Cat named after Nottingham Forest legend Brian Clough becomes celebrity – by visiting his local pub

The Nottingham Post wins our Headline of the Day Award by a distance:

The feline takes himself down to the Blue Bell pub in Sandiacre at around 7pm each night and has become such a hit with regulars and staff that he has his own stool and a stash of kitty treats behind the bar. 

Brian particularly enjoys Monday's quiz nights and Wednesday's darts – where he helps himself to the leftover cheese cobs and pork pies. 

Now the seven-year-old moggy has even got his own Facebook page, with a helping paw from his owners.

Read More

A glory-hunter's guide to supporting Leicester City

With Leicester City five points clear at the top of the Premiership, the club will be attracting a lot of new supporters - particularly former Manchester United fans from Surrey.

So the Leicester Mercury is timely in producing its 'A glory-hunter's guide to supporting Leicester City':

"Interesting fact for you," tweeted Jason Manford. "As a rule of thumb, if you can't place someone's accent, they're from Leicester." 

Unplaceable it may be, but it's there. Even though the council tried to kill it off it the 1950s with elocution lessons in schools. 

It's arguably the first proper accent you hit when you drive north from London. 

Somewhere just south of Market Harborough a barrrth becomes a bath, and as you approach the city, magical things happen to the endings of words. 

The quickleee of RP English becomes quickleh. Less-terr becomes Lestuh. It slows things down a little when there's a run of them altogether, so if you have cause to ring 999 for instance and say: "quickly, quickly, it's an emergency, there's a dire fire at Leicester Snooker Centre," well, there's a good chance there will have been casualties by the time you've finished raising the alarm.

And, as the Mercury says, if you want to understand more about the city's culture, listen to the song above.

Read More

Two Nottingham folk heroes: Robin Hood and Brian Clough

Experience Nottinghamshire tells the story of the city's statue of Robin Hood:

On 24th July 1952, the statue of Robin Hood was unveiled by the Duchess of Portland on the Robin Hood Lawn, beneath Nottingham Castle, in the remains of the moat on Castle Road. 

It was a warm sunny day when 500 schoolchildren sat attentively on the grass in the special VIP enclosure to watch the ceremony of the statue and its complementary plaques and sculptures being revealed to the public, accompanied by a fanfare from the band of the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment. 

Cast in eight pieces of half-inch thick bronze (made to last 6,000 years) and weighing half a ton, the 7ft effigy of Nottingham's legendary outlaw proudly stands on a two-and-a-half ton block of white Clipsham stone.

The statue of Brian Clough was erected in the city centre in 2008.

Read More

Oakham Reserves match abandoned after ugly crowd scenes

The Rutland & Stamford Mercury wins Headline of the Day with this disappointing story.

Read More

Lord Bonkers pays tribute to Shirley Williams

Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for Liberal England:

"I am sorry to see her go, but I fear she had lost the dressing room."

Read More

David Mackintosh MP and the finances of Northampton Town

View image | gettyimages.com

Over the summer the finances of Northampton Town have been in the news.

David Conn wrote a good summary of this byzantine affair in the Guardian at the start of the month:

Put bluntly, there is a huge, grim question over where £10.25m has gone, which was lent to the club by Northampton borough council between September 2013 and August 2014, specifically to pay for improvements to its Sixfields stadium, including a new East Stand.

All that exists in return for so much money are minor works on the west stand, floodlights understood to have cost a little over £100,000, and a shell of a new East Stand for which the developer, Buckingham Group, says it was paid only £442,000, before it downed tools.

Since then the club has been sold to the former Oxford United chairman Kelvin Thomas.

Now it appears that David Mackintosh, Conservative MP for Northampton South and a former leader of the borough council, has been drawn into the mess.

BBC News reports:

A Conservative MP's local party was given undeclared payments linked to a businessman involved in a stalled stadium development, it has emerged. 

David Mackintosh's party received a £6,195 payment for tickets from Howard Grossman, the director of a company overseeing work at Northampton Town FC. 

Mr Mackintosh was leader of the borough council when it approved a £10.25m loan for the plans. Millions of pounds of the money is currently unaccounted for. 

He declined to comment on the payments. 

Three individuals with links to Mr Grossman also paid £10,000 into Mr Mackintosh's general election fighting fund, a BBC investigation found. 

The payment to Mr Mackintosh's party from Mr Grossman and one of the donations for £10,000 were not declared to the Electoral Commission.

The BBC goes on to report a Conservative spokesman as saying "we are looking into the matter".

I suspect this is a story to watch. Already there is a petition in circulation calling on Mackintosh to resign as MP for Northampton South.

Read More