A Triumphal Celebration of Nostalgia

I was in the process of commenting on a post the other day when I went in search of a YouTube clip to illustrate the point I was making (a somewhat spurious contention about the direction of growth of various types of plants and vines). Having found the clip I wanted, I rewarded myself with a rummage in the "Related Items" collection and found an excellent interpretation of one of my very favourite Flanders and Swann songs, "Slow Train". Michael Flanders and Donald Swann wrote and performed the song back in the 1960s and although the events it recorded (the closure of almost 50% of the small railway stations in Britain following the Beeching Report on the future of the railway network) are now long gone, the song remains as a triumphal celebration of nostalgia. To illustrate the cultural loss resulting from the Beeching Axe, Flanders and Swann merely strung together a list of the names of just a few of the 3,000 small stations and halts that were closed during the 1960s. The result is musical poetry at its best.

The Beeching cuts hit all parts of the country. Both rural and urban lines were decimated and by the end of the decade a quarter of the railway millage and a half of all stations had been cleaved from the system. Here in West Yorkshire, many of the small stations and desultory branch lines of my youth vanished almost overnight. One of the more bizarre cases was the fate of the station at Cleckheaton, just down the valley from where I live. It was stolen. Following the closures, British Rail issued contracts for the demolition of the buildings, the clearance of the sites, and the sale of the recovered material. When the appointed contractor turned up at Cleckheaton Station he found the entire station - every stone, wooden fence, metal frame, and tin signpost - had already been dismantled and removed. Eventually the person who had dismantled the station was apprehended and taken to trial (the only case in British legal history concerning the theft of a railway station). They were later acquitted as the court accepted their defense that they had been following the orders of what they thought was the legally appointed contractor. The company that masterminded the plan was never identified, and the station was never recovered.

You might want to bear this story in mind as you watch the video, or you may want to just look at the lovely old photographs of steam trains and sooty cuttings. In either case, I hope you enjoy it.

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THE MACHINIST'S WIFE : Take a look at the entertaining and original blog that prompted the comment that resulted in the post.

LIVERPOOL OVERHEAD RAILWAY : From the News From Nowhere Archives, a brief trip to the Liverpool Overhead Railway.

Boring Link Within

A few months ago I added "Link Within" to my blog. It was a nice idea : it would search through my blog back catalogue and pull up three related posts which it would spotlight at the end of the current post under the heading "You Might Also Like". I assume it chooses the related posts by searching for key words in the titles or the labels. However it did it, it seemed to work quite well .... for a time. Then for some reason it became fixated on one particular post and added it to the "You Might Also Like" at the end of every post. What is worse, the post in question was one titled "So Boring"! After a week or two of my readers being asked whether they might also be interested in "So Boring", I began to get a bit of a complex and decided that I was being unfairly targeted by a Google gadget which was far too perceptive for its own good. Deciding to fight back, I deleted the original "So Boring" post in the hope that if the post didn't exist, the gadget would no longer direct readers to it. Did it work? Did it heck. It continued to offer a link to "So Boring" and, when you clicked on it, it suggested that it could no longer locate the particular post in question (hinting, I suspect, that there were too many that fitted the description to choose from). My only recourse was radical surgery and therefore I removed the "Link Within" gadget altogether.

Which was a pity as the ability to point readers in the direction of older posts was quite useful. And it would also be useful to point readers in the direction of some of the posts on my other blogs, or some of the posts of my blogging friends. The only solution was to manually add a Link feature at the end of posts and this I have been experimenting with for the last few days. So, from now onwards, at the end of each post, you will find a ""You Might Also Like...." link list. At some time or another I will try to include links to all the other blogs I follow, but the order will be totally random so if your blog doesn't appear in the near future, just be patient.

As we seem to have got on to the "boring" theme I thought I would share with you another postcard from my collection. I remember buying this postcard forty or so years ago. I was attracted to it at the time because I thought it was probably the most boring picture postcard I had ever seen. It features three buildings in Hipperholme - a village about six miles from where I live - and shows the church, the pub and the newsagents shop. Whilst such a triptych would normally have the power to be visually attractive, poor Hipperholme seems to be devoid of beauty in each case.

