John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

London trip: 30 May 2005: I've been in London. We had a very pleasant stay over with a friend from uni (hi Karen) last Thursday in St. Albans.; On Friday we drove first to the Belvedere Hotel on Clapham Common. The RAC route planner said it would take 27 minutes but it took two hours. It's an example of how crap the Internet can be sometimes. Firstly, the directions aren't good enough on their own. For example, "leave the motorway and take the A123 heading for x", and you leave the motorway and are faced with a sign saying the A123 to the left, and x to the right. In that case, the directions were too detailed, it meant us to leave the motorway where the exit is signed for x and the A123, then move on to a whole other paragraph about what to do at the island at the end of the sliproad.; But then we were supposed to head into London on the M4, which turns into the A4 and then "continue straight into A3220 (Earls Court Road)" which with the best will in the world is not a straight on. I only knew we were wrong when we reached Harrods and I was familiar enough with London to know that was too near to the centre. I was able to U turn before reaching the Congestion Charging zone. That's a good tip too, when running these route planners around London, remember to click to avoid chargeable routes if that's what you want. Also, I resolved in future to take the route and transfer it to a real map so I understand it before I set off.; But the other thing is, you'd expect the RAC to adjust their route planners to take account of traffic speed wouldn't you? Something like TrafficMaster must have data on average traffic speed on all the roads in the UK. It could be adjusted by season, by time of day, and by events .. we drove past some event happening at Twickenham the next day. So this is about consumer expectation versus what's really provided. I really expected that journey to take the 27 minutes it said. If the RAC is going to give us a journey time, where do they get off it being 1/4 of the actual time the journey requires? Where's the quality checking? Where's the usability testing? And if that's how slapdash the RAC's website is, why should I believe any of their other services get any better attention?; Anyway, we were headed for the Belvedere Hotel on Clapham Common. It doesn't have a website, but I found it on Yell. According to that, it was the nearest place to Brixton Academy except for a B&B run by a gay couple. I'd have loved to have stayed there, but it said it was "by and for" the gay community, so I didn't really want to take the place of someone who would really appreciate it. I think that was a mile away, the Belvedere Hotel is about 1.5 miles away.; It worked, as a solution to the problem. Brixton appears to have almost no accommodation, and almost no parking, so it was a problem. I booked the hotel but then my g/f was asking questions about whether it would be acceptably clean or not, so I started asking questions on Trip Advisor which worked really well when my g/f went to Girona. Anyway, if the link worked you'll see I got good advice, but I proceeded anyway on the basis that no-one said we'd be murdered in our beds.; The hotel's scruffy in the public areas, the chest of drawers fell apart when I tried to open a drawer, but we found the people to be friendly and helpful, particularly the woman who served breakfast was really friendly and smiley, the bed was comfortable and clean, and at £65 for a double for the night, it seemed to be good value.; Strangely it had a fridge and cooker, but the fridge really worked for us as the weather was hot, so we were able to cool some bottles of water.; Clapham's nice, I really liked it. I know I saw it later mainly on a warm Friday evening when everyone was out resting on the common, but it had a very friendly, cosmopolitan feel, similar to the public spaces in Amsterdam. We had great food that evening at Carmen Tapas on Clapham Common South Side, which felt more Spanish than Lanzarote had a few months before.; Anyway, back to the itinerary. Having parked our car on the hotel front, we tubed to Hoxton. Now, I checked the London Underground website to see what ticket would be best for our day, and planned to get a Zone 1-6 day ticket for £3.30. When we got there, the only thing on offer was a Zone 1-3 for £4.70. How does that work then?; We were going to go to Tate Modern but I've been there already and it's a bit overwhelming, it's so big and after a while you start to think, well, so how does this green circle on a white background relate to the white circle on a green background I saw three hours ago?; I'm a big fan of Tracey Emin. Sufficiently so in fact, that I created my own public discussion area in Yahoo Groups for likeminded people to yack about her, but so far idolising Emin seems to be something one does alone.; Anyway, having read about her gallery being White Cube I thought we'd go there, hence Hoxton. When I started planning that I discovered the day we'd be there was the day her new show opens. Fantastic.; The walk from the tube station to the White Cube gave me the most intense feeling of urban life I've ever had, I think. Espresso Urbanity. So much so I took a photograph of the