purplecat

Imposing square red brick building on a road corner. Hardys' is spelled out in mosaic across the top. Hardys Well appears above some windows. Imposing porch entrance.

Just around the corner from us stood Hardy's Well. When we moved here in 2006 it was a pub. At some point in the 1990s Lemn Sissay, Manchester Poet, former chancellor of the university, OBE, was drinking in there. A conversation with the landlady resulted in a poem that was painted on the wall of the pub. It was the first public art poem in what Sissay now identifies as a movement in contemporary poetry in England.

$White-washed building wall on which is written: Wait waterless wanderer. Whoever walks \ to the well will wade into a wonderous world. \ A world which will waken the wilting \ wallpaper of work and worry. Well? Worry \ will wait while wells wand whirls a warm-hearted wackiness into a weary week, \ whereafter waves and waterfalls of \ wonderment will wash all weakness. A way? \ Well? A world wide web of wholehearted \ wholesome wisdom and wit waits wipe away \ worries. Wells works wonders for wrinkles. \ Why wait. Why wonder. Why worry. Why \ wain. Why whittle. Why wither. Walk in. Well. \ What we waiting for. It'll double you. At \ Hardys Well.$

It is not, perhaps, Sissay's best work but it was a significant local landmark.

The pub was always struggling. In the mid 2010s there was a landlord determined to make a go of it with good ideas about exploiting its garden area, but his circumstances changed. There was a brief attempt to run it as a community volunteer venture which folded after a matter of weeks. A fractious email chain in an attempt to organise something resulted in long-standing stalwarts fighting with "ladies who only want to drink wine" and fizzled out into nothing. The pub was closed in 2016. A property developer bought it and for a while builders stayed there while working on other projects. Planning permission was submitted to develop it into flats with the poem preserved in an atrium or lobby space to which the public would have access but the locals objected on various grounds which probably were based in a desire that it should remain a pub. It caught fire and was boarded up. At some point on Wednesday night it caught fire again and had been condemned as unsafe by the council by Thursday morning.

Hardys Well pub being demolished by a digger. Half the poem is still visible but the rest has gone.

Hardys Well pub being demolished by a digger. Half the poem is still visible but the rest has gone.

This was the state of play yesterday afternoon.

Pile of bricks and broken railings. Some bricks still have white paint and black letters showing..

This was the state of play when I went to look just now.

In general, I'm not really in favour of monarchy, but in the priority ordered list of things I think ought to changed about UK society it ranks fairly low so, if asked, I always said I didn't care enough to have much of an opinion about it.

Still, it's weird to have a King.

At some point for some reason I signed up for newsletters from the Open Rights Group. After the general election they requested people write into the various political parties and request copies of the personal data that was held on them. This sounded interesting so I did it. So far:

Change UK know nothing! - arguably the story of the party.
UKIP doesn't think it knows anything but thinks it might have sent me a leaflet in which case it was just sending a leaflet to all addresses in the area not to me personally. This was a long response which sounded vaguely panicked, which was amusing if nothing else.
The Lib Dems noted they were getting a lot of requests via Open Rights group and wanted to know if I was really asking (I can't recall if I responded to this or not). I probably didn't since I haven't heard anything further and, anyway, their data is likely to include something along the lines of "you are a member so *duh*!
The conservatives have data from the electoral role, the marked register from the polling station for 2014, my data of birth which, rather implausibly, they claim to have obtained when canvassing (also nationality and gender which is more plausible). Then they have a shed ton of inferences made from this data using models (and, we think, probably access to land registry). This is fascinating. They have percentages for how likely I am to read various newspapers (most likely The Guardian, least likely The Mirror). They obviously have several different models since they think I both do and don't have children. They are more or less correct about my income but incorrect about the value of the outstanding mortgage on the house. They think I am a housewife or work part time. I've scored 0 on a scale of 1-7 for how likely I am to vote (?) - even more excitingly I've scored 14 on a scale of A-G for how likely I am to be a Conservative. They think they shouldn't try to have a conversation with me on the doorstep.

