Everybody Loves My Baby (in Aspen)

A number of weeks ago I received an invitation to Mr Toast's First Annual Christmas Tea which is being held tomorrow (1st December) in Aspen, which I believe, is some distance away from my native Huddersfield. Having left things rather late in the day, I am now in a panic as I try to undertake last minute travel arrangements and collect my dinner suit from the dry cleaners. However one thing I have managed to arrange in advance is a little musical celebration which I feel will be in the finest traditions of transatlantic harmony - a thoroughly British ensemble performing a thoroughly American song. "Everybody Loves My Baby" was written by the New Orleans jazz musician and composer, Spencer Williams, in 1924. I have arranged for it to be played by the remarkable Temperance Seven whom I have had the pleasure of seeing at the Marsden Jazz Festival on a number of occasions. I have arranged for the band to make its own way to Aspen, so just in case they are delayed in tansit, here is a little preview of their performance.

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HOT TOAST AND JAM : The host blog for Mr Toast's First Annual Christmas Tea.

PROBLEMS WITH CANINE PRONUNCIATION :  The latest adventures of the Fat Dog on her way to the Big Apple

Sepia Saturday : Gladys and Amy

Like all good things, Sepia Saturday started as a joke. In writing a Theme Thursday post a while ago, I needed something cuddle up - in an alliterative sense - with Wordless Wednesday and Fun Friday, so I invented Sepia Saturday. My Blogging friend Kat (Poetikat) asked me whether there really was a Sepia Saturday and I had to confess to my invention. We both agreed that even if such a celebration didn't exist, it should do and therefore resolved to introduce it without further delay. The rules of Sepia Saturday are quite simple - post some kind of sepia picture on a Saturday! In the best traditions of such things we will make any other rules up as we go along. Anyone can take part and the pictures can be either old sepia pictures or newly-created sepia-toned images. So let sepia reign supreme in all its tonal glory.

My entry for this week is a picture of my mother (Gladys, on the left of the picture) and my Auntie Amy (on the right, standing). It is one of my favourite family photographs and I cannot look at these two lovely young girls without remembering them some 80 years after the picture was taken. Amy was living in a Nursing Home in Scarborough and in her nineties and I had taken my mother - herself in her late eighties - to see her. Seeing these two old sisters together suddenly brought back memories of the picture which had been taken eighty years ago. A picture which is somehow improved by its sepia glow.

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POETIKAT'S INVISIBLE KEEPSAKES : Take a look at the other Sepia Saturday post at Kat's wonderful Blog.

THE CLAYTON COUSINS : From the News From Nowhere Archives - the story of Amy and Gladys' cousins.

A Greeting, A Challange And A Piece Of Advice

First the greeting - and that is to all my blogging friends in the United States : Happy Thanksgiving Day. One of the most enjoyable elements of blogging is being part of an international community : a United Nations of the keyboard. There is something rather pleasing about discovering the people, places, holidays and cultures of countries outside our immediate knowledge. Ah, if only blogging had have been around in 1914.

The challenge comes from the blog of Gerald Gee (and he lives down in the south of England which more than illustrates my previous point). Last night, in addition to posting one of his cartoons (and they are the type of cartoon which illustrate that the internet slang "LOL" can have a literal meaning) he threw out a challenge - to reveal our current computer desktops. My current background image (I change it about once a week) is a picture I took from the bottom of the drive to my niece's house in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It was early one morning when The Lad and I had got up early to beat the heat.

And finally let me leave you with a piece of advice. Yesterday the GLW and I were booked in at the doctors to get our various inoculations in advance of our January holiday. My advice is - never go to get your holiday injections accompanied by a Consultant in Infectious Diseases. The GLW and the Practice Nurse had a detailed discussion based upon our intended itinary and the likelihood of us cutting ourselves on a cactus bush, finishing up in a jungle hospital or kissing a rabid dog and it was decided - with the minimum of input from me - that she just needed a tetanus booster whilst I needed an armful of almost every vaccine currently doing the rounds. "Oh I think there was a case of dengue fever a couple of years ago in St Lucia", "Oh was there, you had better give him that", "and there is always the every-present danger of Chagas disease", "Absolutely, better to be safe than sorry" ... the 20 minute consultation went something like that. This morning I can hardly move my arms they are so painful and swollen.

And thus, to my friends in America, I say that I would like to help you celebrate Thanksgiving Day by raising a glass and toasting your continued health and well-being. I would like to, but unfortunately my arm aches too much.

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GERALDGEE : A great painter, a great cartoonist, a great photographer and a great blogger.
MAN AND INSTRUMENT IN PERFECT HARMONY : From the News From Nowhere archives - for no other reason than when I searched for Tortola it came up with this.

Father Christmas, The Guardian And Samak Sundaravej

I have asked Father Christmas for an  Apple iPod Touch for Christmas. My good friend Martin raved about his when I last saw him (and I suspect he is getting chess hints from it somehow, how else does he keep beating me!). We bought a friend one for his 50th birthday and I looked on with envy as he fell in love with it. We bought The Lad one for his birthday and I got to briefly play with it before I handed it over (I was "setting it up for him", or at least that was my excuse). When my friend Harry saw Alexander's, he managed to acquire one for his birthday. Now I am determined that it is my turn.

