I suppose it's time - as the winter's snows cover up the dead dogs' corpses of another year - for another of those 'end-of-year' pieces which are torture to write and which nobody ever reads anyway.
And yet, I find it very difficult to see the point. The more things have 'changed', the more they seem to have stayed the same: home or abroad, the same incompetents, thugs and criminals remain in power; the same self-protecting groups have been allowed to carry on in their own sweet way, never needing to fear apprehension or justice; the same wrong directions are being followed with dangerous - if not suicidal - zeal.
For myself, I find myself in much the same situation as I did this time last year: stuck in a job which is well below my capabilities, under the control of senior and middle managers who consider me and my colleagues to be nothing more than numbers, counters to be moved across the gaming board as and when it suits them; and unable to find anything more suitable because of an economic collapse engineered by those who have managed to insulate themselves from its effects with my money.
Unlike last year, I can't take comfort in having had any work published elsewhere, even for free. The Transdiffusion website is undergoing a major revamp (eight months and counting), and so the one piece I was commissioned to write earlier this year has yet to appear; and I can't even seem to get my letters into The Independent now, either! *
I gave up smoking for two months back in the summer. Not a bad effort after thirty years. But then I started again (albeit to a lesser degree). My doctor had warned me that there were two elements to the problem, one chemical and the other psychological, and that it was this latter factor which was the more difficult to overcome. And so, indeed, it has proven. So far...
Still, I got to see Kraftwerk at last.
In the country at large, there is little encouragement to be found for optimism. During 2009, our political leaders have proven to be terminally corrupt, unable to resolve even their own malfeasances without making themselves look even worse. That the same politicians should then totally fail to take decisive action against the spivs and chancers who filled their boots during the so-called 'boom' and whose cupidity, stupidity and arrogance has caused soaring unemployment amongst those who were not fortunate enough to be caught in one of those happy updraughts of prosperity, only makes it easier to understand why politicians are now ranked as having lower professional standards than crack-whores.
Similarly, the police in 2009 were still able to mistreat, abuse and even kill with apparent impunity; the civil administration was was still able to take even further arbitrary and extreme powers unto itself; and the media who should be watching them like hawks still seem either to be too scared to do so (e.g., the BBC), too 'embedded' with the establishment to do so (e.g., The Guardian), or too obsessed with the culture of brainless celebrity (e.g., just about all the rest of them) to be anything much more than stenographers for whichever organisation or PR company is paying them or passing easy-to-copy-and-paste press releases to them.
And so the arse-covering continues, whether it be yet another eunuchoid 'enquiry' into the criminality of the Blair regime regarding its war on Iraq, or the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission rushing to defend the Metropolitan Police just hours after its officers were implicated in the killing of an innocent bystander...using the exact same phrases used by the Met itself.
And then we face the real prospect during the coming months of a new government committed just as much as its predecessors to favouring the favoured and kicking those who could scarcely be kicked any further. All this added to the (albeit largely media-inflated) rise of the far Right, and the acceptance into the discussions of the political and media 'mainstream' of the most callous, inhumane and dangerous rhetoric towards substantial portions of our fellow inhabitants, be they those seeking shelter from oppression elsewhere or those who are simply 'different' by dint of their being a different colour.
Which brings me to the lands beyond the sea.
I cannot say that I have been disillusioned by Obama, if only because I was never 'illusioned' with him in the first place. He was - and remains - a machine politician and, in the same way that Thatcher's reign brought few benefits to women in the UK, so too 'Barry' may well turn out to be a predictable disappointment to the overwhelmingly-poor ethnic groups of the USA. Given that he has also presided over the continuation of the policies of Bush's criminal enterprise in extending his country's belligerent attitudes and in feather-bedding the Ponzi Pirates of Wall Street, the only groups likely to benefit are those who were already nicely taken care of, thank you. Ordinary Americans (still being laid off by the thousand in order to 'offshore' production or to defend the stock prices) Need Not Apply.
Elsewhere, vicious dictatorships continue to operate unchecked in such places as Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and the so-called People's Republic of China (the thuggish arrogance of which leads them to putting the mentally ill to death just to thumb their noses at the world); the Zionists still illegally occupy large parts of Palestine with the willing connivance of a guilt-tripped West and its puppet regimes in Amman and Cairo; resource wars continue to be fought on at least two continents; and the Obama administration can openly back fraudulent elections in Honduras as a consequence of yet another democratically-elected government being overthrown by the military allied with business interests.
And all the while, supposedly 'democratic' and 'free' countries can contrive to gain increasing control of what we, the people, are allowed to know. Australia has bowed to pressure from religious extremists to censor the internet; India (the land of the Kama Sutra) has just started blocking its citizens' access to pornography online; and in many other countries, politicians are giving themselves, the courts and other state bodies increasing powers to snoop upon and block the online communications of the general population (always under the footling rhetoric of 'combatting terrorism', 'protecting the vulnerable ("Won't someone think of the kiddies?"), or at the behest of those bloated bus-missers called 'the creative industries'. And England's libel laws are still an international fucking disgrace, presided over by a grandstanding oaf like David Eady who claims global jurisdiction for his dangerous opinions.
So, what's new? Sod all, really. Happy New Year...
* Update (01/01/10): The Indy published my letter of 28/12/09 on New Year's Day. Here (scroll down to the last letter). It's merely a restatement of what I said here.
All she was doing was following the wise words of the great Bill Bailey:
"The BBC did a survey of the top 50 things to do before we die...I'd want to put some interesting ones in there: "Number 67: lunge wildly at the Pope"..."
At something of a loose end this evening, so for the first time in many months I went for a Blogwanderung. This is the process by which I start at Joe Gordon's very spendid and worthwhile Woolamaloo Gazette (which is hosted by Blogger), then click the 'Next Blog' button and see what comes up.
Every single one of the next thirty or so blogs which came up featured various types of god-botherer; either small churches, various pastors, or those annoying (usually American) individuals who can't resist telling you about their 'personal relationship with Gahhd' (hint: if you love him so much, get a room and stop waving it in our faces). This is either an epic set of coincidences or there's a conspiracy afoot.
I sometimes wonder if the War On Delusion can ever be won.
I suppose it's one of the inevitabilities of middle age that you find the familiar on-screen faces of your childhood and youth starting to drop off the twig through old age.
Edward Albert Arthur Woodward Actor
b. 1 June 1930, d. 16 November 2009
Whether as the doubt-ridden spy Callan, or as the more urbane type of revenge-fantasy figure in The Equaliser, or as the fundamentalist detective sent to investigate strange goings on among the pagans in The Wicker Man, Woodward was always a credible performer.
This may not be entirely appropriate, but there's a story that when he was first introduced to Noël Coward, The Master said, "Dear boy, you really must change your name; it sounds like someone farting in the bath!"
Not remotely à propos to that, not many nowadays remember that he could also sing, in a not-at-all-offensive tenor, and released a number of LPs (remember those?), even scoring a (very) minor hit single in 1970 with a rendering of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields' The Way You Look Tonight. More interesting for historians of pop was the b-side, The Tide Will Turn For Rebecca, which was one of the earliest recordings of a song by Elton John and Bernie Turpin, a little while before they said hello to the yellow brick road. Click here for an excerpt.
And I suppose that wouldn't bring back their apples, either...
First off, greetings to my old chum Dylan, bass-meister of Hecate Enthroned, who's in bloody agony with his back at the moment. Hope you'll soon be back in circulation, mate.
Secondly, we were in work this morning discussing this and that, and the conversation turned to the sons of the two women in the conversation who, at the age of eleven, were being introduced to the nitty-gritty of what in our day was called 'sex education'. The other male in the conversation was B.H., one of the office characters, who remarked that he'd never had sex education in school in his day (he's in his early fifties). "Not even rabbits", he said, adding mournfully:
"If only I'd dissected rabbits, I'd be much more successful with women."
There's rats in the trenches,
A thousand foul stenches
Of piss, pus and puke, blood and death.
Jim's screaming his head off
'Cause Frank hasn't got one,
And Joey's just drawn his last breath.
While back home in Surrey,
They try not to worry
And keep all their doubts locked inside.
For in a few years
There'll be no more tears,
And they'll all wear their poppies with pride...
She can't understand
As she holds the girl's hand,
That her daughter's no longer attached.
They were all blown to hell
As a terrorist cell,
Though a wedding was all that they'd hatched.
And back in the West
They're so sure they know best,
Though they've tortured and murdered and lied.
And they don't want to know
What the body counts show
As they all wear their poppies with pride...
Oh, they all wear their poppies with pride...
At the annual board meeting,
Arms dealers are greeting
Reports of their profits with glee.
They'll always be willing
To make a quick killing
From slaughter and mass misery
And when it's all over,
They'll head off to stuff
The big bellies their suits cannot hide.
And they won't spare a thought
For the carnage they've brought,
But they'll all wear their poppies with pride...
Yes they'll all wear their poppies with pride...
Whoever you mix with,
There's bound to be someone
Whose mind is still caught in the mesh.
Those soldiers aren't heroes,
They're nothing but fodder
For the thing that grows fat on our flesh.
And you show no respect
For the ones left behind
Or the miserable sods who have died.
If you can't face the truth about why they were killed,
And you still wear your poppies with pride...
If you still wear your poppies with pride....
Do you still wear your poppies with pride?
As promised three weeks ago, the JudgeCo™ Calendar for 2010 is now ready.
Actually, it's been ready for over a fortnight, but I've held off on publishing it until now for a couple of reasons: firstly, because I didn't want to be too quick off the mark with it (although it's coming out a day earlier than last year's); and secondly because when I did a trial print of it last week, I found that my favoured .pdf reading software, Foxit Reader, had a very serious bug in its then-latest version which meant that it wouldn't print most of the text. Including the day numbers, something of a handicap if you're trying to print a calendar.
The problem now seems to have been cured by an update to the program (which you can get here), so it's all systems go for the Calendar, which you can download by clicking on whichever icon below suits you. As ever, there are three versions: a UK one, a US one (both of these showing national/federal public holidays), and a plain version. Then all you have to do is print it off and bind it.
I came across a name the other day which shows that, if you marry a man from a different country, you need to be a bit mindful of the possibility of a terrible mismatch between your given names and his surname.
(I should point out that what follows isn't actually the name in question. There would be all sorts of problems regarding confidentiality and all that malarkey if I did. What follows instead is what one might call 'a parallel')
I'm in the process of designing the JudgeCo™ calendar for 2010, so I've removed the 2009 ones. As in previous years, my webstats tell me that people are still downloading that. In October. Can't imagine why.
I hope to have the 2010 version ready in a couple of weeks or so. I'll let you know.
(For Carl, who is likely to be the only regular reader of this site who will immediately get the reference in the title of this piece)
This is the Rocko. Or, to be formal about it, these are The Rocks. It's a wooded bank which separates two parts of Brymbo; the Penygraig estate above ('Penygraig' means 'The Top Of The Rocks', in case you didn't know), and High Street below.
It hasn't always been anything like as tree-clad as this, though. The reason was that this was a very useful short-cut between the houses at the top and the shops, pubs and what-have-you at the bottom. And especially to the steelworks, the entrance to which stood opposite the steps which you can probably just make out in the left-hand frame of the picture above. A fair number of people who lived on the estate worked there, so walking up and down the Rocko saved a round journey up Blast Road or up the Red Path.
