The Nelson's Column of the North

This is the Collingwood Monument at Tynemouth, which looks out across the Tyne estuary to the sea.

The statue of Cuthbert Collingwood, who took command of the British fleet after Nelson's death at Trafalgar and completed the victory, is some 23ft high and stands on a massive plinth. Four canon from Collingwood's ship in the battle, The Royal Sovereign, can also be found there.

An inscription on the monument reads:

THIS MONUMENT

was erected in 1845 by Public Subscription to the memory of

ADMIRAL LORD COLLINGWOOD

who in the Royal Sovereign on the 21st October 1805, led the British Fleet

into action at Trafalgar and sustained the Sea Fight for upwards of an hour

before the other ships were within gun shot, which caused Nelson to exclaim

“SEE HOW THAT NOBLE FELLOW COLLINGWOOD TAKES HIS SHIP INTO ACTION"

He was born at Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1748 and died in the Service

of his country, on board of the”VILLE-DE-PARIS” on 7th March 1810

AND WAS BURIED IN ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL.

THE FOUR GUNS UPON THIS MONUMENT BELONGED TO HIS SHIP THE

“ROYAL SOVEREIGN”

Word of the Day: Proalition

The Pass Notes column in tomorrow's Guardian:

Do say: Proalition – often. If you say it enough, perhaps it won't sound quite so weird. 

Don't say: "Noalition, more like!"

Queen: Seven Seas of Rhye

Success can be bad for some bands - in particular the need to have music that sounds good when played in stadiums. Even REM suffered from that after Automatic for the People.

This was certainly true of Queen. When they first appeared they looked as they came from the heavy metal scene (at least to this innocent 14-year-old), but they had a wit and a musicality that made them stand out from the glam dross around them. For me, that period lasted up to and including the massive success of "Bohemian Rhapsody".

After that, I liked them far less. There was a bombast about them and it was expertly skewered by the Slovenian band Laibach when they turned "One Vision" into a totalitarian anthem - "Geburt Einer Nation" - with worrying ease.

"Seven Seas of Rhye" is the first Queen track I ever heard. It was played on a Friday evening programme on Radio 1 that reviewed the week's new releases - was it "Rosko's Round Table"? The general view was that it was a good single, but that their first release ("Keep Yourself Alive") had been better.

And thanks to Sound Destruction Device for telling me that it had already appeared on Queen's first LP as an instrumental track.

Home from Tynemouth

Our house is confined to the top of a high rock and is surrounded by sea on every side but one. Here is the approach to the monastery through a gate cut out of the rock so narrow that a cart can hardly pass through. Day and night the waves break and roar and undermine the cliff. Thick sea frets roll in wrapping everything in gloom. Dim eyes, hoarse voices, sore throats are the consequences... 

Shipwrecks are frequent. It is a great pity to see the numbed crew, whom no power on earth can save, whose vessel, mast swaying and timbers parted, rushes upon the rock or reef. No ringdove or nightingale is here, only grey birds which nest in rocks and greedily prey upon the drowned, whose screaming cry is a token of a coming storm.

I have spent the past few days in Tynemouth with the Dowager Lady Bonkers and can reveal that the 14th-century monk who wrote the above was exaggerating. The truth is that it is an attractive and interesting place - I shall share some photographs with you over the next few days.

The one above shows the gatehouse of the Priory, where the monk had been exiled from St Albans.

Six of the Best 268

Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist anti-Putin punk rock band, issued a new single on Friday as three of its members were sentenced to two years in jail for “hooliganism.” The song, entitled Putin Lights the Fires, was released by The Guardian. You can listen to the new song, along with a video montage of the band on Mashable.

A View from Ham Common worries about the front page of the agenda for the Liberal Democrat Conference.

"The best thing Michael Gove could do is to return this sort of decision to local communities, sack his advisers and abolish the School Playing Fields Advisory Panel. But I suspect he'll be dragged out to make some half hearted apology and take on even more power to 'make sure it doesn't happen again'." Living on Words Alone on the row over the sale of school playing fields.