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A CANADIAN FAMILY : A blog all about postcards that is never boring is the one published by Canadian blogger Evelyn Yvonne Theriault. Whether your interest lie in postcards or genealogy it is always well worth a visit.

POSTCARDS FROM AMY : Talking of postcards, you can catch up on the latest postcard from my and my dog Amy describing our coast-to-coast walk across America.

Theme Thursday : Relatively Late

I am sending this post from Samoa. Well that is not exactly true but as I was recently accused of never letting the truth get in the way of a good story, I thought I might as well live up to my reputation. Anyway back to Samoa : the reason I am posting from Samoa is that the island state is just to the right of the International Date Line. And that means it is still Thursday. Which is useful because I am running a little late this week.

It all started with that short holiday in Wales and then all the Christmas shopping. It destroyed my carefully cultivated routine. Thus on Tuesday I was still trying to complete the things I usually do on Monday, and on Wednesday I was just approaching my Tuesday list. When I would normally be penning my Theme Thursday post I was still pondering my Wordless Wednesday submission. If things carry on the way they are doing I will not have completed my Fun Friday post until well into Sepia Saturday. And then I had a thought. Go west, go about as far west as you can possibly go. Go to Samoa. As my Uncle Albert always used to say, "time is relative". You may be late in West Yorkshire but you are early in Samoa.

So there you go. You need never be late again. Simply change the location on your Google profile. In the words of the old adage, go west young man.

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN

THEME THURSDAY : See the other Theme Thursday posts before it's too late.

GREENWICH MERIDIAN : Read all about the Prime Meridian and the International Date Line.

Paradise Found, Paradise Lost.

And so we went to Wales. We headed along the North Wales coast road to the City of Bangor which is about a two and a half hour drive away from where we live in Yorkshire. Bangor stands proud keeping watch over the Menai Straights and the island of Anglesey in the north-west corner of Wales. It is an ancient city and home to a thriving university. It is also home to a thriving branch our family. It was wonderful to meet up once again with so many members of our extended family and they welcomed us with a warmth and a generosity which the Principality is famous for. The scenery was beautiful and, it itself, could justify the "Paradise Found" part of the title of this post, Amy and I explored many a byway and footpath around the city and Amy discovered the delights of chasing seagulls.

But the true "Paradise Found" was the Mostyn Arms, the gorgeous pub owned and run by two generations of the family. I have always been one to claim some kind of genealogical connection to a half-decent pub (I once spent a delightful drunken afternoon in the Albert Hotel in Keighley for no other reason than my grandmother might just have been a barmaid there some one hundred years earlier), However, anyone who loves a traditional British pub and fine ale would be proud to claim a connection to the Mostyn Arms. On Monday evening I sat in the comfortable bar whilst relatives brought me pint after pint of real ale to sample. I may be biased but I do declare that if any of you ever travel within one hundred miles of Bangor in North Wales and fail to beat a path to the Mostyn Arms, you are - in the words of the great Dr Johnson - a fool and a rogue. I have a vague memory that after the Mostyn Arms I was taken to the Skerries (a second pub run by the family) but I was too drunk to appreciate it and therefore I need to plan a return trip to Wales as a matter of urgency.

And paradise was lost today when, on the last day of the Good Lady Wife's short holiday, I was condemned to the seventh level of inferno, otherwise known as the White Rose Shopping Centre in Leeds. Whilst the GLW trudged around yet another store I excused myself and said I wanted to take a few photographs. Having just taken the above shot I was approached by a very official security guard who informed me that it was illegal to take photographs of the shopping centre. "Why?", asked I, reasonably enough. "To prevent terrorism", said he, "we wouldn't want potential terrorists to gain information about the lay-out of the centre". I tried to point out that the Centre itself publishes and gives away a handy little guide complete with maps and photographs, but it was not his day for logic and he walked away. There was an old Yorkshire chap who had been stood near to me and who had overheard the conversation. He came up to me afterwards. "T'worlds gone daft", he said. I nodded. "Paradise has been lost again", I replied.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE TO LOOK AT:
THE MOSTYN ARMS, BANGOR : Take a look at the Mostyn Arms website and see what you are missing.
ALAN BURNETT'S DAILY PHOTO BLOG : I will publish a selection of the photographs I took whilst in North Wales over the next few days on my Daily Photo Blog.