street, but I don't think that'll quite capture the essence of it. According to the schoolfriend I'll talk about later, Nathan Barley was set in Hoxton, so maybe what I saw was some form of false urbanity created by new media workers.; Anyway, the White Cube is quite a small gallery, with just two exhibition spaces, both turned over, for her exhibition, to Emin. For me, the work she showed answered the critics who say that perhaps she's not really a skilled artist in the sense that maybe she can't draw, or can't paint. For me it's clear, she's an artist with immense skill both in the traditional sense, but also in how she works with the media. The thing that attracted me most from the start, however, was her use of language. That I find deeply inspirational .. "you forgot to kiss my soul" comes to mind, and at random from the guide .. "this week I told a friend to burn in hell". It's rock and roll, I love it.; I also earwigged someone asking how much it cost to buy a Tracey Emin picture. The receptionist said "it depends, it ranges". He said "I know, but from what to what?", she said "about £6,000 to £150,000".; Anyway, after that it was off to the London Eye for another dose of incompetence. Interestingly, their website is down right now, so maybe I'll come back to this later.; ... it's the next morning now, and the site is still down. That backs up my experience, so prepare for a moan.; I booked my tickets online and ordered an information pack too. I thought that would save me queuing. We arrived in good time and I collected my tickets from the machine in the council offices. It occurred to us to check when and where we would get our information pack. That meant queuing for the information desk. I stood in a queue of about fifteen people to be told that the information pack could be collected from the shop, and that the queue for the Eye looked bad but was really only about ten minutes long. So, if we hadn't had the foresight to wonder where the guidebook came from, we'd have gone on the Eye without it and so wouldn't have known what we were looking at. The ticket did say something like "please visit our shop", but that sounded like "so we can sell you a postcard of London and some sweets" rather than "please collect your guidebook from the shop".; We sat on the grass for a while and at half past four we joined the queue for the Eye for our "flight" at five o'clock. We stood in the queue for an hour. It was at the end of a long day, it was hot, the second half of the queue was within glass or perspex walls and roof so we were baking and tired.; We noticed that some of the capsules were empty. Listening to a conversation between a fellow customer and the people who were ushering us onto the wheel, the capsules themselves deny access if conditions inside aren't right, for instance, if the air inside is too hot. The usher said sometimes the capsules just need an empty rotation to allow their air conditioning system to cool the air down and then they're ready to take passengers again. I know it was the hottest May day for fifty years, but there's a whole summer to come, is the air conditioning system underpowered?; If we'd booked our 'flight' for 17:00, I fail to see why we had to queue for an hour. People who go on the Eye are mostly tourists (quite a few Americans were queuing with us), they have tight itineraries. It's insulting to have people wait like that.; I imagine the British Airways London Eye was conceived as a branding tool. British Airways has appeared to flounder as the company tried to work out how to counter the threats from the low cost airlines, at one point their share price was around £1 from a peak of £4.50. From memory, there was the new tailfin design that wasn't well received, they created their own low cost airline and then sold it, there were management changes too, and the company appeared to be involved in dirty tricks when Richard Branson won compensation against them for sharp practice in attempting to poach Virgin customers. British Airways had to find a way forward.; In a sense, the obvious strategy was to sell the good service that is associated with British Airways. I imagine the London Eye was conceived as a way to demonstrate this good service to people who travel a lot, or at least, that may be why British Airways got involved with the project.; Well it didn't work for me on this day. Far from it being a taste of refined travel, it reminded me of the hassle of travel. The endless queuing. Constantly having to solve the next problem, to a deadline, like laboratory monkeys undergoing a test for the effects of sleep deprivation.; The London Eye is a marvel. An inspirational thought and great engineering ruined by a bit of sunshine and British Airways' seeming inability to manage its queue of customers. If that's what travel with BA is all about, forget it.; Strangely too, when we alighted from the Eye, they seemed to have stopped anyone getting on at all. No queue. I asked a security chap why there was no queue, and he said "there's a problem", "what with?", "the heat".; Anyway that all rather diminished my enjoyment of the Eye. It's very high. You can see the Wembley arch and inside the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Tum te tum. I did wonder about this