Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

That’s what you call a household

August 27, 2006 – 10:52 pm

An interesting portrayal of the household of Charles I on the eve of the Civil War:

“… it comprised as much as 1800 people. Some of these were given bed and board, others received what was called ‘bourge of court’, which included bread, ale, firewood and candles. The court also suppored hordes of nobles, princes, ambassadors and other state visitors, who all resided in it with their households, such as Henrietta’s mother Marie de Medici, and her entourage…. Supporting the household accounted for more than 40% of royal expenditure. …

The queen had her own household, which included a full kitchen staff, a keeper of the sweet coffers [probably a popular job, I’d suggest!] a laundress and a starcher, and a seamstress. There were over 180, not including the stables staff.”

From The English Civil War: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss, HarperPress, 2006.

What strikes me about this is just how chaotic everyday life must have been in such circumstances. A nightmare should you have been responsible for “security”, as we’d now call it. Sure access to the royal inner chambers would have been tightly controlled, but when the king or queen wanted to go hunting, or otherwise “out” they’d have had to pass through these outer throngs.

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Mapping the emotions of London, or creating cyborg memory

August 27, 2006 – 5:06 pm

Having a clean-up of the desk – which has to happen every month or so, when the archaeological layers threaten to descend into chaos – I stumbled across the handout from a session at the Literary London conference that I had neglected to record, but that certainly deserves a bit of attention.

It was with the artist Christian Nold, who uses the technology of lie detectors (which of course sense stress, not “lies”) to create maps of London showing where people’s stress levels rise as they walk the streets. Participants are then invited to annotate the 3D maps with explanations of what caused their reaction – creating a personal but also social recreation of a moment in space and time.

It is described as bio-mapping and the inventor descibes it as visualising “our subtle relationship between the emotional world and the extrenal world”.

The theoretical discussion contained something of course of the Situationists dérive, something of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, and something of Peter Ackroyd’s views of London’s effects on crowds, that it “channelled the energies of its citizens into the crooked chape of its lanes and thoroughfares, rendering them ever more fierce and desperate”. (Not actually a view of London with which I concur.)

But the maps produced has a very physical reality – the stress measured in black walls that grow high as stress grows.

The “cyborg memory” was my label – for that’s in fact what each map is.

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A green field, a white sightscreen, and 500 runs

August 26, 2006 – 10:19 pm

Apologies for the absence today, but I’ve been out playing cricket again – in what will be my last match of the season, which fitted in beautifully between London’s increasingly tropical-looking rainstorms.

And the groundsman – who was there to be congratulated, deserved it for delivering, despite the conditions, a grass pitch on which more than 500 runs were score between 1pm(ish) and 7pm (ish). That it all ended in a draw after that – well that’s cricket.

But then I came home and read this piece in the SMH about the shortage of sporting fields in Sydney – one “problem” apparently is that more women are demanding access to fields, so that there is less space for the me.

Which reminded me of the cricket fields on which I used to play in Sydney – which were barely deserving of that name. Probably the worst was one out in the shadow of the Kurnell Oil refinery at Botany Bay, which was grazed the rest of the week by horses. Indeed they had to be chased off the field before the game could begin. The chasers being followed, of course, by several women wielding shovels. Still, if you were unlucky enough to be fielding in the deeper reachers of say, deep midwicket, you were all too likely to find a patch of horse-shit that the shovellers had missed.

That was women’s second division, but I also spent a fair bit of my teens playing in the first division, which meant grass pitches, but on our home ground at north Sydney ridiculously short boundaries at each end of the pitch. So most of my time playing first division was spent standing at either very fine leg or very third man, desperately hoping to stop balls the keeper had missed from the bowler then considered the quickest woman bowler in the world.

I wonder if the women’s first division still plays on that ground? Sadly, I think ’tis highly likely.

And as for the lovely white sightscreens at each end of today’s pitch – well they would have been an unimaginable luxury.

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Easter Island – blame the rats

August 25, 2006 – 8:32 pm

A fascinating piece of revisionist history of Easter Island, which says Jared Diamond was wrong that the problem was humans cutting down trees. Instead it was the rats that the humans brought who stopped the trees from reproducing. Still humans to blame in the end though…

Also a very interesting description of the achaeological (scientific) method working as it should work. (At least in the way the narrative is told.)

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Bicycle heaven

August 25, 2006 – 7:10 pm

Thinking about a week in France – probably a week wandering around Brittany, centred on Carnac, so poking around the SCNF website. How refreshing it is that every train on which cycles can be taken has a little logo beside it. I haven’t explored further to see about bookings and things, but surely this is a sign of serious attempts to make combining train and cycle journeys possible and even pleasant – so unlike the attitude of British train companies.

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The MCPs are alive and well …

August 24, 2006 – 11:51 pm

… and living in Australia. (Or at least some of them are.)

Here’s the ABC’s preview of the annual awards for male chauvinism and the SMH’s short summary of the winners.

One “winner” I know, Bill Heffernan, who in my time was a loud and brash conservative activist in the one-horse town of Junee.

The federal Liberal MP Bill Heffernan took out the political award for saying of the deputy federal Labor leader, Julia Gillard: “Anyone who chooses to remain deliberately barren …they’ve got no idea what life’s about.”

Although on scale of seriousness, the top award really should go to this one:

The lawyer Chrisovalantis Papadopoulos won the judicial category for saying a rape was only brief and “at the very bottom of the scale of seriousness”.

Tis said a book is in the offing. Somehow I doubt the standards have “improved” over the 14 years of the awards.

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