What tea bag makes the best cup of tea, and other British dilemmas

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Every year, Britain’s consumer champion, the oddly named Which?, does a blind test of the nation’s teabags and picks a winner. Because, folks, this is important. You’re a consumer. You need the experts’ opinion on this before you wander cluelessly into a supermarket and buy the tea you, in your ignorance, think you like.

Besides, Which? gets some free publicity out of it. 

This year, in what one headline called a “shock result,” a budget tea, Asda’s Everyday–the cheapest of the contestants–came in first. The high-end Twinings was in joint last place with it doesn’t matter who. What does matter is that Twinings’ tea bags cost four times more than Asda’s. 

My favorite, Yorkshire, wandered in somewhere between the two. 

What qualities do the experts judge tea on? Color. Aroma, Appearance. Taste’s on the list somewhere. Ability to boot you into consciousness first thing in the morning isn’t.

Irrelevant photo: Last week’s post also had an irrelevant picture of Fast Eddie, but surely it’s not possible for a childless cat lady (who’re you calling a lady, asshole?) to post too many cat pictures. So here’s Fast Eddie in slow mode.

The advice column

If you’re in the market for free advice, allow me to offer you this: never try to communicate in an accent or dialect you didn’t come by honestly. I mention this because a local council–in non-British English, that’s a governmental body–tried to use the local dialect for an anti-littering campaign and got it wrong. In very large type.

The North Yorkshire Council put up signs–hundreds of the beasts–urging people to “Gerrit in’t bin’” 

Oops. That should’ve been “Gerrit in t’bin.”

What’s with the “t’”? It’s short for the and it’s a Yorkshire thing. 

Why? 

Why not? There’s no arguing with accents or dialects. They are what they are and they do what they do. 

But let’s not take anything for granted: “gerrit” means get it. “Bin”? It’s what I grew up called the garbage can–that thing you throw trash in. But that’s a Britishism, not Yorkshire’s own invention

To be fair to the council, I don’t know that they’re not from Yorkshire. They may just be people who had some apostrophes to spare and got caught dropping one in the wrong place. As I understand the apostrophe process, we’re born with a certain number and the instructions about how to use them were written by Ikea. So as the years go by, some people get desperate, and they drop theirs in any spot that looks likely. Or if not likely, possible.

It’s not entirely their fault.

A lot of the posters were put up in tourist sites on the theory, no doubt, that visitors would be charmed by a bit of local color, but whether the visitors are looking at the original version or the corrected one, 76.3% are locked in place while they try to unscramble the letters and think, What????

 

The ghost of prime ministers past

Fifty-six days after he became Britain’s prime minister and moved into his new office, Keir Starmer had a portrait of a former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, moved out. Apparently short of things to get outraged about, Conservative Party leaders pitched a fit.

But since I’ve been making fun of people’s apostrophe use, I should be careful about this: if multiple people do that thing I just mentioned, do they pitch a single collective fit or multiple individual ones?

Either way, they accused Starmer of being vindictive and petty, of spending his time rearranging the furniture instead of governing, and of appeasing the left wing of his party. 

To which the left wing of his party said, “If only.

That kept the news cycle fed for nearly a day, but when the nation failed to rise up in arms the outrage machine went into sleep mode, during which it appears to be doing nothing but is in fact searching the internet for new and surely more popular sources of potential outrage.

 

The Ig Nobels

A winner of this year’s Ig Nobel Awards, Saul Justin Newman, from University College Lonon, reports that the claims about extreme aging–living past 110–are, to be scientific about it, mostly bullshit. 

“I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world,” he said. “(The other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.”

To be clear: he only looked for death certificates for the people believed to be dead. The ones who were still alive? It’s pretty much expected that they wouldn’t have one yet.

A lot of the over-110s are concentrated in blue zones, where a startling number people are said to live past 100. “For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.”

But in a 2010 review by the Japanese government, “82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.”

Don’t have anyone else register it either.

Okinawa, which was supposed to be a hotspot of extreme aging, turned out to have the worst health in Japan. The best way to find concentrations of super-agers in Okinawa super-agers is to figure out where the halls of records were bombed during World War II. 

“If the person dies [in the bombing], they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.”

As for hotspots in Italy and Greece, “By my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases. . . . [In Greece], over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.”

In England, several low-income areas–”the worst places to be an old person”–have a high number of people over 100 but surprisingly few 90-year-olds. Unfortunately, if you’re going to live to 100, one of the requirements is that you have to live through your 90s first, even if there’s no glory in it.

So will getting an Ig Nobel get people to take his research seriously? 

“I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.”

The fun hasn’t gone out of British politics yet

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Once Britain’s Conservative government was booted out, it looked like the grownups, in the form of a shiny new Labour government, were in charge at last. In other words, it looked like the fun had gone out of politics, but have hope: humanity’s most absurd qualities haven’t been banished. 

This is admittedly gossip and rumor, but it’s credible enough for a responsible paper, the Guardian, to have trusted it: low-level guerilla warfare is going on inside 10 Downing Street between Sue Gray, the prime minister’s chief of staff, and Morgan McSweeney, who was his election strategy wizard and is now his head of political strategy. 

The plan was for McSweeney’s desk to sit outside the prime minister’s office, since he would be in and out of there more than Gray, but apparently Gray has moved McSweeney’s desk away from the prime minister’s door. Twice. Which implies that he’s moved it back at least once. She’s also (allegedly) tried to block his access to a secure computer system that would let him get security briefings.

There’s hope for humanity yet.

A nearly relevant photo, but you’ll have to read to the end to find out why. This isn’t the cat in the news but our own Fast Eddie in the foliage.

 

Exit Liz Truss, pursued by a head of lettuce 

Admittedly, though, the Conservatives were more fun. Watching them run the country was kind of like watching a classroom full of six-year-olds try to make a pie from scratch after the adult’s been called away: a lot to laugh at, but now that their parents have taken them home and, we hope, washed their clothes, there’s a real mess to clean up.

