Literary history

The first written reference to Woking occurs in a letter from Pope Constantine, written in about 710. It's a letter to the monastery in what is now Peterborough and it covers two other monasteries, both dedicated to St. Peter, in Bermondsey and in Woking (then known by its Saxon name, Wocchingas). What's more, it still exists!

...his privilege for the monasteries of Bermondsey and Woking (ibid., 276) may be genuine.

[From Pope Constantine - Original Catholic Encyclopedia]

That monastery no longer exists, but it was pretty much where Woking still is now.

The site of the monastery is probably where St. Peter's Old Woking now stands and the original Saxon church is presumed to have been destroyed at the time of the sacking of Chertsey Abbey by the Danes in 871.

[From St Dunstan's - Home]

Still, 710, not bad. A lot of people seem to think that Woking is something of a recent invention, dating back to the arrival of the railway, but it has ancient roots. so there.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Christmas tits

I absolutely love Slade. When I was a kid, they were the first band I adored. I can remember going to a school disco with a Slade scarf that I'd bought and thinking it was the business. I loved it when they were on Top of the Pops and I still think that some of their foot-stomping chart-toppers are classics of the genre. Years ago, I saw them at the Reading Festival and they were still fabulous.

This is why it upsets me so much to say it, but "Merry Xmas Everybody" gets on my tits.

But it set me thinking about a suitable replacement. Obviously, there must be a ubiquitous Christmas tune, played in every shop, hotel and restaurant in Britain from 25th November to 25th December, otherwise it just wouldn't be a traditional Yule.

With renewed tension between NATO and Russia, I think it's time to recognise "Christmas at Ground Zero" by Weird Al Yankovich as the new Chrismas standard. Oddly, they weren't playing it in Tesco today, but it's always been one of my favourite Weird Al tunes and since we're wallowing in 1970s nostaliga at the moment -- Slade, last days of Labour government presiding over economic collapse, Sterling crisis, that sort of thing -- then all we need is a good Cold War singalone and we've got the set. All together now, "It's Christmas at Ground Zero, the button has been pressed..."

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

No question

Well that was fun. We went to BBC Radio 4 "Any Questions" which happened to be at the kid's school. It was jolly enjoyable. I've listened to the show for years, but had never really thought about how it worked. What happened was that you fill out a form with your question on the way in and then they pick a few questions from all of those submitted. Before the show begins, they announced whose questions have "won" and those people are invited down to the front row where there is a person with a microphone. The questions are typed out so that the people don't forget them or get mixed up. It all went very smoothly, except at the end when it turned out that the recording of the show had a glitch at the beginning, so they had to do the introduction again.

I couldn't help notice the big difference between the experienced Labour politician Bob Marshall-Andrews and the (somewhat content-free, I thought) Liberal Democrat and the Conservative new boy. I thought the old hand easily wiped the floor with them by being good at being a politician rather than by being right, and he did it very well. It's educational to see a politician, a real politician, work a room like that. Good for him.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Seats

I was lucky to get a place to stand, let alone sit, on the 16.30 "Black Hole of Calcutta" from Waterloo. But at least I did eventually get home, even though there was no room to read a book, much less work, on the misery express to Portsmouth. Today, I am pathetically grateful to be able to sit and type on the train. This is only possible because the poor sod jammed in beside me is a very slim young person of the female persuasion. The three seat benches employed by South West Trains date to a bygone age, when the average working-class train traveller was a stunted, dwraven creature with ricketts. They are not made for the modern lard arse. As a consequence, when three people do actually sit on them, the experience is horrible for all of them.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Out of service

South West Trains were well down to their usual standard today. I rush to the station because I'm running late, only to discover that the ticket machines are all displaying "out of service". So I rushed inside the ticket hall, only to find that all of the ticket machines there were out of service as well. And the line to buy a ticket was snaking out of the door and into the street. I wonder if we're being tested, like rats in a maze, by some well-meaning boffins somewhere.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Bus stop!

I don't really understand how transport policy works. I used to drive to Woking station and pay a fortune to park in the car park there. For a few months, however, I've been cycling instead. This is obviously a net revenue loss to the council, so I imagine council tax will go up accordingly next year. Anyway, for a variety of boring reasons, I wasn't able to cycle today so I caught the bus. I haven't used the bus for a while, so I was absolutely shocked that these pirates of the A320 proposed to charge me £3.70 to get to the station and back. When I said to the guy something along the lines of "that's daylight robbery and I won't pay it", turning round to get off, he told me that a one-day pass anywhere in Woking was only £3.60. So I bought that instead, but still spent the entire journey fuming.

