Latest news with #Chesterton
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
Police make arrest and seize car on North Staffordshire street
Police have seized a car on a North Staffordshire street. The vehicle was towed away after being discovered on Hogarth Place, in Chesterton. A man has been arrested in connection with the investigation. A Staffordshire Police spokesman said: "The county proactive and rural crime team have seized a vehicle on Hogarth Place following the discovery of approximately 50kg of suspected stolen three-phase copper cable concealed in the rear compartment. A 57-year-old man is currently under investigation on suspicion of handling stolen goods." READ MORE: Scene of devastation as car ploughs into Stoke-on-Trent kebab shop READ MORE: Neighbours at war as tarmac row sees shopkeeper install car park barrier Anyone with any information about the suspected theft can call the police on 101 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555111. Sign up for the latest breaking news and top stories from StokeonTrentLive on WhatsApp
Spectator
4 days ago
- Spectator
English? Middle class? Welcome to the Costa del Boden
It was when I saw two other women wearing the same red-and-white-striped Boden swimming costume as me that I realised what I had become. Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have been seen dead on a beach in Salcombe in a Boden swimming costume. I would have been topless on a riverbank in Provence, smoking a Gitane and reading Duras. These days, I don't have time to care, and I summon G.K. Chesterton as my guide: 'Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.' I have children, a husband and dogs, and we have come – without really meaning to but by some centrifugal bourgeois force – to the Costa del Boden for our summer holiday. In short, we appear to be in favour of the fence. Where? Has yummy-mummy clothes-retailer Jonny Boden bought up part of the English coastline? Well, sort of. The Costa del Boden, otherwise known as the English middle-class coastline, pops up in more than a few places: Salcombe in Devon, Daymer Bay, Polzeath or Rock in Cornwall, Brancaster in Norfolk, and Seaview on the Isle of Wight. It is where the middle to upper classes holiday in this country. These aren't the middle classes the Telegraph writes about, now apparently priced out of their summer break by rising costs. Neither are they the net-zero middle classes who seek sustainable alternatives to overseas travel. No, these are the moneyed bourgeoisie who routinely spend at least a month of the summer on the English coast before heading to Corfu or France for a jolly in August. At any one of the yacht clubs, status is earned through routine longevity: if you have been coming for 'donkeys yahhs', so much the better. You'll also know everyone you run into – which is all any Sloane really wants; forget cultural exchange or the strange, salty nature of the Continent. All in all, robust, weather-beaten, 'Granny had a house here' boat-y top trumps is the thing. But one hardly needs to be robust to enjoy the Costa del Boden. It's all cloyingly lovely – too lovely, in fact. This isn't the risky carnival of Punch and Judy, the pier or, heaven forbid, dry sand. Far from it. At North Sands or Bantham Beach in Devon, the shoreline is jammed with labradors chasing tennis balls while mothers hare after little Ludos or Harrys togged out in – you guessed it – Boden long-sleeved swimsuits. Conversations I overheard while chasing my own little darling seemed to orbit around commuting, the merits of Bridie and Bert towels and VAT. If you fancy something to eat, you can have artisan pizza by the beach – sponsored, apparently, by Vivobarefoot-trainer tycoon Galahad Clark – or pick up a cortado from the coffee van (no cash, please, begs the sign). In Salcombe, bucket-and-spade shops have made way for an avalanche of boutiques designed to lure in the discerning middle-class female shopper; the brands With Nothing Underneath and Busby and Fox were doing a roaring trade when I stopped in for the briefest of rummages. Of course, if your children are older, the Costa del Boden is all about rummaging – or rather frisking. One friend, a regular on the Costa del Boden's Polzeath strip of coastline, tells tales of public-school teenagers – 'mainly Stowe, Radley and Marlborough, to be frank' – prowling the beach after dark 'like penguins' while their parents drink rosé until 'the police turn the floodlights on at midnight like magic nannies'. 'It's teen mecca,' another friend sighs, adding that Daymer Bay, where the Camerons have a house, is 'still sweet', but 'the teenagers just want to be where they know everyone from school'. All anyone wants, it seems, is to have a jolly good, socially cordoned-off, PLU time, whether procured with a fake ID or not. Ah, identity – that old conundrum. I got to thinking about it, as Carrie Bradshaw would have said, during my week on the Costa del Boden. I thought about how I must have appeared to others in my Boden swimming costumes and Aspiga dresses: invisible death by batik print and nautical stripe. I thought about how strong and persistent the desire to blend in is – and how brightly that desire burns in my seven-year-old daughter's eyes. But I shan't be sad. Chesterton wasn't, after all; he knew that fences were put up for a reason, and that nobody has a good time until someone is excluded. The Costa del Boden, erected to keep others out and let the right sort in, is surely the fence of which he speaks.