I’m not on the clean-up crew, so allow me to call your attention to Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days. During the final stretch, disaster was so clearly headed her way that a newspaper put a livecam and a blond wig on a head of lettuce and asked if it would last longer than Truss.

Or maybe she was in office for 45 days. Or 50. For reasons that I won’t try to understand, different sources are coming up with different numbers. Whichever one we pick, she still holds the record for the country’s shortest-serving prime minister and the lettuce outlasted her, but that hasn’t stopped her from publishing a book, Ten Years to Save the West–an ambitious goal for a politician who couldn’t save her own premiership. And more than a quarter of that first year is gone already. 

Modesty prevents me from making fun of anything more than the title since I haven’t read it. 

The reason she’s back in the headlines is that she walked out of her own book event in August, which must also set some kind of a record. A crowd-funded group called Led by Donkeys had installed a hidden banner above the stage. When they lowered it by remote control, it read, “I crashed the economy.” Inevitably, it included a picture of a head of lettuce. 

Truss said, “That’s not funny,” and walked off stage. End of event. She has since accused Led by Donkeys of stifling free speech, although nothing they did kept her from speaking and a banner can also be considered speech. In fact, interrupting someone can be considered free speech. 

Led by Donkeys calls itself an accountability project and says the new government will inevitably “disappoint us in some, if not more, respects . . . so it’s inconceivable that we won’t turn our attention in a really direct way to what the government is doing.”

I can hardly wait.

 

What’s it worth to be booted out of office?

In the year after she stepped down as prime minister, Liz Truss made £250,000 in speaking fees. In one speech, she took in more than most of her fellow citizens earn in a year.

Suella Braverman made £60,000 as a speaker, although I’m not sure about the time period on that. She also made £14,000 for newspaper articles in the Telegraph and accepted an all-expenses paid trip to Israel worth £27,800. A mere nothing, but then she wasn’t prime minister. She never got past home secretary.

The top earner is Boris Johnson, who made £4.8 million in the six months after he stepped down, £2.5 million of which is an advance on some unspecified number of speeches. I haven’t seen a breakdown of the rest of his income, but I’d think twice before paying him an advance on so much as a piece of toast, even if I was looking at both bread and toaster. He got an £88,000 advance (or “a rumoured” £500,000–go figure) in 2015 for a book on Shakespeare.  

What does he actually know about Shakespeare? Indications are, not much. In 2021, a leading Shakespeare scholar was approached to help him with his homework by answering questions for Johnson. “The originality and brilliance, his agent assured me, would lie in Mr Johnson’s choice of questions to ask and in the inimitable way in which he would write up the expert answers he received,” the scholar said when he went public about it.

The book has yet to appear–or from what I’ve read, make its way to the publisher, but that hasn’t stopped him signing a £510,000 deal to write his political memoirs–for a different publisher. 

And I still don’t have my toast.

*

To prove there’s no justice in this world, the lettuce–which, you’ll remember, outlasted Truss–ended up on the compost heap. 

 

Meanwhile, in Cananda . . .

 . . . a totally separate Conservative Party aired a feel-good election ad, full of patriotic hoorah about how much they love Canada. You know the kind of thing: a Canadian father drives through the suburbs, only it turns out that was shot in North Dakota. The kids in school? That was from Serbia. The university student? Ukraine. The kid in the park with her grandparents? London. The two jets on a training mission, “getting ready to defend our home and native land”? Russia.  

And the sunset with the words “we’re home”? Venezuela. 

The ad has been pulled.

 

And in nonpolitical news . . .

. . . Larry Richardson is the author of a dozen academic papers on mathematics that have been cited 132 times. Larry Richardson is also a cat and, disappointingly, his papers are gibberish. 

Larry was boosted into academic stardom by his person’s grandson, a grad student in metascience and computational biology, who had run into the academic trick of getting your papers cited by either writing the papers citing you or paying someone else to do that for you. This matters, because the more a scientific paper is cited, the more important its author becomes. It influences hiring and tenure decisions. If you’re a cat, it gets you headlines.

Not that you care about headlines if you’re a cat. 

The papers that cite you can be gibberish as long as they have a plausible title. In fact, a program, MathGen, can produce them for you if you can’t be bothered writing your own nonsense. And  they can be written by long-dead scientists and mathematicians. 

Ever wanted to have your paper cited by Galileo? It can be arranged. 

The papers can also be written by your grandmother’s cat. You upload them to ResearchGate, let GoogleScholar do its work, then delete them. Or leave them. What the hell, it’s your call. 

GoogleScholar doesn’t sound overly cautious about what it accepts as a scholarly paper. Someone got it to accept a cafeteria menu. The authors are C.S. Salad, P. Pack, B. Noodles, C. Fajitas, and R. Beans. If the hyperventilating comments on Twitter are to be believed, the paper’s been cited multiple times.

R.  Richardson’s goal was to make L. Richardson the world’s most-cited cat. It took two weeks but only one hour of that was actual work.

The cat whose record L. Richardson broke was E.D.C. Willard, whose human was theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington. Hetherington added E.D.C. to a single-author paper because he didn’t want to go back and change all the we’s to I’s. E.D.C.–also known as Felis Domesticus Chester Willard, or Chester to his friends–racked up a mere 107 citations. He went on to drop his coauthor and write a paper and a book chapter under his own name.

R.  Richardson assures the world that L. Richardson–who goes by Larry–has been compensated in some unspecified way for the use of his name. R. Richardson did not comment, but you can find his profile here. 

Are foxhunters an ethnic group?

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A pro-foxhunting group, Hunting Kind, says it’ll be going to court to prove that fox hunters are an ethnic minority, which they’re convinced will protect their hunts from the barbarian anti-foxhunting hordes. The group’s chair argues that people who support foxhunting suffer persecution by animal rights extremists and that their hunts are an extension of natural selection because they only kill the foxes that are old or weak or slower than a pack of dogs. Or who, you know, overindulge in suicidal ideation. 

