Leicester revisited and rediscovered

Somewhere I have made it to recently is Leicester, a city where I studied as an undergraduate and became a political activist, and which thus had a defining influence on my life.

My appetite for election campaigning was much influenced by Chris Rennard, who at that time was East Midlands Area Agent and a rising star of the then Liberal party, and my political thinking by the late Professor Robert Pritchard, a polymath who led the Genetics Department that developed DNA fingerprinting and who then became leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicester City and then Leicestershire County Council.

While I can’t claim to have been that assiduous in my studies, I got my act together to earn a decent enough degree thanks in great part to the wise guidance of Dr (now Professor) Stuart Ball, the distinguished historian of the Conservative party. That encouraged me to engage in postgraduate study in later life.

For a few years after I returned to live in Watford, I continued to visit Leicester, still having Lib Dem friends there. But over the years I lost touch with people and didn’t go back for over two decades apart from a brief and sad visit in 2015 for Bob Pritchard’s funeral.

This year, though, has taken me back twice, once for sightseeing as we were staying nearby and most recently to watch rugby, of which more later. While I hope I wasn’t a total philistine when I was a student and do remember going to the Newarke Houses and New Walk Museums, somehow I never made it to the cathedral, nor to the greater architectural gem of St Mary de Castro parish church. I’m sure I intended to visit but never quite got round to it before leaving.

This year I was able to put that right and indeed that whole part Leicester was quite a revelation and I wish I had discovered it when I lived in the city, including the medieval Guildhall. The cathedral itself while II* listed, would be quite low down the English rankings, although it has received a boost in from the reburial there of Richard III, something they certainly make the most of. At St Mary de Castro, however, the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves. It is evidently very high church, being full of icons and making more of its Marian affiliation than one expects in an Anglican church.

The more recent visit took in rather less distinguished elements of Leicester’s architecture and skyline. With an hour or two to spare before heading to watch rugby at Welford Road (sorry, Mattioli Woods Welford Road Stadium), we dropped in at the University of Leicester campus. There were various reasons why I chose Leicester back then, but aesthetic considerations were not really among them, although there have been significant changes and new building since I was there, and these are mostly positive additions.

I knew that the famous paternoster in the otherwise undistinguished Attenborough tower, where we humanities students were based,  had been taken out of action in 2017, as it became increasingly difficult to get parts to repair it, but I had a vision of it still being in place, perhaps with the platforms permanently suspended between floors. Alas, it has been replaced by an ordinary lift.

The more famous tower on the campus is the Engineering Building, indeed this is the feature that people most often mention if I tell them I went to Leicester University. Designed by the famous modernist architect James Stirling and his colleague James Gowan, it was a notoriously terrible environment to study in, notorious for leaking water and unpopular with students and staff alike. It was one of Stirling’s Red Trilogy, another one of which, the History Faculty Building at Cambridge University, was reputedly the subject of the following parody by Tom Sharpe in his novel Ancestral vices:

“… thanks to the architect’s obsession with the idea of advanced technology and his consummate ignorance of its practical application, a slight spell of bright weather followed by a small cloud could threaten students who had been sunbathing one moment with frostbite the next.”

The Students Union building had had a serious makeover since I was there, but it was nice to see my friend Neil Fawcett’s name on the honours board of past office holders from when the Lib Dems seized power for a few years there in the early 1990s.

Then it was on to Welford Road to watch Leicester versus Coventry, the club representing the city of my birth and which I have supported since childhood. This was once one of the great rugby rivalries, but in the 1980s Leicester secured their place among the elite clubs while Cov slid into the doldrums. It was painful to be a Coventry supporter living in Leicester at the time, and seeing players who actually came from Coventry and its environs, such as Neil Back and Darren Garforth, lining up for the Tigers.

