The Day After The Day After Tomorrow Vole

A few more of my favourite shots from wandering about in the snow this weekend. The whole set is here, and a few more of the best ones are here. Click to enlarge.

Too dark for a high shutter speed, so this is the best I could do - lots of tits' arses. But you can see it holding a nut in its beak

Squirrel with robin in the background

Quite pleased with the beating wing of this coal tit

One stuffs its face, the other keeps watch

This time I focused on the robin rather than the squirrel

Decent abstract effect from this sculpture 

Same sculpture, different focus

Another bird's bum

Tree outside my office

The view from the top floor. I was pleased with the colour

Tree outside the office again

Another view from the office. 

The Day After Tomorrow Vole

Hello, dear readers. I trust you survived Snowmageddon, which round here meant about 5 inches of the  white stuff and widespread panic.

It is like The Day After Tomorrow in my flat: in the film the stragglers end up barricaded in the New York Public Library with no heating. My flat also resembles a book cave and likewise has no heating other than a little fan heater. I didn't burn any books to stay alive, though P D James's Death Comes To Pemberley almost got incinerated on grounds of quality…

I was going to go walking in the western Peak District but my friends chickened out had very good reasons why they had to cancel, so I ended up taking my camera out to a local park and gardens - not at strenuous, but pleasant none the less. The whole set is here, but I'll show you some of my favourites here and in the next post. Click to enlarge.

Abstract - I won't tell you what it is.

Bureaucracy! I was really pleased to spot this office window down a back street

Fire escape in the snow

A crow. 

Sage plant being eaten by a snow monster!

Crow. I wasn't set up for a fast shot, so was lucky to get the wing like this.

Really please with this one - again I had the camera on a slow shutter speed for a different shot,  so got lucky here.

Cormorants roosting in the snow

Another slow-shutter speed shot of a gull

Squirrels: taste as good as they look

Blue tit and nuthatch

Again, slow shutter speed but a bit of luck with these coal tits.

A very wary jay.

The Abominable Snowvole

Afternoon everybody. And what a lovely one it is for me too. I love cold weather and snow (as you can tell from the picture above this post. Snow and bopping Wolves on the nose.

Today's thick blanket of snow is having a therapeutic effect on me. Having watched Question Time last night, I'm sorely in need of a Mogadon Cocktail. Grant Shapps was on (just the one of him this time), lying with his half-Blair, half-Delboy smirk. Then Caroline Flint, the Labour's Party's Madame Mao only more rightwing and less charismatic. Roland Rudd, another Tory, Mary Beard (whom I like) and the egregious Nigel Farage.

And if you think that was a panel of gargoyles, the Lincoln audience was living proof that we're only an EU referendum away from pogroms, flaming torches, pitchforks and crosses burning on lawns. If I learned one thing from last night's episode it's this: however lovely the Cathedral may be, never go to Lincoln.

What most enraged me about the show was the panellists' determination – with the honourable exception of Mary Beard, who didn't have a political or financial dog in the fight – to lie, distort and mislead for tactical advantage. Not a shred of idealism or principle between them. Especially Shapps, who while he attacked Labour's (tepid) Europeanism failed to mention that the traitorous Fritz-lover who signed the Single European Act was one Margaret Thatcher. Nor that the Charlemagne Prize for efforts on behalf of European Unity was once awarded to that notorious garlic. Meanwhile, Mr Farage failed to explain why one economic and political superstate encompassing several national and linguistic groups, nations and economies is oppressive (the EU), while opposing Welsh and Scots nationalism.

And while we're on the subject, I find that the more opposed to immigration a British person is, the prouder they are of the British Empire – which as far as my admittedly weak grasp of history gets me, involved lots of heavily armed British people immigrating to lots of other peoples' countries, taking their jobs, land, wives, children, gold etc… Or am I missing something? Perhaps it's just that British people only like repressive superstates when it's them doing the repression. Having to reason things through with foreigners as equals… it's just not cricket!


So here's my point of view on the European Union.


Maybe it's because I'm an Irish citizen with recent ancestors who fought the British on two continents, but I find all this Empire nostalgia plain embarrassing. Give it up! Have some self-respect. Look at Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. They all had a go at being imperialist powers. Some of them behaved even worse than you Brits (looking at you, Belgium). But they moved on. They don't sigh with regret at what they lost. They're all rich, peaceful and (mostly) nice to each other inside and outside their borders. They don't wander round the world tugging at America's sleeve shouting 'me too, me too'. They don't feel the need to wave nuclear weapons in people's faces as though the power to devastate the planet somehow confers the right to moral and political leadership. That's the politics of the playground. I don't think the British realise that far from leading an 'English-speaking world', their white colonies slightly pity them and everybody else hasn't yet forgiven or forgotten. This fantasy of once again standing alone (i.e. just being America's butler) is embarrassing.

Europe's full of interesting, quirky, well-meaning and rich cultures. Why not just try being one of them? Just for a bit. You don't have to eat the horse or drink the local moonshine. You can keep your clothes on at the beach. Nobody's going to force you to replace that can of Carling with a Belgian fruit beer or a German Dunkel. Your kebabs are safe, as are your awful trains, nightclubs and architecture. You don't even have to learn anybody else's language, or stop believing that they all think in English and are just trying to be difficult.