“I can tell you for a fact [foxhunting] is not cruel,” he said, “because I take no delight in the suffering of an animal.”

Point proven, then. 

The group claims it meets the five qualifications for an ethnic group: 

  • A long and shared history of culture which is distinct from wider society
  • Distinct customs of their own
  • A common geographical origin
  • Common ancestors
  • Common language or literature

Irrelevant photo: a begonia

Where’d the five points come from? I haven’t been able to trace them to any source. The 2021 census says a person’s ethnicity “could be based on” culture, family background, identity or physical appearance. That’s four and sounds kind of tentative.

The Law Society says its “usually been used to refer to long shared cultural experiences, religious practices, traditions, ancestry, language, dialect or national origins.” That’s seven and not what you’d call rock solid.

Basically, ethnicity’s a hazy term. But let’s not get hung up on how many characteristics it takes to solidify a bunch of people into an ethnic group. What’s striking here is that the desire to be one speaks to a longing on the part of a privileged group to be certified as unprivileged so it can claim the privileges of the unprivileged.

Did I lose anyone on the hairpin turns back there? 

Are foxhunters privileged? Well, foxhunting started out as an aristocratic passtime. In its current form, it dates back to the 19th century and was strictly for the upper crust. These days the hunts are marginally more democratic: you don’t have to be an aristocrat but you do need deep pockets. As George Monbiot explains it, “Not everyone who hunts today is a member of the aristocracy–far from it. But this is the way in which you aspire to become one. To look posh you buy a Land Rover, green wellies, a tweed hat and a waxed jacket: the livery of field sports. You buy a house in the country. You get yourself a horse and you join the hunt.”

You can see why they long to be certified as society’s victims.

 

A bit of history

Farmers have long had it in for foxes. They attack some of the smaller farm animals and they have beautiful fur. It doesn’t do to be too beautiful, friends. I’m telling you. In this case, it led to fur envy: the aristocrats could wear that fur themselves and tell themselves they looked foxy in it. But it wasn’t until the 18th century, with the decline of the country’s deer population, that fox hunting turned into a sport. Because, hey, if they could go out hunting deer they had to kill something, didn’t they?

What happened to the deer? Well, history just loves irony. England’s landowners–a rich and powerful class of people–discovered they could make more money by getting rid of those annoying people who lived on the land and farmed it. They enclosed the land, making smaller fields and raising sheep in them. It’s called the enclosure movement. Cue massive displacement and poverty, not to mention political unrest, but never mind all that, there was money to be made.

In enclosing the land, they got rid of the places deer liked to breed. It wasn’t the most important result, unless you’re a deer, but it left a wealthy group of people in need of something to kill. And there was the fox, who had no hand in all this, with its beautiful coat and inconvenient need to eat. 

To turn up the volume a bit, along came the Industrial Revolution, with its improved network of roads and its new network of railroads, making the countryside more accessible to would-be hunters living in towns and cities. For a few days, they could pretend to be country gentlemen. 

Or gentlewomen. 

Awkwardly for anyone who argues that foxhunting is about pest control, the enthusiasm for foxhunting led to a shortage of foxes, which led to huntmasters buying pests for the hunters to eliminate. They were imported from France, the Netherlands, and Scotland, and in England organized gangs stole them from land that happened to be well stocked. 

Does any of that make them an ethnic group? Well, England’s aristocracy is inbred enough to have a common set of ancestors, but we just shifted ground there from foxhunters to the aristocracy as a whole. They have a few words or phrases the rest of us wouldn’t bother using but they’re stuck sharing their basic language, literature, history, and geographic origins with the rest of us. 

Not me, of course. I wasn’t born in Britain, but there aren’t enough of me to make them an ethnic group. 

Stonehenge: the story keeps changing

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Want to change history? You have two choices: do something that changes the future or change the way we see the past. Neither one is easy, but a group of scientists studying the Stonehenge rocks have managed to change the way historians understand late stone age Britain. 

If you read much about Stonehenge, you’ll probably read about sarsen stones first–the uprights and the massive crosspieces that sit on top of them, forming the outer circle. They were hauled a mere 16 miles. On the other hand, they weigh an average of 25 tons, so however hard you worked last week I’m pretty sure you didn’t do that.   

Once you’re done being impressed, you’ll read about the bluestones–the stones that form the inner circle–which came from 140 miles away, in Wales. Before the invention of smartphones, which would at least have let the people who dragged them document the challenge.

Think about doing that without a single online follower leaving a Like. Where’s your incentive?

The bluestones weigh between 1 and 3 tons. 

A rare relevant photo, with thanks to K. Mitch Hodge, who made it available online at Unsplash.

What most of us wouldn’t have read about is the altar stone, but it’s the one that’s making headlines and retroactively changing history. 

In spite of its name, there’s no reason to believe it was ever used as an altar. It’s lying flat and it must’ve reminded someone of an altar. The name stuck, but don’t get carried away with the idea. 

The new information is that the stone traveled something like 500 (or 350, or 800) miles to play its part in Stonehenge–that’s pretending it went in a straight line–from what’s now Scotland, somewhere around the neighborhood of Inverness, John O’Groats, and Orkney. It’s a big neighborhood, but someone will be out there even now working to narrow it down. 

Why does that matter? Because it tells us that late stone age Britain (known to its friends as neolithic Britain) was a lot more connected than anyone knew. And it tells us that whatever function Stonehenge had, it had it for a whole lot more people than any recent residents suspected. 

 

Moving the stones

How did they get the stone from Scotland to the Salisbury Plain? It’s tempting to think, No problem. Just plop that beast on a boat, but we’re talking about a 6-ton stone. In a boat built in the late stone age. That might not comply with health and safety guidelines. Personally, I’d think two or three times before I jumped in and started to paddle.

Information about ocean-going boats in this period seems to be pretty limited, but they’d have been small and a little sticker on the side would’ve said, “Not recommended for the transport of any stone above 1 ton in weight.” 

