A Previously Undiscovered Roman Villa?

Playing God again, I've been scanning aerial photographs of Oxfordshire, courtesy of Live Search. There's a fascinating soil mark just south of Northbrook, Kirtlington, which appears to show the outlines of two buildings. - A Roman villa, surely!

Still Not Sure : Part 2

By the eighteen fifties and sixties, a new generation of mill owner was beginning to dominate the textile industry in Bradford. Samuel Lister, Titus Salt, John Foster and others were building mills on a massive scale. They were also beginning to provide improved housing for their workers, churches, chapels and elementary schools. Self-improvement was in the air and it is likely that John Burnett wanted to take advantage of the opportunities that were available.

The self-improvement obviously paid off and by the time of the 1891 census we find John Burnett listed as a Weaving Overlooker. Whilst the standard dictionary definition of an “overlooker” is “an overseer or foreman”, a word of caution is necessary, especially in relation to the use of the term in the nineteenth century in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The census records include a large number of “weaving overlookers”: in some cases almost every other house has a weaving overlooker as an occupant. Equally, some of these are comparatively young – in their early twenties – and in some cases they are female. These facts do not easily fit in with the modern concept of a “foreman” as a junior management position. A more likely explanation is that at the end of the nineteenth century in the West Yorkshire woollen and worsted industry, the term was used for the activity of “overlooking a loom” – a position somewhat similar to that which in the Lancashire cotton trades was known as a “tackler”. Each individual loom or group of looms would have been serviced by a small group of workers, the role of the overlooker would be to set-up the looms and supervise this small group.

St Oswald’s Buildings, Southfield Lane, Bradford. The site of the house of John Burnett in 1891.In 1891, John Burnett and his family were living at 3, Southfield Lane, Little Horton, Bradford. The house no longer exists: on the site there is a group of shops known as St. Oswald’s Buildings which were erected in 1900. It would appear that the previous dwellings were demolished in order to facilitate the widening of Little Horton Lane. We tend to think of road widening as a recent curse on the urban landscape. One possible explanation is that it was the extension of the Bradford tram system which was the cause of the loss of the property. A contemporary picture of Little Horton Lane just before the road widening is available and this gives us an idea of the area John Burnett was living in.

Halifax - City of Love

I was half-listening to a news download this morning when my attention was caught by the phrase "Halifax - City of Love". Granted, this is St Valentine's Day : but even if you have OD'd on red roses, chilled champagne and fluffy bunnies, I still can't quite see Halifax as the city of love. This is not the Halifax I have lived in most of my life. The Halifax of smoking chimneys, crumbling mills, greyscale drizzle and sullen faces. Not the Halifax of endless dissatisfaction and binge-fed alienation. Of course it isn't. I had not walked many yards before I realised that I was listening to some Canadian radio programme and the Halifax being referred to was Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Now the description may be just as out of place when used in relation to our Canadian-cousin of a city, but that is not where I am going this morning. No, this is a rambling discourse about the nature of cyber-space. I recall many years ago, in the very early days of the web, one of the computer magazines gave away a large colour "map" of cyberspace. Even back then - when web content could still be counted on the toes of a millipede - this was unrealistic. Cyberspace is not a place - it is the very antithesis of a place. Time, distance, location - none of these exist. Thus my Uncle Harry - now long dead - can exist side by side with Edwin and his electric boat and I can walk the dog along the California highway and get back each night in time to watch Coronation Street.

The first time I realised all this was some years ago when I was doing a search for material about transport in Halifax to help my son with a school project. I eventually found a long article and was feeling well pleased with myself until - on reading it more carefully - I discovered that it was about a new ferry service direct from Halifax to New York! Yes, you've worked it out ... yet again it was Halifax NS. To me that appeared silly, but once you take time and space out of the equation it was all quite logical. So maybe if you take time and space out of the equation Halifax can really be the City of Love. .

The start of the future....

This may look confusing. But it's the engine space at the stern of our narrowboat - which is being converted to electric drive, with an onboard diesel generator. The (electric) drive motor is the coppery cylinder to the left (a friend said it looked just like a big torch battery,) the lump in the middle is the generator (with heaps of cables and a rope on top!) Far left, you can just see the bright colours of the terminals on the motor's electronic speed/direction controller. Not in place at all yet are the six storage batteries - the generator charges these and then they drive the motor.