David Cameron debuts a new look for his Europe speech

Just try negotiating rather than shouting at everybody like a country-sized street drinker with a grudge.

I'm for it. This is unfashionable on the hard left of which I count myself a part, but I see it as an extension of the left's internationalist tradition. I wouldn't keep the EU we have – much of it is a capitalist plot – but I'd happily be a member of the United Socialist States of Europe. Even the EU we have is better than living in a UK stuck on its own.

Why? Because the EU has consistently given British workers and citizens better protection than the British Government. Whatever party's in charge, British governments serve their corporate masters. Remember Tony Blair? When he wasn't prosecuting illegal wars, he wandered the world boasting that Britain had the 'most flexible' workforce in the West, by which he meant 'least protection against exploitation, unfair dismissal, unsafe working condition', the worst pay, the worst benefits and the fewest rights of organisation of any European country. In office, he took the UK out of the Social Chapter, ensuring that British workers could be made to work for longer with even fewer protections. The British Establishment's Utopia is one in which the masses work for low pay in the services industry: doing each other's nails, picking orders in an Amazon compound, offering oral pleasure in out-of-the-way lay-bys. No union rights, no unfair dismissal rights, no collective bargaining, no health and safety laws. Result? Massive shareholder gains, workers unimportant.

Then enter the Tories and their Lib Dem puppies. They've spent the past two years stripping away what little was left of these protections, and mounting a sustained attack on the European Court of Human Rights. It's not an EU body, but it still has Johnny Foreigner making rude comments about Britain's nasty little habit of kidnapping suspects, suspending habeas corpus, turning a blind eye to torture, suppressing war crimes yada yada yada. My MP wants us to delete the Human Rights Act because apparently we've all got too many rights. Yes, you heard me. Too many!

And there are a few other things the Europeans gave us apart from decent justice and workers' protection. Clean Air: Boris Johnson is currently lobbying to prevent EU prosecution for decades' of illegal levels of pollution in London's air. Clean water. Some semblance (however insane) of a farming and fishing policy which isn't just 'help yourself lads'. Decent transport and infrastructure: go anywhere outside Central London and you'll find a discreet EU flag next to major improvements because South Wales, Scotland, the North-East and all sorts of other areas have been left to rot by the cosmopolitan financiers and their tame UK political parties. Who dredged and cleaned the Thames? The EU. Who's paying to electrify the North-West train system? Not the train companies: the EU! Who gave the UK £2.282bn for research and development? Those perfidious Europeans! Who keeps those rabidly anti-European farmers in business? Europe! How much does it cost us? Well, if you earn £50,000 a year, you give the EU £70. That's even better value than the licence fee!

There's just one more thing Europe gave us. Peace. I'm really enjoying it. Before the EU there were lots of wars between European states. Since the 1950s when it was founded: none. No more gas chambers, no border squabbles, no military coups in member states. Ireland fought the British for hundreds of years. And now we're partners. The British v the French, the French v the Germans, the French v Spain, Spain v the Netherlands, Germany v Poland… I could go on. But never again.

So apart from workers' rights, justice, a cleaner environment, decent transport, infrastructure investment and peace, what did the Europeans ever give us?

Oh yes: sensible, thoughtful politics without the braying, brachiating willy-waving of cynical, dishonest blowhards of the type we get over here.

EU Super-state? Yes please.

And now I'm off to build a snow Nigel Farage. He'll like it: it'll be blanc de blancs.

The Thursday Afternoon Vole

Maybe I'll institute a regime of single daily posts rather than a stream of random Reckons. What do you think? 

Here's a moody, wintery little shot I took on my phone the other day. 

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." (James Joyce, 'The Dead').

I've been quiet today because a) I stayed in bed longer than I should have and b) I've been doing astonishingly boring tasks. Administration Hell is very different from Marking Hell. Marking Hell is at least exciting. There's a fresh torture coming along any second: a bigoted comment, a stolen paragraph, a missed apostrophe or a misplaced preposition, all finely tuned to press my particular buttons. But Marking Hell also has its pleasures: there are – despite my sardonic whinging – informed, passionate and fluent students who turn in elegantly stylish essays. 

Administration Hell lacks both the stimulation of the Diabolical Essay and the snatched moments of relief afforded by a good piece of work. For instance, today I was updating the electronic module guide for a single-semester module (remind me to tell you one day about our four – or is it five? – timetables. We have two electronic systems, because an integrated one would abolish Administration Hell. There's Evision, which holds Module Guides, student details, submission details and the like. Then there's WOLF, which holds Module Guides, student details, submission details and the like. Did you see what they did there? They don't talk to each other very well either. And Evision carries stern warnings like PRESS SAVE BEFORE EXITING OR ALL YOUR HARD WORK WILL BE SACRIFICED TO THE ADMINISTRATION GODS AND THEY ARE VENGEFUL, MOCKING DEITIES WHO SCORN YOUR PUNY SACRIFICE except that on many pages there isn't a Save button. Instead, there's a Store And Exit button. But I don't want to Exit and I don't trust this programme's grasp of synonyms and therefore don't believe that Save and Store are the same thing at all and besides I haven't finished working out what the difference between Assessment Criteria and Assessment Requirements are yet and oh gods what if this is all some kind of horrible test and if I get it right they make me an Associate Dean in one of the Lower Circles of Administration Hell?

