Tales from a Draughty Old Fen

"review of the far-right": the shifting sands of politics

2011-07-26T17:01:00.002+01:00

In the wake of the terrible massacre in Norway, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered a review of the far-right, which is apparently to include the English Defence League.

Things had been going so well: the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph had dropped the "far" tag and started referring to the EDL merely as "right-wing" (although given its predominabtly blue-collar membership a survey of union membership among EDL members might be instructive). The organisation has been steadily winning a better reputation among the police-forces with whom it consults and cooperates before and during demos; and, almost alone, it has shone a searchlight into the shadier corners of Blackpool, where 14-year old Cheryl Downes was groomed for sex, murdered and disemboweled by kebab-shop owners.

Describing other people's politics is often relative to where you are standing. Remember the fall of the Soviet empire, when Russian communists suddenly became right-wingers, in a clear indication that the term was indication of disapproval as opposed to marking a sea-change in Politburo direction?

Just so, Dave Prentis, general secretary of the public trade union Unison, writes that "violent racist attacks and intimidation by the far-right is on the rise in Europe and we must take that threat seriously". However, an "Islamophobia" resource in the union's website gives the game away: "centre-right politicians across Europe pretend that majority cultures are somehow under threat from Muslim minorities" (my italics). for "centre-right", read conservative parties, ie the socialist shibboleth that to be conservative is synonymous with racist, discriminatory and, ultimately, murderous.

I am not against having a debate about the role of right-wing politics in Europe, because debate is necessary for a healthy democracy. I just wonder how we will fare at the hands of, say, the BBC, which at its most centrist is the cultural wing of the Labour Party and extends leftwards from there, to depths from where anywhere to the right of Ed Balls must seem an awfully long way away.

For the record, I wish to quote what Anders Breivik said about the English Defence League. It would turn my stomach to provide a link to the maniac's document - if you need to find it, you can hardly avoid it. On page 1436, he states:

The EDL are in fact anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-Nazi. They even have many members and leaders with non-European background (African and Asian). They have worked so hard, and continue to work hard, to keep National Socialists out of the organization, but yet they are strategically labeled as racist-fascist-Nazi-monsters by the multiculturalist authorities. The EDL, although having noble intentions are in fact dangerously naïve. EDL and KT [the murderer's putative organisation] principles can never be reconciled as we are miles apart ideologically AND organizationally. The EDL even rejects taking a stand against multiculturalism which proves that they are even more naïve than Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron who have all admitted that multiculturalism has been a failure and a disaster for Europe.

...The EDL, on the other hand, IS a democratic movement. They STILL believe that the democratic system can solve Britain’s problems… This is why the EDL harshly condemns any and all revolutionary conservative movements that employ terror as a tool, such as the KT. And this is why, we, the KT view the EDL as naïve fools, wasting all their energy monkeyscreaming to deaf ears while they should instead have focused on means and methods that are meaningful in regards to achieving true political change, in regards to tearing down the multiculturalist regime known as Britain.

I feel sullied for just having quoted him - join the dots yourself. And while you do, if you are in any way counter-hegemonic - a member of the EDL, perhaps, or a home-schooling parent, or a maverick trades-union member who won't tow the party line - keep listening for the midnight knock on the door.

May God be with those who died in Norway, and those left behind.

Cambridge University: agendas clash as Prince Philip steps down

2011-05-29T12:54:00.006+01:00

The Cambridge News' Raymond Brown reports that Abdul Arain, an independent trader on the city's Mill Road, is to stand against Lord Sainsbury for the post of Chancellor of the University of Cambridge when the present incumbent, Prince Philip (right), steps down in June of this year. I wish both men good luck, and hope for a clean campaign.

What worries me is that the contest, which is ostensibly about who will represent the University at official functions, is in reality about the imminent opening of a Sainsbury's store in the old Mickey Flynn's Pool Hall on the thoroughfare.

The reason I'm worried is that we've been here before, in the form of a campaign to keep Tesco out of Mill Road that, while ultimately a failure, released more heat than light in its frantic efforts to exclude an outlet popular with blue-collar workers from the "multicultural" area. It was alleged that shops would close down like dominos should Tesco's open a store there, while in reality far fewer shops have become vacant than you might expect in an economic downturn. You can still buy Rosaries, wigs, hard-core porn and second-hand firearms on Mill Road, just as you could before Tesco opened, just as you will be able to after Sainsbury's opens.

I'm also worried that, as mentioned, the present university Chancellor is Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of the Queen, father to the heir to the throne and grandfather to Prince William, who was recently spectacularly married to the Duchess of Cambridge, aka Kate Middleton. A less desirable claim to fame is that, since 1997, he has been accused of the manslaughter (at least) of Dodi al-Fayed and Princess Diana (right) by Mohammed al-Fayed, whose latest effort in his crusade was the Cannes-panned documentary about the infamous crash in a Paris tunnel, Unlawful Killing. Will Mr Al-Fayyed be able to resist a bit of troublemaking should the Prince's stepping down prove a popular subject in the media?

Mr Arain is Kenyan, which gives him something in common with Barrack Obama, whose father came from the country. A low point of Mr Obama's presidency, which I do not ascribe to him personally, was when former president Jimmy Carter decried Obama's detractors as racists. I hope supporters of both candidates will pull back from using the race-card in this campaign.

Perusing the list of Cambridge University Chancellors evinces an absence of names that are not Norman/Anglo-Saxon in origin. It could be that, since the University attracts the most talented people from all points on the globe, the time for a Chancellor from outside this island nation is overdue. But any candidate should have as his/her first priority the good of the University and its contribution to Cambridge and East Anglia; if there's a place for one shopkeeper to try to stop another from opening nearby, the Chancellorship is not that place. It could be that, in the interest of the University and the region which reaps its benefits, the installation of a Chancellor from further afield may have to be overdue a little longer.

English Defence League: Tommy Robinson on Newsnight

2011-02-02T02:07:00.006Z

I'd like to say a big thank-you to the 20,000 visitors who have visited this site since I had to stop updating it due to time issues.

This isn't a blog I could post at the other place, since it's related to an English Village magazine published by the parish church, therefore I try to keep all politics out of it. As the past year's gone by I've become increasingly aware of the English Defence League (EDL), which was founded in Luton in March 2009, when a group of Muslims protested at a homecoming for the Royal Anglian Regiment.

It was first portrayed as a skinhead group, but it soon became clear that as well as white people it welcomed black people, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, gay people etc who are concerned about the spread of radical Islam in the UK. The EDL has both outlived many obituaries and is about to celebrate its second anniversary in Luton. In the run-up to this, founder Tommy Robinson (left) was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on last-night's Newsnight. Previously in the programme, Paxo appeared at his ease interviewing a Government minister, a Jordanian Prince and a USA acedemic, but seemed considerably discomfited when faced with an angry and determined working-class bloke.

Paxman's career-defining determination to put the BBC first (he famously ended Michael Howard's career by asking the former prisons secretary the same question 12 times because - as he later admitted - his producer was insisting that the next interviewee wasn't ready) showed itself tonight. He reacted incredulously to Robinson's insistence that the problem wasn't Muslims but rather the Koran. Had he researched the subjects likely to come up during the interview, he would have learnt that Muslims reject the Judaeo-Christian convention that holy books, while inspired by God, are written by fallible human beings. Islamic belief is that Muhammed produced series of verses dictated by the Angel Gabriel, and the book of those verses is only the Koran if written in Arabic in the original words.

They may have a point, of course - much of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures have been through more translations than you can shake a stick at and, as Kiwi theologian Revd Bosco Peters states, every translation involves interpretation by the translator. So while we as individuals grow up with a Bible around which our culture has entwined like a second strand of DNA at the hands of generations of translators, the orthodox Islamic view is that not just the message but the words of their scriptures are immutable - and so, say the proponents of Sharia law, are the tenets upon which their immutable society is based.

On another level, Paxo was clearly indignant about Robinson's remarks about Pakistani drug-dealers, insisting his interlocutor join him in affirming that there are white drug-dealers. But again he was missing the point: as drugs-workers and police know but are unable to say in polite society, much (if not most) most of the heroin that enters the UK to be cut and distributed to drug-dealers of all races is brought through Pakistan.

I think everybody knew that Jack Straw would crop up in the conversation. The former Labour Home/Justice Secretary said that there was a particular problem in the Pakistani community whereby men saw young white girls as "easy meat". Paxman refused to deal with Straw's statement, which wasn't surprising - the day it was made, the BBC 10pm news wouldn't touch it. Robinson's summary of the difference between the two men was masterful:

Have you seen people on drugs pushed by Muslims? You might not have, but I have.

Have you seen girls chatted up by Muslim men and put into burqas? You might not, but I have.

Have you seen young girls who've been raped and pimped by Muslim men? You might not, but I have.

Paxman's answer, with which he probably said more than he meant to, was "these are your issues".

These are our issues, and why the demonstration is being held in Luton, where schools of radicalisation has produced to date two known suicide bombers as opposed to the BBC, which stands accused of so many instances of editorial bias towards militant Islam I'll leave you to google it. I can't go to the EDL demonstration in Luton because I'm working, but I hope it goes well. Please read this if you plan to go to the EDL demonstration at Luton on Saturday 5th Feb.

some things get everywhere!

2010-08-02T21:52:00.006+01:00

This is a photo of Maxima at the Cambridge Folk Festival, where there was an unofficial hat competition. She's showing off her new henna tattoo and her hat. As well as the ACROSS badge, I'd like to draw your attention to the little silver feet just to the right of her ear, wedged between the "£1" badge and the part-cut-off Glen Michael's Cartoon Cavalcade badge. These are the famous SPUC Precious Feet, depicting the actual size of an unborn baby's feet at ten weeks. Some things get everywhere, don't they?

Click to see more pics from the Cambridge Folk Festival hat competition!

top ten songs about summer for 56k modems

2010-07-18T00:55:00.003+01:00

If you have broadband, click here to see the videos embedded.

English summertime is typified by two things: heat, and rain when you least expect it! In honour of the summer, I'd like to present you with my own personal top ten songs about summer.

If you would like to send in a personal "top ten songs about..", please send the list to fulbourn_mill@yahoo.com. The songs can be secular, religious, modern, classical or a mix of any of these! A few words about why you like each track would be appreciated - I'll do the rest, including cinding the videos if you would like me to.

Ed.

10 Holiday!

This Boney M track from 1979 encapsulated what it felt to be at school as summer approached.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJkrA6DtDgQ

9The seaside

With the present financial situation, holidaying in Great Britain is à la mode once more - in 1975, Freddie Mercury of Queen wrote a song called Seaside Rendezvous that, while our seaside resorts were still popular, looked back to their glory days in the 1920s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWhdx6OB_uc

8The summer hit (1)

Every summer has its memorable hit, and the smart money is on Baby Lee by Teenage Fanclub, for reasons that I hope will be clear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4H8F3TxSzQ

7Last of the summer wine?

The Last of the Summer Wine is the world's longest-running sitcom and is about men and women behaving badly, all the more hilarious because they're at a time of life when ageists assume that behaving badly has withered on the vine. Here, the late Bill Owen, who played Compo in the show, gives a poignant reading of the theme tune's words with the melody playing behind. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATbHZ6qRfTA

6 Classical summer

Latvian violinist and conductor Gidon Kremer leads the English Chamber Orchestra in the third movement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons suite, Summer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-7GXPDVSWY

5 The long road to summer

Sometimes people long for summer because they find winter somewhat oppressive. One of these people is Richard Carpenter, who composed Crescent Noon with his songwriting partner John Bettis because he found himself longing for the light and cheer of summer the whole year through. He performs it here with his sister Karen as The Carpenters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKYNckacP6E

4 All that glisters

The egregious 1970 folly Beyond the Valley of the Dolls produced one very good song that has been described by Stuart Maconie, DJ on the groundbreaking Radio Six show The Freak Zone as "perfect summer pop". The irony is, as he pointed out, that, in the tale of exploitation, the "number one hit" was better than much of the music going about at the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOyA68pfcAM

3 The summer hit (2)

When Terry Wogan, then still at his breakfast show on BBC2, called this song "strange but beautiful", sales soared.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT-dxG4WWf4

2 Enough already!

George Harrison wrote It's all too much about the excesses of the summer of love, and it was his intention that the short song would be included in the Sergeant Pepper album. Unfortunaltely, he wasn't there when the tracks were finally chosen; the song would have made a great bridge between Good Morning Good Morning and the reprise of the title song. Anyway, here's the song, in its incarnation as the penultimate track in Yellow Submarine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXjOf7kdHpA

1 Memories of summer...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXqqw-gQqzo

an explanation

2010-07-14T20:45:00.003+01:00

I've changed jobs recently due to a restructuring in my former workplace. I've got a job that I enjoy, but am working more hours in a different shift pattern, which doesn't leave me with the time I need to devote to the Draughty Old Fen.

I'd been planning to write this post later in the month, but realised when Linda from Don't Poke the Baby contacted me via a mutual friend, Pam, that there are folk out there who care about me in just the same way as I do about them. I'm sorry to have neglected you.

Since I don't want to leave blogging totally, I've started a blog attached to the local village magazine that I edit, that'll be officially launched at the start of August. If any of you want to stop by sometime and say hello, that would be great.

quote of the week: Chris Evans done good

2010-06-23T15:00:00.003+01:00

Following Terry Wogan in the BBC Radio 2 breakfast show was always going to be a hard act, but even those of us who are Chris Evans' staunch fans have been astonished by the ease with which he's carried it off. Like a jazz musician, he structures his show with regular features around which he improvises using his quick-fire feelgood wit.

Some time ago, Jeremy Vine, who runs a talk show in the early afternoon on the same show, spoke about how he "feels unable to talk about his faith on his show because he fears how people would react". It's a fair point: the BBC is famously phobic as regards treating this country's Judaeo-Christian heritage with anything resembling respect.

However, my jaw dropped in admiration when Evans reacted idiosyncratically to the news that ITV1 broadcasts only one hour of religious content per year and Five carries none at all:

Come on, it's not about ratings, it's not about monetisation, it's about keeping in the Big Man's good books!

the dead dog and the stinking cartoon

2010-06-21T22:12:00.007+01:00

In the UK we have a political gossip-blogger and cartoonist called Guido Fawkes, occasionally also known as former City trader Paul Staines.

Basically a political version of Hedda Hopper, Fawkes has excelled even himself in poor taste with a cartoon of Conservative MP David Ruffley who, apparently having become depressed in the wake of the expenses scandal, fell in front of a train on Thursday 17 June, in what the police described as a "non-suspicious incident". The cartoon depicts Mr Ruffley telling a doctor that the cause of the incident was because "they wouldn't let me claim for rope or pills".

I don't care what party Ruffley belongs to, and this is not the time to discuss what he may or may not stand accused of. Some years ago I was lucky enough to survive a suicide attempt, and can recognise Staines' scratchings as an attention-junkie waving histrionically as he kicks against a sea of apathy.

Hollywood Actress Joan Fontaine once sent Hedda Hopper a dead skunk with the note "I stink, and so do you". Staines stinks like a dead dog. I must ask political columnists and bloggers to give him the attention he has indicated that he deserves: none.

And I hope better days lie ahead for David Ruffley.

h/t Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome for his Facebook alert.

England/USA draw: a metaphor for another football game?

2010-06-12T23:28:00.011+01:00

At work we've all participated in a sweepstake, with everybody selecting a World Cup team. There were the usual comments for some folk - for example, a colleague who chose Switzerland was told to cheer up because "they're rubbish at football - but boy can they yodel!"

As for me, a friend circulated an email asking how I, a Scot, was going to deal with having picked England. I replied that I respected the traditions and supported the national teams when I lived in Italy and France, and it was the same now (finishing with "cricket test? What cricket test?")

As it happened, we tried watching the games in the Draughty Old Fen, then put on the radio for the commentary, but had to switch over both times because of those blessed Vuvuzela horns; but I can remember my Mum making similar criticisms of Irvine Meadow fans and their rattles after matches when we lived in the Ayrshire town (behind the stadium).

With its customary patriotism, the BBC has published a report saying that England were forced to settle for a disappointing draw. What rubbish: a defeat is disappointing, a draw isn't.

The draw possibly also served as a metaphor for the political football game being played by Barack Obama and David Cameron over the BP oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, to which the company's chief executive added insult to injury with his comment "I'd like my life back".

Obama's constant references to "British Petroleum", however, perhaps indicate a failure to grasp the interpenetration of liabilities and responsibilities, which are as mixed as USA midfielder Stuart Holden's Scottish and English parentage: a situation, like so many pertaining to Anglo-American relations, best depicted by Wes Wilson's adaptation of the Yin/Yang theme in his poster for the Beatles' concert at San Francisco's Candlestick Park.

Obama's half-hour phone-call with the Prime Minister, in which he told Cameron that his handling of the crisis had "nothing to do with national identity", may indicate that somebody's told him of the likely consequences of his demands that BP not pay dividends until the spill is cleaned up: that American investors and pension funds, which make up 40% of BP's shareholder constituency, will want him to explain to them why their returns have fallen. Unfortunately this isn't going to be over quickly - the gulf-stream is set to move contaminants to the coasts of the Carolinas, and eventually over to those of western Ireland and north-west Scotland.

Both England and the US gave a good account of themselves in this first game for either team. I wish us well against Algeria, and them good luck against Slovenia, both on Friday. I'll try to catch the games...maybe with the volume off?

Related posts:

World Cup: Top Ten songs about Football

Top Ten Songs about England

World Cup: top ten songs about football

2010-06-06T00:42:00.007+01:00

Click here to view this post with only links to YouTube videos, for computers with 56k modems or slow broadband

I'm not a footie fan, but since you can't escape the World Cup this summer, I thought I'd theme my monthly Top Ten around football on the principle that if you can't beat 'em...So enjoy the music, and if you want to go a little deeper, click the flags to find more aboutthe national teams!

So the first song is published in solidarity with people who, like me, don't understand others' obsession with the world's most popular sport! This was originally sung by Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor, from Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively - home to Celtic, Rangers, Partick Thistle, Hearts and Hibernian; but Australian Anglophile Rolf Harris has updated it slightly.

The World Cup's being held in South Africa, which was teetering on race war not long ago with the murder of Eugene Terreblanche; but, as the Telegraph's Rian Malan notes, "when South Africans pull together, we can move mountains". Here, one of the country's greatest exports, vocal group Ladysmith Black Mombazo, repatriate The Lion Sleeps Tonight (sung by, among others, The Tokens, Karl Denver and Tight Fit) in the original Zulu Mbube, "Lion".

The official World Cup song, Waving Flag, is an inspiring piece about the ability of the "beautiful game" to bring peoples together. It would seem patronising were it not sung by K'Naan, a Somalian artist who has seen at first hand the violence that ensues when countries fail. This is the official video:

The phrase "beautiful game" was coined by Sir Edison Arantes do Nascimento, otherwise known as the Brazilian and international player Pelé, arguably the most famous football player ever. Brazil's the only team to have played in every world cup and, as five-time winners, has a small galaxy of stars on its strip. Unsurprisingly, they're the bookies' favourite to win this time. Look at the photo of actors and footballing deities on this video of the theme to Escape to Victory and you'll see Pelé kneeling in the front row, third from the right. He's depicted as being badly injured by a Nazi player in the film, which I wonder is a reference to his being targeted for fouling by Bulgarian players in the 1966 world cup.

An essential part of football is the terrace chant, the simplest being just rhyming phrases, eg "ooh-ah, CantonAAAAH!" More complex ones are taken from songs, for example the first line of Guantanamera, in the form of, eg, "one David Beckham, there's only one David Beckham..." It works with Becks' name and ones like Graham Souness, but it just doesn't work with names like Marc-Antoine Fortuné. Anyway, here's the original from Los Paraguayos:

But this is all very male-orientated. What about the women? Lots of women do, of course, watch football - and there's an ongoing debate as to whether men and women should play football together - but it remains a male-dominated sport. So I hope you ladies out there suffering from footie-fatigue HAVE SOME FUN!

Despite rumours of countries being prepared to bribe referees, one hopes that the Olympian ideal of sport still pertains in football. Whitney Houston sang about that ideal perfectly in the Albert Hammond/John Bettis composition One Moment in Time, and it's covered here by Charice Pempengco, the Filipina singer who shot to fame through YouTube. Watch that space.

Tracks by footballers and other team members are traditionally associated with players gargling with gravel before attempting to deliver an approximation of music, so it was a revelation when England's erstwhile Swedish manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, compiled a collection of classical pieces. This is Malcom Arnold's English Dances Set 2, performed by the Texas Honors Wind Ensemble.

Do England have a chance of winning a second World Cup? Just as any boxer in a ring has a "fighter's chance" of winning, I'd say that England has a chance of winning merely by its presence in the World Cup. It's a pity that injury has ruled David Beckham out of playing, but Fabio Capello's still an inspirational manager and has a great team behind him. As the advert says, "maybe, just maybe..."

If you liked this, click here to go to more top ten songs about...

top ten songs about football for 56k modems

2010-06-05T16:26:00.007+01:00

Click here to access this post with embedded YouTube videos for broadband

I'm not a footie fan, but since you can't escape the World Cup this summer, I thought I'd theme my monthly Top Ten around football on the principle that if you can't beat 'em...So enjoy the music, and if you want to go a little deeper, click the flags to find more aboutthe national teams!

