Posts by 81stcolumn
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I'd love to have had this Quimby for Mayor. Perhaps we could still vote in Tom & Jerry?
#beenalongday
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<chuckle> Sad I missed this earlier:
I suspect I come from this at a rather different perspective. Despite marching quite gently towards my 50’s I still cover close to 7k a year and I don’t commute*. Indeed many of my miles are done out of urban areas. I will often drive out to Albany to start my Sunday ride. Peak week this year saw me cover just over 700km in a week (there that’s the p*ssing contest over for me). My garage contains seven bikes at the moment and will soon contain nine as I build a new commuter bike and the wee man gets started proper. Done my time as racer, tracky and courier (FWIW: my first exposure to PED’s was via rugby union…).
These days I will tend to walk journeys less than 4km. Any distance on a bike for me is likely cause a soaking, so wicking synthetics are a no brainer (might try merino when I can afford it). I’m a bibs man through and through; the only trade shirt I own is Banesto so I guess there is some cred in them, just old, old cred. I prefer stuff like my much loved and over stretched Heinz Baked Beans shirt, cycling cut for a loooong back. For the distances I do, good fitting padded shorts are a must along with good gloves, shades and a comfy helmet. In my later years I have given in to the cult of chamois cream for longer rides.......
When I did commute, I often wore cycle shorts under my work shorts/strides with something spare in my desk drawer. Underneath might be a helly tee topped with some form of windcheater and if it was a gilet I might wear arm warmers. I always clip in (would be real strange otherwise) look-type for “proper rides” and MTB (double sided spuds) to commute. I belong to a generation that chose to wear helmets (and all the better for it - I have pictures). Rain, cold or shine I’m seen in a set of fingerless Pearl Izumi gloves; the latest incarnation have lasted five years (quality is worth it where you can find it).
So what have I learned?
i) Wear what is comfortable and suited to your goals
ii) Fashion is for fashion cycling is for life
iii) Ride FFS ride wherever and whenever
iv) Enjoy
* Stopped commuting in Auckland due to anger issues - I came close to assaulting several people on my way to work……….long story.
Footnotes:
I will ride in cycling lanes – which is better than the pavement however I still feel like I have surrendered the road to the clowns (not terribly pragmatic but truthful). Lights and high viz are a really mixed bag. There is no substitute for the Gorilla test for understanding the difference between looking and seeing. In my professional opinion, there exists a trade-off between attention and estimation for lighting. Flash for attention and use more than one steady light if you want drivers to estimate distances effectively (not sure about two flashing lights).MAMIL as charged M'lord :-) and no I don't shave my legs (me too lazy - they too ugly).
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Lilith __,
Taxes are an insurance premium ?? There’s a Thatcher legacy, right there.
For info:
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I don’t think I’m qualified to answer the question; could the Coal Industry have been saved? I do however a have a little insight into the survival of other industries. The assembly shop that I referred to belonged to a company that is still in business, still in private hands and until recently it was family owned. The company has a manufacturing base in the UK unlike many others with head offices in London and manufacturing wherever. As far as my limited understanding will allow, this company seems to have survived by not growing too quickly, not racing to raise shareholder capital and being measured with respect to overseas expansion/outsourcing. Moreover, even though I hated the work I remained fond of the company. I was treated well, offered overtime and allowed to learn from my mistakes. Such an approach is the product of good leadership as opposed to economics or straightforward management. My second cousin still owns Vollers corsets and I know how much they care for the people that work for them.
It is tempting to suggest that the failings of greater British industry were inevitable or exclusively the responsibility of unions/workers. There were at the time some critical failures of leadership in the preceding period and an utter failure of vision. A strictly hierarchical model (as was common at the time) of leadership may be argued to be sustainable where wages compensate for a lack of ownership by and engagement with the workforce. Where wages were lower and more commitment was needed, some sense of ownership had to be extended to the workforce in lieu of hard cash. Cooperatives are one way of achieving this and they have strengths in that a clear line is drawn between the success of workers and the control of profits. But arguably other less extreme and indeed softer models of engagement may have been useful. Looking like you gave sh*t would have been a start in many cases – In the UK this was like talking to the taxman about poetry.
On the other hand delivering weakened nationalised industries to privatisation undermined a whole chain of manufacturing. Related industries just didn’t have the time in which to diversify in order to avoid collapse alongside their shrinking partners. Many businesses just got bought and re-structured out of existence. With this went a lot of expertise nurtured in the 1970’s which is gone forever. It is worth remembering that Sheffield at the time of the closures was still one of the largest manufacturers of specialist steels in the world. So I guess part of the answer was in buying time for partners and some protections for recently rationalised industries. As I stated before, it is one thing to kick someone off the boat another altogether to do so without giving them a life-jacket. I suspect a lot of businesses gave up when they believed there was no hope and a lot of workers got very angry when they were left with no choices.