So for the last 35 years the two clubs have been in different leagues and games between them few. But the need for some kind of cup competition during the international break had led the Premiership clubs to condescend to play teams from the league below and thus Cov had a rare competitive away fixture at Welford Road. And they won, 33–19,  cheered on by a large and vocal contingent of away support. Admittedly the Leicester team was largely composed of academy players, while Cov had a full-strength team out, but I suspect the Tigers would still be better paid than their second tier counterparts. So it was a happy outcome to the day and a visit that brought back mostly fond memories.

If the silly rules that still make it almost impossible for tier 2 teams to get promoted are ever changed, perhaps I will yet get to see a Leicester v Cov league match, and indeed visit Leicester more often.

On not seeing Bob Dylan play at the Albert Hall this week

By the time this post goes up, Bob Dylan will have played his the last of his tour dates at the Royal Albert Hall. As he is 83 years old this could yet be his last live appearance in Britain. I am a little disappointed and wistful not to have there, given that I am a fan of more than 40 years and virtually a Dylan completist in terms of recorded music.

In truth, though, only a little disappointed. I didn’t try that hard to get tickets. Although I had recently sort of made my mind up to go and see Dylan again if he toured Britain, I took no steps to find out when shows would be announced or tickets go on sale and it was all sold out by the time I cottoned on. In truth, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to go. As his Bobness has a reputation as at best an inconsistent live performer, and as on the two occasions I did see him, in 1981 and 1989, he was excellent, I almost subconsciously decided back then to quit while I was ahead.

Also as the years have gone on he seemed less and less likely to play songs from the era I like best, namely those from about 1978 (Street-Legal) to 1990 (Under the Red Sky). This is not quite so eccentric a view as it might once have been considered. There was a conventional wisdom that Dylan’s great period was the 1960s and this just about continued up to Blood on the Tracks and Desire before a serious loss of form that continued until 1997’s Time Out Of Mind which was seen as a return to greatness and his subsequent work has been met with a succession of five-star reviews.

I started listening to Dylan, though, in the late 1970s after my Dad borrowed Street-Legal off a colleague at work who was a real obsessive. This was the time of the 1978 tour, Dylan’s first visit to Britain for several years. So his stock seemed quite high, but it then took a nosedive after his conversion to Christianity, leading to the ‘Jesus Trilogy’ of Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love over the subsequent three years.

While I had managed to hear the sixties classics and become a Dylan fan, it was a bit awkward when these new albums came out with their decidedly uncool and untrendy Christian message. I still bought them (or received them as presents) but it didn’t do to be too enthusiastic. Even Dylan enthusiasts didn’t like the new stuff and longed for a return to secular material. If you wanted raspy-voiced harmonica-playing American singer-songwriters you listened to Bruce Springsteen and bought The River not Saved.

So I went along with this, all the while thinking that the Christian albums actually sounded rather good. After all Mark Knopfler, who it was OK to like, played some mean guitar on Slow Train Coming, the tunes were memorable, Dylan’s singing and backing group were as good as they every had been and the words were at least interesting. Maybe there was a bit too much Jesus, even for someone with my mild Christian sympathies. But you didn’t have to agree with it to like it. For me, 1981’s Shot of Love album was a happy compromise, one or two overtly religious songs, some with Christian themes but less overt proselytising and some straightforwardly secular material.

At this point I had my first experience of seeing Dylan live, at Earls Court in 1981. The good news was that unlike in his North American concerts of a year previously he was now playing some of the old stuff, not just Christian material. But tickets didn’t sell all that well and I can remember hearing an impromptu interview with Dylan on Capital Radio after he rang the station, presumably to drum up sales. In the end it was a great night, with a slug of some of the better recent material and a good smattering of his 1960s classics, which took up more than half the setlist. It was only slightly marred by missing my train home and getting in big trouble (it was my 15th birthday and one of the first times I was allowed out into London for the evening without adult supervision). Anyone who wants confirmation of how good he sounded during this tour should listen to the live tracks from the previous and following evening on the Trouble No More official bootleg album. Great voice, great band, great choice of songs!

