I get a lot of “please vote in this survey” emails in my inbox, and I seldom share them, but this one demands action: the BBC has a poll on whether Heathrow should be allowed a sixth terminal and third runway.
Currently it is only 40% “no”, which surely means BAA must have all of its workers frantically clicking away – running back and forth from their catching up on the baggage handling duties at Terminal Five.
The Camden Cyclist newsletter arrives with some good news – after much lobbying council has agreed to signpost a route out of these two stations down to the main east/west London cycle route.
It is possible to get out along a reasonably quiet route now details here – but only if you know the area extremely well. The one-way streets and twisting route is otherwise pretty well impossible.
Now all we need is a way to get across Euston Station/railways north of the Euston Road… (here there is also a route, if a roundabout one, cutting across a council estate, but you wouldn’t know it from a map, and there are no signs).
Given all of the Terminal 5 shenanigans, there’ve been many comments in the past week about the contrast to the St Pancras refurbishment, “on time and on budget” – well true in outline, but many months after the site opened, they have still not managed to put one single cash machine into the whole complex.
“Who knows?” said the woman on the Thameslink info desk, rolling her eyes, when I asked on the weekend when they were likely to arrive. “Everyone’s asking for them.”
Not so odd really – when you arrive at an international train terminal, you expect to be able to get cash.
And the taxi rank is still operating in “temporary facilities”, which means there’s either a long queue of cabs, or a long queue of people, but never both … this being a classic case of more order producing only chaos – the single line of cabs moving hardly at all when there are passengers. Hopefully when they finally manage to open the real facility it will be of a form that will join people to cabs a little more rapidly.
But lest you should think that this is only a British disease, in Australia they’ve designed a new underground train – just not allowed any time for it to stop at stations.
Welcome to the Britblog roundup, the all-singing, all-dancing carnival that brings the best of the blogosphere of these islands to you in one easy show – as nominated by you, the readers. Do send your favourites to britblog AT gmail DOT com for Westminster Wisdom’s edition next week.
Section 1: Getting the keyboard dirty
I always like to read about people doing things, getting out and about. Journalists might be, as Flat Earth News points out, increasingly chained to their desks, but there’s no reason for bloggers to be.
So I’m going to start with a collection of bloggers seeing and doing things for themselves, which will also take you on a small but perfect formed tour of the nation…
What could be more evocative of England la profonde than “Whipchicken Farm, Dog Drove South, Dog Drove North and Powder Blue Farm”. They’re on Unmitigated England’s route through the fens It turns out the last name does make more sense than it sounds – but I’m still puzzling about the others, although there’s more on driving dogs right at the end of this roundup, which might shed some light on the subject…
Also walking, if soon not to be, is Dr Sean in West Sussex, who’s found his sensible pedestrian path into town is to be cut – although as is so often the case, the council “consultation” was invisible to those affected.
And walking for a purpose is Adrian on Green Reading, who provides a photographic account of the Japanese peace walk to Aldermaston.
Bibbluemeanie is seeing first hand in London the inhumanity of the asylum system – some minor officials throw their weight around – and a few days later the subjects are back at work…
Also seeing heavy policing is fellow Britblog host Suzanne Lamido, who lives just up the road from me (but not all the hosts are north Londonites, promise) found herself on the fringes of a major police operation. Helmets, massed ranks, screaming sirens. Seems they found lots of dodgy mobiles and forged documents, with 35 arrests. Let’s see – 1,100 police, divided by 35 arrests …
At the real front line, Random Acts of Reality meets a genuine victim of life.
Which kind of puts all of the fuss about Terminal Five in perspective, still Diamond Geezer had the sense when visiting on day one, with camera to always have the intention of leaving by Tube.
