RosieBell

Brightness falls into the air

The most famous verse about plague is Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence. 

Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;
I am sick, I must die –
Lord, have mercy on us!

Metaphorically, darkness has fallen in a time of anxiety. Literally, the air has never looked brighter and clearer. In a fine Spring the colours of flowers and young foliage are intense and the air is clean. In the highly polluted parts of the world eg Delhi they have seen blue skies; in China the smog has cleared from their mega-cities and they can see the stars.

It’s as if the world has been newly washed.

The pandemic’s impact on the environment has been staggering. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are heading for a record 5.5-5.7% annual drop. From mid-January to mid-February, China’s carbon emissions fell by around 25%. In Delhi, a city with often the worst air quality in the world, pollution caused by PM2.5s reduced by roughly 75% as traffic congestion dropped by 59%. A 70% reduction in toxic nitrogen oxides was reported in Paris, while satellite imagery showed nitrogen dioxide levels in Milan fell by about 40%. In the UK, road travel has decreased by as much as 73% and in London, toxic emissions at major roads and junctions fell by almost 50%.

In my city the air pollution has fallen by 50%.

You can see it; you can smell it. The car-farting that was part of the background of getting round the city suddenly becomes noticeable from one individual vehicle.

There is plenty of evidence that polluted air exacerbates the chance of dying of Covid-19.

researchers in the US are building a case that suggests air pollution has significantly worsened the Covid-19 outbreak and led to more deaths than if pollution-free skies were the norm. As well as predisposing the people who have lived with polluted air for decades, scientists have also suggested that air pollution particles may be acting as vehicles for viral transmission.

I like to imagine that citizens will demand clean air as being essential as clean water and clean disposal of sewage – that is, that an aberration will only be tolerated if it is temporary.

What else has changed is the use of urban space. A pretty, cherry-tree lined street near me which was once a challenge to cross now has joggers running down the centre white line. On other streets children play. On the arterial route where we have had a long, exhausting campaign to get a mile of cycle lane, there are now children cycling and the Council is considering emergency measures to build a far longer cycle lane instead of the convoluted compromise that we had battled for (see an account of this here). 

The shared walking and cycling paths have been crammed; people are therefore using the streets as they should be used. They are looking at the masses of tarmac that had been taken over by single-occupancy cars and wondering why they couldn’t walk or cycle safely. And so the demand has come for more space, instead of pedestrians and cyclists being jammed at the edges for the convenience of the motor vehicles.

The bike shops have been selling out, my bike repair guy was working until 11pm to fix the bikes that had been rusting in garages, and the docking stations for hire bikes have become empty.

To accommodate streets now busier with bikes, as well as facilitate social distancing, some places have installed temporary cycle lanes or closed streets to cars. Pop-up bike lanes have appeared in cities including Berlin, Budapest, Mexico City, New York, Dublin and Bogotá. Governments from New Zealand to Scotland have made funding available for temporary cycle lanes and walkways amid the pandemic. In Brussels, the entire city core will become a priority zone for cyclists and pedestrians from early May for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, temporary street closures to cars have taken place in Brighton, Bogotá, Cologne, Vancouver and Sydney as well as multiple US cities including Boston, Denver and Oakland. In England, restrictions have been lifted to enable and encourage councils to more quickly close streets to cars.

Large areas of London are to be made car free. The Council in my city has been closing off some streets for use on foot and cycle and are in the process of repurposing more. Emergency powers are being employed to take measures which used to grind through the laborious planning process. The UK government is pushing councils to produce pop up lanes and urging commuters to commute by cycle.

Active travel campaigners are dazed. The dream we have been chasing for decades suddenly materialises at the bidding of unlikely politicians - the wider pavements; filtered residential areas; cycle lanes on arterial routes; slow car speeds - anything that removes the domination of the car and making exercise as part of getting about instead of something done in gyms. If you want to see a crowd of slimmish, healthy people, go to a cycle demonstration. (Obesity is another condition that makes you more vulnerable to Covid-19.) This is our big break that has arrived after years of toil. But we may of course lose this opportunity as we return to some kind of normality and people hop back into their cars again, in fear of public transport.

Chris Boardman, the former Olympic champion and Greater Manchester’s first Cycling and Walking Commissioner, says that the 1950s level of traffic has made a nice environment, but that can only be continued by a change of transport policy.

we are at a crossroads and we could go either way, and I don’t know which way it is. For the first time we genuinely have a real choice, we could change our transport culture, the way we use our streets.

The pandemic has upended our society, as a war would, and after a war revolutions come. 1945 brought in a Labour government and the welfare state, which had been proposed for decades and demonstrated in other countries eg Michael Savage’s New Zealand of the late 30s. 

Of course we all hope for a future that resembles our desires. Socialists point to the rise in estimation of obviously useful jobs like nurses, cleaners, carers and bin collectors along with the general co-operation as proof of the desire for a better, more sharing society. A libertarian Facebook friend extols the local delivery of various goods like meat and vegetables instead of the supply chain, with a whiff of caveat emptor for hygiene control. A Conservative predicts the end of the expansion of universities and media and gender studies degrees. George Monbiot suggests changing to an eco-education.  And John Gray, ever the happy pessimist, looks forward to a time like Russia’s civil war with cannibalism on the table (so to speak).