At this stage I expected Dylan to continue the move towards more secular themes tinged with Christian sensibilities. In fact his career took another strange twist. There were stories that he had abandoned his Christian faith and returned to Judaism. With the moralising certainty of a teenager (‘I was so much older then’) I felt a sense of betrayal, not because I shared his version of Christian faith (which I didn’t) but because I had persevered with him through these difficult years and this new departure made his Christianity seem insincere and superficial – like a career move gone wrong.

Anyway, when the first ‘post-Christian’ album Infidels came out in 1983, it was touted as a return to secular Dylan and those who refused to listen to the Jesus trilogy seemed to love it. This seemed odd to me since, as the title suggests, it was if anything more preachy than Shot of Love and more like the fire and brimstone of Slow Train Coming, even if the biblical references were now to the Old Testament not the New, it seemed to include warnings about false prophets, and odd negative references to moon travel. If the outtakes Death is not The End, Lord Protect My Child and Foot of Pride had been included it could have passed for being the fourth instalment of Dylan’s God Quartet rather than a step away from religious material. I was interested to hear an edition of the Jokermen podcast that referred to Dylan having a long Christian period lasting from Street-Legal to Infidels, which has some validity especially given the former’s references to Lucifer, Armageddon and St John.

In the intervening decades Dylan’s Jesus years have had enjoyed some sort of rehabilitation, perhaps aided by their being long in the past, a relatively short episode in a long career and capable of being regarded as Dylan’s take on gospel the way Nashville Skyline is his take on country. This was helped by the Trouble No More box set that came out in 2017, featuring outtakes and live performances from the 1979–81 years. To the uninitiated or the gospel refuseniks it gave a new sense of the power and excitement of his performances in these years. Whichever way, even though none of the albums of the time quite warrant the title masterpiece, partly due to Dylan making poor choices of which tracks to include and to omit, this remains my favourite period of his music.

So in thinking about whether to see him live this year I was initially encouraged by seeing that Dylan is regularly concluding his set with my favourite of his songs, Every grain of sand, which is surely the greatest one from the Christian years. Even then I had mixed feelings. He has developed this way of growling out songs as if reciting a shopping list. With its profound lyrics that dwell on on faith and doubt, life and mortality, Every grain of sand is a song for the ages. I feared he would ruin it, and indeed I found at least one version on Youtube where that was the case. Yet I also found this version (linked to in the picture above) which is powerful, haunting and profound. Maybe the possibility of hearing such a performance should have made me make more of an effort to go this time. I can but hope that he will come round again, he will keep the song in his set, that I can get a ticket and that he will deliver a good rendition.

On the 20th anniversary of the Orange Book

The Liberal Democrats’ conference in Brighton is an opportunity to celebrate the party’s best result in terms of MPs elected for more than 100 years. Understandably, few enough of those gathering here are reflecting on this also being the anniversary of the publication of the Orange Book.* Why revisit painful memories?

Being the curmudgeon that I am, though, I have found myself reflecting on this mostly forgotten anniversary. In an ideal world I might have spent time preparing a carefully researched paper on the impact of the Orange Book on Liberal Democrat politics, but procrastination and other commitments got in the way. So what follows is more a personal reflection with an element of justification for why I am somewhat immune from the euphoria about the Lib Dem revival of 2024.

For those not familiar with the intricacies of Lib Dem internal politics, the publication 20 years ago of the Orange Book, a collection of essays by prominent Liberal Democrats, triggered the nearest the party has come in recent decades to outright factionalism - between ‘economic liberals’ or Orange Bookers and ‘social liberals’, especially during the years leading up to the formation of the coalition government in 2010.

There are many reasons why Lib Dems might prefer it not to be mentioned. Those who wrote chapters or at some level welcomed its renewed call for economic liberalism, and who remain active in the party, may feel embarrassed about any association with its the subsequent trajectory of its co-editor and driving force, Sir Paul Marshall, who went on to become a Brexiteer, Tory donor, GB News investor and now as new owner of the Spectator.