It had other uses, too. As kids, we were never off its slopes. If we weren't using it as a short-cut ourselves, we were playing commandos in the long grass and bracken, sliding down it on flattened cardboard boxes (there was a particular broad area of clear slope for this), eating the nuts off some of the bushes (erm, I don't mean that the way it looks!), or (naughty, naughty!) rolling old car tyres down it and seeing what (or possibly who) we could hit on High Street below.
Nearly all the shops and pubs down there have gone, and of course the steelworks was pillaged from us nearly twenty years ago. Between that and the facts that no-one seems to walk anywhere anymore and that kids don't seem to play out in the same way as we did (media scares suggesting that there's a paedo lurking behind every bush, for example), hardly anyone used the numerous paths which criss-crossed the Rocko. As a direct consequence, the trees and bracken have completely taken over, the paths have either been covered up or have slid into oblivion.
This is all part of my heritage. So I've decided to create a map marking the paths which I remember being part of the ways of my life. So here's the map:
(The light blue square marks the house I was born and grew up in; the yellow circle is the Thrupenny Bit; the dark blue rectangle was John Arthur Davies' (Jac Y Pant's) pigeon kit; and the paths are marked in red).
I hadn't been on a really long walk since September 2006. The weather the last two summers (and the last two Septembers) had been too uncertain (or just plain crap) to be able to plan anything.
I'd had a couple of ideas. One of which was to catch the bus down to Llangollen then walk back home via World's End. However, when I measured the distance on the Ordnance Survey map (by the time-honoured method of putting the straight edge of a piece of paper up against the route and marking the turns on the paper), it came out at slightly over twelve miles. I didn't feel that this was in any way realistic given my condition, so I resolved to pick up where I had left off in June 2006 and complete the top half of the Clywedog Trail.
The forecast for Wednesday was good, so shortly before ten o'clock, I set off.
Map time:
(Start at the arrow in the top right-hand corner and follow the blue arrows anti-clockwise. As ever, pressing 'Ctrl' and '+' should enlarge the map:'Ctrl' and '0' will bring it back to the original size)
Passing the eastern side of the electricity substation at Penrhos, I did my good deed for the day in that I rescued a butterfly from a spider's web. OK, it wasn't a good deed as far as the spider was concerned, but there are plenty of them and not enough butterflies.
I turned right at Tŷ Cerrig and up Heol Llewelyn to the top of Fron. The weather was pleasant: not too warm, and not too cool a breeze. I dropped down into the Gwenfro valley, over the bridge and up the mercifully short steep slope on the other which brought me out at Llidiart Fanny...
Out! Go on! Out! Well, stop sniggering then! It's a real place.
Crossing the Talwrn Road and heading up Heol Offa, I heard a roaring noise from above. Looking skywards, I saw one of the huge Belugha transport planes banking prior to making its final approach to the Airbus factory at Broughton. I've seen these planes a few times, and I'm always amazed at how they manage to stay up there, they appear to move so slowly. On top of which, this one seemed to be so low as to threaten people's TV aerials.
Reaching the far end of Heol Offa, there was then a fun minute or two trying to cross the main road. There was nothing coming down the hill, but the world and his concubine seemed to be coming up.
Anyway, I strode manfully down Rhos Berse Lane towards the real starting point of my walk: Nant Mill. This was where I'd left off last time. I reached there and found a gaggle of people getting out of cars, preparing rucksacks and discussing their route. Although I thought it might be a good idea to set off ahead of them (there were more of them than of me, for one thing), I decided to play it cool and sit by the side of the River Clywedog for a little while:
(I took other pictures here, but something weird happened with my camera and the grass on the river bank came out white. I think it's time I got a new camera).
The gaggle was still milling around, mostly popping into the toilets to change into their route-marching gear, so I thought it was time to set off up-river. I crossed the river via the footbridge. I could have been so devil-may-care as to wade through the ford, but I couldn't be sure that my trusty thirty-year-old DMs hadn't sprung a leak so thought better of it. Here's a picture of the ford anyway:
As with the Bersham - Nant Mill stretch I had done in 2006, the woodland north-west of Nant Mill is in the capable hands of The Woodland Trust, and they've done a fine job here, too. The woodland is managed without giving the impression of regimentation, and the paths are well laid down and maintained. At this point, there is a path on both sides of the river, although the path on the northern side crosses over a bridge and joins the southern one within a short distance:
(That water isn't polluted as such, by the way. It's just that there are iron deposits in the rocks it flows through, originally as drainage from the mines upstream.)
The path follows the river closely in this section, passing opposite the remains of a couple of corn mills which probably post-date Nant Mill downstream, and reaches another ford at Stryt Y Sgweiar before veering away to the left and up the slope towards Bramble Farm. It's thought that the line of the path here follows the route of an old tramway which took limestone from the quarries at Minera down to the ironworks at Bersham.
Looking across the valley, you once again get an idea of how big a village Coedpoeth really is. I had passed near its lower end back on Heol Offa, but - a long way further up from my starting point - there was still a fair bit of it to see:
I yomped slowly uphill, stopping to chomp some of the blackberries growing alongside the path, until I emerged into farmland, where cows, sheep and rams grazed in their familiar mindless fashion. The path turns left here and passes a very dingy looking farmhouse before emerging onto the road which runs from Minera to Aberoer and beyond.
Turning northwards, I was somewhat taken aback to find that I was still three quarters of a mile from Minera. Objects on the map are further than they appear, obviously. I strode onwards (I was still capable of striding at this point) past a small, gated housing development and on to where the side roads for World's End and New Brighton converge, which is where I took the following picture of the Graig Fawr cliffs:
Lunchtime was nigh, but I was a little confused. You'll see from the map that the Minera Lead Mines And Country Park seems to be on the eastern side of the main road. When you get nearer, however, you find that it is actually entirely on the western side. Not that it makes any practical difference in this case, because the Lead Mines centre is usually closed anyway. The 'Country Park' seemed to consist of about half a dozen of those all-in-one bench-and-table arrangements, but needs must. A nod of acknowledgment to the elderly gentleman, the two younger women and the dog seated nearby, and I sat to fish my two Brussels pâté baps out of the depths of my rucksack (said rucksack having been given to me as a birthday present by my brother and sister-in-law last year and only now getting its first use).
The table at which I was sitting bore (on the opposite end to me, I'm glad to say) the engraved legend, "ADAM AND EMMA HAD SEX HERE". My only thought was that Emma should be easy enough to spot - she'll be the one with the permanently pained expression on her face as a result of all the splinters in her arse.
Lunch duly completed, I left the scene of Adam and Emma's tryst and walked past the entrance to the Lead Mines (which was, of course, closed) along the road which leads to Minera. However, because to get to Minera one has to cross the Clywedog again, it's necessary to go down a long gradient to the bridge before climbing up the other side of the valley.
I had wanted to take a picture of the river over the parapet of the bridge, but the view upstream included someone's house, and I'm wary of accusations of invading privacy, and the view downstream was spoiled by the presence of somebody's wheel-trim nestling against the riverbank. So there was nothing for it but to carry on up the other side, but taking notice of this road sign:
(It happens in most places from what I can see, but it's rare to have an official warning of it).
I had intended to call at Minera Parish Church, but hadn't realised that it is a fair step from the village itself. Nonetheless, I made it (although my feet were starting to give me gyp at this point - the result of not cutting my big toe-nails beforehand). I didn't go inside, although some people seemed to be in there cleaning, and instead wandered around the churchyard for a while. Churchyards are so readable, aren't they? The only trouble for me comes when I find the grave of an infant, especially a recent grave of one. There's one in our local parish churchyard like that, and it's right by one of the paths. I find the whole thing so upsetting that I deliberately choose another exit. The one in Minera is right at the back, but I found it all the same. Suitably unsettled, I made my way out again. I did take some nice pictures of the outside of the church, though. If I can get my hands on some background info about the building, I'll be giving it its own page in the Gallery, so I won't use up space here with them.
I made my way back into Minera village and past the school. Some of the children were outside with a teacher doing some sort of singing game. The tune, however, sounded at first hearing disturbingly like "The Ball At Kirriemuir", but I quickly realised that that was just a projection of my filthy mind.
Walking down Minera Hall Road towards the final stretch of the journey, I saw a tree which had unwanted guests:
I got back to the main Ruthin Road at Five Crosses and found this piece of very sound advice:
I hobbled off down Gwernygaseg (my toes were in open rebellion by this point) and down to the bottom of Gegin. It was here that I realised - not for the first time - that there was a hell of a climb involved from there to the crossroads at Pentresaeson, I managed it in small doses, climbed over the ridge and back home. I had been gone for nearly six hours.
Of course, since then I have been fit for nothing. It's been a case of, "Ooh, me feet! Me legs! Me hips! Me arse! Me back! Me shoulders!" I had to go into town this morning, and I had some urgent hedge-cutting to do this afternoon, and it has been quite an effort.
I haven't actually been anywhere, you understand; it's just that one or two other things have taken my time of late.
F'rinstance, the Saturday before last, I went out on another ramble. When I got back, I decided that it was time to get all my photographs backed up to one DVD-R, rather than spread across what had become four CD-Rs. Before I could do that, though, I needed to put a bit more order on them than previously, and also to see whether I could improve the quality of some of them.
You see, my trusty old BenQ DC C51 is OK in a lot of circumstances, but I find that pictures taken in low-light conditions, or where there's a lot of shadow, or where there's a lot of green (a particular bugbear this, as I take so many landscapes) don't come out at all well. In particular, the greens just look wrong - like the sort of green plastic they make artificial Christmas trees out of.
So, nine days ago, I set to it. I imported the whole lot to the hard drive, divvied them up between a set of folders, added image information to those which needed it so that I could see where and when they were taken, and tried to improve the ones which stood in greatest need of it.
This took up the Bank Holiday weekend, every evening last week, and a large chunk of this past weekend as well.
I was just finishing off the re-naming of all of them (about 1400 there were in all), when I realised that I'd been using the wrong compression algorithm to save them, and that instead of the definitive version of each file I had a degraded one. Files in .jpg format, you see, lose quality every time you alter them unless you save them in the right way. Which I hadn't been doing. So over a week's worth of work had been completely wasted.
Once I had decided to start the job, I had to get it done as a priority, because I needed to defrag the hard drive. I needed to defrag the hard drive because my other ongoing project - the digitisation of all my vinyl collection - is still running after about seven months, and you can get problems if the drive gets too fragmented. Which it tends to do especially if you're doing a lot of audio or video work.
So, I've had one project delayed and the other completely aborted. And this morning, I threw back my curtains at 08:30 to be greeted by the sight of a large ginger-and-white cat taking a dump right in the middle of my lawn. I had thought that the little bastards were leaving me in peace this year, until I found some more little feline gifts in the side garden on Saturday when I was doing some hedge-cutting. I've tried everything short of thermo-nuclear devices hidden under the topsoil, and nothing seems to deter the vermin.
