View From - Arran Drive - Primrose - Jarrow - 2004
India and Pakistan. Empires against each other – temperatures are like at boiling point, like. Ordering a curry the Bede Trading estate. Coriander not registering as a word. Dal neither. Had they been attracted to South Shields the way Norwegians and Scots to Canada and the Spanish to Mexico? A potato, which had achieved synchronous orbit deflects the warhead from Hyderabad on to a rice field. I wonder now if the Patak pickle factory in Lancashire is safe from missile attack. In Newark earlier I'm told India's rockets were Earth and Fire. This is standing in front of the mosque-like arabesque minarets of Newark Mecca Bingo. The Pakistani ones in Birmingham painted papier mache protests. Up in Newcastle it is February 29th the North blanketed in snow turning my clothes line in to a fluffy white tube, but this estate will never look picturesque until the Great Northern Forest grows and no ‘yuman' sets foot in it. On a slanted slip road in Recendyke, Tyne Dock a lorry driver is admiring some magazine in a lay-bye. The plot is simple – fragmented development innit? Durham is coated in a white dust like asbestos. Today snow unifies the region, optically, like. At Durham railway station heading for Darlington, Sunderland fans get in to Coach D heading for Charlton, unaware that a big sign saying "No chimps in Coach D please". An auld Blake rustles disarmingly his de rigueur Morison’s bag. These are library conditions – you can’t stop people talking. A single moment where a twilight storm animates the curtain and snow drifts in Arran Drive. Selfish urges will rebuild Liverpool with special culture wardens to calm traffic. In Poundbury hippies stroke their cars and use incense to calm traffic. Liverpool built in the ten years from 1830 needed rebuilding now. Like Newcastle Gateshead competing for the European City of Culture. Two brothers from the pit, get up and sing and we hoi them money. Magnesium from 20,000 feet under Saltburn. Snobby Foster’s Sage building on Gateshead Quaysides a "Weeyad shipe", like. "Kanna hava piisoff kike?" "Godiva little latté tavja?". Larty Fenwick would have talked something like that in Costa Coffee. Out on Steel Rigg I remember valley is thallium. Vandalia, Pangea and Gondwanaland. How did they know what these places were called? The English seaside town – I kept gong there because this is my life – now! I knew as I visited Skegness my life was an act of passing. Transitory and Ephemeral. You can just see priest warriors, maybe single, heading up The Umbra river from Tyne or Rouen. "That’s Scunthorpe – lets go further up stream". Eventually in worsted cassocks they founded Fountains Abbey. The once beautiful Umbra is now Payne’s Grey. In creeks water creeps. On the train through to Cleethorpes through Scunthorpe I got a brief glimpse of the vast Humber Bridge, which was momentarily the size of two matchsticks. Passing over the Trent and shrinking peat fields whose area covered soggy flanks to the Ouse. The government had rescued them in the Guardian. Sand drifting over the new sea defence cycle paths of the Lincolnshire coast. A Lincoln man at the Battersea architect had told me of new paths, old concrete wrapped around The Wash, which he described as falsely as it turned out, Areas of Outstanding Natural Ugliness. In 1953, from Mapplethorpe then unguarded by the present high sea wall, a young policeman in a increasingly wild and raging twilight, phones to the south warning of an unusual high tide heading south. In a Trumpton sort of way this was how the message was passed on, odd since the water was to circumnavigate Norfolk and Suffolk, an Anglia of Marconi and radar. Real tragedy hit Canvey Island that night when newly settled immigrants from Holland carried their baby up and up in to the cold rafters only for water to fill the pram and take the child further on up to heaven. Mapplethorpe, easily England’s most unexplainable town. Ian Huntley crossed Lincolnshire to rendezvous with Maxine Carr. How geographic to meet half way in Uttoxeter. Then they crossed the vast county of vegetables to Soham just in Cambridgeshire. On the way a loud speaker shouted at me as I listened to aircraft 15 miles offshore bombing an orange target ship. At Skegness large outsized banana slides and big wheels loom a giant two inches just as they had at the Humber Estuary. The plastic prison of Butlins with a fairground silver Wuppertal hanging train. Vast underrated Lincolnshire. Then Essex. Maplin - An airport was planned here but Concorde did not have the fuel range for NY JFK. The final station on a long journey from Liverpool Street, Clacton-on-Sea where houses are crosses between lean-to's and rabbit hutches line the modest sea wall to the south and this is clearly Gypsy country. The dykes worn out, old. Beyond Battlebridge at the head of the creek a vertical black grain store with a hoist and stranded boats petrified in the mud as if they didn’t make it. This inlet is 20 miles to Burnham-on-Crouch with the Essex boatyard beyond and the atomic power station beyond further long unwinding but going nowhere defences. Unless you have a boat that is – a boat to the resurrection. There are disused ferry landings, north and south. The rail floats across the marsh to Basildon, a new town dumping ground for the under-under class, back to Barking mad. There is no shortage of Saxon churches on hummocks but on exit it is very easy to go in to the marsh maze and never re-emerge. At Coalhouse Fort is a feeling of murder. The land drains drain like eastings and northings. The East Tilbury marshes are empty. At Rainham Marshes concrete scuppered ships lie motionless for sixty years. Was winning a war worth it if we were reduced to making concrete ships?
Friday, February 27, 2009
The summer of 1964 - A Personal View
The summer of 1964 - A Personal View
I watched seabirds in V-formation, from my mother’s bed.The County Durham summer had only occasional hot days, with a latent chill always.I was obliged to measure subsequent summers by this: Eight years old and who I was formed.What changed most obviously then were two-fold. Trunk roads and playing outdoors, the clear conflict of these two, road accidents, and radical physical change in the space around me.On Sundays Boldon Colliery, a pit village across the railway, was the destination via slag heaps to artificial lakes which were allegedly linked to flooded mines.A travelling fair visited the colliery town yearly. The pit closed. Evidence of railway lines and mining disappeared. Steam trains were replaced by diesel trains on the steep railway embankment, and the railway embankment portal to the countryside was removed to take the trunk road.My own childhood was petrified at once.In the 1963 winter snowdrifts miles long were seen at night by me outside the front window.Beyond Down Hill, Sunderland housing estates now surrounded Lumley castle.By which time it was 1964. The two cities of Newcastle and Sunderland collided under this hill.The trunk road was now built. Simultaneously, a boy falls down a manhole, his mother doing the bingo in the Neon Social Club.At about December 1997, in Steglitz, Berlin, I entered the raised garden of Begoniaplatz. 1600 miles and 35 years later, I wondered if I would ever go home.From the flat window I watched the leaves fall off the trees till the very last one.Back then in Jarrow, our house was no longer at the town edge. A school had been built which obscured the view to Boldon.It was somewhere to play football. Police in Hillman Imps cleared us off, occasionally.South Shields, a resort was freezing the day my two brothers from Ushaw college wearing loin cloth-like costumes swam in the cold North Sea, so bracing, there was talk of heating it with under water gas fires.The heaving swell unhinged the pier. One of my brothers would later leap off HMS Hermes as a diver, and later remember ship's now mothballed in Portsmouth harbour. Beyond the boat lake Jimmy Saville was compering a TV games show.Sylvia was about to kill herself in Primrose Hill but I had no idea.On Saturday morning a van delivers pastel clothes for girls at No 17. Up on Perth Green, Durham colliery bands were marching, and there were even side show whippet races underway. This was the Neon Social Club Leek Show. The committee members seemed far too wealthy. The man at No 17 was on the committee.My mother meanwhile kept us fed by sewing and my father worked in a factory.Although Jarrow had only one blackman, a whole community from Yemen lived in Reckendyke. Jarrow was Irish, South Shields maritime. We were socially Irish in an English field. Things changed though when my eldest brother married a girl from the docks and rented the only cottage in Calf Close for £1 a week, a pylon in the backfield next to the railway. They worked for themselves, not an abstract community.For two years my transition from child to youth was on horseback. What happened next is beyond the scope of this story.Historically Jarrow was linked by the worlds oldest coal railway line, into the heart of Durham via Sunnyside but that was already gone but occasionally there was still a 40 shilling cast iron trespass warning.The arches at Tyne Dock were demolished. Newcastle stone was cleaned up and all trams sidelined.My father retired. Decline frightened me. I would go off to Polytechnic and perhaps escape.Uncle Pat, the Jarra Lad who played for Newcastle and comedian at the Robin Hood died.Vince Rea’s gallery opened and closed. My father dumped me at White Mare Pool again, and by nightfall I would be at Kings Cross.
I watched seabirds in V-formation, from my mother’s bed.The County Durham summer had only occasional hot days, with a latent chill always.I was obliged to measure subsequent summers by this: Eight years old and who I was formed.What changed most obviously then were two-fold. Trunk roads and playing outdoors, the clear conflict of these two, road accidents, and radical physical change in the space around me.On Sundays Boldon Colliery, a pit village across the railway, was the destination via slag heaps to artificial lakes which were allegedly linked to flooded mines.A travelling fair visited the colliery town yearly. The pit closed. Evidence of railway lines and mining disappeared. Steam trains were replaced by diesel trains on the steep railway embankment, and the railway embankment portal to the countryside was removed to take the trunk road.My own childhood was petrified at once.In the 1963 winter snowdrifts miles long were seen at night by me outside the front window.Beyond Down Hill, Sunderland housing estates now surrounded Lumley castle.By which time it was 1964. The two cities of Newcastle and Sunderland collided under this hill.The trunk road was now built. Simultaneously, a boy falls down a manhole, his mother doing the bingo in the Neon Social Club.At about December 1997, in Steglitz, Berlin, I entered the raised garden of Begoniaplatz. 1600 miles and 35 years later, I wondered if I would ever go home.From the flat window I watched the leaves fall off the trees till the very last one.Back then in Jarrow, our house was no longer at the town edge. A school had been built which obscured the view to Boldon.It was somewhere to play football. Police in Hillman Imps cleared us off, occasionally.South Shields, a resort was freezing the day my two brothers from Ushaw college wearing loin cloth-like costumes swam in the cold North Sea, so bracing, there was talk of heating it with under water gas fires.The heaving swell unhinged the pier. One of my brothers would later leap off HMS Hermes as a diver, and later remember ship's now mothballed in Portsmouth harbour. Beyond the boat lake Jimmy Saville was compering a TV games show.Sylvia was about to kill herself in Primrose Hill but I had no idea.On Saturday morning a van delivers pastel clothes for girls at No 17. Up on Perth Green, Durham colliery bands were marching, and there were even side show whippet races underway. This was the Neon Social Club Leek Show. The committee members seemed far too wealthy. The man at No 17 was on the committee.My mother meanwhile kept us fed by sewing and my father worked in a factory.Although Jarrow had only one blackman, a whole community from Yemen lived in Reckendyke. Jarrow was Irish, South Shields maritime. We were socially Irish in an English field. Things changed though when my eldest brother married a girl from the docks and rented the only cottage in Calf Close for £1 a week, a pylon in the backfield next to the railway. They worked for themselves, not an abstract community.For two years my transition from child to youth was on horseback. What happened next is beyond the scope of this story.Historically Jarrow was linked by the worlds oldest coal railway line, into the heart of Durham via Sunnyside but that was already gone but occasionally there was still a 40 shilling cast iron trespass warning.The arches at Tyne Dock were demolished. Newcastle stone was cleaned up and all trams sidelined.My father retired. Decline frightened me. I would go off to Polytechnic and perhaps escape.Uncle Pat, the Jarra Lad who played for Newcastle and comedian at the Robin Hood died.Vince Rea’s gallery opened and closed. My father dumped me at White Mare Pool again, and by nightfall I would be at Kings Cross.
Center Start Place Nouvelle, Furnighausplantechnisdormring or SaucerCupPlateginandtechtonictheorumgefunk
England could have been taken over by the Netherlands, Germany or France at any time. Commissions to change place names certainly sent out. Newcastle could be Neuschloss or Nova Castile. Or Center Start Place Nouvelle, Furnighausplantechnisdormring or SaucerCupPlateginandtechtonictheorumgefunk. This idea is copywrited.
Alphaville - La Ville Nouvelle
Alphaville - La Ville Nouvelle
Arriving in England in 1830 with a couple of taytties between them and probably being only two taytie fields from the jungle themselves, shortly after nearly all starving to death in the after hell of the Irish Potato Famine, (there was food in Ireland but landowners kept it: there was a Hunger March through County Mayo) the people of Jarrow obviously gravitated to the visions of St. Bede and the location of St. Paul’s. They were unwitting ‘blacklegs’ as workers of the Tyne they replaced were all dismissed at once beforehand. Philip Larkin, John Betcheman and Silvia Plath wrote beautiful deeply moving poems on visits to simple elemental churches or chapels a few years before their own deaths. As Vince Rea said like a preacher in a priestly yet secular way, ‘life is transitory and ephemeral‘. Jarrow small town Irish descended teachers, priests, nurses and workers were drawn like moths to their earthly expression of divinity, the glass windows of St. Paul’s church. How blessed they were, and what a legacy to hold on to and cherish.
Vince Rea, in his publications, reminded the parishioners, of which there were tens of thousands in Jarrow and mostly catholic, Jarrow was a prosperous town once. However it was the peoples unity, their sharing community, their völkisch inheritance, the Labour Party and the labour government who picked up Jarrow after the Second World War. Not the Conservative Party. Not old people. One passed the other in the Corridor of Misunderstanding. To start repairing the country is through young people refocusing away from consuming cheap foreign embroidered jeans, to change, to doing what has to be done for: FOOD, CLOTHES and SHELTER and FOR THE ECONOMY. Within the Aegis of a SPIRITUAL LIFE. Learn from history and all parties and you have to catch them early. Hitler’s most sincere and accomplished speech was to the Hitler Jugend. Radical redirection via youth energy and vitality towards NATIONAL REJUVENATION. Money has been stolen by the City of London by cheats who we allow to live among us. The money has also gone abroad. English Public School Boys who operate in government, law and the city may or may not have the moral education to take the path of righteousness. Does anyone know?