The main object is an almost-silent boat - electric drive is all-but silent and even if the generator is running it is highly silenced (to military grade.) The system should also be considerably "greener" compared to conventional diesel drive - for one of our favourite day-long 8 hour trips I have worked out the generator should only have to run for about 40 minutes to replace the charge used in the whole day.

How do I work this out? Well, not from complex tables of hull drag, propellor grip and other complex tables of figures I don't really understand and anyway don't know how to apply to our particular boat... but I don't need them!

For one thing I know the propellor grips the water very effectively because when I made a mistake (previously, with conventional engine in place) and left the propellor in gear at low revs I couldn't hold the boat against that force and took half the skin off my hand trying - luckily Jane was able to get on the boat at the other end to cut the motor! Luckily, also, we had suitable wound dressings on board.

For another, Jane and I have several times had to haul the boat by hand. But I know roughly how hard we can possibly pull, I know we got it up to walking pace (canal speed) in reasonable time and distance and then I can apply basic physics ... and hey presto what we actually did matches amazingly closely a totally theoretical sum of how much energy it takes to get the boat to walking pace in about the same distance and time.....

This is very good news, by the way, or the physics I have taught off and on all my life would be flawed!.....

Leaving out further details and the actual calculations, the fascinating thing is that my figures also show that we need an average power a bit under half a horse-power... in other words, the boat should ideally be hauled by a smallish, lazy horse. Odd that. Theoretical physics shows history is true!! Or... since James Watt worked out his value for 1 horse power from observing real horses, it shows that physics correctly predicts reality. Which is all it can do, and only if the theory is correct, but few people realise that.

So, the start of the future... for our to-be-electric narrowboat. About to generate and use exactly the same power as those horses did. So, is it the future or really just the same?

Not Sure What To Call This Part 1

My father, Albert Burnett, was born in Bradford on the 25th June 1911. He was named after his Uncle Albert, who – as the owner of a small coachbuilders’ business – was the most successful member of his working class family. His father, my grandfather, Enoch, was one of five children. Other than Albert, their names reflect the powerful biblical roots of nineteenth century working class culture: Miriam, Ruth, Israel and Enoch.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Burnett family had lived in and around Bradford for several generations. John Burnett, my fathers’ grandfather, had been born in the village of Low Moor on the southern outskirts of, what was then, the town of Bradford in 1855, the son of a blacksmith. At the time, Low Moor was dominated by its famous ironworks and it appears that several members of the Burnett family were employed in the industry. The young John Burnett chose however to enter the booming textile industry which by the eighteen fifties was propelling Bradford to international prominence.

Bradford’s rise to world dominance during the nineteenth century was due to the application of modern machinery to the production of woollen yarns. There was a close symbiotic relationship between the engineering and the textile industries: the vast machines that drove the new generation of super-mills were powered by steam engines built at Low Moor Ironworks. The relationship between engines, machines and textiles was a theme that was reflected in the working lives of the Burnett family right down to my fathers’ generation.

At the time of his marriage to Phebe Broadbent in 1873, John Burnett was recorded as working as a twister – someone who operated a machine that twisted yarns together. Phebe also worked in the industry as a weaver. By the 1870s, the woollen textile industry was become more settled and more organised. In 1842 Bradford had exported £4 million worth of yarns and worsted cloth: by the time of John’s marriage the trade had grown to £27 million. Increasing trade and prosperity was beginning to blunt the edge of deprivation and extreme poverty. In the 1840s, Bradford is said to have resembled a lawless frontier boom town: complete with beer shops, brothels and filthy slum housing. Average life expectancy was just over 18 years, average pay was less that £1 per week. In 1844, a visiting health inspector described it as the filthiest town he had ever visited.

Observations

Today, for a change, Amy and I decided on some drama for our walk instead of our usual diet of podcast news. I therefore searched the BBC site for something to record and listed to and - in the context of what must be a slow week for radio drama - hit on the first five episodes of a dramatisation of The Observations by Jane Richards. Whilst reading a book takes a conscious effort and requires time to be set aside for the task, listening to a dramatisation is perfect for multi-tasking and therefore you can be more adventurous with your choice of subject. As a book I probably wouldn't have chosen "The Observations", as a dramatisation in 10 15 minute episodes it seemed worth a try.

And here is where I should say what a wonderful find it was and how I should foster my adventurous spirit. The book seems to have all the right qualifications - it received glowing reviews and became a substantial publishing hit even before it saw the light of day (This may sound like a curious contradiction but it is not in the context of the current publishing industry where a handful of publishers and supermarket buyers decide which books will be mega-hits even before the printers ink is dry).