In hopeful anticipation that the Good Lady Wife (GLW) will read this post (I will print it off and leave it on her side of the bed just in case) and act accordingly I have started browsing the App Store on iTunes and it was there that I discovered that one of my favourite on-line services - PressDisplay.com - has just released a version of its software for the iPhone and the iTouch. This may mean that when we go on holiday in January I will be able to solve one of the biggest problems associated with leaving these shores - how to acquire a copy of The Guardian. I have lost count of the amount of time I have wasted trawling the shopping streets of distant cities in the hope of being able to source a dated copy of the Guardian. Normally you look in vain. If you are lucky you might find a dog-eared copy of The Times. If you are unlucky you will find a copy of the Daily Mail with all its pages intact. But with Press Display for the iTouch I will be able to find a convenient WiFi hotspot press a couple of buttons and a full PDF version of the Guardian will be in front of my eyes. Harry, who when we are on cruising holidays normally accompanies me on my newspaper seeking activities looking for his fix of the Daily Telegraph, will be able to download that to his iTouch. Speaking to Harry's wife, Elaine, on the phone last night I suggested that whenever we landed in a foreign port, Harry and I could go in search of Wifi hotspots. "Is that something like a lap-dancing club" asked the GLW who was listening in to the conversation.

Press Display is a smashing service and gives you access to over 1,000 newspapers from over 80 countries on a daily basis (for a price, I must add). As I have signed up in anticipation of my seasonal iTouch I can browse the world's press and - it would appear - blog selected stories. I am still experimenting with this and if it works there should appear a link to today's Bangkok Post at the end of this post. It will be interesting to see if it works. But as long as it delivers my daily Guardian in Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama, I don't care too much.

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ABE LINCOLN BLOGS : Abe Lincoln must be the elder statement of international blogging. A distant cousin of the more famous Abe Lincoln, our Abe entertains and informs thousands of readers each day.

THE TITANIC, A LOST SUITCASE AND CHAMPION JACK DUPREE : From the News From Nowhere archives - the fun of delving into old newspapers.

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Samak’s death drains a little colour from Thai politics
AEKARACH SATTABURUTH MANOP THIP-OSOD
Bangkok Post
25 Nov 2009

Politicians from all parties have mourned the passing of former prime minister Samak Sundaravej who died of liver cancer yesterday. He was 74. "I have to express my sorrow to his family and supporters. This is a loss for (Thai) politics,’’ Prime...read more...

Tech Tags: Bangkok Post newspaper Front Page

Postcard Of The Week : Balfour And Protectionism

I always think it is a pity that they don't have political postcards any more. Back in the early days of the twentieth century, if you wanted to make a political point to your Uncle Fred, you could seek out an appropriate postcard, pen a suitable curt message on the back and consign it to the post. One hundred years ago, there were a whole range of postcards representing a whole range of political viewpoints : you just plucked your argument off the display stand, stamped it and sent it. Over the decades, the practice fell out of fashion (although in the 1960s I do recall a particularly eccentric Professor of Philosophy who would send me postcards with his latest counter-arguments to my perfectly rational radical views). I suppose the modern equivalent is to post a YouTube video, but it just doesn't seem the same to me.

The postcard featured above comes from my collection and was postally used in 1904. It relates to the argument which, at the time, was destroying the Conservative Government led by Arthur Balfour. The Conservative Party was being torn apart by the clash between free trade and tariff reform. Balfour tried to be clever by allowing the chief proponent of tariff reform in his Cabinet, Joseph Chamberlain, to tour the country speaking in favour of protectionism whilst he and the rest of the Cabinet sat on the fence and waited to see what the electoral response would be (is there nothing new in politics?). The postcard shows Chamberlain in the water whilst Balfour and the rest look on undecided.

Balfour's attempt to stand back whilst others tested the political water ended in one of the biggest ever landslide victories for the Liberals in the 1906 election. Perhaps the moral of the story is it is better to be decisive and loose than to vacillate and be routed. Now, are you listening Gordon?

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THE THOUGHTS OF CHAIRMAN BILL : Vacillation is not part of the vocabulary of my blogging friend Chairman Bill. 100 years ago he would be sending postcards out every day, his twenty first century equivalent is a blog well worth visiting.
RAMSEY MACDONALD AND A BOTTLE OF BEER : From the News From Nowhere Archives - more adventures in the land of the political postcard.

 

Halifax : Fading Into History

I was sorting through some books and papers today and I came across a collection of photographs of Old Yorkshire. One caught my eye - it was a view looking over Halifax taken in 1958 and there is a copy of it above. It was a familiar view for me, I would see it every day as I sat on the upstairs front seat of the bus taking me from my home in the village of Northowram and into Halifax and my school. As the bus swept out from Godley cuttings, Halifax would be spread out before me. The smoke would belch out of the cooling towers and mill chimneys, the soot-black stone chimneys silhouetted against the smoke-swept sky.

I took the second photograph a few years ago from the same hillside (although a few hundred yards further south). It shows a very different Halifax, 50 years on from the first view. Most of the mills - and the mill chimneys - have long gone and the steam and smoke is a thing of the distant past. The modern building that dominates the centre of the photograph is the headquarters of the Halifax Building Society, or at least it was when the photograph was taken. And then it merged with the Bank of Scotland to become HBOS and then, after the great collapse, it was taken over by Lloyds Bank. With the current uncertainty in the financial sector one is forced to wonder how long it will be before it fades into history, just like those mills and factories of fifty years earlier.

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SALTAIRE DAILY PHOTO : A daily photograph from the West Yorkshire mill village of Saltaire. Try it and discover some wonderful photographs.
AMY CLIMBS HUMBUG MOUNTAIN : The latest postcard from the Fat Dog walking to the Big Apple tells of the discovery of Humbug Mountain in Oregon.

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.

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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.