Excuse me if this seems to naïve or misses the point.
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Bit self indulgent and a bit long -
A closure of sorts-
My first exposure to Thatch’s Britain was watching the Toxteth riots on TV. I was being made up for a matinee performance of musical hall songs for local old folks. A teacher sat next to me, pointed out that some of those rioting were my age. At the time I could not comprehend what would inspire people I viewed as like me, to do things like that. I stepped out, I sang, and settled for the simple pleasure of entertaining others.
“Qualifications once the golden rule, are now just pieces of paper”
By 1984 I had a very different grasp of the world. I was watching Billy Bragg perform a miner’s benefit at my local College of Further Education. Having been expelled from school with limited qualifications at the peak of British unemployment, I looked to gain some leverage by reclaiming lost or missed qualifications. By then, my god mother’s son (god brother?) also unemployed, was going through the personal anguish of a war he fought, but didn’t believe in. That year PW Botha visited the UK and I started getting on buses to places I had barely heard of. Travelling the country and actively objecting to the actions of “Thatch” took me north, where I saw an unfair fight become an unjust one. The “Banana squad” reinforced a battle between police and ordinary people - a battle of Thatch’s contrivance. If that wasn’t enough, footage from the BBC showing the antics of the Met was seized from the BBC never to be seen again.
“call up the draughtsmen, bring me the craftsmen, build me a path from cradle to grave”
In the period leading up to privatisation, the kids I grew up with, played football with and stayed with when no one else would have me, fought over hours and wages at Morris Motors. By then I had worked in an assembly shop and left the job unable to deal with what I saw as the “soul destroying boredom” of manufacturing work. My friends lost and in 1990 I asked my neighbour from the 70’s about what it all meant. I asked him how he did the job and why he felt it was worth fighting for. For my friend the job meant certainty and security; He knew how much he earned, how long to work, how much save and spend. When the whistle went his life was free to share with friends and family and the factory was all he grew up with. When we went to school he was forced to be right handed. Left handers had fewer opportunities for skilled work because so many tools on the shop floor were designed for right handed people. Lefties got jobs feeding the line or sweeping up and that is where they stayed. My friend made a conscious decision that the boredom and constraint was worth the certainty. He settled for a bargain I could not bear. I came to understand a very different contract between workers and management. The kids I grew up with were raised to work in factories, they made sacrifices many would not grasp and felt betrayed when they were left with nothing as industrial Britain was closed down.
“A nation with their freezers full, are dancing in their seats, while outside another nation, is sleeping in the streets”
In 1988 I sold most of my belongings and travelled to America. What I saw was not some grand escape but the future of Britain, divided between the rich, the little people and the invisible. While homeless people slept in the shadows and corners of subway stations, fur coats and stilettoes walked past treble clefs on the road above. At the time, the almost Dickensian image was new and shocking for me. Walking out of New York City you could actually see the rings of economic contraction, poverty and loss. In DC I saw young men dress and wash in toilets on the Mall, having slept rough, clearly desperate to re-capture lost livelihoods. Desperation summed up by a scuffle for the hand dryer which was used to fast dry a shirt washed in the toilet sink. I also saw a huge queue of people just lining up to get to the top of the Washington monument and celebrate the greatness of a nation. The people I met repulsed me, more concerned with who I knew and what I earned as opposed to who I was. Travelling across the US by Greyhound was nothing like Simon and Garfunkel for me. Within four months I was back in the UK uncomfortably aware of the drift away from Europe toward the US and the consequences. The idea that Thatch wanted Britain to be more like America appalled me.
“Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?”
On my return to Britain I continued to get on buses. I got held by the police during the poll tax riots and while at university I protested the “liberation of Kuwait”. As I graduated University grants disappeared and education cuts began to bite. Getting rid of Thatch was one thing, undoing the legacy was impossible. In 1992 after another Labour loss at the polls I stopped getting on buses. I did campaign in 1997 for the “new hope” Blair, only to realise that a combination of Thatch’s legacy and Rupert Murdoch offered legitimacy only to the right; something I could not bear to watch in the following years. Finally, after a bicycle race in 2000 I spoke to a timekeeper, a really nice bloke, who had remained unemployed since the closure of the steel mills in Sheffield. For him “getting on his bike” meant travelling to Germany to get work. Something he said he might have tried, but re-learning metallurgy in German was all but impossible. Instead his wife supported the whole family working at a checkout in a supermarket. No bitterness, just resignation at being unemployed for more than a decade. What Thatch did for them and so many others like them was throw them over the side of a sinking ship without a lifejacket far less a lifeboat. Revisionists may well talk about “what had to be done”, as a bully may tell us how they “had” to hit someone. Even then there are choices about how and where the pain should fall. As far as I could see the pain was always suffered by the same people. There were choices but Thatch didn’t care for them.
