Derelict Uncle Monty-esque farmhouse in the countryside of the Lake District National Park World Heritage Site for sale for a staggering sum
Described as “one of the most stunning sites in the Lake District National Park” by selling agents Michael C. L. Hodgson, the Hard Crag farmstead above High Brow Edge at Backbarrow in Cumbria has gone on sale for £795,000 ($1 million, €889,000 or درهم3.8 million) in spite of being nothing but an utter wreck.
Unusual in that it was built high on a hillside rather than in a valley in the 17th century and unoccupied since 1954, this ‘yeoman style farmhouse’ with a barn and outbuildings is Grade II listed and on the National Park Authority’s register of Listed Buildings at Risk.
Offered with planning permission for redevelopment, designs for Hard Crag envision the creation of a parlour, snug, dining kitchen, utility room and guest bedroom suite with wet room to the ground floor and a sitting room with a raised platform and a master bedroom suite with a dressing room and bathroom to the first floor.
Surrounded by 36 acres of land that includes pasture, grazing, meadows, a tarn and rocky outcrop features, what sets this property apart are its views to Consiston, Scafell and the Langdales.
Though presently akin to Uncle Monty’s cottage in the cult film Withnail & I in its present condition, Hard Crag will most certainly once again soon be a truly fine home.
Matthew Steeples launches a Change.org petition calling on ITV1 to ‘Axe Loose Women’ in the wake of the tawdry show’s latest scandal
Further to his article yesterday suggesting ITV1 cease airing their tasteless daytime chat show Loose Women, Matthew Steeples started a Change.org petition calling on the channel to action just such.
Justifying his decision to start the AXE LOOSE WOMEN petition, Steeples posted:
ITV1’s ‘Loose Women’ celebrates all that is toxic about womankind.
Their latest debacle, involving Coleen Nolan making Kim Woodburn cry on air, is indicative of how low this show stoops.
On another occasion Judy Finnigan suggested the convicted rapist Ched Evans deserved to be allowed to return to playing football.
There have been plenty of other examples involving Katie Price, Gloria Hunniford and Linda Robson that simply provide illustration of how tawdry this programme – screened when mothers are surely watching with young children – is.
“Famously haunted” Chelsea townhouse once home to ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and ‘A-Hunting We Will Go’ composer Thomas Arne and later Shakespearean actress Dame Ellen Terry for sale
Spread over five floors and extending to 3,179 square foot, the renovated Georgian property provides 3 reception rooms, a vast dining kitchen created out of a former artists’ studio space, 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms. It has a garden to the front and a courtyard also.
Dame Ellen Terry and Thomas Arne
Though only briefly home to Thomas Arne – a Roman Catholic and Freemason best known for both Rule, Britannia! and A-Hunting We Will Go – in 1771, actress Dame Ellen Terry lived in 215 Kings Road from 1904 to 1920. It is reported that her possessions there were sold off in 1921 as part of “an attempt to fend off bankruptcy” and of it, a newspaper article titled ‘The Ghosts of Ellen Terry’ reported:
“Surely civilisation was never responsible for the invention of the auction sale. It is such a heartless proceeding. Even a barbarian chief, waving a fierce spear, could not look more relentless than the auctioneer with the dull thud of his cruel little hammer. And surely no barbaric women with palm-leaves and fuzzed hair ever wore harder expressions than the crowd of modern sisters gathered yesterday in Ellen Terry’s old home in Chelsea, as they watched the exquisite china and other mementos of a great artist whisked off by sharp bidders for ridiculously small sums.”
Knight Frank seek £6.45 million ($8.30 million, €7.15 million or درهم30.47 million) for the now “famously haunted” freehold house.
Matthew Steeples suggests enough is enough after ‘Loose Women’s’ latest scandal; ITV should scrap this repugnantly gross TV show
I’ve always thought Loose Women to be nothing but gross – and in fact have even suggested there should be a male counterpoint titled Misogynist Men. Featuring an ageing bunch of blabbermouths, this lunchtime ‘chat show’ is about pandering to the lowest common denominator and allowing a set of ‘brash birds’ to ogle younger men and relive tales of their frankly unappealingly gross sex lives.
Frequented by such has-beens as the ‘Inglorious’ apologist for Cliff Richard, Gloria Huninford, and the cackling cat Linda Robson, Loose Women stooped to a new low last week when Coleen Nolan made fellow panellist Kim Woodburn cry and caused her to storm off the set.
