A simple billing: the first woman to bicycle around the world was a Jewish mother from Boston. And in what looks like a very thick wool skirt, and on a bicycle that I bet weighed a tonne.
Keeping to the sporting theme, a great idea: a scheme to provide girls in Ethiopia with running shoes, which should also help them stay in school and avoid early marriage.
The weekend’s Guardian reports that “English newspapers gave away 54m DVDs in the first quarter of this year, roughly as many as were bought in the shops”. The best estimate I’ve seen is that each new reader so attracted (often for that one week only) costs the papers several pounds. And of course most of those DVDs will sooner or later – and probably sooner, end up clogging the nation’s landfills. How long before a DVD rots back into the earth? I dread to think.
Excellent piece in The Times this morning about the fact that 600,000, give or take the odd hundred thousand, citizens of new EU states, have come to Britain and almost all found jobs, while having almost no effect on British unemployment. I think of it from the situation of about seven or eight years ago, when the fuss was about the influx of people from the Balkans. The Bosnian car-washer, slaving all hours of the day and night for little pay and going back to the room he shares with two others is not taking away the job of the ex-coal miner from the north with his family home and children. They simply exist in different economies. Ditto the young female Polish care-worker.
The interesting question is how many of the Poles and others are going to stay. Most of the anecdotal evidence suggests that they think they are only here for a few years, but of course they might be wrong. And since the UK government crazily keeps no track of people leaving the country, it will be a long time before that is clear.
This is why, for those not following the story, the figure is so vague. First of all the initial statistic relies on data collected only from those seeking a job – the self-employed (all those Polish plumbers) are not counted at all. Secondly, no one knows how many of the initial registrees have got homesick, not found a job, or otherwise have decided to go home.
Having lived there for quite a while, I think that not much can surprise me about the cultural differences in attitudes to sex matters between West and East, but I’d never heard of having striptease at funerals before.
I interviewed the comic Tuo Xian who was one of the first organizers of strip shows in Taiwan. The performance of striptease at funerals, but also at real estate promotions and other occasion, started some 20 years ago and peaked during the mid-80s.
(From a discussion at H-Asia.)
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.
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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