Waging Nonviolence on Chicago's housing liberation movement.

"Kay Kendall - like Judy Holliday and Madeline Kahn - was a comic actress who lit up the screen and left us way too soon," says Bobby Rivers TV.

Wolfie Wolfgang mourns the passing of the Dandy.

Harborough Mail to be edited from Kettering

Hold the Front Page has details of a Johnston Press internal memorandum proposing to axe three editors in a restructure its titles in the Midlands.

The titles affected by the move are the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, Northants Telegraph, Daventry Express, Harborough Mail, Leamington Courier and the Rugby Advertiser.

We are told that the memo says:

Following changes to the portfolio across Northamptonshire Newspapers, the company has carried out a strategic review of editorial management and production processes. As a result of this review, it is proposed to combine the editorial management responsibility of three newspaper centres. 

It is proposed that the Group editor in Northampton will also take on the responsibility for the Daventry Express; the editor’s role at Kettering will also take responsibility for the Market Harborough Mail and the role of editor of the Leamington Spa Courier would take responsibility for the newspapers in Rugby.

Times are hard in the local newspapers, but this sounds to me the move of an industry locked in a downward spiral. Why would people in Market Harborough be more likely to buy the Mail if a good editor is sacked and it is run by someone based in another town?

Later. I have heard from the Harborough Mail. They say that the paper will continue to be edited from Market Harborough by Alex Blackwell, with an editor-in-chief having an overview from Kettering. If that is how things pan out I shall feel more hopeful.

Lord Bonkers at the 1999 Harrogate Lib Dem Conference

This is what the old monster wrote at the time.

Monday

A dreadful storm this evening. The sky is the colour of Messrs Postlethwaite's Blue Black India Ink (with which, as it happens, I am writing these very words), and it is only because of the distant beam of Knaresborough lighthouse that I am able to find my way back to the hotel.

Later, after a stiffener of Auld Johnston, I walk by the shore - the locals have long since barred their shutters and bolted their doors - and watch as the Harrogate lifeboat is launched. There is a crash of thunder and a cry of "God save any soul on The Stray tonight" goes up.

Then, as if by a miracle, a familiar figure in sou'wester and oilskins rows into sight. It is, of course, my old friend David Rendel, the finest oar in the House. Better still, he has with him two picnickers who were cut off by the tide.

"You look just like Grace Darling," I call across to him.

"Nonsense," he shouts back, "Grace had a bushy black beard. And don't call me 'darling'."

Tuesday

Today we have the bittersweet occasion of Paddy Ashcan's farewell. Say what you will about the man - and I have said more than most in my time - he knows how to please an audience. After saying some jolly nice things about us (well deserved, I think), he finishes with an old Irish folk-song which he learned at the knee of his grandmother, Bridey O'Ashplant:

May the road rise to meet you,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others,
Before others do for you.
We'll keep a welcome in the hillside,
We'll keep a welcome in the vales.
How are things in Glocca Morra?
It's much nicer there than Wales.
The pale moon was rising above the green mountains,
The sun was declining beneath the blue sea.
Despite what was said in the Dublin newspapers
'Twas there I first met my sweet Mother Machree.

I am not ashamed to say I blubbed.

Creation, The Alan Price Set and Roger Daltrey

These three videos have appeared on this blog before with a few explanatory notes (Creation, The Alan Price Set and Roger Daltrey), but I think they bear repetition.

A parable from Roger Scruton (and my primary school head)

I originally wrote about this story in March 2009:

He also told with great feeling an apocryphal story concerning the composition of Leonardo's Last Supper, which, in this version of event, the artist composed over many decades, constantly searching the streets and alleyways of Milan for the ideal types upon whom to model the twelve apostles, and having begun with the beautiful and innocent face of a young man whose expression seemed to capture all the grace, dignity and tender compassion of Jesus. 

After years of labour the apostles had all been assembled, representing in their carefully differentiated expressions the fine gradations of hope, resolution, weakness and despair.
Only one remained and that was Judas, whose baseness no citizen of Milan seemed to wear on his face, and to whom Leonardo began to despair of giving the absolute lifelikeness that was vital to his conception. 