building. It's next to what's labelled in the guide as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, so I wonder if both buildings are that. It has an impressive looking circular courtyard, I'd love to see inside.; I did want to give British Airways a chance to respond to this. I imagined a letter requesting not a formulaic response, but a properly considered one. I tried the London Eye website on, I think, the Monday night and it was unavailable (giving a Microsoft database error). I tried it again on the morning after, and it was still unavailable, so I thought I'd write to British Airways themselves.; Their website gave no email address, and no real possibility of contacting them electronically about issues any wider than "lost luggage", or issues about ticketing. I chose the most appropriate, pointed them to this blog, and asked them if they wanted to respond. They emailed back saying, as I understood it, that they couldn't follow links provided via their email form, and requesting that I email them direct. I did that, and they responded saying that all such requests should be in writing and should be clear about what is being requested.; Those systems are put in place by companies that don't want to engage with their users. I danced a little, but I don't think I'll write. It looks to me like I'll get a response saying that for this type of enquiry, the only way they can understand it is in a song in the Brotherhood of Man style. The goal is to wear us down, to make us ask time and again for what we want until we give up.; It's also intended to belittle us. I'm not cheap enough to ask for a refund. I'm not dramatic enough to ask for compensation for a 'ruined afternoon'.; If I remember correctly, Tom Peters advocated using the most vocal complainants to help improve your company. The principle is that if I have enough nouse to put forward a constructive criticism of my experience, and enough gumption to contact the company, then I'm a Bloody Useful Person. Peters has tales of switched-on managers calling in a video crew and turning up at a BUPs house to discuss the problem they had, and then distributing that video to their whole organisation with a note along the lines of "people, get your shit together". BUPs are able powerfully to articulate the feelings of the majority of customers. Listening to them, weaving them into the development and change process, is a quick way to achieve authentic improvement. What's more, there's every chance of turning that vocal complainant into an energetic advocate. If you satisfy your BUPs, you'll more than likely please most of your clients. If you do that, your business will grow beyond your most fevered expectations. BUPs are bloody useful, they're a gift.; I'm still waiting to be treated in the slightest bit properly by any company I've dealt with, never mind being respected or even listened to. Hence the blog, at least here these experiences inform those who care to search and to listen.; After that it was back to the hotel, out for some food, and into the Brixton Academy for The Chemical Brothers.; Maybe by this time I was tired. We were certainly dehydrated, we just drank and drank through the whole evening. The gig was good, but maybe I'm just trying to re-create the time I saw them in Sheffield when I knew little about them and it turned into a near religious experience. This is my fourth time of seeing them and I know the drill.; One of the defining parts of a Chemical Brothers gig is the bass. They know bass. This time, the bass was so big at times it was difficult to breathe in. As I inhaled, my nostrils vibrated. It felt like the whole audience was being picked up as one and shaken by about an inch back and forth.; It was, actually, too loud. It sometimes made it hard to hear the rest of the tune. Whereas normally the delight of The Chemical Brothers is the deep bass you don't hear, you just feel, some other part of the rhythm going on right up in the high frequencies, beyond where a high-hat sits, leaving acres of open plain for some really big sounds and the rest of the song to form inbetween. This time the bass was so loud it encroached on the rest of the song.; With a band that's been around for a while it's difficult to avoid the routine. They started with Hey Boy, Hey Girl, just as they did all those years ago in Sheffield. But they also mixed in a lot of tunes I'd not heard before. But the audience were restless. The bass made it difficult to pick up the rhythm. Maybe it was the day's heat. There seemed to be a lack of, well, of reverence. Perhaps that's London. Londoners can pick any entertainment any day, so there's a constant stream of people pushing to get into the crowd, people pushing to get out of the crowd, lots of people fetching rounds of drinks, as if the band were the entertainment in their local pub. Where I come from, you gape at the electric lights until the very end.; In my writeups of the Sheffield gig from a few years ago, I wrote that there's nothing to see in a Chemical Brothers gig. Nowadays, they project their visuals on every flat surface, and there's no doubt they're consistent and perfectly attuned to the Chemical Brothers' message. But writ large, they overtake your senses and I found myself feeling like I was