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.
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).
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?
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
The Draughty Old Fen, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom
An incurable old cyber-grumpy, I like good music, cats, bacon sarnies and anything to do with Terry Wogan. Raining on ideological parades is the cream in the coffee.
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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".
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.
With its customary patriotism, the BBC has published a report saying that 