Evidence of cross-Channel trade between Britain and Europe has been found, and that meant boats–it’s wet out there, people–but the evidence consists of lighter things like pottery, axes, and cattle. 

Okay, I admit, cattle aren’t light. But compared to the stones we’re talking about? You could lift two of them before breakfast.

The experts are still arguing about how the stones were transported. One experiment tried to move the equivalent of the bluestones across the Severn on rafts. They sank. 

The Severn? Most likely body of water on the way from Wales to Wiltshire, currently playing host to some large stones that future archeologists will try to explain in some marginally rational way.

That doesn’t prove it can’t be done, only that it couldn’t be done the way they tried to do it. Neolithic people would’ve had a lot more experience with neolithic boats than even the best modern-day experimental archaeologist. With so little known about late stone-age boats, it’s all guesswork. So we can’t rule out boats.

But there’s another compelling reason to take the stone overland. An archaeologist who wasn’t involved in the study explained it this way: “If you put a stone on a boat out to sea, not only do you risk losing the stone–but also nobody can see it.” 

But if we spend a few years dragging it the length of Britain, people along the route will get involved. Maybe they’ll help drag it a few miles. Maybe they’ll make us a nice cup of–

No, sorry, we’re centuries too early to get a nice cup of tea. Or even instant coffee, and forget about that frothy, expensive stuff folks have fallen for. We might be offered some nettle tea, though. It’s supposed to be good for sore muscles and arthritis. The island’s rich in nettles, and after hauling that stone we’re rich in sore muscles. We’re also building up the prerequisites of future arthritic problems. So whatever it tastes like, drink that tea and look happy. These people are being hospitable.

Most settlements will lay on a feast, or share what they can if it’s been a bad year. They’ll make us feel welcome and speed us on the next leg of our journey. And with each stop, more people will feel involved with the project. They helped pull that stone. They welcomed the people who delivered it. For generations, people will talk about it. 

The stone, the expert said, will become “increasingly precious . . . as it travels south.”

If dragging a 6-ton stone the length of Britain sounds impossible, I refer you to a BBC documentary–sorry, the name sank into the sludge that passes for my memory–about the bluestones. The presenters somehow got an entire class of primary school kids to pull a stone very much like the bluestones using nothing more than ropes and (if my memory isn’t playing tricks on me) a wooden sledge and logs for it to roll across. Maybe thirty ordinary kids, none of them even close to full grown. And the stone slid across the ground as if that’s what it had in mind all along. 

Admittedly, the ground was flat and it wasn’t full of boulders or forests, but it does show what plain old muscle power can do. 

One objection to the land route theory is that it’s hard to coordinate that many people, but teamwork would’ve been an integral part of any late stone-age community. And they wouldn’t necessarily have seen the length of time involved as a problem. They might’ve seen it as something like a pilgrimage. 

Getting places in a hurry is a relatively modern obsession.

The terrain wouldn’t have been easy, but the idea that Britain was wall-to-wall forest is, apparently, a myth. 

One theory holds that the stones could’ve been moved to Wiltshire by the glaciers, but finding a stone from Scotland wrecks this. 

“From Orkney, I can’t see a way that the stone hikes a ride on half a dozen glaciers in the right order to end up on Salisbury Plain,” a geologist said.

But forget about moving the stones. How did they set them upright?

An archeologist who’s raised the 12-ton cap stone on neolithic tomb using wooden levers said it’s easy, 

So if you buy a Stonehenge from Ikea, those are your assembly instructions.

*

If all that doesn’t sound like enough work, Stonehenge was built in several stages, each one involving a different configuration. I won’t take you through all them but it must’ve been like living with someone who insists on moving the furniture every few thousand years, only the furniture is multiple tons of rock and soil. 

We’ll probably never know what went on there or why, but we’re pretty safe saying that whatever it was, it was important. To a lot of people.

The Battle of Cable Street 

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Now that Britain’s racist riots are–I hope–behind us, this might be a good time to look back at what happened on London’s Cable Street in 1936.

The background? (If you stay here long, sooner or later you’ll end up slogging through a bit of background.) Hitler held power in Germany and Musolini ditto in Italy. The British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, claimed to have 50,000 members, and I’m not saying it didn’t, only that we’re taking their word for it and–oh, hell, it was a long time ago and for our purposes doesn’t really matter. It was big and it was most definitely fascist, complete with the antisemitism, the black shirts, the salute, and the violence. It had a gang of toughs known as the Biff Boys. 

 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: everlasting pea

The roots of antisemitism

Antisemitism was the Islamophobia of the era (in case you’re tempted to tell me that’s antisemitic, keep in mind that I’m Jewish), and it has deep roots in Britain. We could go back to 1290, when Edward I expelled the Jews from England, but let’s start instead at the turn of the twentieth century, when some of the people who opposed the Boer War (1899 to 1902; I had to look it up) blamed it on the Jews–they were imperialists, financiers, bankers, and capitalists. Not long after that, they were blamed for World War I (because they were financiers etc.) and the Russian Revolution (because they were communists). 

One of the oddities of antisemitism is that the Jews appear as both capitalist bloodsuckers who control the world and communist revolutionaries who want to overthrow the capitalist bloodsuckers who control the world. Basically, it works like this: if you see a problem, the Jews caused it. 

But antisemitism wasn’t all name calling and finger pointing. It was respectable. At University College London, in the name of improving the country’s genetic stock, Karl Pearson opposed Jewish immigration and argued that attempts to improve “inferior races” were a waste. Among other things, his work provided an intellectual grounding for the Nazis’ race theories.  

I focus on Jews here because we’re talking about antisemitism, but to be fair he was generous about handing out inferior race labels. 

Clubs and institutions–think golf clubs and things of that sort–had quotas to limit the number of Jewish members they’d accept. That continued into the 1960s. 

In the early 1930s, fascism was also respectable, not only for its antisemitism but because it offered a bulwark against communism, which in the midst of the Great Depression was a powerful force. Fascism appealed to industrialists who were desperate to keep their workers in line and to aristocrats, who’d lost considerable power–and along with it, money–to the industrialists. Again, to be fair, it didn’t appeal to all of them, but some went for it.