watching telly, rather than at a gig by my favourite band. You can't help it, vision is our strongest sense. I did poke fun at them previously for lack of visuals, but it's how I like it, I can internalise the music that way. Here, I found myself watching the videos and thinking how interesting they were, wondering how to program some of the effects, and wondering if they did them themselves or whether they bought-in a designer and if so, whether it was the same designer throughout (the consistency suggests so). My mind wandered, in other words.; One of the things my mind wandered to is whether you see yourself in the audience at gigs. Everyone there likes the music you like. Are the people at a gig more like you than you think? The Chemical Brothers audience is predominantly white, male, about twenty five to thirty years old, and they look like they're planning to buy a holiday cottage in the country in the next few years. Sickening, but I'm not sure what it is I'd prefer. Actually, more variety is what I'd like. A less homogeneous audience. The idea is that rhythm unites us all, not just white successful middle class male graphic designers.; Anyway, they played for two hours and we walked home feeling perfectly safe through Brixton and Clapham, but uncomfortably drenched from head to toe in sweat (even though I'm certainly no dancer). Back at the hotel room, we opened the window, stripped off, and lounged still and silent drinking Lucozade until we felt like we'd regained some equilibrium and could sleep.; The next morning we had some time to kill, the weather was still nice, and I remembered passing a pleasant hour or two between meetings at Virginia Water back when I was a marketing chap, so we went there.; After that we met and stayed with a friend from school (hi Chris). We'd got back in touch through Friends Reunited, so this was us meeting for the first time since about 1981 or so. He's now a headmaster with a penchant for multiculturalism, so were fed gloriously by his Indian wife and generally well looked after until the next morning.; He and I were in a band together, so there were plenty recollections from those times, but he also had a tape of Splat! playing, I think, Eve and Blue Dress On, later tracks. I was the guitarist in Splat! for a fair while and had forgotten those tunes. The tracks we committed to vinyl I've listened to a few times since and didn't really rate that well, but these two were really rather good. Maybe we were, as he believes, on the verge of actually doing something interesting. I think I've resolved to create a couple of websites, one on Splat!, the other on the Sandpiper, Nottingham's punk venue.; Notably we remembered visiting a friend in Handsworth, Birmingham (hi Jane) to go to a Black Uhuru gig, and not being able to get back because the Handsworth riots had kicked off. We wondered at the time why, as we travelled to the gig on the top of a double decker bus, every shop was boarding up its windows. And we thought the sense of tension in the air at the gig was normal.; After that, the five and a half hour journey back from London to Scarborough (if you include petrol, toilet and food breaks), to discover I'd gained two pounds in weight. I mean, not a problem, not a big deal at all, it's just I weigh myself on Mondays because of my running plan, but still .. how? The next morning we slept until one in the afternoon.; Oh, and we spent the whole weekend counting Honda Jazzes because we've, err, bought one. It all started with the J D Power survey, despite the fact that that's how we bought our Chrysler Neon and we've had lots of problems. Anyway, we pick it up later today. My g/f said "first one to spot ten Honda Jazzes wins". It took all weekend, so they're not that common. I think we'd have seen more Norbert Dentressangles. Anyway, there were more in London than on the motorway, which backs it up as a city car.; Maybe I've lost my jizz and I'm becoming a moaning minnie but, it'll be nice to have a new car but it's hardly got my juices flowing. We've gone for a small car because parking on our street's becoming a problem. We've gone for economy for environmental reasons. There's no point in getting a fast car because it takes 2 hours to do a 30 minute journey and if you do get out of the traffic there are speed cameras every mile so if you go out driving in a bad mood, you can lose your licence in a day (and I'd be the first to say "well, you shouldn't have been driving so fast").; I remember my dad accelerating to maximum along Wilsthorpe Road in Long Eaton every time (in an Austin A40, I'll grant you). Nowadays it's built-up, has a 30 mph speed limit, and a traffic island halfway along it. Does no-one else notice the rats in a cage effect? Feeling so boxed in? I mean, the Japanese seem to manage it, but we're so much less conformist than them. Nowadays you have to be so bloody sensible.; That's why it was so good to see the most entertaining tv program, Top Gear, back on air this weekend with their tales of buying a "stylish two-door coupe for under £1,500". It makes us both laugh and cry with the joy of living, it's funnier than the best comedy and contains more warmth than watching a night of Hugh Grant films in a big coat. Top Gear is simply beautiful. We're home.