I have modest visions. I have to say I would quite like to get back to my normality which includes my workplace village of office gossip, a coffee machine and two big screens instead of a poxy little laptop for working from home. With the addition – that commutes will be short; workplaces scattered; shopping more local; streets far more free of cars and every damned front garden space paved over for car storage dug up and used what it was intended for – flowers and vegetables.

Strange days of taboo and ritual

It’s so strange, so weird, so unprecedented. That’s what we say to each other, as we stay at home except for the walk in the streets where hardly a car moves, and then when one comes along it sounds extraordinarily loud. You step off the pavement and walk on the carriageway when you see someone approaching. In my neighbourhood it’s as if we were all having feuds, or had been scabs/strikers during the miners’ strike, or were members of an unpopular ethnic minority. (In the high bourgeois Edinburgh where I take my airings social distancing comes more naturally than to most.)

The air is much cleaner; here in Edinburgh we’re just coming to an end of weeks of bright spring days with a chilly east wind. With blossoms and bulbs and the trees with fresh leaves, it is the most spectacular time of year. I am enjoying the lovely quiet streets then catch a glimpse of something familiar - what is that golden palace – oh one of the private schools - I've not seen it from that angle before. In these days of disorientation they seem fragile, as if they may become ruins soon. Charles Jencks’ installation in the grounds of the Modern Art Gallery looks like a fortification from an archaeological dig in a thousand years’ time.

A school at an unexpected angle

What is strangest to me – and I hope anthropologists are studying this – is how quickly taboos have been established. I eye with shock someone in the supermarket riffling through packets of apples or courgettes before deciding on one. Don’t they know you don’t touch anything unless you are going to buy it? Also, when in the narrow little fish shop, after I’d waited to go in when it was empty of customers, the shop assistant brushed past me to get to the back of the shop. I reacted like a high-caste Brahmin being slapped by an untouchable.

Charles Jencks installation

As you can get up riots and murders in Pakistan by saying the someone is a blasphemer, I await denunciations of those who have had friends around for a visit, or have tripled their daily exercise quota, with crowds turning up shouting, a pitchfork distance between each member. That ancient gentleman walking very slowly up a steep hill in Edinburgh’s Newtown – he is well past eighty, let alone seventy. He should be at home! I admire the old gent’s spirit – this might be his last glimpse of sunshine.

On a holiday in Bulgaria once we were at a street market and were gob-smacked to see a stall selling Nazi memorabilia. My companion picked up a hip flask and found she had touched a swastika stamped on it. She immediately wiped her hands with a tissue, so taboo is that symbol in our culture. She also wiped the hip flask so her fingerprints would leave no trace.

Superstition – well that is from fear. In times of insecurity you look for omens; see patterns which are unrelated to anything that could possibly happen to you or your community. If you’re an Aztec, you make human sacrifices to placate the gods; if a Roman examine the entrails; if you’re a Christian you cross yourself. Life for most human beings as been a fairly insecure thing, and superstition and ritual are one way of coping with it.

So I follow that video that a load of people posted about how to unpack your shopping, quarantining non perishables for three days in the shed; taking the courgettes and apples from their plastic bags packaging (which might have been touched by that vile blasphemer with unclean hands in the supermarket) and pouring the contents (untouched by dangerous human hands) into the chill bin or bowls. I have a special part of my work surface, soaked in disinfectant, where the unpacking and sorting is done. There are several washing of hands episodes during this whole process. Another rule is to leave all the doors in the flat open so that when I return from the dangerous outside world, I can walk straight to the bathroom and do the hand-washing without touching any door handles.

This may be a woefully wrong way of protecting myself from the virus, however it’s a ritual, so if I leave it undone I become very uneasy. I used to be fairly careless about hygiene, now I’m a neurotic.

The result is that the outside world, the one with other human beings, is a zone of danger, and home the only safe place.

We are under orders, both from the government and our employers, and there is nothing much else we can do. Our culture exalts the maverick, the policeman who takes short cuts and gets results, obstructed by his superior who goes by the book; the free spirit; - that is the individual that advertising panders to. Now we have gone collective and people are highly judgmental about neighbours not following the rules. We’re as far from the sixties let it all hang out spirit that upended our culture as we can be. We are all dutiful now. 

But this is the phony war of course. We don’t know how long it will last; whether it will affect the supplies of food, let alone the luxuries. The bizarreness is of how the World War II spirit is evoked when many of us are complaining about how to get that particular type of coffee or sourdough that that little shop (now closed) provided, with the rider that we know we shouldn’t complain, plenty have it worse.

A Stir in the Suburbs

A question – does pro-Palestinian activism make people barmy or are barmy people attracted to pro-Palestinian activism?