But it's OK because we're all going to be moving to Moodle and percentage marking schemes whether we like it or not and once in the sunny uplands everyone will get first class degrees (seriously, that's the justification for changing schemes). 

Anyway, I've just nobly ceded my The Sorrows of Young Werther lectures to my Romanticist colleague for a first-year module. I'm really looking forward to teaching it: it's central to the Romantic notion of individualism and the individual's relation to knowledge and reality. When it first came out, rumours spread that it caused multiple suicides. I've already been ticked off on Twitter for being flippant about this, but obviously I'm rather more thoughtful and sensitive in class than my online persona might indicate. I'll be teaching the legend and reception of the novel, but won't be cracking any more jokes about assignments, student retention etc. But I can't help looking forward to giving the students a novel about a self-dramatising, self-regarding young man…

In other news: good books in the post. David Williams' A World of His Own: The Double Life of George Borrow (just too late to add to my Borrow/Edwards paper, but I was already up to the word limit), and two books on the decline of British Communism: Geoff Andrews' Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964-1991 (by which he rather presumptuously means the CPGB) and Francis Beckett's Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. I went to a conference in 2004 called Reds! The Story of the CPGB. It was fascinating. All the major players from the Party's previous decades were there, acrimoniously blaming each other for minor doctrinal deviations which had destroyed the coming Revolution. It didn't seem to have occurred to them that spending 60 years following every twist and turn of the CPSU's policy and never seriously trying to build a mass movement based on the UK population's needs just might have been a strategic error. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

The Afternoon Vole

Welcome, friends, to Marking Hell, In Marking Hell, academics are condemned to face the consequences of their teaching. Those little jokes, the examples that seemed clear enough at the time, the quotes that you thought you could bear seeing repeated back to you over and over again with added mis-spellings. In Marking Hell, we're made to realise how little of what we say actually goes in. For instance, when I say (and put up on screen in massive texts) things like YOU CANNOT CLAIM THAT VIDEO GAMES CAUSES VIOLENCE BECAUSE MEDIA EFFECTS RESEARCH IS TENUOUS AT BEST, I assume it means that the students are inured to Daily Mail claims about video games and violence. I even ask them to estimate how many 'people' they've killed on screen, then how many people they've killed in real life. They all laugh. Then they write things like 'Many mass murderers are associated with video games'.

While we're on the subject, we also ask 'do you believe everything you see on TV?'. They all say no. Then they write things like 'TV manipulates viewers into thinking x, y and z'. Oh, it's just other people who are stupid passive fleshbags is it? (This is another favourite Daily Mail line).

Today I've also had someone criticise EastEnders for featuring Muslim homosexuals, because 'the ethics of Islam forbid homosexuality'. Unfortunately, the Qu'ran must not forbid plagiarism because that particular essay is virtually completely downloaded from the web. I've also read a female student explaining that pornography is feminist because it allows women to exploit men from the safety and comfort of a TV studio. OK, it's a more sophisticated way of being wrong than simply asserting a load of inaccurate 'facts' or relying on the Ayn Rand Lexicon for definitions (seriously), but Marking Hell is one of those regular occasions when my hope that each generation becomes more liberal is dashed. If I had a pound for every time a female told me that feminism was 'boring' or 'pointless', I'd have a fully funded pension and would currently be putting on my snow-shoes for a Norwegian mountaineering trip.

I'm not normally this downcast by marking. There are always some excellent essays and it's rare that I don't learn something: one student turned in a ridiculously interesting analysis of Tumblr that was clearly all her own work and drew on most of the theory we'd mentioned and some more we hadn't. But I marked 15 essays today and failed 9 of them. I'm not going to generalise about a generation, and certainly not going to claim it was better in my day. Although it was harder to plagiarise: essays were handwritten, so you had to read every word you were copying out, which must have made people think about what they were writing, once they'd been to the library to find something worth copying out! Now it's all Wikipedia, freeessays.com or (I kid you not, it was in the bibliography) AS Level Media Studies: The Essentials.

I had a ridiculously easy time at university. Lectures, with a single tutorial each week, and tutors who wanted one essay a term. My students have a seminar with each lecture and two pieces of work per module – loads more than me. A lot more is expected of them, but they get a lot more support, attention and advice, not least on how to research and write essays.

Clearly with this failure level – and my colleagues report similar grades – something has gone wrong either with the teaching or how we train students to produce academic work. We'll have an inquest and talk to the students to get their point of view. Perhaps the concept of academic writing is problematic at first-year level, perhaps they take a mistaken instrumentalist approach that doesn't work, perhaps the sparkiness we see in class masks doubt and confusion. With some of them, there's a clear causal link between non-attendance and failure. We don't give them the answers in class, but we show them where to look for good leads!

Perhaps it's a subject thing: my English literature classes aren't as bad at the moment, though I have more leeway there to choose obscure texts that have no presence on the internet! One thing that really bothers me about the first-year media group at the moment though is the lack of curiosity. They're content to say 'everyone' does, watches, believes or uses x, y or z. Many of them tell us they have a strict diet of very limited media consumption and don't really care about anything else: channels they don't watch, ownership, regulation. Things just are – there's no political or cultural context worth examining for some of them.