In response, in her “only interview” on the incident, publicity seeking Coleen Nolan told the Mirror: “Anyone that knows me knows I’m not a bully. That would be the most hurtful thing people could call me.”
Returning fire on Twitter, Woodburn stated:
“Those Nolan sisters are just like the mafia, cross them and the mob are after you… fortunately I won’t let them break me, I’m much stronger than that! #loosewomen”
Going further, in an interview with The Sun, the former How Clean Is Your House star added:
“I was ambushed, it was disgusting. It was like a circus and I was there for some cruel entertainment. I want Coleen and her sister fired.”
“They could have stopped that show. The one who had the ear mic could have stopped it. But they did nothing to curb it.”
“I do go at people if they go for me. I hope I never live to see the day when a human being in her 50s and her sister could mock a lady sobbing on TV.”
“They should not be on that show. And I will do all I can to get them off it.”
Ofcom have received over 7,000 complaints about this debacle. They should investigate and ITV should do the decent thing: They should lose the Loose Women for once and for good.
Sign a petition to have Coleen Nolan fired by clicking here.
Former Kensington MP Lady Borwick returns to the fray and is branded a #FearlessPillarOfTheCommunity in spite of her bizarre comments linking the Grenfell Tower tragedy and gangs
“Triple dipper” – branded as such because at one time she was paid nearly £100,000 of public money per year as a councillor, Member of Parliament and member of the London Assembly concurrently – Lady Borwick has now bizarrely branded #FearlessPillarOfTheCommunity on Instagram.
No doubt part of an attempt to resurrect her deservedly dented public profile, this former MP for Kensington – once one of the safest Tory seats in the land and a place where previously even a pig in a blue rosette would have easily won – Lady Borwick most recently was criticised for describing survivors of the Grenfell Tower as “rather like gangs.”
Lady Borwick is, given the evidence, out of touch with the modern electoral landscape and if the Conservative Party are to have any chance of electoral success in Kensington again, they should jolly well send her off back to a safe space where she can happily “tinkle on [her beloved] ivories” in peace.
Competition to win a Knightsbridge flat for £10 per ticket neglects to mention its former occupier, a convicted ‘gay sex plot’ royal blackmailer who died in 2016
Increasingly, with sellers unable to offload prime properties due to Theresa May’s inability to secure any kind of Brexit deal and the ongoing effects of former Chancellor George Osborne’s increases to stamp duty, those with luxury flats and houses are turning to raffling them.
An example of such comes in in the form of a ground and first floor maisonette on the corner of Walton Street and Beauchamp Place in London’s Knightsbridge. Extending to 1,063 square foot and including a large reception room, 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, the aforementioned fully furnished property is ambitiously being touted as being worth £3.2 million in spite of having sold for just £1.4 million in 2007 and £575,000 in 2000.
The ground floor sitting room of the flat; the property has been marketed for rental at a price of £2,750 per week in times pastBisexual ‘royal blackmailer’ Ian Strachan lived in the flat for a period following his release from jail
Now marketed in a competition by a company named Your Laddr – run by a former Alexander McQueen merchandiser named Santa Agolli – for £10 a ticket, Flat 1 at 132 Walton Street, SW3 is being promoted without mention of one of its most recent occupants, a controversial and now deceased ‘royal blackmailer’ who’d sought £50,000 for a set of recordings from various national newspapers in 2007.
Tried under the name of Paul Aðalsteinsson (other aliases included Paul Adalsteinsson, Paul Stein and Charles Goldstein), Grimsby trawlerman’s son turned “playboy” Ian Strachan lived at 132 Walton Street after being released following serving a sentence of five years for a gay sex blackmail plot against an unnamed, married member of the royal family. He subsequently had his left leg amputated following a 30-foot fall from a balcony in Imperial Wharf, SW6 in 2013 and then spent 10 months in jail in Dubai in 2015 after crashing an Audi R8. He died aged just 40 of a drug overdose in South Kensington on Christmas Eve 2016.
The winner of Flat 132, Walton Street will have their stamp duty, legal fees and council tax for one year paid as part of the prize. In addition, they will be ‘given’ a 2017 Jeep Wrangler Black Hawk with 800 miles on the clock, a cash amount of upto £4,000 to cover insurance for one year and a cash payment to cover a Kensington and Chelsea parking permit for one year also. Hopefully they’ll have better luck than the tragic Mr Strachan; may he rest in peace.
