A green and pleasant land?

There is a now mercifully less common propaganda technique where you write an on the face of it interesting piece on Oh! I don't know, football, art, agriculture or education and then in the final paragraph explain how there can never be good football, art, etc until capitalism is finally superseded by the golden age of the workers councils. It's a literary device that must have led to more papers and magazines being chucked in the bin than any other. I try to avoid writing such stuff but frequently find it difficult to, if not actually write it, at least think it. Channel 4 news are running a series, Green and Pleasant Land, examining how climate change is impacting on the countryside. Prompted by a report by the Natural Environment Research Council, the Channel 4 piece last night made fascinating if disturbing viewing but as usual with environmental reporting no effort was made to even begin to question how the natural world can be protected in an economic system that must rely on growth and expansion to survive. To pose the question is to answer it of course and the answer is enough to send shivers down the spines of the rich and powerful. It seems to me that the effects of climate change, distressing though some of them may be, provide us with a challenge and a wonderful opportunity to take a further step along the road of the human adventure. Will the dreams of the 19th century anarchist and socialist revolutionaries be finally realised and will an inadvertent result of industrial capitalism that they could never have imagined be the catalyst?

Fingswotposhpeoplelike.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/things-posh-people-like

Adventures in Metroland.

Have you ever followed the Betjeman Trail into Metroland and headed out on the Metropolitan Line toward the foothills of the Chilterns? That's what we did yesterday when packing the usual flask of tea, packet of sandwiches and trusty Freedom Pass we set out on the tube to Amersham and then to Great Missenden. Journeying into Metroland today it's difficult to imagine that during the inter-war suburban building boom such profoundly ordinaire places as Wembley Park, Northwick Park and North Harrow could be seen as some kind of semi-rural utopia that the moderately affluent middle-class could escape from "the smoke" to. Our plan was to disembark at Great Missenden and walk the ten miles back to Amersham. The walk itself is a pretty easy stroll through fine rolling country. May is my favourite month. All that new growth, blossom, the first almost psychedelic green of beech leaves. Yesterday we had Red Kites soaring overhead as well.  SAY NO TO HS 2 proclaim the posters in every settlement we passed through. I bet UKIP cleaned up here.  Amersham when we arrived turned out to be a microcosm of rural Middle England, the council estate on the outskirts contrasting with the film set, olde worlde High Street with Georgian buildings and the usual posh shops. A group of very smartly dressed women passed us in a cloud of what Her Indoors assured me was Estee Lauder. We sunk a couple of well deserved pints in The Crown before trudging up the hill to the station and the tube home.

For the lack of a kill-cord?

The tragic speedboat accident at Padstow is another in the long line of outboard engine disasters. Power boats, and especially outboard driven ones, are potentially very highly dangerous pieces of kit. Accidents involving outboards engines are never trivial and almost always result in horrific injuries or death. Tight turns at high speed can flip the boat or at least hurl the crew overboard with the boat continuing to make lethal high speed circles around the people in the water. All outboards are fitted with a simple device called a "kill cord" that is attached to the helmsman and will kill the engine instantly if they should be thrown from the boat. Attaching the kill cord is such an easy thing to do but every year many power boat drivers just don't bother. Some of them are no longer with us.

Farewell Audley Harrison.

Show biz, and professional sport is very much a part of the entertainment industry, can be a hard old game. Fans can be very unforgiving and none more so than boxing fans. Many boxing aficionados will be heaving a sigh of relief at the news of Audley Harrison's retirement. Despite a 31-7-0 pro record Audley was never able to really make his mark in the upper echelon's of the paid ranks. At 6 ft 5 in and  250 pounds he cut an impressive figure and with an outstanding amateur record and a stiff jab to back it up their were high hopes, but alas it was not to be. I hope Audley has a happy retirement. I know that he's not short of a bob or two but mostly I hope that when he looks back on his pro career he will be able to raise a smile. Fuck the critics. Good luck Audley.

What do we want? Xenophobia!

Nothing gets politico stamp collector's juices flowing like the ups and downs of the fringe parties and UKIP's undoubted success at the polls yesterday will no doubt have the desired effect. But UKIP having their fifteen minutes of fame is not the rebirth of fascism or (unfortunately) part of the death throes of capitalism. It is a sure sign that, rightly or wrongly, many people in this country have deep misgivings about immigration and our future in Europe. UKIP is no longer the preserve of bitter and twisted old blokes living in bungalows on the South Coast and can now claim a much wider support. More important than the local authority elections was the result of the South Shields by-election. Labour may have had a comfortable victory, and I'm unsure whether to laugh or cry at the Lib-Dems getting just half the vote of the BNP, but certainly UKIP's strong second place points to a lot of working class people seeing their problems, not as class problems, but as individual trials and tribulations brought about by foreigners. Now that is bad news.

Steadman weathers well.

Last night to the preview of the excellent Ralph Steadman retrospective at the Cartoon Museum.          A real treat for Steadman fans and well worth a visit.