“I’m not looking for a New England”
I left the UK for NZ in 2002, other expatriates ask me when will I go back? I put it to them that I left for good reasons, amongst them was Thatch’s legacy and the final lurch across the Atlantic in British politics. I haven’t gone back because I do not recognise nor feel any attachment to the nation that Thatch so callously divided. The UK simply doesn’t look like home and hasn’t done for a long time. I still get angry when I see an image of Thatch, but she is not a figure I loved to hate as some would put it. This is not mourning; I want closure, after some thirty years I want to be rid of the outrage and helplessness that feel when that name comes up. Which is why this is no celebration either.
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Waitangi day began with the sound of a motor mower. Anna, our very un-Swiss, Swiss host could be seen manically steering her way through what was probably the easiest part of her day. The motor camp where we were staying has a life of its own. Repeated visits have given me a sense of just how much work needs to be done and what a good old soul Anna is. A peek out of the door saw weeding, cleaning and laundering all in progress on a public holiday within what would be regarded as a somewhat culturally aware establishment. For my own part, the day really began packing the wagon ready to return to Auckland. Notable was a Southerly that felt quite cold in the shade. The car loaded, Mum and Mr. 4.5 (aka hero of the week*) stayed on for a bit more trampoline and slide. I on the other hand, clipped into my very familiar pedals and set off on a 120km plus ride to Clevedon.
Long rides regardless of the effort involved, give me plenty of time to think and reflect. My usual behaviour on Waitangi has been to stay inside, say nothing and do nothing; a gesture stimulated by the belief that the best I could manage was to be annoying and ill equipped to comment on a day that still leaves me perplexed and challenged. This day was a little different. The Southerly pushed me a long at a rate that would flatter any rider, and felt to me, like a just reward for the sometimes challenging toil of previous days. It being Waitangi, my thoughts dwelt on the possibility that my darling isn’t Ngāi Tahu but Ngāti Rangitān; a revelation with which she is not altogether comfortable despite professing to no real sense of Maori in her own life. As the sun countered the cool breeze I got to revel in a show stopping moment this year, where I encouraged a student to interpret and analyse data from within a cultural rather than common educational framework. The resulting presentation saw a deeply challenged audience gape rather than gasp, and then think really, really hard about what they had heard as well as believed. I doubt that there are many finer moments to be enjoyed by an educator. New Zealand culture can take full credit for that. Later I skidded to a halt when confronted by a kiddie wagon reversed into the road just as I rounded the corner into Kawakawa. I reminded the driver that I had children too. In turn I was treated to a Brown finger offered from the passenger window as though to settle any issues of dissonance. I guess that is New Zealand culture too.
As I hit the hills I dealt with varied instances of driving informed by Auckland importance and entitlement. I also got to look at countryside unique in its heritage and context; the rounded grass rendered bumps are nothing like my old home. Entering Clevedon I caught up with my family and bought Ice Cream. I didn’t realise at the time how much peace I have made with the treaty, which has changed and informed me. Indeed a quick check on some of my early comments in PAS will show that on other days I might well have filled at least half of Russ’s bingo card. As a relatively new immigrant I’m good with that. As I was with a drive home, and a celebration facilitated by grilled salmon, mashed kumara and Tuscan salad (FTW!). Not bad eh! Not a bad day before yesterday, I guess cogratulations do miss the point.
*Mr. 4.5 is totally my hero after climbing a 952m Mountain and then sitting on the doorstep ready to do it again the following day. I think he would have done it too. #prouddadgrin
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Perhaps another tag should be #missing thesis chapter - After two and a half years we abandoned a large body of data due to a critical methodological flaw. This data will not appear in the thesis. Instead we reproduced an effect in the lab that we found by chance. We verified it and found it was quite robust, unfortunately after another two years and two more supervisors we are still unable to explain adequately why we get this result. Consequently, we are making something up and moving on to more trivial research in order to get the job done before the thesis registration expires......
Thesis started in 1993 candidate graduated in........
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In matters of trade and diplomacy America has always appeared (to me) to behave like the unwanted Christmas relative. Everyone is special when a good nosh is at stake. There is no shortage of special relationships as there is no shortage of loved and neglected relatives. What annoys me most is how successful the special relationship con is.
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OnPoint: The Source, in reply to steve black,
Funny I thought it was the Ministry of Shared Data?
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