One essay today told me that the media behaves badly because it doesn't let people carry on believing what they're taught but tries to make them think differently. Oddly enough, that's what I hope my lectures do!

So anyway, it's back to the drawing board…

Something rotten in the state of Denmark?

Afternoon everybody! I haven't just got up, I've been marking essays all day, having sent off my Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (otherwise known as a journal article comparing George Borrow's Wild Wales and O. M. Edwards's Cartrefi Cymru).

This particular pile of essays is on a range of concepts presented to first-year Media and Culture students. They're asked to define one concept and apply it. The quality has been… mixed. Some have looked the term up in a couple of first-year textbooks, quoted them, applied them to an example and done a decent job. Some have done the same thing, then thought about the problems related to the concept, and done and excellent job. A few have cut-and-pasted essays from the internet or Wikipedia entries and failed. And one has submitted 2000 words on how John Terry is a nice bloke and the newspapers should stop being so nasty about him. In short, a pretty normal range of submissions.

This is pretty much the extent of my cultural horizon at the moment. The high point of the week so far has been watching Borgen, the Danish drama (if that's not pushing it a little) set in the Prime Minister's office. Think The Thick of It without any jokes at all, or The Killing without any vulgar killing (or knitwear). But with subtitles. As you might imagine, I am utterly enthralled, although I may be the only person on the entire planet who watched this season's episodes so far and thought 'Hmmm… it's getting a bit too exciting'. It's true, too.



The point of Season 1 is that however high the stakes (and we can all agree that they're pretty high: this is the Danish Government we're talking about), the day to day grind of office relationships and work rivalries drives events. The photography is calm, the lighting low, the dialogue often Pinteresque. It's a show which makes a virtue of slowness. Interesting, the first episode of the show implies that Danish politics has been poisoned by British practices: Hesselboe has to go to London to find a spin doctor, but it's not long before even the 'good' guys (Brigitte's 'Moderate Party') has an amoral spin doctor of its own. In other ways, Danish politics as it's represented here is rather delightful: even the PM lives in a normal house and there's a calmness about public affairs that's certainly absent here.

The other notable aspect of the show is it's twin presentation of politics and the political media: it's often hard to tell who (if anyone) is in charge. The credits (around six minutes in) make the mediatisation of public affairs even more explicit, framing the major players on TV monitors in an editing suite as if to emphasise the dominance of representation over principle.

And yet Season 2 betrays signs that the makers are a little too aware of their cultural cachet. Suddenly characters are behaving oddly. There's too much excitement. A suicide here, a coup there, a drunken prime ministerial shag, a tabloid rent-boy honey-trap - it's getting a little soapy for my taste: as though they've been reading too many British political columnists. That said, there's still an awful lot to savour. My favourite moment was the deposed Labour leader's mournful, hangdog final words 'I'm the last worker in the Labour Party'. That line was crossed here years ago…

So come on: let's put the Bore back into Borgen! It's still the best thing on global TV since The Wire.

Boulot metro dodo

Doonesbury's got it in one today - on the subject of blogging. Poor Rick Redfern was a respected newspaper journalist until social media's tsunami of Reckons obliterated his career (click to enlarge).

You may have noticed that I'm blogging a lot less recently. Partly it's post-holiday, partly the ridiculous workload I have on at the moment, but a lot of it is because I have less to say. Or rather, I've said it all already. This government's been in power for 30 months and they're as predictably evil as I said they would be on Day 1. I'm still outraged, but also weary and depressed by them. On other subjects, I'm reading pretty much the same or similar stuff, so there's not a lot that's new there, and there's an awful lot of great material that I'd love to share with you but can't – like the hilarious things people say in disciplinary hearings when I'm trying to defend them, for instance.

So anyway, today's post includes:
Willie Thompson's history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, The Good Old Cause, which will be quite a contrast to my current reading, a compendium of PG Wodehouse's Psmith novels. Also Daniel Williams' Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845-1945. There's a good quote on the back from Henry Louis Gates basically saying 'who knew?'. I'd have thought that there's plenty of scope for a post-1945 sequel too. I also received Sing-Sing's second album (they're the remains of the long-lamented Lush) and a Mambo Taxi album, out of sheer curiosity.

I've bought quite a few books over the Christmas break, virtually all work-related. Collie and Fraser's George Borrow: A Bibliographical Study, Collie's George Borrow: Eccentric (annoying know-all git-wizard, more like) and Hugh Olliff's On Borrow's Trail - a beautifully ambiguous title. I also got Peter Watts' Béhémoth, a great big SF novel. I didn't mean to buy it in French - not paying attention - but I'll get through it.

Anyway, back to work. I'm about to send off my George Borrow and O. M. Edwards article. My colleague Steve has read it and apart from objecting to my overuse of colons, reckons it's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is good enough for me.

Hackademia's first martyr?

While you lot have been truffling in new media's celebrity trough, distributing Stephen Fry's latest aperçus and OMGing over Justin Bieber's latest calculated transgression, there's been a torrid debate about what social media will do to academia.