Arriving in England in 1830 with a couple of taytties between them and probably being only two taytie fields from the jungle themselves, shortly after nearly all starving to death in the after hell of the Irish Potato Famine, (there was food in Ireland but landowners kept it: there was a Hunger March through County Mayo) the people of Jarrow obviously gravitated to the visions of St. Bede and the location of St. Paul’s. They were unwitting ‘blacklegs’ as workers of the Tyne they replaced were all dismissed at once beforehand. Philip Larkin, John Betcheman and Silvia Plath wrote beautiful deeply moving poems on visits to simple elemental churches or chapels a few years before their own deaths. As Vince Rea said like a preacher in a priestly yet secular way, ‘life is transitory and ephemeral‘. Jarrow small town Irish descended teachers, priests, nurses and workers were drawn like moths to their earthly expression of divinity, the glass windows of St. Paul’s church. How blessed they were, and what a legacy to hold on to and cherish.
Vince Rea, in his publications, reminded the parishioners, of which there were tens of thousands in Jarrow and mostly catholic, Jarrow was a prosperous town once. However it was the peoples unity, their sharing community, their völkisch inheritance, the Labour Party and the labour government who picked up Jarrow after the Second World War. Not the Conservative Party. Not old people. One passed the other in the Corridor of Misunderstanding. To start repairing the country is through young people refocusing away from consuming cheap foreign embroidered jeans, to change, to doing what has to be done for: FOOD, CLOTHES and SHELTER and FOR THE ECONOMY. Within the Aegis of a SPIRITUAL LIFE. Learn from history and all parties and you have to catch them early. Hitler’s most sincere and accomplished speech was to the Hitler Jugend. Radical redirection via youth energy and vitality towards NATIONAL REJUVENATION. Money has been stolen by the City of London by cheats who we allow to live among us. The money has also gone abroad. English Public School Boys who operate in government, law and the city may or may not have the moral education to take the path of righteousness. Does anyone know?
Alphaville - La Nouvelle Jarreau - Center Start Place
Vince Rea’s Dog
Vince Rea’s Dog (not lovely Sulivan, now burried in Jarrow Cemetary!) but the one in Jarrow Metro) has no connection with the decline of Britain whose nadir went un-noticed in the run down Regency villas, mews & side streets of Gloucester of the 1970’s. However for anyone who can visualise a realistic dog shape being formed with a welding torch & a faded group picture including Ellen Wilkinson minutes before setting off on the Jarrow March 1933, Vince Rea’s Dog* is not only emblematic of just how bad building was in the 1960s, but what was good & bad in public sculpture in the 1970’s. Before TV only readers of JB Priestley’s An English Journey or Fredric Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Classes or even Charles Dickens passing through Seven Dials, could visualise how bad things were in England. Early TV interviews in Coventry for example show a shy downtrodden people trying to talk posh like the managers in Kenilworth & feared of saying anything which might force the attentions of policeman & detectives. When the country did not want Churchill anymore in about 1955, ordinary people, often almost without learning, culture, travel, education, breeding, cultivation & deportment supplanted pipe smoking worsted jacketed toffs from architecture, who like the Victorians & in the 1920s & 1930s had done very well & without anyone’s permission thank you very much in inventing, say a vernacular cottage type These, along with the yet to be invented planners ruined the country. Let loose on something they could never understand England became bricked over. Is it any wonder that whenever one is searching the Internet whether by accident or design there is no information available on large chunks of history? ** The appropriate part of George Orwell’s 1984 must have been dead right. Beware of journalists though. It was them guarding their Monday morning prerogative of coming up with some newsworthy news that suffocated & strangled worthy & perhaps revolutionary information from college pamphlets. Why did we have to wait 50 years to find out from TV broadcasts from the Open University that Cromer was all about light, that the period was the Flanders one & the huge brown hills beyond are indeed one big glacial dump? Unequivocally, ‘Coast’ the TV series was a milestone in honouring the BBC brief of living up to the original charter of ‘Entertaining, Informing & Educating’ & after all what’s wrong with hearing people pronouncing things properly in a variety of standard accents? The OU did this by inventing the geographer journalist flourishing behind the colour camera & able to afford £1000 an hour helicopter flights. Would you want to go to Cromer now though where the out of season resort pier once was un-peopled, now crowded with Peckham Rye types dropping their ‘aches’ into the flooding sea?
Alphaville The English city of the future. A pamphlet. Coventry has an inner ring road very near the centre, an original shopping centre by Sir Basil (Urwin) Spence & one of the finest new transport museums at the level of Berlin, Muenchen & Beaulieu. The canal leaves the very centre of the city and joins the network with reminders that families lived from the canal. Nottingham’s inner ring road is a lozenge dictated by the railway line & Gloucester has a network of carriageways which overwhelm the city. In the White Heat of Technology & in drawings by Le Corbusier. The car was not meant to be a noisy polluting nightmare child killer. Now the need to get into the mind of the drivers & turn the car round. In the North East of England they were all supposed to have jet packs & helicopters by 1990 which was once the future. Why was the pedestrian & cyclist so brutally & universally ignored? Commonly in the early 1960s local boys guarded their streets with violence & chasing from strange boys. A council estate boy could not be expected to carry around a Maynard Keynes type macro-economic view. He had the mindset of the scavenging itinerant tribal hunter gatherer whereas Lancing college had intercepted this, these were less ornamented, less well mannered than Oetztal man & would be less welcome at an Edwardian dinner party off the Holloway Road. These mindsets & physcograms, are deterministic & steer the success or otherwise of ideas about Urbanus. Loosening their tribal shackles & instincts & set against each other by the influences of the spiritualty, stratified into workmen & fore men the seeds of their own destruction were sewn into communities & doomed them. A watered down involuntary Protestantism, with a hint or whiff of chapel, aspiring families, protected by ‘blobs’, ‘residual income’, driven away by vermin & pleurisy would now be heading down past Houghton-le-Spring to Weston-Super-Mare in the Vander Plas. Factory owners spent the profits in Wallingford, Banstead & Norbury Junction not Jarrow, Hebburn & Felling. The creepy aspirations of the Bartram’s would mean they would unashamedly ‘join the masons’ rendering them unable speak to their catholic labouring neighbours, the die cast way of life was formed on Roman lines & every generation, as they say, has it’s slaves. Not co-operating with this scheme of things meant not having holidays, & sometimes real poverty. The Bartrams could not have existed in the Bronze Age. In times of war the fit would have grab a spear from the fence, leaving obviously a gap in the fence. Their son, an electrical engineer could not have pleaded having working for another tribe down south & that actually as Reyrolles was taken over by the General Electrical Company they were off to Alderney in a coral on a fishing trip. (Kayaks, boats & ships were the Ka of the Bronze Age). How far south would their snooty daughter have got if she had fallen out with the tribal warriors? Tarmac was way over the horizon & roman roads overgrown. Social Betterment The seriousness of this allegation against the Bartrams now may be ameliorated by the strong possibility that it may not have been their fault although this would be easily refuted by religious fanatics. Society had been forced to stratify not only but also by poor prospects, poor food, poor hygiene, damp, cockroaches, rats, disease & chronically poor housing (holding an umbrella over the baby). The Vanden Plas was a petrol driven four wheeled chariot on wings of desire out the hell of English industrial towns. Sickly as it may sound, as from Coventry to Kenilworth it was an escape to the idyllic rural setting for decent people who wanted to have a proper life & better themselves. But whist one or two went off to seek spirituality in the hills, more often it was reading the Daily Mail in the car park not getting out at all & leaving the engine on when it was cold. So why has this transformed into the petty game of being better off than the people next door?
Southampton in the Life of a Nation. And so to there: Southampton. The unfashionable city rarely or never gets a mention. The accent has classy Hampshire flavours from Twyford & Eastleigh & the country daftness associated with the west country. Yet Benny Hill* was from here, & due to the twin tides protected by the country within a country the Isle of Wight, King Canute almost certainly commanded the sea to retreat back just to the east on the Saxon Shore. The boats & ships could be floated in twice to the dry docks. The balding middle aged man from Coventry sitting next to J B Priestly in the back of a Scammel bus was speculatively heading for ‘opportunities’ in Southampton in the very front few pages of the book. Hill’s birthplace was described in full by J B Priestly when the uniqueness of English towns & cities was there to be seen. Only Mansfield, Hove & Lincoln and maybe Oxford and Cambridge today could be vaguely described as different. ( Maybe Ely but reader, how different is your town? Is there a big shark diving through your roof?) Retail devastated the English town & Zaha Hadid was not involved and nor was, in praise of a higher being, Wayne Hemmingway. Huge profits are made obviously remotely and the big buildings of the day are not Zeppelin Halls but Adidas distribution centres in places like Salford. The Arndale centre cannot be got rid of because of weak structure plans & deceased attachments. Gloucester, a city of a cross lost a whole quarter in the 1960’s surrendering the cattle market and real links & views out to the surrounding hills. No one could have given a f**k in 1947 if it flooded or not. The immovable of Hereford & Gloucester were the greatest prize of the 15th century due to their protected position in the impenetrable south west heartland of England. Tewksbury is at the confluence of the Seven & Avon. The spiralling spread of indeterminable language left me dazed & confused. Lewis Mumford made up much of his book The City in History but it was thrilling. * Benny Hill was far from a hero in terms of life in cities, featuring in the vaudavillisation of TV Circling Vulture Often I am just going round in circles. I am not alone in this though. It is rather frightening to see yourself in a mirror behind you a reflection of a copy of you shaving and wondering which was the left hand. The Image was different enough to make me think it wasn’t me. Douglas Hofstadter told me recently it wasn’t! As a child in the North East of England the first school was a corrugated set of huts. A black man, the only one in the entire region befriended me, had a broad ‘step & fetchit’ smile and was not after me. He just liked me more than he did the other children. When the school moved to the new St. Mary’s he stood there doing the finishing touches to the circular flower bed and when I was addressed ran away embarrassed my friends would think I knew a black man. But it was my first circular building. Geordie children & German professors refer to the Sorkel & somewhere there there must be a common root. As the tourists sorkel round the Mecca bingo in Newark which looks deliberately like a Mosque because of exotic innuendo. They circle round the real Mecca and round St. Paul’s which is a tremendous amount of Portland stone now missing from Portland Bill. This pattern is similar to Indian braves circling overturned wagons and the tourists often are happy at what they saw. You never see tourists walking away en mess moaning. In the 1950s it was good enough for a young lass to push the bairn around in a pram. In West Bridgford now they ram through the window of Iceland in 4B2s, grab a packet of king prawns & tell the decrepit & sad cashier to "f*ck off" on the way out.
* Jarrow Metro Station sculpture ** Informationsheft GB, Alphaville, Westworld, Gerard Depiadier early avante garde films, property ownership in Gloucester & generally te 1970’s, before the internet *** Center Start Place Nouvelle, Furnighausplantechnisdormring or SaucerCupPlateginandtechtonictheorumgefunk
Vince Rea’s Dog (not lovely Sulivan, now burried in Jarrow Cemetary!) but the one in Jarrow Metro) has no connection with the decline of Britain whose nadir went un-noticed in the run down Regency villas, mews & side streets of Gloucester of the 1970’s. However for anyone who can visualise a realistic dog shape being formed with a welding torch & a faded group picture including Ellen Wilkinson minutes before setting off on the Jarrow March 1933, Vince Rea’s Dog* is not only emblematic of just how bad building was in the 1960s, but what was good & bad in public sculpture in the 1970’s. Before TV only readers of JB Priestley’s An English Journey or Fredric Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Classes or even Charles Dickens passing through Seven Dials, could visualise how bad things were in England. Early TV interviews in Coventry for example show a shy downtrodden people trying to talk posh like the managers in Kenilworth & feared of saying anything which might force the attentions of policeman & detectives. When the country did not want Churchill anymore in about 1955, ordinary people, often almost without learning, culture, travel, education, breeding, cultivation & deportment supplanted pipe smoking worsted jacketed toffs from architecture, who like the Victorians & in the 1920s & 1930s had done very well & without anyone’s permission thank you very much in inventing, say a vernacular cottage type These, along with the yet to be invented planners ruined the country. Let loose on something they could never understand England became bricked over. Is it any wonder that whenever one is searching the Internet whether by accident or design there is no information available on large chunks of history? ** The appropriate part of George Orwell’s 1984 must have been dead right. Beware of journalists though. It was them guarding their Monday morning prerogative of coming up with some newsworthy news that suffocated & strangled worthy & perhaps revolutionary information from college pamphlets. Why did we have to wait 50 years to find out from TV broadcasts from the Open University that Cromer was all about light, that the period was the Flanders one & the huge brown hills beyond are indeed one big glacial dump? Unequivocally, ‘Coast’ the TV series was a milestone in honouring the BBC brief of living up to the original charter of ‘Entertaining, Informing & Educating’ & after all what’s wrong with hearing people pronouncing things properly in a variety of standard accents? The OU did this by inventing the geographer journalist flourishing behind the colour camera & able to afford £1000 an hour helicopter flights. Would you want to go to Cromer now though where the out of season resort pier once was un-peopled, now crowded with Peckham Rye types dropping their ‘aches’ into the flooding sea?
