Ah, the joys of leisure

Social networking produces two bonuses this week: Facebook comes up with a free ticket to Midsummer at the Tricycle Kilburn, and twitter tips off about a National Theatre cancellation which gives a cheap ticket to Hamlet. Not bad for someone who can go months on end without going near a theatre or even thinking about it.
Midsummer, apparently an old hit from the Edinburgh Festival last year, is a great comedy, musical with songs its writer and producer calls it. A great laugh, and touching. Hamlet has a very good Rory Kinnear and is a fabulous pruduction by, better get his name right, Nicholas Hytner.

Exposed by the leaks

So I pass my sixtieth birthday and the students are still revolting, taking their protest right up to the House of Commons as it votes to effectively privatise higher education. Great campaigns by the students using occupations and the Internet, and transforming Twitter from a medium through which the world discovers what Stephen Fry had for breakfast to one that is a useful tool in political struggle. Even at 60 no home but the struggle as fantastically under-rated novelist Edward Upward wrote.

Students and wikileaks then were last week’s firing pistons in the motor of British history. The wikileaks saga demonstrates an outrageous abuse of civil rights in what clearly looks like a convoluted plot by the Americans to get their hands on Assange. I can understand the American diplomatic service being miffed at being exposed in their own cables as a bunch of devious, two-faced, calculating manipulators, but what’s new about that. The real exposure in the wikileaks cables is how different the real picture of American foreign policy is from that presented in the mainstream media. In other words how many of our respected journalists swallow without question official government utterances. It’s as if the sort of demented twisted thinking that made the Iraq dossier into a case for invading that country was not so much a one-off act of political desperation by Bush and New Labour, but rather the norm of western diplomatic thinking, and that journalists get embedded into that just as much as they get embedded into jingoistic reporting alongside the troops. Not true of all journalists, but the exceptions, Pilger, Fisk and others seem increasingly marginalised.

Peaceful, now then to be a retired hack, not that, as a sub-editor in the lower echelons of British tabloid driveldom, I was ever near the levers of press political power. I managed to turn down my only offer of promotion up the greasy careerist pole…that was many moons and many bars ago.

So, back to finishing off a disgracefully decadent Euphorium chocolate birthday cake, and watch out for the next anti-extradition demo…

Where was I? anyway...

So, be careful what you wish for. I always wanted to retire by the time I was sixty. So here it is today and here I retire. Strong sense of déjà vu about the whole thing. When I went to Manchester University forty years ago, sudents were occupying the administration. Now I’ve retired they’re doing the same thing. Right on, as we said then.

Anyway, after 35 years of pretty disgraceful hacking on low-grade tabloid newspapers I remain I a die-hard socialist and delighted to see that students are still rebelling. I seem to remember a chairman Mao slogan saying it’s always right to rebel - one to post at Tiananmen Square perhaps, as well as all the other places.

Where was I anyway. Yes, not much change - Vietnam victory, apartheid victory, collapse of Soviet Union, end of British industry, Thatcherism, rise of Islam, computers Internet, and the death of Fleet Street.

So for a gentle rambling retirement blog, the main interests are: the motor of history, the London-Portsmouth road, Arsenal, Pompey, Greek islands, the South Sea Bubble and was one of my uncles responsible… suppose I’d better organise a party.

Walk notes: Housman’s bookshop, Caledonian Road, to Dalston. 30/12/08

Caledonian Road, north , over the canal, right at Carnegie Street, left up Charlotte Terrace (ie round the Barnsbury Estate, right up Copenhagen Street passing Barnard Park on the left, across traffic lights, up Cloudesley Place, then left up Cloudesley Street, across Cloudesley Square, turn right at Richmond Avenue (away from Tony Blair’s old house in Richmond Crescent, turn left up Liverpool Road (would have been more interesting to continue north at Richmond Avenue into Lonsdale Square and then…) then right at Barnsbury Street, across Upper Street (passing the Islington Town Hall on my left), down Braes Street, across New North Road, into Canonbury Grove, then straight on into Douglas Road South, picking up the footpath (ie no cars, but called Douglas Road North) along the line of the New River Walk, emerging onto St Pauls Road opposite the Bastille pub; cross St P’s road passing the Bastille on my right, into Northampton Park, turn left at end up Newington Green Road, over North London line railway and turn right into Mildmay Grove North, straight on across Mildmay Park, and down to St Jude’s on the junction with King Henry’s Walk.

