Oakham Castle, in Rutland, has been closed since September to allow for the restoration of the Great Hall and cleaning of the 230 commemorative horseshoes inside.
The ancient defensive walls have also been revealed for the first time in 150 years.
It is one of the oldest surviving secular buildings in the country.
Oakham Castle, which dates back to 1180, was built as a manor house and was later heavily fortified with walls, a moat and a drawbridge but by the 16th Century most of the castle was a ruin.
If you want to know more about the archaeology of the site, there is a helpful episode of Time Team.
To an occasional visitor like me, the revelation of the walls around the site is striking.
Another outing for one of my favourite artists of the New Wave era - one who is perhaps a little forgotten today.
Thanks to the splendidly obsessive Wikipedia entry for Rock Goes to College, I can reveal that this was recorded at Hatfield Polytechnic (as it then was) and first broadcast on 14 January 1980.
Yesterday the papers were full of the news that the World Health Organization had been sent an open letter signed by 150 health experts calling for this summer's Olympics to be moved from Rio de Janeiro or postponed.
The experts fear the virus could spread more rapidly around the world because of the influx of Olympic visitors to the Brazilian city, which has a high incidence of the disease Zika.
Today, as I expected, the great and good are telling us not to worry our little heads.
Although this was made some fifty years ago it could just as easily been set in 2015. The Victory Party has several aims (which appear to have been designed to alienate as many people as possible) – keep Britain white, kick out the financiers (especially the Jews) and also deal harshly with the pacifists.
One reason for that conclusion is this episode and Gideon's obvious dislike or mistrust of an officer who says of the left-wing demonstrators who are confronting the Victory Party:
“I’m sick and tired of these people trying to push everyone around. Why don’t we shove the lot of them into jail?”
That officer is played by Allan Cuthbertson, who you will recognise from dozens of film and television appearances, including gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.
I also wrote in that post that:
Gideon's family feature regularly. Political trivia fans may like to note that his younger son was played by Giles Watling, who was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate against Ukip's Douglas Carswell in the 2014 Clacton by-election.
You can see the young Giles Watling in the clip above.
As well as being a Conservative councillor in Tendring (he won an open primary to be the party's candidate against Douglas Carswell in the Clacton by-election), Watling is still an actor. He appeared regularly in Bread.
Iain Brodie Brown is the new Mayor of Sefton: "For 36 years I have worked alongside people with mental health issues on their journey to living a full and independent life. I hope to use the opportunity that the mayoralty gives me to continue to challenge the stigma and ignorance that so often blights their lives inhibiting them from playing their full part in our communities."
"The discovery that, if you cut a ‘winner’ enough slack, eventually they’ll try to close down the game once and for all, should throw our obsession with competitiveness into question. And then we can consider how else to find value in things, other than their being ‘better’ than something else." Will Davies takes issue with the unquestioning promotion of competitiveness.
Andrew Vanacore interviews Scott Santents, a campaigner for Basic Income.
Chrissie Russell talks to Richard Louv about 'Nature Deficit Disorder'.
"The 'great smog' of 1952 may have blighted the lives of thousands of children still in the womb at the time," says John Bingham looking at a new study from Alastair Ball, an economist at Birkbeck, University of London.
I have now watched all 26 episodes of Gideon's Way on Youtube. As I said in my first post on the subject, one of the pleasures of the series is the regular appearance of actors who later became famous in other roles.
So it is that in one episode (Boy with Gun) you will find both Sir Oliver Lacon from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Wally Batty from Last of the Summer Wine.
That first post showed you John Hurt and Michael Cashman. Here are some more familiar faces.
Writing about the Gideon's Way police series from the 1960s the other day, I suggested that John Gregson played the hero as "a world-weary liberal".
I may have been on to something because, as an article by Ian Millsted from the Journal of Liberal History once revealed, the author of the books the series was based on was himself a liberal - and a Liberal
John Creasey, who wrote the books, once said:
I have been a political animal all my life. At twelve I was organising and speaking at street corners for the Liberal Party.
Creasey fought Bournemouth West for the party in 1950, finishing third with 17 per cent of the vote. This was a very respectable vote for a Liberal candidate in this era, though the party had come second in the seat in 1945.
In the second half ot the 1960s, though he was often seen in Liberal circles, Creasey fought a number of parliamentary by-elections to promote the All-Party Alliance, He had set this up himself in 1996.
Millsted says:
Its principal aim was to see elected a government of the best people from all parties in order to sort out the problems of the day.
In the last of these by-elections, Oldham West in 1968, he beat the Liberal candidate into fourth place.