So the first song is published in solidarity with people who, like me, don't understand others' obsession with the world's most popular sport! This was originally sung by Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor, from Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively - home to Celtic, Rangers, Partick Thistle, Hearts and Hibernian; but Australian Anglophile Rolf Harris has updated it slightly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6Ab8iXFtM&feature=related

The World Cup's being held in South Africa, which was teetering on race war not long ago with the murder of Eugene Terreblanche; but, as the Telegraph's Rian Malan notes, "when South Africans pull together, we can move mountains". Here, one of the country's greatest exports, vocal group Ladysmith Black Mombazo, repatriate The Lion Sleeps Tonight (sung by, among others, The Tokens, Karl Denver and Tight Fit) in the original Zulu Mbube, "Lion".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJF87m4_k88

The official World Cup song, Waving Flag, is an inspiring piece about the ability of the "beautiful game" to bring peoples together. It would seem patronising were it not sung by K'Naan, a Somalian artist who has seen at first hand the violence that ensues when countries fail. This is the official video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDDpW-wuR2I&feature=fvst

The phrase "beautiful game" was coined by Sir Edison Arantes do Nascimento, otherwise known as the Brazilian and international player Pelé, arguably the most famous football player ever. Brazil's the only team to have played in every world cup and, as five-time winners, has a small galaxy of stars on its strip. Unsurprisingly, they're the bookies' favourite to win this time. Look at the photo of actors and footballing deities on this video of the theme to Escape to Victory and you'll see Pelé kneeling in the front row, third from the right. He's depicted as being badly injured by a Nazi player in the film, which I wonder is a reference to his being targeted for fouling by Bulgarian players in the 1966 world cup.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvE_ri7Pyu0&feature=related

An essential part of football is the terrace chant, the simplest being just rhyming phrases, eg "ooh-ah, CantonAAAAH!" More complex ones are taken from songs, for example the first line of Guantanamera, in the form of, eg, "one David Beckham, there's only one David Beckham..." It works with Becks' name and ones like Graham Souness, but it just doesn't work with names like Marc-Antoine Fortuné. Anyway, here's the original from Los Paraguayos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl9mrsyz2PA

But this is all very male-orientated. What about the women? Lots of women do, of course, watch football - and there's an ongoing debate as to whether men and women should play football together - but it remains a male-dominated sport. So I hope you ladies out there suffering from footie-fatigue HAVE SOME FUN!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl9mrsyz2PA

Despite rumours of countries being prepared to bribe referees, one hopes that the Olympian ideal of sport still pertains in football. Whitney Houston sang about that ideal perfectly in the Albert Hammond/John Bettis composition One Moment in Time, and it's covered here by Charice Pampegno, the Filipina singer who shot to fame through YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eqLNHJgmQ

Tracks by footballers and other team members are traditionally associated with players gargling with gravel before attempting to deliver an approximation of music, so it was a revelation when England's erstwhile Swedish manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, compiled a collection of classical pieces. This is Malcom Arnold's English Dances Set 2, performed by the Texas Honors Wind Ensemble.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbFjq-Z1OMQ

Do England have a chance of winning a second World Cup? Just as any boxer in a ring has a "fighter's chance" of winning, I'd say that England has a chance of winning merely by its presence in the World Cup. It's a pity that injury has ruled David Beckham out of playing, but Fabio Capello's still an inspirational manager and has a great team behind him. As the advert says, "maybe, just maybe..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUKze6da7Uo

eurovision 2010: great music, shadows fall

2010-05-30T04:56:00.005+01:00

Click to see this post with links to YouTube instead of embedded videos if you have a 56k modem or slow broadband

I've just finished watching the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Norway's Telenor Stadium in Bærum, a suburb of its capital, Oslo. My own predictions panned - the Netherlands never made it through to the final, and Spain ended fifteenth, despite having the opportunity to play twice due to a stage-invasion during their first attempt that I'd thought was part of the act.

It was very enjoyable, and I'd like to bring you what I thought was the best of the music - while looking at shadows that sometimes seemed to be lurking behind the industrial joy of what I'd hoped would be an uncomplicated night.

I don't think I'm applying for a stay in the Tower of London for saying that Britain's entry in this year's Eurovision was even a bigger turkey than Turkey (who did field one of their biggest bands, but disappointed with the absence of the usual belly-dancing act).

Manga (the band) is big in Turkey, and other countries were fielding artists who had written songs, recorded albums, and one even owned a recording studio. It would be churlish to suggest that the ten points given to Josh Debovie - landing us in 25th place out of 25 - it has to be said that the song is something I'd expect to hear Redcoats welcoming holidaymakers to Butlins with, or in a quondam Gang Show; I suspect it's not even sophisticated enough to make it into a franchise movie of the High School Musical genre. Maxima said it all when she commented that Jedward would have made a better job.

Last year's show in Russia was, it seems in a different world where lavish productions were possible - although news broke today that the expense may have put paid to Russia's chances of televising the World Cup. Given that the Russian show pulled Eurovision back from death by public apathy due to a tainted voting system, it was sad to hear booing when Russia was awarded points for Peter Nalitch and Friends' Lost and Forgotten, as the tale of lost love with a penitential streak was a really good piece and, like many songs this year, of an above average standard. Here they are at the finals of the contest to find a song for Russia:

Not that we were the only turkey, and this was when one started to see shadows. Giorgos Alkaios and Friends did a taverna-style dance routine that was pretty minimalistic in terms of costumes and background. Perhaps this was at the best as denizens of the northern Euro area, not least Germans, might have ended up asking their politicians what exactly they were contemplating mortgaging their future to. Likewise, the Serbian entry's chorus was "Balkan, Balkan, the Balkans!" and I wondered if the singer realised he was singing about the land the generation above him had gone a-slaughtering through.

On the other hand, Ukraine's Alyosha was much more demure live than in her video. An environmentalist from the land of Ukraine, she made no fatuous references to polar bears or ice but looked (in part) at the relationship between video games and the violence sweeping the world. This is from an earlier BBC recording showcasing the songs for Europe:

There was certainly no shortage of songs in English - but if this is an indication of the language's global ascendancy, in Eurovision terms the victory is a pyrrhic one. The cultural diversity that the European Broadcasting Union was set up to celebrate has lost out. Interestingly, however, Armenia's Eva Rivas got round this by sining, in English, a song themed around the country's national symbol, the apricot, which gives its colour to the flag's lower bar. There was a flurry of protest in Turkey about possible references to its genocide of Armenians in 1915, but it's not clear that the lyrics bear that out, and in any case Turkey gave Armenia 6 points. Rivas performs the song here in the second semi-final - note Jivan Gasparyan playing duduk (traditional Armenian flute) - at 83, he's the oldest musician to accompany a Eurovision act on stage.

Not to be outdone in the field of eminent musicians, Albania's Juliana Pasha was accompanied by Italian violinist Olen Cesari, who had recently played for the Pope, in It's all about you. Like a cross between Debbie Harry and Maddy Prior, she perhaps hoped that by going barefoot on stage she could emulate Sandy Shaw's winning performance with Puppet on a String in 1967. But even Cesari's heroic efforts couldn't rescue the song from its own mediocrity, which might have been disguised somewhat had it been sung in Albanian: so, as a hint of this was featured in the introduction to Oslo 10, I feel unashamed of bringing you Ms Shaw!

Later that year, Israel would launch a pre-emptive attack on Egypt fuelled by proof that the country was, with the help of all Israels neighbours and Arab lands from further afield, going to do the dirty first. If, in gaining Gaza, Israel is an occupying country, then it's probably the most benign occupier since Cyrus the Great. The burden of this is apparent in much of modern Israeli culture, and its 2010 Eurovision entry - sung, refreshingly, in the country's own language - is no exception: I think it'll take a while to unravel all the meanings contained, onion-like, in Milim, a love-song sung by Harel Skaat:

Belarus' entry, Butterflies, again sung in English, could have been a bit more rehearsed for pronunciation, and given that Eurovision posts translations of every song online would have lost nothing fron being sung in Belarusian or Russian. But they had an innovation towards the end of the song that announcer Graham Norton said would have every girl under eight shouting "I want one!" The video was great, but seeing how they represented the special effects live was sublime:

Ireland must have been another country watching Greece very closely, because my Irish friends tell me that back home they're not pleased that, after making such sacrifices in personal and work terms to mitigate the financial crisis in Europe, they are having to watch richer countries prepare to bail out Greece, which helped found the EU's instability by cooking the books in the first place. But Niamh Kavanagh, who won Eurovision for the Emerald Isle in 1993 - again an established star singing a song strong enough to storm any hit parade - gave a first-class performance with It's for You, another song this year looking beyond the precarious value of things to deeper truths.

Given that Belgium's French- and Flemish-speaking populations could be on the track for a messy divorce, it was perhaps wise of Tom Dice to sing Me and My Guitar in English. More than this, however, it was significant that a man alone on the stage with a guitar, helped just a little by strings on a backing track, should come 6th. Is this an indication that Europeans are rejecting showiness, or even setting their faces towards a new austerity?

Poor old Portugal has never won the contest despite, like Ireland, consistently sending great singers with great songs: this year Filipa Azevedo with a sentiment I know well: Há Dias Assim - It's One of those Days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQI4X4BL4Qw

Germany's Lena was this year's Eurovision, with a throwaway pop tune that will be sung by young girls across the continent because it will annoy parents, especially Dads. Consider: "I went everywhere for you/I even did my hair for you/I bought new underwear that’s blue...I even painted my toenails for you..." 'Nuff said. The 19-year-old's enthusiastically-applied lipstick reminded me of what we used to call in quondam Glasgow "Jubilee lips" after the colour the ghastly iced concoction of that name, composed mostly of deep red food-colouring, would leave one's kisser.

The scoring was interesting: after French premier Nicholas Sarkozy humiliated Germany's Angela Merkel with a table-thumping tantrum over differences in how to overcome the crisis precipitated by Greece, the two countries awarded each other a lukewarm 3 points in the scoring; while Greece, having vented its spleen at having been found out in its own murderous tantrum, gave Germany, its potential financial saviour, 2 points in return for 8.

That said, the result was that a delighted girl won a prestigious contest, and this was her night. Here she is receiving the trophy:

songs and shadows; Eurovision 2010 for 56k modems

2010-05-30T00:19:00.006+01:00

Click here to see the videos embedded in this post if you have broadband

I've just finished watching the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Norway's Telenor Stadium in Bærum, a suburb of its capital, Oslo. My own predictions panned - the Netherlands never made it through to the final, and Spain ended fifteenth, despite having the opportunity to play twice due to a stage-invasion during their first attempt that I'd thought was part of the act.

It was very enjoyable, and I'd like to bring you what I thought was the best of the music - while looking at shadows that sometimes seemed to be lurking behind the industrial joy of what I'd hoped would be an uncomplicated night.

I don't think I'm applying for a stay in the Tower of London for saying that Britain's entry in this year's Eurovision was even a bigger turkey than Turkey (who did field one of their biggest bands, but disappointed with the absence of the usual belly-dancing act).

Manga (the band) is big in Turkey, and other countries were fielding artists who had written songs, recorded albums, and one even owned a recording studio. It would be churlish to suggest that the ten points given to Josh Debovie - landing us in 25th place out of 25 - it has to be said that the song is something I'd expect to hear Redcoats welcoming holidaymakers to Butlins with, or in a quondam Gang Show; I suspect it's not even sophisticated enough to make it into a franchise movie of the High School Musical genre. Maxima said it all when she commented that Jedward would have made a better job.

Last year's show in Russia was, it seems in a different world where lavish productions were possible - although news broke today that the expense may have put paid to Russia's chances of televising the World Cup. Given that the Russian show pulled Eurovision back from death by public apathy due to a tainted voting system, it was sad to hear booing when Russia was awarded points for Peter Nalitch and Friends' Lost and Forgotten, as the tale of lost love with a penitential streak was a really good piece and, like many songs this year, of an above average standard. Here they are at the finals of the contest to find a song for Russia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SosyAKUse8

Not that we were the only turkey, and this was when one started to see shadows. Giorgos Alkaios and Friends did a taverna-style dance routine that was pretty minimalistic in terms of costumes and background. Perhaps this was at the best as denizens of the northern Euro area, not least Germans, might have ended up asking their politicians what exactly they were contemplating mortgaging their future to. Likewise, the Serbian entry's chorus was "Balkan, Balkan, the Balkans!" and I wondered if the singer realised he was singing about the land the generation above him had gone a-slaughtering through.

On the other hand, Ukraine's Alyosha was much more demure live than in her video. An environmentalist from the land of Ukraine, she made no fatuous references to polar bears or ice but looked (in part) at the relationship between video games and the violence sweeping the world. This is from an earlier BBC recording showcasing the songs for Europe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0krO1-m6bw

There was certainly no shortage of songs in English - but if this is an indication of the language's global ascendancy, in Eurovision terms the victory is a pyrrhic one. The cultural diversity that the European Broadcasting Union was set up to celebrate has lost out. Interestingly, however, Armenia's Eva Rivas got round this by sining, in English, a song themed around the country's national symbol, the apricot, which gives its colour to the flag's lower bar. There was a flurry of protest in Turkey about possible references to its genocide of Armenians in 1915, but it's not clear that the lyrics bear that out, and in any case Turkey gave Armenia 6 points. Rivas performs the song here in the second semi-final - note Jivan Gasparyan playing duduk (traditional Armenian flute) - at 83, he's the oldest musician to accompany a Eurovision act on stage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgYc2Dphew4

Not to be outdone in the field of eminent musicians, Albania's Juliana Pasha was accompanied by Italian violinist Olen Cesari, who had recently played for the Pope, in It's all about you. Like a cross between Debbie Harry and Maddy Prior, she perhaps hoped that by going barefoot on stage she could emulate Sandy Shaw's winning performance with Puppet on a String in 1967. But even Cesari's heroic efforts couldn't rescue the song from its own mediocrity, which might have been disguised somewhat had it been sung in Albanian: so, as a hint of this was featured in the introduction to Oslo 10, I feel unashamed of bringing you Ms Shaw!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1tiqldaBGc

Later that year, Israel would launch a pre-emptive attack on Egypt fuelled by proof that the country was, with the help of all Israels neighbours and Arab lands from further afield, going to do the dirty first. If, in gaining Gaza, Israel is an occupying country, then it's probably the most benign occupier since Cyrus the Great. The burden of this is apparent in much of modern Israeli culture, and its 2010 Eurovision entry - sung, refreshingly, in the country's own language - is no exception: I think it'll take a while to unravel all the meanings contained, onion-like, in Milim, a love-song sung by Harel Skaat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8WWyCTcUb4

Belarus' entry, Butterflies, again sung in English, could have been a bit more rehearsed for pronunciation, and given that Eurovision posts translations of every song online would have lost nothing fron being sung in Belarusian or Russian. But they had an innovation towards the end of the song that announcer Graham Norton said would have every girl under eight shouting "I want one!" The video was great, but seeing how they represented the special effects live was sublime:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUijZFTCDMY

Ireland must have been another country watching Greece very closely, because my Irish friends tell me that back home they're not pleased that, after making such sacrifices in personal and work terms to mitigate the financial crisis in Europe, they are having to watch richer countries prepare to bail out Greece, which helped found the EU's instability by cooking the books in the first place. But Niamh Kavanagh, who won Eurovision for the Emerald Isle in 1993 - again an established star singing a song strong enough to storm any hit parade - gave a first-class performance with It's for You, another song this year looking beyond the precarious value of things to deeper truths.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMDszSBuppA

Given that Belgium's French- and Flemish-speaking populations could be on the track for a messy divorce, it was perhaps wise of Tom Dice to sing Me and My Guitar in English. More than this, however, it was significant that a man alone on the stage with a guitar, helped just a little by strings on a backing track, should come 6th. Is this appreciation of his minimalism an indication that Europeans are rejecting showiness, or even setting their faces towards a new austerity?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_mIZ0tOHI

Poor old Portugal has never won the contest despite, like Ireland, consistently sending great singers with great songs: this year Filipa Azevedo with a sentiment I know well: Há Dias Assim - It's One of those Days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQI4X4BL4Qw

Germany's Lena was this year's Eurovision, with a throwaway pop tune that will be sung by young girls across the continent because it will annoy parents, especially Dads. Consider: "I went everywhere for you/I even did my hair for you/I bought new underwear that’s blue...I even painted my toenails for you..." 'Nuff said. The 19-year-old's enthusiastically-applied lipstick reminded me of what we used to call in quondam Glasgow "Jubilee lips" after the colour the ghastly iced concoction of that name, composed mostly of deep red food-colouring, would leave one's kisser.

The scoring was interesting: after French premier Nicholas Sarkozy humiliated Germany's Angela Merkel with a table-thumping tantrum over differences in how to overcome the crisis precipitated by Greece, the two countries awarded each other a lukewarm 3 points in the scoring; while Greece, having vented its spleen at having been found out in its own murderous tantrum, gave Germany, its potential financial saviour, 2 points in return for 8.

That said, the result was that a delighted girl won a prestigious contest, and this was her night. Here she is receiving the trophy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bI-G-1z8c8

blogosphere "thank-you's"

2010-05-29T18:10:00.007+01:00

Risa from Isramom has been kind enough to tip me in an internet meme that was started on Adventures in Mamaland. I enjoy Risa's blog because she presents life in Israel as a series of everyday occurences in a religious Jewish family in the Holy Land, free from the accretions of gentiles like me who can write a blogpost then go to work in a Merry England wherein one can still perform the basic tasks of living without risk to life and limb. Thanks for the kind words, Risa; much appreciated.

These are the rules of the meme:

Thank the person who gave you this award.

Share one thing about yourself readers might not know otherwise.

List six (6) bloggers you think are fantastic, and say why.

Contact the bloggers you've picked, and let them know about the award.

One thing about me that regulars to the Draughty Old Fen might not know is that I'm addicted to cheese. So much so that last night, I NEEDED cheese so much that I stole some of Maxima's white stilton with bits of fruit in it, which she buys because nobody else in the house likes it. She confronted me and asked me why I took it. I replied that I took it because it was the only cheese in the house. I'm still on probation.

Here are six bloggers I think are fantastic:

Firstly, Naomi Litvin. The author of We Never Lost Hope: a Holocaust Memoir and Love Story, she critiques antisemitism and the contradictions of modern society in a manner that is no less forensic for being literary. I like her because, as the father of girls, I am grateful for the spotlight she shines - with David Appletree of the Jewish Internet Defence Force - upon Facebook.

My second choice is Linda, an American home-schooling Mom and photographer who writes passionately and frankly about the joys and miseries of life, love and standing her ground as a staunchly pro-life Roman Catholic. Her blog, Don't Poke the Baby, is as unmissable for her lyrical wisdom as it is for her photography.

Ellee Seymour is a Press Consultant and journalist who blogs about both national affairs and the minutiae of her beloved East of England. The reason she's my third choice is that I admire the inner security that allows her to praise people with whose views she disagrees when she feels praise is due. Another reason I admire her is that she's a supporter of Headway, a charity that helps people get over head injuries.

John Smeaton, SPUC Director is the blog of the head of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. He writes for people from all political and religious backgrounds and none who are concerned for members of groups vulnerable to Establishment anti-life prejudices - the unborn, pregnant women, people suffering from after-effects of abortion that aren't recognised as existing, the terminally ill, people with chronic physical/mental illnesses,older people - to name just a few. I chose him because I have uneding admiration for the tightrope he walks by praising members of the Establishment who are brave enough to defend members of these groups, while critiquing enemies of the vulnerable, who are often members of the same Establishment groups.

Lorena lives on a ranch in Texas, and on Lorena's Blog you can find photos of the most exquisite quality. Her blogs, centred on family and animals with the occasional review, are well worth the read.

Lastly, but by no means leastly, I first heard of Naomi Litvin's blog through David Appletree's world-famous blog, The Jewish Internet Defense Force, which provides a voice for Jews in the US and worldwide at a time when many vested interests would have this voice extinguished. More than this, though, if you're not Jewish and/or haven't heard of David, keep an ear open: as Facebook falls, I think you'll hear his name as one of the brave who spoke out against the exploitative network when it could do no wrong in the eyes of the Mainstream Media.

Again, a big thank-you to Risa. It's one thing to get a badge for political blogging, but to be tipped by somebody who likes to read what you have to say is on an entirely different level. And, as the time when I can only blog occasionally as other things demand my time fast approaches, it's something I'll never forget.

Eurovision awaits

2010-05-27T03:18:00.010+01:00

UPDATE: click to read Eurovision 2010: great music, shadows fall

On Saturday we'll have the Eurovision Song Contest. My dearest wish is that it will produce some vintage cheese, but time goes on. But time goes on too quickly, sometimes: when I saw the Ukranian video (which does not by any means represent how the country will be represented on the night) I thought: I don't want my daughters to see this.

These are my two picks for Saturday night. First, the Netherlands entry: Sieneke with Ik Ben Verliefd (Sha-La-Lie):

And secondly, the Spanish entry - Daniel Diges, with Algo Pequeñito:

Don't get me wrong, I hope Britain wins; but I also hope rain will stop, Bank Holiday Mondays will be sunny, and Scotland will win the World Cup. Some things just aren't going to happen. But Britain will not win Eurovision again until, like other countries, we ask our best musical talent if they have the will to enter. Or else until our political masters put aside their mantras of being edgy and diverse, and listen to the wisdom of Beatles manager Brian Epstein: "the next big thing is a good tune".

That having been said, may the best act win - and if not the best, the cheesiest!

Click to go to the lyrics (original and in translation) for Ik Ben Verliefd and Algo Pequeñito

first TV abortion ad: new medium, old agendas

2010-05-24T19:09:00.004+01:00

I've just seen Marie Stopes' advert on John Smeaton's site and, although I should be doing an application form right now, had to get blogging. First, have a look at the advert.

It starts pretty unremarkably with "Jenny Evans" standing at a bus-stop, and the graphics telling us that she is late, ie has not had her period when expected.

