Danskcolin: Wednesday February 4th 2026 "Hold the front page! White House legal team strengthened!"

Yes, Friends, the White House's legal team has been bolstered by a succession of new hirings, which should be good news for the Western World in general, people are saying!

Onion News has more....

the White House's new-hire lawyer, TV fan Ron Farkus

Those were the days! Oh those 1990's, when actress Callista Flockhart was on our "tellies" every week, winning cases as budding US lawyer "Ally McBeal"!

And reading the story this morning brings a nostalgic grin to about an inch below the noses of me and my wife Lois, here in semi-suburban Liphook, Hampshire, that's for sure!

my wife Lois and me - a recent picture

Back in the 1990's, our elder daughter Alison, then studying history and Italian at Cardiff, had already met her future husband Edward, who was studying law there. And Edward, as a budding lawyer himself, was already a big fan of the Ally McBeal series. "That's how it's done!", he used to say, explaining that the US legal system was not really very different in many ways, essentially, from ours - "Ally McBeal is almost 100% Magna Carta, but without the wigs" (!), as he used to say with a laugh (!).

flashback to 1996: our elder daughter Alison, Cardiff University student,

seen here with her future husband Edward, a trainee lawyer

Lois and I, also, used to love watching Ally McBeal, back in the 1990's, but not so much for the "legal mumbo-jumbo" (!), as for the "ever-shifting love triangles and the recurring dancing babies", which White House new-hire Farkus also remembers so fondly!

Despite this experience "under our belts" (!), Lois and I find ourselves this Wednesday morning, in a village hall in Fittleworth, West Sussex, with about 300 other "old codgers", trying to cope with some "love triangles" even more complicated than Ally McBeal's, would you believe !!!!

The Village Hall, Fittleworth, West Sussex, where Lois and I

join about 300 other "old codgers" for a talk organised

by the Arts Society of the South Downs, no less (!)

Yes, you may have guessed! We're listening to a talk about the famous "Bloomsbury Group" of intellectuals, Virginia Woolf and co, also painters Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington, who bestrode the UK literary and artistic scene for decades, before even Lois and I were born, which tells you something about how long ago it was !!!!

And the Bloomsbury Group's "love triangles" were way more complicated than Ally McBeal's - mainly because most of them were bisexual, so Lois and I are finding it even harder to remember "who's screwing who" at any given moment, that's for sure !!!!

(top right) 300 local "old codgers" scramble for seats in Fittleworth Village Hall,

as (bottom right) speaker Alan Read begins his talk on Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington

Of the Bloomsbury group, US writer, critic and satirist Dorothy Parker famous said that they "lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles".

What madness it all was, wasn't it!

And, even after speaker Alan Reid's comprehensive and entertaining talk with slides, Lois and I are still not 100% sure "who was screwing who", or even "who was painting who" (!), at any given moment (!). So when we get home to Liphook, we waste not time, and immediately order, on Amazon, the DVD of Emma Thompson's 1995 film version of Carrington's life, which should arrive next week.

Speaker Alan Reid, in this talk this morning, had confessed that he was "Emma Thompson's biggest fan". He had been fortunate enough to meet her personally, he said, at what he called "some hoity-toity literary function of other "(!). He had asked Thompson for her autograph, but neither of them had had a pen on them, so, instead, she decided to bite his business card, leaving an authentic impression of her teeth, which Reid still regards as "a second-best, at most".

Poor Reid !!!!!

After the talk, Lois had gone up and spoken to Reid on the stage, to tell him that Dora Carrington had also spent some time in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, something that Reid apparently hadn't known about.

Dora had spent some time living with her mum Charlotte Carrington, just six houses up the road from where Lois and I had later lived for 36 years, on the Prestbury Road. Lois also told him about Dora's rather unkind comment about her mother, that she was "as vulgar and tiresome as Mrs Bennett in Pride and Prejudice", so Reid may be including that somewhat revealing "snippet" in his future talks about Dora Carrington - so watch this space!

flashback to 1986: the house Lois and I lived in in Cheltenham,

with our two daughters Alison (11) and Sarah (9) in their then school uniforms,

and (right) an excerpt from the Prestbury Visitor's Guide

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!

21:00 The Bloomsbury Group, however, although "thick" with artists and writers, was short of scientists, for some reason!

So Lois and I remedy that "anti-science bias", to some extent tonight (!), when we watch the latest programme in Alice Roberts' new series of "Digging for Britain", which gives a digest of the most significant archaeological news from excavations carried out in the UK during 2025.

For this programme in the series, presenters Alice Robert and Tori Herridge are in central Britain, and one of the excavations they report on is centred on the old farmstead in Lincolnshire, where physicist Isaac Newton was born and raised.

Isaac Newton's father was a local sheep farmer, but he died before Isaac was born. When Isaac was 3 years old, his mum Hannah remarried, leaving little Isaac to be raised by his grandparents. Later, widowed again, she returned to the original farmhouse and had it refurbished. The house has long since disappeared, but now a team from York University and the National Trust is excavating it.

When Isaac was 17, Hannah wanted him to start running the estate and the sheep farm for her, but his performance in this role was a total disaster, apparently. He left the sheep unattended, and he even forgot his horse when he travelled to Grantham, leaving it behind somewhere on his way home, he "wasn't quite sure" (!).

It was this that made his mum Hannah realised that sheep farming wasn't Isaac's destiny, to put it mildly! He was already far too busy making models of windmills and making water clocks, and just trying to discover more and more about the world around him. So eventually she gave up trying to turn him into a sheep farmer, which, on reflection, was probably for the best (!). And it was his old mum who set him on the road to a lifetime in the world of science.

The archaeologists working here in Lincolnshire have dug up a number of finds giving a picture of life in the farmstead when young Isaac was growing up.

Also, we can see from the record of Isaac's mother Hannah Smith's will, that she was a very capable and savvy woman, who, despite being widowed twice, built up an surprisingly high income from money-lending, which enabled her to extend the farmstead, as well as passing on substantial bequests to her children, not just to Isaac but to his sisters too.

And Lois comments that, after the 16th and 17th centuries until the mid-20th century, it slowly became harder, rather than easier, for women to act independently of husbands or father in the financial world, and they were eventually prevented from taking out mortgages and carrying out other business dealings altogether.

What madness!!

What a woman! And, although of humble origins, Hannah Smith eventually became very wealthy and able to lay out sums of £1400 to purchase land and property, which would be a million in today's money, and then pass on her holdings to her children.

So, behind every great scientist there lies a hard-working mum - in this case at least! And isn't it obvious that Isaac also inherited also a lot of his mother's determination?