This seems to vindicate those who saw it as a kind of neo-Thatcherite Trojan horse within the party. The left of the party will probably not wish to waste time trampling on its grave and as we all unite in celebrating revival and success why would anyone want to revive memories of past factionalising?

Its original launch before the 2004 conference was cancelled, primarily it seemed because David Laws, then a high profile front bench MP, had written a chapter advocating public health insurance, which was directly at odds with party policy. This might have been less of a problem at the start of a new parliament when the party might reasonably have been openly debating its future, but was ill-advised in the last autumn conference before a likely general election. It also appeared that other contributors hadn’t seen the chapter and didn’t agree with it.

The irony was, given the way the title was adopted as shorthand for a revisionist, free-market versiono of Liberalism, that much of the book was quite mainstream. David Laws’ introduction, which made a case for personal and economic, alongside political and social, liberalism, was controversial, as was Vince Cable’s chapter on liberal economics, ironically given his later status as the left-wing conscience of the coalition. Mark Oaten, also a bête noir of the party’s radical/activist/left wing, wrote a fairly anodyne chapter on crime albeit with the provocative title ‘Tough Liberalism’, but the other contributors, Susan Kramer, Chris Huhne, Ed Davey were hardly apostles of iconoclastic revisionism. And Steve Webb’s chapter on family policy appeared positively Fabian.

>While I remember its publication as provoking a fiercely hostile reaction from much of the party, I was surprised to download the relevant edition of Liberator magazine (No. 298) to find a range of reactions and comments, including an article by David Laws himself. Even that scourge of ‘the right’, the late Simon Titley, was quite measured in his criticism, commenting that it ‘may spark a serious debate’ even if he then concluded the the book was part of an internal Lib Dem putsch and ‘more of a lemon’ than an orange.

It did, though, spark debate. There were two sort-of ripostes in the form of Liberator’s collection of essays Liberalism: something to shout about and Reinventing the State edited by Duncan Brack, Richard S Grayson and David Howarth. (Grayson was to join the Labour party during the coalition years). Two of the latter’s contributors had also written chapters in the Orange Book. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published Beyond liberty: is the future of liberalism progressive?, with contributions by journalists, academics and leading Lib Dems, including some who had contributed to other volumes. Unsurprisingly given the IPPR’s historic closeness to the Labour party it appeared to be if anything pushing the Lib Dems in a Blairite direction. There was also the rather pedestrian Britain after Blair from the Orange Book stable.

Yet the arrival of the coalition made it all irrelevant. While the decision to go into government with the Conservatives may be seen as the culmination of an Orange Book project, there were plenty of people from the left of the party who were willing to participate in and support the coalition, relatively few high-profile defections and none among MPs. Despite unhappiness about austerity and individual measures of the coalition, few seemed to argue that we shouldn’t have entered into it.

The years after the 2015 debacle were a fight for survival with debates about political philosophy more or less irrelevant. While the Brexit referendum vote was catastrophic of itself, it did seem to give the Liberal Democrats a new sense of purpose as the one consistently pro-European party. And while the 2019 campaign ended in disaster, it did at least tee up some promising second places, which created a platform for the success of 2024.

Yet if this year’s general election saw an electoral revival for the Liberal Democrats, it hardly marked any kind of Liberal intellectual renaissance. There has been no recent wave of publications by leading party figures setting out their worldview. We still have the Social Liberal Forum and Liberal Reform as ginger groups in the party representing rival views on the merits of economic liberalism, but one could hardly describe the party as a ferment of ideas just now.

Instead the Liberal Democrats have ended as a party not much different from Labour in outlook, but which for reasons of history, demography and current local strength holds the ‘main alternative to the Tories’ franchise in certain constituencies, enabling it to win seats when the Tories are at a low ebb.