I've not heard from any of the other parties and, at this point, I've forgotten which I requested data from, though I would have expected Labour, Green and Brexit to have been on the list and their responses are conspicuous by their absence.

Crossposts: https://louisedennis.livejournal.com/600463.html

Blockchain really only does one thing well
The Conversation has been running lots of articles on the blockchain (or blockchains) recently but this is the first that has actually made some kind of sense to me.
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How Jeremy Corbyn won Facebook
Facebook creates opinion bubbles (we all know this). This article starts prizing the lid off the problem but stops short of a detailed analysis, but touches on a lot of issues I know a variety of academics are interested in tackling.
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More United
I see this and I think it's all very well but they say they will fund parliamentary candidates who sign up to their principles. But how do they propose enforcing compliance to their principles and, given the vagueness of their principles, who gets to decide if someone is complying with their principles and how will they manage change to their principles?
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LessUnited | Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
Not quite the critique I'd have made, but highlights several points that contribute to my view that MoreUnited, as it stands, is ill thought out with a surprising lack of attention to necessary practicalities.
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Are white, working class boys the least likely to go to university? - Full Fact
The answer is essentially yes with a couple of caveats.
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Why Trump voters are not “complete idiots” — Medium
A lot of this seems to make sense (in application to Brexit voters as well as Trump voters), particularly the observation that, at the bottom end of the value scale, particularly at the moment, you are more likely to benefit from volatility in the system than stability.
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You're wrong about Leave voters - four surprising facts about the 52 per cent
However, following on from the above, this is one of several articles I've seen in the past week or two that attempts to cast a more careful eye over the exit-polling data from Brexit and draws more nuanced conclusions than that the haves voted Remain and the have-nots voted Leave.

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Are internet populists ruining democracy for the rest of us?
Having recently hand-wrung on this blog about the tendency of the Internet to polarise and simplify debate, it is interesting to see an article discussing this, albeit in a straightforward way and without offering any answers.
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Traumatic breastfeeding experiences are the reason we must continue to promote it
I'm not sure I'd describe my breastfeeding experience as "traumatic" per se, but we definitely discovered a shocking lack of actual support for breastfeeding when I was having difficulty with it, in sharp contrast to the breastfeeding propaganda that was pushed on us before G was born. As a result I find even now, 13 years later, I get quite irrationally upset by Internet memes and the like that suggest that if you don't breastfeed you are somehow lazy, or don't really care about your child.
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Jeremy Corbyn's media strategy is smarter than his critics realise
I've been thinking a lot, recently, about the apparent paradox of a media space in which traditional, specifically print, media is rapidly losing readers (or at least paying readers) and yet which seems increasingly powerful on the political stage. This article, while mostly focused upon Corbyn, does at least attempt to disentangle this a bit.
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Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/341714.html

