You can travel a long way in the Sacred British Library exhibition, which I’ve just reviewed over on My London Your London. I’ve stuck largely to the history and avoided the theology – an obvious approach really, for an atheist!
And even in a religion exhibition I found the stories of a couple of interesting women get a decent place.
A couple of notes:
* There’s a new cycling shop, Camden Cycles, on Eversholt Road (at the bottom end of the high street, on the left of Mornington Crescent Tube if you’re coming from Camden) which seems OK and has quite decent prices: £30 for a general service and £10 for new brake pads all around. (So now I’ve got brakes again after some time without – have to remember that so I don’t catapult myself over the handlebars.)
* Lock up well if you leave your bike at the British Library. A guard today was warning me that they’ve been having a lot of problems with thefts lately.
… but not as you know it. Chameleon brings her own inimitable style to Britblog Roundup No 116 – if you think it is usually a collection of usual suspects, you’ll want to check this out for something different…
Well it seems all that it is going to buy you is 240 miles of slightly wider road, which will just move the traffic jams a bit further away from Britain’s M1.
Alternative suggestions: hospitals, schools, development aid for Africa, a citizen’s income…?
Isn’t it nice to know we’ve got a “green” government.
Now the dust has settled from last Thursday’s elections, the overall picture from a Green Party perspective is clear. The results proved that when a Green group gets established on a council, people like what they do, like what sort of councillors they are.
In Brighton, we leapt from six to 12 councillors, in Lancaster from five to 12, and in Norwich we reached 10 councillors. (They have annual elections there, so leaps don’t happen quite the same way, but we missed out by ONE vote on getting another seat – and that was an enormous swing to us. That would have made us the second-largest group on council, and was in Thorpe Hamlet ward, where I made my contribution with an eight-and-a-half hour canvassing day – if I’d only done nine hours…)
Norwich is particularly interesting because in the parliamentary constituency of Norwich South we achieved the highest overall vote of any party. That’s a seat currently held by Charles Clarke – and the Norwich Evening News is already acknowledging that fact by including a Green comment in a piece on Clarke’s political future.
I haven’t seen the breakdown figures on Brighton, but we must also be doing very well on overall votes there.
As for the back story to Lancaster, I don’t know a great deal, but it seems it was seriously a shock result that saw the Greens unseat the Labour leader on council.
There’s a complete listing of results here.
It is clear that what the Green Party has to do now is get a lot more footholds, that can make the same sort of leaps as these cities have made… sounds simple when you say it quickly!
(Jim also has a summary, from a slightly different perspective.)
Barista provides an excellent summary of recent changes in the Australian media and its likely future direction – particularly the purchase of Rural Press by the Fairfax group.
Perhaps a specialist interest, but of particular interest to me, since I worked for one and nearly worked for the other. I was lined up to do a cadetship on the Sydney Morning Herald until young Warwick came in and took over the company in one of those disastrous late-eighties takeover swoops that meant an immediate staff freeze.
And I did work experience at The Land, which was at the time Rural Press’s only paper – and owe a lot to the patient chief sub there who first taught me to turn 100cm of detailed notes into a 30cm news story. (My first story published was on chital deer: I still have it somewhere.)
And then at the Cootamundra Herald I worked for Rural Press and later the Northern Daily Leader, indeed directly with Brian McCarthy, who I see has risen to great heights, which surprises me not at all. If you want a man to “control” your costs, I’d reckon he’d be it.
Nostalgia? No!
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