Getting there, song wise

Friday, so slow views-day.

Sooner or later every long-term blog-artist is reduced to this one: songs with a common meme or — if you’re really unlucky and can’t click elsewhere quick enough — a common theme.

So:

• Dolly empathetically came Down from Dover —

• The Bangles were Going Down to Liverpool (with, in this case, a justifiably-unconvinced Mr Nimoy);
• The Drive-By Truckers, all coked up, were bound Greenville to Baton Rouge;
• Lee Ann Womack, having made it A Little Past Little Rock,  was in her two-bed waterfront flat reflecting on the million-miles and half-a-day trip from Montgomery to Memphis. We can pass over that one (though anything by and with Womack is worth the earing), to recall it was a more political distance for Martin Luther King.

There are many, many more.

Malcolm is not looking for the standard songs-with-placenames shtick here: it the A to B (and preferably via C, D, E …) that’s keeping him checking. And, of course, someone tried to get there before him and spoils the fun.

Yet, there’s a bit more to be said about these “distance songs”.

First they should be something better than a list of names, which rules out, for this purpose anyway, I’ve Been Everywhere, Man — originally Australian, more widely recognised in the Hank Snow US-specific effort. It also takes off the list stuff like Dave Loggins’s excellent (especially the Joan Baez rendering) Please Come to Boston — although it states a westward migration (Boston, Denver, L.A.), that isn’t entirely explained. Aw, shucks: let’s have it anyway:

Into the drossy zone

One that always has Malcolm a bit leery is C.W.McCall’s Convoy. Yes, yes: he knows he should scorn it (especially the “PG-variant” variant, which makes no geographical sense whatsoever), but Sam Peckinpah made a decent fist of it:

Bobbie Troup’s seminal Route 66 qualifies as a prime example of what Malcolm has in mind, because it does take us logically from place-to-place.

What intrigues is the YouTube vid is from 1964. So, who is following whom? Did Troup learn to swing it from the Matt King Cole classic? Or did Cole get it from an earlier Troup (who was, after all, no mean practioner)?

Number One?

Well, Malcolm is opting out on that — because he reckons there should be a separate posting on railways journeys, and the all-out Number One is on steel wheels. More, anon. And he’s not sure whether Highway 61 Revisited qualifies. At which point despair sets in: how to do proper justice to Highway 61, Roosevelt Sykes, Mississippi Fred McDowell and all. The problem is that US61 is not the entirety of “Highway 61″: that is more metaphorical than cartographical for the whole migration from the Deep South.

But for a walking journey (although she got on this airplane just to fly)  Emmylou is the pace-maker, with the elegy to Gram Parsons, going Boulder to Birmingham:

What?

For more of the same: https://www.facebook.com/DigitalGlobeInc

Well worth the trip.

What the eye doesn’t see …

About semi-annually an incoming Transport Minister, anxious to make a PR hit at minimal cost and effort, republishes a circular. The document urges local councils to cut back on the street clutter that befouls most streets, junctions and even beauty spots.

The classic example is the warning of aircraft noise, under the Heathrow fly-path. With 1200 or 1300 aircraft in-and-out each day, near roof-top height over Hounslow, with the prevailing wind wafting the pungency of jetfuel, a metal warning of the obvious is just another intrusion into decency.

One of the last occasions Malcolm went to Heathrow, he reckoned the road signage, warnings, prohibitions and indicators — road-side and on the carriageway — aggregated at one to every dozen-to-fifteen yards. So, at thirty miles an hour (and much of the way the speed limit is higher than that), the driver has to take note of them at the rate of more than one a second — as well as watching the traffic. This way insanity lies.

Officialdom gives four main reasons for the latest utterance:

1. Improving the streetscape by identifying and removing unnecessary, damaged and worn-out signs;
2. Helping to ensure signs are provided only where they are needed;
3. Minimising the environmental impact, particularly in rural settings;
4. Reducing costs, not just of the signs themselves but maintenance and energy costs.

The only one of those that needs to be propounded is the third: environmental impact (in other words, gross eye-sores, defacing the streetscape and the landscape). The other three are either self-evident or even (especially with the first one) hazards.