London is funding the rest of the UK, and other things we just learned about the nation's taxes | CityMetric
Interesting, if depressing, summary of some of the numbers in a Centre for Cities report on economy taxes with some nice infographics.
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PHD Comics: Doing vs Writing
This isn't entirely accurate for Computer Science, but I do sometimes get frustrated that the "doing" of programming up case studies and examples yields comparatively little in terms of publishable results.
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Britain is changed utterly. Unless this summer is just a bad dream | Ian McEwan | Opinion | The Guardian
An extraordinarily cynical piece but one which sums up a lot of what I've been feeling the past couple of weeks, right up to the final paragraph which sounds a note of, I would say, unwarranted Remainer optimism.
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The Corbyn Dilemma — Dan Rebellato
I agree with about 75% of this. I got myself a £3 special for the last Labour leadership election but didn't use it to vote for Corbyn. I find it hard to get a good grip on his policies or leadership, in part because most commentators treat him as either a saintly martyr or the devil incarnate and he clearly is neither. He comes across to me as a political scrapper with steely determination and some distinctly dubious allies but nevertheless an idealistic one. Where he seems to have failed is raising his game from backbench "in the trenches" activism into a frontbench grand vision. I'm not, personally, very taken with him, but just at the moment the PLP and Labour NEC seem to me to be worse.
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Forget Brexit — Italy is poised to tear Europe apart | Europe | News | The Independent
There's another referendum coming up which may topple a government...
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Can Theresa May make it to the top? | Gaby Hinsliff | Politics | The Guardian
Recommended by my sister, an insightful profile of Theresa May from 18 months ago.
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How the BBC's obsession with balance took Labour off air ahead of Brexit
I have huge sympathy with the BBC's nigh on impossible task of being "balanced" so what particularly interested me here was not the general thrust of the argument but the stats comparing the number of media appearances by Corbyn in contrast to Johnson which rather undermines the suggestion he didn't campaign hard enough for Remain.
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Theresa May reshuffle: what is behind the PM's top appointments?
Interesting analysis of Teresa May's appointment of Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary which avoids the tempting (but probably incorrect) idea that she's merely giving him the rope with which to hang himself when Brexit fails (for some meaning of the word "fail").
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Doctor Who | Punishment - YouTube
I'm not much of a one for fanvids, but his Doctor Who one is excellent - very angsty mind.
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Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/338281.html

This was copied by younger self from, I think, Poems on the Underground which my mother owned.

Everything Changes
after Brecht, `Alles wandelt sich'

Everything changes. We plant
trees for those born later
but what's happened has happened
and poisons poured into the seas
cannot be drained out again.

What's happened has happened.
Poisons poured into the seas
cannot be drained out again, but
everything changes. We plant
trees for those born later.

CICELY HERBERT

Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/334355.html

I'd been thinking about having a stab at Throwback Thursday since, as an idea, it seems both pretty fun and fairly easy, and I've been looking into ways to post more regularly by being a little less ambitious in what I write about. I had my photo albums out and was thinking about posting a photo from back in the 1970s - maybe a group photo from my 8th birthday party.

But then yesterday we had the unedifying spectacle of the Battle of the Thames, pretty much proving that rational and reasoned debate about the EU referendum is an impossibility and the best we can hope for is a comedy battle using pop music and water hoses to decide the question.

Today we have the murder of Jo Cox, MP - which, I'm aware, may or may not have had anything to do with the EU, since her murderer may or may not have shouted Britain First, and even if he did, Britain First != Leave and it's perfectly conceivable he was more motivated by her work advocating for intervention in Syria or a number of other causes she campaigned for than her support for Remain. I'm not sure, however, that the precise reasons are more important than its probable reflection on the current state of politics, and the relationship between politicians and the public, in the UK.

In other news 20 children are among 34 people who died of thirst in the Sahara desert, having been abandoned by people smugglers.

I wonder what kind of a world we have built, those of us in that group photo, because it gets harder and harder to pretend that the current state of affairs is not in some part our responsibility. So Throwback Thursday, I find I just can't. Maybe next week.

Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/332668.html

That's a headline from the Telegraph.

I feel there is definitely a double-meaning there.

Thanks to my history teacher, I am broadly Ricardian in the comfy sense that involves having only the most tenuous grasp of the evidence and no real investment in an opinion I didn't exactly personally form. I love me a good conspiracy theory though, and as conspiracy theories go, believing Richard III was wronged seems fairly harmless.

I'm mildly bemused by the level of interest the discovery of his remains seem to have raised though. Does having his actual body contribute much of anything to our understanding of the people or politics of the time?

Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/227349.html

Just got back from spoiling my ballot paper, following carefully the instructions* provided by

spiralsheep.

I don't particularly object to the PCCs themselves, accepting the argument that senior police officers have been playing politics without accountability for pretty much as long as there have been senior police officers. However I do strongly object to the barriers that were placed in the way of candidates making their positions known to the electorate. I actually visited the official website where it was clear that the candidates in my area had been told they only had 500 words in which to state their case. Oddly enough they were all hoping to minimize the impact of budget cuts on policing (a non-policy since I can't imagine any candidate seriously putting forward a policy of maximizing the impact of budget cuts on policing).

