So much for the Golden Age

Someone wrote to me yesterday from Canada asking if I'd mind taking a picture of his Mum's old school in Kennington for a book he's putting together for her 80th

He'd identified me via the web as someone who

• lives in/ near Kennington
• takes pictures

Apparently his mum went to an agricultural college in Kennington Village in the late 1930's

Village?!

Agricultual College?!

Kennington?!

Anyway, I did a few web searches and found the following extract from someone’s memoirs on-line

When my father was alive we lived in a big house in Kennington Lane, where he taught young men agriculture and chemistry. My father had a big meadow and garden, and had a sort of small farm there. Fancy a farm in Kennington!

Indeed

To cut a long story short I found out that there was an agricultural college in Kennington and that it was run by E Nesbit's father. She was born there. As in the E Nesbit who wrote The Railway Children and all those other children’s books depicting England's Golden Edwardian Age that never really existed, even before it was destroyed by the First World War. I read a fair few when I was growing up as a nipper just down the road.

But for the life of me I couldn’t picture any building on Kennington Lane that looked like it could have been an agricultural college

Still, any quest that results in images of a young Jenny Agutter popping up in my web browser is definitely worth pursuing

Last night we popped down there in a combined kebab purchasing/ local history exploration operation.

The address given as E Nesbit’s birthplace is now a row of derelict/ run down shops in an area just South of the Elephant and Castle notorious for its crack dens.

The only patch of once open space that could have been the college's grounds is now obliterated by the Cotton Field Estate - as nasty a collection of tower blocks as you're ever likely to see. It’s scary

So the question I am asking myself is

- Black and White or Colour?

- Film or Digital?

Alternatively, I could just lie and send the Old Dear a photograph of some twee school gates taken in Richmond…

Decisions Decisions

The Da Vinci Commode

This next post was going to be a continuation of the previous one but I noticed something last night that was both eerie and chilling that has interrupted my blogging schedule

I’ve posted a couple of times before about how much the success of The Da Vinci Code ticks me off. And that sense of irritation is being compounded by the all-pervasive hype that is being generated in advance of the release of the film of the book.

The success of The Da Vinci Code irritates me because

• The writing style is appalling. Dan Brown clearly graduated from the ‘The tap dripped in a drippety drip kind of way’ school of novelism.
• Finishing each chapter a page early and slapping the missing page at the start of the next chapter seems to be all you need to do these days for your book to qualify as a ‘page-turner’
• Such a spectacular triumph of hype over substance is truly depressing
• In spite of the verdict of the recent bizarre court case in which two authors from the same publishing house battled over plagiary charges, the Da Vinci Code is a rip off

And then we get onto the strange thing. One of the authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, a man calling himself ‘Richard Leigh’, was on the box last night talking about The Da Vinci Code, and all I could think was

‘Why is Lemmy pretending to be someone else?’

Richard Leigh

Lemmy

Restless Natives pt1

Over the weekend a British helicopter was downed in Iraq. Several people died, British and Iraqi, and riots broke out on the streets of Basra.

Now call me old-fashioned but after three years of supposedly benevolent occupation; with cheery, helmet-less British soldiers handing out Mars bars and Manchester United T Shirts, the sight of hundreds of people holding an impromptu street party celebrating one of your helicopters getting shot down does not look like a good sign.

Foolishly maybe, I don’t believe for a minute that our ordinary soldiers are making a balls-up of their responsibilities. If there’s one thing our army is practised at, it’s strolling around foreign countries, outnumbered a thousand to one, and keeping the peace. With the exception one or two unfortunate hiccups the British managed to keep a billion Indians under their thumb for a couple of centuries with something like fifty thousand troops. It’s all about exuding the confidence of someone with cojones the size of watermelons and not pissing the locals off so much that they realise they could totally obliterate you over the course of one not particularly busy morning.

Like I said, the British are traditionally good at that sort of thing.

So what’s going wrong for our Army in Southern Iraq?

Well, our news organisations certainly aren’t explaining to us.

At this point I’d normally launch into a rant about how controlled our media is, how it is owned by a handful of people, how it has got lazy and simply repeats PR bulletins yah di yah di yah dah.

However, I was fortunate to catch a painfully honest account of the impossibility of covering the situation in Iraq, presented by Channel 4’s Jon Snow, a couple of nights ago. Jon Snow seems like a decent, honest man who believes in what he does. To cut a long story short he basically admitted that no news worthy of the name is getting out of Iraq because the environment is physically lethal for journalists.

