Second paragraph of third story (“The Seventh Fanfic”, by Mark Clapham):
This last point was causing Bernice some grief, as she kneeled down holding a multi-tool with various wrench-like arms, trying to work out how to apply it to the twisted front wheel of her bicycle. She had twisted the wheel hitting a bump earlier that day, cutting across rough ground by the Advanced Research Department.
This is at present the last book of Bernice Summerfield stories, looking at her life from school to old age; just seven of them, of which the three standouts for me were “The Bunny’s Curse” by Doris V Sutherland (who I previously knew only for her fannish writing), Simon Guerrier’s “Benny and the Grieving Man” and James Goss’s “The Death of Hope”. Of little use for those who are not already into the continuity, but great fun for those who are. You can get it here.
Compass? A left-wing pressure group rather than a party. They started off about a dozen years ago as a collection of disillusioned Blairites who then moved fairly sharply to the left within the Labour Party and now seem to have become at least semi-detached from it. Their website is at http://www.compassonline.org.uk
On McKenzie’s article – as a Labour Party member myself, I found myself in almost total disagreement with his analysis. I think I found no more than about three points with which I agreed – in each case for almost the opposite reasons to McKenzie. (Just to say where I’m coming from – I voted for Ed Miliband in the 2010 Labour leadership election and, while he went on to get quite a few things wrong, I still think that he was the best of the available choices. This time round, there don’t seem to be any good available choices in the current leadership election – possibly a rare point of agreement with McKenzie, but in a horrified “stopped clock” way that leaves me feeling as if I had just found a point of agreement with the proprietor of a certain Finnish-domiciled publishing house.)