Alphaville The English city of the future. A pamphlet. Coventry has an inner ring road very near the centre, an original shopping centre by Sir Basil (Urwin) Spence & one of the finest new transport museums at the level of Berlin, Muenchen & Beaulieu. The canal leaves the very centre of the city and joins the network with reminders that families lived from the canal. Nottingham’s inner ring road is a lozenge dictated by the railway line & Gloucester has a network of carriageways which overwhelm the city. In the White Heat of Technology & in drawings by Le Corbusier. The car was not meant to be a noisy polluting nightmare child killer. Now the need to get into the mind of the drivers & turn the car round. In the North East of England they were all supposed to have jet packs & helicopters by 1990 which was once the future. Why was the pedestrian & cyclist so brutally & universally ignored? Commonly in the early 1960s local boys guarded their streets with violence & chasing from strange boys. A council estate boy could not be expected to carry around a Maynard Keynes type macro-economic view. He had the mindset of the scavenging itinerant tribal hunter gatherer whereas Lancing college had intercepted this, these were less ornamented, less well mannered than Oetztal man & would be less welcome at an Edwardian dinner party off the Holloway Road. These mindsets & physcograms, are deterministic & steer the success or otherwise of ideas about Urbanus. Loosening their tribal shackles & instincts & set against each other by the influences of the spiritualty, stratified into workmen & fore men the seeds of their own destruction were sewn into communities & doomed them. A watered down involuntary Protestantism, with a hint or whiff of chapel, aspiring families, protected by ‘blobs’, ‘residual income’, driven away by vermin & pleurisy would now be heading down past Houghton-le-Spring to Weston-Super-Mare in the Vander Plas. Factory owners spent the profits in Wallingford, Banstead & Norbury Junction not Jarrow, Hebburn & Felling. The creepy aspirations of the Bartram’s would mean they would unashamedly ‘join the masons’ rendering them unable speak to their catholic labouring neighbours, the die cast way of life was formed on Roman lines & every generation, as they say, has it’s slaves. Not co-operating with this scheme of things meant not having holidays, & sometimes real poverty. The Bartrams could not have existed in the Bronze Age. In times of war the fit would have grab a spear from the fence, leaving obviously a gap in the fence. Their son, an electrical engineer could not have pleaded having working for another tribe down south & that actually as Reyrolles was taken over by the General Electrical Company they were off to Alderney in a coral on a fishing trip. (Kayaks, boats & ships were the Ka of the Bronze Age). How far south would their snooty daughter have got if she had fallen out with the tribal warriors? Tarmac was way over the horizon & roman roads overgrown. Social Betterment The seriousness of this allegation against the Bartrams now may be ameliorated by the strong possibility that it may not have been their fault although this would be easily refuted by religious fanatics. Society had been forced to stratify not only but also by poor prospects, poor food, poor hygiene, damp, cockroaches, rats, disease & chronically poor housing (holding an umbrella over the baby). The Vanden Plas was a petrol driven four wheeled chariot on wings of desire out the hell of English industrial towns. Sickly as it may sound, as from Coventry to Kenilworth it was an escape to the idyllic rural setting for decent people who wanted to have a proper life & better themselves. But whist one or two went off to seek spirituality in the hills, more often it was reading the Daily Mail in the car park not getting out at all & leaving the engine on when it was cold. So why has this transformed into the petty game of being better off than the people next door?
Southampton in the Life of a Nation. And so to there: Southampton. The unfashionable city rarely or never gets a mention. The accent has classy Hampshire flavours from Twyford & Eastleigh & the country daftness associated with the west country. Yet Benny Hill* was from here, & due to the twin tides protected by the country within a country the Isle of Wight, King Canute almost certainly commanded the sea to retreat back just to the east on the Saxon Shore. The boats & ships could be floated in twice to the dry docks. The balding middle aged man from Coventry sitting next to J B Priestly in the back of a Scammel bus was speculatively heading for ‘opportunities’ in Southampton in the very front few pages of the book. Hill’s birthplace was described in full by J B Priestly when the uniqueness of English towns & cities was there to be seen. Only Mansfield, Hove & Lincoln and maybe Oxford and Cambridge today could be vaguely described as different. ( Maybe Ely but reader, how different is your town? Is there a big shark diving through your roof?) Retail devastated the English town & Zaha Hadid was not involved and nor was, in praise of a higher being, Wayne Hemmingway. Huge profits are made obviously remotely and the big buildings of the day are not Zeppelin Halls but Adidas distribution centres in places like Salford. The Arndale centre cannot be got rid of because of weak structure plans & deceased attachments. Gloucester, a city of a cross lost a whole quarter in the 1960’s surrendering the cattle market and real links & views out to the surrounding hills. No one could have given a f**k in 1947 if it flooded or not. The immovable of Hereford & Gloucester were the greatest prize of the 15th century due to their protected position in the impenetrable south west heartland of England. Tewksbury is at the confluence of the Seven & Avon. The spiralling spread of indeterminable language left me dazed & confused. Lewis Mumford made up much of his book The City in History but it was thrilling. * Benny Hill was far from a hero in terms of life in cities, featuring in the vaudavillisation of TV Circling Vulture Often I am just going round in circles. I am not alone in this though. It is rather frightening to see yourself in a mirror behind you a reflection of a copy of you shaving and wondering which was the left hand. The Image was different enough to make me think it wasn’t me. Douglas Hofstadter told me recently it wasn’t! As a child in the North East of England the first school was a corrugated set of huts. A black man, the only one in the entire region befriended me, had a broad ‘step & fetchit’ smile and was not after me. He just liked me more than he did the other children. When the school moved to the new St. Mary’s he stood there doing the finishing touches to the circular flower bed and when I was addressed ran away embarrassed my friends would think I knew a black man. But it was my first circular building. Geordie children & German professors refer to the Sorkel & somewhere there there must be a common root. As the tourists sorkel round the Mecca bingo in Newark which looks deliberately like a Mosque because of exotic innuendo. They circle round the real Mecca and round St. Paul’s which is a tremendous amount of Portland stone now missing from Portland Bill. This pattern is similar to Indian braves circling overturned wagons and the tourists often are happy at what they saw. You never see tourists walking away en mess moaning. In the 1950s it was good enough for a young lass to push the bairn around in a pram. In West Bridgford now they ram through the window of Iceland in 4B2s, grab a packet of king prawns & tell the decrepit & sad cashier to "f*ck off" on the way out.
* Jarrow Metro Station sculpture ** Informationsheft GB, Alphaville, Westworld, Gerard Depiadier early avante garde films, property ownership in Gloucester & generally te 1970’s, before the internet *** Center Start Place Nouvelle, Furnighausplantechnisdormring or SaucerCupPlateginandtechtonictheorumgefunk
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling v Blaydon
Jarrow - In Black and White
Jarrow appears in history when Hebburn did not. Stan Laurel, proud of his Tyneside origins, wrote it as Hepburn. Gywr might have been a tribe from the Fens. In industrial times the running club was Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling. Between 1963 and 1973: This is what I remember: Jarrow had two cinemas, one was the Regal. The Colman's-like Tea Room. The stairs over Jarrow station. Soot black yet to be cleaned stonework in Newcastle. The Station Hotel. Turning under the railway viaduct in to Albert Road on the No 16 bus. The cold winter of 1963. The Tyne Pedestrian Tunnel wooden stairs. Fat Man Squeeze. The Huts. Franco Soave chip shop. The Neon. The Ex-Serviceman’s Club. Trams in South Shields. Stan Mallam. Jarrow steelworks. The Greyhound. The Ben Lomond. Club Franchi. Meanwhile Bill Brandt visited Jarrow and Kylie Minogue spent her gap year working Arndale Arcade flower shop. Valhalla.
Jarrow appears in history when Hebburn did not. Stan Laurel, proud of his Tyneside origins, wrote it as Hepburn. Gywr might have been a tribe from the Fens. In industrial times the running club was Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling. Between 1963 and 1973: This is what I remember: Jarrow had two cinemas, one was the Regal. The Colman's-like Tea Room. The stairs over Jarrow station. Soot black yet to be cleaned stonework in Newcastle. The Station Hotel. Turning under the railway viaduct in to Albert Road on the No 16 bus. The cold winter of 1963. The Tyne Pedestrian Tunnel wooden stairs. Fat Man Squeeze. The Huts. Franco Soave chip shop. The Neon. The Ex-Serviceman’s Club. Trams in South Shields. Stan Mallam. Jarrow steelworks. The Greyhound. The Ben Lomond. Club Franchi. Meanwhile Bill Brandt visited Jarrow and Kylie Minogue spent her gap year working Arndale Arcade flower shop. Valhalla.
Jarrow - Haway Man! JB Priestley Give Ower Man!
Jarrow: extract from English Journey by JB Priestley, 1934
There is a plaque to JB Priestley in Deal, Kent
"The most remarkable giant liner in the world is probably the
Mauretania. for she is nearly thirty years old and is still one of the
fastest vessels afloat. Her record, both for speed and safety, is
superb. We are proud of her. Now the Mauretania was launched at
Wallsend, just across the river from Jarrow; and she has lasted
longer than Jarrow. She is still alive and throbbing, but Jarrow is
dead.
As a real town, a piece of urban civilisation, Jarrow can never have
been alive. There is easily more comfort and luxury on one deck of
the Mauretania than there can ever have been at any time in Jarrow,
which even at its best, when everybody was working in it, must
obviously have been a mean little conglomeration of narrow
monotonous streets of stunted and ugly houses, a barracks
cynically put together so that shipbuilding workers could get some
food and sleep between shifts. Anything – strange as it may seem
– appears to have been good enough for the men who could build
ships like the Mauretania. But in those days, at least they were
working.
Now Jarrow is a derelict town. I had seen nothing like it since the
war. I put a derelict shipbuilding town into Wonder Hero and called
it Slakeby. Some people thought I overdid it a little in my Slakeby
chapter. I assure those people that the reality of Jarrow is far worse
than anything I imagined for Slakeby. It far outran any grim
expectations of mine. My guide-book devotes one short sentence to
Jarrow: "A busy town (35,590 inhabitants), has large ironworks and
shipbuilding yards." It is time this was amended into "an idle and
ruined town (35,590 inhabitants, wondering what is to become of
them), had large ironworks and can still show what is left of
shipbuilding yards.'
The Venerable Bede spent part of his life in this neighbourhood.
He would be astonished at the progress it has made since his
time, when the river ran, a clear stream, through a green valley.
There is no escape anywhere in Jarrow from its prevailing misery,
for it is entirely a working-class town. One little street may be rather
more wretched than another, but to the outsider they all look alike.
One out of every two shops appeared to be permanently closed.
Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of
them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked
as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men
wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a
distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its
people, would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow
had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was
now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that
in theory this town was as good as any other, and that its
inhabitants were not criminals but citizens with votes. The only
cheerful sight I saw there was a game of Follow-my-Ieader that was
being played by seven small children. But what leader can the rest
of them follow?
After a glimpse of the river-front, that is, of tumble-down sheds,
rotting piles, coal dust and mud, we landed in Hebburn, where we
pursued, in vain, another man we wanted. Hebburn is another
completely working-class town. It is built on the same mean
proletarian scale as Jarrow. It appeared to be even poorer than its
neighbour. You felt that there was nothing in the whole place worth
a five-pound note. It looked as much like an ordinary town of that
size as a dust-bin looks like a drawing-room. Here again, idle men
– and not unemployable casual labourers but skilled men – hung
about the streets, waiting for Doomsday.
There is a plaque to JB Priestley in Deal, Kent
"The most remarkable giant liner in the world is probably the
Mauretania. for she is nearly thirty years old and is still one of the
fastest vessels afloat. Her record, both for speed and safety, is
superb. We are proud of her. Now the Mauretania was launched at
Wallsend, just across the river from Jarrow; and she has lasted
longer than Jarrow. She is still alive and throbbing, but Jarrow is
dead.
As a real town, a piece of urban civilisation, Jarrow can never have
been alive. There is easily more comfort and luxury on one deck of
the Mauretania than there can ever have been at any time in Jarrow,
which even at its best, when everybody was working in it, must
obviously have been a mean little conglomeration of narrow
monotonous streets of stunted and ugly houses, a barracks
cynically put together so that shipbuilding workers could get some
food and sleep between shifts. Anything – strange as it may seem
– appears to have been good enough for the men who could build
ships like the Mauretania. But in those days, at least they were
working.
Now Jarrow is a derelict town. I had seen nothing like it since the
war. I put a derelict shipbuilding town into Wonder Hero and called
it Slakeby. Some people thought I overdid it a little in my Slakeby
chapter. I assure those people that the reality of Jarrow is far worse
than anything I imagined for Slakeby. It far outran any grim
expectations of mine. My guide-book devotes one short sentence to
Jarrow: "A busy town (35,590 inhabitants), has large ironworks and
shipbuilding yards." It is time this was amended into "an idle and
ruined town (35,590 inhabitants, wondering what is to become of
them), had large ironworks and can still show what is left of
shipbuilding yards.'
The Venerable Bede spent part of his life in this neighbourhood.
He would be astonished at the progress it has made since his
time, when the river ran, a clear stream, through a green valley.
There is no escape anywhere in Jarrow from its prevailing misery,
for it is entirely a working-class town. One little street may be rather
more wretched than another, but to the outsider they all look alike.
One out of every two shops appeared to be permanently closed.
Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of
them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked
as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men
wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a
distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its
people, would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow
had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was
now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that
in theory this town was as good as any other, and that its
inhabitants were not criminals but citizens with votes. The only
cheerful sight I saw there was a game of Follow-my-Ieader that was
being played by seven small children. But what leader can the rest
of them follow?
After a glimpse of the river-front, that is, of tumble-down sheds,
rotting piles, coal dust and mud, we landed in Hebburn, where we
pursued, in vain, another man we wanted. Hebburn is another
completely working-class town. It is built on the same mean
proletarian scale as Jarrow. It appeared to be even poorer than its
neighbour. You felt that there was nothing in the whole place worth
a five-pound note. It looked as much like an ordinary town of that
size as a dust-bin looks like a drawing-room. Here again, idle men
– and not unemployable casual labourers but skilled men – hung
about the streets, waiting for Doomsday.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Klein Englander
Little Englander
"Sign on, sign on, with no hope in your heart and you'll never work again."
Chelsea FC Chant against Liverpool.
