The Digital Camera Diet continues

Back in September I boasted that I had lost a stone since getting my digital camera a few months before.

It has been harder going since then, but my weight loss is now up to a stone and a half.

Sadly, it is not enough to take photographs: you have to eat less too.

Night and the City

This was a film I had been wanted to see for a long time because it is always described as an authentic noir shot in London in 1950. And it did not disappoint.

Richard Widmark plays Harry Fabian, a small-time hustler who overreaches himself by trying to become a wrestling promoter. It is a vivid performance and Fabian's character is discussed in Paul Arthur's essay on the film:

Harry, famously referred to by a romantic rival as “an artist without an art,” is a figure of palpable instability, always in the midst of a surefire shady venture, some criminalized shortcut to what he describes as “a life of ease and plenty.”

Unfortunately, every jittery step he takes brings him closer to immanent disaster and death (in addition to morbid visual cues, variants of the phrase “You’re a dead man” are a key dialogue motif). Worse still, his precipitous actions drag down everyone around him—although, with the exception of his mistreated girlfriend, Mary Bristol, these underworld characters largely deserve their malign fates.

It is also fascinating to see British stalwarts of the era such as Herbert Lom, Googie Withers and Francis L. Sullivan acting in this essentially American film and looking thoroughly at home there.

Night and the City is also notable for its use of London locations, including a long-vanished shot tower by Waterloo Bridge.

Six of the Best 5

Let's have another go at getting the format for this right. How about numbered bullet points, but with a line space between them? It takes a bit of fiddling, but dear old Blogger can do it.

1. Nick Clegg has been launching the party's new Vibrant Local High Street policy in the Kilburn High Road with Ed Fordham, says the Hampstead & Kilburn Lib Dems site.


2. Mark Reckons reports from the doorstep in his by-election campaigns in Bracknell.


3. Disgruntled Radical argues that the current row over funding care for the elderly shows what is wrong with the British political system - and the BBC.


4. Meanwhile, Under a Watling Street Tree bemoans the current malaise of local government in Britain and looks to the Victorians for inspiration.


5. In line with a recent preoccupation of this blog, Liberal Burblings has turned up another London film. This one is John and Julie from 1955.


6. And Unman-Wittering Blog celebrates the genius of Shire Publications: "With virtually every book still in print and available direct from the publisher, often in their original covers, Shire are an unheralded and unsung British institution that you need to seriously look into."

I think that's the format for this feature sorted.

Later. Except that the line spaces don't show when you publish the post.

Mystery photo

A discovery from the early days of this blog, when it had few readers.

Who are these two? Answer here.

House Points: Prime minister's questions

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News. You may recognise it as a distillation of an earlier effort at live blogging PMQs.

Brown conversion

Useless. However much you fiddle with it, it just doesn’t work. It might as well not be there at all.

Not this government, but my central heating last week. Which is why I found myself at home last Wednesday, waiting for the repair man to call. At least it gave me the chance to watch prime minister’s questions on televison.

David Cameron was sharp. He referred to evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry that morning and landed a blow on Brown’s sudden enthusiasm for the Alternative Vote by quoting Paddy Ashdown’s diaries. In discussions on electoral reform Tony Blair would say time after time: “yeh Paddy, I agree, but I can’t get it past Gordon.”

But it was noticeable that Cameron avoided questions on the economy, where his own party has recently been confused. And there remains something of Flashman about him. For all his studied reasonableness, you sense there is a fag quaking outside a study door somewhere, awaiting an altercation over a burnt piece of toast.

Nick Clegg gave a confident performance, asking why Trident – a Cold War system “designed to flatten Moscow at the touch of a button” – has not been included in the defence review. It was also noticeable how respectful the prime minister was to him. It’s wonderful what the prospect of a hung parliament will do.

Lembit Opik’s question on unemployment in Montgomeryshire was also treated with respect: John Hemming’s on the No. 41 bus in Birmingham perhaps less so.

As to Gordon Brown, last Wednesday revealed a weakness of his world view. Repeatedly, when pressed on a failure of his government, he replied that it was spending more on that area than ever before.

