John Readman

Farmer from Whitby, here for sports updates and country stuff

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

Does this mean a decent price for wheat?

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@NorthAges Without my glasses on it's very like Sean Bean

[Military History Now @MilHistNow]

RIGHT NOW in 1944, the BBC broadcasts an excerpt of Paul Verlaine's 1866 poem "Chanson d'automne" into Nazi-occupied Europe. The passage "...wounds my heart with a monotonous languor” is a coded signal to the French Resistance. It means: “The Allies are coming!”

[Sir Geoffrey Boycott @GeoffreyBoycott]

Enjoyable first day @HomeOfCricket - especially catching up with Ian

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@greenbeltsal @TrooperSnooks @jdpoc @NorthYorkMoors The AngloAmerican mine is still under construction, anyone's guess when/if it'll produce anything. The Polyhalite they are selling is from the old Boulby mine further up the coast

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@jdpoc @TrooperSnooks Perhaps if the London bubble would travel up north to places like Teesside, drive from Redcar back through to Grangetown, and see where once was British Steel and ICI, and how little is left they might realise why de industrialised areas don't trust the political class

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

Nice pic of Scarbados cc

[Scarborough UK @Scarb1723]

Founded in 1863 on North Marine Road, Scarborough Cricket Ground has hosted Yorkshire CCC since 1878. Famous for its historic 1895 pavilion, 1947 record crowd of 22,946, & end of season Cricket Festival it remains one of county cricket's most iconic and revered outground venues

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@mattbrophoto @theiaincameron Clear day with snow it can be seen from Danby Beacon on the NYMoors

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@FarmingUK 27.95p/l increase from March to April, according to AHDB fuel tracker, and now a 3.7p/l cut

[Middlesbrough FC @Boro]

A statement from MFC:

Middlesbrough Football Club welcomes the outcome of today’s Disciplinary Commission hearing.

We believe this sends out a clear message for the future of our game regarding sporting integrity and conduct.

As a club, we are now focused on our game against Hull City at Wembley on Saturday.

Ticket information for our supporters will be available shortly.

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@BellaWallerstei Towton battle site

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@MerryOlEngland Surely it was the war of 3 kingdoms, Ireland and Scotland were very much involved

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@theadelites Leeds are as close to Brighton in 8th as they are to West Ham

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@ExtremeFootbal4 Eddie Gray, David Harvey also managed WhitbyTown just before Eddie

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

Caedmon

[North Ages @NorthAges]

Lost copy of seventh-century poem in Old English discovered at Rome library https://t.co/opO57S7vun

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@SamaHoole Not just the Magpie in Whitby, plenty of the others do

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

It's a bit of a rich comment from him, and then the fertilizer tax coming in next year 🤷‍♂️

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Labour Loves the Countryside. It Just Hates the People Who Run It.

A woman walks into a tailor's shop in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. She loves the heather hills, she says. The wooded dales. The purple moorland stretching to the horizon. What she cannot stand is the shooting that takes place on the Glorious Twelfth.
Jeremy Shaw, the tailor, has heard this before. He considers whether to explain that the heather she travelled three hours to admire exists because of the grouse moor she despises. The gamekeepers who manage the land, suppress the bracken, and keep the moorland in the condition that makes it worth visiting. The cake, in other words, was baked by the baker she came to castigate. What is worrying is that the government shares her confusion.

On March 18, Labour published its Land Use Framework. Half a million acres earmarked for solar panels. Nine percent of farmland committed to rewilding. And buried on page 45, a proposal to license game bird shooting, potentially restricting pheasant and partridge releases onto estates. The trail hunting ban came first. Licensing comes next. Each measure arrives with its own rationale. Together they form a programme.

Licensing does not prohibit. Bureaucracy does not ban. Smaller shoots simply cannot absorb compliance costs, fold quietly, and nobody in Whitehall answers for the consequence. A Natural England case near Helmsley shows the method. A longstanding partridge shoot was barred from releasing birds until after the season had already started. Shoot days cancelled. Revenue gone. Natural England's hands formally clean.

Helmsley bucks every trend in British retail. Four pubs in the town square. A Michelin-starred inn nearby. A tailor forty years in business in what a mentor once called a dying trade. Seventy-five percent of Shaw's revenue is shooting-related. The Pheasant hotel runs at sixty percent shooting occupancy through winter. The deli sells local cheese to Norwegian and German sportsmen. Shooting contributes £3.3 billion annually to the UK economy and supports nearly 147,000 jobs. Pull the shooting thread and the weave comes apart.

One Helmsley pub changed hands a few years ago. The new owners decided they wanted nothing to do with shoot trade. They lost heavily, then went back to the estates cap in hand. The market delivered the verdict that policy is not yet ready to impose openly. Licensing achieves the same result without anyone having to take responsibility.

The conservation argument collapses under scrutiny. Grouse moor owners have restored 217,000 acres of upland heath in the past 25 years. The almost-extinct curlew is four times more likely to fledge on a managed grouse moor than on unmanaged moorland. The landscape that Whitehall has identified as the problem is the reason the landscape exists in the form they claim to value.

When asked what economic trade-offs it had actually modelled, the government was vague. Officials said they recognised shooting's cultural importance and would work with industry toward a sustainable relationship. Starmer has been invited to visit Helmsley and see how the economy functions. He has not replied.

He should go. He should meet the gamekeeper loading double guns through winter to keep the household solvent. The beaters earning seventy pounds a day. The tailor measuring 24 keepers for tweed suits stitched with Essex lining and Yorkshire zips.
What rural Britain is being offered instead is a licensing regime that will first eliminate smaller shoots, then larger ones, then the hotels and tailors and pubs, until the moorland reverts to bracken and the towns that shooting sustained join the dying high streets that apparently only the countryside had managed to avoid.

The heather on the North York Moors, Jeremy Shaw at Carters Country Wear, and the market town of Helmsley. All three exist because of shooting. Labour's Land Use Framework puts all three at risk.

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@BumbleCricket At Uni in the 80's, we used to go there on a Sunday night. Happy times

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@tomhfh Better to bring back the Danelaw

[John Readman @johnreadman11]

@BARRA72 Would be good not to need a pee after 2, age catching me up