Yorkshire Coast Radio: 23 May 2005: Last night I got bored with Radio 4 while I was cooking and did what I rarely do .. flick radio channels. Yorkshire Coast Radio. I hate commercial radio. Adverts for exhausts and double glazing, and jingles that pollute your head for weeks. Anyway, Yorkshire Coast Radio .. you can imagine it. They were playing Mary of the Fourth Form, Boomtown Rats. They followed that up with The Undertones. It turned out to be a 3 hour punk show on Sunday night. I mean, punk in the lightest sense .. Senses Working Overtime (XTC), hardly revolutionary. But then they played Pretty Vacant, and followed it up with a series of ads about window blinds, no-win-no-fee accident claiming, and, well, you get my drift.; In conclusion, punk achieved nothing and became the Perry Como of its generation.; I do fully intend, if I'm still able, when I'm 70 or 80, to start a punk band to entertain my peers, just for the irony. Although an irony purist recently knocked my understanding of that word so maybe I've got it wrong. We could call ourselves The Incontinents.
Bip Bop: 19 May 2005: The most exciting part of the trip into town I just made with Ali was the fact that, in my bank there are three cash machines. When your money's ready, they beep a few times. This time, and only this time so far, me and the guy next to me had money ready almost together, so the beeps syncopated .. bip bip .. bip bip .. bip bip. If I'd been Tyres from Spaced, I'd have bopped till my little heart could bop no more.; The other thing about those cash machines is that the other day one was out of action running McAfee AntiVirus. There, that filled you with confidence didn't it. And you thought they'd run on something half secure, such as Linux.
Age Of Consent: 18 May 2005: I'm reading George Monbiot's Age of Consent atm. It's simultaneously a deep gulp of fresh thinking, a way out, a new path forward, and depressing that we've let things come to this.; The book, in a nutshell, looks first at ways of governing people and persuasively concludes that democracy is the best system there is. He claims to be a former anarchist, and his reasons for moving against that are persuasive, they changed my mind anyway.; He then shows how the international forums that govern the world are not democratic. The WTO, the UN, and the World Bank were set up after the second world war by the victors to ensure they stayed on top. All very sci fi. Interestingly there's an account of how Keynes, after the war, went to Bretton Woods with plans for a world economic system that would be fair to all countries. The Americans, interestingly demonstrating that their unilateralism isn't a modern result of their pre-eminence but is simply how they are, said "no" and imposed a system that stacked the trading deck in their favour.; Those systems are playing their endgame now. The difference between rich nations and poor ones is increasing .. wealth isn't being distributed fairly. Indeed, that's coming closer to home as the difference between Americas poor and its wealthy is also increasing. Poor countries that have followed the World Bank's prescription have found themselves worse off than those who haven't, notably China. Africa is poorer now than it was at the time of Live Aid.; With a world trading system stacked against them, and with the poor countries becoming established as the factory floor of the rich countries, he doesn't quite say it, but it's beginning to feel like this is a modern day slavery, an apartheid happening right here and now. People will look back on these times and wonder how we were so blind to what was happening.; The great thing is, he shows us the way through. He talks of a world parliament of 600 democratically elected representatives each representing the same number of people (was it 10 million each?), with the unique moral authority of being the voice of the world's people. Fascinatingly he says "we don't need anyone's permission to do this". Wow.; Where ideas, such as Keynes', already exist, he doesn't reinvent them. The book is comprehensive. It feels like a bible, it feels complete, like, this is what we need to do. But what? The book looks like it's going to end without saying "go and do x". Apparently this website was set up to answer the question .. I'm off to explore.