"Sign on, sign on, with no hope in your heart and you'll never work again."
Chelsea FC Chant against Liverpool.
Hawthorn Leslies Shipyard, Hebburn circa1974
Hawthorn Leslies Shipyard, Hebburn. c1974
"Everyone Worked in unison building ships with Lads from Jarrow and Hebburn." c1974
versus
"Working on the London Underground with European Collegues." c2008
"Workers often described as resources, are the lowest scum & this taught to managers. All what’s needed to upset a team is a prima donna on her rags who don’t hardly know no English, let alone synonyms, idioms, colloquial speech or misinformation. They think this low life form is only interested in the treadmill rewards of a weekly fix of money, are mercenary & don’t have pride in their work. This is because the European middle classes are unprincipled & after all each generation has its slaves."
"Everyone Worked in unison building ships with Lads from Jarrow and Hebburn." c1974
versus
"Working on the London Underground with European Collegues." c2008
"Workers often described as resources, are the lowest scum & this taught to managers. All what’s needed to upset a team is a prima donna on her rags who don’t hardly know no English, let alone synonyms, idioms, colloquial speech or misinformation. They think this low life form is only interested in the treadmill rewards of a weekly fix of money, are mercenary & don’t have pride in their work. This is because the European middle classes are unprincipled & after all each generation has its slaves."
Monday, February 9, 2009
Heat 1995
Eady: You travel a lot? Neil McCauley: Yeah. Eady: Traveling makes you lonely? Neil McCauley: I'm alone, I am not lonely.
Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling - Sandra Cuskin Cv
Despite Having the Highest Teenage Pregnancy
There are some talented people in the North East
Sandra CUSKIN resident of Pelaw
Middle Farm, Felling, Tyne and Wear NE10 8XQ
Telephone 0191 428 2379 Mobile 07949857609 sandra.cuskin@live.com
ARCHITECTURAL ARTIST
Interests: Japanese 3D Imaging, Housing, Acting, Cycling, Swimming, Fell Running, Seventies Technology, Charity Work, Modelling (Solid and Fashion!)
DOB: 1st May, 1987 Age 21
Education
Durham High School for Girls Junior House,
Farewell Hall,
Durham DH1 3TB
La Sagesse
La Sagesse School, North Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 3RJ The Aspen Institute1000 North Third StreetAspen, Colorado 81611
The Business and Society Program
University of WestminsterHeadquarters Building, 309 Regent Street,London W1B 2UW, U
School of Informatics
BSc Honours Computer Visualisation
Skills
Fashion modelling, Communications, Business , IT and Graphic Visualisation Packages.
Objectives: SAVE THE PLANET
Employment History
June 2008-October 2008
Pelaw Half Way. Underage Pregnancy Mobilization Unit.
Nov 2007 - February 2008
Live theatre, Broad Chair, Quayside, Newcastle, NE1 3DQ
Bar/Reception
July 2007 - Nov 2007
Ministry of Justice. Outward Bound Coniston Borstal
March 2007 - July 2007
References: AM Models Agency 0191 233 1420
There are some talented people in the North East
Sandra CUSKIN resident of Pelaw
Middle Farm, Felling, Tyne and Wear NE10 8XQ
Telephone 0191 428 2379 Mobile 07949857609 sandra.cuskin@live.com
ARCHITECTURAL ARTIST
Interests: Japanese 3D Imaging, Housing, Acting, Cycling, Swimming, Fell Running, Seventies Technology, Charity Work, Modelling (Solid and Fashion!)
DOB: 1st May, 1987 Age 21
Education
Durham High School for Girls Junior House,
Farewell Hall,
Durham DH1 3TB
La Sagesse
La Sagesse School, North Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 3RJ The Aspen Institute1000 North Third StreetAspen, Colorado 81611
The Business and Society Program
University of WestminsterHeadquarters Building, 309 Regent Street,London W1B 2UW, U
School of Informatics
BSc Honours Computer Visualisation
Skills
Fashion modelling, Communications, Business , IT and Graphic Visualisation Packages.
Objectives: SAVE THE PLANET
Employment History
June 2008-October 2008
Pelaw Half Way. Underage Pregnancy Mobilization Unit.
Nov 2007 - February 2008
Live theatre, Broad Chair, Quayside, Newcastle, NE1 3DQ
Bar/Reception
July 2007 - Nov 2007
Ministry of Justice. Outward Bound Coniston Borstal
March 2007 - July 2007
References: AM Models Agency 0191 233 1420
Hebburn - Graham Lewis
Wire
"I composed the main theme in the autumn of 1978, during a sound check at legendary Berlin club SO36."
"I composed the main theme in the autumn of 1978, during a sound check at legendary Berlin club SO36."
Sunday, February 8, 2009
100 Common English Words
100 Common English Words
the be to of and a in that have I it for not on with he as you do at this but his by from they we say her she
or an will my one all would there their what so up out if about who get which go me when make can like time no
just him know take people into year your good some could them see other than then now look only come its over
think also back after use two how our work first well way even new want because any these give day most us
the be to of and a in that have I it for not on with he as you do at this but his by from they we say her she
or an will my one all would there their what so up out if about who get which go me when make can like time no
just him know take people into year your good some could them see other than then now look only come its over
think also back after use two how our work first well way even new want because any these give day most us
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Jarrow R Us
Jarrow - Phones 4 U
http://www.visit4info.com/advert/Phones-4-U-Pub-Quiz-Phones-4-U-Mobile-Phones/17343
The Pub Quizz - Add - The man with the head bandage is a Jarrow Actor
http://www.visit4info.com/advert/Phones-4-U-Pub-Quiz-Phones-4-U-Mobile-Phones/17343
The Pub Quizz - Add - The man with the head bandage is a Jarrow Actor
Monday, February 2, 2009
Common Geordie Slang
A Aad: Old Aad Wife Aakward: Awkward Aall: All Agyen: Again Ahint: Behind Alang: Along Ald: Alreet: Alright Amang: Among: I - Axe: Aye: Yes B Baccy: Tobacco Bairn: A child Bait: Food taken to work Bank: A hill Barney: Barnard Castle Beck: Beor: Beer Beuk: A book Bishop: Bishop Auckland Blaa: Blow Blaa Oot: Heavy drinking session Black and White: A Newcastle United football club supporter Blaydon Races: National Anthem of Tyneside Boggle: A ghost or spectre. Bonny: Beautiful: Broon: Brown C Caa': Call Cam: Came Canny: A Versatile word. Canny old soul - a nice old person. Canny good Canny hard - very good or very tough. Canny job - a good job. Chare: A narrow alley in Newcastle Chorch: Church Claes: Clothes - Anglo-Saxon Clag: Stick Clarts: Dirt or mud Clarty: Dirty Clivvor: Clever Cloot: Coo: A cow Craa: Crow Crack: Croggy: To give a passenger a ride on the crossbar or back of a bicylce Croon: Crown Cuddy: A small horse or St. Cuthbert Cushat: A pigeon D Da: Dad - father Darlo: Darlington Dede: Dead Dee: Do Deed: Dead Deil: The devil Divvent: Do not - ie Divvent dee that Dodd: A fox Dog: Doon: Down Droon: Drown Dunsh: Thump E Eee: Eye F Faa: To Fettle: Good condition Force: Waterfall Fower: Four G Gaumless: Stupid or useless Gadgie: An old man Gallusses: Braces Gan: Go from the Anglo Saxon word for go. Gannin: Going Ganzie: A jumper/sweater Gill: A ravine Give: Given Giveower: Give over Gowk: A fool Granda: Grandfather H Haad: Hold Hadaway: Get away Haipeth: Half Penny Hanky: Handkerchief Haugh: Pronounced Hoff or Harf - a meadow land: Hinny: Honey - a term of endearment. Hoos: House Hope: A side valley in the dales of Northumberland and Durham for example Hedleyhope. Hoppings: A fair. The Toon Moor Hoppings are held in Newcastle. Howay: Come on - Howay or H'way the Lads is chanted at football matches. Hoy: Throw Hunkers: Sitting on haunches Hyem: Home, a word of Scandinavian origin I I Says: I Said Ivvor: Ever J Jarra: Jarrow Joon: June. K Keek: To peep Keel: A boat. Ket: A sweet or something that is nice Kidda: A term of endearment. Knaa: Know L Laa: Low or hill Lads: Blokes H'way the Lads hear at Newcastle and Sunderland football grounds. Laik: To play Lang: Long - Anglo Saxon word. Larn: Learn: Lass: A woman or young girl: Law: A hill Leazes: Pasture land belonging to a town Ling: Heather Linn: Waterfall in Weardale or Northumberland Lonnen: A lane Lop: A flea Lough: Lakes in Northumberland are called Loughs pronounced Loff M Ma: Mother Mac': Make Mac' N' Tac: A native of County Durham or Sunderland see Mackem Mackem: A native of Sunderland. 'We mackem, ye tackem' Mags: Magpies - a Sunderland football club supporters' term for a Newcastle United fan. Magpies: Nickname for Newcastle United Football Club. Mair: More Man: Frequently used at the end of a sentence Divvent dee that man, howay man - even when talking to a woman. Marra: A friend or workmate particularly in the collieries Mazer: An eccentric Mebbees: May be or Perhaps Midden: Dung heap Missus: The Missus - the wife N Nah: No Neenth: Ninth. Nee: No - as in Nee good luck but not as a word on its own. Neet: Night. Neuk: Nook Nigh: Near No Place: A village in County Durham Nyem: Name O Oot: Out Ower: Over P Pet: A term of endearment. Peth: A road up a hill Pitmatic: The dialect of County Durham as once spoken by coal miners. Pity Me: A village in County Durham Ploat: To pluck feathers Poliss: Policeman R Raa: Row Red and White: A Sunderland football club supporter Reet: Right S Sackless: Stupid or hopeless Sand Shoes: Gym Shoes Sang: A song Sark: A shirt Segger: A nickname for the town of Sacriston Sel': Self Shoot: Shout Singing Hinnie: A kind of cake Slake: Mud flat Snaa: Snow Sneck: The latch on a door Sooth: South Sparra: A sparrow, see also spuggy Spelk: A splinter Spuggy: A sparrow Staithes: A pier for loading coal onto ships Stane: Stone Stob: A stump or post Stottie: A kind of flat cake-like bread Strang: Strong T Tab: A cigarette Tak': Take Tatie: Potato Te': To Telt: Told Teem: Pour Thowt: Thought. Toon: Town Toon Army: Newcastle United football fans Tret: Treated Tyeuk: Took Tyke: A Yorkshireman U Up: Us: Me V Vennel: A narrow ally in Durham W Wag: Playing the wag is playing truant Wark: Work Wes: Was Wey: As in Wey-Aye See Why-Aye Whe ?: Who ? Whisht !: Be quiet Why-Aye: Why of course - Why-Aye man. Wi' : With Wife: A woman, whether married or not. Wife was used in this sense by the Anglo-Saxons Wiv: With Wor: Wor Lass means our missus, when a chap is referring to his wife. Wor is the Anglo-Saxon word oor meaning Our the w has crept into speech naturally. Worm: A dragon Wot Cheor: Hello - a greeting Wrang: Incorrect Wynd: A narrow street in Yarm Y Ye: You or your. Yem: Home Yen: One Yersel': Yourself
Charity?
Is Charity is a middle class racket?
Charity is a middle class racket. Oxfam, which now have branched out to Berlin only employ middle class people in their outlets. The shop in St. Marylebone Lane, sold me a poetry anthology, albeit in immaculate condition, for more than the original price of £2 10s, some 45 years after printing. Clothes and books are absurdly overpriced, often equivalent to new commercial prices. The West Bridgford shop employs old middle class ladies who are disdainful at best, and the Hockley, Nottingham branch has a younger set who use the shop as a disco. Of course, all are armed with language skills and arrogance and can swiftly disarm a customer with well chosen words.
Facilitated by female use of language, which is euphemistic and vague by default, but which is exploited by charity managers and staff, who whilst being nice personally, preclude lower class involvement, except in handing over cash, clothes and books.
Acting independently, the educated will siphon off cash for themselves, or when on charitable deeds abroad, which invariably are their typical sunny holiday hot spots, like Kerala, will treat these trips like holidays, and say take only a cursory glance at the rabid dogs the money was for.
Ask, however what the money was spent on, dirty looks are cast, and evasive language quickly deployed. The middle classes have immediate access to food, clothes and shelter from charity shops.
My first experience of what is essentially theft, was in the early 1970s, when a friends younger brother, now a solicitor in Leeds and privately educated in Sunderland, pilfered from his charity bingo numbers which he hawked around Pelaw. Then in 2003 in Kerala, India, my posh hotel neighbour for a month , a wealthy woman from Oxford allegedly helping dogs with hydrophobia, who never left her room unless for sunbathing, apart from one meeting in the capital Trivandrum, in a motorised rickshaw hired for the day.
Charity is now being hijacked in the snootier parts of town, by Waitrose, who in their new Newcastle store have a choice several charities, all in their own territory of Jesmond. Similarly, in Gloucester Road, the benefactors are fee paying schools in Kensington. Their check out staff are forced to force this on their customers.
The only deserving charities are those helping old people, a growing social group, but who are targeted also for their money. Cynical as one might be tempted to be about this charity, the old people of the country are deserving of charity and the more organised the better.
There is nothing worse than being old, and nothing more unkind than neglecting them. Care for the old makes a civilisation civilized.
“If I ever forget my NI number that will mean I have lost my memory”
The English have learnt to exploit each other at all levels and have exported this to America, Australia and elsewhere. This is enforced by ‘mind your own business’ and through secretly using training, knowledge and information to promote oneself and autonomous groups. Nottingham, Durham and Southampton universities have built universities for foreign students mainly, and even have whole universities in holiday locations like Malaysia. Astute and aloof these people did not ask anyone if they could.
Tax Credits are a Halloween method of extracting money and tributes from the poor.
