Film director Alfred Hitchcock at the door of the Rovers Return Inn on the set of Coronation Street, Granada Studios, Manchester, 1964 (photo by Joe Derby, Daily Herald).

RIP. Bradford's David Hockney, 1966, photo by Jane Bown.

The brother and sister in the “Sophie of Dundee” incident have been found guilty of aggressing those young girls. I was overly hasty in expressing scepticism about the narrative as it happened. I’ve deleted the tweet and - yes - lesson learned. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2d…

12 June 1981. The Specials released their classic No 1 single, Ghost Town in the UK, in the midst of the worst economic recession since the early 1930s.

Bizarre caveat here. Like “well, yeah, he did try to behead someone but we don’t know why yet” as if there’s some sort of justification for decapitating someone.

HMOs are an absolute disgrace in this country. Watching lovely former family homes being carved up into multi-occupancy units while families are priced out and struggling to find a decent place to rent makes my blood boil. Entire nice neighbourhoods lost and replaced overnight.

We shouldn’t forget this beautiful little girl. Emily was playing in the park on her scooter in Bolton on Mother’s Day in 2020, only to be killed by an asylum seeker who shouldn’t have even been here. A totally avoidable tragedy and complete failure by the state.

Put it this way. An appalling, brutal terrorist attack was carried out in Israel on October 7, with people massacred, raped, and taken hostage. Immediately afterwards (and for months following), many people in this country celebrated that terror in the streets as a legitimate act of defiance and righteous revenge for the Palestinian cause. A sort of “can you blame them?” Now, some of the very same voices are insisting that violent revenge is never justified and that collective punishment is always wrong. I don’t want to see violent riots as much as the next (normal) person but there’s a glaring inconsistency here. Torching things = bad Massacring people = well I can see where they’re coming from

It isn’t pretty, but it’s the inevitable outcome when people are being consistently ignored and silenced. For years, people have made it abundantly clear through reasonable channels that they do not want this.

Anthony Bourdain had what looked like the best job on the planet. He got paid to roam the world eating whatever he wanted, and strangers everywhere told him things they would never tell a reporter. Eight years ago today, he died by suicide at 61. For almost thirty years before any of that, he was a cook nobody had heard of, working long hot shifts for little money. He was in his forties when he wrote a book spilling the secrets of what really goes on behind restaurant doors, and almost overnight, the unknown cook became a star. What made him different was that he never faked it. Other travel hosts smiled at pretty views and pretended to love everything. Bourdain sat on plastic stools in back alleys and ate exactly what the people there ate. Then he got them talking about their real lives, and they trusted him enough to tell him the truth. He went to places most shows stayed away from, like the Congo, Gaza, Iran, and New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina. He once ate noodles at a tiny plastic-table joint in Vietnam with a sitting US president. His show Parts Unknown ran for twelve seasons and won a dozen Emmy Awards along with a Peabody, the top prize in broadcasting. It made a food show feel like real reporting on the world. His death was so shocking because of the gap between the life everyone saw and the life he was actually living. Here was the guy who looked freer than anyone on TV, doing the job millions of people dreamed about, and the pain underneath was almost invisible to the people around him. He had actually talked about it in the open: on camera he once described how something as small as a bad meal could drop him into days of feeling low, and he had written about his heroin addiction from when he was young. None of it fit the cheerful, curious man people thought they knew. He died just days after the designer Kate Spade died the same way, and that week, calls to the national crisis line jumped 65 percent. The conversation that followed kept circling one hard fact: the life you envy from the outside can be sitting right on top of pain you cannot see. What he left behind is bigger than any of the awards. He taught a whole generation that the fastest way to understand a stranger is to sit down and eat what they eat.

Horrific. When I was speaking to people in Makerfield, one line kept coming up again and again: “I fear for my children and grandchildren.” When you watch footage like this, can you really blame them? Fear is correct and rational.

Well I’ve been to Makerfield and Clive Lewis is correct. The Labour Party *is* toxic (not Burnham) and if Nandy chooses to deny that reality that’s up to her but she’s deluding herself and others.

“NHS Nurse” is such an unusual and unique name.

The police like other public bodies and leading figures in positions of great responsibility have become paralysed by the fear of being branded racist making them dangerously risk averse. This must be confronted honestly because it leads to preventable tragedies. It’s a constant tightrope in modern life where potential reputational damage ends up overriding their fundamental duty to protect us all as a whole. A very sad example of this is the grooming gangs scandal. For years, people hesitated to confront the horror of organised child sexual exploitation and the ethnicity and cultural patterns of many perpetrators out of concern that doing so might cause division or invite accusations of racism.

BBC Radio newsreader John Snagge gives the first news of the D-Day landing at 9:32 AM to the British public.

40 years ago today, l asked my childhood sweetheart, my best friend and the most gorgeous woman l know to marry me. All three said no.

💯 two-tier standards apply to so much. They think they can even tell us how we’re allowed to react to something. You must not show anger over one murder, but anger is allowed for another. It’s almost abusive.