Programming note: Please join me tomorrow, Saturday, for another edition of my weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Happy birthday to our fabulous friend, the indomitable Sammy Woodhouse. I know all those Mark Steyn Cruisers who met her off the Iberian Peninsula a few weeks ago will wish her only the best on this great day:
They say life begins at 40 — let's hope so!
Happy birthday to me! 🎂
— Sammy Woodhouse (@officialsammyuk) June 20, 2025
I certainly hope the next forty years are better than so many of the first forty were. Sammy is a uniquely irrepressible spirit. When it comes to victims of England's Muslim paedo rape gangs, I dislike the term "survivor" - because so many of the poor broken girls are barely surviving at all. But Sammy is one of the strongest people I have ever met. Half the time you're talking about things that are depraved and evil, and the other half you're having a grand old time because she's such good company. I have no idea how she does it, because twenty times a day she's being reminded of what she went through. For example, a decade ago, en route to our first meeting, I asked the manager of the Mercure in Sheffield what was the best hotel in Rotherham.
"There's no best hotel in Rotherham," he said. "They're all crap."
"Er, okay. Could you recommend the least crap?"
I took his advice, and, when Sammy and her friend showed up in the lobby for lunch, they casually mentioned - as one might about having once attended a Rotary meeting there - that they'd been raped in that very hotel. The whole rotten town is like that.
I hope by the time Sammy celebrates her half-century that there will have been justice for her and many thousands more.
~Also joining Miss Woodhouse at sea a few weeks back was my former telly comrade Dan Wootton. Dan is a terrific natural broadcaster - and his eviction from GB News was unjust and contemptible: he was one of a handful of people who built that station. If you enjoyed (as many people did) the Steyn/Wootton 9pm handovers, here's kind of an extended edition, as Dan interviews me on the Bay of Biscay about Britain's disastrously micro-regulated media environment:
~As The Mark Steyn Club begins its ninth year, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