There will shortly be a downward charm offensive launched by the middle classes, like a hippy joining a worker’s colony. Apparently we will be all in this together.
Charity is a middle class racket. Oxfam, which now have branched out to Berlin only employ middle class people in their outlets. The shop in St. Marylebone Lane, sold me a poetry anthology, albeit in immaculate condition, for more than the original price of £2 10s, some 45 years after printing. Clothes and books are absurdly overpriced, often equivalent to new commercial prices. The West Bridgford shop employs old middle class ladies who are disdainful at best, and the Hockley, Nottingham branch has a younger set who use the shop as a disco. Of course, all are armed with language skills and arrogance and can swiftly disarm a customer with well chosen words.
Facilitated by female use of language, which is euphemistic and vague by default, but which is exploited by charity managers and staff, who whilst being nice personally, preclude lower class involvement, except in handing over cash, clothes and books.
Acting independently, the educated will siphon off cash for themselves, or when on charitable deeds abroad, which invariably are their typical sunny holiday hot spots, like Kerala, will treat these trips like holidays, and say take only a cursory glance at the rabid dogs the money was for.
Ask, however what the money was spent on, dirty looks are cast, and evasive language quickly deployed. The middle classes have immediate access to food, clothes and shelter from charity shops.
My first experience of what is essentially theft, was in the early 1970s, when a friends younger brother, now a solicitor in Leeds and privately educated in Sunderland, pilfered from his charity bingo numbers which he hawked around Pelaw. Then in 2003 in Kerala, India, my posh hotel neighbour for a month , a wealthy woman from Oxford allegedly helping dogs with hydrophobia, who never left her room unless for sunbathing, apart from one meeting in the capital Trivandrum, in a motorised rickshaw hired for the day.
Charity is now being hijacked in the snootier parts of town, by Waitrose, who in their new Newcastle store have a choice several charities, all in their own territory of Jesmond. Similarly, in Gloucester Road, the benefactors are fee paying schools in Kensington. Their check out staff are forced to force this on their customers.
The only deserving charities are those helping old people, a growing social group, but who are targeted also for their money. Cynical as one might be tempted to be about this charity, the old people of the country are deserving of charity and the more organised the better.
There is nothing worse than being old, and nothing more unkind than neglecting them. Care for the old makes a civilisation civilized.
“If I ever forget my NI number that will mean I have lost my memory”
The English have learnt to exploit each other at all levels and have exported this to America, Australia and elsewhere. This is enforced by ‘mind your own business’ and through secretly using training, knowledge and information to promote oneself and autonomous groups. Nottingham, Durham and Southampton universities have built universities for foreign students mainly, and even have whole universities in holiday locations like Malaysia. Astute and aloof these people did not ask anyone if they could.
Tax Credits are a Halloween method of extracting money and tributes from the poor.
There will shortly be a downward charm offensive launched by the middle classes, like a hippy joining a worker’s colony. Apparently we will be all in this together.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Arran Drive
India and Pakistan – evil weapons sentries against each other – temperatures are like at boiling point, like. Ordering a curry the Bede Trading estate. Coriander not registering as a word. Dal neither. Had they been attracted to South Shields the way Norwegians and Scots to Canada and the Spanish to Mexico? A potato, which had achieved synchronous orbit deflects the warhead from Hyderabad on to a rice field. I wonder now if the Patak pickle factory in Lancashire is safe from missile attack. Up in Newcastle it is February 29th the North blanketed in snow turning my clothes line in to a fluffy white tube, but this estate will never look picturesque until the Great Northern Forest grows and no ‘human sets foot in it. On a slanted slip road in Recendyke, Tyne Dock a lorry driver is admiring some magazine in a lay-bye. The plot is simple – fragmented development innit? Durham is coated in a white dust like asbestos. Today snow unifies the region, optically, like. At Durham railway station heading for Darlington, Sunderland fans get in to Coach D heading for Charlton, unaware that a big sign saying "No chimps in Coach D please". An auld Blake rustles disarmingly his de rigueur Morison’s bag. These are library conditions – you can’t stop people talking. A single moment where a twilight storm animates the curtain and snow drifts in Arran Drive. Selfish urges will rebuild Liverpool with special culture wardens to calm traffic. In Poundbury hippies stroke their cars and use incense to calm traffic. Liverpool built in the ten years from 1830 needed rebuilding now. Like Newcastle Gateshead competing for the European City of Culture. Two brothers from the pit, get up and sing and we hoi them money. Magnesium from 20,000 feet under Saltburn. Snobby Foster’s Sage building on Gateshead Quaysides a "Weeyad shipe", like. "Kanna hava piisoff kike?" "Godiva little latté tavja?". Larty Fenwick would have talked something like that in Costa Coffee. Out on Steel Rigg I remember valley is thallium. Vandalia, Pangea and Gondwanaland. How did they know what these places were called?
The English seaside town – I kept gong there because this is my life – now! I knew as I visited Skegness my life was an act of passing. Transitory and Ephemeral. You can just see priest warriors, maybe single, heading up The Umbra river from Tyne or Rouen. "That’s Scunthorpe – lets go further up stream". Eventually in worsted cassocks they founded Fountains Abbey. The once beautiful Umbra is now Payne’s Grey. In creeks water creeps. On the train through to Cleethorpes through Scunthorpe I got a brief glimpse of the vast Humber Bridge, which was momentarily the size of two matchsticks. Passing over the Trent and shrinking peat fields whose area covered soggy flanks to the Ouse. The government had rescued them in the Guardian. Sand drifting over the new sea defence cycle paths of the Lincolnshire coast. A Lincoln man at the Battersea architect had told me of new paths, old concrete wrapped around The Wash, which he described as falsely as it turned out, Areas of Outstanding Natural Ugliness. In 1953, from Mapplethorpe then unguarded by the present high sea wall, a young policeman in a increasingly wild and raging twilight, phones to the south warning of an unusual high tide heading south. In a Trumpton sort of way this was how the message was passed on, odd since the water was to circumnavigate Norfolk and Suffolk, an Anglia of Marconi and radar. Real tragedy hit Canvey Island that night when newly settled immigrants from Holland carried their baby up and up in to the cold rafters only for water to fill the pram and take the child further on up to heaven. Mapplethorpe, easily England’s most unexplainable town. Ian Huntley crossed Lincolnshire to rendezvous with Maxine Carr. How geographic to meet half way in Uttoxeter. Then they crossed the vast county of vegetables to Soham just in Cambridgeshire. On the way a loud speaker shouted at me as I listened to aircraft 15 miles offshore bombing an orange target ship. At Skegness large outsized banana slides and big wheels loom a giant two inches just as they had at the Humber Estuary. The plastic prison of Butlins with a fairground silver Wuppertal hanging train. Vast underrated Lincolnshire. Then Essex.
Maplin - An airport was planned here but Concorde did not have the fuel range for NY JFK. The final station on a long journey from Liverpool Street, Clacton-on-Sea where houses are crosses between lean-to's and rabbit hutches line the modest sea wall to the south and this is clearly Gypsy country. The dykes worn out, old. Beyond Battlebridge at the head of the creek a vertical black grain store with a hoist and stranded boats petrified in the mud as if they didn’t make it. This inlet is 20 miles to Burnham-on-Crouch with the Essex boatyard beyond and the atomic power station beyond further long unwinding but going nowhere defences. Unless you have a boat that is – a boat to the resurrection. There are disused ferry landings, north and south. The rail floats across the marsh to Basildon, a new town dumping ground for the under-under class, back to Barking mad. There is no shortage of Saxon churches on hummocks but on exit it is very easy to go in to the marsh maze and never re-merge. At Coalhouse Fort is a feeling of murder. The land drains drain like eastings and northings. The East Tilbury marshes are empty. At Rainham Marshes concrete scuppered ships lie motionless for sixty years. Was winning a war worth if we were reduced to making concrete ships?
The English seaside town – I kept gong there because this is my life – now! I knew as I visited Skegness my life was an act of passing. Transitory and Ephemeral. You can just see priest warriors, maybe single, heading up The Umbra river from Tyne or Rouen. "That’s Scunthorpe – lets go further up stream". Eventually in worsted cassocks they founded Fountains Abbey. The once beautiful Umbra is now Payne’s Grey. In creeks water creeps. On the train through to Cleethorpes through Scunthorpe I got a brief glimpse of the vast Humber Bridge, which was momentarily the size of two matchsticks. Passing over the Trent and shrinking peat fields whose area covered soggy flanks to the Ouse. The government had rescued them in the Guardian. Sand drifting over the new sea defence cycle paths of the Lincolnshire coast. A Lincoln man at the Battersea architect had told me of new paths, old concrete wrapped around The Wash, which he described as falsely as it turned out, Areas of Outstanding Natural Ugliness. In 1953, from Mapplethorpe then unguarded by the present high sea wall, a young policeman in a increasingly wild and raging twilight, phones to the south warning of an unusual high tide heading south. In a Trumpton sort of way this was how the message was passed on, odd since the water was to circumnavigate Norfolk and Suffolk, an Anglia of Marconi and radar. Real tragedy hit Canvey Island that night when newly settled immigrants from Holland carried their baby up and up in to the cold rafters only for water to fill the pram and take the child further on up to heaven. Mapplethorpe, easily England’s most unexplainable town. Ian Huntley crossed Lincolnshire to rendezvous with Maxine Carr. How geographic to meet half way in Uttoxeter. Then they crossed the vast county of vegetables to Soham just in Cambridgeshire. On the way a loud speaker shouted at me as I listened to aircraft 15 miles offshore bombing an orange target ship. At Skegness large outsized banana slides and big wheels loom a giant two inches just as they had at the Humber Estuary. The plastic prison of Butlins with a fairground silver Wuppertal hanging train. Vast underrated Lincolnshire. Then Essex.
Maplin - An airport was planned here but Concorde did not have the fuel range for NY JFK. The final station on a long journey from Liverpool Street, Clacton-on-Sea where houses are crosses between lean-to's and rabbit hutches line the modest sea wall to the south and this is clearly Gypsy country. The dykes worn out, old. Beyond Battlebridge at the head of the creek a vertical black grain store with a hoist and stranded boats petrified in the mud as if they didn’t make it. This inlet is 20 miles to Burnham-on-Crouch with the Essex boatyard beyond and the atomic power station beyond further long unwinding but going nowhere defences. Unless you have a boat that is – a boat to the resurrection. There are disused ferry landings, north and south. The rail floats across the marsh to Basildon, a new town dumping ground for the under-under class, back to Barking mad. There is no shortage of Saxon churches on hummocks but on exit it is very easy to go in to the marsh maze and never re-merge. At Coalhouse Fort is a feeling of murder. The land drains drain like eastings and northings. The East Tilbury marshes are empty. At Rainham Marshes concrete scuppered ships lie motionless for sixty years. Was winning a war worth if we were reduced to making concrete ships?
Nicholas Ridley
Baron Ridley of Liddesdale
"Secretary of State for Transport. In that role he played a major part in making preparations for a possible coal strike, which proved an important factor in deciding the outcome of the UK miners' strike (1984-1985). Ridley had long been acutely aware of the threat the trade unions could pose to the execution of Conservative policies and, in the wake of the Heath government's union difficulties, had authored the Ridley Plan, which set out means of dealing with the trade unions and was a prototype for later developments.
Never far from controversy, he had to apologise, following the sinking of the Channel ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987, for remarking that he would not be pursuing a particular policy "with the Bow Doors Open" (The ship had capsized, with loss of 193 lives, as a result of sailing with its Bow Doors open).
On 14 July 1990 he was forced to resign as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry after an interview published in The Spectator. He had described the proposed Economic and Monetary Union as "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe" and said that giving up sovereignty to Europe was as bad as giving it up to Adolf Hitler. The interview was illustrated with a cartoon depicting Ridley adding a Hitler moustache to a poster of the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
An unrepentant chain smoker for much of his life, Ridley died of lung cancer relatively soon after his elevation to the House of Lords. During a media launch event for an anti-litter campaign with Margaret Thatcher, Ridley was seen during the whole event with a cigarette in his mouth."
"Secretary of State for Transport. In that role he played a major part in making preparations for a possible coal strike, which proved an important factor in deciding the outcome of the UK miners' strike (1984-1985). Ridley had long been acutely aware of the threat the trade unions could pose to the execution of Conservative policies and, in the wake of the Heath government's union difficulties, had authored the Ridley Plan, which set out means of dealing with the trade unions and was a prototype for later developments.
Never far from controversy, he had to apologise, following the sinking of the Channel ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987, for remarking that he would not be pursuing a particular policy "with the Bow Doors Open" (The ship had capsized, with loss of 193 lives, as a result of sailing with its Bow Doors open).
On 14 July 1990 he was forced to resign as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry after an interview published in The Spectator. He had described the proposed Economic and Monetary Union as "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe" and said that giving up sovereignty to Europe was as bad as giving it up to Adolf Hitler. The interview was illustrated with a cartoon depicting Ridley adding a Hitler moustache to a poster of the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
An unrepentant chain smoker for much of his life, Ridley died of lung cancer relatively soon after his elevation to the House of Lords. During a media launch event for an anti-litter campaign with Margaret Thatcher, Ridley was seen during the whole event with a cigarette in his mouth."
Baron Ridley of Liddesdale
Baron Ridley of Liddesdale
"Secretary of State for Transport. In that role he played a major part in making preparations for a possible coal strike, which proved an important factor in deciding the outcome of the UK miners' strike (1984-1985). Ridley had long been acutely aware of the threat the trade unions could pose to the execution of Conservative policies and, in the wake of the Heath government's union difficulties, had authored the Ridley Plan, which set out means of dealing with the trade unions and was a prototype for later developments.
Never far from controversy, he had to apologise, following the sinking of the Channel ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987, for remarking that he would not be pursuing a particular policy "with the Bow Doors Open" (The ship had capsized, with loss of 193 lives, as a result of sailing with its Bow Doors open).
