Monthly Archives: May 2006

Cycling History

Proof: To Brookwood Cemetery, 28 miles in the rain

May 21, 2006 – 9:28 pm

Photo-0143Just to show I’m not making it up, this is what my bicycle looked like when it reached home this evening, after riding between Weybridge and the Brookwood Cemetery along the Basingstoke Canal – i.e. unsealed nearly the whole way. We were fairly lucky with the weather in the morning; less so in the afternoon. But I made a potentially important discovery. Once you are wet and muddy, it can’t get any worse, and it gets rather fun, in a “mad dogs and Englishmen” kind of way.

This was a London Cycle Touring Club event, and it was the historic destination that led me to try the tougher two-star option, having previously been a one-star rider. The cemetery was founded in 1852, to take, it was intended, all of London’s dead. (Detailed history here.)

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Indeed, many of the churchyards and crypts, including that of St George’s Suffolk, (nor the Catholic Cathedral) were emptied and the dead of various ages brought here. The dead of St George’s haven’t had much luck, however, or maybe their gravediggers were slack, because above is the joint memorial for them. It is, or rather was, an obelisk – a nasty case of subsidence has toppled the stones.Photo-0138The cemetery overall (at least the non-military sections) has that faintly romantic air of dereliction – quite why the fact that these dead are now neglected and forgotten has that emotional effect, but it always seems to. Left is a gorgeous built chapel, with very fine stone-work, now sadly closed up with concrete blocks.
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Miscellaneous

Get thee to a public library…

May 21, 2006 – 7:34 am

With a huge hat tip – nay a bow – to Tony on Other Men’s Flowers, I’ve just found that you can access the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography through your local library, at least in England. All you need is your library card number (or to get one), at least in Camden.

There’s also Encyclopaedia Britannica, Grove Music Online, Grove Art Online, and the Times Digital Archive. And it is through the website, so you can do it from home. Let’s all use it, and so help to make sure it continues!

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Early modern history Politics

Childish misdeeds through the ages

May 20, 2006 – 11:31 pm

At the age of nine, Nehemiah Wallington and his step-brother Philip stole a shilling from their family’s parlour table, ran off to an alehouse in Finsbury Fields, and there spent the lot on cake and ale. “When I did come forth into the air, my head was light, and I fell over the rails into the fields, and I could not rise,”  he would later recall.
Two years earlier, the boys had been stealing carrots from the carts in Leadenhall Street on their way to school. Definitely a case for an Asbo, except we are talking very early in the 17th century, and these were no street urchins, but the sons of a respectable artisan, a woodturner.

I often find myself maintaining, against most of the rhetoric of politicians and the media, that kids are just kids, much as they’ve always been – the details of misbehaviour might have changed but the standard of it, could you find a neutral measure, remains about the same level.

And there’s some modern evidence for that, in a study this week that found the youth of today are actually better behaved than their parents were.

The research, by Colin Pritchard, of Bournemouth University’s Institute of Health and Community Studies, and Richard Williams, a social inclusion co-ordinator for the university, is published in the book Breaking the Cycle of Educational Alienation. They repeated a survey in 2005 that was originally conducted in 1985 with year 10 and 11 secondary students.

“The good news and, perhaps, unexpected, is that 2005 youngsters have less problematic behaviour than the 1985 cohort.”

But it won’t surprise you to hear this was not the details of the research that made most of the headlines – this was that girls are behaving “worse” than boys. The smoking, sex etc aren’t great news, but perhaps are an inevitable side-effect of girls getting mixed messages of empowerment and the repression of pressures to be “ladylike”, and their kicking against the latter.
(Account from P.S. Seaver Wallinton’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth Century London, Metheun, 1985 p. 28 This has been on my “to read” list for some time – the Puritan religion gets a bit heavy, but it is a fascinating account of the rare survival of extensive papers from a person of this class. Unfortunately there are no female equivalents that I know of!)

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Feminism

How to have, and not have, babies

May 20, 2006 – 12:22 pm

Norway is now the richest country (in terms of GDP per capita) in the world. A good percentage of that money is going to maintain the living standards of women and children:

Another sign of contentment and economic security is the country’s fertility rate. Norwegian mothers have more children per head than anywhere else in Europe except Iceland and Ireland. Norway also has among the highest level of female participation in the workforce. Squaring the circle is maternity leave that stretches to 42 weeks on full pay.

There’s the answer, for all those keen to work out why Europe’s birth rate overall is so low.

America’s of course is not, but many of its pregnancies are less than good news. This is, it seems to me, an astonishing figure:

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a third of all U.S. girls become pregnant before they turn 20; 80 percent of them are unmarried.

U.S. teens are more likely to have sexual intercourse before age 15 and to become pregnant than teens in England and Wales, France and Sweden… The study also found that Western European teens are likelier to be in a committed relationship when they have sex. U.S. teens also have a higher rate of infection and STDs — due to lower condom use, according to the report.

What’s the difference? Religion and private medicine are probably the two main factors, I’d suggest.

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Politics

Beware the ‘new’ Tories

May 20, 2006 – 12:21 pm

A cautionary report from Matthew Parris in The Times about the “new” British Conservative Party:

“…point to something we may not have noticed: that we could be just a few years from a Cabinet in which the Prime Minister, the Foreign and Defence Secretaries and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, are to the right of Margaret Thatcher in their view of Britain’s place in the world.

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Friday Femmes Fatales

Friday Femmes Fatales No 57

May 19, 2006 – 11:47 pm

Ten great posts from 10 new (to me) women bloggers. It is here every Friday (more or less ..)

To begin, a cautionary tale about a stalker and an unwise encounter, on Letters from a Broad. Exes who want “one last” something are seldom a good idea, in my experience, even if it was never anything like this bad.

On Unsane and Safe, Jennifer considers differences in the view of self in the West and Africa. Staying on the continent, Sylvia, ticklethepear, reflects on the different experiences of male and female Peace Corps members.

Clare Dudman on Keeper of the Snails (no I didn’t find an explanation), is thinking about ways to increase happiness. (Banning advertising comes into it.)

Belle on Smatterings has turned paparazzi, but the subjects of her attention, some famous babies, aren’t too upset. Staying pictorial, Sabine in Germany, on Not All Cats Are Grey, has a running track that we might all envy. But didn’t she have to stop to take the pictures?

Then — not a blog to be read when hungry — Adriana on What I Made for Dinner had a day off for Mother’s Day, although she still ate very well, judging by the pictures. It gave her a chance to reflect on her mother’s hard work. The author of Tiny Bubbles has also been enjoying the perfect meal.

On mothers, the “Chief Biscuit” on As It Happens has a poem for her mother, and a brief account of her mother’s life.

Finally, on Diary of a Goldfish, the said Goldfish has been having bad luck with laptops (I’m carefully avoiding the obvious line here), but she enjoyed a pleasant day of nostalgia and nature anyway.

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If you missed last week’s edition, it is here. (If you’d like to see all of them as a list, click on the category “Friday Femmes Fatales” in the righthand sidebar. That will take you to a collection of 560 (and counting) women bloggers.)

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Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think “that deserves a wider audience” (particularly someone who doesn’t yet get many hits), drop a comment. It really does make my life easier. (Thanks to Holly and Penny this week!)

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