This something I made from a composite of the colours I have snapped from the Web over the past several months with the ColorPicker app on my laptop.
When Squares Run Wild
Historic Newspapers
I just read an article on Simplenote about writing posts for WordPress.
Simplenote is a note-taking app made by Automattic, which is the company that owns the community version of WordPress.
The article says that if I write in Simplenote using Markdown to format the post, then I can paste the text into WordPress and it will preserve all the formatting and just ‘work’.
So that is what I am doing here.
I am pretty sure I wrote about Simplenote at some time in the past, and I’ll add a note about that below this sentence when I get to it and before I paste into WordPress.
I did write about Simplenote
Yes, I did – in 2013 where I also described how to use Markdown to format text.
But I am also writing about historic newspapers
Today has been an historic day for the British Parliament, according to just about every news outlet you read or listen to.
The Government lost the vote on its key proposal for how the UK is to leave the European Union.
It lost by such a huge margin that commentators are referring back to a vote in 1924 for a comparison.
But what does it mean? What is the next stage?
Is Brexit dead or will there be some wrangling in the corridors that will get it back on course?
We wait with a sense of hope and dread. (In case you don’t know where I stand on this, I want Britain to stay in the EU.)
Today’s newspapers might be historic.
They might be historic in more ways than one. Read on…
Look at the cover of the Guardian. It shows the MPs filing down the corridor to register their NO vote.
No one photographs down there. No press photographers photograph down there.
But MPs themselves broke with tradition last night and photographed themselves in the corridor.
The Speaker Of The House
A couple of days ago the speaker of the House allowed an amendment to a motion. He broke with tradition in doing that. His justification was that the House (the House Of Commons) is paramount, and no executive branch (the Government and the Cabinet) has the power over it or to stop it.
The courts are bound by previous decisions. That is why they go to extraordinary lengths sometimes to distinguish one case from another when they want wiggle room to decide differently than they did before.
It is also why the courts make decisions by inches. They make pronouncements of principle as tightly drawn as possible to give them room to wiggle later on.
Parliament is different.
When the Speaker of the House broke with tradition about amendments, he was reestablishing a basic principle, that the House will not fetter itself.
What that means is that if the House votes for X at a certain point in time, it is always free to vote against X later. It will not be bound by its previous decisions.
That principle might be very important in the days to come.
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But What Shall We Do For A Ring
But What Shall We Do For A Ring
A boat and two flowers and a quote from Edward Lear’s poem The Owl and The Pussycat.
And topped off with ‘Be My Valentine’ as the name of the boat.
With all of it set against an impressionistic blue sea with toy waves.
Edward Lear
In case you don’t know it, the quote ‘Oh let us be married, too long we have tarried’ is from the second verse of the poem. It goes:
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried,
But what shall we do for a ring?
Too Long We Have Tarried
There is a whole story tucked in those words ‘too long we have tarried’, isn’t there. It is the story of a couple who have been romantically entwined for ages, for forever, but until how have not taken the step into marriage.
This is of course leaving aside that in this particular case we are talking about crossing the species boundary – so children probably aren’t going to be in the picture for the couple’s future life together.
Still – love is love.
My Favourite Line
My favourite line from the poem is the one that goes:
Dear Pig, are you willing
to sell for one shilling
your ring?
Said the Piggy, “I will.
The more prosaic and direct way to have phrased it would have been to ask whether the pig was willing to sell the ring. And then to offer a price, something like:
Will you sell the ring, I can offer you one shilling.
But that is not what the poet does. He makes his character do a little musical sidestep mid sentence by mentioning the price with the words ‘for one shilling’. It is just delightful.
The card at the top of this article is one of the Valentine’s Day cards now available at Flying Twigs.
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The Bridge Of Sighs
This is the second time I have photographed this bridge. You can see the earlier attempt from 2017 here.
Sigh
The dictionary of etymology says that the word sigh dates to the 1200s and is probably echoic of the sound of the act of sighing.
The name of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice was said by Lord Byron to originate in the sigh given by convicts seeing their last view of Venice as they crossed the bridge to their summary execution in the time of the inquisition.
But in fact not, because by the time the bridge was built the inquisition was long over and there were no more summary executions.
The Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge is a covered bridge at St John’s College, Cambridge University. It was built in 1831 and crosses the River Cam between the college’s Third Court and New Court.
It has nothing in common architecturally with that in Venice, save that both are covered and so the one echoes the other.
Photograph
The bridge cries out for a photograph, and I snapped it with my phone on the way to a talk a few weeks ago about strategies for reducing the use of throwaway plastic.
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Frosty Day On The Cam
Frost and sun on punts on the River Cam at Cambridge last week.
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What’s In A Name: Harehills
I started school when I was about five years old. The school was Harehills Junior School on Roundhay Road in Leeds. I used to catch a bus to school down Easterly Road to get there.
Roundhay Road was the main road and if you walked up the hill you came to Harehills Road and then Harehills Lane.
It was not until I was well into adulthood that I thought about the meaning of Harehills. Oh me oh my – it means hills where there are hares.
I had always just wrapped the two parts into one bundle of a word, like everyone did. I never unwrapped it to look at what it meant. I put the stress on the first syllable, just like everyone did. Until I unpacked the parts, it didn’t mean anything at all: It was just a name, Harehills.