Went out for a walk just now, as I had put a big load of washing on and it hadn't even got to the first rinse. Here, have a dragonfly:
The weather was too nice yesterday afternoon to be sitting in the house or to be faffing about in the garden (leaving aside the fact that I haven't got any more room in my garden-waste bin), so I set out shortly after 1.30 with two possible targets. The first one was to see if there was anything remaining of the old Lodge Halt railway station, and the second was to see if I could find my grandparents' grave at St Paul's churchyard in Pentre Broughton.
I headed off down Blast Road and the Mount...oh, hold on, here's a map:
(The red dot at top left marks my start and finish point, and the blue arrows my route. If you have difficulty in seeing the arrows, try pressing 'Ctrl' and '+' a couple of times - it should enlarge the image)
Heading down the New Road ('New' in the sense that it was new in about 1925, and these names tend to stick), I bumped into my nephew Gavin and we chatted for a few minutes - mostly about how our county councillor is a tool - before I set off down into The Lodge.
I got to the bus stop at the south end of The Lodge and turned up the footpath which leads up to the old railway line. This section of footpath seems to be well-maintained and clear, and I reached the level of the line without any problem. I looked around a bit, but there was nothing about which would have indicated the existence of any structure. This is what it looks like now:
I had a choice here, and decided to turn right. After about thirty yards, I realised that this - unofficial - path was taking me away from the route I'd intended to take. So I doubled back on myself and headed back towards Brymbo. I clambered over a stile which had a sign indicating that the footpath led round to the right.
It was at this point that a problem arose. The path should have led up past a house and up a track to Long Lane, but it seemed to have been blocked by undergrowth (or, rather, overgrowth) and debris. Having not brought the map with me, I was left to try to guess how the field of grass and clover I was now standing in fitted on to the rest of the known universe.
I wandered around the eastern edge of the field, searching for some sign of an exit - a stile or a gate - with no success. I did find three rather bored-looking horses and - wading through the herbage - another group of slightly more engaged steeds in the small paddock to the north.
I started to imagine myself being stranded in this bloody pasture all day, and eventually resolved to get out by whatever means presented themselves. This turned out to be a rather tatty barbed-wire fence where the bored nags had been standing (they had now wandered off in search of interesting grass), and I insinuated myself through this and climbed the field up to the lane - where I was faced with negotiating another fence before I could emerge, sweating, on to Long Lane but not as far along it as I needed to be.
All this had meant that I was seriously behind schedule at this point. I never take a watch on these little expeditions because it tends to make me walk too fast and not stop and smell the roses, so I had no idea what time it was. My instincts prodded me to stride off down towards the junction of Long Lane and Cross Lane (which was also where the alleged footpath was supposed to have emerged).
I walked up Cross Lane rather warily, because the last time I had taken this route I was waylaid by a couple of crazed sheepdogs from the farm-cum-kennels at the top of the ridge. Mercifully, they weren't about on this occasion, and I dropped over the far side towards Pentre Broughton. As I did so, I got this view of Wrexham town centre:
I headed down past the old Cross Keys pub and turned left on to the main road. I hadn't been through this part of Pentre Broughton for over a year; not since a road closure (of which more anon, dear reader) had led to a diversion on the bus route to and from work. Nothing seemed to have changed, and I turned right on to Bryn Y Gaer Road and headed towards the church.
St Paul's churchyard is a bit odd, in that there is little bit of cemetery on the first bend before you get near the church itself, and that this bit isn't connected to the rest of it, as I duly discovered, having once more to retrace my steps back to the road.
I finally reached the main gate of St Paul's. Judging by the black Jaguar S-Type with the white ribbons parked outside, there was a wedding going on inside (inside the church, that is, not inside the Jag; although I daresay that adventurous couples have tried this somewhere). I walked down the front path and turned left in amongst the gravestones.
This is where I had another problem. I hadn't been here since my uncle Harry's funeral over twenty-five years ago, and couldn't remember where the grave (which he shares with my grandparents) actually was. I also remember that the grave was not conspicuously marked in any case, so I was on something of a hiding to nothing. I did manage to find where my aunt Hannah is buried, though; near the front of the church in the same grave as her brother and sister.
Wandering around somewhat aimlessly (although graveyards are so readable, aren't they?), I walked down the far side of the church to muffled organ music from within. The tune being essayed seemed strangely familiar, but I couldn't immediately identify it. It then came to me that it sounded uncannily like an adagio rendering of the theme from Bob The Builder, although this seemed too bizarre to be true. The only other alternative was Half Man Half Biscuit's Irk The Purists, which seemed an even more outlandish possibility. Perhaps if you were there you can tell me.
I gave up my grave-hunting after about twenty minutes and decided to head home. I climbed the steps opposite the churchyard and emerged back onto the main road which I climbed up to the top of Station Road.
Going down the other side, I came to the road closure I mentioned before. See this gallery page (especially the later entries) for the background to this. I now found that the tall metal fences which they have recently erected (because the earlier plastic, concrete or wire barriers previously in place had been moved out of the way by people desperate for a short cut - or just plain stupid) now blocked off even pedestrian access to the area of the landslip.
Edging down Station Road alongside the fence, I got to the bottom and climbed slowly back up The Mount and got home shortly after 4.30.
Richard Morris Jones (Dic Jones, 'Dic Yr Hendre')
Bardd, Archdderwydd, Ffermwr Poet, Archdruid, Farmer
g. 1934, f. 18 Awst 2009 b. 1934, d. 18 August 2009
Petaswn i'n fardd yn y byd, heno mi faswn i'n canu marwnad i fardd Cymraeg mwyaf yr hanner canrif diwethaf, oherwydd fu farw'r prifardd Dic Jones y bore 'ma yn 75 mlwydd oed.
Ond nid bardd ydw i, a buasai hyd yn oed meddwl am gyfansoddi cerdd i nodi ei ymadawiad yn sathru ar ei ddawn (ac ar farddoniaeth yn ei chrynswth gan hynny). Hawlio'r teitl uchod ar ei ran yw'r cyfan gallaf innau wneud, gan y buasai Dic yn rhy ddiymhongar i'w hawlio drosto fo ei hun.
Wedi dysgu'r canu caeth wrth law teulu enwog Y Cilie, aeth Dic Jones ymlaen i feistroli nid yn unig cymhlethdodau'r gynghanedd ond y mynegiant a roes wir werth i'w gerddi, a'u cyfuno'n gyfanweithiau a ragorodd ar ei athrawon - ac ar bawb arall.
Bardd gwlad ydoedd, yn llawn ystyr (ac iawn ystyr) y term. Gan iddo ffermio'r Hendre yng ngwaelod Ceredigion ar hyd ei oes, roedd rhythmau natur a chylchdroadau y tymhorau ynghlwm wrth ei farddoni o reidrwydd. Prin syndod, felly, fod y cydbwysedd hwnnw rhwng y llon a'r lleddf, y dedywdd a'r trist, y golau a'r tywyllwch, yn gymaint rhan o'i gerddi.
Oherwydd ni fu bardd yn yr oes fodern yr oedd ei gynghanedd mor rwydd, mor lyfn. Cymaint felly fel y gallai anwybodyn fel fi hyd yn oed deimlo ei nerth. Beth bynnag bo'r testun, gallai Dic drwy'r amser ein siglo ni - boed hynny i ddagrau neu i chwerthin.
Roedd ei gyfraniad yn enfawr drwy'r blynyddoedd, nid yn unig fel bardd - fel rhan o dîm Crannog ar Y Talwrn - ond fel llywydd y rhaglen honno am ddegawd a hanner tua diwedd y ganrif ddiwethaf. Roedd y syniad o'i roi wrth law Gerallt Lloyd Owen yn un ysbrydoledig, ac yn aml roedd y cyd-weu rhwng y ddau gawr hynny yn fwy o oleuad na'r cynnyrch yr oedden nhw'n ei bwyso a'i fesur. Rhyngddyn nhw ill dau, ysbrydolodd adfywhad yn ein traddodiadau barddol.
Ar un o'r achlysuron prin hynny pan fo'r wasg Seisnig wedi cymryd y diddordeb lleiaf yn ein diwylliant, anfonodd The Observer y bardd ac artist Jeff Nuttall i'r Brifwyl yng Nghastell Nedd ym 1994. Disgrifiodd Nuttall rownd derfynol Y Talwrn y flwyddyn honno fel a ganlyn:
"Dic Jones and Gerallt Lloyd Owen conduct Talwrn Y Beirdd, which is a spoken verse competition usually run as a game on Welsh radio.
"As each competitor delivers his piece, Jones and Owen improvise a link-commentary of such wit and erudition the audience is kept in a state of astonished mirth. Jones has a face like an undertaker's shovel."
Welais i erioed rhaw â'r math wên na'r math feddwl arni!
(Am ymdriniaeth helaethach o le'r Talwrn yn ein bywyd cenedlaethol, gweler yr erthygl hon a ysgrifennais i y llynedd).
Mi gwrddais i â Dic Jones un tro. Ar faes y Prifwyl yn Yr Wyddgrug ym 1991 oedd hi, ac mi welais o'n camu'n araf rhwng y stondinau ('araf' oherwydd iddo ddioddef yn enbyd â'i gluniau yr adeg honno), ac mi ddaeth y cyfle i mi fynd ato a diolch iddo am Y Talwrn. Yr oedd o'n hawddgar a diymhongar wrth rhoi'r clod ar ei bartner y cochyn o'r Sarnau am beidio a chymryd pethau'n ormod o ddifri' ac am wrthod gadael i'r rhaglen fod yn sych.
Ni chymerodd Dic ei hun yn ormod o ddifri' chwaith. Ei fyd oedd ei deulu, ei gerddi, ei dir, y Pethe - am y rheini yr oedd o o ddifri calon, ac yr oedd yr ymroddiad hwwnw'n amlwg ar bob agwedd.
Diolch o galon, Dic Yr Hendre, a hedd i ti'n oes oesoedd.
**********
If I were any sort of poet, I would tonight be singing an elegy to the greatest Welsh poet of the last half century, because the poet Dic Jones died this morning at the age of 75.
But I'm not, and even thinking about composing a poem to mark his passing would be treading on his talents (and on poetry in general, for that matter). All I can do is to claim the above title for him, because Dic would have been too modest to claim it for himself.
Having learned strict-metre poetry at the feet of the famous Cilie family, Dic Jones went on to master not only its technical intricacies but also the force of expression which gave true value to his poems, and he combined them into unified works which surpassed his masters - and everyone else.
He was a country poet, in the full (and correct) meaning of the term. Having spent his whole life farming Yr Hendre in south Ceredigion, the rhythms of nature and the turning of the seasons were inevitably going to be integral elements of his poetry. It's scarcely any wonder, then, that that balance of major and minor keys, contentment and longing, dark and light, was such a part of his work.
Because no other modern poet's cynghanedd was so smooth, so flowing. So much so that even an ignoramus like me could feel its power. Whatever the subject, Dic could always shake us - be it to tears or to laughter.
His contribution down the years was immense, not only as a poet - as a member of the Crannog team on Y Talwrn - but as chairman of that very programme for a decade and a half at the close of the last century. The idea of pairing him with Gerallt Lloyd Owen was an inspired one, and the exchanges between these two giants was often more enlightening than the material they were judging. Between them, they inspired a revivial of our poetic traditions.