Here’s a case. I live on the western side of Edinburgh, in a suburb called Roseburn, and I follow the Friends of Roseburn Park Facebook page. A post caught my eye. It was advertising a "Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism" event in London.

That’s a change from bulb-planting and mural painting.

I guessed this was Pete Gregson – who Shiraz Socialist has covered here and Tendance Coatesy here. Expelled from the Labour Party, expelled from the GMB for anti-semitism, fired from the Council, a 24/7 activist.

Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism (LAZIR) was summed up here:- 

A new campaign group, “Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism”, or LAZIR, has been set up to support Jeremy Corbyn and campaign for the International Definition of Antisemitism to be dropped and for the Jewish Labour Movement to be thrown out of the Labour Party. The group’s logo is a laser beam smashing the logo of a Jewish Labour group.

The founder appears to be Pete Gregson, who was reportedly expelled by the GMB Union after he claimed that Israel was a “racist endeavour” that “exaggerates” the Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million Jews “for political ends.” According to a post on his Facebook page, Labour Against the Witch Hunt, are seeking to expel him from their group. If he is expelled, Mr Gregson has vowed to hold a launch event for LAZIR outside Labour Headquarters in London.

Interestingly, this is the second time that Labour Against the Witch Hunt has split, the first time being when Gerry Downing was expelled and founded Labour Against the Witch Hunt Within Labour Against the Witch Hunt, both of which met at opposite sides of the same pub at the same time. Mr Downing, who was himself expelled from the Labour Party due to his views on the Holocaust, now appears to be advising Mr Gregson on policy for LAZIR.

Other Friends of Roseburn Park thought the post on Facebook inappropriate and one commented:-

The Friends of Roseburn Park SCIO is a Charity who’s sole purposes are “The provision of recreational facilities, or the organisation of recreational activities, with the object of improving the conditions of life for the persons for whom the facilities or activities are primarily intended". Political statements of any kind have no place here and admin should immediately remove this post in my opinion.

The post was taken down. Gregson is a Friend of Roseburn Park and in fact does some useful work like finding grants for a new play park and a carved seat – as an ex-shop steward he does know how to pull the levers, as I have found with my own special focus of interest.

A word picture. On the western side of Edinburgh is Murrayfield, a leafy conservation area of handsome townhouses and villas, climbing up Corstorphine Hill, above the Water of Leith. On the flat floodplain below are Roseburn and Saughtonhall, not so grand nor so leafy, but pleasant enough. Roseburn is the shopping area. It’s prettily situated by the river, has an eighteenth century bridge and some attractive buildings, and would be totally delightful if not cut through by the A8, the main road from Edinburgh to Glasgow, so it thunders with traffic and wafts with fumes all along the section called Roseburn Terrace.

Visualisation of Roseburn Terrace with cycle route

On this arterial route, Edinburgh Council proposed a cycle way at the end of 2014. I was thrilled by this; many of the residents were not, and I began to attend the Murrayfield Community Council where I observed the Edinburgh high bourgeoisie acting like Celtic supporters after a trouncing by Rangers at the thought of (a) losing a parking place; (b) being swarmed by bicycles; (c) having money being wasted on an unused cycle route. The cycling and planning officers who have had to deal with constant baying and table thumping have remained amazingly civil and patient throughout.

There were years of consultations, opposition, further consultations and furious public meetings. Pete Gregson emerged as the chief organiser, whipping up the traders and getting the local media on the case (he is very good at raising the media) showing pictures of traders with folded rejecting arms and posters of Save our Community. Eventually the route did get through the Council’s Transport and Environment Committee and now there is only a Scottish Government hearing to come. Work should begin at the end of the year.

Gregson though has not been defeated. He produced leaflets of a post-apocalyptic Roseburn with boarded up shops, while he led his dwindling band of traders to call for compensation.

He then found a new front for attack. A local resident, a retiree from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, concluded that the cycle route will push the traffic further to the north side of Roseburn Terrace, and with the air movement, will raise the levels of NO2. Gregson duly produced leaflets of people in gas masks. The last two Murrayfield CC meetings have been filled with a sudden outrage that car pollution is responsible for asthma, dementia, and early deaths. (When I get time I’ll check through the Murrayfield CC minutes to see if the air quality on Roseburn Terrace has ever been an issue of any concern before a cycle route was mooted.)

As well as putting in a cycle route and more pedestrian crossings, the Council is also doing some place-making and general refurbishment. The information boards for a consultation were put on the historic bridge. The night before the officers held a drop-in event these boards were spray-painted quite carefully so the bridge itself was not hurt, and Gregson’s posters stuck over them. At the next Community Council meeting a Police Sergeant gave us a lecture on the selfishness and anti-democratic nature of such an act, and indeed vandalism and anti-social behaviour are usually exclaimed over at community council meetings. Gregson changed the subject to the theft of his bicycle.

