Hebden Bridge and Parliament: a strange suggestion

The Houses of Parliament are reported to be slowly turning into an uninhabitable ruin; an option under consideration is moving MPs and peers out for five years.

A news article about a possible move sees it as something positive:

“…with both MPs and peers in Parliament and the Queen in Buckingham Palace facing the possibility of decamping while renovations are made to their historic homes, is it now the time for power to shift in the UK?”

LSE Professor Tony Travers makes a bizarre suggestion:

“…perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to move power out of London. There are compelling arguments to decentralise the UK by moving Parliament...why don’t we move it to...” he trails off, reaching for Google Maps “... now, where’s sort of in-the-middle? Hebden Bridge! We could put it there.”

Hebden Bridge is just about in the middle of the British Isles, although it is not one of the official geographical centres and is considered to be far up north to people who live in the south of England. Even so, it is a very strange place to select almost at random from a map when there are other, better known places in the area, big cities such as Leeds or Manchester for example. 

Professor Travers may have been joking about moving Parliament to such a small market town, but Hebden Bridge has associations and connections that make a place of interest for several other reasons. 

There are some coincidences involving Parliament too.

Two more small synchronicities

The tiny coincidences continue.

I was reading a thread on a consumer forum where people were discussing an episode of Dragons’ Den in which a would-be businessman was applying for funding for a parking scheme that he had devised to extort money from people. 

A poster said, “Not watched it but I can imagine it's a horse face looking ‘entrepreneur’ looking to milk that cow, the motorist. I hope he didn't get a penny.”

At that exact moment, an advertisement for an asset management company came on the radio, and I heard someone use the expression ‘carthorse to cash cow’.

I was watching a film on TV called The Eagle, a drama set in Roman Britain; I started reading forum posts when it got too gruesome for me. I heard someone say, “Get your thumbs up” (during a gladiatorial fight scene) just as I was reading the words ‘thumbs up’.

I can’t see anything significant in these expressions, but they are good examples of very minor synchronicities.

Attacks by energy vampires: some details and theories

I am recovering from a recent attack by an energy vampire.

The bad effects are wearing off; I have decided to post the details in the hope that they will be useful to anyone who may have experienced something similar. 

The symptoms lasted for several days: I was continually yawning; I felt very slow and stupid; I was disinclined to do anything except lie around reading and looking for new posts on a forum or two of interest. 

I felt cursed, as if I were under an evil spell. I experienced strange and unpleasant sensations and an inner state that is difficult to convey in words. I felt very depressed; further descriptions that come to mind include feeling desolated, disconnected, doomed, exiled, hopeless, lost, mortally wounded, paralysed, sabotaged and useless. 

I had unpleasant dreams and woke up feeling terrible, sucked dry and fit for nothing.

I missed opportunities to get out in the sunshine because there is no point in just going through the motions while feeling dead inside and unable to enjoy anything. I had also learned the hard way that distress signals attract predators. 

I also had a string of minor accidents. I tripped over a cable and fell heavily, hurting my knee on top of an old injury; I intended to open the lower door on my fridge-freezer and opened the upper one by mistake, banging myself very hard on the forehead; when I did go out I nearly fell down the stairs on the bus. I stupidly walked up several flights of stairs at a station, not even thinking to take the lift or an escalator. This made my knee much worse.

Sir Terry Pratchett R. I. P.

Sir Terry Pratchett has died. There will be no more Discworld novels and no more stories about his witches.

Reading and writing about certain fictional modern-day witches can be depressing and demoralising, especially when they remind us of people who have injured us in real life. Terry Pratchett’s witches provide a pleasant, entertaining and amusing contrast: their sayings and doings lift the spirits of and bring enjoyment to his readers.

I quoted some extracts from his books a while back, and added some thoughts of my own: there is something about his evil elves here and some of his wise words about magic here.

Goodbye Terry, and thank you.

P. S. I saw Terry Pratchett once, and we exchanged brief smiles! 

It was in Hampstead, in north-west London. I was walking past some shops to the bus stop and saw him sitting with someone at a table outside a café. 

His appearance is distinctive and he was a trustee of a charity in the area, so it was definitely him.

Mary Webb’s legacy: curse or coincidence?

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to and comic parody of a certain type of fiction: the rural novel as written by authors such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. 

I have never been able to see the attraction of what is known as the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ myself  - not even Thomas Hardy’s books have the power to hold my attention – but when I read in an article I found online while researching Stella Gibbons that Stella once expressed her regret to the writer Michael Pick that she had parodied Mary Webb "because she had such an unhappy life", followed by “This was perhaps oversensitive. Webb had, after all, died five years before the publication of Cold Comfort Farm. Her life, though dogged by illness and depression, was by no means without happiness, and her childhood, compared with Stella's, had been idyllic”, I became curious about Mary Webb and decided to investigate further. 

I read the biographies The Flower of Light and Mary Webb, both by Gladys Mary Coles, and the novel Precious Bane, which is generally considered to be Mary Webb’s masterpiece.  

I found some familiar scenarios in Precious Bane; I decided to produce this article after reading about what happened to Mary Webb’s husband after her death.

Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy: a major unseen influence

Out of all of the many works of Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy is the one that I like best. 

I first discovered it at the age of 12 or so. This story educated, entertained and inspired me; it sank into my subconscious mind and some years later influenced the course I took in life. I still occasionally go back to it, and I find it just as enjoyable and moving now as I did when I first read it.

I like the descriptions of life on Jubbulpore, capital of the Nine Worlds. I feel relieved when Thorby, the young hero, escapes from the regimented, restricted, custom-ridden, ship-bound life of the clannish Free Traders, which is my idea of hell. It is an anomaly that he had more freedom in his previous life as a beggar than he did as a high-ranking member of that closed society. 

I feel for Thorby when he experiences the cold wind of fear, when he feels some sick twinges because people he cares about have gone away forever and when he feels lost once more. 

I envy Thorby his string of benevolent mentors, father figures even. His abilities are recognised and he is educated and rigorously trained accordingly.

Older women are there to help him just when he needs it, and he gets some useful briefings from young people too. He has people to tell him the score, to explain what is happening, to show him how to look at situations objectively and put his life into the context of various societies. 

Defence Against the Dark Arts Part VII: Charlotte Brontë’s Martin Yorke

Of all the characters in all the Brontë sisters’ novels, Martin Yorke, who appears in Charlotte Brontë’s socio-historical novel Shirley, is my favourite.

Shirley (1849) is set in rural Yorkshire in 1811/12 against a background of industrial unrest, of violent opposition to the introduction of machinery in the local textile industry. 

Charlotte Brontë intended Shirley to be a counterpoint to her first novel, Jane Eyre, which was considered to be melodramatic and unrealistic. Shirley was to be political, significant, true to life and, in her own words, “real, cool and solid, as unromantic as a Monday morning.” 

Similarly, Martin Yorke is far from being a dominant, dangerous, glamorous, smouldering, rugged romantic hero like the demonic duo of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester. Martin is nobody’s fantasy ideal man: he is a funny, greedy, clever, mischievous schoolboy who in my opinion is worth more than both those bad Byronic boyos put together. 

Martin Yorke is only a minor character in Shirley, but the scenes I most enjoy in the book are the ones that he appears in. His antics and sayings remind me not only of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky, but also of people I have known in real life. Charlotte Brontë modelled him on the brother of a close friend of hers.