Then the interesting stuff starts. We go to "Katie Simmons", who is also late. She is propelling a baby in a pram with one hane and trying to control a toddler with the other. Marie Stopes' message, you might think is that two is enough; three would be too many. However, when you see the difficulty she's having with two children, the subliminal message becomes clear: one child is enough, two are too many. Fittingly, Father Tim Finnegan of The Hermeneutic of Continuity reports the visit last week of Ms Li Bin, called "Madame Sterilisation" (she heads China's forced sterilisation policy) to Marie Stopes' London headquarters. He links to Tibet-Truth, which says of Marie Stopes International that it is "an organization which by its silence, and open support of the Chinese population program, surely merits criticism and challenge".

The last lady we see is "Shareen Butler", a black lady who is in a pottery class. Here we come to the rotten core of the population control movement, as is witnessed to by Arnold Culbreath, Urban Outreach Director of US organisation Protecting Black Life. In asking why abortion providers are particularly interested in building sites in poor black areas of the US, we get a glimpse of their ugly agenda.

In today's Telegraph, trainee consultant Max Pemberton cries for less heat, more light on abortion, protesting that he sat in on a Marie Stopes counselling session with a patient who had been abandoned by the father of her unborn child. The session ended with the patient, contrary to what Pemberton would have wanted, deciding to keep the child. Personally, if I was a Marie Stopes counsellor and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph - known to be friendly to Judaeo-Christian traditions and the pro-life cause - was sitting in, I would have made sure that the pregnancy was continued as well. Tellingly, Pemberton reveals that the woman had a mental illness, in another confirmation of the pro-choice/anti-life eugenics agenda of the abortion industry.

If abortion services are going to advertise their wares on TV, why are pro-life organisations still barred from using this medium to raise awareness of the possible and proven side-effects of abortion? I can only hope that the Coalition Government will do what it can to level the playing-field which has been skewed in favour of the eugenics lobby for the best part of a century. All I can say to strengthen their resolve in this project is: your voters are watching you.

Cambridge's new mosque: planning still pending

2010-05-22T00:21:00.002+01:00

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was going through my mind today when I rang Cambridge City Council to ask how permission for the proposed mosque on the city's Mill Road was progressing. I must admit I expected to learn nothing, but a very polite and helpful chap informed me that, although the land, the former Robert Sayle's site, had been acquired, no planning proposal had been submitted and one was not expected in the immediate future.

The site was acquired in 2008 by the Cambridge Muslim Welfare Society and Mulsim Academic Trust; but a police investigation of an arson attack later in the year, which resulted in their demolition, is presumably hampering planning applications.

Freedom of worship is an essential human right, so if the Muslim community in Cambridge is poorly housed in the Abu Bakr Jamia Mosque off Mill Road, then I hope they get permission for their mosque.

I also hope that any planning process is not a set-up like the Mill Road Tesco process, which was hijacked by well-heeled sandalistas objecting on ideological grounds in the knowledge that they have the money to patronise the independent shops.

So, in the event of there being a planning process that is open to the public, I have one issue that I hope will be debated in the open:

Given that paragraph 49 of Government planning advice PPG13 discourages adequate provision of parking spaces in order to promote sustainable transport choices, how will Councillors and planning officers treat proposals for parking spaces in the plans? If they apply the proposals consistently by refusing an application with adequate parking, how will they respond to claims that not everybody without private transport will be able to make it to worship, depending on where in Cambridgeshire they're coming from? (The Cambridgeshire Roman Catholic community has experienced this, with changes in Sunday bus timetables leaving residents in some villages unable to attend Sunday Mass.)

I am glad that mosque leaders have said that the mosque will have no minaret or call to prayer loudspeaker; speaking of members of Cambridge's 4000-strong Muslim community trying to cram into a space meant for 500 then "spilling out into the street", trustee Mohammed Mahmood says "We don't want to be a nuisance to neighbours anymore".

The reason I thought about Everybody Draw Mohammed Day when I was making my phone call was that I was reflecting how censorship on ideological grounds nurtures but disfigures that which it would suppress: it would have caused much less of a splash had Facebook not pulled the page that founded it. I was going to do a post for the day, but found myself unable to because any blog I would have linked to contained pictures I will not reproduce on a blog accessed by a lot of schools. But anyway, being given the information I wanted straight away was an unexpected and very pleasant surprise.

We see the worst of Islam all too often on the media. I hope the coming negotiations will show us its best out in the open.

And in a spirit of conciliation here, unlinked, is a cartoon by California's Earl Jones that I hope will speak to Muslims, Christians and beyond.

search: "trumpington bible"

2010-05-19T12:18:00.006+01:00

UPDATE: If you are looking for "Trumpington Bible", please look at the three comments to this post by ernest green, patrick of bath and anonymous, and all will be revealed!

UPDATE 2: for an erudite discussion of the Trumpington Bible, click here to go to Bishop's Blog, the blog of Dr David Thomson, Bishop of Huntingdon.

This blog has had a lot of hits recently, which is never something to complain about, but I regret that many readers find themselves unsatisfied. Since yesterday, I've had a huge amount of people being led to my blog after googling the terms "Trumpington Bible". I've spoken about a General Election campaign in Trumpington, a village to the south-east of Cambridge, and list the Bible on the sidebar as one of my favourite books. But I've never mentioned the two words together and - strangely, given the number of hits googling the terms - Google can't find any document mentioning the two words side by side.

I wonder what's going on, what news is breaking? Can anybody enlighten us?

"Mental: a History of the Madhouse"

2010-05-18T02:50:00.009+01:00

As a part of a series of documentaries detailing changes in views about mental illness in the last 60 years, BBC4 screened Mental: A History of the Madhouse last night, and it did an admirable job of exploring the spectrum of shades of grey involved in the issue without black-and-white judgement.

For example, there was Maggie, who volunteered for "experimental" brain surgery in the 1960s and who feels that, after 5 years of debilitation that followed the surgery - in which a section of her brain was burned out to stop the fits of violence that would require increasing lengths of hospitalisation - she recovered in spite of and not because of the operation. She has been given awards for campaigning for community causes...but one is left wondering if this would have been possible without the operation.

I thought of this towards the end of the documentary, when we saw the dark side of the opposite of the asylum model of care. Following a series of murders by people who had been released into the community as beds were closed (so the chance of their being readmitted stadily diminished), the most famous of which was the 1992 murder of Jonathan Zito by Christopher Clunis at Finsbury Park, a psychiatrist briefs a police shift that one of his patients is having increasingly violent urges, and then a dozen riot officers break into his house because both psychiatrist and police have decided that "overwhelming force" is required.

There have, of course, been huge leaps since the days of the asylums, when staff violence towards patients was recalled by a former psychiatric nurse as having been justified, when he was a student, by his charge nurse on the grounds that "if you live among shit you become shit". Although thankfully I missed this period, I felt ashamed to have been a psychiatric nurse.

In 1959, Patricia Hornsby-Smith (in Harold MacMillan's Conservative government) reported on the crippling price of keeping more people in psychiatric institutions than there had ever been, reporting on the "appalling legacy" of the buildings and how maintaining them would take up an increasing portion of the NHS budget; but she also spoke on how an appreciation of mental illness being like "any other disability" was a prerequisite on action that would need to be taken on both pragmatic and humanitarian grounds.

Hornsby-Smith's speech was the prologue that Enoch Powell's 1961 Water-Tower Speech was written to follow:

it is the duty of a Minister of Health and the duty of the National Association for Mental Health, to...choose and to favour wherever they have the choice, the course of more drastic and fundamental change: for we may be pretty sure that even so the progress of medical thought and method will still be well on ahead of our practice.

Powell was, of course right (and it was good to see the BBC admit that the man was more than a controversial 15-minute speech): as the documentary showed, "hope came from the laboratories [in the form of] a new generation of psychiatric drugs". However, Largactil (chlorpromazine) created new problems to replace the ones it solved in the form of simultaneous agitation and sedation, and Parkinson's Disease-like symptoms. Had the resarchers looked further into its genesis, they might have found that it was derived from a dye produced in Victorian England, but wasn't much use. So it was fed to cows to see the effect, which was that the cows calmed down. And died shortly afterwards.

However, the growing voice possessed by mentally ill people and their advocates - who included many mental health workers - drove the phamaceutical search for medications that had maximum effect on symptoms with minimum unwanted effects. The quest still continues.

But how did we get from this sense of optomism to a mentally ill man's flat being raided by a dozen riot police? As beds decrease, I worry that the stigma that infested the ageing Victorian structures hasn't disappeared but has rather been absorbed into society, which has become itself an über-asylum wherein, asserts London Mayor Boris Johnson in an exegesis of Eleanor Rigby, too many people "pretty much stay at home and watch TV" with their loneliness acting as a straitjacket - a garment never used once in the history of the crumbling Victorian asylum where I trained.

As politicians struggle to describe how they are going to deal with the deficit, it's obvious that there are going to have to be cuts. But this should not blind us to the fact that cuts started some time ago. Fulbourn hospital, the psychiatric hospital serving Cambridge and surrounding areas, lost two rehabilitation units and two acute psychiatric wards in 2007. This could have been ameliorated by better services in the community, but Vocational Services, providing occupational therapy, and Cambridge Clubhouse a range of less structured opportunities of rehabilitation after psychiatric treatment, are long gone. The Clubhouse was replaced by a mental health resource centre that aimed to make ex-patients in the community into trainers, but access is now only by telephone.

I'm not setting out my stall for my territory, having switched from a psychiatric nurse to a psychiatric patient some years ago. I'm merely arguing for common sense: in the absence of dedicated resources people requiring mental health treatment are, at the more severe end, going to keep ricocheting between inpatient wards, police cells and prison and, at the less severe, take up more of the general resources that are available, eg GP appointments, A&E beds, etc.

And the human cost is intertwined with the financial one, something that Patricia Hornsby-Smith and Enoch Powell would have recognised. I met a fellow Clubhouse veteran recently; unable to maintain employment without input but "not ill enough" to warrant a community psychiatric nurse, she spends her time subsisting on benefits - mostly, as Boris Johnson says, at home watching TV. Investing in resources that would help people like my friend both to work and to pay more taxes would, in my opinion, be a win/win situation.

Related posts:

Good taste back on the Horizon: How Mad are You?

Blurred Boundaries, Fine Lines - How Mad are You?

Ronnie James Dio RIP

2010-05-17T17:51:00.011+01:00

Being something of a heavy metal connoisseur, I was saddened to hear the news of Ronnie James Dio's death on the radio last night.

Dio started playing in bands in 1957 and releasing records the year after. What a time his first full decade as a recording artist must have been, as rhythm'n'blues morphed into psychedelia which, in its 1970s incarnation as progressive rock, laid the foundations for the golden era of heavy metal in the 1980s. This, incidentally, was kicked off by Black Sabbath's release of Heaven and Hell, with Dio on vocals replacing Ozzy Osbourne, whose demons had nearly destroyed the band.

What marked Dio (born Padavona in Portsmouth, New Hampshire) out as a giant was his eschewal of the rock'n'roll lifestyle, which he put down not to studying pharmacology for a year at degree level but because, he told an interviewer for dmme.net, "I saw how destructive it was, and how it dulled your sensibilities and ate up your talent and your life". On records his first instrument was the bass guitar, but before that he learned trumpet, which built up his diaphragm to the point where it would sustain his most powerful and nuanced instrument: his voice, which would come to international prominence with Rainbow and, after recording arguably the definitive Black Sabbath album, with his eponymous band as well as numerous collaborations.

Dio succumbed to stomach cancer yesterday after battling with it since late last year. This may be of little comfort to his widow at the moment, but his avoidance of the rock'n'roll lifestyle put him beyond the rock'n'roll death that follows on all too often. Not for him choking on vomitus after downing a handful of sleeping-pills like Jimi Hendrix; or alcohol poisoning due to mistaking Heminevrin for recreational tablets, which prevented Keith Moon's stomach ejecting the bucketful he'd had during a relapse; or, most cruelly, Phil Lynott sliding into the last goodnight due to liver failure while his mother wept.

All of these people have left us wonderful music, but Dio left something else alongside - a template for living well in an industry that has been known to eat its children. Thanks for the music, Ronnie.

Here's RJD as I like to remember him, singing about his beloved pop medeivalism with Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow in 1975.

don't kids with HIV suffer enough without this?

2010-05-13T01:49:00.003+01:00

We may have a new government but, behind the scenes, the same unelected sinister forces are pushing their agendas at our children.

HYPNet - the HIV in Young People Network - describes itself as "a multidisciplinary group of health professionals and voluntary sector representatives" working for people between the ages of 14-24 who are unfortunate enough to be living with HIV.

They've just released draft guidelines on the management of sexual and reproductive health for adolescents living with HIV 2010.

The first thing that worried me on the guidance came as early as Section 3, Definitions. In this draft document, which dealt with "possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences" for adolescents, the term "adolescence" itself is defined worryingly:

The term adolescent will be used throughout these guidelines to denote young people aged 10-24 years old, which covers the age from the onset of menarche in the UK to the upper limit of the definition of young adult...

I had to read the lower limit of that definition again: 10. This is no faux alarm - the Telegraph's Aislinn Laing reported recently that "Between 2000 and 2007, a total of 15 ten year olds and 39 aged 11 fell pregnant in England and Wales". HYPnet's somewhat abusive take on sexual health care is outlined in bold letters at point 8.1:

PHCP [paediatric healthcare professionals] need to take responsibility for seeing that Sexual Health needs, if not brought up by the adolescent, are raised in consultations, starting well before sexual maturity is reached.

Yet, although the paper states twice that in England and Wales sexual activity involving under-13's is illegal and indeed rape (under common law consent is meaningless under this age), the waters are muddied by a statement in point 6.3, which concerns the Sexual Offences Act 2003, that "this document does not advocate mandatory reporting to police or social services of every sexually active under 18 if there is no cause for concern"; the cut-off point of 13 has been dropped.

A pattern starts to emerge at point 8.3, where we read under the heading of Sexual Health Education that "Psychosexual issues may arise from cultural and religious beliefs around...female circumcision". Again, there is no comment, even to the effect that "female circumcision", more properly known as female genital mutilation, is a vicious assault on a young girl which, even if it is carried out abroad, is still an offence as if it had been done in the UK under the terms of the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003. But the foul practice is listed as if it had no more significance than being one cultural phenomenon among many.

In 2006 Anthony Ozimic, Political Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) identified that the term "sexual and reproductive health" cannot be taken within any legal framework to include abortion.

The news has travelled slowly: point 9.2 in this document about sexual and reproductive health is a "checklist for sexual history discussion", and the ninth crib-note states: "Managing an unplanned pregnancy. Options of continuing with pregnancy, adoption or termination of pregnancy; methods of termination." The thought of an adolescent girl, already emotionally fragile through the stigma many people living with HIV are still exposed to, being put at risk of post-abortion trauma is as heartbreaking as is the omission of the risk of PAT from the crib-notes. Similarly, the advice under 16.4, emergency contraception, advises not only the morning-after pill Levonelle, which is basically a form of chemical abortion, but that double the dose (3000 micrograms instead of 1500) be given, and that the dose be documented because Levonelle is not licensed to be given in this quantity. There's no mention in the paper of the patient being informed of this in the event of the drug being given in a sexual health clinic as opposed to a pharmacy.

Ironically, the one area (16.5) where the paper hits the nail right on the head is the one that workers whose fields intersect that of sexual health are asked to keep quiet about:

Condoms are estimated to prevent HIV transmission in only 13% (4-40) of cases (Davis and Weller 1999) and should not therefore be relied on alone for contraception.

I recommend that you follow the link to the Davis and Weller article, which seems to contextualise a later study in the New England Journal of Medicine that found a higher rate of protection (22% - albeit against HPV transmission) - when condoms were used 100% of the time.

Draft Guidance on the Management of Sexual and Reproductive Health for Adolescents Living with HIV 2010 is a case-in-point of how wilfully incomplete advice drawn up along ideological lines can put real, vulnerable, people right in the firing line of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The nhsnetworks listing for HYPNet shows that membership is open to all, and current membership is 2 (one of whom is paediatric HIV expert Dr Simon Portsmouth, right) - who have managed to get this paper distributed throughout the world by the otherwise well-regarded aidsmap e-bulletin.

The trojan horse was an article called Numerous unplanned pregnancies in vertically-in fected teenagers (the term indicating that the virus was transmitted during pregnancy or at birth), which did not appear to consider that there are numerous unplanned pregnancies in teenagers generally - Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe - precisely because of abusive sex education strategies of the sort championed by HYPNet.

If you are concerned or disturbed about any of the issues in this post, please respectfully and with sensitivity towards the difficulties faced by young people with HIV email Dr Simon Portsmouth.

election: in the lap of the gods

2010-05-07T01:03:00.006+01:00

I don't know how to call this election, it's unlike any other I've seen.

Maxima and I voted in the Draughty Old Fen, then I cycled into Cambridge, because it's easier for me to get around there than in South Cambridgeshire.

There was a certain post-bellum atmosphere at the two polling stations where I was a teller. Conservative, Labour and Green talked as if we were at a flower show. We wondered if the lack of Liberal Democrats was due to their concentrating in marginal wards, or - my idea, rather naughty - their assuming that Cambridge was in the bag.

A surreal moment was when a Greek chap approached us and asked why he hadn't been asked for ID when voting in the local election. The three of us explained that in Britain, at the moment, we trusted people. I wonder if Greece's travails are, in part, due to people feeling frustrated that the government that demands their details for ID cards cannot balance a budget?

Two Labour tellers told me that they were unhappy about Iraq. I commiserated with them. With the Green teller, we reflected on what would be the best system for Parliament; I said that in my view, Parliament would be a whole lot more representative if more people voted. I was asked how I could make more people vote, and said I didn't know.

I'm sure that every activist is hoping for the result they want. Personally, I hope and pray that the Conservatives have a majority. Last night, I was about to pray for this when I realised what I was doing, and substituted: thy will be done.

top tips for Tuesday (and Thursday)

2010-05-03T22:50:00.001+01:00

This is an unusual Top Tips post in that it's not a blog of blogs, but rather two reccomendations.

Firstly, please vote. Staying at home affects the poll just as much as voting - for example, the last Government was elected not just by 36% of voters, but by 22% of everybody who was eligible to vote. By putting your cross in the square, you at least express your choice in favour of whichever party you want to; and, in this election that has no precendent...who knows?

Secondly, however, if you look at the sidebar on this blog you might work out what I'm going to say next: please vote Conservative. For David Cameron, George Osbourne, Theresa May and the rest of the Shadow Cabinet; but also for your local candidate. For example, Nick Hillman in Cambridge, an educator who has a better grasp of the needs and aspiration of ordinary folk than the ideologues opposing him; and in South Cambs, Jim Paice, who, as Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Rural Affairs, has represented the interests of the farmers, farm-workers and small businesses that Labour has neglected.

Put it this way. In 1997, Tony Blair was swept to power on the strength of five promises on class sizes, judicial reforms, NHS red tape, benefit reforms and restraint on government spending reforms that lie broken and neglected, trampled by the old socialist holy cows.

David Cameron is offering not a load of promises to be thrown away like a shopping list, but a contract with Britain which, if not adhered to, will end in the same way breaching a contract of employment would end for any of us.

Let's all think very carefully about the way in which we'll exercise our choice on Thursday May 6.

top ten songs about flying

2010-05-03T21:46:00.005+01:00

Click here to go to Top Ten Songs about Flying for 56k modems or slow broadband

When I first heard of Eyjafjallajökull, I was of the same opinion as Richard Normington, in that it seemed more like a keyboard malfunction than anything else. But things started to look sinister when continent-sized areas in the course of the volcanic cloud, containing putative glass fragments that could cause high-flying jet engines to close down, were declared no-fly areas on the basis of computer models that are as diconnected from reality as the politicians who made decisions solely on their predictions, without reference to reality.

Thankfully, we can fly again. As it happens, I don't fly that often, but even in the circumference of the world I inhabit the no-fly orders had consequences, from a colleague who couldn't make it to work, through a fellow worshipper whose presence had been required to validate church accounts, to a friend who had been badly injured abroad and whose family was deprived even longer of her presence.

I thought that I'd like to dedicate this month's Top Ten to the theme of flying, because the cooling of Eyjafjallajökull's ire coincides with a crucial time in our country's history, when we decide which political parties will suppress the innate instinct to fly as high as we can, and which will not only nurture it but ensure that we lift up our peers in so doing.

10 - Would you like to fly?

The 5th Dimension, who were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002, are famous for taking the song Age of Aquarius from Hair to the top spot. My favourite song of theirs is Jimmy Webb's Up, Up and Away which, whenever I hear it, brings memories of childhood awakenings to the song being played on the ever-present radio.

9 - Wild Swan

In my opinion, Tony Clarkin - the bearded guitarist in the video - deserves to be hailed alongside Pete Townshend as arranger par excellence of his own lyrics with insight and sensitivity worthy of Berlioz. The video, telling the story of a son who simultaneously hero-worships his crusading father and feels the overarching need for his presence beside him, comes to mind because of a wild swan that's been making the news in Cambridge. Called Mr Asbo, he's been accused of harassing and even overturning boats on Cambridge's river Cam. A recent film aired on BBC 1's The One Show displayed the swan at his most aggressive - but the BBC has been accused - in a video that I recommend you watch - of goading the swan's mate into leaving her nest in order to see off a canoe that was ordered to go dangerously close to it for the sake of "car-crach TV". Given that Asbo, according to vet and Telegraph blogger Pete Wedderburn, has actually had his cygnets killed by "passers by", I'm not surprised he's mardy. The state hasn't killed my children, but arrogates to itself ever greater powers to brainwash them according to abusive agendas that seem to have no other purpose than to "rub the Right's nose in diversity". I feel as angry as Mr Asbo.