Like most fields, there's a sense that the ease with which material is distributed will overturn the dominant forces and vested interests which restrict the free flow of information. And of course there's a determined fightback from those vested interests. I'm not talking about the generators of knowledge, by the way. We're like pre-capitalist cottage weavers: not alienated from our work like industrial factory labourers, but exploited just the same. We take tax-payers' money in the form of research grants and cash from students' loans (thanks, kids - appreciate it) and turn some of it into academic literature: books, journal articles, conference papers and the like. I say we, I mean 'they'. I turn in a research paper roughly on the schedule Jesus turns up in Missouri, which unless you're a Mormon, isn't very often.

What happens to these papers? We give them to publishers for free. In some cases, especially prestigious journals, we actually pay them to get our work in print. Then they charge £50-100 for a book, and several thousand £s per year for journal access. It's largely profit: we hand in our work in ready-to-print condition, and the editors are usually academics working for free career progression too. It's not like the music industry, where the musician eventually gets paid something if you pay for a record rather than downloading it. All the publishers do is print and post things – and in the internet age, I'm not sure that's quite enough to justify their business model.

So in short: you pay for it, we write it, publishers profit handsomely from it – and nobody reads it. Especially you people who pay for the research. It stinks.

Enter Aaron Swartz, a nice young man who decided that information the public paid to generate should be free to read. In a quixotic personal gesture, he hid a laptop in a server cupboard and downloaded every article on JSTOR (an academic publication repository) he could cram onto his hard drive, planning to dump them on the internet where you could all see what you'd paid for. And perhaps use it to write a new generation of enlightening texts unhampered by not being able to afford to pay for them again.

With the connivance of MIT, his employer, Aaron was arrested and charged with multiple counts of theft – we all know that the United States hates copyright breaches more than juvenile gun massacres – and legislates accordingly. He faced decades in prison. True to form, he even posted his court documents for free, evading the US Government's pay-per-view system (?!) until they shut him down.

A few days he killed himself. I wish he hadn't: this argument needs to be had on intellectual and political grounds rather than individualised tragedy, but I'm horrified and saddened by the burden he took on, and the effect it had on him. Swartz is a hero, but he's also emblematic of a generation which lacks political skills in the widest sense. The new media age has made us all radically individualist. All the virtues of mass political action have been discarded as slow and cumbersome but having dumped collective action, the individual is left horribly exposed when a solo mission goes wrong.

That's why I disapprove of Aaron Swartz's action. He was right to download and circulate all these articles - but doing so on his own, without building a movement, didn't advance the cause and didn't help him. We don't need martyrs, we need a critical mass to overwhelm the vested interests. This poor man acted in the best of interests, but lacked the ideological resources to turn a private conviction into something more than a personal crusade. Yes, there's a network of supporters that turned out for Swartz and there's a lot of buzz on the internet about copyright and academic freedom, but these loose, temporary alliances don't build the structures we need to achieve our goals. Aaron loaded millions of papers onto a little laptop: cool in a Goonies sort of way, but a gesture rather than a grown-up strategy of subversion.

t's a general problem: we've grabbed all the advantages of net activism and dumped the skills of the analogue generation. We're decentralised, but we're also alone. Without solidarity, we're exposed, and often reduced to headline-grabbing stunts which bring the wrath of states and corporation down on the heads of indidividuals like poor Mr Swartz. I know this sounds both old-fashioned and cold, but one of the joys of Old Politics is that you're never alone. In my work as a union officer, I know that I'll never be left to face management alone. An attack on one is an attack on all, and there are real-world consequences for anyone who crosses us. For Aaron, the real-world consequences fell entirely on him, because he'd failed to patiently build the networks, alliances and structures required for real-world action.

For all that, Aaron Swartz is a hero. But he didn't need to die.

Work is postponed for the day

Damn the Guardian. I was all set for a massive amount of work, when it linked to this rather wonderful site, tailor-made for people like me, i.e. massive music snobs. Obscurometer uses Last.fm data to show you how obscure your favourite bands and albums are. If, like me, you spent your teens in the dusty back rooms of remote records shops looking for that elusive limited-edition-of-three-one-sided-clear-vinyl-7" by a Faroese band that lasted a week, you'll love it. Or perhaps hate it when you discover that actually, your tastes aren't quite as rarefied as you thought

Let's give it a go. How about my favourite Welsh nationalist hip-hop act, Tystion?

tystion's overall obscurity level is...95.5%. None of the users indexed by the Obscurometer have tystion in their top 50 artists lists.

Not a bad start. What about Ectogram - North Wales's finest krautrock-psych band?

ectogram's overall obscurity level is...94.7% 

Bah. Populists. Let's try David Wrench - Welsh electro-pop maestro and producer:

david wrench's overall obscurity level is...94.1%. None of the users indexed by the Obscurometer have david wrench in their top 50 artists lists 

Beautiful Aussie dream-poppers Hydroplane? 

Hydroplane's overall obscurity level is...91.7%

How about C-Pij, about whom I know nothing?

C-Pij's overall obscurity level is...97.9%

But I can do better. How about bassoon-and-violin rock/jazz/classical duo Architeuthis Walks On Land?