Vandalised information boards on Old Colt Bridge

At this meeting, which was a few days ago (14 May) Gregson said he would be holding a demo about the cycle route causing a rise in pollution levels when the Transport and Environment Committee (TEC) met on the Thursday. Someone in the community council stressed very firmly that this was not officially from the Murrayfield CC, but through another one of his organisations, the Roseburn Vision Group.

So on the day of the TEC meeting at the City Chambers, there was a demo of 3 people –Gregson and 2 local traders, one in a gas mask, the other holding a poster saying Save Baby Finn.

Baby Finn? Well, Ruth Davidson, MSP for this constituency and the Scottish Conservative leader, has her HQ on the north side of Roseburn Terrace. She has a new baby called Finn. Gregson handed out the following press release:-

Edinburgh Council plans to asphyxiate Ruth Davidson’s Baby

Evidence has come to light to suggests Council mandarins seek to prevent the rise of the Conservatives in Scotland by suffocating them at source.

Their scheme requires increasing the levels of nitrogen dioxide at Ruth’s Edinburgh Constituency office on the south side of Roseburn Terrace to deadly levels. They know that Ruth, like most modern mums, will probably take her baby to work if she can. But pollution levels at Ruth’s office are already at their legal max of 40 ug/m3 for toxic nitrogen dioxide and are set to shoot up to around 60/ugm3 if Council plans to pollute Roseburn come to fruition.

I suppose this is supposed to be satirical. I can’t think of any other explanation except that it is the wildest conspiracy theorising.

Gregson was allowed his ten minutes at the TEC meeting. He made a rambling speech, referring to him being sacked by the Council, and repeated the accusation that the Council is trying to suffocate baby Conservatives. Cllr Lesley Macinnes, the Transport and Environment Convener, told him off, saying his press release was “utterly shameful” (applause from the Committee). Gregson shouted, “Let Baby Finn live.” The Committee adjourned and found the standing order which allowed them to tell Gregson to exit. Gregson tried to sit in the public benches, then left waving a gas mask. About 20 minutes later a security guard came in saying he had been listening outside. He was banned from the building. The police were called but were not needed.

As I said, Gregson is very good at getting media attention and this was splashed everywhere. Google it if you will under Pete Gregson Ruth Davidson. His being sacked from the Council (which is thought to be one reason for his unrelenting campaign against a cycle route) was noted, as was his being expelled from the GMB.

He did take exception to being called an anti-cycling campaigner and has now got the media outlets to change this to a “pro-cycling campaigner”. That is, at anti-cycle route demos he wears an ancient cycling helmet while standing on the pavement waving a placard or shouting through a megaphone, and he proposes the worst kind of convoluted back routes with the prefix of Speaking as a Cyclist.

I know these are the days of self-identity, but if you identify as something e.g. a Russian, if no Russian thinks you are Russian you are unlikely to be one. Spiked identifies as being on the left, no leftist agrees. Any Edinburgh cycling campaigner would see Gregson as a vexatious force against decent cycle provision, who is paying off his grudge against the Council by fanning anxiety among the traders and rage from the nimbies who cherish their parking places as their only children

You can see him on the webcast of the meeting at around 1:20.

Highly conservative Murrayfield coming under the influence of an ex-shop steward anti Zionist is certainly full of comedy.

And the question still remains – does anti-Zionist obsession turn people into loons, or are loons attracted to anti-Zionism?

You should see her at home

Nicola Sturgeon is the teenager who is a stroppy pain at home and perfectly well-behaved away. Her parents are half-annoyed and half-pleased when they are told what a delightful girl Nicola is, so well-presented, quick witted and bright, when they suffer from her moods and refusal to take responsibility.

London Liberal: Isn’t Nicola an amazing girl. So grown up, so mature, has her head screwed on.

Edinburgh: She’s not like that at home. For her, it’s Gimme gimme independence and or else. And if anything goes wrong, whose fault is it? Any criticism? “YOU’RE DOING DOWN SCOTLAND!”

Nicola in Holyrood: Poverty and food banks are an outrage, and all the fault of Westminster’s austerity.

Edinburgh: But what about your own powers? Are you using them all?

Nicola: Just give me what I want, and THEN you will see how brilliantly I’ll do it.

Nicola’s Natty Gang: Gie us aindyref2, gie us indyref 2.

Nicola: I wull, I wull, a few weeks time there will be a definite statement on the next indyref.

Nicola’s Natty Gang: Come on, Sturgeonator, gie us oor indyref! Gie us oor indy ref!

Edinburgh: Now Nicola, how’s those jobs you said you would do about health and education?  Last time I looked at them they were in a terrible state.

Nicola: It's wis nae me. It because we don't have independence. STOP DOING DOWN SCOTLAND.

Nicola’s Natty Gang: What about that indyref Nicola. Come on the Sturgeonator, you’re the leader of the pack.

Sturgeon: Not just yet. Wait a bit, I’ll give you definite news. You'll be the first to know.

Naughty Natty Gang: BUT YOU SAID THAT LAST MONTH. AND THE MONTH BEFORE LAST.

Edinburgh (voice raised): Have you done your currency homework yet Nicola? You’ve come up with five different answers.


