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145/365: Working boat Swilgate, Kidderminster
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Well okay, their banks do. Another picture from the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal today, though this one was taken on the outskirts of Kidderminster rather than in Stourport. Most narrowboats these days are pleasure cruisers, but there are also a relatively small number of working boats. This one, Swilgate -- named after a minor Gloucestershire tributary of the River Severn -- was being used to support grass-cutting and hedge-trimming operations beside the canal. You can see the section used to store the cuttings at the rear (though that's actually the front, as the boat is travelling away from the camera). It probably doesn't look it from this picture, but it's only a few minutes' walk to Kidderminster town centre from here.

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144/365: Outdoor tables, Severnside South, Bewdley
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Fantastic Test victory over India today! I must admit, I was among the many yelling at Ben Stokes over choosing to field after winning the toss, but I can't argue with the outcome. It wasn't a classic test of bat and ball as apart from Bumrah in the first innings there wasn't much to write home about with either side's bowling attack. Still, you can only beat what's put in front of you -- and we did. Test cricket may be struggling in global terms, but England v India is generally worth watching. For once, "England bat deep" actually mattered, and India's tail folding in the second innings was what kept England's target reachable. A proper five-Test series this year, so what a way to start off!

The Iranian theocracy is a bloody terrible regime that executes huge numbers; disappears, tortures and otherwise oppresses its citizens; and is no kind of heroic state, regardless of what one may think of Israel or the US. I have no more time for the kind of protestor who actively supports Khamenei and his ilk than I do for the kind who decades ago used to portray Stalin as a goodie purely because he was an enemy of the Americans. I suspect more than a few of these idiots think supporting Iran is showing some kind of pan-Arab solidarity with Palestine. Newsflash to those guys: Iranians are not even Arabs.

In everyday news, I arranged my diabetes review today, which as usual with my local practice was a quick and painless operation. For those who aren't aware of how these things work, every six months I have a blood and urine test, and a face-to-face meeting with a specialist nurse, to see how I'm managing. Every other meeting, ie annually, I have a more detailed appointment which includes things like a comprehensive foot health check. It's that which I've now booked for next month. As for today's photo, it's not that interesting but I didn't get anything better. Some pub and café tables on Severnside South in Bewdley.

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...is that I am just starting to pick up (and I mean myself, not just reading about it in the press) a significant backlash against the sheer volume of student accommodation being built in towns and cities. I think most people accept that a large student population brings various benefits. But drawbacks too. Most students (outside London, at least) have cars now, and so both congestion and parking issues get noticeably worse. People resent being unable to buy a house or even a flat at a vaguely affordable price when hundreds or even thousands of extra students are being provided for. Some shopping centres are being cleared out for yet more space for student flats. In some cases student accommodation is at least partially exempt from rules that apply to normal residential, such as the (admittedly inadequate) ones on affordable housing. The number of foreign students is now vastly higher than 20 years ago. There's a sense in many places that the towns and cities they live in won't see much benefit as those with high-value degrees will go off to London or abroad. "It generates money for the economy" feels hollow if it's spent somewhere else.

This isn't to say that people don't understand the benefits of having a significant student population in a town. I think most people do, and sometimes (as with the Hive, the large library in Worcester that I wrote about yesterday) there's a clear and obvious benefit to the local community. But I do think we're at the point now where people are beginning to feel that (and this isn't a new complaint by any means) some areas are starting to verge on being a giant student housing quarter with a town attached. I think we could reach a point where some local communities actively don't want more uni growth in their towns. Higher education institutions need to do a lot more, and now not in 10 years' time. Big, serious provision available to the local public -- theatres, say, or leisure centres -- and on a walk-in basis too, not a "we have occasional public events" or "well, if you sign up and pay a membership fee and book a week in advance" basis. Some do -- the Hive succeeds for exactly this reason -- but not enough.

ETA: It's been pointed out in the comments that the increase in student accommodation is not necessarily simply at unis' behest, and that's perfectly fair comment. This is still how quite a few people feel, though. They feel as though another big student block is being prioritised over their run-down shopping centres and swimming pools. It's also true that it's the case that the hollowing out of local government by various Westminster parties in recent decades has had a strongly negative effect, otherwise they would be providing better pools and centres. But what I've recently been picking up, fairly or not, is resentment against the unis themselves, even if that's not altogether fair.

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141/365: Old Woodcolliers Arms, Bewdley
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Another very warm day, but hopefully the last for a little while. Today's 365 photo is not one of the easiest to make out, but I particularly wanted to include it at some point. It's the engraved glass on the front door of what is now a private house but until 2016 was the Woodcolliers Arms pub. What, you may ask, is or was a woodcollier? It's simply another name for a charcoal burner, and until about a hundred years ago charcoal burning was carried on in the nearby Wyre Forest. This pub went through several incarnations in its final years, including a short spell as a Russian-menu gastropub. I never went in it as far as I can remember, though. Just not my kind of place.

