Stop Thief

If you are doing a brewery tour, I suppose it makes sense to arrive on a touring cycle - but you can't take it up seven stories of a brewery tower, so why not leave it here. As far as we could see they were not locked, and both Mrs M and I immediately thought of Bicycle Thieves - the classic 1948 neorealist film depicting the degrading impact of impoverishment on the Italian working class. These riders obviously don't think such conditions apply to our village

In the same vein, we spent the evening at a performance of "Three Acres and a Cow" - an entertaining race through 1000 years of the history of land rights in (mainly) England, with brief detours into the Irish potato famine (described as Europe's largest genocide) and the Highland Clearances. This was accompanied by folk music and poetry: we sang Jerusalem (Blake was a fervent republican and reformer), The Manchester Rambler (the Kinnder mass trespass) and The World Turned Upside Down (the manifesto of the Diggers). We also sang

Ba ba black sheep
Have you any wool
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full
Two for the master and one for the dame
And none for the little boy
Who cries down the lane

...which we were told are the correct words as originally sung. The rhyme is about the 33% taxation of wool - an attempt by the aristocracy to curb the power of the merchant class, which also had the impact of further impoverishing the workers on sheep farms and in the wool industry

Othe snippets from the evening, which of course I have not had any chance to research or verify, but I pass on what was said...

One in six tomatoes in British supermarkets is picked by an enslaved worker in southern Spain

The Duke of Westminster died in 2016 with an estate valued at £9 billion. No inheritance tax is to be levied on the estate

A "mottley crew" is a term coined during the period in which enslaved Africans were rebelling against their oppressors. It refers to a rebel army composed of both black and white people fighting together

Every British citizen has a statutory right to one twelfth of an acre of land to cultivate

The chorus of another of the songs we sang (Song of the Times. 1854) was...

So arise and fight for freedom, the world seems upside down,
They scorn the pauper as a thief in country and in town