Now let’s take an example: not from a main London highway, but from a quiet Nidderdale village (one pub, one shop, one bus an hour — none on Sundays) just outside the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Once upon a time:

And, a similar view today:

There are now seven metal signs, where once a single, simple (and very “English”) wooden fingerpost sufficed.

Face off

While Malcolm was in the former American colony of Noo Joisey and in absentia, WordPress would seem to have re-arranged how photographs are inserted into posts. That Malcolm was somewhat jet-lagged after an eventful ride with Mustang Sally was a further confusion.

That means the two protagonists of that anecdote in the previous post went un-illustrated. While Malcolm works out what he is doing wrong, let’s hear it for Aelia Galla Placidia (above).

There’s a decent Wikipedia mini-biog of the lady, well worth a quite viewing — for she was a figure of considerable consequence. She is also mother  to millions — try the account on rootsweb for a taster. One way or another, she figures in the ancestry of many Europeans — and probably all of their hereditary rulers. She was, for example, Elizabeth II’s something-like forty-six-times-back great-grandmother.

Ravenna

The source of that image is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna, which deserves to qualify as one of the wonder of early European art, recognised by UNESCO as:

the earliest and best preserved of all mosaic monuments, and at the same time one of the most artistically perfect.

Slide out of the Mausoleum, take a swift left past the Information Bureau into the Via Cavour, then right into Via di Roma, and there is the Basilica of San Apollinare Nuovo. [Aha! See! Malcolm is getting the knack of this insertion business!]

San Apollinare Nuovo was where W.B.Yeats was confronted by his:

sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

— another poem Malcolm was made to learn at Dublin’s High School for his Leaving Cert., and which has fertilised brain-cells ever since.

A note of dubiety

Despite that image of Galla Placidia having a prominent position in her eponymous Mausoleum (as part of the family group with her two children, Valentinian and Honoria), there are certain snippy critics who question whether it does in fact represent the lady.

Malcolm will have none of that. That is she, majestically, imperially, imperiously so, and no-one else.

Oh, and a further footnote …

One modern legend has it that Cole Porter visited the Mausoleum, came outside, looked up at the Italian sky, and had the notion for Night and Day. And if that’s not a good enough excuse …

One up-woman-ship

Doubtless the next few outings will reveal what Malcolm has been doin’ of late.

Back to a fer-fer-freezing London, courtesy of G-VROC Mustang Sally (and she surely was bucking about in the early stages of the flight), one of the first little bizarreries lodged in Malcolm’s mind was that very word.

bizarrerie

The OED definition is Bizarre quality — which is rather like saying ‘pinkness’ is the quality of being pink. It doesn’t really help. You either ‘get it’ or you don’t.

Rather like ConDem coalition government, which itself defines a particular bizarrerie.

Perhaps bizarrerie was intended to be the name of a retail shop, and therefore most likely to suit one specialising in female ‘intimate’ apparel. And so we have another bizarrerie: how can clothing be ‘intimate’?

Anyway, bizarrerie enjoyed a brief span as a borrowed (from French) English word in the first part of the Nineteenth Century. We find the ubiquitous Walter Scott employing it in his little spook-story, The Tapestried Chamber:

Upon a gentle eminence, nearly a mile to the southward of the town, were seen amongst many venerable oaks and tangled thickets the turrets of a castle, as old as the wars of York and Lancaster, but which seemed to have received important alterations during the age of Elizabeth and her successors. It had not been a place of great size; but whatever accommodation it formerly afforded, was, it must be supposed, still to be obtained within its walls; at least, such was the inference which General Browne drew from observing the smoke arise merrily from several of the ancient wreathed and carved chimney-stalks. The wall of the park ran alongside of the highway for two or three hundred yards, and, through the different points by which the eye found glimpses into the woodland scenery, it seemed to be well stocked. Other points of view opened in succession; now a full one, of the front of the old castle, and now a side glimpse at its particular towers; the former rich in all the bizarrerie of the Elizabethan school, while the simple and solid strength of other parts of the building seemed to show that they had been raised more for defence than ostentation.