Spectator
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Henry VIII turned England upside down
Henry VIII, who was born on this day in 1509, is the only English monarch other than William the Conqueror who can claim to have destroyed a society and replaced it with a new one. Catholic apologists like Chesterton are right to see in the Henry VIII saga a sort of secular apocalypse; it was, in Chesterton's words, the 'dissolution of the whole of the old civilisation'. The new England that grew up in its place – by Henry's unwitting patronage – was alien, denatured, dislocating, and altogether more worthwhile than the one that had gone before it. The story of Henry VIII's is the story of an eccentric clique capturing society and recasting it in its own image. From 1529-47 nearly all of England's historic institutions were destroyed. All the things that had given life its shape and meaning were junked: the monasteries torn down and their assets made off with; guilds suppressed; commons enclosed (a fitful attempt by Cardinal Wolsey to reverse this notwithstanding); old customary rights stamped out; the cosmopolitan link to Europe severed. The old mediaeval learning was torn up by its roots and the universities refounded in the study of the Classics. It was England's version of Jacobinism. English society became a series of regulated games in which the prizes were glory and renown But unlike Jacobinism, Henry-ism had no popular backing to speak of. One man's ego; a handful of religious extremists; a few dodgy Giulliani-esque attorneys. These were sufficient to turn the world upside down. Everything that happened in those years happened in the face of settled custom, settled opinion, so-called common sense. The forces that would dominate English life for the next 400 years – Hellenic revival and religious radicalism – were alien ones, the preserve of this small Henrician circle. The reign of Henry VIII was about the conquest of reality by dreams. The England that it gave rise to would recognise no limits but the limits of its own whimsy. The most cherished of these whimsies was Hellenism. Henry VIII's new grammar schools and his reformed universities created a governing elite that looked more to classical Greece and Rome than to the society around them. This is something that went well beyond 'revival' – what took place after 1509 amounted to the splicing of England with the classical world. Later figures like Byron, Charles James Fox, or Alan Clark are unexplainable unless we account for the shrewd paganism that's prevailed in the national psyche since Henry's reign. Grecian stone urns in the badlands of Northumberland, Temples to Venus in Stowe: these were the physical symbols of an alien civilisation being grafted onto the old one. British people were still exclaiming the name Jove at the end of the twentieth century. There are now all kinds of debates about what Britishness really means: 'pretending to be Greek' is probably the best answer. Another cadge from ancient Greece was the spirit of agon – competition. Mediaeval English society was a web of mutual obligations in which everyone had a place. Henricianism destroyed this and replaced it with a competitive free-for-all. Much like classical Greece, English society became a series of regulated games in which the prizes were glory and renown. The England that Henry VIII created was the first to adopt school entrance exams, stock exchanges, adversarial lawyering, markets. It would also invent the Queensberry Rules, along with most of the world's sports. What all these have in common is that they're made-up conflicts regulated by intricate sets of rules and codes of honour. Westminster became the most dazzling game of all. Henry VIII's reign saw the beginning of the process by which parliament was transformed from a boring Diet of burghers into an arena for people's ambitions. As Lewis Namier tells us, by the 18th century, people came to parliament not to represent interests but to cut a figure. Westminster, too, now accepted no limit on its powers of creative invention. The middle ages, viewed one way, was a series of interminable legal disputes between kings, barons and the Church over their rights and the proper scope of authority. The Statute in Restraint of Appeals (1532) called time on all this. In establishing parliamentary sovereignty, it declared that life would no longer turn on precedent-scraping and wrangling over fixed 'rights' that seemed to come from nowhere; that we might, instead, debate and decide things on their merits, revealed to us through reason. The Statute in its full meaning was a thunderclap from the heavens: one of the great triumphs of the human spirit. The social order Henry created had to make unprecedented concessions to talent. Jacob Burkhardt tells us that the tyrants of Renaissance Italy, being illegitimate, could not rely on the church or the aristocracy to help them and had to instead turn to talented individuals of humble origin. Henry faced a similar dilemma: his claim to the English throne was shaky and the break with Rome had made him an international outlaw. It was this isolation that