At last, in a mean alleyway, a dark figure, engaged in some whispered transaction, caught the painter's eye. Recognising in those fear-filled, treacherous glances the lineaments of Judas, Leonardo enticed him to the cenaculo with a gift of silver. 

The figure, shifty, suspicious and huddled into himself, is pushed into a corner and told to sit. Looking up at last, and recognising the painter and the tools of his trade, he says, "You have painted me before." 

"Have I?" asks the startled painter. "When?" 

"Oh, a long time ago." 

"And for what purpose?" 

Judas turns to the nearly completed fresco that is taking shape above them. 

"There I am, he says, and points to Christ.

If only I could see a picture of Enoch Powell on a pogo stick

You can!

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

Enjoy it here.

House Points: Keeping up with the cojones

This column appeared in Liberal Democrat News on 21 May 2004. I don't get all the references any more, but at least I wrote it with a certain biro brio.


Keeping up with the cojones

Tony Blair likes people to think he is a pretty mean hombre. Hat pulled down, eyes screwed up against the desert sun. Think Charles Bronson in the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West.

So he must have been delighted when George W. Bush told Alastair Campbell that “Your man has got cojones.”

Oddly, in a later interview reported in Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack, Bush said: “Of course, these Brits don’t know what cojones are.”

Of course we know what they are, even if we do wonder first whether C.O. Jones used to keep wicket for Glamorgan. And in any case, Bush probably thinks the trouble with the Spanish is that they have no word for cojones.

This macho Blair wants to be seen as standing shoulder to shoulder with the President. Trouble is, more and more people are finding that a less dignified position comes to mind when thinking about their relationship.

So we have to find another way of picturing them. One possibility is to see Blair as Bush’s resourceful boy assistant. Every superhero needs one: Batman had his Robin; Sexton Blake his Tinker. And when Hollywood got twitchy because Tarzan and Jane were not married, Johnny Weissmuller found himself, on moral grounds, sharing the jungle with a pretty little boy in a loincloth.

But George W. Bush is no Tarzan. He is no superhero at all, unless it is Can’t Manage Whole Sentences Man. That would make Blair The Incoherent Kid. We had better think again.

The Beano suggests a more promising approach. “Young Tony Blair was the envy of all his chums, for he had his very own pet chimpanzee called Dubya.”

Think of all the scrapes they would get into together. Reporting asylum seekers to the authorities. Attending one of Charles Clarke’s summer homework camps. Invading Iraq. (“Crikey, Dubya! We’ve gone too far this time.”)

At this point in the comic the vicar and village bobby would step in to set things to rights. (“And no more monkey business from you, young Tony!”)

In the real world, unfortunately, it is unlikely that anyone will be laughing in the last frame of this story.

Remember when Tony Blair was a Womble

From a Calder's Comfort Farm, the column I used to write for the New Statesman website, published on 24 June 2008.

A couple of summers ago the excitement over Cash for Honours was at its height. There was even speculation that Lord Levy’s troubles might see the end of Tony Blair.

What would we have made in 1973, I wonder, of the thought that the arrest of Alvin Stardust’s manager might one day bring down the government?

But in those days the link between politics and pop music was closer than most voters realised. One of the most popular bands of the era was The Wombles, who always appeared on stage in large furry costumes.

The advantage of this was that anyone could be a Womble, and a shifting cast of session musicians used to share the gigs between them. But, thanks to the good offices of Michael Levy, on occasion a Womble costume would be worn by a hungry young Labour politico.

Levy’s recent memoirs are disappointingly sketchy on the subject, but it is known that Jack Straw, Patricia Hewitt and Dr John Reid all appeared as Wombles at one time or another.

Fascinatingly, a young lawyer named Anthony Blair would also pull on a costume when the briefs were slow coming in.

Alastair Campbell has ruthlessly expunged this episode from the Blair CV -- I feel a little nervous telling you about it even now -- but was he right to do so?