Of course the Conservatives, given to promising both better public services and lower taxes, have to be challenged. But if record defence spending coincides with poorly equipped British troops in Afghanistan then something more fundamental is wrong. And it is no answer to the charge that health spending is skewed towards Labour-held constituencies to boast about that spending’s overall level.

It turned out that my central heating needs a new motorised valve and could do with a new filter and a power flush. Gordon Brown’s thinking could do with a power flush too.

Congratulations to Martin Brookes

This blog has occasionally crossed the path of Martin Brookes from Oakham over important matters like the town's station cat.

Martin tells me will be elected as a town councillor for Oakham North West next week as he is the only candidate nominated to fill a vacancy.

Congratulations!

Jenny Tonge "sacked as health spokesperson"

Writing on the Jewish Chronicle website, Martin Bright reports:

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has sacked controversial peer Jenny Tonge as the party’s health spokesperson in the Lords over her demands for an investigation into allegations of body parts harvesting by the Israeli Defence force in Haiti.

Her remarks followed an article making the accusations in the online journal Palestine Telegraph, of which Baroness Tonge is a patron.

I cannot find the article on the Palestine Telegraph website, but I presume it relates to this clip on Youtube. Surely the corneas have been sent to Haiti, not harvested there?

Bright also says that Jenny's comments "prompted outrage from fellow Liberal Democrats who put immediate pressure on Mr Clegg to act against Baroness Tonge". Unfortunately, he does not say who these Liberal Democrats were or offer any evidence of this outrage.

Six of the Best 4

Let's see how we get on without bullet points this time.

***

The People's Republic of Mortimer looks at the real reason for young people's political apathy. Alix concludes, rightly I think, that politicians campaign relentlessly on public services and that healthy, childless young people have little contact with them.

The issues those politicians should concentrate on instead if they want to engage with them, it seems, are money, renting and drinking.

I am also reminded of a ward in leafy outer Kingston that was so affluent that a casework survey found the biggest issue was damage caused to cars by squirrels dropping their nuts. Not everyone is obsesses with public services.

***

The issue of the day has been the Tobin or Robin Hood tax. Writing from Addis Ababa, where he is working on development projects, Owen Abroad expresses his doubts about the idea.

***

It is a pleasure to able to agree with Conservative Home when it says "The Telegraph's Con Coughlin is a disgrace."

***

Stumbling and Mumbling is against blogging awards - or at least against judging them by asking people to submit a few examples of fine writing. I am with him. Surely the overall mood of a blog and the quality of its links are important too?

***

Boston.Eye catches the BBC pretending that a Plymouth monument is in Lincolnshire because it made a nice picture.

***

And the Richard Jefferies Society blog reports that the Jefferies Museum at Coate, Swindon, "will be re-opening its doors to the public on Wednesday 10 February after a five-month closure during which time Swindon Borough Council has carried out structural repairs to the old house".

***

Please feel free to suggest links to me for this feature. And thank you to the reader who did so this time.

The London Nobody Knows

This is an extraordinary film from 1967.

It is written by Geoffrey Fletcher, who (as Electric Sheep explains) was an illustrator and columnist for the Daily Telegraph in the 1960s who "documented the sights, sounds and scenes of a London fast vanishing beneath the grey concrete tide of redevelopment". He published several illustrated collections of these columns and I have a copy of the book that shares a title with and inspires this film.

James Mason narrates it, wearing the sort of dapper cloth cap I have taken to affecting myself. He takes in the street markets (rightly treated as survivals of Victorian London rather than an outbreak of the Swinging Sixties), the extraordinary ruined Bedford Theatre in Camden, a Yiddish Theatre that has become a bingo hall and Salvation Army hostels.

He visits Shoreditch, knocks at the door of a decrepit house and goes through to its yard to show us where one of the Ripper's victims was found. Mason says there are people still living in the area who remember the murders, and you believe him.

The London Nobody Knows shows the city at an important juncture. Victorian slums stand next to new tower blocks (which are welcomed in a commentary that avoids easy nostalgia). You can even see the sixties contending with an older world in the clothes of the children playing in the streets.