On 14 July 1990 he was forced to resign as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry after an interview published in The Spectator. He had described the proposed Economic and Monetary Union as "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe" and said that giving up sovereignty to Europe was as bad as giving it up to Adolf Hitler. The interview was illustrated with a cartoon depicting Ridley adding a Hitler moustache to a poster of the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl."
"Secretary of State for Transport. In that role he played a major part in making preparations for a possible coal strike, which proved an important factor in deciding the outcome of the UK miners' strike (1984-1985). Ridley had long been acutely aware of the threat the trade unions could pose to the execution of Conservative policies and, in the wake of the Heath government's union difficulties, had authored the Ridley Plan, which set out means of dealing with the trade unions and was a prototype for later developments.
Never far from controversy, he had to apologise, following the sinking of the Channel ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987, for remarking that he would not be pursuing a particular policy "with the Bow Doors Open" (The ship had capsized, with loss of 193 lives, as a result of sailing with its Bow Doors open).
On 14 July 1990 he was forced to resign as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry after an interview published in The Spectator. He had described the proposed Economic and Monetary Union as "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe" and said that giving up sovereignty to Europe was as bad as giving it up to Adolf Hitler. The interview was illustrated with a cartoon depicting Ridley adding a Hitler moustache to a poster of the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl."
Perth
F*cked Australia
They killed all the Abo’s on Tasmania, & most of them on the mainland, brought in rabbits which f*cked the outback then poisoned all of the rabbits in an excruciating plague of Mick’s O’Mitosis. They’ve wiped the miniature wallabies with Quokka Soka from Rottnest Island. They’re all over here pretending to hate everything English whilst swatting up for Citizenship, hating their own accent on the way.
Meanwhile Perth, which is understood to have desalination plants, is being pushed into the sea by the Western Desert. There are plans for a water pipeline from the north.
They are all over in England because on the quiet they’ve noticed the Chinese have bought up half the land & property, there is a huge ozone hole over Neville Shute’s beach; water is drying up on the coastal strips, where English rejects from the 1960’s have remained White Trash.
Jarrow Scotch Estate and South Shields Australia Estate at Brockley Whins are joined by Perth Avenue.
They killed all the Abo’s on Tasmania, & most of them on the mainland, brought in rabbits which f*cked the outback then poisoned all of the rabbits in an excruciating plague of Mick’s O’Mitosis. They’ve wiped the miniature wallabies with Quokka Soka from Rottnest Island. They’re all over here pretending to hate everything English whilst swatting up for Citizenship, hating their own accent on the way.
Meanwhile Perth, which is understood to have desalination plants, is being pushed into the sea by the Western Desert. There are plans for a water pipeline from the north.
They are all over in England because on the quiet they’ve noticed the Chinese have bought up half the land & property, there is a huge ozone hole over Neville Shute’s beach; water is drying up on the coastal strips, where English rejects from the 1960’s have remained White Trash.
Jarrow Scotch Estate and South Shields Australia Estate at Brockley Whins are joined by Perth Avenue.
Melbourne
Australia's epic drought: The situation is grim
By Kathy Marks in Sydney
Published: 20 April 2007
'Australia has warned that it will have to switch off the water supply to the continent's food bowl unless heavy rains break an epic drought - heralding what could be the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation.
The Murray-Darling basin in south-eastern Australia yields 40 per cent of the country's agricultural produce. But the two rivers that feed the region are so pitifully low that there will soon be only enough water for drinking supplies. Australia is in the grip of its worst drought on record, the victim of changing weather patterns attributed to global warming and a government that is only just starting to wake up to the severity of the position.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, a hardened climate-change sceptic, delivered dire tidings to the nation's farmers yesterday. Unless there is significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, irrigation will be banned in the principal agricultural area. Crops such as rice, cotton and wine grapes will fail, citrus, olive and almond trees will die, along with livestock.
A ban on irrigation, which would remain in place until May next year, spells possible ruin for thousands of farmers, already debt-laden and in despair after six straight years of drought.
Lovers of the Australian landscape often cite the poet Dorothea Mackellar who in 1904 penned the classic lines: "I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains." But the land that was Mackellar's muse is now cracked and parched, and its mighty rivers have shrivelled to sluggish brown streams. With paddocks reduced to dust bowls, graziers have been forced to sell off sheep and cows at rock-bottom prices or buy in feed at great expense. Some have already given up, abandoning pastoral properties that have been in their families for generations. The rural suicide rate has soared.
Mr Howard acknowledged that the measures are drastic. He said the prolonged dry spell was "unprecedentedly dangerous" for farmers, and for the economy as a whole. Releasing a new report on the state of the Murray and Darling, Mr Howard said: "It is a grim situation, and there is no point in pretending to Australia otherwise. We must all hope and pray there is rain."
But prayer may not suffice, and many people are asking why crippling water shortages in the world's driest inhabited continent are only now being addressed with any sense of urgency.
The causes of the current drought, which began in 2002 but has been felt most acutely over the past six months, are complex. But few scientists dispute the part played by climate change, which is making Australia hotter and drier.
Environmentalists point to the increasing frequency and severity of drought-causing El Niño weather patterns, blamed on global warming. They also note Australia's role in poisoning the Earth's atmosphere. Australians are among the world's biggest per-capita energy consumers, and among the top producers of carbon dioxide emissions. Despite that, the country is one of only two industrialised nations - the United States being the other - that have refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The governments argue that to do so would harm their economies.
Until a few months ago, Mr Howard and his ministers pooh-poohed the climate-change doomsayers. The Prime Minister refused to meet Al Gore when he visited Australia to promote his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. He was lukewarm about the landmark report by the British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, which warned that large swaths of Australia's farming land would become unproductive if global temperatures rose by an average of four degrees.
Faced with criticism from even conservative sections of the media, Mr Howard realised that he had misread the public mood - grave faux pas in an election year. Last month's report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted more frequent and intense bushfires, tropical cyclones, and catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef. The report also said there would be up to 20 per cent more droughts by 2030. And it said the annual flow in the Murray-Darling basin was likely to fall by 10-25 per cent by 2050. The basin, the size of France and Spain combined, provides 85 per cent of the water used nationally for irrigation.
While the government is determined to protect Australia's coal industry, the drought is expected to shave 1 per cent off annual growth this year. The farming sector of a country that once "rode the sheep's back" to prosperity is in desperate straits. With dams and reservoirs drying up, many cities and towns have been forced to introduce severe water restrictions.
Mr Howard has softened his rhetoric of late, and says that he now broadly accepts the science behind climate change. He has tried to regain the political initiative, announcing measures including a plan to take over regulatory control of the Murray-Darling river system from state governments.
He has declared nuclear power the way forward, and is even considering the merits of joining an international scheme to "trade" carbon dioxide emissions - an idea he opposed in the past.
Mr Howard's conservative coalition will face an opposition Labour Party revitalised by a popular new leader, Kevin Rudd, and offering a climate change policy that appears to be more credible than his. Ben Fargher, the head of the National Farmers' Federation, said that if fruit and olive trees died, that could mean "five to six years of lost production". Food producers also warned of major food price rises.
Mr Howard acknowledged that an irrigation ban would have a "potentially devastating" impact. But "this is very much in the lap of the gods", he said.
How UN warned Australia and New Zealand
Excerpts from UN's IPCC report on the threat of global warming to Australia and New Zealand:
"As a result of reduced precipitation and increased evaporation, water security problems are projected to intensify by 2030 in south and east Australia and, in New Zealand, in Northland and eastern regions."
* "Significant loss of biodiversity is projected to occur by 2020 in some ecologically rich sites, including the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland's tropics. Other sites at risk include the Kakadu wetlands ... and the alpine areas of both countries."
* "Ongoing coastal development and population growth in areas such as Cairns and south-east Queensland (Australia) and Northland to Bay of Plenty (New Zealand) are projected to exacerbate risks from sea-level rise and increases in the severity and frequency of storms and coastal flooding by 2050."
* "Production from agriculture and forestry by 2030 is projected to decline over much of southern and eastern Australia, and over parts of eastern New Zealand, due to increases in droughts and fires."
* "The region has substantial adaptive capacity due to well-developed economies and scientific and technical capabilities, but there are considerable constraints to implementation ... Natural systems have limited adaptive capacity." '
By Kathy Marks in Sydney
Published: 20 April 2007
'Australia has warned that it will have to switch off the water supply to the continent's food bowl unless heavy rains break an epic drought - heralding what could be the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation.
The Murray-Darling basin in south-eastern Australia yields 40 per cent of the country's agricultural produce. But the two rivers that feed the region are so pitifully low that there will soon be only enough water for drinking supplies. Australia is in the grip of its worst drought on record, the victim of changing weather patterns attributed to global warming and a government that is only just starting to wake up to the severity of the position.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, a hardened climate-change sceptic, delivered dire tidings to the nation's farmers yesterday. Unless there is significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, irrigation will be banned in the principal agricultural area. Crops such as rice, cotton and wine grapes will fail, citrus, olive and almond trees will die, along with livestock.
A ban on irrigation, which would remain in place until May next year, spells possible ruin for thousands of farmers, already debt-laden and in despair after six straight years of drought.
Lovers of the Australian landscape often cite the poet Dorothea Mackellar who in 1904 penned the classic lines: "I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains." But the land that was Mackellar's muse is now cracked and parched, and its mighty rivers have shrivelled to sluggish brown streams. With paddocks reduced to dust bowls, graziers have been forced to sell off sheep and cows at rock-bottom prices or buy in feed at great expense. Some have already given up, abandoning pastoral properties that have been in their families for generations. The rural suicide rate has soared.
Mr Howard acknowledged that the measures are drastic. He said the prolonged dry spell was "unprecedentedly dangerous" for farmers, and for the economy as a whole. Releasing a new report on the state of the Murray and Darling, Mr Howard said: "It is a grim situation, and there is no point in pretending to Australia otherwise. We must all hope and pray there is rain."
But prayer may not suffice, and many people are asking why crippling water shortages in the world's driest inhabited continent are only now being addressed with any sense of urgency.
The causes of the current drought, which began in 2002 but has been felt most acutely over the past six months, are complex. But few scientists dispute the part played by climate change, which is making Australia hotter and drier.
Environmentalists point to the increasing frequency and severity of drought-causing El Niño weather patterns, blamed on global warming. They also note Australia's role in poisoning the Earth's atmosphere. Australians are among the world's biggest per-capita energy consumers, and among the top producers of carbon dioxide emissions. Despite that, the country is one of only two industrialised nations - the United States being the other - that have refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The governments argue that to do so would harm their economies.
Until a few months ago, Mr Howard and his ministers pooh-poohed the climate-change doomsayers. The Prime Minister refused to meet Al Gore when he visited Australia to promote his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. He was lukewarm about the landmark report by the British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, which warned that large swaths of Australia's farming land would become unproductive if global temperatures rose by an average of four degrees.
Faced with criticism from even conservative sections of the media, Mr Howard realised that he had misread the public mood - grave faux pas in an election year. Last month's report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted more frequent and intense bushfires, tropical cyclones, and catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef. The report also said there would be up to 20 per cent more droughts by 2030. And it said the annual flow in the Murray-Darling basin was likely to fall by 10-25 per cent by 2050. The basin, the size of France and Spain combined, provides 85 per cent of the water used nationally for irrigation.
While the government is determined to protect Australia's coal industry, the drought is expected to shave 1 per cent off annual growth this year. The farming sector of a country that once "rode the sheep's back" to prosperity is in desperate straits. With dams and reservoirs drying up, many cities and towns have been forced to introduce severe water restrictions.
Mr Howard has softened his rhetoric of late, and says that he now broadly accepts the science behind climate change. He has tried to regain the political initiative, announcing measures including a plan to take over regulatory control of the Murray-Darling river system from state governments.
He has declared nuclear power the way forward, and is even considering the merits of joining an international scheme to "trade" carbon dioxide emissions - an idea he opposed in the past.
Mr Howard's conservative coalition will face an opposition Labour Party revitalised by a popular new leader, Kevin Rudd, and offering a climate change policy that appears to be more credible than his. Ben Fargher, the head of the National Farmers' Federation, said that if fruit and olive trees died, that could mean "five to six years of lost production". Food producers also warned of major food price rises.
Mr Howard acknowledged that an irrigation ban would have a "potentially devastating" impact. But "this is very much in the lap of the gods", he said.
How UN warned Australia and New Zealand
Excerpts from UN's IPCC report on the threat of global warming to Australia and New Zealand:
"As a result of reduced precipitation and increased evaporation, water security problems are projected to intensify by 2030 in south and east Australia and, in New Zealand, in Northland and eastern regions."
* "Significant loss of biodiversity is projected to occur by 2020 in some ecologically rich sites, including the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland's tropics. Other sites at risk include the Kakadu wetlands ... and the alpine areas of both countries."
* "Ongoing coastal development and population growth in areas such as Cairns and south-east Queensland (Australia) and Northland to Bay of Plenty (New Zealand) are projected to exacerbate risks from sea-level rise and increases in the severity and frequency of storms and coastal flooding by 2050."
* "Production from agriculture and forestry by 2030 is projected to decline over much of southern and eastern Australia, and over parts of eastern New Zealand, due to increases in droughts and fires."
* "The region has substantial adaptive capacity due to well-developed economies and scientific and technical capabilities, but there are considerable constraints to implementation ... Natural systems have limited adaptive capacity." '
Vince Rea’s Dog
Vince Rea’s Dog
Vince Rea’s Dog (not lovely Sulivan, but the one in Jarrow Metro) has no connection with the decline of Britain whose nadir went un-noticed in the run down Regency villas, mews & side streets of Gloucester of the 1970’s.