8 - Volare

In February 1991, I had an interview in London and arranged to stay with a friend in Brixton. The interview went well but later in the day came the news that 10 Downing Street had been attacked by an IRA mortar. Mobile phones being as rare as they were huge in those days, I found myself having to wait in one of the lines that trailed from every phone box. My friend explained, "I think everybody's phoning home to say they're ok". That evening, he. I and another friend went to his flat in the middle of Brixton High Street, kicking up the snow that had emptied the thoroughfare of cars. Since all of us had lived for some time in Italy, this is the song we sung:

7 - Flying machines in pieces

This is such a video of James Taylor's Fire and Rain, which is about, in part, the suicide of his fried Suzanne Schnerr, whom he'd met while both of them were hospitalised for addiction to heroin. "Flying Machine" was the name of his first band; but the line "flying machines in pieces on the ground" is about more than the breakup of a musical unit, but I wonder if. when Taylor sings "Susanne the plans they made put an end to you" (my italics) he's running from the couple's co-dependency. But. counterintuitively, I can see a better case for the use of prescribed pharmaceutical diamorphine (heroin) under strictly controlled than for legalisation of cannabis, because we cannot halt supply of heroin within our own borders. The thing is, cannabis-legalisation site UKCIA (offline at the moment) has made a case for legalisation of weed as a gateway to legalisation of just about every illegal drug. Having been a drugs-worker, I hope this never happens; I'd hate the misery I saw in the needle-exchange to become commonplace.

6 - So much owed by so many to so few

In 2002, Nick Clegg, now leader of the Liberal Democrats, wrote an article about a school trip to Germany:

A boy called Adrian started it. He shouted from the back of the coach, "we own your country, we won the war". Other boys tittered. One put a finger to his upper lip - the traditional British schoolyard designation for Hitler's moustache - threw his arm out in a Nazi salute, and goose-stepped down the bus aisle. Soon there was a cascade of sneering jokes, most delivered in 'Allo 'Allo German accents.

I was shocked by his ignorance. Britain was indeed on the winning side of WWII and was a major and heroic player, but to baldly assert that "Britain won the war" is as disingenuous as is baldly asserting that Germany lost it. We must never forget the key role that Britain played in defeating the Nazis (who were by no means synonymous with Germany), but it is salutary to remember that, on the eve of the Pearl Harbour attacks on December 7, 1941, Britain was losing, and Winston Churchill had authorised the distribution of bayonets with a poster campaign saying "at least you can take one with you".

As it happens, historian Colin Heaton concluded in Night Fighters that had Britain been conquered, America would have eventually had confront Hitler's contagious monomania - but Britain would have been a much changed place. Thank God that never happened.

Rector Pellegrina wasn't quite convinced when I confessed a guilty pleasure in heavy metal. I hope this video about the Battle of Britain - by an RAF composed of 10% Polish pilotry - will give her cause to reconsider.

5 - Flying Sorcery

Al Stewart merged his twin loves of flying and history for this song from his classic Year of the Cat album. An article on his website explains the context of the lyrics, from Amy Johnson, to the biplanes called Faith, Hope and Charity which defended the George Cross island of Malta and the double meaning of the Flying Circus. Enjoy this footage of him singing in Cambridge's namesake town in Massachussetts.

4 - Flying for me

John Denver was a founder of the "citizen in space" project and was even considered for the honour, but was pipped at the post by Christa McAuliffe, a secondary/high school teacher who had worked in Washington DC before moving to Concord in New Hampshire. Denver recollected that on the morning of January 28 1986 his adopted son Zac phoned him and told him to put the TV on, any station: there was the Challenger disaster, inspiring him to write:

She was flying for me
She was flying for every one
She was flying to see a brighter day for each and every one
She gave us her light
She gave us her spirit and all she can be
She was flying for me

3 - Abide in His shadow for life

We had a discussion on hymns at our annual church meeting recently - you know the sort, that can quickly degenerate into an "old=Good" vs "New=Better" argument all too quickly. It was left to our venerable and classically-trained organist to point out that while traditions need maintaining, some new hymns are beautiful. One of these, I think, is Fr Michael Joncas' On Eagles' Wings, based on Psalm 91 and Isaiah 40:31. Given that John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, has been correcting misleading Government advice on sexual education and abortion, I think it's appropriate that this video of the song performed by Angela Birkhead-Flight is dedicated to "all babies who have died prematurely due to abortion, miscarriage or other means".

2 - Icarus

Although Kansas sung a song specifically about Icarus, another one - Carry On my Wayward son - seems to be a more meditative take on the sublime fall of the son of Daedalus, the craftsman who gave a ball of yarn to Ariadne so she could guide herself and Theseus out of the Minotaur's labyrinth, although there appear to be elements of Plato's allegory of the cave threaded through. Father and son, of course, strapped on wings of wax and feathers in order to escape the wrath of King Minos of Crete, but Icarus ignored a warning from Daedalus not to fly too high, and plunged into the sea when the heat melted the wax. It's often taken as a cautionary tale warning those who are over-ambitious of the danger of flying too high on constructions that should have been kept closer to earth. Just so, blogger Benedict White tells us that Gordon Brown was warned when Labour took power in 1997 that his proposed financial reforms would lead to a systemic banking failure. But he flew too high...

1 - The final attack

In the film The Dambusters we see a disconsolate crew looking back at the Möhne Dam on the Ruhr, feeling they have failed: then, suddenly, under the attacks that have been visited upon it, the dam's wall collapses and water floods out.

In reality, the crew pulling away was the fourth wave: a fifth Lancaster dropped its bouncing bomb upon the already-disintegrating wall to consolidate the damage.

This election has been a long, unpredictable slog. The Conservative party's first wave of attacks upon Gordon Brown, who is damming up the British people in a politically-correct prison where the silent majority of law-abiding people are punished the most, might be said to have happened shortly after his unelected accession to the Labour throne in June 2007, when he bottled out of an election he might have won when the David Cameron and George Osborne announced that only millionaires would pay inheritance tax. The second wave was a tsunami of activism, fuelled by both shoe-leather and blogs, cat-herding organised by the long-suffering Eric Pickles, the third a series of defeats inflicted upon the Prime Minister,Chancellor of the Exchequer and miscellaneous Ministers by David Cameron, George Osbourne and the Shadow front-bench team. The fourth is happening now, as candidates, activists and supporters work like Trojans to bring about change necessary for national survival.

The fifth wave is coming shortly, even as the dam walls crumble - illustrated by Gordon Brown's disastrous labelling of his own supporter, Gillian Duffy, as a "bigot" because she challenged the prevailing orthodoxy on immigration, imposed on people like her by rich ideologues who do not have to live in areas like hers. The fifth wave of attacks upon Labour's walls of infamy will come on May 6 and be inflicted by the voters, and I pray that the power-houses of willful negligence are swept away by the resulting inundation.

If you liked this, click here to go to more Top Ten Songs about...

"Bronson" - special charity screening in Cambridge

2010-05-03T02:36:00.005+01:00

Since the Willow Walker folded, a lot has been happening behind the scenes to re-establish a written-word service for homeless and vulnerably housed people in Cambridge and the people who serve them.

This culminated earlier in the year with the formation of Flack, a company registered as a social enterprise which aims to launch its first issue next spring. Their patron, Tom Hardy, is coming to the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse on Sunday 9 May to answer questions after a special screeening of his controversial film
Bronson in aid of the charity. I don't think I can do better than give you the press release, with hyperlinks and pics.

Hollywood star Tom Hardy will be coming to Cambridge on Sunday, May 9 for a special screening of his film Bronson. The showing, in the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse at 1pm, will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the actor.

The screening is to support the newly-formed charity Flack, which was set up to replace and expand the services to homeless/vulnerably housed people and the agencies who serve them by the magazine Willow Walker. The first editor of the Willow Walker, named after a Cambridge hostel run by English Churches Housing Group, was Alexander Masters, whose book Stuart: A Life Backwards was turned into a film starring Hardy.

The editor of Flack, which hopes to launch its new magazine in Spring 2011, is Kirsten Lavers, whose tenure at the Willow Walker as Alexander Masters’ successor saw the formation of a business called Cambridge Link-Up, run by present and formerly homeless people, and Street Voices, whose double CD Both Sides of the Tracks was released in March 2009 to critical acclaim.

Tom Hardy, patron of Flack, has successfully battled an alcohol and crack addiction he acquired after the box-office failure of Star Trek Nemesis, in which he played Praetor Shinzon, an evil clone of Captain Jean Luc Picard; the film was released at the same time as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the James Bond film Die another Day and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Bronson is the story of prisoner Charles Bronson, who changed his name from Michael Peterson to give him a harder image as a bare-knuckle fighter in London. First arrested in 1974 for armed robbery, he has spent just four months as a free man since, and is still imprisoned. He has been called "the most violent prisoner in Britain", and has been moved 120 times. Hardy famously did 2500 press-ups a day for five weeks before filming started to bulk up for the role. His other films include Black Hawk Down, Minotaur and RocknRolla, while he has also starred in TV productions such as Band of Brothers, Wuthering Heights and The Virgin Queen.

top ten songs about flying for 56k modems

2010-05-02T03:19:00.007+01:00

Click here to go to Top Ten Songs about Flying for broadband

When I first heard of Eyjafjallajökull, I was of the same opinion as Richard Normington, in that it seemed more like a keyboard malfunction than anything else. But things started to look sinister when continent-sized areas in the course of the volcanic cloud, containing putative glass fragments that could cause high-flying jet engines to close down, were declared no-fly areas on the basis of computer models that are as diconnected from reality as the politicians who made decisions solely on their predictions, without reference to reality.

Thankfully, we can fly again. As it happens, I don't fly that often, but even in the circumference of the world I inhabit the no-fly orders had consequences, from a colleague who couldn't make it to work, through a fellow worshipper whose presence had been required to validate church accounts, to a friend who had been badly injured abroad and whose family was deprived even longer of her presence.

I thought that I'd like to dedicate this month's Top Ten to the theme of flying, because the cooling of Eyjafjallajökull's ire coincides with a crucial time in our country's history, when we decide which political parties will suppress the innate instinct to fly as high as we can, and which will not only nurture it but ensure that we lift up our peers in so doing.

10 - Would you like to fly?

The 5th Dimension, who were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002, are famous for taking the song Age of Aquarius from Hair to the top spot. My favourite song of theirs is Jimmy Webb's Up, Up and Away which, whenever I hear it, brings memories of childhood awakenings to the song being played on the ever-present radio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAQf1uAHaXM

9 - Wild Swan

In my opinion, Tony Clarkin - the bearded guitarist in the video - deserves to be hailed alongside Pete Townshend as arranger par excellence of his own lyrics with insight and sensitivity worthy of Berlioz. The video, telling the story of a son who simultaneously hero-worships his crusading father and feels the overarching need for his presence beside him, comes to mind because of a wild swan that's been making the news in Cambridge. Called Mr Asbo, he's been accused of harassing and even overturning boats on Cambridge's river Cam. A recent film aired on BBC 1's The One Show displayed the swan at his most aggressive - but the BBC has been accused - in a video that I recommend you watch - of goading the swan's mate into leaving her nest in order to see off a canoe that was ordered to go dangerously close to it for the sake of "car-crach TV". Given that Asbo, according to vet and Telegraph blogger Pete Wedderburn, has actually had his cygnets killed by "passers by", I'm not surprised he's mardy. The state hasn't killed my children, but arrogates to itself ever greater powers to brainwash them according to abusive agendas that seem to have no other purpose than to "rub the Right's nose in diversity". I feel as angry as Mr Asbo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWbNRGV8jL0

8 - Volare

In February 1991, I had an interview in London and arranged to stay with a friend in Brixton. The interview went well but later in the day came the news that 10 Downing Street had been attacked by an IRA mortar. Mobile phones being as rare as they were huge in those days, I found myself having to wait in one of the lines that trailed from every phone box. My friend explained, "I think everybody's phoning home to say they're ok". That evening, he. I and another friend went to his flat in the middle of Brixton High Street, kicking up the snow that had emptied the thoroughfare of cars. Since all of us had lived for some time in Italy, this is the song we sung:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qivzSaALee8

7 - Flying machines in pieces

This is such a video of James Taylor's Fire and Rain, which is about, in part, the suicide of his fried Suzanne Schnerr, whom he'd met while both of them were hospitalised for addiction to heroin. "Flying Machine" was the name of his first band; but the line "flying machines in pieces on the ground" is about more than the breakup of a musical unit, but I wonder if. when Taylor sings "Susanne the plans they made put an end to you" (my italics) he's running from the couple's co-dependency. But. counterintuitively, I can see a better case for the use of prescribed pharmaceutical diamorphine (heroin) under strictly controlled than for legalisation of cannabis, because we cannot halt supply of heroin within our own borders. The thing is, cannabis-legalisation site UKCIA (offline at the moment) has made a case for legalisation of weed as a gateway to legalisation of just about every illegal drug. Having been a drugs-worker, I hope this never happens; I'd hate the misery I saw in the needle-exchange to become commonplace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T35WXFOmwI

6 - So much owed by so many to so few

In 2002, Nick Clegg, now leader of the Liberal Democrats, wrote an article about a school trip to Germany:

A boy called Adrian started it. He shouted from the back of the coach, "we own your country, we won the war". Other boys tittered. One put a finger to his upper lip - the traditional British schoolyard designation for Hitler's moustache - threw his arm out in a Nazi salute, and goose-stepped down the bus aisle. Soon there was a cascade of sneering jokes, most delivered in 'Allo 'Allo German accents.

I was shocked by his ignorance. Britain was indeed on the winning side of WWII and was a major and heroic player, but to baldly assert that "Britain won the war" is as disingenuous as is baldly asserting that Germany lost it. We must never forget the key role that Britain played in defeating the Nazis (who were by no means synonymous with Germany), but it is salutary to remember that, on the eve of the Pearl Harbour attacks on December 7, 1941, Britain was losing, and Winston Churchill had authorised the distribution of bayonets with a poster campaign saying "at least you can take one with you".

As it happens, historian Colin Heaton concluded in Night Fighters that had Britain been conquered, America would have eventually had confront Hitler's contagious monomania - but Britain would have been a much changed place. Thank God that never happened.

Rector Pellegrina wasn't quite convinced when I confessed a guilty pleasure in heavy metal. I hope this video about the Battle of Britain - by an RAF composed of 10% Polish pilotry - will give both her and you cause to reconsider.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r0EE74vJKc

5 - Flying Sorcery

Al Stewart merged his twin loves of flying and history for this song from his classic Year of the Cat album. An article on his website explains the context of the lyrics, from Amy Johnson, to the biplanes called Faith, Hope and Charity which defended the George Cross island of Malta and the double meaning of the Flying Circus. Enjoy this footage of him singing in Cambridge's namesake town in Massachussetts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG7jd9aucr0

4 - Flying for me

John Denver was a founder of the "citizen in space" project and was even considered for the honour, but was pipped at the post by Christa McAuliffe, a secondary/high school teacher who had worked in Washington DC before moving to Concord in New Hampshire. Denver recollected that on the morning of January 28 1986 his adopted son Zac phoned him and told him to put the TV on, any station: there was the Challenger disaster, inspiring him to write:

She was flying for me
She was flying for every one
She was flying to see a brighter day for each and every one
She gave us her light
She gave us her spirit and all she can be
She was flying for me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC3o-lsUf4Y

3 - Abide in His shadow for life

We had a discussion on hymns at our annual church meeting recently - you know the sort, that can quickly degenerate into an "old=Good" vs "New=Better" argument all too quickly. It was left to our venerable and classically-trained organist to point out that while traditions need maintaining, some new hymns are beautiful. One of these, I think, is Fr Michael Joncas' On Eagles' Wings, based on Psalm 91 and Isaiah 40:31. Given that John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, has been correcting misleading Government advice on sexual education and abortion, I think it's appropriate that this video of the song performed by Angela Birkhead-Flight is dedicated to "all babies who have died prematurely due to abortion, miscarriage or other means".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70bJHNTxtZU&feature=related

2 - Icarus

Although Kansas sung a song specifically about Icarus, another one - Carry On my Wayward son - seems to be a more meditative take on the sublime fall of the son of Daedalus, the craftsman who gave a ball of yarn to Ariadne so she could guide herself and Theseus out of the Minotaur's labyrinth, although there appear to be elements of Plato's allegory of the cave threaded through. Father and son, of course, strapped on wings of wax and feathers in order to escape the wrath of King Minos of Crete, but Icarus ignored a warning from Daedalus not to fly too high, and plunged into the sea when the heat melted the wax. It's often taken as a cautionary tale warning those who are over-ambitious of the danger of flying too high on constructions that should have been kept closer to earth. Just so, blogger Benedict White tells us that Gordon Brown was warned when Labour took power in 1997 that his proposed financial reforms would lead to a systemic banking failure. But he flew too high...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB17uWuBrL0

1 - The final attack

In the film The Dambusters we see a disconsolate crew looking back at the Möhne Dam on the Ruhr, feeling they have failed: then, suddenly, under the attacks that have been visited upon it, the dam's wall collapses and water floods out.

In reality, the crew pulling away was the fourth wave: a fifth Lancaster dropped its bouncing bomb upon the already-disintegrating wall to consolidate the damage.

This election has been a long, unpredictable slog. The Conservative party's first wave of attacks upon Gordon Brown, who is damming up the British people in a politically-correct prison where the silent majority of law-abiding people are punished the most, might be said to have happened shortly after his unelected accession to the Labour throne in June 2007, when he bottled out of an election he might have won when the David Cameron and George Osborne announced that only millionaires would pay inheritance tax. The second wave was a tsunami of activism, fuelled by both shoe-leather and blogs, cat-herding organised by the long-suffering Eric Pickles, the third a series of defeats inflicted upon the Prime Minister,Chancellor of the Exchequer and miscellaneous Ministers by David Cameron, George Osbourne and the Shadow front-bench team. The fourth is happening now, as candidates, activists and supporters work like Trojans to bring about change necessary for national survival.

The fifth wave is coming shortly, even as the dam walls crumble - illustrated by Gordon Brown's disastrous labelling of his own supporter, Gillian Duffy, as a "bigot" because she challenged the prevailing orthodoxy on immigration, imposed on people like her by rich ideologues who do not have to live in areas like hers. The fifth wave of attacks upon Labour's walls of infamy will come on May 6 and be inflicted by the voters, and I pray that the power-houses of willful negligence are swept away by the resulting inundation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJun5ziotfw

Daniel Zeichner, that salute and a bizarre exchange

2010-04-25T21:34:00.007+01:00

Old Holborn is an independent libertarian candidate for Cambridge who dresses as Guy Fawkes, including mask.

The reason I mention him is that he appears to have been the first person to have posted a picture of the city's Labour candidate Daniel Zeichner performing a revolting gesture during a debate at the Cambridge Union. Zeichner, giving his opinion of the Polish Law and Justice Party with which the Conservative Party in Europe is allied by giving a Nazi salute. This is yet another instance of the blogosphere leading the news agenda.

Zeichner referred to the incident at a hustings ran by the Stop the War Coalition at which Old Holborn was also present and - according to minutes - found it necessary to point out very early on, in a conversation that was heading in sinister directions, "80% of Conservative MPs and 40% of Labour MPs are signed up as friends of Israel. Only Israel has more Jewish MPs than Britain." The hustings was also attended by Julian Huppert of the Liberal Democrats, Martin Booth of Cambridge Socialists, Simon Sedgewick-Jell (representing Tony Juniper) of the Green Party and Daniel Zeichner. Conservative candidate Nicholas Hillman was speaking at another engagement.

Zeichner was lucky enough, given his recent history, to arrive right at the end of the section of questions on Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Soon after, though, the following bizarre exchange took place between Zeichner and a photographer standing at the front:

Photo:
How does Daniel Zeichner square what he says with his membership of Labour Friends of Israel?
DZ
I’m not a member.
Photo
I have information that you are.
DZ
I’m not.
Member of public to photographer: “sit down!”
Photo
I withdraw my previous comment, as my knowledge is not sufficient – what did you mean by “forces outside our control?”
DZ
My Dad was born in the 1930s in Vienna, and was driven out by the Nazis. I’m not Jewish, but my Dad lived in Vienna at a time when it was wise to get out.
The photographer turned to the seats and said "I want to reassure everybody I’m not anti-Jewish", then he and the member of the public who’d told him to sit down accused each other of wanting to direct the meeting before the Chair regained control.

As a member of both Conservative Friends of Israel and Anglican Friends of Israel, I'm curious: what's so wrong in being a friend of Israel? We deserve to know.

All of the minutes are very interesting - click to read them here. I'm sure that anybody who wants to take issue with them can refer to the video of the event filmed by Cambridge Socialists.

happy St George's Day!

2010-04-23T01:01:00.002+01:00

Related posts:

top ten songs about England

this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

let England stand free

Earth Day: John Denver versus the pandora's box

2010-04-22T22:40:00.007+01:00

My friends are sometimes surprised to hear that I'm a John Denver fan. I disagree with some of - actually most of - his political views, but then again I like some of John Lennon's early 1970s music, even though the man was by then an even nuttier fruitcake than he was in the Beatles.

What I admire is Denver's adherence to his principles, and one of the first things I point out when talking about him is that while rock and pop oligarchs were recording their histrionic singles Do they Know it's Christmas? and We are the World, Denver was frequently in African countries with his sleeves rolled up. Denver had wanted to be on We are the World, but the single's producer, Ken Kragen, who also managed Harry Chapin and Kenny Rogers, commented that "several [un-named] people felt his image would hurt the credibility of the recording as a pop/rock anthem. I didn't agree".