And Roundhay Road, a road that went where hay was gathered. And Easterly road – a road to the east!
Which leads me on to something I read today.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge runs more or less north-south for thousands of kilometres along the seabed in the middle of The Atlantic Ocean.
The ridge is formed by the Earth’s mantle throwing up material as the tectonic plates move apart. At the same time, the land between the plates sinks.
In effect, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge has a deep score line running along the top of it along its whole length. When I say ‘score line’, I am talking on a geologically large scale. From close up it is a long valley running along the top of the ridge.
An analogy would be a cake that has risen and collapsed in the middle as it is baking.
For most of the length the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is under water. However, it goes right through Iceland and there it is visible on land.
I was just now looking at photographs of the Thingvellir Rift Valley in Iceland, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are moving apart.
They are not moving very fast. The Universities Space Research Station says the gap between the plates has widened 230 feet (70 m) and sunk by 131 feet (40 m) in the last 10,000 years.
When I read about the ‘Thingvellir Rift Valley’, I thought of the other rift valley that I know – the Great Rift Valley.
It too is caused by the splitting apart of tectonic plates and it runs from the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon down through the Dead Sea in Israel, on through Ethiopia and Kenya and down to Mozambique.
The thing is that I have known about the Great Rift Valley for years, but for whatever reason, I thought the word ‘Rift’ was something from the language of the region.
It wasn’t until today when I thought of the word ‘rift’ associated with Iceland that I realised that the word is effectively an adjective, a description. It is a rift – a crack, a split, a division, a break.
How could my brain have not woken up to realise that?
Maybe I was led astray by the word Rif – a mountainous region in the north of Morocco? (Nice try, David)
Do you do that kind of thing – not see the meaning because you are so ‘close’ to the word?
I think we all do things like that with names, although maybe not as blind as I was over the word ‘rift’.
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The English Revolution Of 1640
I have copied this more or less word for word from where I wrote it first on No More Pencils. I have Gutenberg active on No More Pencils, like it is here. I went into the ‘admin’ there and copied the text and plonked it in here. And all the formatting is preserved. Pretty neat. The only thing I have to want to change is the origin of the photo of the bust of Charles II. It is being pulled from No More Pencils and I want to put it here in the media library.
I have just read The English Revolution 1640by Christopher Hill. It is available to read online, and that is how I read most of it before I bought the book secondhand. It’s a slim book that shouldn’t cost you more than £3.00.
My particular interest now today is to understand the reasoning and motivation of those in positions of power who favour a hard Brexit or indeed any Brexit. So I start with English history.
In A Nutshell
In a nutshell, the book argues that the monarchy, the landed gentry, the church, the big capitalists, the little capitalists, the merchants, the peasantry, the urban masses, the army – all had their positions to protect and advance, and their shifting allegiances in a changing world.
Capitalists were making money overseas and as pirates on the high seas. Those who bought land following the destruction of the churches under Henry VIII wanted rack rents from their tenants.
They weren’t interested in the feudal relationships that had kept the feudal landlords living like lords and they denied tenants their feudal copyhold entitlement to remain on the land.
Capitalists wanted workers. Tenants weren’t safe from being evicted from their land or unable to pay rack rents and were moving away to the towns to work in capitalist ventures.
The towns were bound by guilds that prevented the opening up of competition. Acts of Parliament prohibited those less well off from entering guilds – Parliament being the King’s parliament made of the King’s friends.
But things were changing, the makeup of Parliament was changing. And the capitalists had other means to circumvent the King.
They established ventures outside the towns, free of the restrictions.
Prices rose, and the feudal order collapsed because it was too expensive to maintain.
Meanwhile, attitudes changed because the Church was no longer the favoured or only route for disseminating truth and propaganda.
Civil War
The result was civil war, the establishment of a republic, and eventually a change in the relationship of a changed parliament that brought back the monarchy stripped back to do its bidding.
What didn’t happen? The mass of the population were not able to take power. They tried but they failed.
What I learned
What can I take from reading the book?
I learned that every group was bound together by self interest; that groups changed their composition as outside forces changed them; that groups formed allegiances with former enemies; that it was always a struggle for ascendancy and someone else’s expense.
Beyond that, that economic changes and the march of history rarely favour those trying to stop change.
I think the look in the face of Charles II in this c.1678 terracotta bust attributed to John Bushnell says it all. He was brought back on condition that he knew his place and kept out of politics.
At the beginning of this article I said that my particular interest now today is to try to understand the reasoning and motivation of those in positions of power who favour a hard Brexit or indeed any Brexit. What make-up of this country do they want to bring about?
A Longish Quote
In that context, here is a longish quote from near the end of The English Revolution 1640.
Ever since then orthodox historians have done their utmost to stress the “continuity” of English history, to minimise the revolutionary breaks, to pretend that the “interregnum” (the word itself shows what they are trying to do) was an unfortunate accident, that in 1660 we returned to the old Constitution normally developing, that 1688 merely corrected the aberrations of a deranged King. Whereas, in fact, the period 1640-60 saw the destruction of one kind of state and the introduction of a new political structure within which capitalism could freely develop. For tactical reasons, the ruling class in 1660 pretended that they were merely restoring the old forms of the Constitution. But they intended by that restoration to give sanctity and social stamp to a new social order. The important thing is that the social order was new and would not have been won without revolution.
There is a worry from the hard Left and from the hard Right.
