A sad choice to make this week. I was going to talk about Clarence Clemons stalwart of the E Street Band a giant with a giant sound backing Bruce through some of his greatest moments - but there are a lot of people missing the big guy tonight so I thought Id write aboot another hero, one rather less well known certinly away from these shores...
Reading his obit in the Indie today he was called "Britain's conscience" and I certainly think that that the guy probably had more basic human decency in his little finger than the yes men careerists in the House who decided that ingratiating their way into Blairs good books was rather more important than the lives of both Afghan and Iraqi civilians not to mention the lives of British service personnel.
He actually started his protest bfore 9/11 to protest the embargo of medical supplies into Saddams Iraq and continued until receently until he was diagnosed with cancer and underwent treatment in Berlin. As a very public and sometimes lone figure of protest he bore the brunt of some spectacularly odious comment from such delightful cretins as Boris Johnson and David Cameron who announced that he "believed in demonstrations but there are limits" not to mention the numerous attempts by those brave boys in blue to move him along.
He was voted most inspiring political figure in the Channel 4 political awards not that there was a whole lot of competition - identikit suits both a delightful shade of blue labour.
Another nail in the coffin of dissent in this country
Monday, 20 June 2011
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Ill met by moonlight
Well it had to come I guess. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor was after all 96 years old. And they were 96 years well lived.
I suspect that he'll be best remembered for his wartime exploits on the German occupied island of Crete, events that he never wrote about although they are the stuff of a Boys Own annual. The Powell and Pressburger film of his adventures show their trademark love of location, a love shared by Pat. The tale of the abduction and evacuation of a nazi general is barely credible but happen it did and bizarrely the events were very much in character.
His was an educated mind but an academic failiure culminating in an assignation with a greengrocers daughter that got him expelled from Kings College Canturbury. His family believed the army would be a fitting career but a peacetime army wasnt for him and so he decided that he would tramp from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople across a continent overshadowed by the upcoming war. A Europe now long vanished, noble families, relics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire swept away in the flood of post-war communism.
His two volumes of travel memoirs A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water are extraordinary - dense, lyrical, erudite and utterly bewitching. He set off in 1932 with an allowance of £5 a month and via - hostels and monasteries, sheep byres and castles reached Constantinople on New Years Day 1935. Unfortunately the final leg of his journey will now never be detailed. He spent his 20th birthday in a monastery on Mount Athos and a month later took part in a cavalry charge suppressing a rebellion in Greece. He fell in love both with Greece where he spent many years and also a Romanian princess. On the outbreak of war he returned and joined the Intellegence Corps were he was employed as a liasion officer with the greeks fighting the Italians to a standstill and then once the Germans invaded being evacuated to Crete where he fought a guerilla war.
He published his first book The Travellers Tree in 1950 a recital of his travels in the Caribbean after the war but his love was on the Mediterranean and Greence in particular and he lived the rest of his life in the sun - soaking up all he could of life. He wrote in long hand only very recently adopting a manual typewriter which mirrored a lengthy writing process where each word was measured before use.
He married in 1968 but leaves no children.
I suspect that he'll be best remembered for his wartime exploits on the German occupied island of Crete, events that he never wrote about although they are the stuff of a Boys Own annual. The Powell and Pressburger film of his adventures show their trademark love of location, a love shared by Pat. The tale of the abduction and evacuation of a nazi general is barely credible but happen it did and bizarrely the events were very much in character.
His was an educated mind but an academic failiure culminating in an assignation with a greengrocers daughter that got him expelled from Kings College Canturbury. His family believed the army would be a fitting career but a peacetime army wasnt for him and so he decided that he would tramp from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople across a continent overshadowed by the upcoming war. A Europe now long vanished, noble families, relics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire swept away in the flood of post-war communism.
His two volumes of travel memoirs A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water are extraordinary - dense, lyrical, erudite and utterly bewitching. He set off in 1932 with an allowance of £5 a month and via - hostels and monasteries, sheep byres and castles reached Constantinople on New Years Day 1935. Unfortunately the final leg of his journey will now never be detailed. He spent his 20th birthday in a monastery on Mount Athos and a month later took part in a cavalry charge suppressing a rebellion in Greece. He fell in love both with Greece where he spent many years and also a Romanian princess. On the outbreak of war he returned and joined the Intellegence Corps were he was employed as a liasion officer with the greeks fighting the Italians to a standstill and then once the Germans invaded being evacuated to Crete where he fought a guerilla war.
He published his first book The Travellers Tree in 1950 a recital of his travels in the Caribbean after the war but his love was on the Mediterranean and Greence in particular and he lived the rest of his life in the sun - soaking up all he could of life. He wrote in long hand only very recently adopting a manual typewriter which mirrored a lengthy writing process where each word was measured before use.
He married in 1968 but leaves no children.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Sir Henry Cole (1808-1882)
So back to our London trip - M had expressed a wish to visit the V&A which due to its being on the wrong side of town tends to lose out to the British Museum on our cultural wanderings - but we thought that wed stretch our legs and visit as there was an exhibition of contemporary South African photography which was taken in after a brief wander around the lovely South Asian and Middle Eastern rooms and a cuppa in the rather lovely tiled dining hall. Its a really interesting glimpse of a society in flux. Whenever I look at some of the abuses of power going on around he world I think of the fact that nothing lasts forever and that in my lifetime Ive seen the fall of the wall and the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Opposite the V&A is the Kazakh embassy on which is the plaque for Sir Henry Cole. Cole was a member of the Society of Arts and an early proponent of memorial plaques. He was a civil servant who began his working live at the age of 15 in the National Records Office where he rose to the position of Assistant Keeper. From 1837 to 1840 he worked under Sir Roland Hill and helped introduce the penny Post - hes even credited with designing the worlds first christmas card. He visited the 1849 11th Quinquennial in Paris and inspired by it secured Queen Victorias backing of the Great Exhibition of 1851 which championed British industrial supremacy. The financial success of the exhibition meant thata significant surplus would fund the development of the South Kensington / Albertopolis development which he to a large extend supervised. He was the first direector of the V&A or at least the Museum of Ornmental Art as was and so was responsible for one of the great treasure houses of the world. at some point Ill have sort out some listing of museums but the V&A is certainly something...
Opposite the V&A is the Kazakh embassy on which is the plaque for Sir Henry Cole. Cole was a member of the Society of Arts and an early proponent of memorial plaques. He was a civil servant who began his working live at the age of 15 in the National Records Office where he rose to the position of Assistant Keeper. From 1837 to 1840 he worked under Sir Roland Hill and helped introduce the penny Post - hes even credited with designing the worlds first christmas card. He visited the 1849 11th Quinquennial in Paris and inspired by it secured Queen Victorias backing of the Great Exhibition of 1851 which championed British industrial supremacy. The financial success of the exhibition meant thata significant surplus would fund the development of the South Kensington / Albertopolis development which he to a large extend supervised. He was the first direector of the V&A or at least the Museum of Ornmental Art as was and so was responsible for one of the great treasure houses of the world. at some point Ill have sort out some listing of museums but the V&A is certainly something...
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