All of which, to get back to the Orange Book, suggests to me that ideological and intellectual disputations count for very little in determining the party’s electoral fortunes. We struggle to obtain much media coverage anyway or to get any detailed understanding of our policies. So it seems to be enough for the Liberal Democrats to appear a bit like Labour but a little less tribal or political to that we appear a safe alternative to vote for and can boost our parliamentary representation in a bad Tory year. Which is fine but as a political raison d’être hardly inspiring. 

While there are a few different reasons I give for joining the then Liberal party back in 1985, one is being inspired by a Jo Grimond article in which he argued that while the free market was more successful than socialism at delivering economic growth, it produced unequal outcomes and the challenge for Liberalism was to find ways of redressing that balance. Which sounded like something I could sign up to and so I joined the Liberals hoping to find a lively intellectual debate going on about this.

In fact by that stage Grimond was regarded by Liberals as having gone a bit eccentric and right-wing in his old age and that conversation was not happening. Yet debate about how the Liberal Democrats can offer something distinctive has occasionally threatened to break out and the publication of the Orange Book was one of those occasions. It seemed positive that books were being published, ideas debated. But sadly not now and the Liberal Democrats appear to have reverted to being (to borrow a phrase I vaguely remember hearing Nick Clegg use once upon a time) a collection of left-of-centre people who for one reason or another don’t like the Labour party.

So while it’s great that the Liberal Democrats have their highest number of MPs in over a century and thereby helped to deliver a richly deserved drubbing to a destructive Conservative government, I can’t help wishing that the party had something more distinctive to offer than simply being a vehicle for beating the Tories in areas Labour don’t seem able to reach.

*Although David Laws did wryly mention it at the Liberal Democrat History Group fringe meeting today.

 

Hoodwinked by experts? My belated twopenceworth on the Post Office scandal

WHEN you write an obscure blog as an occasional self-indulgent hobby, the world is not waiting for your take on the big issues. That much I have learned. So in reactivating this site I resolved to remember that and stick to rambling on about my own inconsequential nonsense.

So on the Post Office miscarriages of justice scandal, I was simply going to nod along with Jonathan Calder's judgement that 'Ed Davey should go easy on calling for people to resign' and ponder quietly why it is that after reading intermittently about this case over several years, muttering that it did seem like a miscarriage of justice, being pleased to learn of the TV series and watching it in a single evening, I felt uncomfortable about its aftermath.

A degree of enlightenment comes from reading David Aaronovitch's Substack post The fatal flaw in Mr Bates vs The Post Office', which has flown into my inbox as I am a non-paying subscriber to his newsletter. I haven't always been an Aaronovitch fan, and still often disagree with him, but I came to a grudging admiration through reading his (sadly now discontinued) Times column, in particular because he is willing to make difficult arguments rather than simply write to please his readers. This is a case in point.

The fatal flaw he identifies with Mr Bates vs The Post Office is not simply that it is full of familiar good-guy underdog and heartless-bureaucrat-villain tropes, but that while it is clear why the former do what they do it displays no interest in and doesn't attempt to understand the latter: the Post Office CEO Paula Vennells or her sidekick or their Fujitsu contractors. 'But what about the baddies?' he asks, arguing that their motivation is what we really need to know.

Weirdly I could have a stab at that one, paradoxically because my experience of holding public office, even if only at the lowly level of district councillor, gave me enough understanding of the perils and pitfalls of power that I resolved not to attempt to climb any higher up the ladder. Even dealing with such matters as controversial planning applications, rows about allotments, taxi regulation, market relocations and hospital redevelopments was daunting enough to make me think this may have parallels on a grander stage. At the very least when I read or watch abuse-of-power stories, I pause and wonder whether I would have done any better before getting on my high horse. So, based on my maybe slightly relevant experience, here are my best guesses as to how they may have gone wrong without having malign motives. 