Architeuthis Walks On Land's overall obscurity level is...98.7%

And here they are:




Not bad, but I can do better. How about Epitaff, the previous band of Welsh brother duo Brigyn?

epitaff's overall obscurity level is...99.0% 

And finally shouty teenagers from the 90s The Period Pains:

The Period Pains's overall obscurity level is...99.2% 

Here's their gleefully spiteful track 'Spice Girls':




Bingo! Loads of my albums hover around the 97% range, which is all very satisfying if you think that being there first or at all is a mark of your taste. I used to, but now I'm just sad that these talented artists will never be heard by the people out there, because they're so good. 

Anyway, there's a massive flaw in Obscurometer's system. Quite a lot of the music I have was only released on vinyl, and therefore can't ever show up on their database. Stick that in your CD player, populists!

And now, back to work…

Osborne's warning from history

Back when he was young and didn't have so many media advisors, George Osborne said what he thought. In particular, he encouraged people to avoid paying tax.

Warning: contains creepy and sinister facial expressions.

You that grind our faces

Right, I need a little break from the writing (it's going quite well, thanks, though I suspect the editing will be a nightmare), so I'll have a little rant.

Yesterday, I had the House of Commons debate about social security payments on in the background. The Tories and their Lib Dem sidekicks have decided that increases will only go up 1% rather than in line with inflation. Essentially, it's a cut, because inflation is the cost of living. If bread goes up 4% and your unemployment payment goes up 1%, you won't be able to afford bread.

The Tories think this is a brilliant wheeze. They didn't need to have a parliamentary vote to make it happen, but Osborne and their Australian strategist Lynton Crosby thought that it would make Labour look like softies, supporting those who, in the Chancellor's words 'sleep off a life on benefits' while you and I go to work. So they released this poster:

Is this poster's charge true? I hope so. My pay rises for the past four years have been below inflation, so I've got slightly poorer each year. But that's OK, because 'slightly poorer' for me means less caviar on my toast, not 'shall I eat today or have hot water?'. When Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister, unemployment benefits were equivalent to 22% of the average wage: not exactly generous. Now, it's 11% and declining. 

I have a postcard of this old Labour poster on my wall - the same one David Miliband referred to in his speech yesterday:

It's exactly right. A 1% cut from my salary is a flea-bite. A cut from the £40 or so a young unemployed worker gets is enough to send her over the edge. 

Some of this Tory  poster is – of course – purest bollocks as we say in the trade. The Conservatives don't support 'hardworking people': they're bankrolled by corporate interests, and directors' pay increased by 50% over the past year or so. More importantly, the vast majority of people claiming state benefits are in work: ignore the crap about lives on the dole –virtually nobody does that. Instead we're a nation of underpaid workers. Thanks to New Labour and the Conservatives, low wages are subsidised by benefits paid for by taxpayers. We're not feather-bedding lazy skivers: we're feather-bedding shareholders and HR departments. 

It's also true that the unemployed benefit claimants aren't an alien race of parasites. 400,000 civil servants lost their jobs since 2010. Teachers, nurses, police officers, health inspectors and a whole range of ordinary people. You might be one of them. You'll certainly know one. They're us, and they've paid their taxes: social security isn't a hand-out to be withdrawn on a whim: it's an entitlement awarded on the basis that we all have or will contribute to the exchequer. To claim otherwise is a vicious lie. 

I've been reading a biography of John Lilburne recently, the Civil War-era leader of the Levellers, who were too leftwing and radical even for Cromwell and the Commonwealth. The Levellers published a manifesto called The Agreement of the People, debated by the Army council and others in Putney. For the Levellers, Colonel Rainsborough made a beautifully simple point about how a country should be run:

I thinke that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee

We're in the midst of a campaign to demonise those who are without work. There are 500,000 vacancies and 2.5m unemployed people. They can't all be demons. Yet the Conservative campaign to paint them all as 'shirkers' directly denies Rainsborough's call for respect for 'the poorest hee'. The mega-rich have had tax cuts. The companies they run don't bother paying taxes at all. They are the 'greatest hee', and they're nakedly in control. The 'poorest hee' is going to pay for the damaged caused by bailing out 'the greatest hee'.

What are our Parliamentary representatives going to do about it? The Leveller pamphlet Vox Populi (sorry, can't find a full text for this one) was pretty clear on this - addressing MPs who make even the most leftwing socialist now look lily-livered:

O you Members of Parliament, and rich men in the City, that are at ease, and drink Wine in Bowls, and stretch your selves upon Beds of Down, you that grind our faces, and flay off our skins, Will no man amongst you regard, will no man behold our faces black with Sorrow and Famine? What then are your russling Silks and Velvets, and your glittering Gold and Silver Laces? are they not the sweat of our brows, and the wants of our backs and bellies?

The Levellers failed: land, privilege and human rights were retained by the moderate gentlemen of Cromwell's party, though the King was decapitated thankfully. What will be get? A few expressions of dismay from Ed Miliband, a scowl from Nick Clegg and a smirk from Cameron and Osborne.

Update: This has just been picked up by The Guardian as if to prove my point:

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has said that MPs believe their pay should rise by 32% hike to £86,250. As the Press Association reports, a survey carried out by Ipsa also found more than a third believe they should keep generous final salary pensions. The findings emerged as Ipsa published a report on its initial consultation into pay and pensions, which ended last month. The research, which politicians completed anonymously, found that 69% thought they were underpaid on £65,738. The average level suggested for the salary was £86,250.