What His Bones And Blood Are Made Of

For reasons best known to myself I was doing some research into the American poet and writer Carl Sandburg which involved reading his FBI records. In itself, his FBI file is nothing out of the ordinary : any decent person slightly to the left of Attila the Hun seems to have gathered such a collection of spiteful accusations and innuendo in America in the 40s, 50s and 60s. But as I looked at a typical page from the file, with its blacked-out paragraphs, numerous rubber stamps, and endless annotations, I began to see the page as an image rather than as a document. It didn't need to be read : you could almost feel the bureaucratic enmity leach from the page. It was a piece of art, black art maybe, but a visual monument to all those of have seen lives and loves and beliefs as things to to be recorded and used as weapons of oppression. 

The thing which started me in my quest for knowledge of Sandburg (and my apologies to my American friends for being ignorant about him until now) was the advice he gave to his friend, Martha Dodd, before she left for Germany in 1933 where her father, William E Dodd, was about to take up the position of the American Ambassador in Germany. In his excellent book 1933, Philip Metcalfe quotes Sandburg saying the following to Martha Dodd.

"Find out what this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his bones and blood are made of. Before your eyes will pass the greatest pageant of crooks and gangsters, idealists, statesmen, criminals, diplomats and geniuses. You will see every nationality in the world. Watch them, study them, dissect them. Don't be frightened or diffident, don't let them or your experiences spoil you or your eagerness for life. Be brave and truthful, keep your poetry and integrity"

The GLW and myself set out for Wales tomorrow for a short shopping trip. We will be staying with a cousin in North Wales whose daughter and son-in-law, I am happy to relate, run several pubs. Compared to Martha Dodds' journey, a trip to Wales is nothing much I suppose, but I too will attempt to be brave and truthfull and hold on tight to my poetry and integrity.

THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES : And speaking of poetry, my good blogging friend, John Hayes, has just launched a new blog - The Days of Wine and Roses - devoted to his own poetry. Take a trip over there, it is well worth the visit.

THE FBI : Want to browse through the records of the FBI? Head over to the FBI's website and start searching. But be warned, its compulsive.

A Birth, A Birthday And A Coachload Of Buffaloes

Rather a full day yesterday, full of births and buffaloes. Perhaps I need to explain. The first of the birthdays, chronologically speaking, was The Lad and yesterday was his 20th birthday so Good Lady Wife and myself went over to Sheffield to take presents, cards and greetings. Twenty years seems an awful long time but it was thrown into perspective the other day when I rediscovered a series of postcards I had sent to him during the first month of his life. In the main these cards contained a mixture of day-to-day gossip and philosophical speculation. The first of the series was, however, quite prosaic and I reproduce it here as evidence that the Lad's well-known lack of organisation has been a problem since birth.

After we met Alexander and his friend Ayelet in Sheffield we all went for lunch with our good friends (and fellow cruisers) Harry and Elaine. The lunch was a double celebration as H&E had received news of the birth of their first grandchild the day before. Their grand-daughter had been born at eleven minutes passed eleven on the eleventh day of the eleventh month and most appropriately will be named Poppy. The picture shows Ayelet, The Lad, Harry, the GLW and Elaine.

Those who have nothing better to do than read this blog may remember that I wrote some months ago about my long-standing desire to become a Buff. I wrote somewhat whimsically about the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes and feared that my levity might mean I was banned from the organisation altogether (indeed I feared they might come in search of me to seek revenge). So you can imagine my trepidation last night when I was enjoying a harmless pint in the pub and a whole coach-load of Buffs - smartly dressed in Lodge blazers -came through the door. I went and hid in the toilets until they had left but my absence during a critical quarter of an hour meant that my team could only come second in the pub quiz. Failing to find me in my usual seat at the Rock probably means that the posse of Buffaloes is still on the prowl and therefore I will need to keep my head down for a few days.

WANTING SOME FUN IN THE BUFFS : Read the post which gave rise to the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes' vendetta against Alan Burnett.

AMY TAKES HER REVENGE : Alan Burnett is still sending daft postcards. But now it is virtual postcards from the virtual coast to coast walk by him and his dog Amy.