Galloway: 18 May 2005: Britain this morning is loving George Galloway for his rebuttal of US allegations that he received money for Iraqi oil. Fantastic stuff.; The wonderful bit that the Today program broadcast that isn't covered in the Guardian story above was Galloway saying that he'd met Saddam exactly the same number of times as Rumsfeld, the difference is that Rumsfeld was there to sell Saddam arms.; Fresh from coverage of that completely ridiculous Paxman question at the election (details are in the Wikipedia link above) and with pictures (who else got this) of him being carried through the streets on the shoulders of cheering supporters, he did what, God can you imagine, we really wanted our PM to do all along. Not toady to the Americans, but to go over and give it to them straight. I think we feel happier now as a nation. We told the yanks. Fantastic :-)
I see ya: 18 May 2005: A study reveals the percentages of people who click the first search engine result, the second, and so on. Interesting. I've not much to say on it, but I wanted to bookmark it anyway.; Well, I have actually, for my clients I provide a single number each month which represents their search engine position. The higher the number the better. It takes account of search engine popularity and position, but doesn't take these new figures into account, nor the importance of the key phrase I'm measuring. I'm pondering creating a system to do those calculations, but can't seem to get a response from the people managing the Google API (programmers interface) who appear to forbid you to use the API to calculate your website's position in a search request. They're happy, however, for you to run a search every five minutes to check for changes in a results page. Weird, not sure why that is.
Sellafield: 18 May 2005: Almost immediately after I helped vote the grinning premier in because I wanted more of the same investment in services and stable economic management, we also got a heap of the same old 'treat em like mushrooms' technique.; Apparently, the government will have to make a decision quite soon about whether, and if so how, to replace our nuclear deterrent, and our nuclear power stations. Then in last Saturdays FT, it appears that decision might be sooner than you think (I thought it was already taken, so .. even before then .. blimey).; Incidentally, on the front of that issue was a fantastic photograph worthy of Vogue showing young men posing outside what looked like a designer clothes shop. On closer inspection those young men were carrying guns. They were armed guards guarding a local government building after the uprising in Uzbek town. Great photograph though.; Anyway, back to the nuclear thing. Imagine my surprise, having listened a little to Today on Radio Four, having watched Channel 4 News at lunchtime, having scanned the Yahoo news as I logged in, to see, in Wikipedia's "In the news" that "The Sellafield nuclear plant's Thorp reprocessing facility in Cumbria, England, is closed down due to the confirmation of a 20-tonne leak of highly radioactive uranium and plutonium fuel through a fractured pipe." That'll be the Sellafield that's just 150 miles from where I'm sitting.; That news stayed at the top of Wikipedia for several days, but was incredibly reluctantly covered by the UK press. On that day I queried Google news and the only British newspaper I could find that had covered the story was the local newspaper the Manchester Evening News.; So hang on. At the time the government is trying to warm us to the idea of having another set of nuclear power stations, Sellafield leaks "leaked enough highly dangerous mix of nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid to fill a large swimming pool" and that's not news? The fact that there are reports it'll eventually eat its way out of the tank it's in, and the engineers are going to have to build new robots to go and fix it in a race against time, not news? The fact that we've only just been told, three weeks after the event, not a problem? The Simpsonian method by which they discovered the leak, not an issue? The fact that "a Sellafield spokeswoman said it was not known when the leak had occurred or how long the material had been lying in the area, but believed the leak was likely to have occurred 'relatively recently'" is no cause for alarm? The sheer size of the leak, 20 tonnes of plutonium and uranium dissolved in nitric acid that no-one noticed for we don't know how long, not of great concern?; I've seen no clearer example of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent in action (in that book he explains the, perhaps unintended, pressures newspaper editors receive to toe the line). It may not be that the government is suppressing this story, but all in all, the system works to suppress it.; Perhaps Wikinews will turn out to be the truest news source for the next few years. Given that one of the other two stories on that day was "John Conyers and 88 members of U.S. Congress write an open letter to George W. Bush about the new documents leaked which apparently reveals the secret agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom to attack Iraq in 2002", it promises to be a fun ride.; There's another aspect too. How come 9/11 never plays in our favour? As a result of 9/11, we get id cards, increased surveillance and two wars we didn't really want. Mind you, the Taliban did seem to be unusually offensive. I thought we might become more aware of global inequality as a result. Nope. But at least, I thought, when the nuclear power plants reach the end of their useful life we won't be renewing them. Imagine a plane flying into Sellafield. The British Isles would be made unsafe for generations, I mean, it's not a big island, it only takes a month to cycle round it. Unimaginable? 9/11 was too. To paraphrase Thatcher, terrorists only have to get lucky once, we have to be lucky all the time.