Take, for example, a 1934 headline in the Daily Mail, reflecting the opinions of its aristocratic owner, Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st (ahem) Viscount Rothermere: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Harmsworth saw fascism as the wave of the future, was enthusiastic about Hitler and Mussolini, and opposed votes for women and wrote, “The fact is that quite a large number of people now possess the vote who ought never to have been given it.” 

Archibald Ramsay, son of the Earl of Dalhousie, founded the Right Club,  whose logo was an eagle killing a snake with the initials P.J., standing for “Perish Judah.” 

As an article by Adam J. Sacks points out, any hereditary aristocracy has a built-in affinity with theories about pure blood. “Even today,” he writes, “adoptees into aristocratic families in the UK are ineligible to inherit titles or properties.”

Oswald Mosley himself was a baronet. As titles go, it’s minor-league, but hey, it’s one more title than I have.

Or want.

But why should we spend our time with baronets, viscounts, and other riffraff when we can talk about the king? Edward VIII was openly pro-fascist. After he gave up the throne, he told Hitler, “We are derived from the same race with the blood of the huns flowing in our veins.” He’s on record as having told the Nazi high command “that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.” 

Sacks sums it up by saying, “There is hardly a major British institution that was left untouched by fascism, from the Bank of England to the Daily Mail to the House of Commons. . . . If there is a story to be told about Britain and fascism, let it be this: while the people of Britain stood up to the Nazis, the British ruling class were in many cases enthusiastic collaborators–and found justification for being so in their own aristocratic roots and worldviews.”

 

The British Union of Fascists

Mosley overdid the violence at a couple of BUF rallies, where his Biff Boys beat up hecklers badly and more to the point, visibly, and he lost some of his support. That led him to refocus, organizing in a handful of working class neighborhoods. In 1935, the BUF newspaper said, “We are now the patriotic party of the working class.”

Led by a baronet.

One of the things they did was hold threatening open-air meetings on the fringes of the East End, which in the 1930s was a mainly Jewish neighborhood, and forget that noise about Jewish bankers and financiers, the people here were poor. Soup kitchens had lines outside every night.. And to double down on the parallel between antisemitism and Islamophobia, many of the Jews were immigrants. 

Individual Jews were attacked on the street, shopkeepers were threatened, antisemitic slogans were painted on walls. One or two of the articles talk about the residents feeling like they were living under siege.

 

Enough with the background. What happened?

Mosley announced that the British Union of Fascists would march through the East End, in uniform. 

The Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Anti-Semitism–the JPC–circulated a petition asking for the march to be stopped. Within two days they’d gathered 100,0000 signatures and the petition was presented to the Home Secretary, who said goodness, no, he couldn’t interfere with freedom of speech or movement. Instead, he sent a police escort (6,000 in one telling, 10,000 in another) to keep protesters from interfering with the march.

The JPC started organizing to do exactly that–interfere. Various sources credit slightly different combinations of groups for this, but let’s go with the counter-demonstrators being from the Jewish and Irish communities, from trade unions, and from the Independent Labour and Communist parties. More respectable Jewish organizations were urging the Jewish community to stay indoors and avoid confrontation. This was very much an action of the left, and the crowd that turned out on the day was big enough to block Gardiners Corner at Aldgate. The estimates I’ve seen range from 100,000 to 300,000. 

The march was made up of 3,000 Blackshirts, and they waited near the Tower of London for the police to clear them a path, which they tried to do by charging the crowd on horseback and wading in with batons. They’d beat the crowd onto the pavement and more people would stream onto the street. Four tram drivers abandoned their trams where they blocked the road.

Meanwhile around the Tower of London, fights broke out between Blackshirts and antifascists. 

Eventually, the police gave up on clearing a path and redirected the march to Cable Street, a narrow street leading to the docks. (In one telling, this was Mosley’s decision.) A combination of Jews and Irish dockers barricaded the street. (The final third of Cable Street was predominantly Irish.)

When the police broke through the barricade, they were faced with a second barricade and while that slowed them down women threw things at them from upstairs windows. 

Eventually the police retreated and told Mosley to head his march in the opposite direction and disperse. 

A member of the Jewish community later said, “I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working-class people could get together to oppose the evil of fascism.” 

Another said, “it was amazing because we saw Jews, Orthodox Jews with long silk coats and soft felt hats and the sidepieces standing shoulder to shoulder with Irish Catholics, dockers and Somali seamen. . . . They all felt there was a need to be out there to stand on that particular day.” 

A third said, “In Stepney nothing had changed physically. The poor houses, the mean streets, the ill-conditioned workshops were the same, but the people were changed. Their heads seemed to be held higher, and their shoulders were squarer–and the stories they told! Each one was a ‘hero’–many of them were. . . . The ‘terror’ had lost its meaning. The people knew that fascism could be defeated if they organised themselves to do so.”

The acclaim wasn’t universal. Time magazine described it as an “anti-Fascist rampage . . . which turned out to be London’s biggest riot in years.”  

By the end of the day, 85 people had been arrested, 79 antifascists and 6 fascists. Many of the antifascists were beaten by the police and some were sentenced to hard labor. What happened to the fascists who were arrested I don’t know.

Cable Street marked a turning point for the British Union of Fascists. The leaders turned on each other. Some resigned. The organization didn’t collapse but it did lose momentum. It also lost Mussolini’s financial support, which had been substantial. In 1940, not long after the start of World War II, Mosley and other leaders were in prison.

No, Britain hasn’t had a civil war lately

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As you may have read when the UK experienced a series of racist and anti-immigrant riots earlier this month, Elon Musk predicted that civil war was inevitable in Britain.  

Relax, kids. Bad stuff did happen, but a civil war it ain’t, and whatever else Musk is, he’s not a political sage.

 

What did happen? 