August 2018 – Prize draw remains open indicating that ticket sales must be rather slow.
December 2017 – Offered in a raffle for £10 per ticket with a minimum of 380,000 tickets needed to be sold. This would equate to a return of£3.8 million ($4.9 million, €4.2 million or درهم17.9 million) in ticket sales.
November 2007 – Sold for £1.436 million ($1.845 million, €1.581 million or درهم6.776 million).
October 2000 – Sold for £575,000 ($739,000, €633,000 or درهم2.713 million).
Advert for a Quooker boiling-water tap featuring a child in pyjamas using it was plainly the choice of a deranged marketing executive
Priced at between £1,150 and £1,600 depending on specification, a Quooker boiling-water tap with a flexible pull-out hose is anything but cheap but an advert for it, also, is anything but appropriate.
Though promoted as “extremely safe,” the marketing executive who came up with the advert for the product truly must have been on acid. It features a child in pyjamas perilously perched on something that allows him to reach the Quooker Flex. He is pictured squirting the hose into six glasses already filled with some kind of no doubt unhealthy sugary drink.
Produced between 1923 and 1939, Austin Sevens were a huge success because they were “simply constructed, economical and easily maintained by the home mechanic.” They “brought motoring within the financial reach of the man in the street” and by the time production ceased, over 290,000 had been made.
The canary yellow car to be offered was purchased by the current owner in 2013 and restored between 2015 and 2017 at an additional cost of £20,000 ($25,700, €22,100 or درهم94,300). It features a rebuilt engine, gearbox, front and rear axels, steering and brakes and has been driven just 400 miles since recommissioning.
An estimate of £19,000 to £25,000 ($24,400 to $32,100, €21,000 to €27,600 or درهم89,600 to درهم117,900) has been set for this little beauty. What better way could one think to take to the open road?
One-of-a-kind “big caravan-house” with patio on the roof for sale for £30,000; the current owner bought it for just £1 and spent £70,000 restoring it
Believed to be the last remaining example of 99 originally made, a “revolutionary” hammer finished aluminium caravan named a Berkeley Statesman has gone on sale.
Costing £1,065 when new in 1951 – the same price as a terrace house – and rebuilt at great expense by its current owner Tim Mitchinson after he found it hidden on a farm in Bedfordshire in 2004, the two-floor structure is described as being “a wonderful piece of history lovingly restored to its former glory.”
The 22-foot long by 12-foot high caravan features a living and dining area, a 1950s style kitchen with a range of appliances, two bedrooms capable of sleeping four and a shower room complete with a modern shower and an ingenious sink from an old railway carriage.
An advert for the Berkeley Statesman following its launch at the Earl’s Court Motor Show in 1951On occasions, Berkeley Statesman caravans have known to take to racetracks
Of it, Mitchinson told the Discovery Channel:
“I thought it so ugly it, it had to be mine… [Restoring it was an] exercise in insanity… But it [is] absolutely unique… She arrived on the back of a lorry and I thought: ‘We’ll have a go.’ … A beautiful silver phoenix… It’s been blood, sweat and tears… A remarkable restoration.”
“I need to sell it so [my] house can be extended but I will miss it terribly. I am really proud of rescuing what is a valuable piece of social history.”
Estate agents RM English are marketing the Berkeley Statesman for just £30,000 ($38,500, €33,200 or درهم141,500) and point out that it is currently located in the centre of York. They add: “It will need to be transported off-site by a low loader trailer.”
Whackjob Wetherspoons owner Tim Martin has followed up on banning foreign booze including Moët & Chandon and now banned dogs from his entire chain of pubs
Pro-Brexit publican Tim Martin has landed himself quite literally in dogshit.
According to a report in Friday’s Mirror, Martin’s pub chain, Wetherspoon, will ban dogs from both the inside and outside areas of his 880 pubs from Monday 10th September 2018. The reason? “The group’s hard-working staff had grown tired of picking up poop.”
Back in June, this king of ‘making a dog’s dinner of it’ scored another own goal when he banned European alcohol such as Moët & Chandon champagne from his premises also. At the time, this multi-millionaire commented: “The EU’s customs union is a protectionist system which is widely misunderstood. The products we are now introducing are at lower prices than the EU products they are replacing.”
In April, plainly showing how much he likes to ban things, Martin ordered his staff to delete all the firm’s social media profiles. Whatever next? Will he ban his very own customers?