While there are evils associated with unregulated campaigning, at 500 words it seems people have little choice except to vote according to party ideology which is, I believe, the opposite of the stated intention of these elections.

*There seems something terribly British and middle-class about needing instructions for spoiling a ballot paper.

Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/219766.html

I have no idea why I am so completely mind-blown by the idea that there is daylight on Mars because, well, duh! - maybe it is growing up with all those pictures of the moon-landing against a dark sky. But I am completely mindblown by the idea that there is daylight on Mars.

( Look! Daylight on Mars! )

On the 24th June the Olympic torch went past the end of our road - admittedly at 7.30am which was not entirely civilised for a Sunday morning. However in the name of small-children-present we dragged ourselves up and stood with a small crowd.

One of our neighbours thoughtfully took a photo and then, photoshopped other neighbours who were standing on his side of the road onto the other side of the road in order to capture the spirit if not the reality of the occasion:

( Image under the cut )

I think the torchbearer is Muaaz Khan who apparently had a kidney transplant at the age of 10 and now works with children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I wasn't actually aware of the torch relay's connection with Hitler but it was an event, much like the Royal Wedding and Jubilee about which I had somewhat ambivalent feelings. I hope, if I'd actually bothered to think about it properly, I'd have come to conclusions similar to this thoughtful post on the use of ritual in modern public life.

( If you don't like blood, or needles, then all of the following is probably TMI )

Not entirely getting the panic.

I fully recognise that there are probably some people who were relying in an important way on Google Search, Google Mail, YouTube and Blogger keeping their information separate. However Google has given lots of warning that the change is coming, and I don't see any reason in principle why a web-based company should not share information between all its web-based services so long as it's up-front about the fact. So I find it hard to work up even the low-level sense of outrage I occasionally manage when Facebook springs some sweeping change to privacy settings on me.

I do, of course, see that Google's emphasis on "real names only" for Google+ etc may prevent people with legitimate reasons to operate pseudonymously when online from accessing Google's other services. But its real names policy seems to me to be tangential to the issue of linking its data. Obviously the issues interact, but I see more reason to fight the real names only policy than to fight the new privacy policy.

What I'm really not clear about is why it is particularly important that I, personally, take various steps (or should have done since it's now March 1st and so I'm basically doomed) to scrub my information from all Google's platforms. I mean this is the company whose search engine (when it confesses to knowing anything about me at all) thinks I'm a man, between the ages of 25 and 35 who's main interests are computer games, American football and women's clothing. I wouldn't actually be complaining if they could join a few more dots than that, to be honest. I should really re-check it, come to think of it, and see if, now they've linked my web search to my Google+ account, they've managed to work out I'm female.

Maybe I'm failing to see the panic because I'm moderately careful about who gets what personal information anyway, and have never assumed that any company (especially one based in the US) is going to keep it entirely secure and inviolate. I also suspect I tend to over-estimate rather than under-estimate the ease with which my online identities could be linked. Frankly, I was surprised to learn that Google+ wasn't already linked up with Blogger, YouTube and Search!!

Maybe I'm failing to see the panic simply because I don't really use most of these services. I use search a lot, I post videos for family to YouTube, but my usage of all the over services is minimal to non-existent.

B. and I have decided that we are Very Confused about Greece and the euro. So in the hopes that someone on my flist (e.g.

philmophlegm or

wellinghall) can help I said I'd underline our understanding of what is going on and then the flist can tell us where we're wrong and fill in the gaps.

( How we think currencies, gov'ment bond and economies work )

A conspicuous number of people, or at least a conspicuous number of pre-teens with their families, draped in the Libyan flag. I wouldn't describe it as a celebratory atmosphere, but a suppressed sense of excitement. I'm curious about the pre-dominance of families, particularly mothers with children, though a ten minute walk is difficult to generalise from.

