Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Sitting proud: Elizabeth of Sevorc

February 2, 2007 – 3:09 am

Over on My London Your London I have a piece on an exhibition of medieval seals at the British Museum. Now can I find a feminist angle on that? Well of course I can. There are some lovely women’s seals, but my definitely favourite is that of Elizabeth of Sevorc, asserting her importance and independence (she’s no one’s father or husband in the inscription, just herself).

elizabethofsevorc

Look at that image and you think this is a woman who could look after herself. (I haven’t been able to find her anywhere else; has anyone come across her?)

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Listen to the grass

February 1, 2007 – 9:14 pm

It speaks of just how fast things are changing:

Grass can grow only when the ambient temperature is 5C (40F) or higher. Until recently lawns could be left untended between November and March as the average temperature for the winter months was a chilly 3.7C. But a mild November and December, which averaged 6.4C, was followed by the warmest January since 1916, and the second-warmest on record, at 5.9C. In the South averages were even higher, at 7.1C.
Tim Sparks, an environmental scientist at the National Environmental Research Council, in Cambridge, said that between 1961 and 1990 the average January temperature was 3.8C. But January the past five years has been above average, and grass was growing all year.
He said that three years ago only 20 per cent of people would cut their lawns between November and February. “Going back 20 years that figure would have been almost zero.”

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Spam and ham, or what you find on the internet

February 1, 2007 – 8:23 pm

One amazing set of figures, and an illuminating graph here.

So about 6 per cent of comments made on blogs are “real”; the rest spam. (Luckily Akismet, which provides these figures, is pretty good. On a bad day it catches on this site around 1,000 spam comments – I can hardly complain that during spam “storms”, which seem to come along every week or so, it misses the odd one.)

Speaking of things you find on the internet: I discovered today that you can watch the entire BBC2 show The Daily Politics (until noon the day after broadcast). I discovered that today because Sian Berry, the Green Party Female Principal Speaker, was on the show – which was going to be about climate change, until the latest Blair revelation. Still, she did a good job, I think, across some unexpected ground.

The funny thing is that a couple of days ago someone was mocking me for not owning a television. As I said, it is me who is ahead of the curve now, not them – since you don’t actually need one any more…

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Break a leg …

February 1, 2007 – 1:47 am

Well it seems like an appropriate morning injunction, since I’ve just been reading in the London Cycling Campaign magazine about the sport of bicycle polo.

No, I’m not making it up – see here: apparently it almost made it into the Olympics.

But even though for a softer, more litigious, age they’ve had to amend the rules, I don’t think I fancy it myself – hard enough from horseback, when at least your “steed” has brains of its own and the desire to remain upright.

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Oh, you mean the male Coleridge

February 1, 2007 – 1:42 am

No I was talking about, or rather have been reading about Sara. Samuel was her father. She’s been “rediscovered” and looks like being brought back into the limelight – or at least someone is giving it a rather good go.

She had a lot to write about, for her father left the family home when she was three, then:

Her husband’s parents disapproved of her marriage, three of their five children died soon after birth, she suffered severe depression in the 1830s and her husband died young in 1843.

And her final subject was breast cancer. Written soon before she died:

Doggrel Charm
To a little lump of malignity, on being medically assured that it was not a fresh growth, but an old growth splitting.
Split away, split away,
split away, split!
Plague of my life, delay pretermit!
Rapidly, rapidly, rapidly go!
Haste ye to mitigate
trouble and woe!…

That’s what you call dying well, with spirit and brave anger.

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A legacy of plastic

January 31, 2007 – 3:06 pm

Over on Comment is Free I’ve been reflecting on the legacy of discarded plastic I’ve left around the world, on how hard it is to stop doing this.

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