A wee bit of Lit. Hist.

Another bizarrerie: the Gothic Novel was running into exhaustion by the start of the Nineteenth Century.

In its first incarnation it expired with Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, of 1820. That’s why Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey (1818) guys The Mysteries of Udolpho (from 1794) so mercilessly. And Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, from the same year as Austen, is up to the same knavish tricks. Yet here we have Scott, in 1828, apparently counter-reacting against the reaction, and re-deploying some classic Gothic elements: the haunted room, a stereotypical villain, and a family curse. Scott’s regular publishers, James Ballantyne and Robert Cadell, were none too keen; and Scott had to divert his gothic tales to Frederic Mansel Reynold’s annual The Keepsake.

Scott, though, was the shrewd dude. He recognised that the clichés of the Gothic genre would sell and sell — all the way down to the present day. Which, in another way, is what Austen and Peacock were also about.

The particular instance

What brought the word bizarrerie into Malcolm’s mind this particular day, and in connection with the headline above, was discovering the story of Galla Placidia and Saint Germanus.

Galla Placidia was one of the pincesses of the later Western Roman Empire. daughter of Theodosius I. On New year’s Day, AD 417, she fulfilled the dynastic need imposed upon every princess: she was married off to Flavius Constantinus, the Emperor Honorius’ military hatchet-man and fixer-in-chief. By the end of that year, Galla Placidia was the mother of a doughtier, and a son was added within another year or so. Constantinus was named co-emperor, and the young son, Valentinian marked as Honorius’s heir.

After seven months as co-emperor, Constantinus died, and Honorius — never the most stable element around — took suspicions that Galla Placidia was plotting to do him down. Galla Placidia bunked off from Ravenna to the eastern court of Theodosius at Constantinople. Theodosius was severely frosty about Valentinian, nurturing ambitions to reunite the empire from Constantinople.

Galla Placidia was in a vexed political position, distrusted by both imperial court. Her solution was to revert to virginity (i.e. strict chastity and religious observance).

Time passes

By her later years (let’s jump over the vagaries of fifth-century Italy) Galla Placidia was back in Ravenna, being a professional mother of the church, founding churches and monasteries, providing an example to all and sundry.

In 446 Bishop Germanus of Auxerre came visiting, apparently to moderate the ‘official’ distaste (which fell little short of persecution) for the Bagaudae, who were grass-roots, and lower orders, fundamentalist christians and as-near-as-dammit national liberationists across Gaul and Iberia.

The Bagaudae had first emerged from the primeval forests between the Seine and the Loire towards the end of the Third Century, attacking the great landowners in their villas, and even over-running small, ill-defended towns. A further outbreak of civil disobedience, also termed the ‘Bagaudae’, happened in the first half of the Fifth Century, all the ay from Brittany to the Pyrenees. Roman generals Aetius and Litorius had to do a bit of aggressive ‘hearts and minds’ stuff, using the full might of the Roman army and their Visigoth mercenaries.

Germanus had acquired charisma as a populist preacher, ascetic, faith-healer, and miracle-worker. He turned up at Ravenna, in the depths of night, hoping to avoid fervid excesses. Galla Placidia was not to be cheated of her celebrations, though: she had ordered a full-on, all-night vigil. Galla Placidia 1, Germanus 0.

Germanus was welcomed with a vast silver platter, laden with all sorts of vegetarian delicacies (a gesture to the Bishop’s known diet). Galla Placidia 2, Germanus 0.

Germanus countered by giving away all the prepared food: Galla Placidia 2, Germanus 1. He followed up with another strike: he sold the silver platter, and distributed the proceeds to Ravenna’s poor.

Half-time: two-all.

Into the second half, Germanus went for an opportunist goal, sending Galla Placidia a gift of his own: a modest barley loaf on a simple wooden platter. One up to Germanus, particularly because the implicit message was how Galla Placidia insouciantly combined the regal ostentation of her imperial rank with shows of pious simplicity.

Our gal was up for that.

She had the barley loaf preserved, assuring all and sundry that it had miraculous healing powers. The wooden platter she had framed in gold, and made an object of veneration. A clear win for the lady and the home team, by any standard.

