(1) England’s Nazareth: Walsingham (The Imaginative Conservative)

(1a) St. Augustine and J.R.R. Tolkien (The Imaginative Conservative)

“To Newman, nineteenth-century liberalism and philosophic utilitarianism were the harbingers of a secular, modern City of Man, and God would not stay his wrath. ‘A confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, [was] preparing the way for a general Apostacy from it,’ Newman feared in 1838.”

(1b) The Lord of the Rings from Sauron’s Perspective (In Deep Geek via YouTube)

(2) Man secretly built UK’s biggest model railway and hid it from his girlfriend in case she dumped him (Metro)

(3) A quote from British Rail: The Making and Breaking of Our Trains by Christian Wolmar:

“The most common sports specials were for football matches, serving a rather different and more difficult clientele than the race trains. Some football grounds, such as Cardiff’s Ninian Park, even had their own stations to accommodate football specials. While lucrative, they were problematic, creating a dilemma for both the football and railway authorities. As football hooliganism, which at times resulted in extreme violence, took hold, the pictures of wrecked carriages with windows smashed started appearing regularly in the national press. Simon Bradley recounts how a train returning to Liverpool was ‘set on fire by the occupants, using as fuel the contents of mailbags they had stolen from Leicester station’. This was after youths had trashed a train at the station with a hatchet from an emergency kit, with the result that ‘228 windows were destroyed, with 128 compartment mirrors and picture glasses, 86 blinds, 38 window straps, 180 light bulbs and 8 fire extinguishers’. In another incident, Tottenham Hotspur fans on their way back from a heavy defeat at Derby damaged a train so badly they had to be ejected at two small stations in Bedfordshire and promptly terrorized the local villagers by smashing windows and attacking cars. The authorities did not know how to respond. On the one hand, they feared that scrapping the specials would unleash thousands of unruly and drunken supporters on to regular services; but on the other, the widespread publicity given to the pictures of wrecked trains presented the railway in a very poor light.”

“As David Henshaw concludes, under Labour, the system appeared to have experienced ‘all the negative aspects of socialism without any of the benefits — a top-heavy bureaucracy, without market safeguards or a policy of integration.'”

(4) U.K. Cycle Sales Slump To 39-Year Low. Industry Group Seeks Government Help (Forbes)