Bad stuff, genuinely. It all started when with a knife attack on a dance class in which three young kids were killed and eight people were injured. The attacker was arrested, and a social media campaign claimed he was a Muslim immigrant. He was neither. He was the Welsh-born son of Somali Christian immigrants. 

If anyone knows what his motivation was, they haven’t gone public with it. The best guess going is that he’s crazy, and craziness is an equal opportunity employer, but good luck convincing someone of that if they’ve put their bet on immigrants being the cause of all the country’s problems. Social media blamed an immigrant with a vaguely Muslim sounding (and incorrect) name, so folks got fired up. It was all the fault of immigrants and of Islam. The government was withholding the truth. Somebody had to do something!

The first something they did was riot in the town where the stabbings had taken place, attacking a completely unrelated mosque, burning a police van, and fighting the police–and they had so much fun there that they, or versions of them in other towns, went on to riot in other cities, attempting to burn down buildings housing refugees while people were inside. They also attacked mosques, minority-owned businesses, cars, Muslim gravestones, police, libraries, reporters, photographers, camera crews, individuals who weren’t white, and whatever else was available, including trash cans. 

I saw this broken window and sign in London shortly after the riots ended. I tried to go in and ask what they meant (with my still-American accent, no one’s surprised if I seem clueless), but they were closed. The slogan appeared when David Cameron, the first in a string of Conservative Prime ministers, claimed he was going to fix Broken Britain. We could argue about whether it was, in fact, broken, but he and the Conservative prime ministers who followed him have beyond doubt left it shattered. So I’m genuinely not sure what the thinking is behind this particular sign.

In places, the rioters came with helmets and metal bars, wearing balaclavas, and generally ready for to wreak havoc. An article in Foreign Policy reports rioters yelling, “Go home,” at anyone with brown skin, or more generally, “We want our country back.”

The riots have gotten most of the publicity, but they’ve gone along with a fivefold increase of threats to Muslims–death threats; rape threats; generalized hate messages–and a threefold increase in outright hate crimes against Muslims. (I’m focusing on those because statistics are available, not because threats and attacks are only against Muslims.) Predictably, many Muslims and people of color report not feeling safe in public–which was, of course, the point. An anti-racism activist, Nazir Afzal, said, “This feels targeted against people who are black and brown. I can’t have a conversation with any person of color at the moment without finishing with: ‘Keep safe.’ ”  

 

What’s the background?

The riots make no sense until you look at the background: we have entire dump trucks filled with politicians happy to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. In fact, they’ve built their careers on it. They’re from both the Conservative Party and, to its right, the new Reform UK. I’ll give you just a few of examples or I’ll get too depressed to go on tapping the keyboard:

  • Robert Jenrick, who’s in the running to lead the Conservative Party, called for the immediate arrest of anyone who shouts “Alluhu Akbar” at a protest. Betting sites give him the best chance to win.  So does the Telegraph.
  • The former home secretary Priti Patel got a lot of press for accusing “lefty lawyers” of keeping the government from cracking down on immigration. More recently, she’s accused the Labour government of “two-tier policing,” in which police are harder of whites than Blacks. 

Yeah, I know, but if you lot at the back of the room can stop laughing, please, we’ll go on.

Et cetera. They’ve shifted the conversation around immigration so far to the right that the Labour Party is afraid to say, Hey, this country needs immigrants. They contribute to its economy and culture, even though it’s true and would resonate with a substantial number of voters.

 

Who took part in the riots? 

Some participants were–as the papers put it cautiously–linked to the now-defunct English Defense League, which held that Muslims couldn’t be truly English. Some were Nazis, complete with swastika tattoos and straight-arm salutes. Others may have been football hooligans–a category of troublemaker I’d never heard of before I moved to the UK. They’re basically guys who like football and like a fight, so wouldn’t it be efficient to combine the two? I’ve been told–and it does seem to be true–that the British will organize a club for just about anything, and this is an example: they organize themselves to go out and get in a fight with people who support an opposing team. 

So here was the prospect of a fight. Whee. Let’s go join in. 

Are football hooligans inherently racist? A government site says no, they reflect the communities they come from, so some are and some aren’t.

Not all the rioters were there because they’re racists or hate immigrants, though, and I find that oddly reassuring. They wandered by, saw a riot, and were angry enough that rioting seemed like a great idea, so they joined in. Or saw looting going on and wanted some stuff. As one participant put it, “People just like rioting.”

Listen, fourteen years of Conservative governments have shattered not just the country but a lot of people’s lives. Let’s not be surprised if they’re angry. That wasn’t the cause of the riots, but it does seem to have been part of the picture.

Social media is another part of the picture, and was used in two ways: first to stir people up in general and second to let people know about specific riots. So although the articles I’ve read talk about the British far right as fragmented and can’t pinpoint any organizations responsible for the riots, it does sound like some non-organizations were effective in calling their non-members together. 

According to a former head of MI6’s Russia desk, Russia was involved in instigating the riots. How accurate that is I don’t know. He’s a former-head, not a current one. Tuck the thought in your pocket as a possibility, not a fact.

 

Counter-demonstrations

The day after the first riot, in Southport, neighbors from multiple backgrounds came out to clean up, to rebuild and raise money to rebuild the mosque that had been attacked, and to show solidarity. Any number of them were quoted as saying that the rioters weren’t from around there. 

There’s your first shred of hope for the day.

In Liverpool, an imam prepared for an expected riot by stocking up on burgers, chips (that’s British for french fries; you’re welcome), and cold drinks. About thirty people showed up ready to riot and were met by a couple of hundred who were there to protect the mosque–again, from many backgrounds. The imam crossed over to the thirty, handing out food, drinks, and when possible, hugs. Some people refused to talk with him, but with some he managed a dialogue.

There’s your second shred of hope for the day. 

The rioting lasted about a week and seems to have been stopped by a combination of arrests, with threats of heavy sentences, and large anti-racist counter-actions. There’s your third shred of hope. 