And that, friends and acquaintances, is Malcolm’s example of bizarrerie.

Windfall Big Apple

The Great Sandy Disaster happened across a whole swathe (good to hear that underused word coming from presidential lips) of the East Coast.

Yet in the first instance (though see codicil below) the UK press coverage confined Sandy’s main effect  to three Boroughs of New York: one got flooded, one got fired and one was deserted. Malcolm’s familial ties to Essex County, New Jersey, meant he was looking in that direction — most of what he found involved views of downtown Manhattan from Hoboken Terminal.

Oh, and there was the aerial shot of the dunked yellow taxis in their Hoboken lot and the tanker piled onto Staten Island.

And therein lies this tale.

It’s not just the London/British press. There’s something makes Manhattan the focal point of the whole world’s (including the US) media attention. A frequency chart of stories from and about the United States would come up as a dot-matrix of that famous Steinberg New Yorker cover.

All that is explicable for film and television. After all, it’s the sky-line, innit? A movie set in London, for international consumption, has to be located by reference to Tower Bridge and the Palace of Westminster> Similarly the spiky horizon behind Battery Park, or the classic view across the Brooklyn Bridge (always from the Brooklyn end) is new York, but natch.

All understandably so. After all, flying into Newark Liberty (as the Lady in his Life and Malcolm do in a few days time) is made worthwhile by:

• it being the one New York airport that seems to work (although with inevitable delays);
• its ease of access (particularly when Number One Daughter is waiting at the gate); and
• the final approach in darkness, having that wall of high-rising lights to port. Even hardened travellers seem incapable of resisting this ocular cliché.

Which allows Malcolm chance to mention a particular favourite.

A while back (early 2011) Bernie Hou manufactured a magnificent, even iconic graphic, packing 91 New York movie locations into a single image.

Of the 91 Malcolm recognised perhaps a dozen.

Malcolmian aside

They say that half the scientists who have ever lived and worked in the history of the human race are alive, well and researching today.

The same must be true, to an even more remarkable fraction, about graphic artists. Across the digital globe, spotty geeks with pirated Photoshop and illicit Illustrator, all sitting at their high-definition video-screens, are pushing the envelope of the possible. Their mothers despair they will ever tidy their bedrooms.

The New York Central meme is a consequence of all the media operators having their bases within shoulder-rubbing distance of each other, and as close to Times Square as can be.

The corollary

And then the lights went out.

Remarkably the Sandy story then moved outwards, to where other tv studios were still operating. And that, folks, is how they make ‘news’ in the Big Apple.

And how the Big Apple is sauced for news.

Cylonic irritation

James Dyson is, quite literally, a household name: his vacuum cleaner is the object of choice in so many bourgeois under-the-staircase glory-holes.

He is also a good North Norfolk-born lad (Cromer, as it happens), which is fair enough reason to hear him.

Here he was today, with the Thunderer opinion-column in The Times [£].

His gripe, which we have heard before, is the UK’s failure to maintain and improve the infra-structure:

With Britain’s population having grown by nearly four million in ten years, we need to match that extra demand with long-term investment in roads, rail and airports. The coalition’s plan to electrify the spine of Britain is exactly what is needed. The spin doctors may tout it as a £9 billion investment in our railways, but split over five years it’s £2 billion a year. Slow and steady investment will win the race.

Despite our British tendency to form a well-mannered queue, we cannot delay decisions on infrastructure in the world’s seventh largest economy. The delay in deciding how we could add more capacity to our overstretched airports in the South East is infuriating. The IMF has downgraded the UK’s growth prospect to 0.2 per cent, so as the home market struggles British businesses will have to look abroad in order to grow, At Dyson four fifths of our machines are exported. Without strong links to foreign markets, british business suffers. Indecision over a third runway for Heathrow or a Thames Estuary airport is bad for business and bad for government coffers too; Dyson pays 85 per cent of its taxes to HMRC.

The problem is not confined to the air. Our roads seem to be crumbling just as we expect some of the heaviest traffic into London. The M4 has been closed for emergency repairs to cracks in the supporting pillars. Investing in our ageing roads is as important as spending on big new projects. A constant flow of funding is required to prop up an economy worth £1.4 trillion.