Similarly, while Earth Day, instituted in 1970, is a once-a-year "awareness-raising exercise" for some, the title of Denver's 1990 song for the occasion summed up his typically uncompromising view: Celebrate Earth day (Every Day).

In other words, if you think that the activities of humankind are causing global warming, you can use your God-given free will to give up your car, stop flying in aeroplanes (admittedly not hard to do recently with the help of Icelandic volcanoes) and power your household entirely with wind-turbines. Every day.

My favourite Earth Day story was from Anthony Watts, stating that today Arctic sea-ice is at its hightest for 9 years, while Telegraph blogger James Delingpole lists the lunacy of Earth Day votaries:

"Between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct" by 1995 - Earth Day founder, the late Gaylord Nelson.

The world will be "…eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age," Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.

"By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…" Life magazine, January 1970.

Gaylord Nelson, aside from founding Earth Day, is also famous for instituting hearings as a Senator on the safety of the contraceptive pill which required US manufacturers to place a statement as to the Pill's safety on its boxes, the first time in the country that an adverse effect had to be listed on a pharmaceutical product, and I can't fault him for that. But I think it gives an insight into the way his mind worked that no women were invited to testify, and this gave "reproductive rights" advocate Alice Wolfson a chance to stake her place in the dimming light.

Another peek into his psyche is given by his insistence that Earth Day should be held on April 22. This was against the likes of, say, anthropologist Margaret Mead, who called Earth Day "the first holy day which transcends all national borders", that the feast should be held on the Spring Equinox, which falls around a month earlier. Students of history will note, therefore, the significance of the first Earth Day being held on 22 April 1970: it was, according to the Grergorian Calendar, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - Lenin.

Sadly, in the aftermath of John Denver's last flight, I am not aware of eminent left-leaning figures who believe in showing what they think about the environment at least as much through how they live as what they say. I suspect they were sidelined from public life by the same sort of ideologues who decided Denver was not appropriate for We are the World.

So we are left with a holyday of obligation for a monster who murdered and oppressed his own people before directing his baleful gaze towards Russia's neighbours, thence to the rest of the world both in his own right and through his unintended heir Stalin, who muscled in on his legacy the same way that Alice Wolfson piggybacked on the unsuspecting Gaylord Nelson. Thus do each generation's self-elected prophets hand a Pandora's box to those who will empty its contents upon the silent majority of the next.

And that's before we get to Al Gore.

Related post: lights on: don't let earth hour usher in a dark age

moving pictures: journeying to and from Spring Harvest

2010-04-15T02:05:00.004+01:00

In my late teens, having decided to terminate my studies in Italy, I returned home by train and boat and found myself drawn to conversation with a variety of people, as if we souls in transit - in more ways than one - were drawn to each other.

I found myself reflecting on this last week while travelling by train to Spring Harvest, an annual Christian festival of lectures and worship based in two Butlins camps - Minehead and Skegness - of which I went to the latter. As it happened, I spent the first half of the week feeling a little sedated due to unexpected side-effects from my meds, but experienced yet again, in going and coming home, the discovery predicated by Dickens of David Copperfield that the stages on the journey contribute to its object.

Due to an urgent meeting at work I'd been unable to travel with the family. Not having the opportunity to partake of a radical fast in the tradition of Lough Derg in Ireland, one of Europe's most ancient sites of pilgrimage, as a blogger I'd decided to fast from the news. This left me looking out of the train windows and realising that I hadn't done so for many years, such had been the pull of having my head stuck in a book or paper when travelling.

Perhaps a meeting at work at which the probabililty of downsizing was discussed had taken my eye off the ball (as well as ensuring I couldn't travel with my family), or maybe I was a little too calmed by the smell of freshly-mown hay from the field opposite Ely station; anyway, when my train arrived simultaneously with another on the other side of the island-platform, I got on the wrong one and found myself heading back to Cambridge. An anticipated sulk was swept away by the discovery that I could get straight on another train to Ely, and I wasn't held back all that much.

On the journey to from Ely to Grantham I watched the waterlogged Fen landscape roll past with a sense of wonder at how much dry land had been reclaimed by the heroic efforts of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, whose travails are commemorated in the legend beneath South Cambridgeshire District Council's coat of arms - Niet Zonder Arbyt (nothing without work) - which is the only Dutch motto in British civic heraldry.

I got off at Grantham to join the Poacher Line to Skegness. The East Midlands town was instantly recognisable by the skyscraping spire of St Wulfram's Church, built to commemorate the 7th century Frankish missionary in the early 1300s, and a striking contrast to the many Norman church towers, arising from parish churches of villages mentioned in the Domesday Book, punctuating the horizon during the journey. As we drew out of the expanding East Midlands town I got a glimpse down St Peter's Hill before another new shopping centre went by. I pity people trying to get onto the property ladder here, as prices rocketed after the discovery that, at a pinch, one could commute to London from it.

Soon after Grantham the train stopped at Rauceby, once the site of a major psychiatric hospital that was closed in 1997, after which we were once again in the fens proper. I was delighted to catch a glimpse of two great crested grebe perform a mating dance before arriving at Boston, where a group of pilgrims known as the English Separatists left firstly for the Netherlands to try to practice their faith in freedom, before finally and famously fleeing the religiously-riven continent on the Mayflower to land on Plymouth Rock, and found a namesake of their hometown in Massachussetts in 1620.

It was getting darker as the train drew towards Skegness - known as "skeggy" to its many admirers - and I saw a Barn Owl swoop low over a field in the gathering gloom. For somebody who's still a city-boy at heart, it felt like winning a prize.

On the bus from the station at Skeggy I felt a squirt of adrenaline at catching the sea just as I've always done since boyhood, although it was good to get into our caravan in the site opposite Butlins at last. Spring Harvest was good, although I was dismayed at the lack of any opportunity for traditional worship. I attended some good lectures, but will have to review my notes and do some digging before posting an appraisal.

Spring Harvest finishes on a Sunday which, if you don't have a car, is hellish, because only one train runs, but at least this year it had an extra carriage. We met one lovely woman from the north-east, who suggested that next year she might spend the Sunday night in a bed-and-breakfast and leave on the Monday - or else not come if she can't afford the extra expense. The situation regarding the trains is a crying shame, because Butlins is full-up during the two Spring Harvest week-long sessions, which help it provide such a vital economic and jobs boost to Skegness.

Passing Boston again, I saw a row of terraced houses that, like unbraced teeth, had grown organically, with the Unicorn Bar and Andy's Fish and Chip Shop, while St Botolph's unique spire (The Stump) played hide-and-seek in the background. Another station, Heckington, was beautifully trimmed and displayed a poster advertising a "Railway and Heritage Museum". beside the station was a huge windmill, and I wondered if this might be one of the originals deployed by Sir Cornelius to drain the Fens. Wainfleet was also beautifully kept, with flowers growing from cut-down beer barrels: an addendum to each railway sign identified it as "the home of Bateman's Brewery".

As good as it was to get back to the Draughty Old Fen, it was a beautiful, if crowded, journey. Despite large green spaces being built into the Fen drainage system by Vermuyden as an integral part, whether or not those places in the Fens I saw will be built on depends upon the result of the next election. I hope I get a chance to see them again soon.

top tips for Tuesday

2010-04-13T14:49:00.014+01:00

At this vital time in the General Election timetable I've returned from holiday to find that my computer has chosen to go wobbly - I'm sure it was made by a sicialist - and I can't launch Photoshop. My daughter, who - like many children - is the resident computer expert is visiting Granny on the other side of the Fens; so, apart from pics I already have on Photobucket, I'll have to leave you to the tender mercy of Blogger's in-house image hosting program...

Suddenly blogging as the General Election approaches looks much more interesting...and dangerous. In the wake of a report by Iain Dale on a judgement against a Labour blogger sued regarding a comment he left on his site, barrister James Tumbridge (right) posts a gust blog on Ellie Seymour's site on What bloggers need to know about defamation. Watch out for the most thought-provoking conclusion to a blog that I've seen for a long time.

Nick Hillman, Conservative PPC for Cambridge, posts on the meeting to save the city's Strawberry Fair, which has been opposed this year by police on drug-taking and disorder grounds. As a historian he shares his views on the prospect of losing this festival, which began in the early 1970s.

Richard Normington profiles the launch of the Conservative Manifesto, with links to the appropriate parts so you can make up your own mind.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then this snap taken by Phil Salway of the Coleridge Conservative team in Cambridge, of the Green Party's electoral campaign headquarters in the Alternative Bookshop on the city's Mill Road, speaks volumes about what the Green Party really thinks about the commitments it wants us to take on energy conservation. Be sure to click the link or the pic to go to Andrew Bower's (Cambridge City Council Conservative Candidate) to have a look and read an analysis.

In the US, commentator Michelle Malkin posts on First Lady Michelle Obama's initiative on "youth engagement" in Mexico City, contrasting this with the plight of farmers in Texas (which shares a border with Mexico) "besieged by border violence".

Canadian newspaper website The Gazette looks at the Vatican reaction to Richard Dawkins' and Christopher Hitchins' histrionic plan to have the Pope arrested on his forthcoming State visit to Great Britain in September.

David Appletree of the Jewish Internet Defence Force reproduces a letter from Rabbi Dov Coder complaining to YouTube about hate material posted by David Dukes, notorious antisemite, racist and Ku Klux Klan member...

...while There is nothing British about the BNP looks at a racist group joined by BNP vice-chairman Simon Darby that's hosted by Facebook, a site Appletree warns about repeatedly.

And finally, here's a treat: Open Music Archive, "a collaborative project, initiated by artists Eileen Simpson & Ben White, to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings. The archive is open for anyone to use and contribute to.".

see you shortly

2010-04-05T22:32:00.003+01:00

We're going to Butlins in Skegness for a week of Christian events called Spring Harvest, during which my cyber-phobic brother Asinus will be house-sitting. Ar rather, cat-sitting.

Hoep you all have a good week!

top ten songs about England

2010-04-05T02:24:00.019+01:00

Click here to go to Top Ten Songs about England for 56k modems or slow broadband

I can't pinpoint when I became an Anglophile; my Mum and I would go to Blackpool frequently when I was young, but during the traditional "fair fortnight" holiday the Lancashire coastal resort would essentially turn Scottish in what remains of Scotland's support for the House of Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses, the price of cooperation having been Berwick (which soon returned to England).

I first lived in England after marrying Maxima, who comes from the other end of the Fens. After a spell we went and lived in Glasgow as my mother was very ill and, after her death, came to the Draughty Old Fen when offered a temprorary job here; when it became permanent the family moved down - it was a good move.

Although Maxima was regularly sent to coventry in Scotland because she's English, the situation has never been reciprocated here. I find the English warm-hearted, supportive and generous, despite their having laboured under an administration that for twelve years has tried its best to chip away at its best-loved traditions, the latest victim having been Pooh sticks, ostensibly cancelled for health and safety reasons.

I will always retain a level of affection for Scotland, but my guttering loyalty to the country was finally extinguished when the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, was released for political reasons. Remembering TV pictures of the approaches to the Borders town choked with ambulances that would return empty, I felt sick.

Having deconstructed the notion of "race" to the level that, the Establishment says, your race is what you decide it is, one might make a good case for "English" to be a race, although in the diversity-ridden alternative universe presently prevalent in the corridors of power I suspect that one would be a non-starter. But if I called myself English, my accent would betray me the moment I opened my mouth. However, I definitely feel more British than Scottish, and will continue to do so should Scotland go its own way to make the United Kingdom into, says Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party, the United Kingdoms.

I love England. And so, in the month when we celebrate the Feast of St George, I would like to offer you a Top Ten about this wonderful, kind race: the English.

"In England, where my heart lies..."

Paul Simon toured England in the early-mid 1960's, and famously spoke of his wish to voyage Homeward Bound, which he wrote while stranded at Widnes train station. "Home", of course, meant America, but it also referred to Kathy Kitty, the English girl he'd fallen in love with (hence the line "Kathy I'm lost" in America). Like many before and after he also fell in love with England - see the reference to "Cathedral bells" etc in To Emily, wherever I may find her. Here's the late Eva Cassidy singing the song live, including the classic reference to "England, where my heart lies".

Dirty Old Town

Lancashire songwriter Ewan MacColl, father of Kirsty, wrote Dirty Old Town about Salford, near Manchester, where he was born. Written in 1949, it was immediately adopted and made famous by the Dubliners, and subsequently by bands all over the English-speaking world in an example of the way English-speaking culture can go international in a heartbeat, although the socialist songwriter may not have liked to think of it that way. Luke Kelly, Dubliners founder member, sings it with his band here, displaying the English-Irish cross-pollination that has enriched both countries for centuries.

Zadok the priest

This great anthem was written by Handel for the coronation of George II in 1727. Since the union of he Crowns of England and Scotland was in 1603, and the Act of Unions uniting the two countries' Parliaments in 1707, one could say that this is a British anthem. But should Scotland secede from the Union, it will be up to them what heritage from the Union they take: I hope that Zadok the Priest - based on 1 Kings 1:38-40 - is retained by England, even if it should be duplicated elsewhere.

From Brixton to another place

Electric Avenue is a thoroughfare in Brixton linking two roads full of stalls, just like you might see in Eastenders. As cosmopolitan as it is, the video of Eddy Grant singing about the street suggests that its inhabitants and patrons might like, maybe just once in a while, something else.

Preotecting the old ways...

Yorkshire folk singer Kate Rusby covers the Kinks' 1968 hit The Village Green Preservation Society for a series called Jam and Jerusalem, which was modelled on the Womens' Institute, formed in 1915 to revitalise rural communities, but which now has a vital message for women and girls everywhere.

Burn them down?

The Jarrow Crusade was a heroic peregrination from Jarrow, near Newcastle, to the Houses of Parliament, to protest against the unemployment, poverty and even starvation that followed the collapse of the US stock exchange in 1929. In Alan Price's song about the event we hear him put himself into the song in a deconstructionist manner; but, more than that, while the majority of marchers wanted a job, we hear him echoing the cries of the vocal minority to "burn them down" - which prefigured the minority in the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 for whom a settlement of better pay and conditions would have been a disaster, because they wanted nothing but régime change.

Cricket

It was sad to see that Cambridge University's Emmanuel College was forced to desist from holding a May Ball in praise of the British Empire. Nobody's going to support the Amritsar Massacre, but Britain - and England - spread abroad a culture that continues to refer back to the English way of life where, as poet Rupert Brooke asked, stands the church clock at ten to three? A sign of this culture, visible in India, Pakistan, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand, is cricket: and here is the tune that has accompanied English cricket on TV for decades - Soul Limbo by Booker T and the MGs.

Queen of Bollywood

Before the (modern) Suez Canal was opened in 1856, civil servants and administrators working in India would often marry Indian wives, because of the unworkability of having a wife "back home" due to the long passage time. Thus began a new race, called Anglo-Indians or Eurasians, who are still very popular in the Bollywood film industry. This is Asha Bhosle singing for the BBC - enjoy.

The seaside

The fascination for seaside resorts grew exponentially during Queen Victoria's reign, and still remains. As well as Blackpool, there were Skegness, Brighton, Torquay and many other resorts. After a fallow period, English seaside resorts are becoming more popular due to the recession, as it becomes relatively more expensive to go abroad. (Study the video below and you'll see Brian May.)

Fisherman's Friends

The Fisherman's friends, of Port Isaac in Cornwall, were founded to support the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in a part of Britain where it's all too easy for boats to go missing. If you like what you hear, please think of the men and women who give so much to bring us fish, and of the men and women who are ready to sacrifice everything when something goes wrong. Click on the flag to find out more about the RNLI, or on the image of the Fisherman's Friends' latest album on the left to find out more about the band.

If you enjoyed this, click here for more Top ten songs about...

Related posts:

this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this england

let England stand free

Happy st George's Day!

he is risen...happy Easter!

2010-04-04T16:25:00.004+01:00

Click on the image below to read the Resurrection story in the Gospel of Luke.

on the trail in Trumpington

2010-04-04T00:54:00.018+01:00

UPDATE: click here if you're looking for "Trumpington Bible"

In the photo above, from left: Andrew Lansley, Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Lara Hillman, candidate for City Councillor for the Abbey Ward in Cambridge, and Nick Hillman, Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Cambridge; taken in Brookside, in the Trumpington ward of Cambridge.

Going to Trumpington Waitrose to meet Nick Hillman - Prospective Parliamentary Candidate) for Cambridge - for a letter-drop explaining a boundary change, I was delighted to meet Nick's wife Lara, who is standing to become a Councillor for the city's Abbey ward. I have to admit a stereotypical male reaction on meeting an obviously pregnant woman in asking whether she might need some rests while walking about, which she handled with very good grace, considering the weight I'm carrying myself.

The letter was from Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, explaining that the village of Trumpington will no longer be part of his South Cambridgeshire Constituency but pass to Cambridge City which, hopefully, will be turned blue by Nick Hillman on Election Day.

Look to the panel on the top right to see a countdown to how long we have to wait until that day. Since Gordon Brown bottled out of an autumn 2007 election that he might well have won through the "honeymoon effect" of his just having taken over from Tony Blair, he must be thinking back to 1979, when James Callaghan went right to the wire and lost to Margaret Thatcher after a humiliating vote of no confidence which he lost by one vote.
Mr Lansley had been in the news yesterday criticising the Government for not making vital cancer-treating drugs available on the NHS; but, like any responsible MP, Lansley cares deeply about his constituency and says in his letter, which he came to Trumpington to hand to the Cambridge team:

[The boundary change] is sad for me. I lived on the High Street in Trumpington for five years. I have been involved in many issues locally and have got to know well many people and organisations. It will be hard to hand over. But, when I do, I hope it will be to Nick Hillman, who is the Conservatives' Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Cambridge City. I have known Nick for several years. Living in Cambridge, a former teacher at Hills Road Sixth Form College and latterly the Conservatives' leading advisor on policy towards Universities, Nick is brilliantly well qualified to be the Member of Parliament for Cambridge.

As Andrew Lansley indicates, Nick Hillman works closely with David Willetts, who is the Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills. I hope to see Nick Hillman and David Willetts working closely together with Michael Gove, presently Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families - who has challenged a major teaching union to "put its own principles into practice by setting up its own school" - to help us all create a society where, Gove stated at this year's Conservative Party Spring Conference in Brighton, "Education is at the heart of change."

It was interesting to see the cosmopolitan nature of the ward in the streets around the Panton Arms, houses side-to-side with student accommodation and University buildings. I saw a few students going about their business and reflected that Labour had brought education back to the state which prompted James Callaghan to deliver his Ruskin speech in the Oxford University college, one of his first acts upon taking over as Prime Minister in 1976 after the sudden retirement of Harold Wilson, in the middle of the Labour term that mirrors the present one in ending so chaotically. Callaghan wrote about the speech in his 1987 autobiography Time and Chance:

Industry complained that some school-leavers did not have the basic tools to do the job and many of our best-trained students from university and polytechnics had no desire to join industry. Why was this?...Were we sacrificing thoroughness and depth of courses in favour of range and diversity?

Lara was a bundle of energy: the people of Abbey will be well-served should they elect her as their City Counsellor. She and Nick gave me a lift back up to Waitrose so I could pedal frantically back to catch the start of Doctor Who, which I almost managed. Settling down to turkey-roll, and chips, it made me feel slightly guilty to think that Nick and Lara still had their sleeves rolled up and were working hard. I hope, for all our sakes, that they are elected in May.

top ten songs about england for 56k modems

2010-04-02T05:09:00.007+01:00

Clikc here to go to Top Ten songs about England for broadband

I can't pinpoint when I became an Anglophile; my Mum and I would go to Blackpool frequently when I was young, but during the traditional "fair fortnight" holiday the Lancashire coastal resort would essentially turn Scottish in what remains of Scotland's support for the House of Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses, the price of cooperation having been Berwick (which soon returned to England).

I first lived in England after marrying Maxima, who comes from the other end of the Fens. After a spell we went and lived in Glasgow as my mother was very ill and, after her death, came to the Draughty Old Fen when offered a temprorary job here; when it became permanent the family moved down - it was a good move.

Although Maxima was regularly sent to coventry in Scotland because she's English, the situation has never been reciprocated here. I find the English warm-hearted, supportive and generous, despite their having laboured under an administration that for twelve years has tried its best to chip away at its best-loved traditions, the latest victim having been Pooh sticks, ostensibly cancelled for health and safety reasons.

I will always retain a level of affection for Scotland, but my guttering loyalty to the country was finally extinguished when the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, was released for political reasons. Remembering TV pictures of the approaches to the Borders town choked with ambulances that would return empty, I felt sick.

Having deconstructed the notion of "race" to the level that, the Establishment says, your race is what you decide it is, one might make a good case for "English" to be a race, although in the diversity-ridden alternative universe presently prevalent in the corridors of power I suspect that one would be a non-starter. But if I called myself English, my accent would betray me the moment I opened my mouth. However, I definitely feel more British than Scottish, and will continue to do so should Scotland go its own way to make the United Kingdom into, says Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party, the United Kingdoms.

I love England. And so, I would like to offer you a Top Ten about this wonderful, kind race: the English.

In England, where my heart lies..."

