Ideas and Politics
Queueing for Beginners: ‘the tiny catastrophes of which everyday existence is made up’
In 1973, Georges Perec wrote, ‘What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front page splash, the banner headlines…The daily papers talk of everything except the daily …We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.’ Joe Moran’s book Queueing for Beginners, which I’ve just read, aims to […]
Thatcher? Tramp the dirt down.
Symbolic really: on the day that Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, we get a letter informing us that ‘following a robust procurement process’ the GP practice at our local health centre has been acquired by a private company, SSP Health Ltd. It’s part of a massive move by a company that is rapidly taking over […]
Animals: silent or screaming?
The other day I wrote about John Gray’s The Silence of Animals. The silence of animals, says Gray, is not the same as the silence pursued by human beings. The silence of animals is not a literal silence, for most sentient animals inhabit vivid sound worlds. It is, however, a world without the kinds of turmoil […]
The Silence of Animals: ‘barbarism is a disease of civilisation’
Watching BBC2′s Life and Death In Herculaneum the other night I thought I glimpsed a truth in the case that John Gray has advanced relentlessly since Straw Dogs in 2002 and now in The Silence of Animals: that the idea of progress in modern western thought is a myth, and advances in civilisation can easily […]
The right to roam land and shore, ‘but for the sky, no fences facing’
The other day I posted about how access to the river Mersey was restricted by the Cressington and Grassendale private estates. ‘As a freeborn Englishman’, I wrote, ‘I can’t understand the idea that a private estate should have the right to deny people access to a great river’. That provoked a fair amount of debate, […]
An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street: a hymn to the book and the word
Built to enshrine free thinking and public access to knowledge, the John Rylands Library in Manchester is an appropriate place to see An Inventory Of Al-Mutanabbi Street, a project conceived by poet Beau Beausoleil and artist Sarah Bodman to ‘re-assemble’ the ‘inventory’ of reading material that was lost when a car bomb exploded in al-Mutanabbi […]
Owen Jones’ Chavs: who is working class now?
When Costa Coffee opened a new outlet in Mapperley, Nottingham recently, they advertised 8 vacancies (most of them part-time) for baristas and received 1,700 applications. Several of the successful applicants were graduates. Meanwhile, the Oxford Student newspaper reported that a member of the Bullingdon Club was fined last month for setting off a firework in […]
Cyprus bailout: crazy and dangerous
You have to ask yourself, ‘Are these people bonkers?’ It certainly looks that way; the economists of the EU, European Central Bank and IMF who came up with the idea of relieving savers of up to 10% of their savings in Cypriot banks presumably regard themselves as rational beings. But this plan could have massive […]
Public libraries: 150 years of advance is being destroyed
Away in London for a few days, we returned to Liverpool to the news that the City Council has voted to close half the city’s libraries. Liverpool has 19 libraries at present but the council aims to save around £1 million (from April 2014) by closing ten. The school uniform grant is going too – […]
Walking back through time on the Sandstone Trail
It’s as if a lid lifted to let in the light: days of spring sunshine and blue skies (blue sky!) have arrived to banish the rain-sodden, ‘gale-battered, winter-worn‘ sensation that’s been clinging on for what feels like months. So when I set off with my old friend Bernie to walk the first ten mile stretch […]