The Roman Emperors used to keep a slave to whisper “remember thou art mortal” when they got above themselves. Tony Blair would have done well to have an aide close at hand to say “remember you’re a Womble” now and then.

And if he was being particularly messianic, that aide could have added: “Re-member-member-member what a Womble Womble Womble you are.”

Polly Toynbee vs Charles Masterman

I wrote this back in September 2009 as In dejection near Polly Toynbee.

Polly Toynbee had a column in the Guardian yesterday extolling Labour's bright new generation and the party's achievements in Lambeth:

all around us are good Labour legacies of money well spent: the new school sports hall, the new primary school on Brixton Hill, nine new children's centres, health clinics, squads of neighbourhood police, and a spectacular sixth-form college next door to my home.

I was struck by her celebration of buildings rather than the life that goes on in them. The sixth-form college may be "spectacular", but does it provide its students with a good education?

And It has always seemed to me that one of Toynbee's weaknesses is that her writing fails to convey any sense that she is aware of the pleasures of family life. It is children's centres, children's centres, children's centres all the way.

More than this, I was strongly reminded of another piece of writing about South London. I knew it was by my hero Charles Masterman, but did not know where I had read it. Thanks to the wonders of the net, I was able to find what it was and share it with you.

It comes from the essay "In dejection near Tooting", which was collected in Masterman's 1905 book In Peril of Change. In it he describes that suburb as follows:

On every high hill towered a monstrous building of that particular blend of austerity and dignity dear to the municipal mind. Each was planned of vast spreading dimension, with innumerable blank windows, surrounded by high polished walls.
Down below in the valley, conveniently adjacent to the cemetery, was the immense fever hospital, a huddle of buildings of corrugated iron. In front was a gigantic workhouse; behind, a gigantic lunatic asylum; to the right, a gigantic barrack school; to the left, a gigantic prison.

And that, I think, is one of the differences between a liberal like Masterman, who celebrates life, and a social democrat like Toynbee, who celebrates institutions.

Conservatives are not conservatives and it's all Reg Varney's fault

I shall be away from this blog for a few days, but have scheduled some good things to appear in my absence. Most of them are by me, so let's begin by paying tribute to someone else.

Stumbling and Mumbling is a blog written by Rutland's own Chris Dillow, whose book The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism is well worth seeking out too.

I remember two of his posts in particular.

In Conservatives for Revolution from October 2008 he argued, surely correctly, that a reverence for English traditions is more common on the Left than amongst the Conservative Party - " you’ll struggle to find a Conservative voter at a meeting of CAMRA or at a Martin Carthy gig."

And he goes on to point out how little the policies of the modern Conservative Party have to do with conservatism:

The conservative prefers the tried and trusted to the new; he prefers to back the field than any particular horse. 

But bosses reject all this. Their claim to power - in business or in government - is a claim to an especial expertise. And the Conservative party, at least in my lifetime, has been the party of bosses.

The conservative temperament gave us mutual building societies, with their local roots and long traditions. The Conservative party gave us the demutualized societies, which blew up spectacularly.

This is impressive, but if I had to vote for a favourite post on this blog it would be Reg Varney's Role in Economic History from the following month:

His portrayal of Stan Butler did much to perpetuate the image of the 1970s worker as a bone-idle work-dodger; we forget today just how enormously popular On the Buses was. And this in turn might subconsciously have contributed to the popularity of Thatcherism. How many of those who, when asked by Tories in 1979 whether the working class had become too big for its boots, conjured up a picture of Stan Butler and so voted for Thatcher? 

There’s more ... Reg Varney was the first man in the world to use a cash point machine.

And by doing so he brought in two undesirable features of the modern British economy: inflation and rising levels of personal debt.

No wonder Blakey hated him.

Headline of the Day

From the Guardian:

Labradors lead crackdown on Italy's cash smugglers

Ennio Morricone: Once Upon a Time in the West

Once Upon a Time in the West regularly tops polls as the best Spaghetti Western or even the best Western of all. The film was directed by Sergio Leone and its wonderful score was written by Ennio Morricone - remarkably, they were in the same class as schoolboys.