My observations on The Observations are that it was shallow, formulaic, trite and astonishingly boring. I suppose you could say it is the dramatisation which has spoilt it, but so many of the problems are with the basic story. It's of the "add a dash of childhood prostitution, a sliver of ghosts, a taste of class consciousness and mix together with a couple of pounds of historical colour" variety. Luckily I only recorded the first five episodes, It is back to Channel 4 news tomorrow.

The Relentless March Of The Cult Of Celebrity

Something strange happened to my downloaded podcasts this morning. My podcast client (Juice) is set up to download half a dozen news programmes from around the world so I can listen to these whilst I walk Amy the dog. One regular download is the NBC5 morning news programme from Chicago (I find it very good for the weather forecasts but more of that in a later posting). However, today I discovered that the normal 15 minute news podcast had been replaced by a recording of a telephone conversation between a reporter and a fireman in Florida. It emerged from the course of this conversation that the fireman's colleague (another fireman) had responded to an emergency call from a hotel to find a women dead. The woman is seemingly famous for being an ex strip-club dancer who married a man sixty years older than herself. The 15 minute telephone conversation was full of questions such as "what would you normally do when you find someone not breathing?". It was banal, trivial, boring - the kind of thing they edit out of Big Brother Live. My first reaction was to assume that the tapes had been switched in error. Instead of uploading the morning news file some hapless technician had uploaded an internal file of some journalist. I decided to do my civic duty and report this error to the station concerned. Going to their website to get some kind of contact address I discovered that this was no mistake : the normal news programme had been replaced by this "mega breaking story". It is yet another example of the relentless march of the cult of celebrity. As a society we have become obsessed with the lives and deaths of people whose only claim to fame is that we are obsessed with their lives and their deaths. It is strange, but as news has become more global it has become more parochial. Oh, and thanks to all those people who have been asking, Amy's paw is much better and the antibiotics have done their trick. I will be posting an updated picture of her scar on my daily photo blog site.

Snow in Oxford

Dear me, I did that wrongly... the picture above was meant to come later on... over-size snowmen on Port Meadow... really quite spooky and Easter-Island-ish. I think - no, I know - I suffer mild iconophobia. In fact the one on the left was quite carefully sculpted when we got closer - lady with bosom and bustle, definitely a period figure. One suspects the creators were quite serious artists... maybe sculptors, even. Anything is possible in Oxford.

First time in absolute years we've had such deep snow! We went for a walk on nearby Port Meadow... little wind, so hushed, so still, so like walking inside a picture. Even if some of the logs did make me think of the pictures accompanying Christmas recipes I'd been idly reading whilst waiting for an appointment (of course the magazine was out of date as they always are in waiting rooms.)

And yes, there were fluffed up Robins looking just like the ones on Christmas cards...

Virtual reality? I think it's a bit sad when one looks at real things and finds one is only describing them by relating them to virtual things. I'm very bad at this. For example, many years ago I did a lot of student theatre lighting and for the one show I was very proud of creating lighting to look just like a particular type of dawn. Now when I see a dawn of that kind, I remember that lighting effect and think "Oh, it's just like that lighting effect I did." . Uh? Surely that's the wrong way around?

I feel the photo above looks like some famous work of art, but I can't remember which. I'm not an Art Historian. But why do I want to relate it to a work of art?

Perhaps the power of reality is too much for me and I can only cope if I can relate to a book I can close or something. Or a TV I can turn off. Who knows, (who cares?)

Sad thing is, all this alternative landscape is due to vanish tomorrow morning. How many years before we see the like again? The mad thing is, the snow experience is clearly a major influence in one's life. In fact I can probably count the total number of really reasonably deep-snow years in the whole of my life on my fingers, and not all of them. Perhaps it's all those snow-scene Christmas cards and the association of pleasant ideas... in other words, deep down we live in virtual reality anyway....

Or, we really all were dreaming of a White Christmas. Never mind it arrived on February the 8th. this year and the only year in yonks!