All change

Sorry to read (in the December issue of the National Union of Journalists’ magazine Journalist) that Roy Greenslade “cannot, in all conscience, remain within a union I now regard, albeit reluctantly, as reactionary. The digital revolution is here and I am a digital revolutionary.”
This is sad news. Greenslade he has always been a powerful force for unity in the industry. Even when he worked on The Sun, he managed to reconcile his union membership with offering every assistance to publisher Rupert Murdoch in his disputes with the NUJ. Greenslade even dragged himself into work through picket lines and barbed-wire fences in his attempt to bring about a peaceful settlement to Murdoch's dispute with his printers over News International's move to Wapping in the 1980s.
Greenslade, who was once a radical young reporter in the Dagenham area of east London, is now professor of journalism at the City University and writes a much better blog than this one, making full use of all the facilities of the Guardian Unlimited site (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/greenslade).
I agree with him about some of the democratic benefits of the digital revolution. It has huge potential for improving the free flow of public information. Indeed all this information appears in a blog (http://debeauvoirnotes.blogspot.com/).
The invention of the Internet has not eroded the power of the major publishers, nor improved the working conditions of journalists. Greenslade is a beneficiary of publishers’ power, and often makes very positive use of that advantage. It is sad that, with his long-awaited return to revolutionary principles, he is formally finalising his abandonment of any industrial connection with organised journalists.

Pitch battle
England 2 Croatia 3: The pitch at Wembley looked to be in atrocious condition, verging on water-logged. Worse, it still had the scars and the markings from a recent American football game played on it.
Clearly the economics of the new stadium dictate that the pitch is going to get overworked to the point of being unplayable.

Up the Windsors
Congratulations to Mrs Windsor and her hubby on sixty years together, which is pretty good going by anyone’s standard.
The press has been churning out drivel by the ton about what a hard-working existence they have. In fact they have an army of flunkeys around at every corner, mainly at taxpayers’ expense, to make sure that their affluent lives go smoothly.
It suits the ruling class very nicely to have a powerless, non-elected apparently God-appointed person at the top of the social pinnacle. It sanctions the complete irrationality of the UK’s institutions. So much easier for commentators to brown-nose on about constitutional monarchy than to examine the realities of a 21st century democracy-tinted plutocracy.

Normans and Song Que

More thoughts about London and Normans.
Interesting line of axis from Rome to Chester as a European power line, with London always balanced on it. In the Saxon and end of Saxon times the contest for England is between Danes and Normans, with Cnut being the period of total Danish supremacy; but like most supremacies he survives on a degree of consensus (or absence of resistance), then William I reverses it to a Norman supremacy, but still with a degree of (enforced) consensus.
A speculation: The line that divides Europe from Roman times right up to the Reformation goes along the Danube, up the Rhine, over the Channel, up the Thames, up the river Lea and on to Chester.

Song Que, on Kingsland road added to restaurant reviews. Vietnamese, excellent food. Always good.

hague, murdoch, europe

Hague in h of c producing a huge list of ifs about europe and a ballot on the constitution, suggesting that the whole thing might end up with the Conservatives doing something (presumably renegotiate the Euro treaty) if all the ifs are fullfilled. Which the Tories would never do.
Odd really. Murdoch papers seem kind of lukewarm pro-Tory at the moment, but really very anti-Europe. The Murdoch empire interest looks really to be about getting into China at the moment and he seems to favour a weakened Europe and a stronger America as his best way in.
I suspect Murdoch knows that the Tories would never significantly challenge the European Union structure (Thatcher for all her huff and puff never did), so he won't get too excited about Hague's tub thumping, except insofar as it might embarrass Brown over Europe...