Cambridge University: agendas clash as Prince Philip steps down

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.

some things get everywhere!

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!

blogosphere "thank-you's"

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:

1. Thank the person who gave you this award.


2. Share one thing about yourself readers might not know otherwise.


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


4. 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.

Cambridge's new mosque: planning still pending

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"

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"

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?

top tips for Tuesday (and Thursday)

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.

"Bronson" - special charity screening in Cambridge

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.

Daniel Zeichner, that salute and a bizarre exchange

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.

moving pictures: journeying to and from Spring Harvest

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

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.".

on the trail in Trumpington

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.