London Liberal: Oh, she’s such a bonnie wee lassie, is that what you say, that Nicola of yours? So grown up, so mature, so realistic. Why can’t she come and live with us?

Edinburgh: Haaaaaaaaa! I’m telling you…….

(That's her telt.)

Edinburgh: India, if you’re still keen, we’ll put her on the next train to Kings Cross.

English historian: Noooooooooooooo

(Disclaimer: This is not ALL of Edinburgh speaking. But the SNP is always claiming to be Scotland so I can claim to be Edinburgh).

The dance of democracy

I was in Jordan once during an election. I knew nothing of the the parties or Jordan's constitution but there were huge posters of the faces of the candidates, including women without hijabs. I got the impression of a lively democratic dance, unlike Syria across the border, where the only bill-boarded faces were chinless dictator Assad and his hard looking father.

Notes at the time:-

The passengers were all fairly quiet until we got to a town where the air was filled with election posters hanging from every pole and house. Suddenly everyone started talking, presumably about what candidate they favoured. ...

(At Petra):-

Bus back - through people electioneering - painting their cars election colours and sticking posters to them - messed up the paint job I would have thought. The young blokes were dancing on the cars and trucks and blowing horns while the women looked at them from balconies. This was very jolly and like elections in the nineteenth century here. [Including the ladies keeping away from the male throng.]

There's an election in Scotland on 5 May for the Scottish Parliament. Nary a poster. They have been banned from Council property eg street lamps, and this has happened right across Scotland. A visitor wouldn't realise a Government with tax-raising and considerable spending powers was being elected.

The number of councils passing legislation banning political material on their property has increased dramatically since the last general election in 2010.

….

The main reason cited for the bans is the expense of removing election material from council property after the country goes to the polls.

But an expert fears that the lack of posters could contribute to lower turnouts and have a deleterious effect on Scottish democracy.

“People often don’t pay attention to politics. They need every reminder they can get (to turn out to vote). One way of reminding people is by posters in localities. It is important for democratically getting people out to vote and mobilising them,” says Alistair Clark, senior lecturer in politics at Newcastle University (link).

All right, I hated the ubiquitous blue Yesses and less frequent (vandalised) purple Noes that covered the country before the referendum, and which took a long time to finally disappear. You will still come across a fresh Yes sticker. But that's because of my hatred for referendums, not to mention Scottish nationalism. Visitors took it as vigorous democratic debate, and visitors' impressions are superficial, as mine of Jordan were, no doubt. Still, it reminded the citizens that this was an important event, and that they should get out and vote. Posters before the vote show hope, and afterwards the poignancy of a time and an opportunity passed, and lost.

My own city of Edinburgh has banned them:-

Labour Councillor Ewan Aitken also voted against the ban.

He said: “This is not a ground breaking decision on democracy but it is a sign that political parties have fewer and fewer resources and so are looking to reduce the demands on their teams. I voted in favour of keeping them as I think they add mood and colour to elections.

“Democracy is about how people feel and that is always an environmental as well as an intellectual thing. Posters don't win elections but they help make elections.”

Compared to, say, massed ranks at a Nazi rally or synchronised North Korean leader-worship, democracy's ceremonies are dishevelled and haphazard and often enough make for cynicism eg the pointless leaders' debates. And it's true that much political activity takes place on social media these days. People don twibbons and change avatars and pass around simplified-to-idiocy memes.

Still, though we can't get back the time when an election was an event dominating a town as in the nineteenth century, politics should come into the physical space - the street, the wall, the lamp post, and not be considered as litter. That includes attendance at a hustings and the walk to the poll booth (a curse on postal voting, and anathema on voting on line). The bookies changing the odds and the long night watching the results roll in* add to the drama and suspense and catching a moment, like seeing a band live.

A sign of a free society is a poster of the First Minister with added moustache and fangs. Assad's chinless mug covered Syria and had not once been touched up with spray paint.

*The Beeb replayed the 1966 election on the 50th anniversary, and it was watched by those interested in politics and British history as drama as well as social history.

Pedal on Parliament IV

Pedal on Parliament, 25 April 2015 12:00 Middle Meadow Walk Edinburgh

This Saturday I'll be among the thousands pedalling from The Meadows down Edinburgh's Royal Mile to Holyrood for the fourth year of Pedal on Parliament (POP).  The motorised traffic will stop and for once we can enjoy Edinburgh's beautiful centre without the fumes, noise and fear that are the usual experience of cycling among the internally combusting.

This is Pedal on Parliament's fourth year.

Transport is a devolved power in Scotland. According to Sally Hinchcliffe, one of the organisers of POP:-

Since we started in 2012, Pedal on Parliament (PoP) has become a national force for cycling in Scotland. As soon as we saw the first-year turnout – the biggest demonstration ever outside the new Scottish Parliament building, apparently – we realised we were going to have to continue.