The Sands: 18 May 2005: I've no idea why I haven't found the will to blog for a while. Well, possibly it was because I needed to do some preparation for Digital Scarborough at which the local Scarborough Linux User Group had a stand. I did that preparation in the time I usually use for 'admin' .. before 8:30am. So, my admin, and my blogging, fell behind. Anyway, the show was worth doing, and hopefully we'll improve each year.; Anyway this blog isn't about that, it's about The Sands (hmm, take care, it doesn't let you back easily), the new development in North Bay which has been mooted ever since I've been in Scarborough (about 8 years I think). The local paper carried numerous visualisations over the years, but in the last week or so the developers have put up a board, and taken a geological survey. Well it's a start.; Good thing? Bad thing? Good thing? Bad thing? Can't decide. There are those who say the jobs won't be local jobs, that it will be an all inclusive resort so no-one will venture outside. I don't think the council would allow an all inclusive resort, but let's see. North Bay is comparatively unspoiled. Actually, that's nonsense, but it has a different feel to it. South Bay .. fat ugly burger-eating littering apes and their leaking children. North Bay .. normal, reasonably likeable people. Will The Sands change that? Demographically, probably not. Perhaps the divide will still exist. Will they, heaven forbid, get rid of the beach huts?; Speaking of which, on my walk up to the gym yesterday I noticed one of the biggest victorian (I assume) shelters up behind the spa had been burned. No doubt it will be demolished. Something goes to the pyromaniacs every year .. the earliest I remember here was the chinese style building in the island in Peasholm Park, but there was a year when the beach huts behind the old pool were being set alight regularly. Anyway, the shelter was a rather intricate building, and won't be replaced by anything much. Sad. Perhaps this one's down to the dossers though, who often used to sleep in there.
Porto Alegre: 5 May 2005: Naomi Klein, in her book Fences and Windows, talks about an active democracy movement in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It happens to also be where the World Social Forum meets.; Anyway, topically for us, they've been running a system of local government in which ordinary people make the investment decisions for the town. In this way they've overcome feelings of corruption in local government and improved basic service provision such as access to water and sewerage. There's more here. Brazils president seems interesting and apparently has a skilfull way with words.; Why does this feel like a breath of fresh air? It can't be that we lack choice .. from the Greens (ouch, their site's down (at 9am on election day)) to the BNP we surely have that. Is it that no-one is suggesting changing the political system? Their 'active democracy' seems to return some involvement in local affairs to the people. I must admit, when I looked at my local government organisation I got about three lines in and lost the will. It took me a while to work out which party dominates our council. A similar revolution in local government would surely be popular here.
Puerto Calero: 5 May 2005: I've still a few things to say about Lanzarote. This is about Puerto Calero, a new marina development on the South East coast. It's actually rather beautiful. Besides the marina with the luxury yachts, there are lots of eating places, plenty of open space, and endless rather large fish swimming between the boats. There's a sense of El Dorado about it.