As Electric Sheep says, Fletcher anticipated the psychogeography of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd by decades. And an imagined scene at an egg-breaking plant looks forward to Jonathan Meades.

The London Nobody Knows shares the DVD with Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, a bit of sixties whimsy shot in village Hampstead. At least it has a good theme song.

Finally, a scene from a time when there were no more than a dozen buskers left in London...

Heresy Corner has a dungeon beneath it

One of my favourite blogs is Heresy Corner. I know that because it quotes me as saying so in its testimonials.

What I had not realised is that its writers has a second blog, Heresiarch's Dungeon. It is described as:

This blog is intended for longer treatments of various subjects, for supplementary materials, and also for items which, for various reasons, aren't suitable for Heresy Corner.

Or, for short, it is "where bad ideas are tortured to death."

The Condover Mammoth

The controversy over who discovered the mammoth skeleton at Condover in 1986 may have been settled, reports the Shropshire Star:

Andy Edwards, of Baschurch, says that the real finder was an unidentified contractor who kept his mouth shut for fear of getting into trouble

A trade union rep writes: Is there a clause in your contract that bars you from discovering prehistoric remains at work? It's worth checking.

A memory of the Leicester South by-election

This empty shop in London Road was the headquarters of the successful Liberal Democrat by-election campaign in Leicester South in 2004.

Six of the Best 3

I said this new feature might appear twice a week. So far it is every two days:

1. NW6: the blog interviews Ed Fordham, Lib Dem PPC for Hampstead and Kilburn.
2. Andrew Reeves reports the defection to the Lib Dems of a senior SNP councillor in Glasgow.
3. At And another thing... Labour MP Tom Harris reports how election night was saved - probably.
4. Alexis Rowell, The Eco Councillor, has good news from Islington: 30 new allotments.
5. Dr Huw looks at an Australian attempt to curb anonymous blogging.
6. And, across the road, Go Litel Blog, Go... pays tribute to Ian Carmichael.

Spring is coming earlier: Should we worry?

There was a piece in the Guardian today on a study suggesting that spring is coming earlier these days:

The results showed that more than 80% of trends between 1976 and 2005 indicated earlier seasonal events. On average, the study showed the seasonal timing of reproduction and population growth shifted forward by eleven days over the period, and that the change has accelerated recently.

The article goes on to quote various campaigners and academics as suggesting that this finding is quite possibly a sign of man-made global warming and certainly a serious cause for concern.

But I wonder.

How much does a study lasting 30 years tell us about what it is normal over the period that life has existed on this planet?

There is a view implicit in much popular discussion of man-made global warming that until very recently the planet's climate was stable and benign. Only recently, it maintains, has that climate changed to threaten man. I think this view is mistaken and is another manifestation of our tendency to see whatever was around in our youth as natural and right.

Surely the truth is that our climate has always been changing? (This does not preclude the possibility that some of the recent change is the cause of man-made pollution of the atmosphere.)

Further, species have always been adapting more or less successfully to that change. It is odd in a society where Darwin is now the most honoured intellectual figure (far more than, say, Freud or Marx) that we regard the possibility of species struggling to stay in existence as such an aberration from the natural order of things.

None of this offers any reason why we should not try to conserve species that are under threat. But I suspect that spring coming 11 days earlier after 30 years is the natural order of things, not a cause for deep concern.

The political education of Chris Bryant

The 18 January issue of The House Magazine has an interview with Chris Bryant, the Europe minister. That interview, which does not appear to be online, touches on education in a couple of places.

In the first of them Bryant passes lightly over his own schooling:

We lived in Cardiff until I was seven, when we moved to Spain. I was sent to boarding school in Scotland, and then to Cheltenham.

That is Cheltenham College, the leading public school (current boarding fees £9,270 per term).

Later Bryant writes:

After my ordination I worked as a curate in High Wycombe. The grammar school there was almost entirely white, and the secondary modern was almost entirely black. I didn't understand this education system that determined success and failure by the age of 11.