At the time, although the SNP government had made bold promises about having 10% of journeys made by bike by 2020, on closer examination its plans proved to be no more than the usual UK-style handwaving: training a few schoolchildren, encouraging people to get on their bikes (ignoring the fact that most of them would love to if it wasn’t for the traffic), and asking everyone to be nice to each other on the road.

Funding for the one measure proven to be effective at getting people cycling – building safe, direct and attractive cycle routes – was being cut. Instead, money was being poured into roads: a new Forth crossing, extending Glasgow’s motorway network, and dual carriageways between every city in Scotland.

Sally though does point out the accessibility of Scottish politicians, some who will be at POP including the Minister for Transport. Some of the MSPs are members of Spokes, Edinburgh's cycling pressure group.  The First Minister obviously thinks appearing on a bicycle does her no harm.

If the First Minister likes to be seen riding a bicycle, perhaps we can hold her pedals to the fire to do more for cycling in Scotland than photo opportunities.

Cycling activism moves slowly and incrementally and the news that a kerb will be dropped will cause you a frisson of achievement. However there is the bigger picture, and who better to talk about cycling than a Dutchman Henri de Ruiter:-

As I grew up in the Netherlands, cycling is so entirely normal for me that it still feels strange to advocate for it. As a teenager, I cycled to football training from one end of the city to the other end. It did not matter whether it was dark, light, raining, or sunny; we just cycled. The only thing my mother worried about was how dirty the laundry would be when I returned, not whether I would return at all. We cycled to school, to music lessons, to football training, to friends – just everywhere. No parents or their cars needed. Here in Aberdeen, I would never let my child cycle from one side of the city to the other. One small mistake could kill here.

So cycling is an enabler, especially for children. Though most cycling advocates stress the health and environmental benefits of cycling, for me cycling is about liveable, enabling cities – places where everybody wants to live and where children can play on the streets. Even in the US, arguably the car-loving country in the world, people want to keep cycle lanes once they are put in, because the vast majority agrees that their “neighbourhoods became more desirable to live in”. So why wouldn’t that be the case in Scotland?
..
70% of our world’s population will live in cities in 2050, and people will be increasingly geographically mobile. As a result, cities compete for talent and businesses in a global marketplace. If Aberdeen, Edinburgh or Scotland wants to thrive, it needs to be able to attract people; hence an attractive cityscape will be vital.
More densely populated cities are needed, because “Generation Y” is different (more singles / fewer kids / more focused on experiences) and has other demands, such as work close to home and smaller apartments. The Atlantic recently reported that car makers are worried about these “Millenials” because they don’t seem to care about owning a car. So why build an infrastructure based on current preferences without talkin’ ‘bout my generation?

Densely populated cities are also needed because suburban sprawl is becoming too expensive for an ageing population (more maintenance of roads/sewers/landlines ). However, in order to function properly, densely populated cities need a different transport hierarchy: pedestrians first, cyclists second, public transport third and the private car last.

So the new urban types, the harbingers of the two-wheeled future, are going to Pedal on Parliament. There are feeder rides and also a feeder walk. 

I'm having a quiet one

I asked a young personable colleague, the only other person in the office today, what he was doing for New Year, or Hogmanay as we call it up here, also known as a further tourist opportunity in the darkest days of a Scottish winter.

"We're having a quiet one," he said and went on to echo my thoughts about the general awfulness of New Year – the forced jollity and celebration, the crowds in the streets getting pissed, pubs charging you to enter, the general nastiness of it.

I really enjoy Christmas.  It has traditions, it has good food, it has great music, it has lights and colour and behind it a pagan idea of new birth in the bleakest of seasons.  But is there one decent song for New Year?  It's a date on the calendar, that's all.  The Chinese make more of a thing of it, and seem to celebrate it with some style, but here it's just another excuse for a piss-up. And in Britain, we need no such excuses.

(Re Christmas music - Here's  a picture I took with my phone of what ice can do to a fence on a hilltop in the Pentlands last Sunday.  On our way down we started singing Good King Wenceslas. A teenaged girl walking uphill with her dad joined in:- "Gathering Winter Fu-u-el." )

Christmas was not a public holiday in Scotland until 1958. The overtones of Catholicism made it uncomfortable for Presbyterians and so they celebrated New Year instead, with drinking and dancing.  And in some country parts it is still celebrated with first footing and as a celebration in a community that works.  A friend of mine who lived in a little Highland town said he would spend Hogmanay on the move, whisky bottle in hand, walking past his own flat but never entering it for four days together. In each house they visited they were revived with soup.

Nowadays the Scots celebrate Christmas like everyone else, but still have those two days off at New Year.  When younger I remember the pubs being too crowded for a drink and then shutting early and we'd traipse round the streets waiting for something, anything to happen.  But in Tron Square, where we gathered, the bells didn't even ring at midnight. So we hung around, then some ripple in the crowd – perhaps someone had a radio – told us it was new year, and random people kissed you – and by the look of them, and the smell of them, that was the one close bodily contact they were going to get all year.

