Generalising

Photographs from the trip to follow (when I’ve sorted them out). For now… well, it’s raining, but it was a beautiful sunny spring morning when I got up. Time for an old piece of seasonal humour.

A quick recap of the context. Through what can best be described as Insistently Being An Annoying Bugger in the mid-1930s, the author A. P. Herbert found himself campaiging on a number of politically small causes, but ones dear to the heart of many. My personal favourite was his proposal for reforming the licensing laws; the proposed Refreshment Bill had exactly one section, which proposed that “the laws of England regarding [the sale of alcohol] … shall be made, mutatis mutandis, the same as those of France”. This, like his attempt to force reform of the same legislation by causing criminal charges to be brought against the House of Commons – it reached the High Court, and just contemplate the majestic beauty of that for a second – was unsurprisingly unsuccessful. (Within a year, he would be sitting as the Member of Parliament for Oxford University; within two, he would single-handedly have pushed through a far-reaching reform of the English divorce law as an independent backbencher. Never let it be said that a quixotic campaign carried out by a non-politician has no chance…) As a part of this, he found himself drafting a vast number of proposed Bills.

Herbert was, at the time, best known for his light verse. It was, perhaps, inevitable that these two streams should coincide, in…

WHEREAS in every lawn and bed the plucky crocus lifts his head…