On one of those rare occasions when the English press have taken the slightest interest in our culture, The Observer sent the poet and artist Jeff Nuttall to the National Eisteddfod in Neath in 1994. Here's how Nuttall described the final of Y Talwrn that year:
"Dic Jones and Gerallt Lloyd Owen conduct Talwrn Y Beirdd, which is a spoken verse competition usually run as a game on Welsh radio.
"As each competitor delivers his piece, Jones and Owen improvise a link-commentary of such wit and erudition the audience is kept in a state of astonished mirth. Jones has a face like an undertaker's shovel."
I never saw a shovel with such a smile or such a mind!
(For further explanation of the place of Y Talwrn in our national life, see this article I wrote last year).
I met Dic Jones once. It was on the maes of the National Eisteddfod in Mold in 1991, and I saw him walking slowly between the stalls ('slowly' because he was suffering terribly with his hips at that time), and the opportunity arose to go up to him and thank him for Y Talwrn. He was amiable and modest in giving the credit to his partner the redhead from Sarnau for not taking things too seriously and for not allowing the programme to become dry.
Dic never took himself too seriously either. His family, his poetry, his land - these were the things he was in earnest about, and that commitment was obvious at all times.
Thank you, Dic Yr Hendre, and may peace be forever with you.
And no, you weren't the only one to misread the headline. My first thought was...
"A group of rabbis and Jewish mystics have taken to the skies over Israel, praying and blowing ceremonial horns in a plane to ward off swine flu."
"About 50 religious leaders circled over the country on Monday, chanting prayers and blowing horns, called shofars."
"The flight's aim was "to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it", Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying."
""We are certain that, thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us," added Mr Batzri."
Just in case you thought that this was a piece of collaborative surrealist fiction between, say, Beachcomber, Woody Allen and Monty Python, there are even photographs:
"I don't think much of the in-flight entertainment, do you? I mean, an Eddie Calvert soundalike competition?"
Of all the various categories of woo in the world, a bunch of strangely-dressed men chanting gibberish at 10000 feet to ward off a virus must be somewhere near the top of the league. It certainly makes the Hare Krishnas look rational.
And given that Israel is far nearer to being a theocracy than a democracy (rabbis blessing the killing of children in Gaza, for example), I suppose the plane didn't fly over the West Bank or Gaza for fear that they might accidently cure an Arab.
Going through a set of 'good ideas' for the site, and this one changes the look of the Archive pages and also improves the navigation between them.
I've spent all afternoon on it, largely because of the need to create a special style-sheet to handle Internet Explorer's notorious lack of adherence to standards.
I've revamped The Gallery (link in left sidebar), in the sense that I've moved it up one level in the folder hierarchy on the site and have also renamed the pages and images so as to make it a bit easier for me to follow and to update.
If you've made a bookmark or other link to any of the pages, then you'll need to change it.
Each year, the Neuralcorrelate Society in the US stages a Best Visual Illusion Of The Year contest. I had thought that the bankers might be in with a shout this year, after creating the illusion that they knew what they were doing with our money, but that's not the sort of thing they're talking about here.
The winners were announced a couple of months ago, but I've only just caught up with it. The winning eye-deceivers are here (Flash required).
I'm way behind with this, because I've only just re-discovered the relevant file on my hard drive, and was also prompted by my posting of Tim Minchin's wonderful piece Stormhere.
In response to yet another load of superstitionist warm piddle from Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian, the commenter going by the name of peteran posted this, which is as concise a statement of my position as I could hope to come across:
"I'm an atheist. I believe that I'm a product of evolution; a member of one species amongst many. I think that the Earth existed for billions of years before mankind, and that it'll carry right on going after we've become extinct. If I have a problem, I believe that it is I who must sort it out (though, if I'm lucky, I might have family and friends to help me). I expect, when I die, that my existence and awareness will end.
"My friend is a Christian. He believes that he was made in God's perfect image, and that he has dominion over the Earth's beasts. He reckons that the Earth was made quite recently, just for mankind's benefit. He thinks that the Supreme Being has an infinite love for him personally, and will intervene at his request to help him pass exams and scoop the lottery, and to make the cute kid on X-Factor win. He thinks that, when he dies, his existence will be much too precious to end, and so he'll live forever in eternal blissful happiness with the Supreme Being who loves him so.
"One of us is accused by Madeleine Bunting and Karen Armstrong of "egotism and arrogance". Guess which."
There haven't been many opportunities to get out and about with the camera so far this year. In addition, as soon as I've taken a fortnight off work the weather turns rotting to spite me.
Nevertheless, there are some new photographs in The Gallery for you. The link is in the sidebar (left).
A burst of nice weather, combined with other projects and dealing with a personal issue which I might go public with later have kept me away for a couple of weeks. That, and there being nothing I wanted to say on anything.
I just wanted to remind you that there are elections coming up this Thursday (4 June). You might have missed them if I hadn't pointed it out.
The important point I wanted to make is not that they are elections to the European Parliament, and not that they give you the opportunity to avenge yourselves on the political establishment, but that you have the right to vote.
OK, I concede that that includes the right not to vote, but that should only be done as a calculated decision reached after a lot of thought, rather than out of a feeling either of "a pox on them all" or just "I can't be arsed".
There has been a lot of talk from the liberal bien-pensants such as the regular columnists in The Guardian about the danger of those knobheads in the Brutish Nazi Party getting elected. Well, if enough people vote for them, I don't have a problem with them getting seats. That's democracy, however cracked.
I do think, however, that the threat has been talked up rather too much, and for the wrong reasons. Given that so much noise on the issue has come from senior members of the governing party, I don't think it unreasonable to claim that the spectre of the BNP is being used as a scare tactic in order to frighten the gullible back into voting for an organisation which is a crumbling, venal, amoral wreck.
For the BNP to get even one MEP would be unfortunate, but in the same way that the election of one councillor in one London borough a decade and a half ago was treated as if the fall of civilisation was imminent, it won't bring the end of the world.
I can't see them getting more than one, though. In any case, as those who have temporarily fallen under the spell of these Hitler-worshipping retards in past elections at council level could testify, once in office they are too isolated, too clueless, just too fucking dumb to do any lasting damage.
Besides which, I still have a lingering (some would say naïve) faith in the intelligence of my fellow voters that they will not take seriously any party whose leader - despite the trappings of a private education, Cambridge degree (lower second) and smart suiting - can come out with remarks and scribblings like these:
"I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale [the Holocaust] is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter day witch-hysteria."
"It's well known that the chimneys from the gas chambers at Auschwitz are fake, built after the war ended."
"[W]e affirm that non-Whites have no place here at all and will not rest until every last one has left our land."
A man, moreover, who pals around with Italian and Austrian fascists and the Ku Klux Klan.
And just think...some people describe them as the 'respectable' face of violent bigotry.
As for their soul brothers in that circus of irrelevance called UKIP (whom someone marvellously described today as "The BNP for people who shop at M&S"), well they'll probably get most of their MEPs re-elected. At least, those who haven't been disowned, left in high dudgeon at being passed over for the leadership, or charged with/convicted of fraud. I suppose we have to see it as a success for democracy that even these nineteenth-hole bores and refugees from the Monday Club can get elected, but it leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth all the same.
One way of minimising the chance of either of these groupuscules getting elected is simply to go out and vote. Under the proportional representation system in use for the European elections, a party needs to pass a certain percentage to get a seat. That means that the lower the turnout, the easier it will be for them.
So if you want to stop either the Führer's Favourite Fuckwits or the Golf Club Bunker Boys getting in, then vote!
Or, as Robert A Heinlein - an author with whom I'm proud to say I disagree on many things - said, and was actually right for once:
"If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong."
And if you don't vote, then I'm sorry but you forfeit any right to whinge about the result.
Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.
Thirty years. It seems a long time, but for those of us who were around (and politically aware) at the time, it seems almost as yesterday.
Which in a sense it is, as the actions and reactions she and her government set in train reverberate to this very day. And not necessarily in the way which is usually claimed. For the re-writing of history which has been so much a feature of recent years has all but obscured the realities of that time.
First of all, down through these past three decades, we have been fed a remorseless diet of narratives determined and designed to tell us how absolutely dreadful the second half of the nineteen seventies were. The country was goin' to the demnation bow-wows, m'dear, wasn't it? The commie-infiltrated unions were running the country and stopping the dead from being buried, the country was bankrupt and had had to go begging to the IMF, and the punks and the wogs were running riot in our towns and cities. Weren't they?
Well, no, actually they weren't. As one who became politically aware in the middle of that decade (and culturally aware a little before that), I most emphatically do not remember the period in those apocalyptic terms. Yes, economically we had been through a difficult time earlier in the decade, with industrial strife and inflation. Most of that, however, had been under - and directly caused by - the government of Ted Heath and his lamentable booby of a Chancellor Tony Barber. It was Barber's creation - or at least encouragement - of a fake 'boom' which had fuelled inflation and caused the inevitable friction with workers in those sectors of the economy - heavy engineering and public services prominent amongst them - who were being left further behind. Add to this the consequences of the oil-exporting countries of the Middle East quadrupling the price of oil as a result of western support for Israel, and it was scarcely surprising that inflation was running at over 25% by the early months of the Wilson government.
There were still problems in industry, but they weren't just occuring (as the 'official' version of events we have been propagandised with ever since claims) in the state-owned sector. There were issues of overmanning, but it was still considered generally better for society that people be in jobs (even if those jobs may have been superfluous in a strict time-and-motion sense) than not working at all.
By the time 1978 rolled around, inflation had dropped back below 10% and was set to fall even further (bear in mind that inflation of 5-7% was not considered unusual - or particularly alarming - in all the years prior to that); unemployment too had peaked, productivity was rising - yes, even in the nationalised industries - and the balances of payments and trade were showing small but healthy surpluses. Hardly the savage and searing indictment of the failure of a firmly-regulated mixed economy which we have been told to believe it was forever thereafter.
Those who weren't around then, and who have only had the version of events as told by the punditocracy of the intervening years - and peddled from a number of apparently disparate sources (all of whom were, however, pushing the same ideological agenda) - may be forgiven for not knowing any of what I have just outlined. These facts have all been airbrushed out in an a posteriori attempt to justify what then followed.
But what about 'The Winter Of Discontent'? Well, it was a handy slogan. The unrest in the public sector which took place during late 1978/early 1979 was not, of itself, unusual, and was caused primarily by the Callaghan government not keeping its promises to some of the lowest-paid people in the whole economy. The unions - doing what unions are supposed to do (that is, defend their members rather than act as a glee club for the Labour Party or - as seems to be more than ever the case today with most of them - to be a promoter of 'cheap' loans to its hard-up members) - fought with the means at their disposal. Unfortunately, this led to things like municipal cemetaries not being staffed, which enabled The Sun and the other right-dominated rags to go happily shroud-waving and using emotive language and images in order to forward their proprietors' political and economic agendas.