So the Edinburgh Council, always stalking the tourist pound. thought to organise actual celebrations since people arrived in Edinburgh for Hogmanay anyway, no matter that nothing happened. Now they have torch-light processions and concerts i.e. outdoor activities at a time of the year when it rains, snows, blows or the temperature drops below zero.  If someone told me – go out in winter with minimum public transport to be snogged by drunken strangers I'd say no thanks.  It makes no difference that it's 31 December.

Once a colleague passed me on some tickets that she couldn't use for the concert in Princes Street Gardens.  They had cost her £35 each and I asked a friend to come.  We were sitting in the pub while the wind howled and screamed and were getting ready, with utmost reluctance to go out in it, so as not to waste the £35.  And the relief when we were told the concert was cancelled, so we could honourably slump back in our chairs and my colleague could get a refund.  We had no desire to go to an outdoor concert in winter – no sane person would. Still, there it is, forced celebration.

So I wish everyone a prosperous New Year with drinks and celebration, if that's your style.  As for me, I'm having a quiet one.

Nationalist Banality

Well, I have had one of the worst evenings of my life in the theatre. It's the Edinburgh Festival, and of course that is to be expected, but a bad night there is usually stumbling into a hopeful group of students doing the Medea on roller skates in a church hall performing to an audience of four. It is not going to the splendid Festival Theatre to see a play that has received pages of press coverage and is sold out.

This was James III: The True Mirror, the third part of a trilogy about the early Stewarts. James was a useless king who irritated his nobles by promoting favourites and neglecting business and was eventually killed- i.e. he was a little like Richard II and Edward II, and though you can't expect any dramatist to use language like Shakespeare or Marlowe, you would think they could learn a bit about structure and tension and narrative drive. But instead of, say, alternating scenes of a frivolous king with the powerful plotters against him,, there were endless going-nowhere soap opera domesticities of him talking to his wife the Danish Queen Margaret (played by Sofie Gråbøl from The Killing, who made her likable) fighting over custody of the children, a whole meandering pointless mass of boneless characters, sweiry words and button pushing jokes  that got knowing laughs - eg - James to his missus - "all I got with you was Orkney and Shetland". James III was presented as an anarchic guy pissing round, like Russell Brand and the play was as intellectually light-weight. 

The staging of a high wall with a tier of benches for the meetings of the Three Estates was rather grand and looked promising. Then it began. A red-haired laundry maid tells a bloke that she's heard James the King is gorgeous. Then discovers she is in fact speaking to James. Squeaks from the maid, and his wife tells James that he's been doing his man of the people act again. This was the first ten minutes, with dialogue so self-conscious, slack and banal I wanted to leave at that point. At the interval my friends and I discovered that we were all having a bad time, and what the hell was everyone laughing about? But we hung on to the end, and that's when we got to the worst part of all - cringe-making, boag-inducing awful - a final speech from Queen Margaret who has become regent and tells the Scots lords (who rhubarb aye, aye) that she is a rational Dane from a rational country and they are heaps of manure, but aren't they a lovable lot, and Scotland could be a nation again, and never fear for the future - in short a party political broadcast for the Yes side of the referendum. Oh how the audience loved it- tell us we are rogues with a bad attitude but lovable and we'll lap this like Irn Bru.

There are other shows dealing with this matter of Scotland, all pro-independence, which is to be expected as Yesses are full of vision and enthusiasm and poetry, while Noes are grumpy. I did stumble on a comedian, Erich McElroy The British Referendum. He's an engaging American guy, a naturalised Brit, who is evidently put out and a little puzzled that his newly adopted country could lose one third of its land mass. With some easy laughs comparing British talking head politicking and American raw gun-shooting advertisements, he did get a few digs in the referendum's vitriol, with pictures of what a nationalistic country looks like (ie an American flag-lined street). And facetiously warned Scotland that the USA could have interesting designs on an oil-rich country with no defences. There were a few Noes in the small audience, relieved that someone was speaking to them.

 

Norman Lamont and the Heaven Sent

 

Norman Lamont is a distinct and quirky singer song-writer. His lyrics are clever and moving stories in song.

He is performing at the Acoustic Music Centre with his band the Heaven Sent tonight and tomorrow.

I heard them last night and thought they were excellent - really touching and charming. As well as his own songs he did a version of Yeats' The Song of Wandering Aengus.

Details

Venue: The Back Room, The Acoustic Music Centre, 10 Orwell Terrace, Edinburgh, Midlothian EH11 2DZ
Date: Sat 9th, Sun 10th, Mon 11th Aug
Show time: 19:00
(Duration: 60mins)
Tickets: £7.00
(Concessions: £5.00)

Making it cool, making it normal

The well-heeled urbanite, in tailored threads, bicycles with pleasure through the traffic-clogged streets of Jakarta. Meet Monocle Man.