When I was a relatively new councillor a more experienced opponent advised me: 'The secret in this game is knowing when you're being bullshitted by so-called experts'. But that's not as easy as it sounds. Experts can be quite good at bullshitting. At the very least they have more specialist knowledge than we generalists/lay people/elected representatives do. You end up having to take some things on trust, unless you happen to have knowledge that contradicts what you are being told or have access to other experts with other opinions. 

There can be moments when it feels you have troubles and stresses enough and privately hope to be reassured not burdened with yet another woe. And then there's the risk of appearing too stupid to understand. On the latter point, I'm sure that among the reasons for my dear wife's longevity as Elected Mayor of Watford was a willingness to keep asking questions until she got an answer she understood and a sixth sense for when someone's story wasn't stacking up, the latter skill perhaps deriving from her previous career as a schoolteacher.

Another, perhaps opposite, challenge was that over my 30 years in the foothills of public office, a regular flow of strange stories came to my ears, of varying levels of plausibility. Some of them I knew to be untrue because they were about me (land I supposedly owned, but in fact didn't, where planning permission had just been granted.) Indeed to read comments on newspaper websites one might imagine that every controversial planning application was only granted permission due to 'brown envelopes'. We could have paralysed the entire council if we had investigated every such spurious allegation or rumour.

Sometimes serious, specific and public accusations were made that went beyond hearsay yet fell apart almost as soon as an investigation got underway. Yet just occasionally an issue was raised that initially sounded improbable, but on closer inspection proved absolutely accurate – there was something wrong that needed putting right. Knowing which was which was never straightforward - more art than science. And while one may be aware of cases that proved either spurious or true, one never knows if there were other things one should have followed up but didn't because they seemed too implausible.

All of which is to say I can at least imagine how the Post Office ended up in denial and why ministers believed their assurances. I can even read Mr Bates and the Post Office against the grain to see why they might have done so. Before the emergence of a whistleblower what specific evidence did they have to show Fujitsu could change individual postmasters' records? Even if they knew it was possible why would they think Fujitsu staff were deliberately falsifying records to postmasters' detriment? There seemed no evidence of any gain to the company or of fraud by individual employees. While the line that no one else was having problems was clearly false, might fraud by postmasters not have appeared at first sight the most plausible explanation - fraud does happen? If Horizon had gone haywire why was it still only a small proportion that was affected (at least that was my impression from the series) and why was what was being thrown up was all in one direction - unexplained losses not unexplained surpluses? Maybe these points have been answered, but such initial reactions might not have been unreasonable.

None of which is to let Paula Vennells, other Post Office officials or government ministers, even Lib Dem ones, off the hook. The job of public officials to judge when we are being hoodwinked or bullshitted by experts and which of the many unlikely stories one may hear has the ring of truth and needs further investigation. Praise is due to those who have exposed miscarriages of justice, whether James Arbuthnott, or back in the day Chris Mullin, and serially Private Eye. Likewise, brickbats, and even withdrawn honours, are the price of misjudgement. But amid the justified condemnation perhaps there is room for a little understanding of why those with responsibility can get such things badly wrong.

Two Bentleys

Strongly partisan though I am for Watford, and keen to proclaim the town's merits, I can't really argue it is full of architectural gems. Indeed on that point it is probably most famous for a building it lost, James Wyatt's Cassiobury House, described by Pevsner as 'one of [Hertfordshire's] major architectural losses of the C20'. Its famous staircase, which is often attributed to Grinling Gibbons, but which I've just read isn't, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where, unlike last time I looked this up, it does at least appear to be on display.

So it is always a pleasure to visit one of the town's undoubted architectural masterpieces, Holy Rood Roman Catholic Church, although my attendances at Mass are rare these days and even the current Pope would probably regard my religious views as more heretical than merely heterodox.

Holy Rood, Watford

Holy Rood was part of the great programme of Catholic church building in England during the nineteenth century as anti-Catholic laws were repealed and worship no longer needed to be quite so furtive. It was designed by John Francis Bentley, regarded as one of the great architects of the gothic revival and this is his only complete church. Hence it is sometimes referred to as 'Bentley's Gem'.