Of course, none of this would have happened had not Callaghan - in an act of dithering which is impossible to forgive today, knowing what we know - chickened out of calling an election for October 1978, when the worst which was likely to happen was a very small Conservative majority; so small as to preclude the implementation of the wilder lunacies of what in those days was misleadingly called 'monetarism', the quack nostrums of the Chicago School of economists. But dither he did, the winter intervened, Callaghan didn't have the balls to face down the anti-devolutionists in his own ranks, and May 1979 saw the effective end of the Post-War Consensus.
I think it worth pointing out three things here. Firstly, for all the talk since about it being a great upheaval in British politics, it's necessary to recall just how narrow Thatcher's margin of victory actually was. Her majority was 43 seats; this was certainly larger than we had been used to in the preceding years, when Labour had governed with a sequence of overt and covert agreements with the Liberals and Nationalists, but it was hardly the swamping mandate which conventional wisdom claims (it was, for example, less than half the majority of Wilson in 1966).
Secondly, although it was always going to be the case that electing a woman as Prime Minister was going to be a break with tradition, many who voted for the Conservatives in 1979 were nevertheless under the impression that it would still be nothing more than a return to the Tory governments of the previous two or three decades - one-nation Conservatism, a bit like Heath or Macmillan but with a more dynamic tinge. What seemed to have passed most such voters by was the seismic change which had taken place in the party since the last time it had held office. The Conservative Party had always been about business and wealth foremost, but since the end of World War II it had nonetheless - albeit with varying degrees of conviction - gone along with the spirit of 1945 and its wish for a fairer society. Although Thatcher's campaign in 1979 had sought to play on that notion to a large degree (right up to the point of her mumsy-ish quoting of St Francis on the steps of Number 10 on the day of her 'coronation'), the Conservative Party by then was a very different - and more vicious - beast than its earlier incarnation. For it had been taken over by the swivel-eyed acolytes of Friedman and Hayek, calculating machines made flesh who believed that people were only as good as their economic utility and that nothing, but nothing - not social concern, not fairness, not even a sense of propriety or human decency - should be allowed to stand between a thrusting entrepreneur and the full enjoyment of profit. What the Chicago School had hitherto only been able to force upon the populations of military dictatorships in Latin America was now to be applied to a nominal democracy for the first time.
The third, comparatively minor, point, is that - despite having elected her - people didn't really take Margaret Thatcher that seriously. This was partly down to the misapprehensions about her and her party to which I've just referred, but it was largely due to the continuing refusal of the vast majority of men to take women seriously at all when they were trying to gain important positions.
So that was the political and economic hinterland of 1979; but what of the society of that time?
I'm not going to become all misty-eyed about it, because it wasn't even on the way to Utopia. There were still regressive attitudes to be found at all levels, towards women, the disabled, ethnic groups, gays and anyone who was (in some formally undefined, but generally understood, sense) 'different'. The Police were still wont to brutalise anyone (particularly in the aforementioned categories) they knew they could get away with brutalising. The extreme right was on the march, having been able to recruit from the first generation of youth with no direct knowledge of World War II and its aftermath, and there were behind-the-scenes plots from 'respectable' far-rightists to go so far as to seek to overthrow the democratically-elected government.
I know my environment at that time was not 'typical', in that it was not metropolitan or even particularly urban, and I wasn't a member of a vulnerable minority. But I was working class, I did live on a council housing estate, and I did attend a comprehensive school. All I can say is that it was still an environment where you could leave your door unlocked (to do otherwise was considered to be a sign of standoffishness), street violence was all but unknown (unless linked to a football match), public drunkenness was fairly rare, and drug-taking was largely a middle-class activity and confined to cannabis and the odd tab of acid if you were really daring. But then, we had nearly full employment, and changing jobs tended to be done only by those who wished to do so and was comparatively easy to do.
There were bugbears, of course. Sundays were deadly dull days on which not only did nothing happen, but hardly anything was permitted to happen (and this wasn't just in Wales, either), and culturally there was a quite stifling, if well-intentioned, paternalism prevalent. But we had the coming of a new music scene which was stirring things up, and new plays, TV and radio programmes which were opening the doors onto a broader view.
On the whole, though, our society was stable, peaceable and more noticeably equitable. This, of course, did not stop the ideologues of rampant individualism filling the pages of the newspapers and magazines with stories about how we were in deep crisis, how it was all the fault of the debauched, liberal nineteen-sixties, and how we needed to bring back the birch, the rope and National Service to put things right. All this, together with the deliberate mis-portrayal of our economic circumstances, combined to create a feeling of near-panic in sufficient of the populace to convince them that it was necessary to throw over ways of doing things which had served the vast majority of the population pretty well for over thirty years, and replace them with something which was little more than theory and experimentation.
And so it came to pass.
Another thing worth pointing out was that, right up to the early part of 1982, the Thatcher government was seen as being likely to serve only one term. The deliberately-engineered recession caused by what the IMF and World Bank now call 'structural adjustment' in our economy had created runaway unemployment, the social effects of which had become bloodily apparent in Scotland, Wales and the North of England; the 'short, sharp shock' retributive theory of 'Laura Norder' had set the police increasingly against those more marginalised elements in our society who had nothing left to lose but to seek to defend themselves; and the callous indifference of most of the new rulers to the effects of their policies. All of these were combining to create potential grounds for either the people to replace the government, or for the government to replace its leader and some of her more poisonous ideological baggage.
As we know, it didn't happen. Courtesy of a cabal of blundering thugs in Buenos Aires, some dodgy manouevering behind the scenes at the UN and - most of all - a campaign of the most tooth-rotting, jingoistic, flag-waving from the government and its acolytes in the gutter press; this combined with the inept leadership of the main opposition party and the creation of a spoiler party (nominally centrist, but effectively a re-hash of One Nation Toryism), led to the landslide victory of June 1983, a 144-seat majority, and the cementing-up of the entrance of the tomb of the Consensus.
This was when the froth-lipped fundamentalists knew that they could really let rip with all the most extreme and coo-coo of their ideological wet dreams. They perceived themselves as now being invulnerable and invincible, and set out to demonstrate it. Their first recession having been reduced by the necessity to tread warily, the second was more ferocious still, in extent and in depth. I well remember the mother of a dear friend of mine, when I was first introduced to her in about 1980, saying to me that she was all in favour of what Thatcher was trying to do. She and her husband had a business in the construction trade. By the mid-1980s, the business had hit the rocks and they had lost much of what they had worked hard to build up. I won't tell you what her view of Thatcher was by that time. Because, although Thatcher and her followers made much play initially of being on the side of small business and the local entrepreneurial class, this was not what they were about for long. For what Thatcherism really stood for was for the expansion of big business. And so it proved. Executives were parachuted in from large private corporations to run (or, rather, to run down) major national assets such as the coal and steel industries. Other industries, such as telecoms, which were deemed not to be expendable, were split up and sold off, with much yatter about a 'share-owning democracy'. Given that the vast majority of shares continued to be held by other large companies or the banks, this was bollocks on stilts, but the public was still convinced by it - we had entered the Age Of Advertising - The Message Was All.
No-one and nothing was to be allowed to stand in the way. Coal miners trying to save their pits, and hence any hope for the economic future of their families? Denigrate them, smear their leaders, treat them to a reign of paramilitary rule by police bussed in from elsewhere. Other workers trying to organise to defend themselves from a similar fate? Render their unions toothless, sequestrate their assets, use the welfare system to force them into capitulation and allow your friends in business to blacklist the organisers. People trying to live independent lives by travelling the country and not contributing to the profits of corporations? Ban them, herd them into fields, beat them up, yea even the pregnant women, babies and dogs thereof, and smash and burn their vehicles. There Is No Alternative! There Is To Be No Alternative!
And so we were turned into a society at war with itself. Except that, famously, there was 'no such thing as society' anymore. In a mindset reminiscent of that most wibbling of charlatans, Ayn Rand, it was declared almost to the sound of trumpets that only the individual mattered.
It is difficult to convey to people who either weren't there or weren't adversely affected what it felt like to live under such a régime. It really did feel to many of us that we were living under a form of Occupation government. It wasn't just the torrent of propaganda from the expected sources - the government and a press which seemed to have combined into one thundering orifice called the Thatscherische Beobachter - but the underlying assumption in just about every public pronouncement on just about any subject that not only was this The Way It Was but that it was The Way It Must Be. Those who were not 'One Of Us', whether by fortune or inclination, were to be marginalised, whether they be clergymen who pointed out that the policies being followed sat ill with their promoters' claims to be Christians, writers who tried (however half-arsedly) to express the rage and despair felt by the unheard, or those who campaigned for a more humane way of organising our world. All that was needed was to point the snarling mongrels of The Sun at them, to smear them as 'communists' or 'artsy-fartsies' or 'lesbians', and 'normality' could quickly be restored.
There was a bestial, snarling, in-your-face brutalism about the level of public discourse in a time in which someone was judged by their income, where you were nothing unless you had the latest whatever, and where only losers took the (deregulated) bus. For all the snazzy fonts and colourful advertising, there was a void within, a hollow from which all thought - it seemed, all humane considerations - had been evicted, to be filled only by stuff. Acquisitive consumerism was the means to the Perfect Life: if you refused to join in, you were an object of suspicion; if you couldn't join in because you lacked the means to do so if not the will, then tough shit - you were an unperson.
Some of our best institutions were maimed in the name of all this. The BBC was branded as pinkos and traitors by odious lizards like Norman Tebbitt (we'd gone from a government full of Freds a decade before to a government of Normans), its attempts to report accurately on the rotten core of the government and the governing party were met with police raids, court cases or threats to its continued existence. Even ITV, which one would have thought was the Thatcherites' preferred media model (except, of course, that it was regulated, a word which became an insult in the contemporary lexicon) was not to escape; Thames Television's Death On The Rock, which exposed the government's lies regarding the killing of three Irish people in Gibraltar, was one of the motives behind the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which enabled the regulators to remove the company's licence to broadcast a few short years later. Our public health system, public transport, education; all were infected with the voodoo of 'market forces' which meant that 'the bottom line' (a hideous phrase seldom heard before, but parrotted ever since by those who want to make it appear that they know what's what) of profit and loss was considered more important than what those services were actually supposed to be there for. In short, we came to know the price of everything, and the value of very little.
Put briefly, it was a dark, hostile, hateful decade. I remember that in 1987, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper, Channel Four had a programme about the Sixties which contained both filmed reports and round-table debates. At the end, Anthony Wilson (who was hosting the show) went round the table for each member of the panel to sum up what each thought of the Sixties. I only remember two of the participants: one of those obnoxious young Thatcherites who, being seventeen, didn't even remember the Sixties but who, being seventeen, nonetheless had Views on the matter; and the other was the great John Peel, someone who had been there, and had seen events from both sides of the Atlantic. Tory Girl (who's probably running a small hedge-fund somewhere now) went first, and went into the Authorised Version about how awful the Sixties were, how liberal permissiveness had destroyed decency, and about how socialism had ruined society. After her clockwork had wound down, Wilson turned to Peel, who had been listening with ever-increasing agitation to this wretched clone-child's wittering. Peel said something like, "When I hear stuff like that, and when I see what's going on around me today, I only wish I had the courage to become a terrorist, because I think that's all I've got left!". I - an unemployed graduate sitting at home wondering if my next Giro would last the full fortnight - literally stood up and applauded. It was that sort of a time.