Needless to say, I won't be using the bus again either except in the most dire circumstances. But I couldn't figure out the "plan" behind all of this. Are the council colluding with the bus company and trying to get us out of the bus and back into our cars because of the revenue from the car park, or are the bus company just fed up with running buses but too embarassed to tell the council that they don't want to do it any more? This must be what is meant by an integrated transport policy: make everything expensive and rubbish except cars.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Disturbing perspective

Well, that was a bit of a shock. The trains were held up because someone went under a train at Woking, so we travellers were advised to go down to Guildford and pick up a service back into London from there, which I did and was only half an hour late at Waterloo in the end so it wasn't too bad. Anyway, while I was waiting for the Guildford train, I was staring down the platform while I was thinking about a document that I'm writing at the moment so I wasn't really paying any attention to what I was looking at, which was a bunch of emergency services people in high-vis jackets. Then I suddenly realised what they were doing: getting a body up from the tracks. They had it in a black sheet and four of them carried it back up the platform to the exit. What an unpleasant job.

But I was more shocked by it than I would have expected. When the announcer says that there's someone under a train and so services are delayed, you don't really think about the person, just about how inconvenient it is and how you'll be late. Once you see the body, even though it's wrapped in a sheet, you are forced to think about them.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Guardians of our money

It turns out that the buffoons at Surrey County Council had £20m in Icelandic banks -- wow! sorry we're flying over the Alps right now and they look stunningly beautiful -- and will undoubtedly claim that they could not possibly have foreseen the problems on the way. Yet...

By March this year the situation was so worrying and so widely known, it was even featuring in the Daily Mail. On 16 March 2008, reporting on risky banks, they wrote:

[From Burning our money: How Were They To Know?]

What the article says is that "Credit insurance for debts at Iceland's biggest bank, Landsbanki, is priced at 610 points while that for Kaupthing is priced at a hair-raising 856. Given that these two have taken billions in UK retail deposits, it may be a sobering thought for savers to consider where they are putting their cash. These banks are now seen as the most unsafe in the developed world."

So it looks to me that they had a few months to get their money out of there and put it under the bed or in the Nationwide or something. For goodness sake Kingston -- get your noses out of The Guardian's public sector jobs supplement and pick up the odd copy of the FT or something.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

What's in a name?

If you're hanging around bored at the train station, waiting for the next train to come along because you just missed your train because of a huge queue at the ticket office, you may notice that some of the trains that go past have names. In the quaint English tradition, they're always called things like "Duke of York" or "Pride of the West" or similar. Why don't South West Trains give theirs more up-to-date names in keeping with modern Britain? At Woking, the trains should be called things like "Black Hole of Calcutta" or "Survival of the Fittest".

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Litter lout

Bill Bryson, who is the head of the Campaign for Rural England, has been complaining about the amount of litter everywhere in the UK. I hate to sound unpatriotic, but he's right: England is a dump.

I spend a lot of time working in different countries at the moment, and I can vouchsafe that nowhere is as filthy as home. You don't see garbage all over the place when walking around New York and as soon as you return to Woking you can't help but notice rubbish in the hedgerows, on the verges, beside the road. Compared to Singapore, living in Woking is like living in a landfill. It really does begin to affect you after a while, because you want to feel proud of your homeland, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult. With St. George's day still fresh in my mind, I'm trying to find -- cling on to -- a few things to be proud about, but all I've come up with so far is Radio Four.

Unfortunately, when I picked up the newspaper are after arriving back in merrie England, the first stories I saw were about a criminal being let out of jail to go on a golfing holiday, the police taking over four hours to respond to a 999 call about a murder and a guy being fined (and getting a criminal record) for putting too much rubbish in his bin (oh, and a convicted terrorist is being let out of jail because he can't be deported as it will violate his human rights). Still, great to have a decent cup of Yorkshire Gold tea again.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

Should I have apologised?

I was walking past the White House the other day, when I suddenly thought to myself that perhaps I should go and apologise because it was burned down by the British in the War of 1812. I know it's all the rage to apologise for ancient wrongs, and I want to surf the zeitgeist.

I have to say it was a beautiful day and as I had a couple of hours free I walked all around the White House and down to the Washington Monument and part way along to the Capitol and a few others places. While I was having coffee, I read an article in the Washington Post about American's giving up their cars and using public transport. I have to say that I've been using the bus and transit here -- I didn't take a taxi once -- and it works very well. I caught the bus to West Falls Church metro and then took the metro downtown. I also took the bus over to Tyson's Corner for a $2 exchange rate rampage. The buses were pretty much on time, comfortable and only $1 (that's a fraction of what I pay to ride the bus to Woking train station, which is the equivalent of $3.50) each way. There was even a story in the Post about a couple getting married and then taking the metro -- along with all of their guests -- to the reception. Once major difference between riding the bus in Washington D.C. and riding the bus in Woking that I noticed was the civility. People were being nice to each other. The teenagers weren't drunk, swearing at everyone or listening to loud music and one or two of them even -- unprompted -- said hello to me. Even the BBC have begun to acknolwedge this...