Too dumb to live

Sometimes students come in, distraught, having missed a deadline because they got the date wrong. Some of them are liars, but most of them have made a genuine error. I'm usually sympathetic but have to tell them that the system doesn't allow for human error. We academic staff don't have control of the submission mechanism and can't give extensions. Quite often I think to myself 'the date is on the module guide and the assignment brief: sort yourself out'.

No longer. The next time someone comes in with this tale of woe I will move heaven and earth to help them. Why? Because it's happened to me. In a move of stunning stupidity, I read a submission date for my Travel in Wales journal article as January 15th rather than January 5th. Was it because I wasn't wearing my newly-acquired spectacles? Or because I have another chapter deadline on February 15th? Or because I am, in the final reckoning, a moron? Whatever the cause, I've been working steadily away confident that I'd make the deadline. Indeed I was feeling rather smug that my new academic rigour and determination was going to get me there a day or two early unlike some people (in some fields extra time is always given as part of the submission ritual).

What to do? I've sent the most grovelling and apologetic email ever written to the editors begging for extra time and apologising profusely. The heart raced and the face was red as I prostrated myself humiliatingly. It's all I can do: hope they show mercy and keep writing. This is one of those occasions on which there's no scintilla of light, nobody and nothing else can be blamed. It's just me, being a dick. I've always loved this Douglas Adams line: 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly past', but it's not funny today: I've let down my academic peers and announced to them that I'm unreliable. Not good at all.

If there's any good coming out of this at all, it's that I'll be a little more understanding to students in the same position. But that doesn't make me feel one iota better this morning, I can tell you.

Update: the lovely editors have forgiven me and given me until the 15th. So relieved. Now to make it the best paper ever. I don't think I'd ever live down an extension which led to a rejected article…

2013 commences in earnest

Hi everyone. Here I am, back at my desk and what a joy it is merely to be able to type that sentence. As I'm sure you can all imagine. It's going to be – I hope – a quiet sort of year. Last year I sent so many weekends training for the Olympics and then there was the excitement of actually being right there. Plus the Grant Shapps-baiting, which was highly gratifying. He called me 'politically-motivated', which seems a bit rich from a Chairman of the Conservative Party!

This week, I've got an entire book chapter to write by next Monday, so you won't be hearing much from me unless I'm really stuck and need a good rant to get the creative juices flowing. I've written my half of the chapter on jazz in contemporary fiction, though things I should have put in make me wake up in the night. I've done all the reading for this Welsh travel chapter, but I'm dreading the writing process.

In the meantime, have some pretty pictures from this weekend's walking in Church Stretton and on the Long Mynd. Click on them to enlarge, and see the whole set here. This year I'm going to upgrade my equipment. I've just bought a second-hand 18-200 VR lens to replace my 18-55 and 70-200 lenses. After that, I'll be getting a Tokiina 11-16 landscape lens, then an f/2.8 300mm one for wildlife, and finally f2.8 105mm lens for portraits. All this depends on inheriting massive amounts of cash or finding a suitcase of used notes down a rabbit hole, of course. Or you could send me all your money.

A wild pony foal on the Long Mynd

Looking south-south-west from Ragleth Hill

A sheep at sunset

Prehistoric enclosure on the Long Mynd

The sun comes up over Ashes Hollow, the Long Mynd

Sun shine over the edge of Ashes Hollow, Long Mynd

Sunset over the Long Mynd

Sunset over the Long Mynd and Caer Caradoc

Monchrome sunset over Caer Caradoc and Cardington Hill

Sunset over Caer Caradoc and The Lawley

While we're on the subject of photography, I've discovered a whole pornographic sub-culture whose existence I'd never suspected. When I was working at the European Fencing Championships, I took lots of pictures of the Wheelchair EFC competitors (it's a much harder sport than ambulatory fencing, by the way). One photo is my most-viewed shot of all - coming up to 1000 views. Several people have 'favorited' (not a word) it or other shots of these fencers. Curious, I clicked on the profiles of some of them, only to discover that there's a whole fetish scene of amputee porn… and plenty of models willing to provide the necessary material (very much NSFW). Is this exploitation? Liberation? Something in between? Being a prudish old lefty rather than a libertarian, I tend to see porn as exploitative and commodifying but that's just me. 

So, I think we've all learned something today. Something you may not wish to have learned, but now you're stuck with it. 

Back. By popular demand?

Hello everybody. How were your Christmases (those of you who mark Christmas at all)? I've had a long break from blogging by my standards - over ten days, and I'm not going to resume normal service until next week probably. It's not that I've weaned myself off getting angry and opinionated over the holiday: more that I've had the computer switched off. I've quite enjoyed being almost entirely unsociable too. I've virtually no friends in the area (or indeed anywhere else, I hear you cry) so there's little pressure to engage in social bonding rituals.

Instead, I've been working on a couple of book chapters every day, though possibly not quite hard enough. We shall find out in a week or so on the deadline.

