One morning the President (FDR) entered his guest’s suite to see Churchill emerge pink, glowing and completely naked from the bath. Embarrassed, Roosevelt started to leave but Churchill beckoned him into the room. Churchill declared, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.”
My favourite Winston Churchill quote #503
Prime Ministers and Presidents: special relationships
There are some nice clips on the TMS (Test Match Special [the BBC’s cricket radio commentary]) page
This is the ‘leg over’ bit where Agnew and Johnson lose their composure after an unintended double entendre
The text of this should surely be part of the UK Citizenship Test?
Interesting bit in the lunchtime discussion of the cricket yesterday.
Aggers asked the panel of journalists what they thought of the argy-bargy and general bad temper of the latest Test.
They all said it was good for the Test Match. I think what they meant was that it was good for clicks.
There’s a gallery of 50 photos from our World Cup win on the official Chelsea app
Not one of them features either Donald Trump or Gianni Infantino….which is quite good
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
The planet is blue
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
I too am having a great time.Tremendous sport.
Decent first half, on the whole 😁
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
I’m going through my old tweets, loading them into a micro.blog and found this favourite, forgotten piece of music trivia
Steel Pulse were named after a racehorse
(From BBC Master tapes - Steel Pulse )
I finished both Beserker and Saint Denis Medical today.
Enjoyed them both very much.
Saint Denis is very much like the American Office moved into a hospital.
Ade Edmondson’s biography is funny and sad. The break up with Rik Mayall is heart -breaking.
I don’t normally link to Substack, because it’s the most annoying thing on the internet, but David Aaronovitch on the 7/7 bombings is worth reading
“ON THE fringes of Central London the news of a bombing doesn’t break, it seeps. The first clue is the crowd at a bus stop which, on a normal day, has just a small queue. Then, a few hundred yards away at a different stop, another crowd, and this means that the Tube station is closed. Up the hill, close to another station on another line altogether there are more people at more bus stops, so something bigger is wrong. Two ambulances and a police car chase each other in the direction of town."
I’d left London by the time of 7/7, but that really gets how it was during the IRA bombing campaign.
My Crucial Track for today
What song reflects how your football team are doing at the minute?
(I’ve gone off piste and made up my own prompt today)
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
With apologies to those who don’t have access to it.
God Bless the NHS and all those who work for it
In honour of the Oasis reunion….other terrible band names
Coldplay Depeche Mode Crass INXS Supertramp Green Day Buzzcocks Fairport Convention The Bee Gees Boney M U2 Pink Floyd The Band The Beatles The Cure Television Emerson, Lake, and Palmer Prefab Sprout Blur Every other Britpop band?
I wouldn’t dream of correcting anyone’s spelling or grammar or anything much else, but a misattributed quotation really gets under my skin - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
I agree with most of this, although I’d omit the word ‘beach’
One of the unresolved tensions in life is that between culture that is supposed to be good for us, and culture we enjoy. Some books do reward perseverance and a bit of an effort, but often, to borrow the phrase I think it would be good to stop when the fun stops.
Do I ever do that? Not really.
Podcast bits worth listening to this month - Patrick Stewart, Ben Travers on WG Grace, AUKUS, David Kynaston, Disney, Coffin Ships,, some brilliant stand-up about Northern Ireland, the bloke from Judas Priest and a proto-fascist
Stuff I’ve enjoyed listening to
Fresh Air - Actor Patrick Stewart - Patrick Stewart says he is responsible for his colleague in Star Trek being pronounced as the English ‘day-ta’ rather than the American ‘dah-ta’
TMS View from the boundary - Ben Travers - the 93-year-old playwright remembers WG Grace as having a “curiously falsetto voive in such a large frame”
The Hated and the Dead - Australia’s Aukus sceptics - “Australia’s greatest defensive asset is distance…..Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney "
[1960s Britain: smashing the status quo?
- History Extra podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/bb/podcast/1960s-britain-smashing-the-status-quo/id256580326?i=1000631611944) - David Kynaston quotes Dominic Sandbrook’s “killer fact” - the best selling LP of the 1960s wasn’t Sgt Peppers, it was the Sound of Music
History Extra - Slave Traders - the men who built a brutal empire - a fifth of the enslaved people transported across the Atlantic died on the journey. A further sixth were too sick to sell once they got off the ship
History Extra - Disney at 100 I either didnt know or had forgotten that the Diney corporation wanted to create a theme park of American history, called Disney’s America. I’m not sure whether it would’ve been A Good Thing, but it might have been interesting.
Borderline: A postcard from the edge of the Union - “One day I’ll tell them all about their grandad, and what happened to them, but just not yet”. A very sad line from Patrick Kielty’s stand-up show on the BBC…but the rest is very funny. Information, education and entertainment in every line.
Wtf with Marc Maron - Rob Halford - apparently, the case against Judas Priest was based on a judge’s ruling that the First Amendment right to free speech wouldn’t protect backwards messages on records
The Rest is Entertainment - Titanic, tattoos, and Trade Wars - the Titanic film was pre-digital cinema. The reels for the film were three miles long
RTE The History Show - Myles talks to Cian McMahon, author of the book “The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine” - during the Famine there were cases of people committing small non-violent crimes so that they can be sentenced to transportation to Australia. The author says that conditions on some migrant ship were indeed dreadful, earning the description of ‘coffin ships’, but many weren’t that bad for the time.
The Hated and the Dead - Gabriele D’Annunzio - Fascinating podcast episode about Gabriele D’Annunzio, who Mussolini called “The John the Baptist of Italian fascism”
Bill Bailey is auctioning his rather good drawings of swifts, to raise money for conservation
Auction for Bill Bailey’s swift drawings
We’ve got swifts around where we live. They are lovely to see flying around…but they make a horrible racket when they’re not
It’s very hot in The Shire today
I’m wondering whether it’s better to read a book set somewhere else hot, or somewhere cold in such conditions