Which, in itself, says something about what’s going on there.

So, I’ll modify my standard rant about all journalists being whores to ‘all journalists are whores except for John Snow and a couple of his mates’.

Anyway, why are the Iraqis so pissed off with us?

Well, if you trawl around the alternative media and non-Western news organisations, it seems that at least some Iraqis believe that we are fucking their country up deliberately.

Even on Jon Snow’s program it was significant that the Iraqis interviewed chose to use very loose terms to describe the perpetrators of the atrocities happening in Iraq. Terms that could equally apply to coalition forces as other Iraqis.

Some Iraqis believe that it is the deliberate intention of the US, UK and, yes, Israeli governments to split Iraq into three parts and set those parts against each other for the foreseeable future.

After Hamas' victory in the recent Palestinian election, it is clear that the last thing ‘We’ really want is democracy in the Middle East unless it is the kind of democracy that delivers the kind of results ‘We’d’ like to see. A united, democratic Iraq is not on the table. It is not worth the risk to ‘Our’ interests.

We, in the West, are the terrorists

Actually, it doesn’t matter if any of this is true or not, the point is that significant number of Iraqis believe it to be so

And they’re pissy.

Latest and greatest daft link roundup

My occasional selection of links I can’t be bothered to email to people

There’s some choice material this time around...

Best Sean Connery impression/ voice-over ever?

Bozeta German Shepherd Dogs – don’t miss the ‘Contact Us’ section

The Lego ‘Brick Testament’

A fantastic achievement. There’s so much quality material it’s impossible to really single any part of it out. However, the Crucifixion scenes surpass anything Mel Gibson has done and the depiction of the End of the World was especially scary

Badger! Badger! Badger!

An oldie admittedly but I had cause to revisit it today and it still has the power to inspire – but not if the sound is turned off

Tom Cruise is Nuts

There are two reasons to be pissed off with Tom Cruise right now - all the hype surrounding Mission Impossible III and the suspicion that he was involved is getting an episode of Southpark pulled from UK TV because it made fun of his ‘fruity little’ Scientology Club.

As the makers of Southpark said ‘So, Scientology, you may have won this battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will not stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail!’

As well as being nuts Tom also dances like a twat.

He does, however, have incredible, superhuman powers

My Travelling Face

An interesting experiment in blogging that features pictures of its author’s face instead of the interesting places the author has visited. I’m guessing wildly here but I reckon he started doing that because he doesn’t get out much. Fine work.

If I perceive it's becoming a demonstration I'll come and let you know. How about that

I opened up the Internet today and saw the headline

Prescott urges Labour to avoid "war" – Reuters

And, for the briefest of moments, I thought that the IncredibleCocktailSausageMan had suffered from some kind of mental seizure and had spoken out against the war on Iraq.

Silly me.

One person who is still speaking out against the Iraq War is Brian Haw, though it’s looking increasingly likely that he’s going to have to stop doing it opposite the Houses of Parliament. Three appeal court judges decided that he and his peace camp represent a significant security threat to our beloved MPs and that he has to move on.

This will be a real shame. Partly because the right to protest in public is an important right but also because Haw and his camp have proven to be a magnet for all sorts of amusing though sadly futile activity.

Mind you, I keep saying how futile all these right to speech demonstrations have been but they have obviously pissed Blair and Co off enough for them to draft legislation banning them.

The latest amusingly futile stunt took place on May 1st when ten demonstrators turned up with a blank protest placard and trotted around Westminster pursued by sundry police and surveillance people, Benny Hill style. A short video is available here and includes a few choice lines including…

"If I perceive it's becoming a demonstration, I'll come and let you know." How about that?"

Priceless

-

The suggestion that Haw is to be moved on because his camp represents some kind of security risk is a transparent lie. It is a nice example, if one were needed, that citing security concerns as a justification anything that our leaders wish to undertake is the name of the game from now on.

Pretty much any activity can be depicted as a potential cover for terrorist activity.

That’s why our government has such a hard-on for terrorism.

And the truth isthat no level of security can prevent terrorism, particularly if the terrorist is willing to exchange their life for their target’s life. The Nazis couldn’t stop terrorism in their time and the Israelis can’t now. Trading liberty for security is a fool’s bargain and anyone offering to make such a trade is either wicked or stupid, or both.

-

For not entirely unrelated reasons I have recently been enjoying reading up on the latest advances in Remotely Piloted Vehicle (RPV) technology. I have been particularly impressed by the New Zealand hobbyist who designed a DIY, GPS-controlled, ramjet powered cruise missile that cost only $5,000 and then he put his draft plans on the Internet. I also like the look of the Yamaha RMAX G1.