As Notes of a Film Fanatic explains:

In an unusual but inspired move Leone had Morricone write the score before filming began, and then had the music played on the set, which not only allowed Leone to synchronize camera movements and modulate editing rhythms with the tempo of the music, but also inspired the actors to shape their performances around the rhythms of the score. The result is an unrivalled marriage of music and image.

The footage that accompanies the music in the video above does contain spoilers, but you really should have seen this film by now.

If you haven't, then snap up this two-disc special collector's edition for only £4.69.

Digging up Greyfriars, Leicester

In Leicester today, I went to Greyfriars to see if there was any sign of the dig to find Richard III's bones. Sure enough, the road was up and there was a mechanical digger on site,

Sadly, this had nothing to do with archaeology. Still, the Leicester District Energy Scheme is admirable in its way.

More on the current dig in Leicester here.

Six of the Best 267

Mark Thompson writes on the disqualification of candidates from November's police and crime commissioner elections because of youthful misdemeanours: "I find it intensely depressing that such illiberal laws can be passed through our parliament without any real understanding of how ridiculous the consequences of said laws will actually be in practice from those who are supposed to be legislative experts."

"The best way forward is for schools, government et al. to encourage children to join sports clubs and groups to learn their sports properly. If the government wants to increase young sport, it should channel the funds to those groups, who should be given time to run more taster sessions at schools to obtain interest." Rob's View (from the sidelines) thinks David Cameron has got it wrong on school sport.

"Why do people (frequently economists) not understand that continuous growth of the economy (measured by either real GDP or resource throughput) could in theory, and probably has in fact, become uneconomic?" asks Herman Daly on the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy site. He also suggests eight answers to his own question.

The Atlantic Cities looks at ways of making city biking less scary.

Some photographs taken in the Eastry chalk mine can be found on Underground Kent.

allertonOak takes us for a walk among the industrial relics of North Liverpool.

More school sport: A solution in search of a problem

Photo: Jusben from MorgueFile

The enormous success of the London Olympics has led our politicians into trying to outbid one another in their enthusiasm for physical education in schools. Boris Johnson, with his demand for two hours of sport a day, is currently in the lead.

Quite what all this sport is intended to achieve is not clear. Is it mean to make children happier or fitter or better behaved or more community minded?

Back in 2006, when school sport was being promoted as the answer to the obesity crisis, I wrote this:

Children were not thinner 20 or 40 years ago because of school sport. Organised games dominated the lives of boys in public schools and, to a lesser extent, grammar schools - even if many of them spent their time shivering on the wing and hoping the ball did not come near them. But for most children school sport was not that important. 

Children were thinner because they burnt energy in free play out of doors. What politicians should do is look at the forces which militate against their doing so today. Among them I would list the dominance of the motor car, the removal of authority figures from public space, the panic over child abduction and a culture that has left adults afraid to exert any sort of authority over children. 

The car can be tamed by home zones, with their planting and very low speed limits. We might begin to repopulate the public world by campaigning for a new generation of Routemasters with conductors in the next London Mayoral election. The panic over stranger danger is harder to tackle, but as a first step politicians could avoid stoking public anxiety. 

And adult authority? Perhaps children's freedom to play in the street was always balanced by an adult's right to tell them to play somewhere else if they became to irritating. The collapse of this sort of authority has not resulted in an age of freedom for children: instead they see their lives ever more closely policed by the state and its agents.

I did write a longer piece on this theme for Graham Watson's collection Liberalism - Something to Shout About. I must post it here one day - David Boyle once called it "brilliant" (hem, hem). At least I anticipated Boris Johnson's new Routemasters.

As to the current arms race amongst our politicians, I am sure there are children who would thrive on two hours of two hours of sport (just as some would love Stephen Twigg's schools run by the military) and the state system should be able to provide it for them. If they have the passion and drive that makes Olympic champions, the problem may be getting them to do anything else.

But for most children, an increase in school sport looks like a solution in search of a problem.