I don't have a good grasp of the sectarian politics of Liverpool. Though I am often struck, as I arrive on the train each morning, by the way the anglican and catholic cathedrals dominate the skyline.

( Anglican Cathedral )

( The Catholic Cathedral )

A couple of years ago in a "symbol of Christian unity" (which I suspect may have had something to do with modern art) a light was shone between the towers of the two cathedrals. Unfortunately the light chosen was a narrow red beam, creating the unfortunate impression that one cathedral had a laser sight carefully trained upon the other.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/48595.html.

Inevitably I have been linked via Facebook to the UCU petition of no confidence in the government's policies in further, higher and adult education.

Now, I think its fair to say, that I think the government doesn't have a good grasp of the higher education sector. It is probably also fair to say that I'm not convinced the UCU actually has any better a grasp of the situation. The sector is riven with elitist divisions between "old" and "new" universities, between researchers and teachers, between science and humanities teaching styles, between businessmen, scholars and engineers, between those who study out of interest and those who study to obtain a qualification, between the worth of the theoretical versus the worth of the practical (however you choose to define those two terms), between the sense of entitlement held by students and the sense of entitlement held by lecturers. The higher education sector has proved itself adept at optimising whatever short term targets the government has chosen to place before it, often to the detriment of researchers, teachers and students and any stated government long term goal the target was intended to encourage. A side effect seems to have been increasing and entrenched factionalism within universities. It would be nice to see the sector more united, with a clearer understanding of its own value and the reasons it does things the way it does. The government could play a part in that, though it would be a brave politician to try. But I don't think tuition fees are, per se, wrong if we know why we are charging them and how a student is meant to make ends meet while studying as a result and I strongly suspect the above petition will primarily be read as "I believe tuition fees are wrong under any circumstances" and not as a wider criticism of successive governments and the higher education sector itself in failing for decades to adequately define its role.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/48192.html.

I didn't see the lunar exclipse (clouds, trees) but this stunning image is today's NASA photo of the day taken from part of Greece with the improbable name of "The Planet of the Goats".

( Lightening Eclipse from the Planet of the Goats )

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/45975.html.

According to the BBC anyway.

I'm not sure what to make of this news. Skype is quite clunky in several ways and it would be nice to see it improved with the potential investment of Microsoft's resources behind it. Unfortunately the terms "not clunky" and "Microsoft" don't automatically link up in my mind. There's also a concern that the Skype implementations for Linux and MacOs may become poor cousins (though part of the value of Skype must be its ubiquity) and that the charging model may become less generous.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/41480.html.

I'm mildly depressed by this. My parents vote Lib Dem. In fact they are positively pillars of liberal democracy. I was half-hoping for some kind of revelation that, you know, actually I secretly agreed with David Cameron or something and that, in fact, listening to the Today program actually wasn't sufficient to decide between the parties. But on being asked my opinion on a series of yes/no questions the Daily Telegraph concluded I was a Lib Dem - yeah, yeah, I know it is equally trivial but if I was majorly deluded you'd expect it to show up and I actually couldn't state off-hand, in general, which parties agreed with which statement though I could make educated guesses.

Locally, I don't know. I've read their leaflets but both lots (the Conservatives can't be bothered) say they will improve the same services while criticising the corruption and waste of the other.

I'd have doubts about accepting a cake from any of them.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/4659.html.

Farewell to the Wandering Well

It is weird to have a King

What do the political parties know about me?

Linky links

linky links

Trying to be Optimistic

Not Throwback Thursday

"Richard III's burial could be as poignant and beautiful as the royal wedding"

PCC Elections

Daylight on Mars

The Olympic Torch

Blood Donation

Google's new privacy policy

AKICOLJ: Currencies, Government Bonds and the connections between them

On the Curry Mile tonight

The Orange Men were Marching in Liverpool this Morning

UCU Petition

Photo of the Lunar Eclipse

Microsoft have bought Skype

The Daily Telegraph tells me I should vote Lib Dem

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April 2025

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