Monocle Man is the hip sophisticate who reads the magazine Monocle.

a magazine that is in general focused on a particular brand of well-heeled global urbanism, the go-to source for articles on  . .. such new-urbanist obsessions as bicycling (“Kenji Hall goes for a little bike ride — in the middle of traffic-clogged Jakarta with the city’s governor, a Spanish MotoGP world champion and the ambassador of Denmark”),

I'm glad to hear that bicycling is a new-urbanist obsession. Of course in some countries like Denmark and Holland it's merely how you get about but in Britain it would be good news if it became the same sophisticated activity that it was in the 1890s, when titled ladies pedalled about London and the beau monde showed off their cycling gear in the Bois de Boulogne.  


Fashionable ladies in the Bois de Boulogne, Vanity Fair, 1897

Those rich folk turned to automobiles but poorer people picked up second-hand  and then cheap mass produced bicycles. Cars, in Britain, were for the elite. When they began to be owned by the general public, they were also used differently from how they are today - for excursions and holidays, not for day to day transport. You got to your work on foot, by bicycle and by public transport while cars did not become the habitual way of getting to work until the 1960s.  The film Made in Dagenham, about a strike in 1968, showed the factory workers arriving by bicycle. In 10 years time it would be by car.


Made in Dagenham

So part of cycling campaigning is to make cycling normal urban transport  and not a lifestyle choice.  The Guardian, for instance, has good articles about cycling but they are in the Life and Style or politics  section of the website, not Transport.

I heard a talk by Professor Colin Pooley co-author of Promoting Walking and Cycling;  New perspectives on sustainable travel.  A study was undertaken in four different towns/cities,  (Leeds Leicester, Worcester and Lancaster) among various communities on how people made their choices of transport for short urban journeys. The summary of the key findings can be found in Understanding Walking and Cycling.

The authors demonstrated that, even in areas of England where 'utility cycling' is relatively common, most cyclists still perceive themselves to be part of a marginalised group; this compares starkly with studies in Europe that have revealed the extent to which cyclist believe they are confirming to a societal norm.

While attitudes to walking and cycling . . are mostly positive or neutral many people who would like to engage in more active travel fail to do so because of:-

1. Concerns about the safety of the physical environment - for cyclists that is traffic, for pedestrians, scary streets
2. Difficulty of fitting walking and cycling into complex routines
3. Walking and cycling are "abnormal"

Certainly cycling is seen as a desirable activity. Why else would Google put up this image for Mother's Day.



Capes? Have they never heard of Isadora Duncan or watched The Incredibles?

But although bicycles are seen as a carefree family occupation - look at the advertisements for Center Parcs, for instance - they are not used as ordinary urban transport.

The key message that comes from this research is that at present in Britain using the car for short trips in urban areas is convenient, habitual and normal. . . Alternatives to the car - especially cycling and walking - are perceived to take too much effort, need planning and equipment that causes hassles, and may be risky and uncomfortable. They also run the risk of being perceived by other as eccentric or odd.

Common remarks from those interviewed by the study:-

"It's not a cool thng for a girl to be on a bike"

"People assume that there's something wrong with you if you don't drive."

There were various suggestions for remaking cities and towns for walking and cycling:,-

1. Fully segregated cycle routes on all arterial and other busy roads
2. Making pedestrian routes more welcoming (widening pavements, removing street furniture, better lighting, keeping them clear of ice and fallen leaves)
3. Restricting traffic speed on non-segregated residential roads;
4. "Strict liability" so that pedestrians or cyclists injured in an accident involving a motor vehicle do not have to prove fault in seeking compensation;
5. Urban design that makes eg shopping centres convenient for cyclists and pedestrians.

There are a range of bodies that could effect these changes from central government to private businesses.  

Professor Cooley was speaking to a converted audience, i.e. 150 cycling members of the public and sympathetic councillors.  To us he made three important points:-

1. A good urban policy is against the use of cars, not the ownership of them.  
2. It should not be assumed that it is sufficient to change attitudes and make people more environmentally aware. It is necessary also to make the changes that enable people to translate these values into actions.
3.  Do not base policies about walking and cycling on the views and experiences of existing committed cyclists and pedestrians. They are a minority who have, against all the odds, successfully negotiated a hostile urban environment to incorporate walking and cycling into their everyday routines. It is necessary to talk. . .to non-walkers and non-cyclists, potential cyclists and walkers, former cyclists and walkers . . to encourage them to make more use of these transport modes.

The Leader of Edinburgh City Council, Andrew Burns, also spoke. Edinburgh has achieved 4% to 8% work rides within 8 years, with a target of 15% by 2020.  Councillor Burns cited Munich and Cologne as cities that have made progress in cycling. The utopias are Copenhagen and Amsterdam.

Cyclists, Copenhagen

Edinburgh has a strong campaigning group, Spokes, and a sympathetic council, and so has achieved better cycling than the average in the UK, in spite of its chilly, windy climate, hilliness and (the council falls down here) pot-holed road surfaces. On some of the cycle paths at peak hour it's like the M8 for traffic flow.  So it can be done.  But it needs political will.  

However, to finish with another quote from Professor Cooley (paraphrased):- 

"The politicians report that the electorate will not accept changes that will make it easier to walk and cycle, yet speak directly to the electorate and they are happy with these changes."