The aim of the All-Party Alliance may sound naive, but Jeremy Thorpe was to call for something similar in the general elections of 1974.
Today the Supreme Court overturned a decision by Court of Appeal and ruled that an injunction banning the naming of a celebrity involved in an alleged extra-marital relationship should stay in place.
Over to John Hemming, the former Liberal Democrat MP:
The logical conclusion of this is that gossip about anyone with children will become a criminal offence subject to a potential penalty of 2 years' imprisonment.
It is important to note that the injunction covers people talking in pubs, gossiping over the garden fence, or twittering on the internet. All of these could potentially see an application for committal for contempt of court. That comes with large amounts of legal costs and up to 2 years imprisonment. One would assume that it would not be assumed that this would only apply to claimants who have a large amount of money, but also everyone else.
And all this despite the fact that anyone who wants to find the identity of the celebrity, or of the married actor who slept with a prostitute and has taken out a similar injunction against the British press, can easily do so.
Delivering the court's judgment, Lord Mance did at least say:
“It is different if the story has some bearing on the performance of a public office or the correction of a misleading public impression cultivated by the person involved."
But there are those who question even that.
Over on Liberal Democrat Voice, Caron Lindsay has argued that there is "nothing of public interest in lurid headlines about SNP MPs".
I find this creeping doctrine that everything printed in a newspaper must be "in the public interest" rather sinister.
Who decides what is in the public interest? Somewhere in the shadows I detect the presence of a committee of the great and good - a retired cabinet minister, the headmistress of a leading public school, a celebrity chef and Dr Evan Harris - deciding what we should and should not be allowed to know.
At its lowest, the argument against the spread of this public interest argument is that laughing at the follies of rich and powerful has always been one of the consolations of the poor and weak.
At its highest it is that character matters immensely in politics. To many voters it is more important than the parties' detailed policy platforms, and I am not sure those voters are mistaken.
The spread of privacy law in recent years has been very much a judge-led initiative with little involvement from parliament. As John Hemmings says, it is time the politicians stepped in and set sensible limits on it.
The Londonist video on the lost GWR line to Uxbridge Vine Street shows that today there is nothing left of that station, which closed to passengers in 1962 and to goods two years later.
But it was still standing when a 1967 episode of my new favourite programme, Gideon's Way, was shot there.
I have a new weakness - or rather I have revived an old one.
The Gideon stories were a series of police procedurals written, under the pen name J.J. Maric, by the extraordinarily prolific John Creasey between 1955 and 1976.
For some reason I took to them while I was at school even though they were already dating markedly by then.
Now I have discovered that the whole of the Gideon's Way TV series has been uploaded to Youtube. There were 26 of them made for ITV and broadcast in 1965 and 1966.
John Gregson took the title role, playing him as a world-weary liberal who sometimes had to reign in his keener subordinates - a sort of prototype for Morse and Wexford.
Gideon's family feature regularly. Political trivia fans may like to note that his younger son was played by Giles Watling, who was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate against Ukip's Douglas Carswell in the 2014 Clacton by-election.
One of the pleasures of Gideon's Way is spotting familiar actors in unfamiliar roles. I have watched only a few of the shows so far, but already I have seen Inspector Wexford masterminding a bullion robbery, Mrs Bridges from Upstairs Downstairs running a gang of pickpockets and fences, and Arthur Daley committing arson,
Then there are the pleasures of spotting actors on the way up.
This, for instance, is a young John Hurt on the run from prison. (You can see an even younger Hurt on this blog as an undergraduate in The Wild and the Willing.)
And this young man is now in the House of Lords. It's Michael Cashman, formerly of EastEnders and the European Parliament, in his first role. At this stage of his career his chief means of conveying emotion was hunching his shoulders.
Above all, though, there are the pleasures of the location footage. This is London before turbocapitalism and moral relativism. It's a city of quiet suburbs and decaying warehouses where the villains are cornered and the police inevitably round them up.
The former chairman of the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, makes the case for helicopter money.
David Boyle is characteristically illuminating: "I have no problem in principle with contracted out services, but note that the contracts tend to be won by companies whose main skill is the delivery of target data to their commissioners."
"Labour’s new members have arrived at the expense of the Greens and the assorted Judean People’s Front parties of the far left. Those new members are still fighting their #1 enemy, the 'Blairites', some of whom have decided, for various reasons, that enough is enough and have left." Jake Wilde dissects zombie Labour.
"Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge, Brent: in my mind, they’re all clinging to the middle rungs of England’s class ladder. That, in large part, is the comedy of their situations." Zadie Smith on her father and British comedy.