Short of imposing a 24 hour curfew in central London, jamming all radio frequencies and shrouding the House of Parliament in a huge wire mesh bubble it’s not entirely clear to me what the security services could do to stop one of those babies

/ Reverts to Dr Strangelove mode

Well, sir, if the pilot's a really good man, I mean really sharp, why he can barrel that plane along so low - well you just have to see it some time ... zig-zagging in, its jet exhaust frying chickens in the barnyard ... Has he a chance? ..... Hell, yes! He has one hell of a chance!

If I were a character in Southpark...

I've just found a web-based drawing package that can give you some idea of what you would look like if you were a character in Southpark

Southpark Studio v2

Oh dear...

Flip Flop Squirrel

Fodey.com

Dave the Chameleon

Whilst on the subject of the folks at Backing Blair, praises be upon them, I was tooling around their site and came across their version of the Dave the Chameleon video...

Dave the Chameleon

I prefer their version a lot more than the original.

I’d be the last person the sing the praises of New Conservative leader ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron but Labour’s Dave the Chameleon negative campaigning project is a particularly woeful enterprise.

They’ve set him up his own web page with a blog and everything...

Dave the Chameleon’s Blog

Even if you didn’t know New Labour was behind Dave’s blog you could tell straight away by the absence of a comment option.

The fact that it is excrutiatingly unfunny and a significant distance up its on arse is also a major ‘tell’

Anyway, I’ll have to leave my Dave the Chameleon blog comment here instead

‘Dear Dave (and Friends). Great blog. This is your best ever stunt since you started pretending to be ordinary members of the public and wrote all those letters to newspapers, phoned radio chat shows and posted blog comments saying how great the New Labour government was. For your next trick why don’t you just crawl back into your hole and FUCKING DIE!!! you slimy deceitful humourless douche bag. Big kisses, love Stef’

There, I feel better now.

Presumably, Dave the Embarrassingly Unfunny Chameleon and his blog will be allowed to just die quietly one day when no one is looking and the New Labour spin team can back to what they’re good at, telling straight lies

New Labour sucks donkey dick

OK, so the Uk local elections turned out pretty badly for New Labour and now, for the umpteenth bleeding time, the airwaves and newspapers are just bursting with endless chatter about when Blair should or shouldn’t step down and let someone else become Prime Minister.

What no-one, and I mean no-one, outside of the Internet is suggesting is that it really doesn’t matter which particular figurehead is in charge.

They are all the fucking same.

Yup, your average London taxi driver has a more incisive take on what’s going on than any journalist or political commentator.

Exactly the same thing is taking place in America with George Bush

The notion that the removal of Bush, or Blair, will act as some kind of panacea for all that’s been fucked up in our societies is being actively pushed by the supposedly Left Wing/ Liberal press and politicians. Those bitches are pushing this crap because they are owned by the same people and playing the same game.

We live in a world where we are increasingly jerked-off with false choices.

And ordinary people are dumb enough to swallow it.

Time and time again I’ve encountered expressions of a justification process that goes something along the lines of

‘The grassroot supporters of New Labour and the majority of its politicians are decent people and once Blair and his clique are removed everything will be just hunky dory’

Bullshit. I know we’re just a stone’s throw from seeing Thought Crime on our statute books but, for the moment, people are still best judged by their actions and, more to the point, omission of action.

New Labour sucks donkey dong. Big time. As, undoubtedly, does the newly spun Conservative Party.

The superstars at BackingBlair, all praises be upon them, put it better than me though, and to music too.

Don’t Vote Labour

The World According to Leo Blair

My mate Marmite

As has been pointed out a couple of times by way of comment in this blog, I am frequently cyncial about the effectiveness of (misguided) direct action against the woes of this world.

A recent Flickr group discussion about the significance of Marmite to the British way of life reminded me of a time when I was not so jaded. I'd like to share that memory to demonstrate my socially active credentials...

I took part in a Marmite eating boycott 25 years ago in response to the manufacturer, Beechams, having extensive business interests in the apartheid regime in South Africa.

This was a heavy burden for your average tree hugging social progressive to shoulder as Marmite was the preferred breakfast spread of vegetarian anti-apartheid campaigners across the UK.

But it was worth it and I like to believe that by switching to marmalade I helped free Nelson Mandela

I'd like to believe a lot of things