OK, fair enough. Not cutting-edge stuff. No Nobels for Literature there. But we feels your pain, James.

Let’s do a quick check-back:

The population may not have increased by those four million in ten years. Local authorities in the big cities have been banging on for the last decade that the 2001 Census was a long way less than perfect.

£2 billion year is about what we’ve been chucking at the Olympics. It might buy you a decent aircraft carrier, or pay for a small war. It’s not open-wallet time.

There is no way that Borisport-on-Thames is going to happen. That leaves us with a third runway for Heathrow, second runways at either Stansted or Gatwick, and developing feeder sites (such as Eddie Stobart is doing at Southend) linked to much improved rail links. Currently a coach service ambles along the congested M25 from Heathrow to Gatwick. For half of the Olympics budget, less than a sixth of the Borisport back-of-an-envelope accounting, we could achieve “Heathwick”, with a 15-20 minute transfer time.

But all of that, and more, would amount to “Plan B”, and Gids he say no.

Nothing new here

Down towards the known roots of Malcolm’s family tree is the Man from Brabant — still one of his more visited postings. Further back there are indisputable Norman-French, Scots Grants and other undesirable aliens.

The Lady in Malcolm’s Life has an Ulster background; and happily, like many — if not most — of her ilk, records French Huguenot ancestry. Where would the linen industry have been without them?

The Redfellow Number One Daughter lives with her American brood in New York.

Malcolm is currently seventy-odd pages into David Miles’s beautifully-written The Tribes of Britain — still in the Neolithic, but he’ll get to the later immigrants in due course. The history of British imperialism, why so much of the map was that curious pinky-red, is another bit of the story.

All of which means he isn’t greatly impressed by the BBC’s Lucy Ash recognising that London is France’s sixth biggest city.

Just as Boston and Philadelphia  probably rank close behind Dublin as major Irish cities. And the English in Paris are none too difficult to find.

We migrant humans are the Bisto that lubricates the meat-and-potatoes of life. On which Galton and Simpson put as good a definition as any into the mouth of Antony Aloysius St John Hancock:

Hancock: (Sigh) I wish I hadn’t got up now. Your dinner wasn’t worth getting up for, I’ll tell you that for a start!

Hattie: Ah, well, I don’t know, I ate mine!

Hancock: That is neither here nor there. You also ate Bill’s and Sid’s and mine. I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about. Yours just sort of lies there and sets.

Hattie: That’s the goodness in it.

Hancock: That’s the ‘alf a pound of flour you put in it! Oh, dear! (Sigh) What a life!

If Mr Salmond dared extend his referendum to all the hemi-semi-demi Scots, he’d be getting very short shrift.

Not a new river crossing

Walter Raleigh was rather OTT at the best of times, including:

There are two things scarce matched in the Universe — the sun in heaven and the Thames on earth!

As far as Malcolm can see, that is an ascription, without definitive provenance. William Dunbar had waxed lyrical forehand:

Above all ryvers thy Ryver hath renowne,
Whose beryall stremys, pleasaunt and preclare,
Under thy lusty wallys renneth down,
Where many a swan doth swymme with wyngis fair;
Where many a barge doth saile and row with are;
Where many a ship doth rest with top-royall.
O, towne of townes! patrone and not compare,
London, thou art the flour of Cities all.

Much as Malcolm admires Dunbar as a makir [= poet] he must have caught the Thames on a good day to observe it as a “precious blue-green color-of-sea-water stone”. And swans swimming with their wings, fair or not?

Still, such extravagances are totally in line with what follows.

As recently as a month ago, you could have read this in your Boris Johnson-loving Daily Mail:

The new cable car is due to start carrying passengers this summer, just in time for the Olympics.

Gondolas will glide over cables suspended between 300ft white pillars and ferry Olympics spectators between two of the Games venues – the 02 Arena on the south bank of the Thames and the ExCel exhibition centre in east London.

And the puffery continued:

Alas! There is an update:

Transport for London said it would be ready for people to use by the summer but there were no plans for it to be open before the Olympics.

