RosieBell

Fundraising Gig, Sunday 1 December, Bannermans, Edinburgh

Fundraiser for Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty  and Autonomous Centre for Edinburgh.

 

 Full Moon Club style DIY punk ethic music night. Expect everything from seasoned professionals to brand new talent. With a bit of experimentation thrown in.

6pm til midnight.

Back room: The Bucky Rage, Sad Society, The z28s, Babylon Dub Punks, Desperation A.M., FRAKtured Fingers, Ugly Baby, The Phlegm.

Front room: Rodney Relax and NUSS, Tommy MacKay, Liz Cronin, Freeloadin'Frank, Etrange, and Kirsty Kennedy.

£5 before 9pm, including veggie haggis, neeps and tatties. Food finishes at 9pm, £3 door.

Bannerman's Bar
212 Cowgate, Edinburgh, EH11NQ

I'm playing at this gig. My band, FRAKtured Fingers, is on at 7:30.

 

Cycling forecast

Cycling may be good for our health and personal finances, but chancellor George Osborne and his road-lobby pals would rather we stay in cars, while they build more roads and collect our motoring expenditure. So the government has decided the current growth in cycling is just a passing fad.

Transport minister Robert Goodwill told MPs that the government's official traffic forecasts assume that cycling in England will carry on growing for just a little longer, reaching 3.4bn miles in total in 2015, but will then drop to 3bn miles by 2025 and stagnate until 2040 (the end of the forecast period). England's population is expected to increase, so David Cameron's government is telling us - and crucially the officials who'll decide where transport cash is invested - that the distance travelled by bike will fall by 22 percent per preson on average from 2015 to 2040.

What a withering indictment of the "cycling revolution" launched just three months ago by, er, David Cameron, who said: "This government wants to make it easier and safer for people who already cycle - as well as encouraging far more people to take it up."

Private Eye No 1353, p9

World War I

As the Team's Head-Brass

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Edward Thomas

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

Edward Thomas

Cycling philistinism

It's a tragedy. Oscar Wilde, having just written his finest work, The Importance of being Earnest, sues the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his love object Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel, and then is arrested for gross indecency and serves 2 years in jail. Victim of the horror of homosexuality in the nineteenth century, victim of the feud between thevindictive Marquess and his equally vindictive son.

Wilde and Lord Alfred are less attractive in their pursuit of rent boys than they would be if they had been just knocking each other off as consenting private adults.  Wilde however  is rightly a gay martyr, his Soul of Man under Socialism is a manifesto that still attracts the artistic and romantic and though Wilde enjoyed the glamour of the aristocracy he lampooned it as well and was no snob.  So the Marquess, pugilist, hard riding fox hunter and general sportsman, who wrote like the kind of deranged commenter that you would end up banning on a blog thread, seems an appropriate enemy for an aesthete. 

But I did jib a bit at this piece by Jeannette Winterson:-

Wilde's fatal amour, Lord Alfred Douglas, was son of the Marquess of Queensberry, who was a bully, womaniser, gambling addict, cycling bore and amateur boxer (to him we owe the Queensberry rules). In his personal life there was no such thing as fair play. Queensberry was a vicious pugilist detested by his family. A caricature of masculinity, he loathed the cult of art and beauty that Wilde championed, and under the guise of saving his son from sodomy, he set about bringing down Wilde at the height of his fame."

Well, according to The Marquess of Queensberry: Wilde's Nemesis by Linda Stratmann his desire to save his son from sodomy wasn't a "guise" but genuine and thought of as reasonable by his contemporaries.  He wasn't much of a gambler either, though his son and heir Percy, was.  He was certainly a bully and also an obsessive - "monomaniac" as his contemporaries said.

But cycling bore? Queensberry did bang on about a lot of things, including his dislike of Christianity (he wanted an eco-burial) but where did Winterston get that?

According to Stramann when he was 49 he had given up riding horses and became a keen cyclist.

In an interview with the Westminster Gazette (April 1895) he said:-

No man was ever fond of riding or of horses that I have been but the only riding worth having is what you get in racing or in following hounds. Park riding and that sort of thing is not worth talking about. Well, I got tired of riding, and I have given it up, but from my experience of riding and cycling I say that cycling is the better and more useful exercise. I know nothing like it to keep one fit.

He had a cycling accident so could not attend Wile's first criminal trial.

He became president of the Bath Road Cycling Club and often accompanied members on their weekly runs. He frequently went out on a tandem.

He took part in a bicycle challenge in 1896, completing a 10 mile course in 35 minutes, 43 seconds - that's about 17 miles per hour - which doesn't sound that impressive.

He was twice fined 15 shillings for riding a bicycle on a footpath. (Evidently the police were more rigorous those days at enforcing regulations.)  The second time was to avoid muddy roads. 

Now that sounds like someone who loves cycling rather than a cycling bore. There's no mention that he talked about cycling all the time to people who weren't interested. Presumably he talked to members of the Bath Cycling Club about cycling - but then, they would have been interested. In the 1890s cycling was popular among the rich, until the wretches took up motoring and aviation.

"A caricature of masculinity, he loathed the cult of art and beauty that Wilde championed,." says Winterson.  Queensberry seems to have been indifferent to art and beauty, except for beauty in women, horses and Nature. So you can call him a Philistine, and also a vile man who brought down a kind and talented man. But Winterson is showing her own Philistinism - that cycling in itself (which she presumably doesn't like) is an activity only for bores.  Similar prejudices are held by modern aesthetes and progressives against sports - which was one of Norman Geras's themes.  "It is . .  a type of philistinism for those ignorant about sport to overlook the beauties and the excitements it can offer." 

War on cars

Good article with plenty of detail about how fewer cars = happier cities:-

Peñalosa insisted that, like most cities, Bogotá had been left deeply wounded by the 20th century's dual urban legacy: first, the city had been gradually reoriented around cars. Second, public spaces and resources had largely been privatised. This reorganisation was both unfair – only one in five families even owned a car – and cruel: urban residents had been denied the opportunity to enjoy the city's simplest daily pleasures: walking on convivial streets, sitting around in public. And playing: children had largely disappeared from Bogotá's streets, not because of the fear of gunfire or abduction, but because the streets had been rendered dangerous by sheer speed. Peñalosa's first and most defining act as mayor was to declare war: not on crime or drugs or poverty, but on cars.