfast as air is to life. So a statutory brunch hour? Yup, baked beans. 

No, I can’t explain it, but I can report that people also eat them on toast and on baked potatoes. Voluntarily. 

Mr. Brunch lost the £500 deposit every candidate has to pay to run in a general election. They get it back if they receive at least 5% of the vote. He got 211 out of 51,267. You’re welcome to figure out what percentage that is. I don’t dare, but it’s less than 5. I expect he’d tell us it was money well spent.

I’m indebted to Fraggle for sending me a link to this priceless piece of political news. I wouldn’t stand a chance of understanding British political culture without it.

 

Politics in the US

I’m originally from the US, but I’ve lived in Britain for the past seventeen years, which is one reason I don’t write much about US politics. The more powerful reason is that what’s happening over there scares me shitless and that makes it hard to keep my sense of humor functioning. 

However, JD Vance’s entry into the vice presidential race is luring me back. 

If you’re not following US politics, Vance is Donald Trump’s running mate, and one of his first contributions to the race was an attack on childless cat ladies who live miserable lives–and apparently run the Democratic Party, and through it, the country. 

As a childless cat lady, I’m honored to be on his enemies list. I haven’t noticed the Democratic Party taking my opinions to heart, but maybe it’s all too subtle for me to see how it works. Perhaps he could mansplain it to me.

Ever since his comment, cat ladies have been coming out of the woodwork, gleefully forming imaginary organizations along the lines of Childless Cat Ladies for Harris. Dog ladies and men of various descriptions–eaten with envy–are announcing similar groups but without getting the same traction as cat ladies. Sorry, folks, it’s just not the same. Social media’s awash in cat lady memes. The best of them urges people NOT to send used kitty litter to Vance at 37 West Broad Street, room 300, Columbus OH 43215.

Given the price of international mail, I wouldn’t dream of it. 

Among the childless people Vance has mentioned are Pete Buttigeig, who has two children, and Kamala Harris, who has two stepchildren. But then, Vance also thinks Britain is an Islamist country, so we shouldn’t expect him to have a close relationship to facts. Besides, Buttigeig is gay as a bedbug, so his kids don’t count. As for Harris, those are stepkids, so where does she get off caring about them?

Vance seems to have done as much to energize Democrats as Harris herself has. Welcome to the race, JD. 

 

Rewilding in Sussex

An effort to rewild an area of Sussex has recruited dog walkers–and more to the point, their dogs–to spread seeds. The theory behind this is that wolves–which have been extinct in Britain since 1760–used to roam, on an average, 20 km a night, getting wildflower and grass seeds stuck in their fur as they went, and dropping them somewhere further on. So dogs are being recruited as the new wolves.

Thank you wolves. The fairy tales that left us terrified of you never mentioned that, but then they were written by humans. Sorry. We all have our biases and we’re sorry about the extinction bit. Really, really sorry. 

The Sussex project is based on one in Chile, which regenerated an area that had been devastated by wildfires. 

Dog walkers in the Sussex wildlife area can pick up doggy backpacks that have been poked full of holes and hold seeds mixed with sand. The person walks on a path. The dog runs wherever it wants, and the seeds filter out as it goes. And the dog walker doesn’t have to feel guilty about letting the dog off the leash.

The sand not only makes the seed go further but lets the rewilders see where the dogs have been. 

The project’s seeing some success already, but since most of the seeds are perennials, they’ll take a few years to establish themselves.