The election: 4 May 2005: It's close. Tomorrow we vote. Which shall I go for? I'm still working down the Labour party manifesto. To be honest, I'm unlikely to reach the Liberal Democrat one, but since they didn't make theirs available through W H Smith's so I had to write off for it, and since it was delayed anyway (for the nicest of reasons), they are simply at the back of the queue and, well, that's life. I only have so much time to give.; The thing with Labour is, I like their management style. There are two parts to that. Firstly, I don't think there's anyone in the world who can get opposing factions to work together like Blair can. I don't know whether it's fair to attribute any of The Good Friday agreement to Blair, but it happened on his watch. The Tories before were flag waving and belligerent. Blair is a unifier, he gets people with different views to agree on what really matters. That he has a supreme awareness of core values seems a given to me. In that sense, there's some safety in having him around.; On the other hand, since I'm doing Blair, he also has that streak that leaders get, the one that goes "I'm in charge and here's my decision". For me it came much earlier than the war, for me, I lost my faith over GM where he seemed set to approve its use and it was only by massive protest that we made it impossible for GM to proceed.; The thing is, he's on his way. We should be voting about the future parliament, not what's past, and Blair will be gone during the next parliament.; Back when the sun shone on the new Labour government in 1997 I was a marketing consultant and it felt like Labour was really connected to the people. Yes there were focus groups and news management, but that didn't seem out of place to me. For me it was all part of having a machine that reacted to the people's voice. I thought that was fantastic.; OK, it didn't turn out like that. But reading through the manifesto there's a lot of progress planned, and not in broad sweeping changes, but in a collection of small measures (well, and not so small .. id cards, road pricing) aimed at solving real problems. I think that's the mark of a machine that's working well on the basics, and that underpins everything. A stable economy with full employment means more money for health, education, pensions, and everything else we'd like. Labour has delivered that. Underneath Blair and all the other ducks in the shooting range is a system that's working. Blair may stay or go, but we shouldn't be focussing so much on him. The huge mound he's sitting on is perhaps what matters.; It's frustrating to not punish them for the war. But secretly my problem isn't the war, it's the way we went into it, the way it felt the decision was made so much earlier than it was supposed to. If the Americans hadn't gone to war, we certainly wouldn't have. It wasn't our agenda. My bigger problem is with the American administration. We just made the best of a bad situation, we just dressed for the weather.; I don't really believe in tactical voting, I think we should vote for what we believe in. But if we wake up on Friday with this Tory government, I'll be part of the people's revolution that takes parliament by storm with the rallying cry "we're sorry, we take it back, we never meant this to happen". OK, maybe I wouldn't be their copywriter, but anyway, that scares me. Driving past farmers fields decorated with their Tory posters reminds me that Tories are for landowners, those who are wealthy and want to stay that way. Not, in essence, for 'us'. I see Labour doing what it thinks is right by the public services for eight years, and then we could lose it all in a rash moment.; So, I want Labour to win again, with a majority, to continue with their public services improvements. If I had to vote today, I'd vote Labour. I think that will be my first ever Labour vote.; As for the local election, I don't follow local politics much, but the whole sea defence thing hasn't seemed right from the start .. I'm not sure that's exactly where we need the work doing, for me it's more about the hotels and apartments at the top of the cliffs in both bays, but what do I know?; Then again, we have the whole renaissance development, and finally work starting on the new development in North bay. Is that good news? I like the renaissance feeling.; It appears we have a Tory council, but who knows which party sanctioned the High Point Rendell project. I haven't the time to work it out. I think locally, I'll vote Green.; Why not vote Green for the national election too? While most of the manifesto filled me with joy, there were some parts that raised big questions. I'm not a socialist, and the Greens appear to be so I may have a fundamental problem with that. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with letting anyone into the country who wants to come either. I'm reading George Monbiot's Age of Consent atm, and his argument against anarchy is that not everyone's as nice as you are, that basically you have to have sufficient defence against baddies. An open borders policy seems to be based on the idea that people will want to stay where they are because it's 'home'. Not convinced.; I haven't watched much news in the last few days, but I did catch Andrew Marr saying that most experts are questioning the polls, questioning their own predictions of a comfortable Labour win. The experts aren't confident of the outcome. So your vote counts. So vote. Election night is likely to hold quite a few surprises.