With its wide nave, crossing and series of side chapels, and highly decorated chancel, it feels like a kind of mini-cathedral rather than a mere parish church. Its Rood loft, unusually without a screen below, is a highly distinctive feature. One can feel the sense of exuberance at the Catholic Church putting itself back on the map, both literally and metaphorically.

Westminster Cathedral

Bentley's most famous work, by contrast, is anything but complete. Distinctive outside for its striking red brick and Portland stone stripes, inside Westminster Cathedral is a riot of colour and decoration in its bottom third, but above that it's all bare brickwork turned black from candle smoke. It creates a rather eerie sensation, one commentator likening the upper parts of the cathedral to railway tunnels. I had always assumed that at some point the money had run out and plans to decorate the rest of the building had been abandoned. But the late Gavin Stamp in a 2016 article refers to it always having been known that it would take a century to complete the interior. It even seems that plans to complete the work remain in progress.

Unusually, I had occasion just before Christmas to attend services in both Holy Rood and Westminster Cathedral giving me a chance to compare and contrast. As well as their relative levels of completrness, the striking difference between the two is their contrasting styles, the one Gothic Revival the other Byzantine. The one thing that does unite them visually is that each has a dramatic Rood cross dominating the nave.

I am curious as to whether that is a common theme in Bentley's churches. And I wonder too why Bentley, who seems to be considered an important gothic revival architect designed so few complete churches, and why his most famous one is in a completely different style.

Answers to such questions can be hard to find, but I see that since I last pondered them at all, Historic England and Liverpool University Press have published a biography of Bentley by Peter Howell, which might enlighten me. Yet it's just after Christmas, when more books that remain unread came into my possession. And its price of over £30 is that little bit more than I like to pay for a book I don't actually need. So it will have to wait while I monitor its price on various websites and hope I can swoop in for a bargain. In the meantime I will have to remain curious and wait for my answers.

My December listening: 'Albion' by Harp

I became a supporter of the Texan retro-folk-prog-rock band Midlake about the time of their 2006 breakthrough album The trials of Van Occupanther when one of its tracks was included in one of the sampler CDs that came with the much-missed Word magazine.

It was described as drawing on 1970s soft-rock, but it to me it felt more a Fairport Convention/Strawbs/Stackridge kind of thing. So I was a little surprised when reviewers commented that their follow-up The courage of others was a move in the direction of British folk-rock. While there had been a certain evolution, it seemed to me they had always been there or thereabouts.

Then a strange thing happened - as they were recording their next album the lead singer Tim Smith announced he was leaving. Strange because one sort-of assumed that Smith essentially was Midlake, or at least the band was a vehicle for his songs and would consist of the musicians he chose to play with. After all he wrote and sang all the material with no other member getting so much as a co-writer credit. While other groups have continued after the departure of a leading creative force, it's almost unheard of when the force is quite this dominant. It would be rather as though Mark rather than David Knopfler had left Dire Straits after Making Movies and the band had carried on without him. Or perhaps, more appositely given the nature of Midlake's oeuvre like Jethro Tull minus Ian Anderson.

So it was a surprise to learn back in 2013 that the residual members were carrying on and intending to release a new album. How could this be the same band. Couldn't they be done under trades descriptions legislation. Three seemed to be three possibilities, none of them good: that they would be little more than a tribute band rehashing or reworking old material; that they would be a pastiche act, with new material that was an uninspired imitation of their former leader; or that they would sound nothing like the old Midlake but a different band altogether.

So when the fourth Midlake album Antiphon appeared in 2013 I approached it with no great hopes. And yet it was a mini-triumph. Guitarist Eric Pulido, who stepped up to the lead singer's microphone, sounded enough like Tim Smith that his voice was not jarring, but also he didn't sound like he was going an impersonation. The sound had clearly evolved to a heavier prog-rock style, but this wasn't the band's first sonic evolution and they still sounded like Midlake. And there were a clutch of decent songs that were sufficiently in the Tim Smith mould (tender, wistful lyrics with bucolic imagery), and it followed the first three Midlake albums in having a very strong first half, but a few longeurs towards the end.