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.

[From BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | America's 'safety catch']

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

Dragon's den

I was talking to my 11-year old in the car about school.

Me: So how was school today?
Son: They told us the story of St. George in assembly, about how he killed a green dragon with his spear. But I don't think it's true, it's just a story. It couldn't have happened.
Me: Why do you think that?
Son: Because a long spear only does 1d8 damage, so even if he got critical hit with triple damage, that's not enough to take down a green dragon. Unless it was a juvenile.
Me: Well, suppose St. George had a lance, not a spear, and was charging.
Son: Couldn't have happened. A lance is a bludgeoning weapon and the teacher said he pierced the dragon's side.
Son (after a bit of thinking): Suppose George was a 10th-level Paladin with Weapon Focus spear, Power Attack and strength 18. Then suppose that the story exaggerated the size of the green dragon, and that the green dragon had been out fighting or something and flew back to its lair because it was down to 40 hit points. Then it could have happened, if George got a critical hit. That would have made him a hero.

Clearly, obsession with Dungeons & Dragons is, after all, genetic.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.[posted with ecto]

Top comment on Glastonbury

I wish I could write as well as Emily Hill at Spiked...

Glastonbury’s got 99 problems – but Jay-Z ain’t one.

[From Who killed Glastonbury? | spiked]

A sentence that works on so many levels. In order to understand it, you need to know about Glastonbury's slide from countercultural Mecca (when I used to go, of course) to flabby post-modern dreariness, one of Jay-Z's greatest hits (and a work of modern poetry, "99 Problems") and the fact that ticket sales are down this year. All beautifully encapsulated in a single sentence that literally shines from the page. Sometimes, writing like this makes me want to cry, because I fancy myself as a writer (I've even been to my first editorial conference at a real magazine) yet I know I'll never write that line now.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Guru gloats

There's something quite strange about the looking-glass world that is Britain today. I know this is the case because when I relay news stories from the U.K. to friends, relatives and colleagues in other countries, I find myself having to begin my tale with "I'm not making this up". That, sadly, tells you something terrible about our society. Anyway, sometime back, I said in a post about the Home Secretary's extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act that

I'd lay a pound to a penny that the first time Woking council invoke their new Stalinist powers it will not be to defeat a cunning plot by international terrorists dedicated to our destruction but in a dispute over hedges or car parking.

[From Citizen of the World... (Well, Woking)]

I can't tell you how upset I am to find my status as a guru confirmed by the news of the last couple of days. It transpires that

Councils and other public bodies are using legislation designed to combat terrorism in order to spy on people, obtain their telephone records and find out who they are emailing... Last year, councils and government departments made 12,494 applications for "directed surveillance", according to figures released by the Office of the Surveillance Commissioner. This was almost double the number for the previous year.

[From Council spy cases hit 1,000 a month - Telegraph]

Note that, in comparison, applications from police and other law enforcement agencies fell during the same period, to about 19,000. The trend is very clear: soon, councils will be conducting more surveillance than MI5. Are the councils using the legislation to keep track of budding suicide bombers? No, of course not. The whole reason that this has blown up now is that one council was caught... well, I'm not making this up:

A council has admitted spying on a family using laws to track criminals and terrorists to find out if they were really living in a school catchment. A couple and their three children were put under surveillance without their knowledge by Poole Borough Council for more than two weeks. The council admitted using powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) on six occasions in total. Three of those were for suspected fraudulent school place applications. It said two offers of school places were withdrawn as a consequence.

[From BBC NEWS | England | Dorset | Council admits spying on family]

For puzzled overseas readers I must point out that the education system in the U.K. is so bad that parents who are unable to afford private school fees that have been inflated by Russian oligarchs, civil servants and celebrities will do anything to try and get their kids into the dwindling number of decent schools. One couple I know (not in Woking) gave their in-laws address, for example, because it was in the catchment area of a good school. In the socialist paradise of local authorities, this is considered an unpardonable sin. Hence the campaign to drive these terrible people (ie, middle class parents who want a good education for their kids) out of our neighbourhoods.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people. [posted with ecto]

Global cooling

Woke up this morning to a fairytale Christmas scene, with flakes falling gently outside and the garden covered in snow. The kids leaped out of bed and went out to have snowball fights and build a snowman with their friends. I started thinking about roast turkey with all the trimmings this afternoon... but hold on a minute, it's already a week after Easter!

This must be global cooling at work. Or was it global warming?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]