However for anyone who can visualise a realistic dog shape being formed with a welding torch & a faded group picture including Ellen Wilkinson minutes before setting off on the Jarrow March 1933, Vince Rea’s Dog* is not only emblematic of just how bad building was in the 1960s, but what was good & bad in public sculpture in the 1970’s.
Before TV only readers of JB Priestley’s An English Journey or Fredric Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Classes could visualise how bad things were in England. Early TV interviews in Coventry for example show a shy downtrodden people trying to talk posh like the managers in Kenilworth & feared of saying anything which might force the attentions of policeman & detectives.
When the country did not want Churchill anymore in about 1955, ordinary people, often almost without learning, culture, travel, education, breeding, cultivation & deportment supplanted pipe smoking worsted jacketed toffs from architecture, who like the Victorians & in the 1920s & 1930s had done very well & without anyone’s permission thank you very much in inventing, say a vernacular cottage type These, along with the yet to be invented planners ruined the country. Let loose on something they could never understand England became bricked over.
Is it any wonder that whenever one is searching the internet whether by accident or design there is no information available on large chunks of history? ** The appropriate part of George Orwell’s 1984 must have been dead right.
Beware of journalists though. It was them guarding their Monday morning prerogative of coming up with some newsworthy news that suffocated & strangled worthy & perhaps revolutionary information from college pamphlets. Why did we have to wait 50 years to find out from TV broadcasts from the Open University that Cromer was all about light, that the period was the Flanders one & the huge brown hills beyond are indeed one big glacial dump?
Unequivocally, ‘Coast’ the TV series was a milestone in honouring the BBC brief of living up to the original charter of ‘Entertaining, Informing & Educating’ & after all what’s wrong with hearing people pronouncing things properly in a variety of standard accents?
The OU did this by inventing the geographer journalist flourishing behind the colour camera & able to afford £1000 an hour helicopter flights.
Would you want to go to Cromer now though where the out of season resort pier once was un-peopled, now crowded with Peckham Rye types dropping their ‘aches’ into the flooding sea?
Alphaville
The English city of the future. A pamphlet.
Coventry has an inner ring road very near the centre, an original shopping centre by Sir Basil (Urwin) Spence & one of the finest new transport museums at the level of Berlin, Muenchen & Beaulieu. The canal leaves the very centre of the city and joins the network with reminders that families lived from the canal. Nottingham’s inner ring road is a lozenge dictated by the railway line & Gloucester has a network of carriageways which overwhelm the city. In the White Heat of Technology & in drawings by Le Corbusier. The car was not meant to be a noisy polluting nightmare child killer.
Now the need to get into the mind of the drivers & turn the car round. In the North East of England they were all supposed to have jet packs & helicopters by 1990 which was once the future. Why was the pedestrian & cyclist so brutally & universally ignored?
Commonly in the early 1960s local boys guarded their streets with violence & chasing from strange boys. A council estate boy could not be expected to carry around a Maynard Keynes type macro-economic view. He had the mindset of the scavaging itinerant tribal hunter gatherer whereas Lancing college had intercepted this, these were less ornamented, less well mannered than Oetztal man & would be less welcome at an Edwardian dinner party off the Holloway Road.
These mindsets & physcograms, are deterministic & steer the success or otherwise of ideas about urbanism.
Loosening their tribal shackles & instincts & set against each other by the influences of the spiritualty, stratified into workmen & fore men the seeds of their own destruction were sewn into communities & doomed them.
A waterered down involuntary Protestantism, with a hint or whiff of chapel, aspiring families, protected by ‘blobs’, ‘residual income’, driven away by vermin & pleurisy would now be heading down past Houghton-le-Spring to Weston-Super-Mare in the Vander Plas.
Factory owners spent the profits in Wallingford, Banstead & Norbury Junction not Jarrow, Hebburn & Felling.
The creepy aspirations of the Bartram’s would mean they would unashamedly ‘join the masons’ rendering them unable speak to their catholic labouring neighbours, the die cast way of life was formed on Roman lines & every generation, as they say, has it’s slaves.
Not co-operating with this scheme of things meant not having holidays, & sometimes real poverty.
The Bartrams could not have existed in the Bronze Age. In times of war the fit would have grab a spear from the fence, leaving obviously a gap in the fence. Their son, an electrical engineer could not have pleaded having working for another tribe down south & that actually as Reyrolles was taken over by the General Electrical Company they were off to Alderney in a coral on a fishing trip. (Kayaks, boats & ships were the Ka of the Bronze Age).
How far south would their snooty daughter have got if she had fallen out with the tribal warriors?
Tarmac was way over the horizon & roman roads overgrown.
Social Betterment
The seriousness of this allegation against the Bartrams now may be ameliorated by the strong possibility that it may not have been their fault although this would be easily refuted by religious fanatics.
Society had been forced to stratify not only but also by poor prospects, poor food, poor hygiene, damp, cockroaches, rats, disease & chronically poor housing (holding an umbrella over the baby). The Vanden Plas was a petrol driven four wheeled chariot on wings of desire out the hell of English industrial towns.
Sickly as it may sound, as from Coventry to Kenilworth it was an escape to the idyllic rural setting for decent people who wanted to have a proper life & better themselves.
But whist one or two went off to seek spirituality in the hills, more often it was reading the Daily Mail in the car park not getting out at all & leaving the engine on when it was cold.
So why has this transformed into the petty game of being better off than the people next door?
Southampton in the Life of a nation.
And so to there: Southampton. The unfashionable city rarely or never gets a mention. The accent has classy Hampshire flavours from Twyford & Eastleigh & the country daftness associated with the west country. Yet Benny Hill* was from here, & due to the twin tides protected by the country within a country the Isle of Wight, King Canute almost certainly commanded the sea to retreat back just to the east on the Saxon Shore. The boats & ships could be floated in twice to the dry docks.
The balding middle aged man from Coventry sitting next to J B Priestly in the back of a Scammel bus was speculatively heading for ‘opportunities’ in Southampton in the very front few pages of the book.
Hill’s birthplace was described in full by J B Priestly when the uniqueness of English towns & cities was there to be seen. Only Mansfield, Hove & Lincoln and maybe Oxford and Cambridge today could be vaguely described as different. ( Maybe Ely but reader, how different is your town? Is there a big shark diving through your roof?)
Retail devastated the English town & Zaha Hadid was not involved and nor was, in praise of a higher being, Wayne Hemmingway. Huge profits are made obviously remotely and the big buildings of the day are not Zeppelin Halls but Adidas distribution centres in places like Salford.
The Arndale centre cannot be got rid of because of weak structure plans & deceased attachments. Gloucester, a city of a cross lost a whole quarter in the 1960’s surrendering
the cattle market and real links & views out to the surrounding hills. No one could have given a f**k in 1947 if it flooded or not. The immovables of Hereford & Gloucester were the greatest prize of the 15th century due to their protected position in the impenetrable south west heartland of England. Tewksbury is at the confluence of the Seven & Avon.
The spiralling spread of indeterminable language left me dazed & confused. Lewis Mumford made up much of his book The City in History but it was thrilling.
* Benny Hill was far from a hero in terms of life in cities, featuring in the vaudavillisation of TV
Circling Vulture
Often I am just going round in circles. I am not alone in this though. It is rather freightening to see yourself in a mirror behind you a reflection of a copy of you shaving and wondering which was the left hand. The Image was different enough to make me think it wasn’t me. Douglas Hofstadter told me recently it wasn’t!
As a child in the North East of England the first school was a corrugated set of huts. A black man, the only one in the entire region befriended me, had a broad ‘step & fetchit’ smile and was not after me. He just liked me more than he did the other children. When the school moved to the new St. Mary’s he stood there doing the finishing touches to the circular flower bed and when I was addressed ran away embarrassed my friends would think I knew a black man. But it was my first circular building.
Geordie children & German professors refer to the Sorkel & somewhere there there must be a common root. As the tourists sorkel round the Mecca bingo in Newark which looks deliberately like a Mosque because of exotic innuendo. They circle round the real Mecca and round St. Paul’s which is a tremendous amount of Portland stone now missing from Portland Bill. This pattern is similar to Indian braves circling overturned wagons and the tourists often are happy at what they saw. You never see tourists walking away en mess moaning.
In the 1950s it was good enough for a young lass to push the bairn around in a pram. In West Bridgford now they ram through the window of Iceland in 4B2s, grab a packet of king prawns & tell the decrepit & sad cashier to "f*ck off" on the way out.
* Jarrow Metro Station sculpture ** Informationsheft GB, Alphaville, Westworld, Gerard Depiadier early avante garde films, property ownership in Gloucester & generally te 1970’s, before the internet *** Center Start Place Nouvelle, Furnighausplantechnisdormring or SaucerCupPlateginandtechtonictheorumgefunk
Vince Rea’s Dog (not lovely Sulivan, but the one in Jarrow Metro) has no connection with the decline of Britain whose nadir went un-noticed in the run down Regency villas, mews & side streets of Gloucester of the 1970’s.
However for anyone who can visualise a realistic dog shape being formed with a welding torch & a faded group picture including Ellen Wilkinson minutes before setting off on the Jarrow March 1933, Vince Rea’s Dog* is not only emblematic of just how bad building was in the 1960s, but what was good & bad in public sculpture in the 1970’s.
Before TV only readers of JB Priestley’s An English Journey or Fredric Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Classes could visualise how bad things were in England. Early TV interviews in Coventry for example show a shy downtrodden people trying to talk posh like the managers in Kenilworth & feared of saying anything which might force the attentions of policeman & detectives.
When the country did not want Churchill anymore in about 1955, ordinary people, often almost without learning, culture, travel, education, breeding, cultivation & deportment supplanted pipe smoking worsted jacketed toffs from architecture, who like the Victorians & in the 1920s & 1930s had done very well & without anyone’s permission thank you very much in inventing, say a vernacular cottage type These, along with the yet to be invented planners ruined the country. Let loose on something they could never understand England became bricked over.
Is it any wonder that whenever one is searching the internet whether by accident or design there is no information available on large chunks of history? ** The appropriate part of George Orwell’s 1984 must have been dead right.
Beware of journalists though. It was them guarding their Monday morning prerogative of coming up with some newsworthy news that suffocated & strangled worthy & perhaps revolutionary information from college pamphlets. Why did we have to wait 50 years to find out from TV broadcasts from the Open University that Cromer was all about light, that the period was the Flanders one & the huge brown hills beyond are indeed one big glacial dump?
Unequivocally, ‘Coast’ the TV series was a milestone in honouring the BBC brief of living up to the original charter of ‘Entertaining, Informing & Educating’ & after all what’s wrong with hearing people pronouncing things properly in a variety of standard accents?
The OU did this by inventing the geographer journalist flourishing behind the colour camera & able to afford £1000 an hour helicopter flights.
Would you want to go to Cromer now though where the out of season resort pier once was un-peopled, now crowded with Peckham Rye types dropping their ‘aches’ into the flooding sea?
Alphaville
The English city of the future. A pamphlet.
Coventry has an inner ring road very near the centre, an original shopping centre by Sir Basil (Urwin) Spence & one of the finest new transport museums at the level of Berlin, Muenchen & Beaulieu. The canal leaves the very centre of the city and joins the network with reminders that families lived from the canal. Nottingham’s inner ring road is a lozenge dictated by the railway line & Gloucester has a network of carriageways which overwhelm the city. In the White Heat of Technology & in drawings by Le Corbusier. The car was not meant to be a noisy polluting nightmare child killer.
Now the need to get into the mind of the drivers & turn the car round. In the North East of England they were all supposed to have jet packs & helicopters by 1990 which was once the future. Why was the pedestrian & cyclist so brutally & universally ignored?
Commonly in the early 1960s local boys guarded their streets with violence & chasing from strange boys. A council estate boy could not be expected to carry around a Maynard Keynes type macro-economic view. He had the mindset of the scavaging itinerant tribal hunter gatherer whereas Lancing college had intercepted this, these were less ornamented, less well mannered than Oetztal man & would be less welcome at an Edwardian dinner party off the Holloway Road.
These mindsets & physcograms, are deterministic & steer the success or otherwise of ideas about urbanism.
Loosening their tribal shackles & instincts & set against each other by the influences of the spiritualty, stratified into workmen & fore men the seeds of their own destruction were sewn into communities & doomed them.
A waterered down involuntary Protestantism, with a hint or whiff of chapel, aspiring families, protected by ‘blobs’, ‘residual income’, driven away by vermin & pleurisy would now be heading down past Houghton-le-Spring to Weston-Super-Mare in the Vander Plas.
Factory owners spent the profits in Wallingford, Banstead & Norbury Junction not Jarrow, Hebburn & Felling.
The creepy aspirations of the Bartram’s would mean they would unashamedly ‘join the masons’ rendering them unable speak to their catholic labouring neighbours, the die cast way of life was formed on Roman lines & every generation, as they say, has it’s slaves.
Not co-operating with this scheme of things meant not having holidays, & sometimes real poverty.
The Bartrams could not have existed in the Bronze Age. In times of war the fit would have grab a spear from the fence, leaving obviously a gap in the fence. Their son, an electrical engineer could not have pleaded having working for another tribe down south & that actually as Reyrolles was taken over by the General Electrical Company they were off to Alderney in a coral on a fishing trip. (Kayaks, boats & ships were the Ka of the Bronze Age).
How far south would their snooty daughter have got if she had fallen out with the tribal warriors?
Tarmac was way over the horizon & roman roads overgrown.
Social Betterment
The seriousness of this allegation against the Bartrams now may be ameliorated by the strong possibility that it may not have been their fault although this would be easily refuted by religious fanatics.
Society had been forced to stratify not only but also by poor prospects, poor food, poor hygiene, damp, cockroaches, rats, disease & chronically poor housing (holding an umbrella over the baby). The Vanden Plas was a petrol driven four wheeled chariot on wings of desire out the hell of English industrial towns.