In the intervening decade the members of Midlake embarked on various creditable side projects before the band last year with an excellent fifth offering For the sake of Bethel Woods - a reference to the site of the original Woodstock festival. So well done chaps!

Meanwhile we waited to see what Tim Smith had to offer. Soon after leaving Midlake he announced a new project Harp, whose website was updated occasionally over the next decade usually with apologies for the continuing delay in producing new music. I had almost given up but when checking the site earlier this year saw the debut Harp album Albion was due for released at the start of December.

As the title suggests it has a very British (specifically English) feel, with song titles such as Daughters of Albion, Herstmonceux (a village and castle near Eastbourne) and Shining spires. Paradoxically it manages to go further in the folky direction than the last Tim Smith led Midlake album but the listener can't help but notice the presence of electronic drums, presumably a contribution of Smith's wife and collaborator Kathi Zung, who is credited as co-writer of the album.

Given the long wait I hoped it would be the epic statement that Smith could only make by having full creative control. Instead it is lovely but slight, the songs averaging around three-and-a-half minutes, the vocals a little too low down in the mix for the lyrics to make an impact. While the Guardian reviewer says it 'plants the hopeful seeds of something yet to bloom', I thought this might be the great blossoming, but like previous Midlake and related albums it falls a little short. Still, with its wintery atmosphere, it has been a pleasing accompaniment to December.

Wonder Boys: a little-known gem

Who is the only person to have won both an Oscar and the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Many years ago I remember preening myself on having answered this question correctly in a quiz. I didn't know the answer, but worked out that George Bernard Shaw was a likely choice. He had definitely won the Nobel Prize and it seemed at least plausible that one of his plays had become a film script or even that he had written a screenplay. (And indeed it was for adopting Pygmalion for the silver screen so a bit of both.)

Pride comes before a fall though, and on a visit to Shaw's Corner a few years ago I came a cropper trying to impress one of the National Trust volunteers by offering up this piece of arcane knowledge. 'No longer true' he said and I racked my brains trying to work out who else had managed this feat. The embarrassment was complete when I was told the answer 'Bob Dylan' as I am a diehard fan of His Bobness. I knew he had won an Oscar for Things have changed and could hardly have missed the controversy over his 2026 Nobel Literature Prize Award, indeed even going so far as to respond to a blog post on the subject. But I hadn't quite put the two things together.

Ever curious about the minutiae of Dylan's career, I recently found myself wondering why, despite regarding Things have changed as one of Dylan's best ever songs (and his Oscar as well deserved as his Nobel Prize), I knew nothing about the film he had won it for, maybe not even the title. So I looked it up and discovered why. Wonder Boys, which starred Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr and Tobey Maguire, was praised by critics but was a box office failure. It is referred to by various bloggers and the like as a hidden gem.

Douglas is cast in an untypical (unlikely even) role of a professor of creative writing who is struggling to follow up his successful first novel, while attempting to mentor a troubled student and (inevitably) having a complicated private life. It was described as an amusing and realistic portrayal of campus life. In our household's not always straightforward search for films we might both enjoy watching, this comedy drama of campus life seemed to fit the bill. There's also always something enjoyable about discovering and championing a film (or indeed any artistic creation) that didn't quite get its due.

It proved a good choice, although one can see exactly why it pleased the critics but did not attract the punters. It is maybe a little too low key. The plot, with its redemptive theme, trots along nicely, the characters well-drawn and convincing, the jokes and humorous scenes consistently funny. Yet it is touching rather than seriously emotionally affecting and gently amusing rather than outright hilarious.

As I've mentioned before, one of my current hobbies is tracking down cultural experiences of one kind or another that I've missed and Wonder Boys was certainly worth seeking out.