Rob Baker nominates his Top 8 Swinging Sixties London Films. Groovy! Laura Reynolds maps London's lost lidos.
These days I find something too premeditated about televsion comedy. The idea of sitting down to watch something for 30 minutes because it will be funny, feels odd. I much prefer wit in the pursuit of another goal.
But the comedies we watch when we were young don't just form our sense of humour: they form who we are.
When I was in the sixth form ... we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.
Recently Radio Four Extra, my new favourite station, has stated repeating two comedies that take me back further than that.
When I was 11 my favourite radio comedy was The Men from the Ministry. I suppose its anti-Whitehall ethos has its roots in post-war resentment of socialism by the comfortably off - think of the fuss over the Tanganyika ground nut scheme - but it was immensely good natured.
The comedy was in the hands of pros like Derek Guyler and Richard Murdoch,* and it managed to be funny despite, even because of, its formulaic plot.
Their General Assistance Department would have two projects on the go, get them mixed up (perhaps sending the letter referring to one project to the other and vice versa) and there would be a news bulletin describing the resultant chaos.
They would fear the sack, but then discover that their boss was happy with it for some reason and live to cause chaos another week.
So ingrained is the show's comedy in my own sense of humour that I recently heard a joke that I stole for one of the first couple of Lord Bonkers' Diaries. (It is a sobering thought that those first diaries are nearer in time to my 11-year-old self than they are to me today.)
But I can go back further than that.
Radio Four Extra has started to repeat The Clitheroe Kid, which was my favourite radio comedy when I was 8.
You'll get a good idea of Jimmy Clitheroe's schtick if you watch the video above of him with George Formby. He was the ultimate precocious, cheeky schoolboy.
Except that Much Too Shy was made in 1942 and Jimmy Clitheroe was born in in 1921. Which means that he was already 20.
Because Jimmy Clitheroe - and that was his real name - suffered thyroid gland a birth and never grew after the age of 11, remaining 4ft 3in tall.
So by the time I fell in love with his show in 1968, he was 47. He still turned up for recordings in schoolboy cap and short trousers, but he had the face if a middle-aged man. That is why his television and film career had foundered by then.
Jimmy Clitheroe died in 1973, at the age of 51, after taking an overdose on the day of his mother's funeral.
* Richard Murdoch married into the family of Market Harborough's doctor. When he had his appendix out in the cottage hospital here he was plagued by urchins demanding to see "Stinker". He entertained them by putting his bare feet up on the windowsill and wiggling his toes.
"Oakeshottian conservatives prefer the devil they know; idealists, rationalists and managerialists think they can improve upon it." Chris Dillow returns to one of his favourite themes: the trouble with the Conservatives is that they are no longer Conservative.
Anoosh Chakelian meets Piers Corbyn, brother of the Labour leader.
"Our National Parks are dominated by sheep farms and grouse or deer estates, leaving almost all our hills bare. Nature is protected in isolated reserves which provide important refuges for biodiversity. But these refuges are not joined up, and so are very fragile in the long-term." Helen Meech makes the case for rewilding.
St Peter's Seminary, Cardross, is a celebrated modernist ruin on the Firth of Clyde. John Grindrod has photographs of it from the 1960s: "What's immediately apparent is how beautiful the building is. The arches, the windows, the concrete, the strange forms and shadows."
Richly Evocative introduces us to the elusive, slippery territory that is Ashley Vale in, St Werburghs, Bristol.
Here are some paragraphs from the best case I have seen for Britain's continued membership of the European Union:
In 1973 my parents held a Common Market party. They’d lived through the war, and for them it seemed a good idea to form closer ties with our endlessly troublesome neighbours. For me, however, it was a chance to make flags out of coloured felt and to eat exotic foods such as sausage and pasta. I felt very European that night, and I still do.
Whether I’m sitting in a railway concourse in Brussels or pottering down the canals of southwestern France or hurtling along a motorway in Croatia, I feel way more at home than I do when I’m trying to get something to eat in Dallas or Sacramento. I love Europe, and to me that’s important.
And:
Isn’t it better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly? To create a United States of Europe that functions as well as the United States of America? With one army and one currency and one unifying set of values?
Britain, on its own, has little influence on the world stage. I think we are all agreed on that. But Europe, if it were well run and had cohesive, well thought-out policies, would be a tremendous force for good
Can you guess who wrote them?
Of course you can. I have pasted a photo of him above.
But this column by Jeremy Clarkson, published in the Sunday Times on 13 March of this year.
It's support for full-blown federalism will scare some off - I am not its greatest admirer itself - but it captures an enjoyment of our European identity that has been wholly absent from the Remain campaign.
