Britblog Roundup 234: The one that breaks the rules

Look, it's perfectly simple. You are meant to nominate postings from British blogs. That can mean written in Britain or by Britons abroad or about Britain. But there has to be something British about them.

Instead, what do I get? A posting from December of last year, that's what. But it is from the Jersey-based blog Voice for Children and touches upon the failures of institutional childcare on the island. As the national press lost interest when no skeletons of orphans were produced, it had better go in.

Someone suggests I include an aggregator for tweets. But if you are into politics and Twitter then you will enjoy House of Twits, so that goes in too.

Then Agoraphilia tells us What I Learned at the FBI. Hmm. British? Well, the blog bill itself as The Center for Blurbs in the Public Interest, so no.

And nor is Reason Online and its piece on the artist's duty to dissent - even from Obama.

Then there was someone who just sent me the URL for his blog. We need individual postings please.

And I have an unwritten rule that if someone nominates more than one posting from his or her own blog I choose only one of them.

Oh look! It has just become a written rule.

So with thanks to all the people who nominated postings from British blogs of the past week, let's go on a tour.

A tour of Britain

We begin in Copenhagen where the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates is admiring an ingenious machine for slicing cheese.

Relax. The post is on The London Review of Breakfasts. And it is an ingenious machine - I have already inquired about the British patent for it.

Then it is on to Preston where, says River's Edge, school and college leavers face a hard time finding jobs.

The economy is doing no better in Kirkcaldy. Doctor Vee says:

there are thirty empty units in the High Street. There is a particularly dire section in the middle of the pedestrianised zone, where three shops in a row — which used to be the Link, Adams and Icon Clothing — now lie empty.

This is given added piquancy by the fact that the town is, of course, in the constituency of the prime minister. It has never recovered from the collapse of the moral compass industry.

Closer to home - in fact very close, because the author of the blog appears to live in the same road as me - Go Litel Blog, Go... has visited Corby:

For those who don’t know, Corby used to be a small village in Northamptonshire, until – in the thirties – a large steelworks was established there and there followed an influx of – mainly Scottish – workers that transformed it into a fairly substantial industrial town. In the fifties it became a New Town and there was more immigration, again mainly from Scotland.
In the late seventies/early eighties the steelworks shut down and the town almost went down with it. Recently it’s been subject to sustained attempts at regeneration : adverts on the tube in London encourage people to move there – as (apparently) does Stephen Fry, in some capacity.

When you have read the whole posting you may conclude that Mr Fry probably does not visit Corby very often.

Maybe Clerkenwell is more his style? Bridget's Blog has a photograph of Kodak's former headquarters there.

Still in London, a new magazine has been launched in Hackney says My London, Your London.

And still in Hackney, Matt Sellwood is not impressed with the Labour MP Diane Abbott. But then as he is the Green candidate for her constituency, maybe he wouldn't be?

Keep your johnson at home, gentlemen

Otherwise you may be shot, like Bussy D'Ambois (see Early Modern Whale), or have it set alight, like a British tourist in Greece (see The Daily (Maybe)).

That was a public health announcement.

Children

See sign above.

More children

Scroobious Scrivenings has the diary of a learner mum:

Day 15
Superdaddy has been back at work two days and baby has turned into demon. What happened? Don’t you remember how to sleep? It’s easy, look, I’ll show you… OH WAIT I CAN’T YOU WON’T LET ME.

And The F Word looks at the horror of child beauty pageants, which sadly are no longer confined to America.

Political Correctness Gone Mad

Blogging MP Lynne Featherstone offers an illuminating account of the ructions at the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the organisation's shortcomings in general.

And paramedic Random Acts of Reality suggests that he and his colleagues are popular with the public precisely because they do not buy into the current mania for consulting and empowering patients:

We turn up and make the chaos into calm, the fear into peace and the uncertain become certain. We tell people what to do, we tell them what we are going to do and we can often explain what the hospital is going to do. People surrender into our loving embrace and feel better because we are there to help and the other people present can abrogate responsibility to us.

Meanwhile, Andrew Reeves wants David Cameron to sack his East Midlands MEP Roger Helmer for claiming that homophobia is "merely a propaganda device designed to denigrate and stigmatise those holding conventional opinions".

The environment
Nick Barlow of What You Can Get Away With has been to Colchester's plastic recycling plant. I don't mean it's made of plastic... You get the point.

And Suz Blog has been to visit a new house with lots of environment-friendly features.

A guest post by Andy Nimmo on A Place to Stand looks at plans to buy a stairway to heaven - or at least a space elevator.

And Pigeon Blog asks if Banksy is a pigeon.

Some of those, on reflection, are more environmental than others. But still:

Far away on an ice floe,
A grateful polar bear
Waves her paw.

Next week

The next Britblog Roundup will be in the capable hands of Suz Blog. Nominations, as ever, to britblog [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

And please remember the rules, guys.