Sickly as it may sound, as from Coventry to Kenilworth it was an escape to the idyllic rural setting for decent people who wanted to have a proper life & better themselves.
But whist one or two went off to seek spirituality in the hills, more often it was reading the Daily Mail in the car park not getting out at all & leaving the engine on when it was cold.
So why has this transformed into the petty game of being better off than the people next door?
Southampton in the Life of a nation.
And so to there: Southampton. The unfashionable city rarely or never gets a mention. The accent has classy Hampshire flavours from Twyford & Eastleigh & the country daftness associated with the west country. Yet Benny Hill* was from here, & due to the twin tides protected by the country within a country the Isle of Wight, King Canute almost certainly commanded the sea to retreat back just to the east on the Saxon Shore. The boats & ships could be floated in twice to the dry docks.
The balding middle aged man from Coventry sitting next to J B Priestly in the back of a Scammel bus was speculatively heading for ‘opportunities’ in Southampton in the very front few pages of the book.
Hill’s birthplace was described in full by J B Priestly when the uniqueness of English towns & cities was there to be seen. Only Mansfield, Hove & Lincoln and maybe Oxford and Cambridge today could be vaguely described as different. ( Maybe Ely but reader, how different is your town? Is there a big shark diving through your roof?)
Retail devastated the English town & Zaha Hadid was not involved and nor was, in praise of a higher being, Wayne Hemmingway. Huge profits are made obviously remotely and the big buildings of the day are not Zeppelin Halls but Adidas distribution centres in places like Salford.
The Arndale centre cannot be got rid of because of weak structure plans & deceased attachments. Gloucester, a city of a cross lost a whole quarter in the 1960’s surrendering
the cattle market and real links & views out to the surrounding hills. No one could have given a f**k in 1947 if it flooded or not. The immovables of Hereford & Gloucester were the greatest prize of the 15th century due to their protected position in the impenetrable south west heartland of England. Tewksbury is at the confluence of the Seven & Avon.
The spiralling spread of indeterminable language left me dazed & confused. Lewis Mumford made up much of his book The City in History but it was thrilling.
* Benny Hill was far from a hero in terms of life in cities, featuring in the vaudavillisation of TV
Circling Vulture
Often I am just going round in circles. I am not alone in this though. It is rather freightening to see yourself in a mirror behind you a reflection of a copy of you shaving and wondering which was the left hand. The Image was different enough to make me think it wasn’t me. Douglas Hofstadter told me recently it wasn’t!
As a child in the North East of England the first school was a corrugated set of huts. A black man, the only one in the entire region befriended me, had a broad ‘step & fetchit’ smile and was not after me. He just liked me more than he did the other children. When the school moved to the new St. Mary’s he stood there doing the finishing touches to the circular flower bed and when I was addressed ran away embarrassed my friends would think I knew a black man. But it was my first circular building.
Geordie children & German professors refer to the Sorkel & somewhere there there must be a common root. As the tourists sorkel round the Mecca bingo in Newark which looks deliberately like a Mosque because of exotic innuendo. They circle round the real Mecca and round St. Paul’s which is a tremendous amount of Portland stone now missing from Portland Bill. This pattern is similar to Indian braves circling overturned wagons and the tourists often are happy at what they saw. You never see tourists walking away en mess moaning.
In the 1950s it was good enough for a young lass to push the bairn around in a pram. In West Bridgford now they ram through the window of Iceland in 4B2s, grab a packet of king prawns & tell the decrepit & sad cashier to "f*ck off" on the way out.
* Jarrow Metro Station sculpture ** Informationsheft GB, Alphaville, Westworld, Gerard Depiadier early avante garde films, property ownership in Gloucester & generally te 1970’s, before the internet *** Center Start Place Nouvelle, Furnighausplantechnisdormring or SaucerCupPlateginandtechtonictheorumgefunk
The Jarrow Manifesto
Alpha Ville - Map Reference - ZZ AA 66
'These are only suggestions: There is no obligation.'
Jarrow might be renamed Alphaville. ZZ AA 66 is the map reference of the giant pylon near St. Paul's, the River Don and Jarrow Slake. Alphaville to become a crime free desirable town similar to Gosfoth/Yarm/Jesmond in 25 years. All statues/wall plates of the Jarrow March to be trashed. Vince Rea’s Metro relief of Jarrow March to be melted down except for the dog which will be saved Statues of positive modern icon like Peter Beardsley and Steve Cram to welcome visitors to a rebuilt Alphaville Metro Rohm and Hass invited to leave Alphaville Low Jarrow housing to be flattened. Residents to rehoused in Hebburn or Cramlington Mile wide strip of Alphaville from the rivers edge to be fenced off and left untouched for 25 years. Paid ex-squaddies to keep this land free for 25 years with use of surveillance cameras All housing south of the Newcastle to Sunderland railway axis to be abandoned. Wide green belt to be achieved separating Alphaville clearly from the air from Sunderland No one will have to lock a bicycle in Alphaville No housing on ridges. A walk from Marsden to South Shields reveal minimal buildings in view Alphaville’s logo is to be a Prince Bishop Soldier Priest death mask in black hooded top wielding a heavy sword, escaping persecution, in search of the freedom he needs to breath. Kind and cultured but willing to exact harsh punishment Hospitals and cemeteries to be merged. No more leafy suburbs!!!!! Alphaville the town to be a "forest with houses in it" with cobbled streets, wild deer and boar, and organic or designer buildings Prison ship to be purchased from council tax. Thieves, arsonists and anti-socials to be removed from Alphaville and placed in a prison ship. Inmates to clean up Alphaville policed by ex-squaddies and to complete public works such as landscaping Rohm and Haas and levelling Morison’s for the people of Alphaville Returning soldiers to be given well paid jobs as guards and enforcers, not left unemployed nor on insulting low pay Vandal driven architecture to end. Public buildings to be good enough to win design awards. Public Art to be by local talent not Wayne Hemmingway or Will Allsop Forced cycling fitness. All roads, cycle-ways and paths to be organic. Cars only for diplomats, posh people and foreigners with money. "Pool" cars for the rest No dogs. Only kindness to lavished on people. Limited dog/animal interaction corals on mid Hebburn side Big open heated swimming pool miles long to replace Luke’s Lane adults only with ozone - no chlorine. German style hygiene system and monitoring. Raised pool on first floor with massive viewing windows for viewing swimmers Planet Organic food to become the norm along with the hot dogs from IKEA @ the Gateshead Metro All northern economic bodies to be dissolved and replaced with single one charged with retaining wealth and attracting money and good jobs to the North MP to report to the public on St. Georges playing field in an open meeting to explain what he has done for Alphaville that week. The wall of shame awaits Morison’s to be systematically boycotted until they close down. Old shoppers to be free bussed to Boldon ASDA Arndale/Viking arcade to be demolished and landscaped. Crime against parks and forests to be harsh. Arson to be punished by banishment to a national place for banished people e.g. Gruniard island where sand will be replaced by asbestos lagging from decommissioned ships Viking statues to be melted down and Charles Palmer, the creator of Jarrow, to be reinstated/rehabilitated Eldon Square and Metrocentre to be similarly boycotted. 90% of the money spent in NE shops ends in London and the Home Counties. Both Metrocentre and Eldon Square are owned and managed from London. 95% of building and architectural work in the NE create work in London and the Home Counties Free London accommodation/hostels for northern builders /tradesmen bringing wealth back to the northeast. London sleeper reinstated. Tax incentives for working away Matriarchy to be toned down. Men can work indoors too, but require long and extensive re-education and telephone manner training i.e. men to learn some female skills. Failure to mean having to work outside again or shot blasting. Equal work opportunities for men in local authorities. Overweight officials to hand in car keys until fit again The curriculum. ZZ to pay lip service only to the national curriculum. The national curriculum is designed to neuter local strengths. New curriculum to play to local strengths of courage, unique and genuine friendliness among locals, sport with emphasis on kickboxing and self-defence. Criminals. Local dealers to be removed from drug scene and sent on business management courses. On return to replace overweight officials in the management structure of local authorities. Churchgoing to be discouraged and eventually banned South Shields to get new logo. This will be a raft of survivors from the convoys to Murmansk, illustrating the courage of English men. Similarly the virtue of comradeship and bravery in Hebburn’s new logo to be HMS Kelly. Background of logo to be yacht exploding in Dublin bay alluding to the wealth of the local sense of humour. Sunderland. All un-visual i.e. and e.g. "industry" (occupational therapy/distraction "eehh!! Look there’s an engine falling off an Easyjet! type thing to be removed to Sunderland but perhaps not – not flat so better to have it like a section of the Rhine with sirens, eddies and castles. As the river diverted to Sunderland instead along the Team Valley so to Sunderland to disappear just as it appeared – by freak chance. Blyth, Sunderland , Cullourcoats! The trains are full to Newcastle not the reverse each working morning so lets go with the flow. No more surface buildings. Tellitubby buildings only –especially caravans must be buried.
'These are only suggestions: There is no obligation.'
Jarrow might be renamed Alphaville. ZZ AA 66 is the map reference of the giant pylon near St. Paul's, the River Don and Jarrow Slake. Alphaville to become a crime free desirable town similar to Gosfoth/Yarm/Jesmond in 25 years. All statues/wall plates of the Jarrow March to be trashed. Vince Rea’s Metro relief of Jarrow March to be melted down except for the dog which will be saved Statues of positive modern icon like Peter Beardsley and Steve Cram to welcome visitors to a rebuilt Alphaville Metro Rohm and Hass invited to leave Alphaville Low Jarrow housing to be flattened. Residents to rehoused in Hebburn or Cramlington Mile wide strip of Alphaville from the rivers edge to be fenced off and left untouched for 25 years. Paid ex-squaddies to keep this land free for 25 years with use of surveillance cameras All housing south of the Newcastle to Sunderland railway axis to be abandoned. Wide green belt to be achieved separating Alphaville clearly from the air from Sunderland No one will have to lock a bicycle in Alphaville No housing on ridges. A walk from Marsden to South Shields reveal minimal buildings in view Alphaville’s logo is to be a Prince Bishop Soldier Priest death mask in black hooded top wielding a heavy sword, escaping persecution, in search of the freedom he needs to breath. Kind and cultured but willing to exact harsh punishment Hospitals and cemeteries to be merged. No more leafy suburbs!!!!! Alphaville the town to be a "forest with houses in it" with cobbled streets, wild deer and boar, and organic or designer buildings Prison ship to be purchased from council tax. Thieves, arsonists and anti-socials to be removed from Alphaville and placed in a prison ship. Inmates to clean up Alphaville policed by ex-squaddies and to complete public works such as landscaping Rohm and Haas and levelling Morison’s for the people of Alphaville Returning soldiers to be given well paid jobs as guards and enforcers, not left unemployed nor on insulting low pay Vandal driven architecture to end. Public buildings to be good enough to win design awards. Public Art to be by local talent not Wayne Hemmingway or Will Allsop Forced cycling fitness. All roads, cycle-ways and paths to be organic. Cars only for diplomats, posh people and foreigners with money. "Pool" cars for the rest No dogs. Only kindness to lavished on people. Limited dog/animal interaction corals on mid Hebburn side Big open heated swimming pool miles long to replace Luke’s Lane adults only with ozone - no chlorine. German style hygiene system and monitoring. Raised pool on first floor with massive viewing windows for viewing swimmers Planet Organic food to become the norm along with the hot dogs from IKEA @ the Gateshead Metro All northern economic bodies to be dissolved and replaced with single one charged with retaining wealth and attracting money and good jobs to the North MP to report to the public on St. Georges playing field in an open meeting to explain what he has done for Alphaville that week. The wall of shame awaits Morison’s to be systematically boycotted until they close down. Old shoppers to be free bussed to Boldon ASDA Arndale/Viking arcade to be demolished and landscaped. Crime against parks and forests to be harsh. Arson to be punished by banishment to a national place for banished people e.g. Gruniard island where sand will be replaced by asbestos lagging from decommissioned ships Viking statues to be melted down and Charles Palmer, the creator of Jarrow, to be reinstated/rehabilitated Eldon Square and Metrocentre to be similarly boycotted. 90% of the money spent in NE shops ends in London and the Home Counties. Both Metrocentre and Eldon Square are owned and managed from London. 95% of building and architectural work in the NE create work in London and the Home Counties Free London accommodation/hostels for northern builders /tradesmen bringing wealth back to the northeast. London sleeper reinstated. Tax incentives for working away Matriarchy to be toned down. Men can work indoors too, but require long and extensive re-education and telephone manner training i.e. men to learn some female skills. Failure to mean having to work outside again or shot blasting. Equal work opportunities for men in local authorities. Overweight officials to hand in car keys until fit again The curriculum. ZZ to pay lip service only to the national curriculum. The national curriculum is designed to neuter local strengths. New curriculum to play to local strengths of courage, unique and genuine friendliness among locals, sport with emphasis on kickboxing and self-defence. Criminals. Local dealers to be removed from drug scene and sent on business management courses. On return to replace overweight officials in the management structure of local authorities. Churchgoing to be discouraged and eventually banned South Shields to get new logo. This will be a raft of survivors from the convoys to Murmansk, illustrating the courage of English men. Similarly the virtue of comradeship and bravery in Hebburn’s new logo to be HMS Kelly. Background of logo to be yacht exploding in Dublin bay alluding to the wealth of the local sense of humour. Sunderland. All un-visual i.e. and e.g. "industry" (occupational therapy/distraction "eehh!! Look there’s an engine falling off an Easyjet! type thing to be removed to Sunderland but perhaps not – not flat so better to have it like a section of the Rhine with sirens, eddies and castles. As the river diverted to Sunderland instead along the Team Valley so to Sunderland to disappear just as it appeared – by freak chance. Blyth, Sunderland , Cullourcoats! The trains are full to Newcastle not the reverse each working morning so lets go with the flow. No more surface buildings. Tellitubby buildings only –especially caravans must be buried.
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