The anti-racist demonstrations really took off after it became known that a list of organizations supporting refugees had been circulated. The organizations on list either were or were believed to be targets for the next set of riots. Many of them were lawyers, and given Suella Braverman’s campaign against “lefty lawyers,” it wasn’t not irrational to think they’d be a target. 

Thousands of people showed up in multiple cities to protect them. 

Your fourth shred of hope is this: On Twitter, someone called RS Archer (@archer_rs) wrote, “I’m a lurking member of some far right discussion forums and they are VERY unhappy. They lament the lack of public support and recognise the fear generated by the high number of arrests and swift convictions. Also a lot of anger toward Farage [the most visible politician in Reform UK] who is seen as abandoning them.”

Who is Archer? No idea. Does he know what he’s talking about? I can’t say. It’s a shred. I won’t tell you it’s more than that, but I’m not above being glad of what it might tell us.

But with or without that fourth shred, sorry, Elon, we don’t have a civil war today and my reading is that we’re not on the edge of one either. We do have some ugly stuff happening, and we do have a problem, but I think we need to discuss the definition of civil war. Once we work that out, we can talk about what it takes to start one. 

Or not. I don’t believe we have the ingredients in stock, but even so I don’t want to hand you a blueprint. 

Who were the Bluestockings?

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You’ve just been dropping into the 18th century. You are a) privileged, b) clever, and c) female. That letter C) is going to cause you trouble. And you can expect some grief from the end parenthesis as well. You’re expected to be mindless, pretty (if possible), and above all, childbearing. After that–well, there is no after that. That’s your role. Abandon hope, ye who expected more out of life.

The rational creatures in your world are all male. Just ask one if you don’t believe it. If you think you’re also rational, you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone of it, and you’ll cause all sorts of social embarrassment by trying. 

Any form of ambition will also cause embarrassment.

You will, of course, have been educated, but only to be a wife and mother, to manage a prosperous household, and to be decorative–fashionable, demure, graceful, and several other adjectives. You will have learned reading, embroidery, music, dancing, drawing, a little history and geography, maybe a bit of French. Just enough to make yourself agreeable to men and above all, marriageable.

Irrelevant photo: Montbretia. It’s pretty but it’s invasive.

Those are the limits of your expectations, so let’s shift to the past tense. I don’t want to trap you back there for too long. Or myself. I’m about to hyperventilate.

Did I make any of that up because I’m a childless cat lady? Sadly for the people who lived through that era–and sadly for our era, which inherited a surprising number of assumptions from theirs–no. By way of example, the statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1748 that women “are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never knew in my life one who had it, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four-and-twenty-hours together.”

With a bit more generosity, Dr. John Gregory wrote in A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), “If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from men, who look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of cultivated understanding.”

This is the world the Bluestockings came from and whose conventions they both broke and stayed within. 

 

The conventions they broke

The Bluestockings were never a formal organization. They were a social and intellectual circle made up for the most part of affluent English ladies, and they’re best known today for having hosted gatherings where men and women spoke on equal terms about literature, art, history, philosophy, science, foreign affairs, and pretty much anything except politics. And as Margaret Talbot puts it in the first article I linked to, England made room for them with, “a kind of condescending, self-congratulatory gallantry.” 

They hosted some of the age’s top talent, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Horace Walpole, and other men of letters, aristocrats with a literary bent, diplomats, painters, politicians. In short, people who mattered.

But they were more than simply hostesses. These were highly educated women at a time when the doors of any serious school were closed to girls and women. Some were self-educated. Some were educated at home by unconventional parents. But having attained an education against all the odds, they were shut out of most of the public spaces, such as coffee houses, where men discussed the issues of the day. The only way they were going to be part of those discussions was to bring the discussions into their homes. Hence the hostessing.

The men they invited had something to gain as well. Gatherings that discussed serious subjects were in sharp contrast to the usual social evenings of their class, which involved drinking, cards (of course for money, silly), and, as Talbot puts it, getting up to “sexual shenanigans.” That helps explain why the Bluestockings offered lemonade and tea instead of booze.

But the Bluestockings did more than just host salons. Many of them went on to write novels, criticism, history, classical scholarship, and endless letters. Letters were the social media of the day. Others worked as translators. One of them, Elizabeth Montagu, published an essay that was influential in establishing Shakespeare as a central figure in England’s national identity. The essay first appeared anonymously and after it became a smash hit (in the small circles where these things could be smash hits) it was republished under her name. 

Publishing was more than just a way to participate in the national conversation. It was one of the few fields where a woman could keep the money she earned. She couldn’t go into business or own property in her own name, but she could publish. 

 

The conventions they kept

But far from throwing all conventions out the window, they lived the conventional lives of ladies of their class, running their households and caring for aging parents, as women were expected to. Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus held its place as the standard translation for the next century, is described by Gibson as “always careful to present herself as the perfect woman: meek and modest, diffident and self-effacing, completely unthreatening to male authority.” 

She could make a pudding as well as she could translate ancient Greek.

And then there was class. As ladies of their class were meant to be, they were snobs. One, Hannah More, had helped a working class woman publish her first book of poems, and when the book was successful enough to bring in some money she pressured the author to put her money in a trust administered by More and another upper-class Bluestocking, because how could “such a Woman” be trusted with her “poor Children’s money?”

(As you can see from the quotes, they didn’t break the conventions around capitalization either. They capitalized anything they damn well pleased.)

Another tale involves conventions around both class and women’s bodies. And religion. When the widow Hester Thrale married her daughter’s music teacher, her Bluestocking former friends were toxic about it. He was of the wrong class, he was foreign born, and he was Catholic. She was giving in to passion, and they were above passion. As one wrote, “Overbearing Passions are not natural in a ‘Matron’s bones.” 

Part of the problem with passion was that their intellectual claims rested on their respectability. One whiff of scandal and the whole structure might collapse. The rest of the problem was that in their world women were thought of as physical and men as intellectual, and in order to emphasize women’s rationality, they saw themselves as standing outside their bodies. That made them refined and respectable. That was the basis for equal treatment. Lose that and they were back to being just babymakers.