An education system that divides children by income at the age of 7, however, seems less worthy of comment or condemnation.

I doubt that there were many Black children at a Scottish prep school in the sixties or at Cheltenham after that, but this state of affairs does not seem to have radicalised the young Bryant or to be thought worthy of comment now.

And don't think I am being unfair to Bryant: you can bet the terminally respectful House Magazine gave him the chance to approve the interview before it was published.

His view are typical of the modern Labour Party in that he sees selection by ability as anathema but is unable to summon any indignation at selection by income. It's an odd position for a party of the left.

Joanne Cash found alive!

Last night Joanne Cash resigned as Tory PPC for Westminster North resigned.

This evening she has tweeted saying:

I did resign. Assoc did not accept. CCHQ has resolved specific issue so I am not leaving. It's official DC has changed the party!!!!!!!!

Tory Bear has more, but no one using that many exclamation marks should be allowed into the Commons.

Tory PPC for Westminster North resigns

Conservative Home reports:

Ms [Joanne] Cash resigned at a special meeting of the Association tonight - also attended by Eric Pickles and Lord Strathclyde - following internal tensions in the local party.

Why don't the Tories come clean on Lord Ashcroft's tax status?

Sir George Young has always seemed one of the more decent Conservatives. I felt sorry for him when Michael Martin was hoisted into the Speaker's chair ahead of him because of unthinking backbench determination that a Labour House should have a Labour Speaker.

But his performance on the Today programme this morning, where he twisted and turned every way to avoid giving a straight answer on Lord Ashcroft's tax status, was embarrassing. It will be hard to regard him in the same light after that.

The Guardian website has a transcript of this interview, together with excerpts from several others in which senior Tories have been similarly evasive on the subject.

If he is paying tax, they would surely say so. But these clumsy attempts to avoid the question are only making journalists more intrigued. So if an admission that Lord Ashcroft is not paying UK tax does eventually come, the Conservatives have ensured that it will receive maximum publicity.

I am genuinely puzzled by their approach.

Tomorrow at Ten at last

I have seen Tomorrow at Ten, the film at which a kidnapped small boy is locked in a room with an exploding golliwog. It is certainly not a lost gem, though there are a few things of interest about it.

Because the child is menaced in this way, the kidnapper is free to talk openly to his father and even to the police. He holds all the cards until... But that would give the plot away.

There are a couple of interesting points in the casting. The villain is effectively played by Robert Shaw, 11 years before he starred in Jaws. And his father is played in a sharp cameo by William Hartnell.

Not so long before, Hartnell had been playing far more substantial roles, but by 1964 his career was in decline. He did not see playing the lead in a new children's serial called Dr Who was as much of a consolation.

Hartnell and his wife own The Golliwog Club. And there is some significance to the toy chosen to house the bomb.

One final question. Is the Piers Bishop who played the boy the same Piers Bishop who became a television announcer, the Piers Bishop who is a psychotherapist involved with Mindfields College, both or neither?

Six of the Best 2

A second outing for this new feature:

1. Harry's Place suggests that we may never hear about another aspect of the MPs' expenses scandal: the payments they made to their staff. (It seems some Lib Dems would be in the frame here)
2. The suspension of Gita Sahgal, the head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International, over an article in the Sunday Times is covered by Bartholomew's Notes on Religion. Personally, I have never felt as warm towards Amnesty since it watered down its emphasis on political prisoners and became a generic human rights organisation.
3. Dare to Know discusses how home schoolers should set about amending the current children, schools and families bill. It reports hearing an increasing number of home educating families being "remorselessly bullied" by local authorities in anticipation of having new powers.
4. Fellow admirers of the children's writer Malcolm Saville will be interested in a collection of papers by Stephen Bigger linked to on his 1930 to 1960 blog. I think I published one or two of these when I was editing the Saville Society newsletter some years ago.
5. Liberal Bureaucracy proves I am not the only Lib Dem blogger with a thing about old railway stations.
6. And the ever-fascinating Unmitigated England visits Borough Market.

Please feel free to suggest links for this feature.