Now, Malcolm is confused. The Olympic horror is on us in late July. the funfest runs the full length of the school summer holidays. So, when is “summer” this year? Or is this a Theresa May calendar?

All good home-grown stuff

The cable car (sorry, “the Emirates Air Line”, as it already features on London tube maps) — as right) links the O2 arena — it’s origins as the Millennium Dome are now lost in time — with the ExCeL expo-centre. One of those is leased by the Anschutz Entertainment Group of Los Angeles (which, by no coincidence, also owns the Thames Clipper catamarans). The other is owned by the Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company.

In short, this not-great, non-innovation in restricted-public transport links one commercial wasteland with another. Or, as BoJo burnished the jobbie, with inventiveness and accuracy not far short of Raleigh or Dunbar:

In terms of demand, the cable car is predicted to carry in excess of a million passengers in its first year of operation. The demand for the system is expected to come from 3 principal sources: people living and working in the surrounding area; people who may use the cable car to visit surrounding facilities such as Excel/O2 and people who choose to use the cable car as an attraction in its own right, drawing new visitors to the Royal Docks and Greenwich Peninsula. 

Another fine mess …

This is not the first cock-up clocked by the cable car project:

This from Martin Hoscik in October last year:

In a statement issued in July 2010, Johnson said: “The aim is to fund the construction of the scheme entirely from private finance and discussions are ongoing with a number of private sector organisations that have expressed interest in the project.”

The Mayor also told Assembly Members that Transport for London “does not have the budget to implement this scheme itself.”

Despite this he later confirmed that Londoners, via TfL, would provide the scheme’s “upfront funding” which would then be recouped “from a range of sources including the appointed commercial partner, fare revenue and sponsorship.”

That back-of-an-envelope £25 million, had become £45 million within two months, and now the money was coming from the TfL budget, at the expense of rail improvements. The latest figure seems to indicate something in excess of £60 million.

What would an austerity-mongering Tory (obviously not BoJo) call a Labour-sponsored project which over-ran estimates by 240% in just one year?

What would an efficiency-not-austerity Cameroonie say about a project which duplicates existing provision, for no great consumer advantage, at this ridiculous cost? Tom at Boriswatch, admitting that the cable car had flown under his radar, considered the fares arrangements in some detail (calculations which seem to have come first via Rachel Holdsworth at Londonist), with the conclusions that this was yet another of [BoJo's] expensive boondoggles … involving carrying fresh air across the Thames. 

Here come the rantin’ lads

Anyone looking for the shorthand of this post should refer to Doubting Thomas‘s comment on the earlier post, below. For those who prefer the scenic route …

It’s Topic 12ts297 all the way from 1976. If you’ve got an original, keep it, frame it, put it in the safe deposit …

It turns up regularly on eBay, with decent folk sharing their happiness and making a decent profit on their initial investment. One can acquire an electronic placebo from iTunes. A warning, however: another fine recording, Along the Coaly Tyne (a compilation of Louis Killen and Johnny Handle), uses the same cover image.

A Malcolmian aside

It took Malcolm a while to identify the source of that image.

It seemed remarkably akin to Ford Maddox Brown’s Work, the far better-known — and contemporary — depiction of Hampstead High Street from Greenhill. Stand at that spot, look up the hill, ignore the fashions, tarmac and traffic, and not a lot has changed.  Even the dogs are dressed very like that whippet in the foreground.

Fortunately a full explanation of Iron and Coal by William Bell Scott is on line, thanks to Andrew Graham-Dixon’s site reproducing a review (dated 28th November 1989) he did for the Independent:

William Bell Scott, a little known Victorian painter who was uncharitably remembered by Algernon Swinburne as an ‘imbecile, doting, malignant, mangy old son of a bitch’, is both the discovery of this show and the creator of its centrepiece, Iron and Coal: The Nineteenth Century. This is an impressive if somewhat ungainly painting and probably the most strident piece of Novocastrian propaganda ever painted. A quartet of broad-shouldered foundry workers raise their hammers high, bashing something unseen but doubtless major into shape. Scott’s picture has, itself, a sort of piledriving thrust: every detail is significant, hammering home just how modern, how up-to-the-minute Newcastle was in 1861.