But so it went on unabated: the asset-stripping of our country and the handing over of control even of our energy and water supply to merchant adventurers from outside; the running down of more and more of our basic wealth-producing industries (and the communities for which they provided work); the monomaniacal pursuit of the vision of a 'property-owning democracy' (in which only those who owned - or thought that they owned - property counted for anything); the removal of all meaningful regulation on speculation and share-trading; the sheer wilfulness of being unable to see that a form of tax (the so-called 'Community Charge') which forced the poorest to pay the same amount as the richest was about as iniquitous a measure as could possibly be devised ("Of course it's fair!", drawled the noxious Nicholas Ridley, the minister who implemented it, "How can it not be fair when the Duke and the dustman pay the same amount?"); all of this continued all but unrestrained right up to the end of the decade.
Thatcher's defenestration in late 1990 - welcome as it was - was small comfort. It was never going to be the end of an ideology which - as with all theories not grounded in the real world - had hardened into something approaching a set of religious dogmata. Those who had been central to its imposition were still there, and were likely to gain enhanced status now that the Great She was no longer there to cast her shadow of domination over them. Although the face of the policies was slightly humanised by the amiably gormless visage of John Major, we were merely entering a different part of the dark forest. Instead of the rebarbative rent-a-quote MPs of the Eighties - Peter Bruinvels, Anthony Beaumont-Dark, David Evans - we now had their equivalent at ministerial level - Michael Howard, Anne Widdecombe, Peter Lilley. The casual viciousness was much the same, whether it was Howard's removal of the right of silence of arrestees, Widdecombe insisting that a female prisoner was shackled to the hospital bed while giving birth, or Lilley's 'little list' of entire categories of people he wanted to debar from the welfare system.
It was to be another six and a half years before they, too, were gone. But anyone sufficiently deluded to believe that the election of a man who had torn the Labour Party rightwards in the previous three years was going to change anything fundamental about the 'givens' of the way in which things were done should have had the scales fall from their eyes soon enough. The virus of Marketism doesn't kill its host; it merely causes a permanent modification of the host's behaviour so as best to benefit the virus. And so, the marketisation of public services (either by direct sell-off, by the importation of private sector managers and management techniques, or by handing large sums of public money over to private companies to guarantee their profits twenty or thirty years hence) has continued, at an accelerated pace in many instances. Added to this has been a new strain of the disease - managerialism - which has meant that most of the much-vaunted increased spending in the public sector since 1997 has gone not on providing better front-line services, but on employing an ever-larger cadre of management whose sole purpose is to monitor everything right down to the paper-clip level, and to tick the appropriate boxes (or to ensure that others tick them). This is the inevitable result of the setting of 'targets' for overtly political purposes: after all, if you set targets, you have to be able to measure them; and you can't do that unless you fill in all the sheets. And someone has to collate all that information for £35 000+ p.a., don't they?
Overlay all that with a level of social authoritarianism which has long been at the Fabian heart of the Labour Party, and which it now felt safe to impose (feeling that if the public sat quiet for Thatcherism and all that it did, it would sit still for anything), and we find ourselves where we are today.
We are a disordered country, in a way that we weren't thirty years ago. We are now in the second generation of people who have grown up scarcely knowing what a proper job (or any job at all) is, who have never known what it really means to be a functioning part of a successful community. And, as an inevitable consequence, we have more mental illness, more alcohol dependency (and its associated violence), more drug use and more completely wasted lives than we could ever have imagined thirty years ago today, when our land was led, as eager as a Labrador puppy, down the path of a vicious socio-economic experiment which has consumed the lives and the value of millions of us and our neighbours.
And yet there are still many who are willing - as does the appalling Bruce Anderson in today's Independent - to vest Margaret Thatcher with the mantle of Greatness, to say that she was always right (except when she wasn't vicious enough). All I can say is to adapt a famous phrase relating to an earlier decade:
If you remember the Eighties with affection, you weren't really there.
I appear to have been adopted by one of the cats across the road.
She (I think it's a 'she') shows an unnatural interest in my gardening enterprise (possibly because, like the other cats in the neighbourhood, she thinks I'm creating new latrines for her), and rubs up against my gardening gloves, my trowel (dandelions, evicting, for the use of), and anything else she bloody well pleases, to the point where she makes a complete pest of herself.
It's hard to take against her, because she emits a near-constant purring.
So, here's a home-made LOLcat of her in my back yard:
When I was a kid, I had an older friend called Roddy Williams. He it was who introduced me to the supreme madness of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, although much of it went over my head at that time.
Because of the two-school-year gap between us, he went to a different secondary school to me (he was the last of the Grammar School era hereabouts) and we gradually drifted into different social circles. Roddy eventually moved to London in the early 1980s and that was the last contact I had with him, although his mother is a near neighbour of mine.
This afternoon, I got home from work to find an e-mail correcting some information on one of the Gallery pages (this one, in fact). The e-mail was from Roddy's brother Keith, whom I hadn't seen in years either.
One of the most annoying things going around at the moment is that annoying sign which says "Keep Calm And Carry On". There are two main things about it which piss me off: one is the suspicion that the sign's reappearance is the result of some covert campaign by the State and the corporations which own it in order to deflect attention away from its venal, corrupt incompetence; the other is that the whole thing just enables conservative Brits to imagine themselves back where their hearts and souls would most like them to be - World War II, and that whole atmosphere of official, curtain-twitching busybody-dom and fake social solidarity.
So I think it's ripe for subversion. For starters:
I mentioned a few weeks back that Multimap had decided to mess about with their layout, which meant that the map links from The Gallery were no longer coming up with the Ordnance Survey versions of the maps, and they had stuck one of those helpful (not!) information arrows on the maps.
(I hate it when organisations decide to 'improve' their sites with what they think enhance the 'customer experience', but which only ends up being a regal pain in the arse)
Anyway, it was clearly time to look elsewhere. The Ordnance Survey's own site doesn't seem to allow linking in the way I needed it, so that was a non-starter. Luckily, I found Streetmap, which offers what Multimap used to but has the added advantage of having far shorter and less complicated URLs.
So I set to work last Friday. I hadn't quite realised what I'd let myself in for, as I had to get the URLs for the right maps at the right scale and then insert them into about 150 different pages. I was also able to correct some of the map references which were slightly out, and to add something else, namely a set of co-ordinates for each location (and I found out while doing that that are many ways of typing the word 'co-ordinates' - only one of which is correct, of course).
Having taken almost the whole weekend doing this (apart from the time I spent trying to de-dandelion the garden - the weather was too good to waste), I then decided that it would be an idea to try to improve some of the photographs themselves. Some of the old photographs, which I'd taken in the 1980s with a Pocket Instamatic, had faded badly; some of the photographs were a different size to the standard 433x325 pixels which I've tended to use as a compromise between viewability and conservation of bandwidth (yours and mine); and others suffered from the main fault with my trusty BenQ DC C51, namely a terrible contrast problem in less-than-perfect light conditions which manifests itself in greens looking all wrong and browns shading into reds. I also wanted to standardise the copyright note on each one, as I seem to have used two different fonts in two different sizes.
So I fired up Paint Shop Pro and went to it, working from the original files (except for one, which seems to be like Clementine, i.e. lost and gone forever). It has taken me a further couple of days to get that all sorted out, and now both the pages and pictures are ready to go.
One word about the maps. Please ignore the way the arrow is pointing. That's just their thing and doesn't indicate the direction the photograph was taken in: that information is under each photograph.
To go to The Gallery, click on the link in the left sidebar.
I never met Alan Walter, and I wouldn't have shared all of his political positions. But he and the organisation he helped found, Defend Council Housing (DCH), were crucial sources of information for me and many others when the then-Labour-controlled Wrexham County Borough Council were using a barrage of misleading statements, half-truths and outright lies and threats (all paid for out of our taxes) to try to force us council tenants to hand over control of our homes to a private company back in 2003/4.
That we faced down New Labour's monomania and persuaded a clear majority of tenants to tell the privateers to sod off was not only a victory for the tenants ourselves - it marked the beginning of the end of the Labour party's grip on Wrexham Council. They were thrown out of power just a few weeks later and have never returned.
The Philip Pulman piece I reproduced below has now re-appeared in The Times, but with no apparent explanation for its disappearance. I'll keep it here all the same until/unless Mr Pulman or The Times request otherwise.
I just wish some smarty-boots would come up with a program which, whenever something goes screwy on your PC, simply states in plain-man's terms what the hell the problem is.
I referred in my earlier post to my PC running like clockwork (i.e. going cuckoo). I thought the defrag had solved it, but...ah, but back to the beginning, my children...
It started on Friday evening. The mouse cursor started freezing once per second. It's an old mouse (a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical that I bought for my old 98SE rig about seven years ago), so I thought that that was where the problem lay.
Except that when I tried to go into the Mouse applet in Control Panel, it tried to install the mouse software but couldn't find it. Things started getting worse and I noticed that everything was freezing up for a brief moment every second or so. In the end, even Windows Explorer hung on me and I was forced to reboot.
When everything came back up, the freezing wasn't apparent, but I still had the mouse applet problem. So I looked for newer drivers for the mouse, found them and installed them. That seemed to sort it out for the rest of the evening.
Problem solved? Nah. On Saturday, after the machine had been running for about four hours, the momentary freezes came back. I ran Ad-Aware (although I don't think it was a good idea to 'upgrade' to the new 'Anniversary Edition') which produced a list of suspect files which had been on the system for months without being deemed dodgy. I wasted a good half hour or so online reassuring myself that I had nothing worse than a set of false-positive results. I also ran Spybot and a full Avast! virus scan. I also downloaded a new program called MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (MBAM). All these came up clean, so no solution. By this point, the Windows Explorer decided to hang again as I was trying to get to the Defrag, so I rebooted again.
When I logged back in again, I went straight to Defrag and then ran a Disk Scan on it. For whatever reason, after that the thing ran straight as a die for the seven hours before I went to bed.
This morning, it started playing up after little more than half an hour. My vocabulary at this point was not appropriate for a Welsh Sunday. This time I rebooted into Safe Mode with Network Support and went back online (dangerously, because my AV wasn't running) to look for more possible answers.
By this time, the Windows Task Manager was showing a steady ticking back and to between 0% CPU usage and 38%, with the graph looking like a bandsaw blade. I ended up rebooting back into Live Mode, then downloading and installing Process Explorer (formerly made by Sysinternals, but now put out by Microsoft because they gave the Sysinternals guys well-paying jobs in their organisation). This gives more detail than Task Manager, and it was this which gave me my first real clue. There was an entry called Hardware Interrupts which was taking about 18% of the CPU usage once per second. Hardware Interrupts - as I understand it - are where PC hardware says to the processor, "Excuse me squire, but could we have a few of your cycles for a mo', only we're right out?".
So, having established what it was, it was down to why. This didn't prove to be easy, and I browsed for quite a while (I found during this process, quite by coincidence, that Autorun had not been disabled on my optical drives as I thought it had been, although there was a Windows Update the other night which could have changed that).