Now We Are Three

I always remember being deeply disturbed by a book I read when I was still in my early teens. Called "The Crowthers of Bankdam" and written by Thomas Armstrong it was a West Riding family saga of the "trouble at' mill" type. The main character - Jos Oldroyd, the head of the family business - had smoked a pipe all his life. One morning, when he was in his sixties, he woke up and left his pipe unlit on his desk. He never touched it again. Within three weeks he was dead. Beware sudden changes in behaviour was the clear lesson, especially as you approach what we optimistically call "middle age". When people have encouraged me to change behaviour patterns with phrases such as "why not change the habits of a lifetime?" I have usually replied, "because you die within a couple of weeks just like old Jos Oldroyd". It was the negative role model of old Jos that kept me smoking my pipe for years after I finally accepted on an intellectual level that smoking might be bad for my general health. When I eventually put my pipe to rest just over two years ago I kept a careful watch for other behavioural changes. The other day I started wearing pyjamas again after a gap of about forty years. For most people this can be interpreted as a normal reaction to the cold nights, or the fact that the central heating is playing up, or just plain old age. But in my heightened state of watchfulness it becomes a sign of impending mortality. It depresses me. "Never mind", I tell myself, "at least you are managing to keep your blog going". But I have never managed to keep anything going: it is the fatal flaw in my character which has stopped me being Prime Minister or Chief Executive of Walkers' Crisps. Although I start a diary every year I have never managed to get past January 8th. And now this blog is in its fourth month......! It is a paradox : I started blogging to guarantee my immortality and by keeping blogging I hasten my mortality. So how on earth did I get on to this in a posting entitled "Now We Are Three". This is supposed to be about my third blog I have just started "Fat Dog To The Big Apple" which charts my virtual walk with Amy the dog from Los Angeles to New York. My trouble is that I can't stick to the bloody point. Never have been able to. No change there then. .... Thank Goodness.

Signposts, Filters and Aardvarks.

"If, in the future, a computer will give me access to the entire resources of the Encyclopædia Britannica, I think I will die a happy man" I said that, I remember it distinctly. It must have been twenty years ago. Prestel (it was a pre-web information system that worked a bit like teletext) was just coming in and late one memorable night I managed to download a story from that days' New York Times. I felt tremendously proud, at the vanguard of a new information age. When that age came it proved to be on a scale I could never have dreamt of. And it would also have consequences I could never have dreamt of. In reality the new age did not give everyone access to the Encyclopædia Britannica, it destroyed the Encyclopædia Britannica. It is in the process of destroying the music industry as we know it. Newspapers and magazines - at least in their present form - will not be far behind. This is not a complaint. There was nothing wonderful about the pre-download music industry and I am not sorry to see it go the way of tallow candles. All I am saying is that the so-called "information society" is in fact an "information revolution", which - like most revolutions - is beyond the day-to-day control of mankind. So what brought me to these thoughts? Three things. First, over the weekend there was much talk amongst the people I was with about information overload. e-mail inboxes that take half a day to get through, the routine circulation of reports to everyone in your address book ... this kind of thing. I have some sympathy with such moans : the information super-highway has become as clogged up as the M62 which I can see from my window. However, there is a positive side to this. For reasons best known to myself I am currently taking the dog (Amy) on a virtual walking tour of the USA. Each day we measure our mileage and plot it on Microsoft Live Search maps. Yesterday we were passing the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles which I had always fancied seeing. Now - thanks to the much maligned information super-highway - I could read about them (http://www.tarpits.org/), look at them, listen to them, and I suspect smell them if I had followed enough links. I even managed to get a wonderful tour of the museum courtesy of a video made by a member of YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibcv_-I2Vfs). The third element is my current period of reflection about the future of my European news service. When I started it 25 years ago - information was paper-based and in relatively short supply. The value added I could provide was to summarise and point people in the right direction. Now information is abundant and the need - if a need exists - is for a signposting service. In a way this is still summarising and pointing - but of a very different nature. So, where have I got to? Information overload ? Probably. Solution - signs and filters. I am not sure at the moment whether I have the energy any more to help design the solution. Alternatively I could probably buy myself an old paper-based copy of Britannica and start out with the Aardvark.

My Dearest May : The Back-Story Part 1

June 3 1897, Hotel Saint Quentin, Paris
My Dearest May,
We arrived last night after a long and tiresome crossing. Aunt B. has complained of sickness ever since setting foot in France and insists all water must be thoroughly boiled before we drink it. I, however, am captivated by Paris and want to explore and see everything. Aunt B says I must not go anywhere without Mr. Copthorne, but he is old and slow and limps like a lobster. There are wonderful shops to visit and mysterious people to meet and I am stuck here inside the Hotel looking out through the window. Mme Ladoux called this morning and promised to take me to the theatre on Friday. Do write dear May with all your news. Have you heard from George? And what news of the little German man? We will be in Paris for at least a fortnight so plenty of time for your PCs to reach me. I will write again soon.
Your dearest friend, Adele.