Paul Simon toured England in the early-mid 1960's, and famously spoke of his wish to voyage Homeward Bound, which he wrote while stranded at Widnes train station. "Home", of course, meant America, but it also referred to Kathy Kitty, the English girl he'd fallen in love with (hence the line "Kathy I'm lost" in America. Like many before and after he also fell in love with England - see the reference to "Cathedral bells" etc in To Emily, wherever I may find her. Here's the late Eva Cassidy singing the song live, including the classic reference to "England, where my heart lies".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G860hkE0Tc&feature=player_embedded

Dirty Old Town

Lancashire songwriter Ewan MacColl, father of Kirsty, wrote Dirty Old Town about Salford, a suburb of Manchester, where he was born. Written in 1949, it was immediately adopted and made famous by the Dubliners, and subsequently by bands all over the English-speaking world in an example of the way English culture can go international in a heartbeat, although the socialist songwriter may not have liked to think of it that way. Luke Kelly, Dubliners founder member, sings it with his band here, displaying the English-Irish cross-pollination that has enriched both countries for centuries.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSDzOKPvedc&feature=player_embedded

Zadok the priest

This great anthem was written by Handel for the coronation of George II in 1727. Since the union of he Crowns of England and Scotland was in 1603, and the Act of Unions uniting the two countries' Parliaments in 1707, one could say that this is a British anthem. But should Scotland secede from the Union, it will be up to them what heritage from the Union they take: I hope that Zadok the Priest - based on 1 Kings 1:38-40 - is retained by England, even if it should be duplicated elsewhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCHUCMiJ_Ew&feature=player_embedded

From Brixton to another place

Electric Avenue is a thoroughfare in Brixton linking two roads full of stalls, just like you might see in Eastenders. As cosmopolitan as it is, the video of Eddy Grant singing about the street suggests that its inhabitants and patrons might like, maybe just once in a while, something else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA5MtAmT24g&feature=player_embedded

Preotecting the old ways...

Yorkshire folk singer Kate Rusby covers the Kinks' 1968 hit The Village Green Preservation Society for a series called Jam and Jerusalem, which was modelled on the Womens' Institute, formed in 1915 to revitalise rural communities, but which now has a vital message for women and girls everywhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRK6U5vIHCs&feature=player_embedded

Burn them down?

The Jarrow March was a heroic peregrination from Jarrow, near Newcastle, to the Houses of Parliament, to protest against the unemployment, poverty and even starvation that followed the collapse of the US stock exchange in 1929. In Alan Price's song about the event we hear him put himself into the song in a deconstructionist manner; but, more than that, while the majority of marchers wanted a job, we hear him echoing the cries of the vocal minority to "burn them down" - which prefigured the minority in the Miners' Strike of 1984-85 for whom a sedttlement of better pay and conditions would have been a disaster, because they wanted nothing but régime change.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlMjSESoz9A&feature=player_embedded

Cricket

It was sad to see that Cambridge University's Emmanuel College was forced to desist from holding a May Ball in praise of the British Empire. Nobody's going to support the Amritsar Massacre, but Britain - and England - spread abroad a culture that continues to refer back to the English way of life where, as poet Rupert Brooke asked, stands the church clock at ten to three? A sign of this culture, visible in India, Pakistan, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand, is cricket: and here is the tune that has accompanied English cricket on TV for decades - Soul Limbo by Booker T and the MGs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67xXbTaQlKI&feature=player_embedded

Queen of Bollywood

This is Asha Bhosle singing for the BBC - enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oj2vvCUwHc&feature=player_embedded

The seaside

The fascination for the seaside grew exponentially at the end of Queen Victoria's reign, and still remains. As well as Blackpool, there were Skegness, Brighton, Torquay and many other resorts. After a fallow period, English seaside resorts are becoming more popular due to the recession, as it becomes relatively more expensive to go abroad. (Study the video below and you'll see Brian May.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWhdx6OB_uc&feature=player_embedded

Fisherman's Friends

The Fisherman's friends, of Port Isaac in Cornwall, were founded to support the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in a part of Britain where it's all too easy for boats to go missing. If you like what you hear, please think of the men and women who give so much to bring us fish, and of the men and women who are ready to sacrifice everything when something goes wrong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93wjsRsz1cI&feature=player_embedded

coast: natural history of a man-made environment

2010-04-02T03:47:00.003+01:00

I once wisited The Wash. I was staying with a friend who worked in a hotel in Holbeach, in the South Lincolnshire area of Little Holland, and we drove up to see this seemingly unspoilt area of the Fens.

I say "seemingly" because the Fens compete with the Netherlands as constituting arguably one of the most modified areas in the world. Mostly below sea level, they were once a vast flooded area with bits of land poking up, on which settlements were built: Ely Cathedral in its various forms has been called "the ship of the Fens" for over a thousand years, and it's not a metaphor.

On last night's episode of the BBC2 10-minute documentary season Coast, focussing on The Wash, local archaeologist Maisie Taylor summed up how the Fens have been seen in Britain in the past: "they were wonderful for people who lived here, but for outsiders it was an evil place". Former Professor of History and Head of Trinity College at Cambridge University (and head of the British Red Cross during World War I) G.M. Trevelyan provides a case in point in his 1944 masterpiece English Social History by quoting Elizabethan historian William Camden:

The upper and north part of Cambridgeshire is all over divided into river isles, which all summer long afford a most delightful green prospect, but in winter are almost all laid under water, and in some sort resembling the sea itself. The inhabitants of this and the rest of the fenny country (which reaches 68 miles from the borders of Suffolk to Wainfleet in Lincolnshire) are a sort of people (much like the place) of brutish, uncivilized tempers, envious of all others, whom they call Upland men; and usually walking aloft upon a sort of stilts they all keep the business of grazing, fishing and fowling.

Isolation, however, can have its advantages: I don't know if it's an urban myth that many churchyards dating from medieval times have mounds owing to mass graves dug to inter victims of the Black Death, but most churchyards in the Fens are flat, because they were cut off from the rest of England and often only reachable by boat.

As Trevelyan notes, there had been plans to drain the Fens and make them more widely habitable since Elizabeth (I)'s time, with jealous eyes cast across the North Sea to Holland, whose modern name, Nederland, means "the lowland". It was eventually achieved by Dutchman Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, who was commissioned by King Charles I on the basis of his work in reclaiming parts of Essex from the sea. He oversaw the creation of artificial waterways - from ditches (one runs outside our house) to rivers - to channel water to the Wash, into which water was pumped through a series of windmills, although the job is now done electronically.

One principle Vermuyden insisted on was that large areas of land should not be built on; they might be cultivated (Taylor refers to the Fens in Coast as "a huge growbag"), but they needed to be free from buildings so that they could absorb precipitation, so it's disturbing to learn that politicians who either dont know, or don't care about, this country's history demanding that Cambridgeshire greenbelt land be built on. Some of this land is next to us, and higher than us - even with the fields there, we sometimes get floods: should the soil and grass be replaced by concrete, we'd better buy life-jackets! We were all relieved to hear the Conservatives' plans to scrap national plans and promote local decision-making in the area of house-building, as reported by Richard Normington - not due to party-political considerations, merely because not all of us can swim!

I'm a birdwatcher - albeit not a twitcher, I'm not into ticking boxes - so it was gratifying to see Coast deal with the half-million feathered friends who use The Wash as a stopping-off place each year during long migrations; I was surprised that oystercatchers, one of my favourite birds, sometimes travel from the Arctic to Africa. It was interesting to see how placid the birds were when caught by a cannon-net for purposes of ringing, with ornitholigist Miranda Krestovnikoff explaining that this made the job of the Wash Wader Ringing Group so much easier.

Presenter Mark Horton finished the show by saying that, due to rising sea levels, a decision would have to be made regarding whether to fight for the land around The Wash, or give it up to the sea. Businessman Peter Dawe proposed a controversial Wash tidal barrier in 2008 but it seems to have sunk without trace, although I wouldn't be surprised if it were refloated given that we now have near-idle windfarms that are killing bats and eagles.

If any of you reading this can access the BBC, I thoroughly recommend Coast as a compelling and informative series on the natural history of these islands, which at the moment do not have borders but rather coasts.

lies, damn lies: statistics, strikes and the abuse of truth

2010-04-01T17:27:00.004+01:00

We're looking forward to going to a Christian retreat at Skegness called Spring Harvest, which we attended last year.

We'd been worried about an impending strike by the RMT union that was going to stop as many as four trains in five from running.

The timing of transport strikes gives a fascinating insight into the anti-religious mentality of union leaders. On the feastday of Frederick Denison Maurice, founder of Christian Socialism, we see a train-strike planned to disrupt the travel plans of members of Judaeo-Christian faith traditions around the time of Easter and Passover, and BA cabin crew, among the highest-paid in the industry, planned their original strike to disrupt the Christmas/Hannukah period.

The original BA strike was cancelled because members of the Unite union who no longer worked as cabin crew voted for the stoppage, invalidating the ballot. Now, we hear that, thankfully, the Telegraph's David Millward reports that an injunction has stopped the railway strike because - among other innaccuracies - more votes were cast than there are members in the relevant parts of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union.

This blind reliance on manipulated statistics betrays a contempt for the truth that pervades the modern left. For example, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just been rapped by Sir Michael Scholar, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, for stating in a podcast that immigration fell in 2009, using uncompareable statistics to back up his claims. But for me the most shocking abuse was by Equalities Minister Harriet Harman, who consistently claimed that the conviction rate for alleged rapists was 6%, discouraging women who had been violated from reporting the crime to the police, when the true conviction rate is over 60%.

Despite the best efforts of the RMT to disrupt travel at the time of major Christian and Jewish feasts, the trains will run next week and so (please God) we'll get to Spring Harvest, but I bet Frederick Denison Maurice is turning in his grave.

top tips for tuesday

2010-03-30T00:31:00.001+01:00

The Burke's Corner blogger, in his theological blog More than a Via Media, gives us his reflections on Jesus' last words from the Cross.

Nick Hillman, PPC (Prospective Parliamentary Candidate) for Cambridge, writes about a night spent with Cambridge Street Pastors.

And while we read about the various pronunciations of Ceotibus in Fr Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes...

...Richard Normington, who was lucky enough to attend a comprehensive school in the days when some were allowed to speak Latin, reflects upon a phrase from Tacitus in the imminent General Election.

Two for the price of one from Fr TF's The Hermeneutic of Continuity: click here to read about Richard Dawkins' hate-material about the Pope, comparing Dawkins to another villain who wished to eradicate another religion; quite disturbing given that the Pope will soon visit as a head of state. Alternatively, click the pic to read his blog about an article by an atheist who warns his peers against "Catholic-bashing".

Former British Ambassador Charles Crawford wonders if fans really want to feel like they're entering a boardroom when they go to watch the football...

While finally, on a slightly less urban note: a proposal for a city-farm in the south of Cambridge, from the Coleridge Conservative Action Team blog.

lights on: don't let earth hour usher in a dark age

2010-03-28T04:58:00.010+01:00

In the Draughty Old Fen last night, I didn't see many more houses in the dark than the number of people who are usually out on a Saturday evening leave behind. The reason I was looking was that Earth Hour took place from 8.30-9.30, during which people who believe the theory that the activities of humankind are causing our climate to change were told to leave their lights off to make "a call to stand up, to take responsibility, to get involved and lead the way towards a sustainable future".

If so, Earth Hour fell at the first hurdle. In the words of the Daily Telegraph:

Even if power stations are turned off, the upsurge in turning the lights back on one hour later will require power stations that can fire up quickly like oil and coal.

Energy experts said it could therefore result in an increase in carbon emissions "rendering all good intentions useless at a flick of a switch".

But WWF said the campaign was about raising awareness and saving energy in the long term, rather than a short-term fix.

Any chess player understands the principle of making an immediate sacrifice for a future gain, but if the WWF (World Wildlife Foundation) and its Green fellow-travellers were really into long-term thinking, they wouldn't have campaigned for decades against the cleanest proven source of large amounts of energy around: nuclear power. Because the protests of a tiny minority of vocal vested interests were heeded, Great Britain now has only 19 nuclear reactors, and the new generation, commissioned only last year, won't be ready to fire up until 2020, if there aren't yet more objections.

I was interested to see a night-time satellite image of South Korea taken during Earth Hour on Anthony Watts' Watts up with That blog, showing the country's towns as lit up as on any other night, while on the north of the border a Communist dark age still exists.

I am concerned that in our still-free societies there are those who would like to lead us into such a dark age and, although little that justice-and-peace types say surprises me, I was shocked last year to be invited to "fast" from the lights in my house from Ash Wednesday so that I and my family would appreciate God's gift of light on Easter Sunday. Was it coincidence that this was also the time of the changeover from real lightbulbs that have served us well from Edison's time to the pathetically poor energy-saving bulbs that don't even light up when you switch them on?

Suite 101's Paula Stiles identifies the term Dark Ages as having originally been coined by the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, who "appears to have used the term to describe the 5th to 14th centuries in protest at the relentless denigration of ancient pagan religion by Christian writers during this period."

Bertrand Russell, in his A History of Western Philosophy, doesn't link Petrarch with the phrase, but places the conception of the modern era at the Renaissance (in a chapter entitled The eclipse of the Papacy), and vents his anger on the Fathers of the Church, with special bile reserved for St Augustine, whose death was roughly contemporaneous with the final decomposition of the Roman Empire:

It is strange that the last men of intellectual eminence before the dark ages were concerned, not with saving civilization or expelling the barbarians or reforming the abuses of the administration, but with preaching the merit of virginity and the damnation of unbaptized infants. Seeing that these were the preoccupations that the Church handed on to the converted barbarians, it is no wonder that the succeeding age surpassed almost all other fully historical periods in cruelty and superstition.

(It should be said that Russell lets his prejudice - and western ethnocentrism - trump his erudition here: one could say that the rump Roman Empire, as the Byzantine civilisation centred on Constantinople, survived happily into mid-Renaissance times until destroyed by Sultan Mehmed's Ottoman army in 1453).

But how dark were the dark ages? If the past is another country, we would be ethnocentric ourselves to blame other civilisations for not undergoing the explosion of progress that has marked ours since, say, the invention of the steam locomotive by William Murdoch and James Watt in the late 18th century. But the early medieval period was not short of eureka moments in many fields.

In 1150, for example, the Knights Templar sowed the seeds of modern capitalism by inventing the "letter of credit" - which would evolve into the cheque - that allowed a pilgim to deposit funds in one place and redeem them in another far away.

Shortly afterwards, the arbitrary power of absolute monarchs was dealt a fatal blow by the Magna Carta, signed in England in 1215. Around the same time, Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon would initiate the scientific method by making a hypothesis, testing it and then refining it further if it passed the test; if not, moving on to another hypothesis - one of his experiments was on the ancient remedy of ground willow bark to treat fever and pain, which would be built on by French chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt to synthesize Aspirin in 1853.

Underpinning both of these - and much else - was the novel addition of wheels to the plough in the 6th century (above), allowing it to increase in weight and till more and heavier soil, allowing populations to increase and create more pressure for innovation.

But now we have a movement of groups of activists, supposedly informed by science, to stifle any innovation that they do not approve of, and allow only research that saves the appearances of anthropogenic climate change/global warming, which is being shoved down the throats of our children and young people in education and leisure. Case in point: energy secretary Ed Milliband commissioned adverts promoting the theory of anthropogenic climate change as fact and using nursery-rhymes to do so, only (thank God) to have them banned by the Advertising Standards Authority on he grounds that the clear implications of the ads weren't supported by science. Milliband had obviously studied his Jesuit educational theory: "give me the child for his first seven years..."; but at least the lights are still on in the ASA.

The Telegraph's Murray Wardrop reports that earth is said to be entering a new period of geological time due to the acts of humankind having an indelible effect on old Gaia. Eugene F Stoermer of the University of Michigan's Center for Great Lakes and Aquatic Sciences places the handover from the present Holocene era to the putative Anthropocene at the end of the 18th century and "James Watt's invention of the steam engine" - William Murdoch obviously having gone the same way as Alfred Wallace, Friedrich Engels and woogie.

Last night I marked Earth Hour by having every light in the house switched on - except Maxima's room, as our cat Magus was curled up sleeping on her duvet. It was no mere excercise in contrarianism - we need a symbol of our desire to keep the lights on in science, and in our hard-won freedoms of conscience and expression.

To allow a Dark Age of fluffy earth-worship to be imposed would necessitate abuses of knowledge and wisdom that would have horrified the followers of the Old Religions whose torches were finally extinguished by the so-called Enlightenment's genteel patrician oppression; and the population control measures needed for proposed swingeing cuts in carbon dioxide (a gas necessary for all life on earth) would make the Holocaust look like a practice session. And guess what? It wouldn't be the lives of hand-wringing liberal intellectuals that were demanded.

Come next Earth Hour, my electricity meter will be working as hard as ever and for a good cause. When the time comes, I heartily commend Damian Thompson's advice to you: "Beat the 'Earth Hour' fascists and turn on your lights NOW!"

spring of hope: an update in pictures

2010-03-22T16:58:00.011Z

I'm not doing too well this Lent. Last year, I gave up a couple of pints a week and gave the money to charity. This Lent I've had to learn editing from scratch to publish the village magazine - although I was priveleged to learn from somebody who'd done the job in professional and voluntary roles for decades.

So it was good to be sent a photo-update of a charity I was made aware of soon after moving to the Draughty Old Fen: the Spring of Hope foundation (part of the Youth with a Mission group) which helps disabled children in Uganda - much are in their clinic in Wabwoko, which is in the Kayunga District of Uganda, shaded orange in the map to the left. I'd like to share some of these photos with you, with the original comments.

Click here to go to the Spring of Hope blog

Emily (volunteer) and Victor (OT student ) on a home visit!! Feb 2010, we saw our first Uganda OT students come from Mulago training hospital!!

Our deaf children from both schools were able to visit the zoo in Entebbe thanks to Roxy fundraising!! 22nd Feb 2010

We bought our 2nd bike, after a previous volunteer Melanie fundraised. Moses is now out and about in the community. Children in Wabwoko are at last receiving weekly home visits!! Bought Feb. 11th!!

Carolyn(volunteer) and Moses counting medications at the end of a very busy clinic,. At this clinic in Wabwoko we received 96 epileptic patients!! Feb 12th!!

Children and parents at the clinic in Wabwoko. Feb 12th!!

The last pic really struck a chord with me because I remember the sense of wonder and getting bigger exuded by both my children when they started school, something I think one can see on the face of little Zachariah as he starts on his own incredible journey of education, thanks to Spring of Hope.

mothers' day: comfort and pain

2010-03-14T21:52:00.005Z

The nomenclature of the feast of mothers leaves me confused. I'm not sure if the difference between Mothers' Day and Mothering Sunday is that one is American and the other British, or one secular and the other religious.

Anybody who has had the privilege of knowing members of the Filipino community in Cambridge (the city's St Philip Howard's church has been called Little Manila) will know that they celebrate Mother's Day as religiously as any Holiday of Obligation. It leaves you with a renewed appreciation of the feast; but it's a time of year that can bring as much upset as it can peace.

Mothers' Day at St Gallicus was a happy affair that saw the first reading subsequently dramatised preceded by the children, which ended up with the teenage daughter of a two-year-old Pharaoh rescuing a plastic Moses from a basket. At the close of ther service all the mothers in the congregation were presented with little potted primroses, with enough left over so that everybody was abe to leave with one.

At home, Minora had put a lamb joint in the oven, and Minima prepared the veg while I divested the table of a week's accretion of books, homework and other things we'd decided we needed to keep but couldn't quite remember why.

A sobering note came during dinner when we heard on the radio news of Children's Commissioner Dr Maggie Atkinson's cynically-timed announcement that murdered toddler Jamie Bulger's killers Jon Venables and Robert Thomson, both 10 at the time of the slaughter, would never have stood trial today under the change she wishes to implement to the minimum age of criminal responsibility, raising it from 10 to 12.

Calling Dr Atkinson's comments twisted and insensitive, Jamie's mother, Denise Fergus, called for an apology to be followed by her either jumping or being pushed from the post. Doubtlessly we'll hear more of the affair, as Mrs Fergus is due to meet Justice Secretary Jack Straw this week to discuss Venables' arrest, rumoured to be connected with child pornography.

Minima volunteered to wash up, while Maxima and I listened to Johnny Walker's Sounds of the 70s show on Radio 2, then we got the laptop out for something that, to be honest, I think we'd been avoiding.

Aled Jones came to fame as a choirboy singing most famously Walking in the Air from The Snowman, and now, as well as pursuing a singing career, presents Christian programmes on TV and radio. On this morning's Good Morning Sunday Mothers' Day special, he'd interviewed Kate McCann, whose daughter Madeleine was taken from the family's holiday apartment in Portugal.

At times her voice seemed on the verge of cracking - and we were close to tears - as Kate told how she thinks of Madeleine every day and prays for her captors: her Parish Priest has given her a key to the church. She said that "every day is the same without Madeleine", so Mothers' Day brings both comfort and pain. When Jones asked her if she could forgive the people who took her daughter, she paused then said "I don't know". It was, I think, the most searingly honest point in an excoriating interview.

I was pleasantly surprised that the programme emphasized the religious aspect of Mothers' Day - Jones played Taverner's Hymn to the Mother of God, performed by the Choir of St George's Chapel, and an unexpected treat: Hymn to Mary by Beth Nielsen Chapman. It was interesting that Taverner composed his hymn in remembrance of his mother: this was the motivation for Paul McCartney's Let it Be, with the meditation on a line of the Prayer to Our Lady of Lourdes - priez pour ceux qui aiment et sont partis (pray for those who love and are parted) - in the middle two verses.

And the best prayer that I can send up to the mother of God on this day for Denise Fergus and Kate McCann and their families concerns the situation which many mothers have to face as regards their children, albeit hopefully in happier circumstances: pray for those who love and are parted.

Click the picture above to spend a "minute for Madeleine", or click here to listen to Good Morning Sunday featuring Kate McCann (until Saturday 20 March)

top tips for Tuesday

2010-03-09T21:49:00.005Z

Ten top tips this week, starting with Cambridge's Big Three Conservative bloggers!