Following up one possible line of enquiry, I went into Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Device Manager to see if there were any IRQ conflicts. I then clicked on Action > Scan For Hardware Changes (just to see what would happen, to be honest; I had no more idea than the Man In The Moon by this stage). Nothing visible happened, so I came out of it and went browsing for more possibilities.
I'd been doing this for a couple of minutes when I suddenly realised - it had stopped happening! CPU usage was now static and stable. Baffled, I went off to do something else for a few minutes.
Upon my return, I went back into Computer Management and - just for the hell of it - decided to check the Event Viewer. There was an entry with a big red 'X' which, upon opening it, told me that the DVD-ROM drive had disappeared. I went into My Computer and, sure enough, I had drives A, C, D and F to I, but no E, 'E' being the DVD-ROM drive.
Suddenly, things started to fall into place. If this system has had one fault all along, it has been that the cabling into the optical and floppy drives never seems to be completely secured, and I've had to reseat them before. I then recalled that I had knocked the tower case with my foot a couple of evenings ago - not a kick by any means, but contact all the same. So, log off, power off, and cover off the tower. The cables seemed to be secure, but I knew from past experience that that can be deceptive. I did a bit of waggling and shoving, then put the cover back on and powered back up.
That, my dears, was over three hours ago. I've had Process Explorer on the whole time, and Hardware Interrupt has behaved itself just fine - only the occasional leap up to the dizzy heights of 0.78% of CPU usage. All now seems well again. The Hardware Interrupts must have been either from the system trying to find the DVD-ROM drive, or the DVD-ROM drive trying to find out where the hell it had got itself to.
It's nice to have had the training and experience from my former life as a Systems Administrator which enables me to be able to follow a line of thought like this and reach a successful conclusion, but the problem completely put paid to my plans for a productive weekend digitising more of my vinyl.
Technology - don'cha just love it?
**********
Wikifiddling
(I was worried that my PC was going apeshit yesterday - turned out the little darling just needed a defrag. Anyway, to business...and Dydd Gŵyl Dewi dedwydd i chi gyd)
The notable thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it.
One thing this means is that, despite wretched totalitarian Home Secretary Jacqui Smith being exonerated of fiddling her housing expenses in yet another one of those convenient "Government appointee clears government minister" shocks, someone doesn't want to let us forget it:
A timely essay from the novelist Philip Pulman on the ongoing and escalating threats to our basic freedoms.
Which makes me wonder why The Times, where it was published on Friday, pulled the piece from their website within a matter of hours.
Copies of it have been saved to other sites, however, and so I shall do the same. Perhaps I'm subverting a conspiracy of some sort against us by doing so.
**********
Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms
by Philip Pulman
Are such things done on Albion's shore?
The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake's prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.
We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.
We are so fast asleep that we don't know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?
The new laws whisper:
You don't know who you are
You're mistaken about yourself
We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless
We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you
And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised
The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:
Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity
Whatever your opinions are, we don't want to hear them
So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are
And we do not want to hear you arguing about it
So hold your tongue and forget about protesting
What we want from you is acquiescence
The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.
You are not to be trusted with laws
So we shall put ourselves out of your reach
We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition
You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them
You do not need to hold us to account
You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?
Who do you think you are?
What sort of fools do you think we are?
The nation's dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.
And the new laws whisper:
We do not want to hear you talking about truth
Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours
We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on
We do not want to hear you talking about innocence
Innocent means guilty of things not yet done
We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence
You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt
We do not want to hear you talking about justice
Justice is whatever we want to do to you
And nothing else
Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don't mind if we are. They don't think we care about it.
We want to watch you day and night
We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you
We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people
We can see you have abandoned modesty
Some of our friends have seen to that
They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible
In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide
We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural
We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things
One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that::
We know who our friends are
And when our friends want to have words with one of you
We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need
It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law
It is for us to know what your offence is
Angering our friends is an offence
It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.
Inconceivable.
And those laws say:
Sleep, you stinking cowards
Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms
Freedom is too hard for you
We shall decide what freedom is
Sleep, you vermin
Sleep, you scum
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Thanks to Anonymong and the forums at No2ID for the steer (and other ranch animals)
Not relevant to anything at all, really, I just remembered the most surreal headline I think I've ever seen. It was in the staff magazine of our local steelworks (in the days when we had one. A steelworks, I mean). Over a piece about the upgrading of part of the steel-making process, the headline read:
"CONVERSION OF 'D' ARC FURNACE TO ECCENTRIC BOTTOM TAPPING"
Perhaps we should make 'eccentric bottom tapping' an event in the next Olympics.
After my little prod at opera the other day, I remembered something.
I've spent a fair bit of time over the last year or two transferring material from old cassette tapes on to disk in order to preserve it from decay or obsolescence. This is stuff that I'd taped down the years which appealed to me at the time for whatever reason. I've got a similar job in mind for the hours (days? weeks?) worth of open-reel tapes which I haven't been able to play since my trusty old second-hand Stella machine suffered terminal rubber rot about 12 years ago, but I'm having a hell of a job trying to find a machine which will do the job. I've looked time and again on eBay, but have been frustrated by the machines not being of the right technical spec for the job (four-track mono, speeds of 1⅞ and 3¾ inches per second and the ability to take seven-inch spools), or of them being sold by people who proclaim that they think the machine works because "...it worked the last time we switched it on" (which usually turns out to be 1979), or of them being 'buyer collects' from somewhere unfeasibly remote like Pontypridd or Keswick. Back in September I bid for a Stella machine which would have been ideal, but I came up 99p short.
Anyway, back to the story: one of the programmes I had recorded was called All At Sixes And Sevens. It was broadcast just after midnight on 1 January 1977 on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Ned Sherrin, it was a mélange of spoken items by such as Basil Boothroyd, Frederick Raphael and Wynford Vaughan Thomas, alongside musical items from Stephen Sondheim's Company, Hinge & Bracket and - relevantly here - Stephen Oliver.
Stephen Oliver was at that time a promising young composer, mainly of operas but also of music for theatre, radio and television. He was to go on to become a figure of great energy and erudition in the world of opera, before AIDS took him from the world in 1992 shortly after his forty-second birthday (there's a nice article about him in The Independent's archives from a few years ago).
Oliver provided three short pieces for All At Sixes And Sevens, one of which was about the types of 'new opera' being staged at that time; written by composers with an ideological axe to grind and staged by theatres who were desperately trying to make the most of their taxpayer-funded subsidies.
The result was a piece which described something all too familiar to anyone who knew what was going on in theatre at that time, along with a heartfelt final section (written in the waltz time which was Oliver's preferred time signature) bemoaning the loss of the older style of musical theatre.
You can hear it (dubbed, remember, from a recording made on a cheapo radio-cassette recorder over thirty years ago, with all that that implies for quality and steadiness) by clicking this link.
Yes I know, it's a mistake which is as old as the Mound Of Venus, but in the context of the subject matter whoever posted this article on UK Indymedia really should have proof-read it first:
It may come as a surprise for regular viewers, but there some types of music I can't stand. Country And Western is one, if for no better reason than it encourages the setting up in dingy post-industrial towns of line-dancing clubs with names like Cade's County or Magnolias. What is laughingly called R'n'B nowadays is another, full of auto-tuned fame-whores who would never have stood a chance in the world of real R'n'B.
But I reserve the most withering of my uneducated, groundling scorn for opera. If ever there was a form of art which lent itself to ridicule, this is the one. It's not simply the music, although it's true to say that the performers would have to be far better actors than they are if they did not have the noise to fall back on. I tend towards Thomas Beecham's dictum that,
"The trouble with singers is that they always want to be heard above the music."
To which he added,
"I make damn sure they're not!"
But leaving aside the damnability of unfeasibly large women singing at a pitch which only a basset hound could ever love, the whole idea of opera as spectacle is utterly ludicrous. Don't listen to the siren voices (and most operatic voices remind me of sirens - air-raid warnings, mostly) telling you about opera's noble descent from commedia dell'arte and about how it is the pinnacle of the fusion of the musical and dramatic arts; opera is bizarre and extreme beyond explanation. What other form could - like the infamous production of Aïda at Luxor some years ago - come closer than any other to turning supposedly artistic endeavours into natural catastrophes?
(The little demon who squats just behind my eyes insists at this point that I admit that the only performance of Parsifal I ever saw - a television screening of the Bayreuth centenary production about twenty years ago - was so affecting that I blubbed through most of the final act. To which I defend myself by saying that Parsifalisn't an opera, it's "A Festival Play For The Consecration Of The Stage". That must be true - Wagner himself said so, so there!)
The 'cause' of opera is also vicious. It is the 'art form' which, more than any other (with the possible exception of ballet, which one Labour councillor in Swansea once dismissed as being, "...just a leg show for the nobs" - which is better than vice versa, I suppose) is espoused by inveterate snobs. It is the musical equivalent of what The Times and Who's Who used to be in the days when everyone (i.e. everyone who mattered) knew how one addressed a duchess. For every doomed attempt to make opera 'relevant' to the masses - which usually involves the absurdity of singing Mozart in English, that most unmusical of languages - such efforts are dwarfed by the preponderance of carefully-maintained exclusivity.
So far, so common. But take a closer look by selecting that drop-down menu. Usually, the choices consist solely of the standard Mr, Mrs, Miss and Ms.. Not in these exalted circles though, m'dear. These are the options presented to you by the ROH:
It goes on:
And on, to include such worthies as Group Captains, HRH Sultan Shahs, Profs Emeritus and (somewhat incongruously to my mind) Rabbis.
It's so nice to know that the opera is truly for everyone, and that no-one should ever feel excluded from it - even if they're a Wing Commander.
(A big tip of the wig to the delightfully forthright Mr Eugenides for drawing the world's attention to the Royal Opera House's wonderful outreach project.)
A wonderful correction from The Guardian's website:
"In our entry on Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to a Prairie Ho Companion; we meant a Prairie Home Companion. This has been corrected."
For those of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies, during what we can now see to be The Golden Age Of Children's Television, Tony Hart was a central figure.
Although he had worked in television for over a decade by the time it started, it was Vision On in 1964 which made him truly famous. The programme was a strange and wonderful beast: created for deaf children (its predecessor was actually called For Deaf Children - nothing mealy-mouthed in those days, although it is rumoured that a planned sister-series called Cripple's Hour was pulled from the schedules at the last minute), it concentrated on interesting visuals.
In this, Hart was the master. In whatever medium he chose to work - crayons, chalks, charcoal, paint, a stick or a line-painting machine - he could produce before your very eyes images which appeared as if out of nowhere. In this he was somewhat like Rolf Harris, but whereas Harris was hyperactive to the point of mania, Tony Hart was calm, quietly-spoken and avuncular. But far from boring for all that.
That style would never find favour today, I'm afraid. Not because da kidz are too stupid, or too hypered up on blue Smarties or whatever, but simply because those running our television services into the ground are too doped up on focus groups and their own pseud selves to be able to admit that it would still work. Besides which, you're not allowed to do kids' telly now if you're over forty (which is why The Chuckle Brothers are so creepy).
Even for those of us with no discernable talent in that direction, his work could draw admiration and astonishment. I don't think any of us who watched him in those days came away empty handed - however inept we may have been ourselves - even if it was only in an enhanced ability to see the shapes and patterns in the world around us.
