Here’s somebody who knows how to enjoy a bank holiday weekend by getting away from it all and going fly fishing in Wales. The fast flowing stream is next to an ancient stone bridge in a valley out off the road between Abergavenny and Brecon in South Wales. Fly fishing requires relaxed concentration, which is also excellent practice for getting in the flow state for other activities.
The River Vyrnwy in mid Wales is also excellent for fly fishing for trout.
Originally uploaded by Andyrob
The wiki called WorkNets has a project collating a list of UK Online Communities.
UKOnlineCommunities, WorkNets. A culture for independent thinkers.
The list is young and obviously has huge gaps, as well as probably many entries which are listed more out of optomism than evidence of community, but it’s going to be well worth watching and contributing to.
Two more people in London have been diagnosed with swine flu virus H1N1 type A, the UK Department of Health confirmed on 30th April
One is a 23 year old man from Islington, north London, and the other is a 29 year old man from Westminster, central London. Both have only mild symptoms said a spokesperson from the DH.
Both the new patients with swine flu are being treated at their own homes and the third, earlier case – a 22-year-old man from Barnet, north London, was responding well to treatment for the virus according to doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead .
Eight people in the UK are now known to have caught the H1N1 virus which causes swine flu, a type A descendent of Spanish Flu which cause the outbreak after the first world war, and all eight so far are associated with recent travel to Mexico, the epicentre of the current epidemic.
Swine flu is a respiratory disease, caused by influenza type A, which infects pigs. Until recently it has not normally infected humans, but the latest form of the virus which also contains genetic material from both human and avian flu, is able to spread amongst the human population.
The man from Barnet also caught the virus during a recent visit to Mexico and was admitted to hospital on Wednesday. A spokesman for the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust said he was “brought to the trust in a secure, specialist ambulance. Staff are scrupulously following infection control procedures to ensure no other patient or member of staff is at risk. In Mexico itself, the signs are that the swine flu numbers are stabilising, but the economy has been devastated for workers in catering and service industries.
As usual the advice is to wash hands thoroughly and regularly, restrain coughs and sneezes with disposable tissues and stay at home if you have flu symptoms. Keeping generally fit and healthy will also help immunity.
London is apparently well geared up for coping with a flu epidemic, having been primed for the last 5 years in preparation for bird flu but Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, said on Tuesday that “tried and tested plans” were in place to combat the threat of any outbreak of the swine flu virus and then offered to donate the entire Greater London Authority’s stockpile of Tamiflu over to the UK as a whole. The Tamiflu drugs were purchased by Boris Johnson’s predecessor, Ken Livingstone, at a cost of £1m as a precaution to help keep London’s public services running.
Twitter Search realtime results for Mask in London
Epidemiologists believe the UK will get two periods of increasing swine flu cases. Because of the time of year in the temperate northern hemishere, it is likely that the exponential spread of swine flu will come in two waves. The first trickle beginning now in May will probably see numbers double every few days and then level off as the warmer drier weather dampens down the rate of spread. This should happen before the majority of the population has been exposed to the virus. But a reservoir level of virus will persist throughout the summer months and then flare up again as the cold damp autumnal flu season begins in October or November. The whole process of a swine flu pandemic should have run its course by late spring 2010.
Update: 8th May 2009
There have only been five new cases of swine flu in London in the past few days and all seem to be associated with one school in Dulwich, South London
Update 26th May 2009
Reports of Swine Flu have been eclipsed in the UK news recently by media interest and public outrage over the MP’s expenses scandals, but the swine flu epidemic has not gone away. It’s continuing to spread.
UK health officials say the number of swine flu cases reported in Britain has risen to 184.
Britain’s Department of Health said on Tuesday it has confirmed 47 news cases of the virus, largely traced to an outbreak at a single school.
Health officials said the cases have been mild, without evidence of widespread transmission in the community.
The agency said 170 cases of the H1N1 virus have been confirmed in England, with 13 in Scotland and one in Northern Ireland.
Dozens of other cases are still being investigated.
Here’s an aerial picture of The Coombe Valley Raceway Banger Racing stadium in Dover Kent where I used to go on alternate Sundays to watch the banger racing, stock cars, hot rods and mini rods. They also hold special two day meetings to give people something to do on bank holidays. I don’t know how many other figure of eight racing circuits there are in the world but this is the only one I’ve ever heard of. The banger racing takes place in beautiful valley surrounded by wooded hillsides, typical of the East Kent chalk downs.
Here’s an amateur video of a big van bangers race which I think captures some of the excitement and chaos of standing on the bank near the approach to the pits bend.
Another one of a Bangers Destruction Derby
Banger racing is a well regulated contact motorsport.
I’ve registered for a chance to spend an hour on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square this summer, have you?
The One & Other website opened for registrations yesterday and the idea is to get “representatives” from all areas of the UK to spend an hour each on the plinth to do whatever you like, as a piece of art lasting three months with a permanant archive.
It really is an opportunity of a lifetime: your chance to become a living monument; to join the likes of Horatio Nelson, George IV and those enormous lions.
The Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar square has been empty for some historical reason until it was decided to put on a series o temporary exhibitions and One and Other is just part of that series. Then when Mayor Boris replaced Ken Livingstone in an unfortunate electoral joke, the intention has been declared to end the series and erect another equestrian statue. Personally I would have been delighted if Alison Lapper Pregrant could have been secured as a permanant placement but that was not to be. The current piece of coloured glass “Hotel” is less impressive when not in full sunshine.
One And Other is the title of the event created by sculptor Antony Gormley this summer on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London.
One & Other is the brainchild of the artist Antony Gormley, best known for iconic statues such as The Angel of the North and the figures on the beach at Crosby, Merseyside. He is asking people from all over the UK to help create an incredible living monument by standing on the Plinth, for an hour each, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break. We need 2,400 participants to make the Plinth their own, and we want to represent every corner of the UK in proportion to its population. So we’re looking for 277 participants from the North West, 71 from Northern Ireland, 304 from London and so on.
I’m actually a big fan of Gormley’s work. I’ve not seen the Angel of the North but I admires the sculpture outside the Millenium dome (now the O2) called Quantum cloud which I photographed from a boat on the river Thames:
And also the collection of humanoid sculptures ‘Event Horizon’ which adorned many riverside rooftops along the river Thames in centreal London a few years back.
So that’s why I’ve applied to be on the plinth, because I’d be honoured if drawn, to have the opportunity to take part in a great work of art. I’m not so sure about the idea of representation involved in the selection process though. Over on the One And Other Facebook group I contributed this comment:
“I’ve registered as an individual because I don’t really understand how one person who happens to live in a particular postcode can be said to ‘represent a community’ in any meaningful way.”
But never mind that, the big question is:
and what will you do with your hour on the plinth?
Interview with Arofish from back in January, 2005 by gravel
Arofish is a stencilist currently residing in London. He promised to greet our “intelligent, subtle, carefully thought out questions . . . with a load of boorish, superficial, irrelevant, conceited self-promotionism (well, I am a graffiti artist after all…),” but actually ended up giving us one of our best interviews yet.
Q) How did you first get involved with street art? How did you find your way to stencils?
I came to London a couple of years ago and the stencil graffiti I saw just blew me away. I’ve always had a little bit of skill for drawing but rarely ever had the urge to produce anything. Until I came here, graffiti to me just meant the wildstyle, new york hip-hop stuff you see. That’s often incredibly beautiful and skilled but it still just comes down to writing your name and I wouldn’t personally bother trying to get good at it. Ironically, a lot of those artists piss on me in terms of technical skill. What limited drawing skill I have (and I draw everything I do ) is with pen and pencil, hence stencils. (And of course the exposure time is minimised too)
Q) Did you start out making political art, or was this a later development? Did someone or something catalyze a change in direction?
I came to graffiti from a background of political activism, which is why doing art in Palestine and Iraq was a sort of natural extension of both elements.
It was one of the biggest pieces of distributed research ever conducted outside of official human population census, with over half a million people investing an hour of their time to watch garden birds and then input data via the RSPB garden bird watch website. The results are now published. I wasn’t surprised to see the long tailed tit rising up the charts, having spotted a few around and about and in our garden recently for the first time since I moved here.
Long Tailed Tit
With half a million people caring enough about wild birds to take part, the garden habitat is set to become increasingly important for UK wildlife in general, with bird feeders and ordinary wild bird food now being available in so many more outlets such as supermarkets and hardware stores, not just garden centres and pet shops.
| Position | Species | Average per garden |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | House Sparrow | 3.70 |
| 2 | Starling | 3.21 |
| 3 | Blackbird | 2.84 |
| 4 | Blue Tit | 2.45 |
| 5 | Chaffinch | 2.01 |
| 6 | Woodpigeon | 1.85 |
| 7 | Collared Dove | 1.44 |
| 8 | Great Tit | 1.40 |
| 9 | Robin | 1.36 |
| 10 | Long-tailed Tit | 1.34 |
| Position | Species | Average per garden |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Starling | 2.78 |
| 2 | Woodpigeon | 2.77 |
| 3 | House sparrow | 2.41 |
| 4 | Blue tit | 2.05 |
| 5 | Blackbird | 1.87 |
| 6 | Feral pigeon | 1.53 |
| 7 | Robin | 1.29 |
| 8 | Great Tit | 1.21 |
| 9 | Magpie | 1.36 |
| 10 | Collared Dove | 0.88 |
Outside of the UK top ten, there are 63 other species mentioned starting with the Goldfinch, Greenfinch, Dunnock, Magpie, Coal tit , Jackdaw , Feral pigeon , Carrion crow ,Wren, Song thrush, Pheasant , Great spotted woodpecker , Common gull , Rook , Nuthatch , Siskin , Tree sparrow , Bullfinch ,Pied wagtail , Jay , Blackcap ,Fieldfare ,Black-headed gull, Goldcrest and Mallard ending with the rarest observations of Little owl , Meadow pipit , Skylark and Black redstart.
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
