About the Warminster Thing
BBC News - The Warminster Thing: 60 years since town’s UFO fascination began - BBC News
Paul McCartney on a Beatles work-in-progress “It’s complicated now. If we can get it simpler, and then complicate it where it needs to be complicated.”
64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney - by Ian Leslie
This is reminiscient of the quote attributed to Einstein - Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler – Quote Investigator®
Because of what I’d have to say was a disappointing service by Wiltshire Reds buses, this was as close as we got to Stonehenge for Winter solstice this morning.
We were there for an hour and there was one bus.
Felt sorry for the people who’d travelled to get here
Retirement project number 7
Rewrite the words of Ken Dodd’s ‘Happiness’ on the theme of ‘Spursy-ness’
:)
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc à
Pantomime at Salisbury Playhouse was, again, terrific
My favourite line, excluding the filthy ones
Swindon? It’s practically the Cotswolds
I don’t know if I’ve read something about Hawksmoor in the past that’s been filed in my subconscious somewhere, but there’s something about his churches that I find a bit disconcerting. Beautiful, but disconcerting.
Donald Trumps administration says that we in Europe are facing “civilisational erasure”.
I went to London today and to be honest I couldn’t see any sign of it
#TodayILearned that “role [of Mary Poppins] had been earmarked for Bette Davies, with Cary Grant in the running for Bert”. Also, the Sherman brothers said that they thought a nanny must be a goat.
Making Mary Poppins by Todd James Pierce review – the musical brothers behind the movie magic
The Spire is supposed to be Salisbury Cathedral
Till Faber lit on Lord of the Flies, Golding gave it the tedious title Strangers from Within and for what became The Spire he half-jokingly suggested An Erection at Barchester. William Golding: The Faber Letters review – the making of a masterpiece
The Guardian Long Read - Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act
An interesting read. It’s jarring how recent much of this is. I met one of the women mentioned, v briefly, and it’s weird to think she was involved in this stuff that feels like it’s way in the past
Nick Cave on a Fairy Tale of New York
One of the many reasons this song is so loved is that, beyond almost any other song I can think of, it speaks with such profound compassion to the marginalised and the dispossessed. With one of the greatest opening lines ever written, the lyrics and the vocal performance emanate from deep inside the lived experience itself, existing within the very bones of the song. It never looks down on its protagonists. It does not patronise, but speaks its truth, clear and unadorned. It is a magnificent gift to the outcast, the unlucky and the broken-hearted. We empathise with the plight of the two fractious characters, who live their lonely, desperate lives against all that Christmas promises — home and hearth, cheer, bounty and goodwill. It is as real a piece of lyric writing as I have ever heard, and I have always felt it a great privilege to be close friends with its creator, Shane MacGowan.
Simon Schama on Downton Abbey
‘a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery … servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia'
I don’t think he liked it very much :)
Currently reading: The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook 📚
I got a new old Salisbury postcard. Interesting bits are:
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the people queuing up for a bus, presumably not knowing that they are going to be stars of both postcard and micro.blog
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the designation of the Blue Boar Row as the A30 - before the ring road all the a-roads used to wend their way through town
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Sidney Herbert’s statue is still behind the War Memorial. From memory, it was moved to Victoria Park in 1953, to make room for celebrations for the Coronation
I like the informality of this postcard - it feels like a snap as much as a professional photo
Update: I’ve added in a pic I took today (January 2026)
Listening to Richard and Marina on The Rest is Entertainment and Marina mentioned that this advert came out in 1973
A couple of thoughts…
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I can’t believe it’s that old
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I don’t know how much TV I remember from 1973, but I certainly remember this
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I would’ve seen it on a black and white TV. I wonder whether many people any younger than me would know that black and white TV’s were a thing…or that, in the UK, cheaper black and white TV licenses were a thing
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should someone old enough to remember black and white TV’s really be using the phrase ‘is a thing’?