 

Their name

The name Bluestockings came not from what the w\omen wore but from a single man at one of those salons–or so the story goes. A botanist, Benjamin Stillingfleet, was invited and didn’t bother to change from the blue worsted stockings he wore in the field to the white silk stockings upper class men wore to formal occasions. Or else he was invited and declined because he didn’t have the appropriate clothes and his hostess told him to come “in his blue stockings.”

Or else–as one article claims–the respectable stockings were black, not white. It doesn’t matter and I can’t be bothered chasing that down. My money’s on white. Believe whatever version you like. Believe them all if you can manage. Either way, the story has nothing to do with what the women wore. The women accepted and used the term. 

Later, when their time had passed, Bluestocking became an insult–something to call a woman with intellectual ambitions and unbecoming opinions. And the radicals who might would’ve been sympathetic to their inherent feminism overlooked them as elitist and conservative. 

Still, history didn’t erase them. The Bluestockings had an effect on Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and much later Virgina Woolf, and through them, on us.

Nothing is lost. I swear it to you. 

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.

*

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. 

*

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?

*

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. 

*

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. 

English Protestantism and the King’s Book of Sports

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Like so much of human history, England’s conflict between Protestants and Catholics (and between Protestants and Protestants) was played out against a backdrop of absurdity. That’s not to say it didn’t turn deadly with grim regularity, and at the time I’m sure it all would’ve looked perfectly sensible. Looking back, though–

Yeah, there’s nothing like hindsight. Let’s drop in on one small, strange moment.

The year is 1603. Elizabeth I has died and King James is riding from Scotland–where he’s already king–to London to have all the hocus-pocus of becoming the English king performed over and around him. Along the way he stops in Lancashire, and while he’s there, proto-king that he is, he’s handed a petition complaining that the local clergy and magistrates are keeping people from playing traditional games on Sunday. 

This, my friends, is important. So important that we’ll shift to the past tense.

Irrelevant photo: geranium

Enter the Puritans

The Puritans got their start inside the Church of England, and their goal was to cleanse the church of all traces of Catholicism–the ceremony, the fancy clothes, the incense, the stained glass, the bishops, and pretty much anything else that wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. And since dancing and Maypoles and archery hadn’t been mentioned–

Okay, I have no idea what was mentioned in the Bible. I’d feel safe betting on Maypoles. Dancing and archery? Those look like shakier ground and I won’t be placing any bets. 

But you know how a movement can start out with one clear argument–being or not being in the Bible is surely as simple as a baloney sandwich–and before it’s even lunchtime people are arguing about ketchup and mustard and pickles? And somebody in a fancy suit wants sliced tomatoes and sourdough bread and swears it’s spelled bologna? 

It was like that. Forget that business about the Bible, the rumor was going around that Catholics encouraged games on Sunday in order to keep people away from Protestant church services. Clearly, the only sensible response was to ban the games. Basically, the idea was to close off all other activities so people would come to church out of sheer boredom, although I don’t suppose they’d have made the argument in quite that way.

 

And now, enter James

James was a good audience for this particular petition. (Remember the petition? If not, return to Go and start over.) Several Puritans writers argued that kings who didn’t support the true religion could legitimately be deposed, which isn’t an argument calculated to win the heart of either king or proto-king. Kings were used to deciding which religion was the true one and watching their subjects fall into line.  

So that didn’t go down well. What’s more, there was a good argument to be made that banning sports on Sunday would drive people not to Protestant services but into the arms of–gasp, wheeze–Catholicism, which didn’t object to a bit of fun on a Sunday.

Sunday, remember, was most people’s only regular day off, so why not allow them a little fun. Catholics would positively come flocking to the Protestant cause.

Once James got to the other side of the checkerboard–or, more accurately, to London–and got himself kinged, he issued the Book of Sports, now known as the King’s Book of Sports, since any idiot can write a book but it takes a certain kind of idiot to be king, and people pay more attention to the second kind of idiot than the first. 

I wish I knew the secret of getting as much press as he did.

 

The book

The book wasn’t actually a book. It was a proclamation allowing (after Sunday afternoon services) dancing, archery, “leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation . . . having of May games, Whitsun ales and morris dances, and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used, so as the same may be had in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect of divine service, and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to church for the decorating of it, according to their old custom.” 

Women, as ever, got to have all the fun. They were specifically left out of archery but were at least allowed to take part in the dancing. And no doubt the ales.

But not everything was allowed on a Sunday. There would be no “bear and bull-baiting, interludes, and (at all times in the meane [or in some versions, “meaner”] sort of people by law prohibited) bowling.” 

If you’re having trouble untangling that list, so am I, but it’s not law anymore so we don’t have to lose sleep over it. Tangled or not, though, it calls our attention to the class aspect of the conflict. The original petitioners were from the gentry–the “well-born” people below the level of the aristocracy but very much above, as James had it, people of the “meane [or meaner] sort.” 

Why was bowling on the list of no-no’s? It had become such a craze that working people were thought to be neglecting the work they should be doing. So it was banned for them. But the nation wouldn’t suffer if their betters neglected their duties to roll balls across the ground, because let’s face it, they weren’t producing anything anyway.

 

And so . . .

. . . merriness was restored to merrie England. (Scotland was still a separate country, which just happened to have the same king, so we’ll leave it out of the discussion.) But let’s not get too merrie, because in justifying his decree James mentions not only the likelihood of attracting Catholics to the Church of England, but the importance of healthy exercise in making men “more able for war, when We, or Our successors, shall have occasion to use them.”

Drink, dance, and be merrie, folks, for tomorrow the king may lead you to slaughter. 

Sorry, I always did know how to spoil a party.

In 1618, James ordered that his proclamation was to be read from every pulpit in the country, but in the face of an uproar from the Puritans, and on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he withdrew the order. 

His son, Charles I, wasn’t as wise. In 1633 he reissued the decree, with a few additions, and insisted that it be read, tossing matches into an already combustible situation and leading eventually to the Civil War.