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140/365: GWR 1450 on autotrain duties, Bewdley
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For the second day running temperatures here approached 30 °C, but this time it was much cloudier for a lot of the day and so it felt uncomfortably humid. I still went out, though, as I had a ticket booked for the SVR's Supporters Day -- when the railway is open free of charge, but only to people like members (that's me!) and shareholders. The heat sapped me a bit and I didn't do as much as I might have done on a cooler day, but I still had a good time and I still (rather to my surprise) just topped 20,000 steps. The photo is from the SVR today: GWR no. 1450 on autotrain duties. This arrangement allows the locomotive to be controlled from an area at the rear of the train. That leads to the highly distinctive sight seen above: it's not an optical illusion or camera trickery; the engine really is sandwiched between the front and rear coaches.

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137/365: Teddy Gray's sweetshop, Bewdley
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Earlier this month, I posted a picture of a Teddy Gray's van. Today, I'm posting a picture of the sweetshop it was delivering to! This is Teddy Gray's in Bewdley, one of the town's most famous shops. It's right next to the river bridge (just out of shot on the left) and in Load Street, the town's main artery. I don't go in there much these days as sugary sweets aren't the ideal food for diabetics and their ice cream isn't quite the utter bargain it used to be, but I'm always pleased to see it. The shop was opened shortly after WW2 and barring modern hygiene standards and metrication it hasn't changed much, with a sympathetic restoration about 15 years ago. It remains a cash only business, so this is one town where the schoolkids passing by on their way home certainly do not rely entirely on their phones!

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The Casey Report, formally the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, is now available from the .gov.uk website in both PDF and HTML formats. Including notes and references it runs to nearly 200 pages, so I haven't yet read it all, but I shall when I have the time to do so properly. I have looked at the foreword, the executive summary, Baroness Casey's personal note and the bullet-point list of recommendations.

Inevitably the question of ethnicity will dominate the media, and that is addressed. Baroness Casey is very clear that ethnicity data on offenders must be collected, something which at the moment is widely not happening. "Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years" is a direct quote from her foreword (p. 4). Yes, this aspect absolutely will be (and has already been) extensively exploited by far-right racists, but it is not acceptable to use that as an excuse to avoid looking too hard. It's somewhat reminiscent of the reluctance in the past to investigate abuse by Roman Catholic priests in both Britain and Ireland on the grounds that doing so might stir up anti-Catholic sentiment. That was wrong. So has been this.

There are a frightening number of other phrases that jump out even in the portion of the report I have yet read. For example, from Baroness Casey's personal note: she mentions that when she conducted an inspection of Rotherham Council in 2016, Alexis Jay ensured that South Yorkshire Police were removed from oversight of the investigation as they had been "incompetent at best - sometimes turning a blind eye but often actively enabling abuse - and corrupt at worst" (p. 11). The large number of girls¹ who have been actively painted as complicit or even criminal accomplices to their own abuse is terrifying.
¹ And a significantly smaller but still far from zero number of boys.

The Baroness's recommendations will be challenging for politicians, and so they should be.¹ For example, she recommends that the current "two-stage" criminalisation of men having sex with under-16s should be replaced with making rape the standard offence. To avoid criminalising teenagers in relationships with each other, she says a "Romeo and Juliet" (close-in-age) clause should also be introduced. This is pretty much the legal situation in France, barring their age of consent being 15. People in Britain often bandy about the term "statutory rape", but the law at present in this country is not actually as clear as that phrase makes it sound. This recommendation would make it so.
¹ The Home Secretary has said the government will implement them all. I'll believe it when I see it.

Both the last UK government and the current one have behaved terribly on this issue. The Tories did nothing of note to investigate the scandals during their decade in power, yet now pretend it's all Keir Starmer's fault; Labour only recently insisted that those calling for a new statutory inquiry risked "amplifying the far right", yet the PM announced exactly that two days ago. A risk now is that this new inquiry will take so long to report that it will be a convenient way for politicians of all parties to kick any kind of justice for the abused children into the long grass yet again. Look at how compensation for subpostmasters is still being held up by probably deliberate delaying tactics for a recent precedent.

Finally, it is absolutely clear that the legal system in general in this country has been desperately underfunded for years, under governments of various colours. Even serious criminal cases can take ages to come to court, and this emboldens some to think that they can effectively get away with wrong-doing. As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied. The children who have lived with the abuse and its after-effects for years are absolutely reasonable to consider that they have been denied justice. Baroness Casey's report does, and one hopes the new inquiry will, at least acknowledge that -- but they do not remove that failure.

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134/365: Tank destroyer, Kidderminster station
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On my way to Worcester today I noticed this outside Kidderminster station. It's not actually called Thomas, sadly. In spite of my (usually humorous) references to Kidderminster being a place only one step short of being a post-apocalyptic wasteland, this tank¹ had not been placed here to keep the peace. It was actually there as part of the Severn Valley Railway's annual "Back to the 1940s" weekend. Well, the first of two. This has been running for a long time now and is always one of the SVR's busiest events of the year. I'm rather ambivalent about it as I tend to think we go on and on and on about WW2 rather too much in the UK, but I have attended a couple of times and I won't deny that it made for an entertaining few hours.
¹ Technically an M18 Hellcat tank destroyer, but close enough!