Round and about

Spotted in The Dark Place over the last few days. Taken on my phone, hence the execrable quality of the pictures.

I would avoid the bacon in this pub. 

This week's Private Eye. I assume that Dominic Lawson is reassessing his view of the Right's behaviour given his own paper's attack on Ed Miliband's dead dad, or as I'm putting it in tabloidese: 'The Belgian Who Battled For Britain and the Paper that Batted For Berlin'.

Interesting bit of left-wing agitation posted at various sites around the city. The use of the West Midlands Police logo is quite cunning: people do tend to stop and read them. 

Rather lovely letter and newspaper box on the Central Library. A bit Deco, a bit Nouveau, and the luxury of separate slots for papers and letters!

I've had an interesting, if expensive morning already. The daily hate of the Today programme riled me up good and proper. It finished with a reading of a Dylan Thomas poem. Brilliant. Read by… Prince Charles. Because when you need a voice which really expresses the joys of a dissolute, cultured, Welsh thinker, you automatically think of a billionaire monarch-in-waiting with a plummy English accent and a courtesy title to remind Wales of its subjection. Next week he's back to read The Road to Wigan Pier, followed by a preview of his new album, This Land Is My Land: Prince Charles Sings the Hits of Woody Guthrie. 

After that, it was off to the bike shop with both my bikes. The 1967 Moulton Classic needs a full service, and the Forme is getting its 3-month once-over. I don't think the guys in the shop had ever seen a Moulton, and needed persuading that it isn't a shopper or Bike-Shaped Object. Then they started to notice the weird and interesting bits and got quite interested. Needless to say, the simple servicing visit was a trap: I walked out with a pair of Specialized cycling shoes and the associated pedal clips, and significantly financially lighter. Despite my politics, I have a terrible weakness for techy stuff: it's my capitalist Achilles heel. It's the same with my photography and fencing: there's always an essential extra bit of kit with my name on it…

OK, time for some work. Got a friend's book chapters on 30s Welsh literature to read, and a lecture on Volpone to write. I did one last year but it didn't quite work, so this is attempt No. 2. 

Cry, my beloved country

You may know that I am simultaneously sentimental about, and cruel to, Stoke-on-Trent, that poor abused carbuncle, a classic post-industrial city used and abused by government, developers, businesses and politicians, yet still - just - alive and distinctive. 


Dylan Thomas called Swansea and 'ugly, lovely town' (in Reminiscences of Childhood). Going for a walk in the 'un-defiled' country a few miles from that benighted cosmopolis, I was reminded of The Road to Wigan Pier. Here's what George Orwell had to say about Stoke in 1936. The only difference now is the absence of potbanks, more's the pity. 

It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism-- an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it… It would probably be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap.

The best thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly. Less than ten miles away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the almost naked hills, and the pottery towns are only a smudge in the distance.

Day of Remembrance

For lefty types like me, it's a special day. Firstly, Oliver Postgate died today - grandson of George Lansbury the Labour Party Leader, cousin of Angela Lansbury, the creative brain behind Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and many more. I've never seen Bagpuss and don't give a flying one for childhood TV nostalgia, the last redoubt of rugger-shirt wearing students, but I know enough of Postgate's work to understand that like Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman, they're responsible for the generations of enthusiastic, open-minded, imaginative and thoughtful cultural socialists we have: liberation socialists, we could call them. There might not be many of them, but they're out there.

UPDATE: Zoe Williams makes my points much more eloquently - but then she's a professional journalist. Channel 4 News last night also claimed that Ivor the Engine was set in Wales because Postgate was a huge fan of Dylan Thomas - and there is a (gentler) ring of Llareggub about the cartoon. Also, Professor Yaffle was inspired by meeting Bertrand Russell. Everything I learn about the man makes me sadder that he didn't run the country rather than make cartoons in a cowshed.

Which brings me on to Milton - not forgotten at all, as the Today programme's grumpy slot claimed. I teach Milton in an ex-Poly, and some of my colleagues specialise in his work. I'm not an unalloyed fan of JM - the mouthpiece of a genocidal regime as far as Ireland's concerned - and as Ackroyd's Milton in America suggests, he could so easily have become an Ayatollah figure, but he was also a Republican in body and spirit, and a force for rationality and liberation in so many ways. Here's Philip Pullman reading Milton and here's Terry Eagleton's summary of Milton's greatness (the poetry's pretty good too).