One of the books I'm writing about is George Borrow's 1862 Wild Wales, an account of his 1854 journey round that country, mostly on foot. He can sometimes be quite funny and he's interested in other people's quirks, but on the whole I think he'd be a massive pain in the arse. The purpose of the journey seems to be to demonstrate to everybody in Wales exactly how much more he knows – about everything, but particularly the Welsh language – than everyone in Wales. He doesn't like English people unless they are (as he fondly imagines he is) 'Saxons': he reckons it all went wrong for England when the Normans turned up. He likes the Welsh for still speaking their language, but every meeting he has with anyone is an opportunity to demonstrate his superiority. It gets very wearing. Other obsessions are religious sectarianism: he hates Methodists, Baptists, Independents, Calvinists, Lutherans and anybody who isn't C of E. But he hates Catholics and the Pope more than anybody. Irish Catholics are the lowest of the low – Borrow takes every opportunity to mock and trick the 'wild' Irish. Particularly tasteful episodes are those in which he tells freed slaves that they'd be better off in chains, the time he blackmails an Irish fiddler into playing the offensive supremacist song 'Croppies Lie Down', and the occasion on which he poses as a priest and makes some devout Irish travellers grovel to him.

Still, he's very learned and he knows exactly what people from The Dark Place are like:

'He is what they call a Wolverhampton gent... a person of little or no literature'.

A sentiment with which I find it hard to disagree. Have I missed the Black Country this Christmas? In a word, no. I've barely left the house, but have eaten eggs from my mum's hens (two of whom were murdered by my sister's cat, also here for a holiday, a safari in its case), read Goethe, Arthur Ransome and Alastair Gray's astonishingly brilliant 1982, Janine. I'll be posting some gloriously bilious quotes from that book sometime next week.

About the only time I left the house, I took some decent sunset photos from Mow Cop, the folly castle on a crag which famously became the birthplace of Primitive Methodism. Some pictures here. I've been on Twitter quite a lot thanks to my mother's wi-fi but kept the laptop off until tonight.

So it's been a great holiday. Lots of reading, no exercise, good food, no sirens, gunshots or murders under my window. As you can imagine, I'm really looking forward to work next week. Especially as I'm wholly unprepared…

Hello? Helloooo?

It's like the Marie Celeste round here. Just me and some underemployed catering staff whiling away their time trying to chisel through the gravy crust. They really need safety goggles for that kind of work.  I just sent round our end of term Union newsletter and got several hundred out-of-office replies. Slackers! It's not even Friday evening!

Anyway, enough about them. Time to talk about me. I'm feeling uncharacteristically optimistic, which is weird considering a colleague was killed here yesterday. Perhaps it's the contemplation of mortality which makes me value even the mundanity of daily existence.

It's also because I've done a big chunk of  writing. I'm writing a piece about jazz in contemporary fiction with a colleague who has published loads of stuff. We're covering Jim Crace's All That Follows, Alan Plater's The Beiderbecke Trilogy and Jackie Kay's Trumpet, which is one of the best novels I've read all year. I'm meant to be doing the section on masculinity and jazz. Basically, I'm claiming that in Plater's novel, jazz creates an 'imagined community' of New Men freed by their secret hobby from the deforming oppression of established gender roles. Which is ironic because only men understand jazz in these novels. They like jazz and historical football facts, and the women look on with amused disdain. On the other hand, it's jazz which gives the men empathy and other supposedly 'feminine' traits. Oh, and it's all played for laughs. For the Crace and Kay novels, I'm arguing that jazz structures the texts and the readers' experiences because it washes away essentialist gender structures. The musicians and those they relate to have to improvise their lives and their understanding of identity under the influence of jazz. In All That Follows, Lennie is 'unmanned' because he can't play jazz any more, nor engage in political activism, or make love to his wife: once the jazz comes back, so do all the other things. Trumpet is different: it's structured like a jazz performance complete with central solo, and the plot is driven by everybody else's reaction to the discovery that dead Joss Moody, married with a son, was actually biologically female. Without jazz, Kay seems to be saying, we are trapped in pre-formed concepts of sex, gender and race, but jazz's natural antipathy to formality enables us to reassess our preconceptions.

1300 words. Unfortunately (for my colleague) it's currently 3500 words. Unfortunately, because as the experienced author, she gets to decide what stays in (if any) and what goes. Being a humble sort of chap, I shall accept the axe without demur. I'm just pleased I got something substantial written.

In the meantime, I have to write an entire 8000 word book chapter on Welsh travel writing by January 15th. So that's the Christmas break spoken for. But at least I have some nice music to soothe me: I've just received Freedom Is A Hammer: Conservative Folk Revolutionaries of the Sixties. I used to teach a course on 1960s US culture, and played the students a lot of rightwing music to demonstrate that much as we might wish it, the majority of Americans at the time were pretty rightwing. I haven't come across the stars of this new CD (Janet Greene, Tony Dolan and Vera Vanderlaan), but I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy  it in an infuriating sort of way. They are in many ways the grandparents of the Tea Party movement: stridently conservative yet using the tools of the leftwing 60s counterculture (folk music, protest) to argue their case.

Here's Janet Greene's truly appalling 'Commie Lies': sorry about the visuals - it's been posted by a true believer sadly.



I've also broken the book drought in a small way: Bent Flyvjerg's Megaprojects and Risk about the way construction and engineering companies lie and cheat self-deceiving politicians to get their hands on our cash; and Alasdair Gray's postmodernist Scottish classic 1982, Janine. His Lanark is one of the best books I've ever read, so it was about time I read this one.

Right, back to the writing.