Daily catch-up: old London under construction, with no counterweights
Plus: the Labour leader’s big test tomorrow – ‘haffely, gaffely, gaffely gonward’
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Your support makes all the difference.Another great picture of old London: Tower Bridge being built in about 1890, via The East End. The spans of the bridge creep closer together, unsupported and with no counterweights. I had always assumed that the slopes from the towers to the shore were built first.
• It is the Labour leader's big speech tomorrow. For once, the weight of expectation is justified. It will be hard to get right, as I wrote in The Independent on Sunday yesterday, but his performance with Andrew Marr, albeit under not-very-probing questioning (video and transcript), showed he can do unruffled reasonableness well.
• I also contributed to a report for The Independent on Sunday of Fabian Society research that noted the gap in voting behaviour between the old (65 plus) and the young (under 35s) was much wider in this year's election than in the previous three.
• Also in The Independent on Sunday, Jane Merrick met Derek Hatton, someone she has hated for 30 years, since he hired a taxi to scuttle around a city to make her mother redundant. And Simmy Richman is very good on imitation Mr People, and on Chris Eubank Jnr's response to online racist abuse.
• Quiz question: which country is named after a woman? Legspinner offered Jordan, but the real answer is given by Haggard Hawks, with a couple of possible bonus answers.
• The Top 10 in The New Review, the Independent on Sunday magazine, is Mondegreens (so named from a childhood mishearing of 'They have slain the Earl o'Moray/ And laid him on the green' as 'And Lady Mondegreen', from the traditional ballad 'The Bonny Earl of Murray', admitted to by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Harper's Bazaar article). Sam Korn looked up some more examples, and says he has been laughing at "haffely, gaffely, gaffely gonward" ever since.
• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain for this:
“Currys? Ridiculous. That’s like calling your tandoori house ‘Electrical Goods’. The staff were understanding though, toasted me a sandwich.”
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