Harry Stopes

On 24 April 1932 around three hundred ramblers, mostly from Manchester, took part in a mass trespass of private land at Kinder Scout in the Peak District, organised by the British Workers’ Sports Federation (a Communist Party affiliate). ‘Weekends are all that the majority of working lads and girls have to look forward to and live for,’ the Manchester secretary of the BWSF, Bernard Rothman, wrote in the Worker Sportsman a few weeks before. ‘In winter it is [football], but in summer we all go Open Air Mad.’

The plague first came to Marseille on a ship from Spain in 588, forty-seven years after the disease’s appearance in the Eastern Mediterranean marked the beginning of the first pandemic.

The German elections have serious implications for the climate, housing and healthcare. There are major differences between the parties though the campaign materials aren’t always clear about what these are. ‘Berlin: ready for more,’ says a poster for the CDU’s mayoral candidate, Kai Wegner. (More what?) ‘There has never been more to do … let’s grab the future,’ the FDP urges. ‘Olaf Scholz, chancellor for Germany,’ the SPD flatly declares.

‘It’s really a good idea to live in houses and with furniture that are at least a hundred and twenty years old,’ Bertolt Brecht wrote to his publisher in 1953, after he and Helene Weigel had moved into their apartment on Chausseestraße, in the north-west corner of central East Berlin. ‘Let’s say, in early capitalist surroundings until later socialist surroundings are available.’

I became a Manchester City fan out of principle, or contrariness. Most of the other boys at my infant school were United fans. ‘City are rubbish,’ they said. ‘No one likes City.’ After a couple of years I managed to persuade my dad – a South African with no interest in English football – to take me to a match. It was 12 December 1994 and we lost 2-1 to Arsenal. I don’t remember much about the football. I noticed the parking signs on the lampposts with distinct rules for ‘First Team Match Days’. Men were shouting and singing in the street. Football meant that the normal rules and habits of behaviour didn’t apply.