Many of that generation (and of the succeeding one who came across Tony Hart's work in his own series which followed after Vision On and which - amongst other things - gave Aardman Animations their own big break) have gone on record as saying that it was watching him which made them into artists, too. All I can say is that I wish I'd had an art teacher like that.
Sadly, two strokes in recent years had left Hart unable even to draw - a frustration which he faced with characteristic good grace. But, for those of us who watched, he had done enough for us down the years. Thank you, Tony.
Update: A simple, yet deeply moving, image created by ms morbo on the Beta board:
(PS. I hope this isn't going to be another one of Those Years, Not out of January yet, and two obituaries on this page. Sheesh!)
My 78s conversion project is now all but over and, as promised, I'll share some of the discoveries with you now.
First a few words about the process itself. Having transferred the discs to my PC through the Audacity software, I found that the results weren't as good as I'd hoped, even with the lowered expectations which came from knowing in how bad a condition many of these old platters were. So, I installed my old copy of Magix Audio Cleaning Lab and put them through that as well.
The results were mixed: some of the tracks came up quite nicely, but other were clearly beyond help and were only included simply for - as it were - historical purposes. There's always a dilemma when doing things like this: if you don't do anything to the original tracks, the hisses, pops and general sound quality (or lack of it) will render them all but unlistenable. However, if you go the other way and try to process every last click out of them, then you end up with something which just sounds artificial (what I call the 'metal box' effect) or which is so full of artifacts produced by the cleaning process that it makes for a very poor listening experience. So a balance must be struck, one which recognises the limits of the technology and which maintains a degree of authenticity in recordings which are between fifty and a hundred years old.
Anyway, on with the selection. Click on the pictures to play the tracks:
First off, here's the oldest item in the bunch. It's by George Formby Senior. Not the one with the ukelele and the face like a distressed halibut, but his dad, who was a noted music hall performer in his time. This track dates from about 1910, and is an indication of what passed for comic material on record a century ago:
Moving on about twenty years, Leslie Sarony was one of the most prolific writers of comic songs in the twentieth century. Here's one he recorded for the budget Eclipse label in about 1931. The lyrics even refer back to an early song of his, Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors, which I also have in the collection but not in good enough condition to share with you:
Another Eclipse artist was Roy Leslie. I've been able to find out nothing else about him other than the fact that he even recorded covers of Leslie Sarony's songs for the label they were both working on. Here's a jolly number from about 1932:
There were a number of other comedy items in the bunch, but few could be said to be amusing now. One which is still quite funny is this next waxing, by the comedian Norman Evans. His most famous creation was that of a toothless woman gossiping over the garden fence to her neighbours (you can see a clip of him/her in action here), which struck a chord with me because when I were a lad in the 60s and early 70s, there were still women like this about around our way who would behave in exactly this fashion. Our sample here, though, is of his character Joe Ramsbottom (and his wife Mary, and the salesman), who has decided to buy a piano:
Eclipse Records - despite being set up simply to sell in Woolworth's - also had some quite big names recording for them, such as Donald Peers (although this was very early in his career). Peers, a native of Betws in the Amman Valley, went on to great success in the 40s and 50s. Here he is in about 1934, accompanied by a ukelele which is flat (but not quite flat enough, if you see what I mean):
(You can see from the state of some of these labels that using gold print on a red background was not a good idea - it tended to rub off pretty easily)
A lot of the discs were dance-band numbers from the period 1925 - 1950. There were about five in there by Roy Fox and His Band. Fox, an American, had great success in Britain in the 1930s. Here's his band (with trumpeter Nat Gonella on vocals) in 1931 (as John Peel used to say, "...Fades in..."):
Another star of the dance-band years was Charlie Kunz. Another American who settled in Britain, Kunz initially worked with dance bands until moving on to concentrate on solo piano work from 1934. Here he features with his band in a very jaunty little number from about 1929:
Finally, I move on to one of the least old of the 78s I have. Embassy Records was a successor to Eclipse, in that they were made to sell cheaply in Woolworth's, but they concentrated almost entirely on cover versions of what was in the charts at the time, producing tracks which weren't really very much like the originals, but people weren't as hung up on that sort of thing in those days. They did manage to get some good performances, however, as they were able to call on singers and musicians who had performed in or with the dance bands but whose careers had suffered with the coming of rock'n'roll.
One such was Paul Rich, who had sung and played guitar with Harry Leader and Lou Preager before leaving music to run a business. From 1957, however, he began a run of over sixty recordings for Embassy. This was one of the first of them, a cover of a Johnnie Ray hit. Some of his enunciation is, shall we say, over-precise for the song and the times, but it's a good song with a good arrangement by Ken Jones:
And there we have it - a few snippets from recording history. I hope you've enjoyed the little tour, but now it's time to put the records back in the spare room and burn the files to DVD for the archive.
(Dedicated to Bill Everatt and all at Celtica Radio)
I can't imagine that The Independent (sic) intended this the way it reads:
"An initially peaceful demonstration ended with a group of protesters facing mounted riot police throwing missiles and smashing windows on Kensington High Street near the Israeli Embassy."
Ee, those Met coppers, are they little tinkers or what?
(The original piece - from a Press Association hack - is currently here (in the Arts & Entertainment section for some reason - perhaps because it's a work of fiction?). It'll be interesting to see what happens to it)
Oh, and while we're on the subject, the exchange rate seems to have gone bonkers. That is, the ratio between the number of people the Met claim to be on a demonstration and the number of people who actually took part (see here (point 3) for some background). The Met say that there were 12 000 on today's protest. Eye-witnesses have said that there were no less than 80 000 and it was possibly higher still. So the current going rate appears to be at least 7 Reals to the Plod. The various friends of Zionist slaughter are holding a couple of Rallies For Israel tomorrow; it'll be interesting to see how many attend and how many the police claim attend.
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich have often been overlooked as one of the great bands of the late sixties. It may be that their name (based on their nicknames) doesn't help their crit-cred. But those who take the care to look further will be rewarded by a catalogue of remarkable recordings released over a period of about five years.
True, nearly all their hits were written by their managers Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, but when they were as consistently good as they were and when they covered such a variety of styles - the leering suggestiveness of Bend It, the exoticism of Zabadak!, the psych-pop and intriguing back-story of Last Night In Soho (was it really about a rent boy? The lyrics suggest so) - combined with fine production and arrangements, that doesn't matter. Add to that the fact that they had a wild live style - honed in the clubs of Hamburg and Köln amongst other places - and they were always bound to be a cut above.
The Legend Of Xanadu was probably the pinnacle of their achievements, and if you click on the picture of Dave Dee above you'll be taken to a clip of them performing it on Top Of The Pops (although I think it only fair to warn you that the clip contains dangerous concentrations of unexploded Jimmy Savile!). That song, that arrangement, that drama, that whip (although the 'whip' sound was made by means of a pedal steel guitar, a metal bar, two wooden blocks and some technical trickery)!
The band's own compositions were confined to 'B'-sides and the four albums they released, but they often show even more adventure than the hits. The Sun Goes Down (the 'B'-side of Zabadak!) is the story of a man about to be executed, and is pure psych. Click on the image below to hear an excerpt:
Those who know their sixties music have long recognised the significance of the former policeman and his mates. Thank you, Dave.
There was something missing from my New Year this time around.
For the first time in I can't remember how long, the chimes of my hall clock were absent from that most significant of all midnights.
The clock is quite an unprepossessing thing - just a set of works in an old Co-operative Wholesale case, with a bit missing from the glass at the front - but it's one of the nearest things I have to an heirloom, having been in the family for about forty years. It was the old man's pride and joy, and always had pride of place on the mantelpiece. Here it is, for example, photographed as it saw in 1977:
The thing stopped working just before Christmas, and resisted all my attempts to get it to go again. It would start, but after a few seconds the pendulum would judder to a halt. I fiddled about and squirted some WD40 in it, but to no effect.
Luckily I'm quite methodical about these things, and thought through the various possibilities as to the cause of the problem. Given where the vibrations were coming from which were causing the stoppages, I reckoned that it was the escapement which was causing the problem. So I unscrewed the pendulum mount. This, however, had the effect of startling me because removing the pendulum mount also removed the anchor (that's the rocking-back-and-to thing which controls the escapement gear - do let me know if I'm getting too technical), and the bloody thing started whirring out of control and made the hands of the clock face whizz around like a clichéd cinematic effect.
Having been thus discombobulated, I quickly put everything back together again and reviewed the situation. On Friday afternoon, I came back to the matter and removed the pendulum mount and anchor again. There were no alarums and excursions this time, simply because the spring had run right down.
Examining the anchor, I could see that it was held on its pivot by a tiny screw, but that this screw only held the anchor by means of friction. I also then noticed that the anchor was tilted off to the right of level by about seven degrees of arc. This meant that the right-hand tooth of the anchor was going so far down into the gear that it couldn't come far enough back up from the pendulum's motion to enable the cog to move on. I loosened the screw, moved the anchor back to as near to level as I could get it, tightened the screw back up, re-fitted the whole kaboodle and wound the mainspring up again.
It worked! I left it to run on the living-room table for about an hour before restoring it to its customary position on the sideboard in the hall...
...where - apart from having the pendulum weight adjusted because it was running slow - it has gone like a bird ever since.
I am now, of course, strutting around the place like I was John Harrison. But it's so good to hear those chimes again.
The 78 conversion programme is nearly complete, and I can't help sharing another little gem with you.
In the late 1920s, it became the fashion for American college men to wear raccoon coats. Songwriters just had to pick up on it, of course, and here's George Olsen And His Music with this offering from 1928. Click on the image to download the song.
And here are the lyrics:
"College men, knowledge men,
Do a dance called raccoon;
It's the craze, nowadays,
And it will get you soon.
"Buy a coat and try it,
I'll bet you'll be a riot,
It's a wow, learn to do it right now!
"High brow, low brow, intermediate,
Make believe they're all collegiate, soon,
To do the raccoon!
"Raccoon coats don't care who's wearing 'em,
Hallroom boys will all be sharing 'em soon,
To do the raccoon!
"Every day its popularity grows,
It's the most important item in clothes.
"Ten bucks down, and though it scratches you,
Wear it 'til the sheriff catches you, soon,
To do the raccoon!
"Oh, they wear 'em down at Princeton,
And they share 'em up at Yale,
They eat in them at Harvard,
But they sleep in them in jail!"
"They store 'em at Ohio,
They're hawked at Notre Dame,
They carry 'em at California,
But they wear out just the same!
"At Penn, they're made of rabbit,
At Vassar, sex appeal,
At Nebraska, made of airedale,
In Chicago lined with steel!
"From every college campus comes the cheer: oy-yoy!
The season for the raccoon coat is here, my boy!
"Rough guys, tough guys, men of dignity,
Join the raccoon coat fraternity, soon,
To do the raccoon.
"Rich men, poor men, all have pride in them,
No one knows who walks inside of them, soon,
To do the raccoon.
"Every day you'll have your downs and your ups, high-ho,
Every day those raccoon coats will have pups, I know!
"Get a girl and start to hurry her
Right downtown to some big furrier, soon,
You'll do the raccoon!
Not A Blog Archive 2009
