October 8, 2009 at 10:50 am (Animal Kingdom, Culture/Literature, Environment/Planning, New Paradigm/Health, Regeneration/Economy)
Wikimedia CommonsThe contamination of the River Trent between Stoke and Yoxall this week with sewerage and cyanide, leading to the deaths of thousands of fish, is a sad reminder of the importance of “water issues” for the West Midlands, as reflected in the Examination of the Region’s proposed Phase 2 Spatial Strategy Revision’s earlier this year. This latest incident follows a recent prosecution of the Severn Trent Water company by the Environment Agency for a previous sewerage leak into the river.
In my closing submission to the RSS Examination - post of 26.6.2009 @ http://janetmackinnon.wordpress.com- I therefore invoked a Sewer King, as a sort contemporary equivalent of the Fisher King in Anglo-Celtic culture, who would lead the implementation of a new age of eco-logical infrastructure in the region, and thereby help bring about wider sustainable regeneration.
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July 28, 2009 at 3:30 pm (Culture/Literature, Regeneration/Economy)
Please Note : The following post has now been filled.
From pa.press.net Tuesday, 28 July 2009 :
Auditions are to be held for wannabe witches who are after a £50,000 job at a tourist attraction. Wookey Hole Caves, near Wells, in Somerset, is looking for a new witch to teach visitors about witchcraft and magic after its previous employee retired. The job offer comes with a salary of £50,000 pro-rata based on work during school holidays and at weekends.
The job advert, which appeared earlier this month in local newspapers and job centres, states that the successful applicant “must be able to cackle” and “must not be allergic to cats”.
Wookey Hole said it has since sent out 2,319 applications and have received 23 letters of complaint from church or religious groups. Legend has it that the caves were home to the Wookey Witch who was turned to stone by Father Bernard who had been appointed by the Abbott of Glastonbury to rid villagers of her curse.
Auditions for the role are being held in front of a panel of judges who will assess the applicants costume and character as well as the ability to perform witch tests.
Daniel Medley from Wookey Hole said: “We are expecting hundreds of male, female and trans-gender witches all in full witchy regalia competing for the 50k job opportunity in a X-factor style audition.In one minute they have to convince a panel of three judges they are the right witch for the job using whatever props they can carry. The grand winner will be chosen on the day.”
Sounds good to me !
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June 16, 2009 at 10:04 am (Culture/Literature, Environment/Planning, Government/Politics)
Following a comment from Navid (Many Thanks !), here are the opening lines from Mercian Hymns by Geoffrey Hill : to which I have added “Defender of Faiths ?”
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the
M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at
Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh
Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates:
saltmaster: money-changer: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the
friend of Charlemagne : Defender of Faiths ?
‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ’sing it again.’
Incidentally, Many Thanks also to my old friend Patrick Roper who sent my a copy of Mercian Hymns shortly after I moved to the West Midlands.
More information about Geoffrey Hill can be found @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hill
* The term “Defender of Faiths” was coined by our own Prince Charles, whose constitutional powers, incidentally, have today been called into question by the architect and Labour Peer Lord Rogers of Riverside, in the context of the Prince’s intervention in the proposed re-development of Chelsea Barracks, led by member of the Qatari royal family.
Lord Roger’s intervention in turn recalls the opening lines of a poem, this time of my own – not for nothing have I been likened by a gentleman dispensing Bombay Gin tasters in the Windsor branch of Waitrose to Britain’s best-selling poetess Pam Ayres – entitled “At Thames Gateway” :
At Thames Gateway did Rogers Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Tamesis, sacred river, ran
Through transport corridor of man,
Down to Southend-on-Sea…
Credits due, of course, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”.
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June 3, 2009 at 2:47 pm (Culture/Literature)
The following extract is taken from John Brannigan’s highly interesting study of Literature in England, 1945 – Orwell to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan 2003) from a chapter entitled “English Journeys”, in which the author considers Geoffrey Hill’s poem Mercian Hymns :
“In recent years, this scarcely understood Mercian king has become central to an ongoing debate about the nature of Englishness, as a number of Islamic commentators have argued that Offa converted to Islam during his reign over England. The evidence for this conversation comes from the Islamic inscriptions on Offa’s coins, whch have been interpreted as quotations from the Qur’an….I’m ill-equipped to to make any contribution as to the veracity of these claims and their refutations, but amidst contemporary Powellite debates about the degree to which the Islamic faith is congruent with Englishness, the possibility that Offa might prove to be the ancestor of a diversely orientated, multi-cultural, multi-faith England is a salutary reminder of the polymorphous legacies of history.”
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May 12, 2009 at 2:38 pm (Culture/Literature, Government/Politics, New Paradigm/Health, Pantomime/Satire, Regeneration/Economy)
Reflecting on the “Big Stuff” recently, I had to acknowledge that there might be something in the notion of “intelligent design”. Whilst no creationist myself, Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, although it may apply to Nature in general, I find deficient in explaining the evolution of the human species, in Britain anyway. For with regard to our own Nationals, it seems to me that it is the survival of the feckless which offers most evolutionary insight at the present time.
Take for instance the issue of Government-funded allowances, whether to cover the living expenses of Members of Parliament, or those of lesser citizens who rely, in ever increasing numbers it seems to me, upon state benefits to fund their lifestyles, regardless of whether or not they actually need such allowances. By contrast many hardworking people, including small business proprietors, are unable to access any kind of state support. Meanwhile, they observe that the life of the feckless is well-rewarded, and wonder whether they too should pursue it.
Is some “intelligent design” at work here, I wonder ? Or is it that the state benefit system, including its funding of MPs allowances, is just supremely stupid ?
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April 4, 2009 at 3:29 pm (Culture/Literature, Government/Politics)
Although a proposed “town twinning” of Worcester and Gaza cities is not to be taken forward, I can recommend – albeit a rather chilling – summer read for any local politicians interested in Israeli-Palestinian relations : “Vicious Circle” – sub-titled “A Novel or Complicity” – by the American “living in France” Robert Littell.
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August 13, 2008 at 3:18 pm (Culture/Literature, Environment/Planning)
This week’s Country Life magazine reports that 80 of people in England want to live in the countryside. Personally, I would like to be a professional show jumper, but in the unlikely event that I succeeded in my aspiration, I might not enjoy it. So with country living, a lot of people who realise this “dream” find out that it is not the rural idyll they imagined, but more “Rural Noire”.
Having said this, the quality of urban/sub-urban life is obvously deteriorating for many people : a major problem which, as Country Life also points out, needs to be tackled as a matter of urgency. Much urban and suburban development is lacklustre at best, often poorly designed and constructed, and without the investment in amenities required by different types of household.
Nevertheless, the major urban areas still have fundamentally better infrastructure than their provincial/rural counterparts, as many people found out during last year’s flooding in Worcestershire.
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February 18, 2008 at 12:05 pm (Culture/Literature)
Jonathan Swift once wrote that : “We have just enough religion to make us hate oneanother, but not enought to make us love oneanother.” A few hundred years later, and the same still seems to hold true today : hence my support for the secular state.
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January 21, 2008 at 4:42 pm (Culture/Literature, Environment/Planning)
Although many people will know Sabrina as the TV Teenage Witch, in West Mercia she gives her name to the River Severn whose “course” has determined much of our region’s history. In times of flood, like now, she is indeed awesome, reminding us, in this media-obsessed, and, frequently, unreal, age that the realities of Nature remain transcendent. Hopefully, new generations may understand this better than the present powers that be.
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