The Coleridge Conservative Action Team, including City Councillor Chris Howell and candidate Andy Bower, looks at the police's success in closing down two brothels in the city's south-east area, then meditates on the injustice in doffenences in the BBC's coverage of the financial affairs of Conservative and Labour donors...

...Cambridge's Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, Nick Hillman, blogs on Rwanda's President Kagame's speech to the Royal Commonwealth Society on his country's entry to the Commonwealth, focussing on young people in Africa and the world...

...and Richard Normington picks up on Iain Dale's question of why the next Budget hasn't been announced yet.

Alex Ferguson watch out: Lisa Zyga speculates on the US site physorg.com on whether the result of a football game can be predicted through maths.

Anybody who knows anything about mental illness or recovery from drugs misuse has heard of serotonin and dopamine - here Neuroskeptic summarises the case of a chap who was born with a brain unable to synthesize either.

The cartoonist Bones - aka Yaakov Kirschen - looks at a meeting of three modern dictators and compares in to events on the eve of the Second world War - click the pic to see the whole cartoon.

One for the photographers of both digital and analogue disposition: petapixel posts a link to an online application that calculates the "golden hours" - the time immediately after dawn or before sunset - for anywhere on the globe.

The Seventeenth Century History blog ponders the decisions to sack Naomi Tadmor and David Ganz, respectively an early modern historian and Britain's only Professor of Paleography, in a polyglot post bemoaning the dumbing-down of our education.

Father TF looks at That "Adam & Steve Apology in the wake of a deacon having been forced to make an apology over the prospect of same-sex marriage that, FrTF points out, may not have come from homosexual activists.

But I can make a cappuccino, asserts Linda from Don't Poke the Baby, meditating upon the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

war and information: what Lloyd George could teach Gordon Brown

2010-03-09T00:52:00.006Z

I was concerned to read an article by the Telegraph's Andrew Gilligan, saying that journalists will be banned from the front line in Afghanistan once the date for the General Election is set.

I can understand the reasoning behind a certain amount of discretion about military matters in time of war - censorship imposed upon the newspapers by the wide-ranging 1914 Defence of the Realm Act was intended to maintain the morale of families, many of whose members would vote in an election that eventually came in 1918.

But nevertheless war journalism, from Winston Churchill's commission as a war reporter during the Boer war, through Leslie Illingworth's satirical cartoons for the Daily Mail to the embedding of journalists in military units today (which is going to be banned), has been essential in dispelling rumours about what might really be happening at the front.

But what's really happening at the front may be, for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the problem. For example, Snatch Land Rovers (left), nicknamed "mobile coffins" due to their vulnerability to mines, are to be phased out in favour of more robust Ridgbacks. But, after Gordon Brown's markedly uncensored visit to troops in Afghanistan on March 5 - after giving evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Britain's involvement in the Iraq War about his commitment to funding the Armed Forces that was immediately rebutted by senior military chiefs - Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox claimed that the procurement of 200 Ridgbacks (right) was at odds with the tender for 400 originally put out.

If this is the reason for the media blackout, it is a myopic repetition of history by those who appear to have forgotten it. When David Lloyd George took over as Prime Minister from Herbert Asquith after the latter's resignation in 1916, he had no choice but to relax reporting restrictions upon newspapers somewhat, because the tales of soldiers returning from the fighting were at odds with tales of victory planted by official sources.

Brown might again ban forces personnel in Afghanistan from using social media, as happened in February last year only to have the ban lifted that August, but is he going to cancel leave and Medivac during the period of "purdah" - a domestic political protocol intended to make government department communications equitable to all political parties once an election has been declared? If he wishes to put us all into a position where we don't talk about the war, he's on a hiding to nothing: if returning soldiers forced Lloyd George to loosen his government's stranglehold on the press, what will be the effect of full-on deployment of social media during [the] British election?

One thing's clear to me: if the Government thinks it can stage-manage information on a war that half the world's reporting on, we'd better keep an eye on the ballot boxes on election night.

street drinking: syrup and paint-stripper

2010-03-07T00:09:00.013Z

The staff of Cambridge's Mill Road Tesco deserve an award for tenacity in the face of eejits, as in merely opening the store they scored a gruelling victory over vested interests mounting a predominantly anti-capitalist campaign under the name of the No Mill Road Tesco Campaign.

The store has recently had an application to sell alcohol turned down - see Cambridge resident (expected to stand as an Independent in the next election) Richard Taylor's helpful and exhaustive account - on account of its being in a cumulative alcohol impact zone, which creates an assumption against granting new licences to sell alcohol.

What got me thinking was how alcohol gets into the hands of people in Mill Road with problematic drinking patterns in the first place. So as soon I was able I went to the end of Mill Road nearest town and walked up the mile-odd length, paying attention to the shops that sell alcohol.

Like any other consumers of alcohol, street-drinkers are partial to their favourites - most commonly Carlsberg Special Brew or the other 9% lagers on sale. (The manufacturers observe the Memorandum of Understanding between the Department of Health and the Alcohol Industry on putting sensible drinking reminders on their cans, despite the fact that the contents of a single 500ml can of 9% lager, containing 4.5 units of alcohol, put the drinker above the government's recommendation of 2-4 units daily). Strong ciders also appeal to their palate, so I think it's significant - thanks again to Richard Taylor for his report - that Mill Road Tesco had pledged to sell no beers or cider above 5.5% alcohol - the equivalent of 11º proof in US measurements.

So No Mill Road were being rather disingenuous in making a noise about the local Tesco store's admittedly presumptious display of posters offering cheap wine: one doesn't often hear of pinot grigio-fuelled disorder.

Which isn't to say that there hasn't been controversy with wine in Cambridge: in 2008, a wine-shop in the city's Victoria Road called Bacchanalia, which is opposite an Alcoholics Anonymous centre (and has a sister-store on Mill Road) displayed a sign proclaiming Rehab is for Quitters. Although one can appreciate the wordplay on one level, I think the fruit of the vine was more sinned against than sinning, not to mention people trying to piece their lives back together.

The first thing I noticed was that shops genuinely serving specific communities - eg Chinese, Afro-Carribean, Malaysian - sold little or even no alcohol. On the other hand, the cynically-named International Food Store was in reality a wallful of shelves stocked with wines and spirits facing a wall of beers and soft drinks, with two thin aisles of snacks in between, and in between those huge plastic bottles of strong cider on the floor. Another general store had not only three different brands of 9% lager but also a variety of strong, cheap ciders, of the chemically-derived sort that Conservative leader David Cameron once remarked had "never seen an apple".

In all, there were five small, independent stores of the kind, say No Mill Road Tesco, in need of protection against the supermarket giant which were selling drinks that specifically fuel the thoroughfare's alcohol problems. I say specifically advisedly - when's the last time you saw 9% syrup or paint-stripper cider at a dinner-party or while getting together to watch the football?

Capitalism is insensate and must needs be fenced in by legal frameworks to prevent abuses like, for example, the sale of alcohol to minors, directly or through adults. Both the Co-op and Tesco, as far as I'm aware, will not sell to adults who are known to pass on to underage street-drinkers; so why can't smaller stores be leant upon to refuse to sell to people who are drunk, or who are known to drink in the street? Many people buy drinks from stores because pubs are forced to keep their prices high - releasing the legislative garotte strangling them wouldn't stop street drinking, but it could prevent people taking drinks home in a habit that has the potential to spiral dangerously, and would widen the cadre of social drinkers in pubs in whose self-interest it is not to let each other get out of control.

And while I'm on my wish-list, how about doubling the price of superstrong lagers and ciders?

top ten songs about women's week

2010-03-04T17:25:00.012Z

Click here to view top ten songs about Women's Week for 56k modems or slow broadband

I first became aware of Festa delle Donne (Women's Day) in the 1980s in Italy, which is quite appropriate as that is where it appears to have begun. At the end of the Second World War, it was decided to consolidate several days celebrating women in March, some with roots in antiquity, in March 8. I remember going to university and seeing just about all of the women wearing flowers on their coats - small, white flowers, I wish I could remember the name.

March 8 is still, of course, International Women's Day, but it has accrued a whole week around it, which this year lasts from Saturday 5 March to Saturday 12 March, with the day itself in the middle on the Tuesday. And, as a bonus, Women's World Day of Prayer on the inaugural day, Saturday March 5, focussing on Cameroon.

I'd been planning a Top Ten pertaining to women for some time, because I looked at my music collection and saw that there were few women fronting a band or singing solo there: Carole Fredericks, Ulanda McCulloch and Bonnie Tyler, for example, and, of course, Cambridge-born songstress EJ Norman (right - click to hear her music). Is collecting music by other blokes something men do when we graduate from stamps?

It's not an idle question: last night I had a bath, which among other things affords me the only opportunity I get to read for a prolonged time, and had BBC Radio Cambridgeshire on the shower radio. Having the germ of this blog in my head, it shocked me that well over an hour passed between hearing one female vocalist and the next, despite there certainly being no dearth of good music written and/or performed by women. If this phenomenon is threaded through the fabric of society, is it possible that, say, all-women shortlists to select Prospective Parliamentary Candidates - which I've always felt vaguely uncomfortable with but are supported by many including Ellee Seymour - are the way ahead?

On the other hand, the opposite situation doesn't pertain with Maxima: although she certainly listens to more female vocalists than me - like Diana Ross, Nancy Griffiths and Katie Melua - she also has in her collection The Jam and the Police (with their respective solo leaders Paul Weller and Sting), Madness and Planxty, as well as her family's favourites such as Guy Mitchell and Tommy Steele. (And Buddy Holly. Being a Buddy Holly fan makes life easier in our house.)

Making a list for this post, I found myself trying to identify only pieces sung by women but also composed by women, and wondered if I were unconsciously applying a sort of gender-apartheid? The thing is, if I am, I am therefore part of the problem and will be unable to appreciate it from the outside. I'm confused...

10 - what men think women think

I can only ever write this post from the outside, so here's Nick Lowe with Girls' Talk, showing how men can be paranoid about women when there aren't even any present.

9 - self-assurance

Beverley Knight released this recently with Chaka Khan, and these lines go right to the heart:

Where's the man to quantify
Everything I'm worth and who I am?
He should look me in the eye
Tell me where he figures in my plan...!

8 - remembrance and sorrow

Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel Imitation of Life was filmed twice, the 1934 version being eclipsed by the 1959 one - which I remember watching with my Mum in the late 1970s: here Mahalia Jackson sings at the funeral of the black woman who brought up a white girl who didn't quite appreciate the worth of her foster-mother until it was too late.

7 - remembrance and joy

6 - the girl he left behind

All around my Hat was originally written from the viewpoint of a minor English criminal sent to Australia for several years, but here legendary folk singer Sandy Denny fronts Steeleye Span in turning it round so that the girl he leaves behind will wear a ribbon in her hat for "a twelve-month and a day".

5 - sticking with it

French singer/songwriter Jean-Jacques Goldman (who wrote for Céline Dion before she started singing in English) found himself surfing TV channels one night and was suddenly faced with a documentary called "Far West", part of which dealt with a group of nuns in the delivery suite of a maternity hospital. He was amazed by the footage and wrote a song that he performed with the supergroup he formed with his chums Michael Jones and the late, great Carole Fredericks, to whom this video is dedicated.

4 - incertitude?

Nena (Gabriele Kerner) released 99 red balloons (or luftballone) in 1983, not long after a British TV survey of the concerns of schoolchildren revealed nuclear war to be their greatest fear. Towards the end of the video, set on an army assault course in Germany (the father of one of the band members was a NATO colonel), if the band look distressed, it's because they were: unscripted gasoline bombs were exploding around them. But it made for a good video.

3 - identity

Here Gali Atari, who won the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest for Israel singing Alleluia wih Milk and Honey, sings of the joy and the pain of belonging to a place one cannot separate oneself from.

2 - What have they done to the weather?

Originally released as Weather Song, writer Malvina Reynolds wanted to highlight the effects of nuclear testing, which - reports the Telegraph's Bonnie Malkin, is still bearing bad news to the Aboriginies of the Australian outback. For a while, this became the anthem of a generation sufficiently secure behind their countries' nuclear deterrents to call for said deterrents' dismantling. (See the passionate support of the recently demised Labour leader Michael Foot for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which he helped found.) Here it's sungby one of the most beautiful voices of all time, Judith Durham, with of course the Seekers.

1 -trust

When Minima asked to play this at the start of an Advent course and I heard the first few lines, I thought it was time to hide behind my hands; but I hadn't trusted her enough - just over halfway through the song by Nashville-based Christian band Zoegirl, the lyrics develop to completely change the meaning of the piece.

If you enjoyed this, click here for more Top ten songs about...

top ten songs about Women's Week for 56k modems

2010-03-04T00:10:00.015Z

Click this link to view top ten songs about Women's Week for broadband

I first became aware of Festa delle Donne (Women's Day) in the 1980s in Italy, which is quite appropriate as that is where it appears to have begun. At the end of the Second World War, it was decided to consolidate several days celebrating women in March, some with roots in antiquity, in March 8. I remember going to university and seeing just about all of the women wearing flowers on their coats - small, white flowers, I wish I could remember the name.

March 8 is still, of course, International Women's Day, but it has accrued a whole week around it, which this year lasts from Saturday 5 March to Saturday 12 March, with the day itself in the middle on the Tuesday. And, as a bonus, Women's World Day of Prayer on the inaugural day, Saturday March 5, focussing on Cameroon.

I'd been planning a Top Ten pertaining to women for some time, because I looked at my music collection and saw that there were few women fronting a band or singing solo there: Carole Fredericks, Ulanda McCulloch and Bonnie Tyler, for example, and, of course, Cambridge-born songstress EJ Norman (right - click to hear her music). Is collecting music by other blokes something men do when we graduate from stamps?

It's not an idle question: last night I had a bath, which among other things affords me the only opportunity I get to read for a prolonged time, and had BBC Radio Cambridgeshire on the shower radio. Having the germ of this blog in my head, it shocked me that well over an hour passed between hearing one female vocalist and the next, despite there certainly being no dearth of good music written and/or performed by women. If this phenomenon is threaded through the fabric of society, is it possible that, say, all-women shortlists to select Prospective Parliamentary Candidates - which I've always felt vaguely uncomfortable with but are supported by many including Ellee Seymour - are the way ahead?

On the other hand, the opposite situation doesn't pertain with Maxima: although she certainly listens to more female vocalists than me - like Diana Ross, Nancy Griffiths and Katie Melua - she also has in her collection The Jam and the Police (with their respective solo leaders Paul Weller and Sting), Madness and Planxty, as well as her family's favourites such as Guy Mitchell and Tommy Steele. (And Buddy Holly. Being a Buddy Holly fan makes life easier in our house.)

Making a list for this post, I found myself trying to identify only pieces sung by women but also composed by women, and wondered if I were unconsciously applying a sort of gender-apartheid? The thing is, if I am, I am therefore part of the problem and will be unable to appreciate it from the outside. I'm confused...

10 - what men think women think

I can only ever write this post from the outside, so here's Nick Lowe with Girls' Talk, showing how men can be paranoid about women when there aren't even any present.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fpW1thGues

9 - self-assurance

Beverley Knight released this recently with Chaka Khan, and these lines go right to the heart:

Where's the man to quantify
Everything I'm worth and who I am?
He should look me in the eye
Tell me where he figures in my plan...!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAwPuJAbHPE

8 - remembrance and sorrow

Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel Imitation of Life was filmed twice, the 1934 version being eclipsed by the 1959 one - which I remember watching with my Mum in the late 1970s: here Mahalia Jackson sings at the funeral of the black woman who brought up a white girl who didn't quite appreciate the worth of her foster-mother until it was too late.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__DcBjGBlVc

7 - remembrance and joy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uZz3Hak0zc

6 - the girl he left behind

All around my Hat was originally written from the viewpoint of a minor English criminal sent to Australia for several years, but here legendary folk singer Sandy Denny fronts Steeleye Span in turning it round so that the girl he leaves behind will wear a ribbon in her hat for "a twelve-month and a day".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zzwbYyvWiU

5 - sticking with it

French singer/songwriter Jean-Jacques Goldman (who wrote for Céline Dion before she started singing in English) found himself surfing TV channels one night and was suddenly faced with a documentary called "Far West", part of which dealt with a group of nuns in the delivery suite of a maternity hospital. He was amazed by the footage and wrote a song that he performed with the supergroup he formed with his chums Michael Jones and the late, great Carole Fredericks. Even if you don't speak French, there is a part of this video that will literally stop your heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-2oIj8NTNc

4 - incertitude?

Nena (Gabriele Kerner) released 99 red balloons (or luftballone) in 1983, not long after a British TV survey of the concerns of schoolchildren revealed nuclear war to be their greatest fear. Towards the end of the video, set on an army assault course in Germany (the father of one of the band members was a NATO colonel), if the band look distressed, it's because they were: unscripted gasoline bombs were exploding around them. But it made for a good video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14IRDDnEPR4

3 - identity

Here Gali Atari, who won the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest for Israel singing Alleluia wih Milk and Honey, sings of the joy and the pain of belonging to a place one cannot separate oneself from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roD7i5xYCx0&feature=player_embedded

2 - What have they done to the weather?

Originally released as Weather Song, writer Malvina Reynolds wanted to highlight the effects of nuclear testing, which - reports the Telegraph's Bonnie Malkin, is still bearing bad news to the Aboriginies of the Australian outback. For a while, this became the anthem of a generation sufficiently secure behind their countries' nuclear deterrents to call for said deterrents' dismantling. (See the passionate support of the recently demised Labour leader Michael Foot for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which he helped found.) Here it's sungby one of the most beautiful voices of all time, Judith Durham, with of course the Seekers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3DqC5c8VDQ

1 -trust

When Minima asked to play this at the start of an Advent course and I heard the first few lines, I thought it was time to hide behind my hands; but I hadn't trusted her enough - just over halfway through the song by Nashville-based Christian band Zoegirl, the lyrics develop to completely change the meaning of the piece.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwmkg6mpUC8

top tips for Tuesday

2010-03-02T21:34:00.006Z

I was hoping to have done another "ordinary" blog before the Top Tips this week, but was called out to the printers to sort out a problem with the village mag...so here come the tips!

Nick Hillman, Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the city of Cambridge in the forthcoming General Election, gives an excerpt from a non-partisan article he's written about involvement in political parties for the Church Times.

OBV, the website of Operation Black Vote, provide a pictorial presentation of the Revd Jesse Jackson's visit to London, from where he travelled to Cambridge - unfortunately no pics of this on the site.

John Smeaton from SPUC presents a review from his newly-graduated son, Paul, of a challenging new play called Really Old, Like Forty-Five, which looks at what happens when the breakdown of the family reaches breaking-point.

A three-link chain: as the Spectator's Melanie Phillips lauds the House of Commons All-Parliamentary Group against anti-semitism while presenting depressing evidence of the necessity of its existence...

...David Appletree of JIDF (Jewish Internet Defence Force) presents a victory against an antisemitic site on Facebook, which is notoriously selective in enforcing its own Terms of Service...

...and author of love-story and Holocaust memoir We Never Lost Hope Naomi Litvin interviews Appletree on her own blog.

Photographer, cook, home educator and general polymath Linda from Don't Poke the Baby delivers a haunting and poignant meditation for Lent.

Poppy, avatar for LegionLive, the new blog of the Royal British Legion, looks at the nomenclature of British and American military operations and wonders, What's in a name?

Here's Alex Massie, again from the Spectator, getting rather worried about Hilary Clinton & The Falklands.

On the other hand, Telegraph blogger and Conservative MEP Dan Hannan has been looking admiringly at the American Tea-Party movement and presents a report from the first British manifestation at the Conservative Spring Conference at Brighton. And I bet they served tea at this one.

The National Catholic Reporter blog reports on a letter from the Bishops of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to President Obama and the Japanese Government advocating the abolition of all nuclear weapons.

Aned finally, what do you think is The Most Reproduced Piece of Art in the World?

eggs, pesto and Tolkein: my bachelor weekend

2010-03-01T01:29:00.007Z

I'm a big fan of The Lord of the Rings, but must admit to my shame that I find the films more accessible than the book - I'm on my third attempt to get to the finish and, being halfway through The Two Towers, am further than I managed to get to either as a schoolboy or ten years ago.

A few months ago I bought a book - the first of a series called The Wheel of Time - that offered to "mine the world Tolkein hinted at"; I got through a few hundred pages then came to a phrase "slowly he began to breathe slowly". (Minora calls me a pedant, which really annoys me, because she puts the stress on the wrong syllable.)

As I threw it in the bin, I resolved to spend my weekend alone - Maxima having taken the girls to the other end of the Fens to visit her parents - reacquainting myself with the films, which have helped me power through the book no end.

As usual with one of my "bachelor weekends", I raided the "reduced to clear" section of the local supermarket to make one of my experimental meals that the women in my life tend to frown on.
The goal, I decided, would be something meatball-ish. So I emptied three cans of mince and onions into bowl, and grated two big wodges of blue cheese into it. I'd come home with a pack of eight factory eggs which had been going for a song because there should have been ten. I'm not overly chuffed at the concept of factory farming, but it beats me how people can look virtuous when buying their free-range eggs laid by hens bred to produce the extra-large ones, either not thinking or not caring why the shells have blood on them. Anyway, I couldn't decide how many eggs to use, so in went the lot. Then the best part of a jar of pesto went in. I like pesto. It's the nearest you'll get to a culinary proof of a deity other than an epiphany in your pantry, especially at times when you find yourself wondering why a loving God would create something like carrots.