At lower right you find a technical drawing of a passenger locomotive of the latest design, then in production at Stephenson’s engineering works (the setting for Scott’s picture); next to it you find what the catalogue identifies as a seven-inch breech-loading Armstrong gun, also Made in Newcastle and a great success in the Crimean War; the background is a tangle of telegraph wires and ship’s masts, picturing Newcastle as a buzzing, humming metropolis, Victorian capitalism’s capital city. Scott was cavalier with topography and various other things besides (there were no telegraph wires in Newcastle at the time), but then he had a point to make: there is no Tyne, so to speak, like the present.

Tell it like it is, Algy baby!

Then look at the image on wikipedia, and spot the difference:

There’s another, fuller analysis of the painting on the Images of Industrial Revolution site, which seems to indicate that wikipedia and therefore the image used by Graham-Dixon are at fault.

Still ranting

Along came the Whisky Priests [volume and sensitivity alert!]:

Killen and Handle must be held responsible for what they kick-started.

And so to Doubting Thomas’s point

Which is undeniable.

Let’s have no quibbling here: privatization has been a total, unmitigated disaster for anyone outside the investing classes.

What it didn’t do is denationalize: it internationalized (which amounts to “anyone but British”). Large swathes of Malcolm’s public transport, rail and bus, come courtesy of DBahn — that’s German National Railways. His electrical supplier (irrespective of to which corporation the account is paid) is EDF energy — that’s Électricité de France (gas bills included). London’s main airports are run by BAA, which is owned by Grupo Ferrovial of Madrid. Thames Water is an agency of the Macquarie Group of Sydney, Australia.

All are answerable only to the markets and the limp regulators.

This particular gripe grew out of the patent lies that the water industry have been peddling about security of supply. Get this:

In recent years companies have invested heavily in better connections between their own supply zones and also in cooperation with neighbouring companies where cross-boundary connections are the most cost-effective way to secure supplies for all.

It’s not as though nobody knew what was happening:

Hotter, drier summers will mean that flows will fall. More water will evaporate. The water mains will come under greater pressure, breaking more frequently as London’s soils dry out, and so further contributing to the loss of water. Put this all together and a London drought is a very real and rising risk.

The result (and only yesterday):

Ms Spelman said after the summit: “Drought is already an issue this year with the South East, Anglia and other parts of the UK now officially in drought, and more areas are likely to be affected as we continue to experience a prolonged period of very low rainfall.

‘Use less’

“It is not just the responsibility of government, water companies and businesses to act against drought.

“We are asking for the help of everyone by urging them to use less water and to start now.”

Is it fair to blame the ConDems for a chronic problem?

By no means, except:

“The Tory-led government is out of touch with the pressures facing families – the fact that it has postponed its long-awaited Water Bill means that there will be no action to tackle unsustainable water usage or to help households facing rising water bills for at least another two years,” [Mary Creagh, Labour's shadow environment secretary] said.

If that refers to the Flood and Water Management Bill, it’s been in daft form for nearly three years. But, of course, Lansley’s NHS privatisation must take priority and parliamentary time.

The gentleman on the far right has an objection?

— Yes, indeed. Surely you must admit that water quality has improved since privatization?

True. Very true. Mainly because of catching up (or not) with EU standards. Small issues like cryptosporidium apart. And not forgetting stuff like this (in the National Audit Office report on Tackling diffuse water pollution in England, July 2010:

In 2009 only 26 per cent of water bodies in England met the required levels of water quality under the [European] Directive’s more demanding classification system.
The Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (the Department) and the Agency do not expect that all English water bodies will achieve these levels by 2027 as it may be disproportionately costly or not technically feasible for some water bodies. Although the Directive does allow for these reasons, if the European Commission does not accept the case for these particular water bodies, it could take legal action against the Government. If such action were successful and the United Kingdom did not comply with the judgement, there is a possibility that it could face considerable financial penalties.

Not so much rage or rant against the machine. We’ll be retching against it.