That campaign has concentrated on pointing to the disasters that may befall Britain if it leaves the EU and pointing to the contradictions in the Leave case. Its arguments are right, but are unlikely to inspire anyone.
So why hasn't Jeremy Clarkson been up front and centre of the Remain campaign? He would appeal to great swathes of voters likely to have so far remained untouched by it.
Maybe he was asked and said no, but it is hard to resist the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, the leadership of the pro-EU campaign does not consist of the best and brightest who could have been found.
Incidentally, Clarkson's article is lodged safely behind the Sunday Times' paywall, but I found the full text of it on a Top Gear bulletin board.
It was a little like stumbling across a site devoted to a fetish you do not share. I was not so much surprised as puzzled.
No, Clarkson's views are not mine, but I do admire the easy flow of his prose as a columnist. From that point of view, a young writer could do much worse than adopt him as a model.
Andrew Hickey says the Liberal Democrats should support Basic Income: "The person receiving the benefits will always know better than some Whitehall bureaucrat who earns a hundred grand a year what they most need to spend money on at any given time."
Internet voting is a terrible idea. In a video, Andrew Appel explains why.
"Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done." Edward Mendelson discovers Barack Obama the literary critic.
Railway Maniac uncovers Ilkeston's forgotten history as a spa town.
"The last time I had seen Panesar at Wantage Road the club shop was fully stocked with Monty merchandise – “I Love Monty” and “Sikh of Tweak” t-shirts, the ill-advised “Monty’s Cricket Madness” DVDs (a compilation of cock-ups, whose cover made him look as though he had just been pulled up for driving a minicab uninsured), those masks." Backwatersman sees Monty Panesar return to play for Northamptonshire.
Curious British Telly on a forgotten (by me at least) comedy starring Rik Mayall - Believe Nothing.
"This tells you everything you need to know about the desperate, empty campaign being run by a gang of politicians who’ve stepped beyond mere incompetence, and have ended up somewhere truly nasty, surrounded by supporters who love every bit of it." Rupert Myers is damning about the Brexiteers' assault on President Obama.
Monroe Palmer outlines the improvement to the government's Housing Bill that Liberal Democrat peers have battled to make.
"The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. Moscow has found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea of an American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed unlikely." Timothy Snyder dissects Donald Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin.
It is good to see Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End getting a mention alongside the usual suspects in this Steve Rose survey of films about Britain from the 1960s.
Jessica Fielding brings us the Yorkshire Television schedule for Monday 19 April 1971 - Richard Beckinsale, Austin Mitchell and Ena Sharples in unexpected colour.
The defunct Glasgow Central Railway line left behind a trail of stations, tunnels, shafts, cuttings and bridges throughout the west of the city. Alex Cochrane explores its remains.
Nicholas Whyte has been ploughing a lonely furrow with a series of posts on the early 1970s children's television series Here Come the Double Deckers.
Although this fell precisely into my era, I fear I can recall disliking it at the time. Even then I sensed it was peopled with stage-school brats and aimed too shamelessly at the American market.
As a result I viewed the later careers of two of its stars - Brisnley Forde of Aswad and Peter Firth - with mild scepticism.
I struggled with Spooks in particular. MI5 just would not employ a former member of the Double Deckers and that is the end of the matter.
Still, I am the last blogger qualified to complain about obscure enthusiasms, and Nicholas's latest Double Deckers post has turned up a top piece of trivia. In fact he wins my Trivial Fact of the Week award.
That trivia concerns an episode of the show called Barney, in which the children befriend an entertainer down on his luck and (inevitably) put on a show with him.
Barney was played by Julian Chagrin, who a few years before had been one of the tennis players watched by David Hemmings at the end of Antonioni's Blow-Up. You can see this scene in the video above, which Nicholas included in his own post.
He calls it "the very odd 1966 film Blow-Up," but I think he meant to call it "a key moment in both the creation and the examination of the myth of Swinging London".
Nicholas also reveals that Chagrin appeared as the secret lemonade drinker in the R.White's television commercials.
The song in them was sung by Ross MacManus, the father of Elvis Costello.*
But you knew that already.
* I like Carl Wilson's observation that "a secret lemonade drinker" sounds like a line from one of Elvis Costello's own songs.
A Whole Scene Going must have been quite a programme, Last year I posted a feature on the Spencer Davis Group that it broadcast on 16 March 1966.
The week before it had shown this profile of Lalla Ward, who was only 14 at the time.
She grew up to be an actress, writer and artist. She played Romana the Time Lady in Doctor Who, was briefly married to Tom Baker and is now married to Richard Dawkins.