Anyway, I grated a chunk of parmesan into the concoction, mixing while some penne bubbled away, then dropped teaspoonfuls of it onto a hot frying-pan with plenty of oil. (Helping make pancakes at the Rectory on Shrove Tuesday, Rector Pellegrina asked me to reduce the amount of oil in my pan. When I did, people grumbled that my pancakes suddenly weren't as nice.) They ended up more like flat coins than balls, but tasted sublime in a sauce of blue cheese, mushroom soup and eggs.

It was, in fact, a meal suitably epic to accompany a marathon session of all three videos from which I emerged square-eyed but happy. I have the book with Tolkein's Foreword to the Second Edition, in which he tries to dispel speculation that the work is a religious analogy. I accept that, but it was also a labour of love for the author and expert on the Anglo-Saxon and early English languages, and as such I believe that the childhood convert to Roman Catholicism dug deep into the mines of his spirituality to inform the ethics of his morality-tale. What's really becoming clear to me as I read The Lord of the Rings this time is that his first-hand experience of the horrors of the Great War wedded to frustration with the politics of appeasement directed towards Hitler - despite Tolkein's denial - come through in the backstory of the powers of Middle Earth standing back while the treacherous Sauron consolidates his hold on Mordor, to use it as a base for launching his bid to enslave the fantastic world.

And my cooking? I enthusiastically showed the remainder of the panful to Maxima on her return, at which she winced and told me to go get everybody a Chinese. Was it the eggs?

top tip for Tuesday

2010-02-23T00:50:00.005Z

Only time for one tip this week, as I'm experimenting with the seat-of-the-pants style of editing the church mag: but what a tip it is.

Last Friday John Smeaton, director of SPUC (the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children) drews a line in the sand in response to the Government's abusive proposals for sex education in schools, which bode ill for the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim voluntary grant-aided

Smeaton cites a Government media release praising St Thomas More's RC School in Bedford on the grounds that, among other things,

St Thomas More delivers SRE [sex and relationships education] through the pastoral programme in conjunction with the RE syllabus...the school explicitly recognises the reality that some young people may choose to be sexually active and, if that is the case, they need the knowledge and confidence to make an informed choice to protect themselves from pregnancy and STIs. The school nurse provides students with clear accurate information about the full range of contraception and STIs and details of local services...Pregnancy options, including abortion, are also discussed in a non-judgemental way with the RE syllabus requiring students to understand the spectrum of pro- and anti-choice views on abortion.

Smeaton provides a long list of tenets of the Roman Catholic faith that these grounds violate, after announcing that "I will be writing to St Thomas More school, asking them to confirm or deny the government's claims about what is happening in its school."

Later that day, the Telegraph's Blogs Editor, Damian Thomson forecast Bad Things for Oona Stannard, chief executive of the Catholic Education Service, which, as Smeaton identified, had helped the Government draw up its guidelines. Fr Tim Finnegan, a frequent flier on this feature, refers to both posts as he runs with the theme on his blog The Hermeneutic of Continuity. He asks how far the moral relativism will be taken:

I doubt whether you would get Healthy Schools Status if you taught that there was a range of views on the advantages of smoking tobacco; and I don't suppose there is meant to be a valid range of views on the pros and cons of nazism as a system of government. The relativism of Ed Balls and his friends who are setting the agenda for secular Britain is actually only applied to the "views" they disagree with, such as Catholic moral teaching on the sanctity of life, marriage, and the procreation of children.

The Government is mounting an attack both on one Faith and on faith. I remember minor Scottish politicians muttering about "Rome on the rates" and, as they have risen, they have dripped their poison slowly through the years in the hope that the erosion would create a cavity large enough to insert their specious moral outrage about "religion on the rates".

As John Smeaton notes, today - Tuesday 23 - is the day when Parliament is due to vote on what is effectively the nationalisation of the bodies, minds and spirits of our children.

Smeaton remarks that St Thomas More "preferred to sacrifice himself rather than put the state's demands above the church's teachings", as can be seen in the 1966 film
A man for All Seasons starring, among others, Paul Scofield and Susannah York. I wonder if the Government was careful to use a school bearing his name as a Trojan horse to try to use the state's demands to extinguish the church's teaching?

Maasai medical mission 2010

2010-02-20T00:44:00.002Z

A friend of Maxima's had a leaving do in the Draughty Old Fen yesterday, before she goes to Africa.

Hélène Evans (right), a nurse from Cambridge, is leaving next month to work with a two-week medical outreach to the Naroka district of Kenya called the Maasai Medical Mission, which has been led by GP Dr Richard Scott since 2002, (before which he'd went to Kenya with Through Faith Missions) at the invitation of Pastor David Kereto.

I have to admit, to my shame, that I was ignorant of the Maasai people of East Africa until they touched my world in 2008. Six of the tribesmen from across the border in Tanzania - wearing recycled car tyres as shoes - came to run the Flora London marathon in order to raise money through sponsorship to instal a fresh-water well in their village. (The next year, the marathon was won by Kenyan runner Sammy Wanjiru, setting a course record).

Hélène writes:

The Maasi is a true pastoralist. Farming is anathema to them. They are hospitable, generous and affectionate, love their children, unbelievably domestic and gentle, and religious. They are firm believers in the one God - Engai, but are plagued by a fear of evil spirits. Bravest of the brave, a warrior tribe living the life they have lived over hundreds of years.

They see Engai as a creator-god associated with a mountaintop who gifted all the world's cattle to them. As well as travelling around the area to provide midwifery advice, dress wounds, treat malaria and the after-effects of polio, they will be bearing witness to another Creator God who was originally associated with mountains (see the experiences of Moses, Elijah and Jesus).Again Hélène writes:

Who is my neighbour in today's global village?

99% of all maternal deaths, 98% of all child deaths and 80% of all AIDS deaths occur in the developing world, yet this is the place where resources and workers are fewest. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 3% of the world's health workforce cares for 10% of the world's population bearing 24% of the global disease burden - with less than 1% of the global health expenditure.

The Good Samaritan helped a stranger because he saw this desperate need. How can we respond to the enormous needs we see in other parts of the world? There are many ways we can get involved - going, giving, praying, partnering, teaching, training - and more. Maasai Medical Mission aims to play a part in bringing God's love and care to some of the poorest people in the world.

Hélène is asking for three things:

First, pray: for Dr Scott, Pastor David Kereto (right), Hélène, and the rest of the Maasai Medical Mission 2010 team.

Second, if you can contribute financial aid (towards eg flights/food/water/petrol/staff costs etc) or medical supplies, please contact Hélène on penhydd1740@yahoo.co.uk.

top tips for Tuesday

2010-02-16T21:21:00.007Z

Vicar and blogger David Keen gives lots of reasons to give up blogging for Lent. I'm not contemplating a Lenten fast from cyberspace, but with more things competing with my time something's got to give, and after the shouting's done over here that might be the blogging. I found reason (4) very compelling, but the killer quote was from Reginald Foster - that we should fast from what we sense is becoming a compulsion.

Revd Bosco Peters of the Liturgy blog wrote a post on Shrove Tuesday and its relation to Mardi gras and, as Ash Wednesday approaches, here's his reflection on the day's Collect and observing Lent.

I've read Rabbi Shai Specht's one-line explanation of the month of Adar as "the Jewish Mardi Gras" - here Risa from Isramom wishes everybody a Happy Adar!

Labour MP David Wright has got himself into a bit of a pickle. A tweet in his name referred to his political opponents as "scum-sucking pigs" ("if you put lipstick on scum-sucking pigs they're still scum-sucking pigs" - an obviously irresistable dig at Sarah Palin). If he'd put his hand up and said it was a stupid mistake we'd all have moved onto the next gaffe, but instead he seemed simultaneously to defend the remark as "legitimate comment" and claim that his twitter account had been hacked, turning the issue into one of ministerial propriety. Here, TotalPolitics director Iain Dale reproduces a letter from Eric Pickles, Chairman of the Conservative Party, asking him to answer several questions on the affair.

We've just had Valentine's Day, and this is the most poignant image I could find posted on that day: a US military nurse whispering into the ear of an unconscious Canadian soldier as they fly him to a hospital base in Afghanistan. May God be with all the Coalition troops as they roll out Operation Moshtaraq.

Seth Godin explains how companies racking up as many followers as possible on Facebook etc are on a hiding to nothing compared with viral growth of an idea or product starting from a very small base.

The name of Elie Wiesel has been sorely misused in the climate debate, therefore I recommend you help restore the balance by following David Appletree of the Jewish Internet Defense Force's advise on his new project, the Advisory Board of the Algemeiner.

Fr Tim of the Hermeneutic of Continuity writes on the Pope's encouragement of priests to use the opportunities afforded by new media, and includes a YouTub video entitled "Why am I a Catholic"?

Richard Normington worries about where the people who thought up the name for the UK's military satellite system got their inspiration from.

"We're supposed to talk to meat?". Sci-fi author Terry Bisson posts the correct version of a legendary short story of his that has been orbiting around cyberspace.

touching home: the day after Valentine's

2010-02-16T00:09:00.007Z

Mindnight having passed, this should really be called "the day after the day after Valentine's", but then I suppose that depends on where you are when you're reading it.

Maxima and I try to refrain from going overboard with cards and gifts now that the girls are a little older. We celebrate Christmas religiously, but otherwise don't bother too much with cards etc. Except when we do. That's the problem with an unofficial arrangement.

So I was nonplussed when Maxima handed me an envelope that morning, with a very nice card touched my heart. She left the room to do something - at which Minora came in, slipped an envelope into my hand and whispered in my ear - in a manner a Sergeant Major would be proud of - "fill it in!" I know when I'm licked.

I can't lay my hand on the card right now, but I remember the verse being a little treacly. Was this the only card she could find, or is that how she sees love between a couple who have nearly been married 20 years? Or is that how our love would seem to me if my tired old hull weren't so barnacled?

I remember a party my Uncle and Aunt had for their 25th wedding anniversary - he said he loved her, and went bright red. It was the first time, I believe, their children had heard it said 'twixt one and the other. It was almost like a line I once read in a classic detective story set in Sicily by Leonardo Sciascia called Il Giorno della Civetta (later made into an Italian-language film with Claudia Cardinale) where the detective asks a newly-widowed woman "Did you love him?" and she answers "Of course - we were married". I don't want the girls, in the future when we're gone, to assume that we must have loved each other because we were married, because unfortunately, even these days, it ain't necessarily so. I'm glad that they can hear us say it as well as see us show it, like the two sides of a coin.

After attending a service of Holy Communion at St Gallicus we came home and dinner was put on. I hadn't been aware of my mood being slightly elevated towards the end of the week, but I felt a leaden weight drag my mind down while mashing the potatoes. Maxima saw me slow down and start to slouch, and placed me at the table while she finished the tatties. Yet again, with my family around me, I experienced love as the safety-net under the trapeze.

Thankfully we were able to attend St Gallicus for a Valentine's Day Celebration of Marriage, one of hundreds that were happening up and down the country. There were three hymns from the top ten wedding hymns during the service - Amazing Grace, Make me a Channel of your Peace and Praise my Soul the King of Heaven. Between the second and third the married couples faced each other and renewed our wedding vows, saying "I took you..." and "with this ring I wed you...", etc. With a peal of bells beforehand and a slice of cake and glass of champagne or orange juice afterwards, it was good to touch home with where we'd started out all those years ago - scrape off the barnacles, as it were.

I didn't feel well enough to the discussion on theology Rector Pellegrina was hosting that evening, but it was a lovely day and - one of the major points, I think - Minora and even Minima (now a teenager) had went a little misty eyed at the flowers, bells, etc. The service was thoroughly grounded in the continuing theological thread concerning marriage running through the Old and New Testaments (hardly surprising, since the Christian Bible starts with one marriage and ends with another). I found this all the more comforting for not feeling too great; something Richard Dawkins would sneer at, but I think Bishop David Thomson, in his Valentine's Day Sermon on the Four Loves, explained it consummately: "Religion is easily accused of being a crutch, but I have no problem myself with an A and E department if I’ve been in an accident, and life is full of accidents." Amen to that.

I never had time to write all this down on Valentine's Day as I had to be up early for work - which compliments medication excellently in putting mental illness in its place - but I hope your Valentine's day was good or, if it wasn't, that it wasn't too bad. Touch home more than once a year.

body image isn't all it looks like

2010-02-13T02:08:00.013Z

Cavete: discusses and links to material some people may find disturbing

When I was in my mid-teens I developed acne. Never having been one to do things by halves, mine was in the form of angry boils flowering luxuriantly over my fizzog. I didn't have much of a problem with it, and didn't get more hassle than one might have expected in a working-class Glaswegian housing estate.

Then I went to university in Italy, and the head of my college decided he did have a problem with my acne, and at his insistence I set out on courses of antibiotics and various other pills and potions - one of which, as I remember, turned my first wee of the morning bright red, which was quite a thing if you weren't prepared for it.

During my first year at uni I fell into a deep depression, and I wonder if the head's effective declaration that my appearance was undesirable contributed to the mix of being away from home from the first time and studying like I'd never done before. But the past can be a dangerous place to form assumptions about, so who knows?

I found myself thinking about this period of my life for the first time in a while after an advert directed me to BBC Radio 1's listen-again feature, where Aled Jones from the Chris Moyles show (me neither) had hosted a "surgery" about body-image, when a young man called in to speak about his desperation that nothing his doctor gave him was touching his acne. I felt for him.

An American psychotherapist called Aaron Haydn Jones explained the process of filtering, whereby we might ignore 100 positive comments and dwell on one negative one. I can't argue with that - Richard Carpenter attributed one journalist's comments about his sister's weight in the early 1970s to her tortured death in 1983.

The show, however, wasn't exclusively about anorexia and bulimia as such but about unhappinesses with one's body (which might admittedly feed the pathogenesis of one of these terrible illnesses). I started to wonder about the direction of the show when one chap rang in to complain about the shape of one of his eyebrows, but then a young woman said that she'd had problems with her mum after she (filia) had a breast reduction: Aaron was running with the ball immediately, and wondered if the girl had had cosmetic surgery for what was a relational problem, and spoke of feelings of jealousy - or at least displacement - that can sometimes occur between mother and daughter, father and son. Then, of course, another young woman rang in to complain that her breasts were too small.

Something that's been in the news recently is airbrushing - a case in point being a photo of model Phillipa Hamilton where her waist appears smaller than her head, an image that made fashion house advertisers Ralph Lauren regret their use of Photoshop and ultimately issue a reluctant apology. To indicate the power of the program, some Radio 1 figures allowed their images to be retouched and posted on the website.

Where things started to get interesting was when Emma Ledger, deputy editor of More clebrity magazine, came on the show briefly to say that the publication had no policy as to the sizes of models whose photos it published, and that it only airbrushed to get rid of zits or tidy up hair. "Who wants to see a zit on the cover of a magazine?" she moaned, and suddenly I realised that perhaps punk had a point after all.

The first thing I did was to reflect that if a mag is publishing pics of clothes that are supplied to it, its in-house policies on model sizes are meaningless if the sample garments supplied to it only fit "size-zero" models; something which caused (British) Vogue editor Alexandra Schulman to fire off an angry letter to designers.

The second thing I did was to buy a copy of More, and try not to look too embarrassed as I payed for it. This is something I did when suspicious about Now editor Abigail Blackburn's protestations of innocence to Louise Redknapp, who had accused her magazine of triggering "pregorexia; the issue of Now brought out to coincide with Redknapp's crusading documentary was a celebrity pregnancy special, but the devil was in the detail, and the detail turned out to be in the back issues.

I have no back issues of More, but on flicking through the magazine did find an advert for Tesco Clothing Online featuring a photo of a woman who looked as though she had other priorities than eating. Had the magazine been supplied with the pic, or with clothes that would only fit somebody of her dimensions?

What caught Maxima's eyes made a bee in her bonnet buzz furoiusly: she pointed to a photo of Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud with (I think) Tom Crane, and, pointing to Crane's form (which compared to mine looks skeletal), demanded to know why men could look any way they wanted while women had to look like Barbie. At least she let up quite soon - one Hogmanay she went on and on about male performers looking like they'd been dragged through a hedge while female ones were expected to exude glamour. At least she had a point. But I hope the bloke who phoned in to complain about his eyebrow never had a look at the "More man of the week" (Kellan Lutz from vampire flick Twilight); no wonder illicit steroid sales are booming, as vulnerable young men think they have to "get ripped". It's not for me to contradict Emma Ledger and say that the photo was digitally manipulated, but Radio 1 DJ Vis showed that it could be done (see pic below).

Ledger did stress that her magazine was for 18-26-year-olds ("of all shapes and sizes"), but the feature that gave me most cause for concern was nothing to do with body-image, rather "position of the week", demonstrated with Barbie and Ken dolls. I thought of the poor girl who texted Jones' show to say that she only felt good about herself if a boy told her she was pretty, and felt furthermore that the only way to bring this about was to sleep with said boy. I remembered sadly the travellers' tales of former colleagues in drugs work, who had given talks to schoolchildren and reported back that girls said that some boys threatened to spread the word that they were "frigid" if they refused to have sex. Sometimes we fellows are unconscionably nasty people, and moreover, while More is by no means the worst offender, I'm also not sure what Ms Ledger thinks happens to somebody on their 18th birthday to make them less vulnerable to masculine con-tricks than they were at 17 years and 364 days old.

Now I only look in the mirror on those occasions when I have no choice but to shave and comb my hair; but I remember a strange young man who would examine his image, although I'm no longer sure what he was looking for or even at. Young people today are not the means to enrichment of the staff of celebrity magazines and/or the shareholders of companies that own them. It's no cliché that children are the future: young people will father and bear our grandchildren, will work in supermarkets and universities and, among a milion other things, will hopefully enjoy life enough to convince the grumpier among us that there's a point to it all.

And, on a personal note, I'd like to send a message to the young man with acne. Nothing worked for me either - but it faded in every way as I got older.

Related posts:

Abigail Blackburn and the truth about pregorexia

Claire Sweeney's big fat...

the empty seat

2010-02-11T03:32:00.009Z

Sitting on the sidelines is a favourite occupation of mine, and I avail myself of the luxury whenever it occurs.

So when I read on Richard Normington's blog that there was going to be a debate featuring the Conservative, Green, Labour and Lib Dem candidates, I headed to Cambridge's B-Bar, and was gratified to see that beside the seats there were half-a-dozen stools.

Sitting on one of them, I was party to a conversation between a young lady and a gentleman who had occupied the seemingly unoccupied seat next to her. He asked if it were fair that a seat that didn't even have a bag on it was deemed to be occupied and she replied that it had been agreed beforehand that her friend would sit there. He vacated the seat - eventually - and met a very nice lady with whom he had a loud conversation about whether a seat with nothing on it could be considered to be "booked".

The four candidates in the debate were Nick Hillman for ther Conservative Party, Tony Juniper (Green), Nick Huppert (Liberal Democrat) and Daniel Zeichner (Labour).

My money for the election is on Nick Hillman. Not because I'm a conservative (which I am), but because one of the first things he spoke about is relevant to my immediate family. The debate was sponsored by the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership; all the Prospective Parliamentary Candidates mentioned Cambridge University's potential to provide leaders, and rightly so: but Nick was the only person to mention Cambridge Regional College in the context of learning to be a builder. My daughter Minora has no desire to be an academic, but she wants get a job so that she can earn money and buy nice things.

Nick later mentioned that Cambridge is good at producing eminent professors, but not perhaps so good at producing, say, competent engineers. Personally, I used to enjoy a conversation about the ablative absolute with Professor Calculus of blessed memory, but we both agreed that when your boiler's gone south, you need somebody who's been trained to fix boilers (who, the job having been done, might very well have wanted to talk about the ablative absolute).

I didn't forsee emerging with a respect for the position for another party, but the Green's Tony Juniper eschewed the language of the debate being over, and left me with a longing for a time when those of us on both sides of the climate change debate can cool our heels and concentrate on what needs to be done.

I felt sorry for the Labour candidate, David Zeichner, who said in his opening speech that the Conservatives might win. But I must admit to being a bit confused as to when he said that if the Conservatives won there would be no going back, because we'd go back to Mrs Thatcher's time: answers on a postcard please...

Zeichner appeared to be angry about everything he spoke about. At one point he referred to the number of young people "coring through apprenticeships", and he had every right to be proud of this, but it didn't seem to occur to him to deal with why apprenticeships had died: trade union stewards were put under pressure to oppose apprenticeships because apprentices were perceived to be doing work on the cheap (Zeichner is a national political officer for the trade union Unison).

What confused me most was Mr Zeichner's statement that, in 90 days, "our financial decisions may be taken by George Osborne and we will be part of an experiment that has only been tried once before, in Ireland, and we've all seen how that's going". He then appeared to excoriate Nick Clegg because he might support the party with the most votes - but that's not my reading of Clegg's interview with the Telegraph.

I think the most human part of the night was when a distressed lady asked people not to vote for "the witch", by which she meant "Magus Lynus Shadee", who claimed to have performed a ritual that would make somebody commit suicide. She made a special request that a photocopy of the Cambridge News article be given to "the Conservative". Nick had the eejit nailed - he wanted to open a shop, and was seeking attention.

It's significant that Nick Hillman is a historian, because history is about what worked, what lasted, what doesn't need fixing. It seemed to me that the Labour candidate, God bless him, had made his mind up beforehand what Nick was going to say and this informed his reaction, because very little of what Zeichner said was relevant to Nick's presentation.

It seemed to me that Mr Zeichner not only had his seat booked, but had reserved the empty chair next to him in order to occupy it with a conservative bogeyman that exists only in the Labour collective consciousness. I hope things work out well for him. Personally, I'll be voting for Nick Hillman, because I want to vote for somebody who cares, and who is part of a government that not only cares but does it in the real world.