gave rise to 'new men' like Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley, Richard Rich, William Paget, and – in the reign of Elizabeth – William Cecil. What began as a temporary expedient soon became a permanent part of the social system. For the next several centuries anyone who was good at their job in England was simply ennobled and made part of the Establishment. With this act, Henry VIII set off the primordial conflict between the 'new men' and the old aristocracy that would shape the country's history for the next 300 years. After the fall of the Pittite regime – the last great flowering of the new men – the cabinet of the Earl Gray (the most blue-blooded in living memory) would pass the Reform Bill of 1832 as a means to finally flush out their old class enemy, birthing liberal democracy in Britain largely out of spite. Amid all this, Henry seems like a man out of time, eerily out of place in his own age. He appears to us as a Subjective Man of the 19th century – full of introspection, rumination, and self-reproach. In him we can see all the defining traits of a modern person. The capacity for romantic love. The prickly amour-propre. The consuming neediness. Henry is familiar to us in a way that the Sun King Louis XIV – who lived 150 years later – is not. When Henry VIII came to the throne, England was a normal European country. By 1700 it was a lunar landscape: its countryside a work of complete artifice, with shaped topiaries, carved hedges and artificial lakes; blasted heaths created by deforestation; farmers replaced with sheep by Act of Parliament; dotted everywhere with imitation Greco-Roman temples. Its neighbours thought its people were dangerous lunatics and had only recently ceased to treat it as a rogue state. By pure will, England had been made as remote and peripheral to the continent as Russia. Does the England that Henry VIII created still exist? The grammar schools have largely been abolished and the last of England's pagan virtues were exorcised by New Labour. The country is once again ruled by dull landowners who believe in human rights. One part remains. Parliamentary sovereignty – the master-mechanism of Henry's system – is still in operation. If the English people should ever tire of their 'Rolls Royce' institutions, their fixed international obligations, or what's being demanded of them in the name of human rights, then they, uniquely in the western world, have the ready means to change them. It'll be there to hand – should the English ever want to turn the world upside down again. The idea that we can examine the values and systems by which we're ruled, find them wanting, and choose different ones; or, really, the idea that the world belongs to the living. That is Henry's ultimate bequest.
CBS News
19-06-2025
- CBS News
Indiana man died of suicide during shootout with police in Chesterton, autopsy finds
A man shot himself in the head during an exchange of gunfire with police Wednesday morning outside a hotel in Chesterton, Indiana, an autopsy determined on Thursday. The Porter County Coroner's Office said 45-year-old Joseph Gerber, of Winamac, Indiana, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and his death was deemed a suicide. An autopsy revealed he also suffered multiple other gunshot wounds. Shortly after 8 a.m. Wednesday, Chesterton police were called to the Hilton Garden Inn to investigate a complaint about a suspicious person at the hotel who was not a guest, according to Indiana State Police. Chesterton Police Chief Tim Richardson said, when two officers arrived at the scene, they had an interaction with Gerber, leading to an exchange of gunfire between Gerber and police. Gerber was killed, and a 33-year-old officer also was shot, and was taken to an Illinois hospital for treatment. Richardson said the officer's prognosis is good. "Our thoughts are with the officer and his family. They are most important to us right now," he said. Indiana State Police were investigating the shootout, and once the investigation is completed, police will turn over their findings to the Porter County Prosecutor's Office for review. If you or someone you know is concerned about suicide, you can contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 24/7 by dialing 988. You can also reach the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, or go here to online chat. More helpful resources can be found here.
CBS News
18-06-2025
- CBS News
Chesterton, Indiana police shooting under investigation by state police
Indiana State Police are investigating a shooting by a police officer in Chesterton Friday morning. State police posted on social media that they are investigating an officer-involved shooting near State Road 49 and the Indiana Toll Road as of shortly after 10 a.m. No further details were immediately offered by state police, though they said they would be releasing more information in a news conference in the near future. How many people were involved in the incident was not immediately known, nor was information about injuries to either civilians or officers. This is a developing story. Check back with CBS News Chicago for updates.