Finally in this section, you can go with Julie on Londonist, who braved the rain and the drinks tent to see the boat race. Okay, maybe it’s just because I’m antipodean, but I just don’t get the excitement…
Section 2: History and media
(Unashamedly pandering to my own interests here, but they’re all great posts…)
Sharon on Early Modern Notes is braving the depths of a minor feud to explain just how to get extra points in an academic pissing contest. It runs along the lines that “to get this piece of information I had to crawl over broken glass,scrambled over barbed wire and….
On Early Modern Whale, Roy is analysing two accounts of the explosion of Mt Etna in 1670. As a shorthand, one might be from the journal Science, the other from the Daily Mail.
On Mind the Gap, Peter Tatchell’s use of Sylvia Pankhurstis questioned.
But Anna on Inklings has no problems at all with a BBC account of Edwardian mourning – and she looks further into its nasty health effects for women. (Men just got to wear a ribbon on their hat!)
The Magistrate, like lots of people, does, however, have problems with the Daily Mail. Well don’t we all – but in this case it either doesn’t grasp the nature of the law of common assault, or thinks there should be a special law for “financial advisors”. Well so might many of us – just not in the direction the Mail is pointed.
And finally, if Shakespeare wrote 884,647 words with a quill, how can we generate millions of items between computer backups?
Section 3: Politics
Our own Matt Wardman has instituted roundups of the Scottish, Welsh and Westminster parliament. Given the government’s sudden desperate enthusiasm for constitutional reform, how long before there’s a “English” to add to the collection?
And Amused Cynicism has turned serious to back a campaign to get parliamentary bills published in an accessible form. Whatever will these supporters of democracy think of next?!
Perhaps serious analysis of bills, as Spy Blog has done to the Draft Governance of Britain – Constitutional Renewal Bill. It is your democracy the Spy is trying to defend, so you really should read this.
Because of course legislation is the solution to all problems, as Feminist Avatar notes on An Open Letter by a Feminist about suggestions that the legal drinking age in Scotland be raised to 21.
Elsewhere in politics:
Section 4: Miscellaneous
Finally, to the uncategorisably curious. Into which class the Blog of Funk’s celebration of the bendy nature of cheese definitively falls.
As does Liberal England’s account over the row over a an advert in which a song goes for a drive and sings – in this case with genuine music nostalgia.
And Onionbagbloggers solution to the disappearing wheelie bins.
The focus internationally tends to be on wheat prices, but to the world’s poor rice is more important, and the price has doubled in three months – that’s when you can lay hands on it at all.
Vietnam’s government announced here on Friday that it would cut rice exports by nearly a quarter this year. The government hoped that keeping more rice inside the country would hold down prices.
The same day, India effectively banned the export of all but the most expensive grades of rice. Egypt announced on Thursday that it would impose a six-month ban on rice exports, starting April 1, and on Wednesday, Cambodia banned all rice exports except by government agencies.
Another example of the long-term, and often ill-understood, impact of human actions: metal-eating bacteria are poisoning the British Peak District. They are mopping up pollution from sources that stopped spewing it out 50 years ago.
But on the mildly good news front: four states, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Costa Rica are in a race to become the first carbon-neutral state. Of course one thing that unites them is that they are, on a world scale, very small states. Still, it is a start.
The story of Esther Ingles is one of those that may never fully emerge from the mist of history – in part because her particularly skill, astonishingly neat, tiny handwriting is not a form that has real respect in the present day, but even more so if Tricia Bracher is right and her involvement in the messy politics of the end of the reign of Elizabeth I was so close.
The writer, in a chapter titled “Esther Ingles and the English Succession Crisis of 1599”, in the text detailed below (pp. 132-146) suggests that the book of psalms she had written which were carried from Scotland by her husband, Bartholomew Kello from the Scottish court to London was part of efforts to “promote a secret or not-so-secret alliance” between James VI of Scotland and the Essex faction of the English court.
From Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450-1700, James Daybell (ed) Ashgate 2004. (Other women covered include Lady Mary Sidney and Kat Ashley, Lady Ralegh, Elizabeth Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury (Bess of Hardwick”), Anne of Denmark, Mary Carleton and Aphra Behn.
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