HMS Illustrious is moored in the Thames off Greenwich for a week to help with the Royal Navy’s participation in Remembrance Day commemorations in London. This year is the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War.

HMS Illustrious was also used as a platform for the November 6TH Fireworks display which by all accounts was quite spectacular, being accompanied by the dramatic sounds of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture.

Photo derived from one by Simon Starr

Posted by Andy Roberts

HMS Illustrious at Greenwich

Ukraine accepted a 40 billion dollar loan from the IMF to avoid bankruptcy, Romania is currently negotiating and Iceland has already taken drastic measures after the collapse of its financial sector. Belarus and Hungary are also on the critical danger list but the UK and Switzerland have serious national debt and currency problems as well.

Iceland has enough natural resources to survive in some way outside of the global financial system but The UK should be especially worried, as one of the main importers of goods in Western Europe. UK national borrowings also tend to be in other currencies so the debt balance will almost certainly increase as the pound sterling weakens against both the dollar and the euro, after printing and lending out huge sums of money to avert the banking and finance sector crisis.

When Gordon Brown the UK prime minister went to tell the Eurozone leaders how to restructure their banking industries along the lines of the UK model this appeared as a great act of economic statesmanship, but I bet Sarkozy and Merkel had a quiet word in his ear about the UK ditching the pound and joining the euro zone eventually. The big question would be at what rate? The present rate doesn’t look too great, having fallen from 1.5 Euros to the Pound down to 1.25 over the past year or so, but as the financial crisis gets worse over the next few months the worsening terms could end up looking look more like a collapse and rescue operation rather than a dignified merger.

Posted by Andy Roberts

Can Countries go Bankrupt?

If 20 percent of the value of world stock markets can be wiped out in one week, as has just happened, then where does that wealth actually disappear to? Is it buried in a big hole somewhere, scuttled at sea or sent on a rocket into outer space? Apparently not, but if money can simply disappear from world markets how can we make any sense of the concept of value in finance. How is it measured and where did it come from in the first place?

Theories of value

In the first post of this series I asked “where does money come from” and gave a brief history of the origins of money in the form of precious metal coins used to facilitate the process of trade from simple barter to the exchange of goods of different values. Without exactly defining where money comes from I hinted at the idea that monetary value is realted to the total amount of work or labour which is tied up in bringing the goods to market. That’s a theory which is known as the labour theory of value and is not always widely accepted, probably due to association with a certain Karl Marx who took that theory, which was already known by cpaitalist economists, and developed it a bit further with his concept of “socially necessary labour time”.

Money grows on trees

People who don’t subscribe to the labour theory of value believe that money comes from being rewarded for taking risks, that value is determined entirely by the balance between supply and demand, and that substantial sums of money can somehow just “grow”. They say that money doesn’t grow on trees, but that’s not too dissimilar to the idea that interest just accumulates on investments because money begets more money. In reality, investments such as stocks and bank deposits typically pass through a number of hands but end up being used to buy goods not for consumption but for increased or more efficient production. Investment of capital buys machine tools, land, property and other wherewithal to employing labour in order to create goods or services for the market which can be sold at a profit. The important point here is that the capital doesn’t generate a single penny of orginal value until the employment of labour has happened. To be profitable, the output from this process of applying labour to previously accumulated capital must be of actual use to a buying market, and must be produced with a total number of labour hours which is competitive with alternative setups, such as differently tooled machine shops employing labour under different terms and conditions. That’s pretty much all that’s meant by the “socially necessary labour time” formulation really, to counter the idea that simply getting enough people to work hard for the the most minimal wages will necessarily creaste wealth.

Wealth Ceated by Labour

All wealth is created in the first place by labour, and that is the real answer to the question answer “where does money come from”. It comes from work that has been done by somebody, that has been abstracted and turned into a type of commodity itself, which can then change hands and accumulate, which can be exchanged for special kinds of products, Which can then be deployed in the employment of further labour. Capital is an accumulation of the results of previous rounds of expended labour, or “dead labour” as is sometimes expressed. The capital exchanged on world money markets then represents a further abstraction as speculators buy and sell options to receive the fruits of other people’s labour in the future, that hasn’t even been expended yet, and place bets on the likelihood of prices rising and falling.

Destruction of Wealth in a Slump

In a serious recession, when stock markets crash, and seemingly abstract wealth is destroyed, this is not just a accountancy game played out with pieces of paper or rather electronic transfers. It does actually play out into the very real destruction of productive capacity as enterprises go under or cut back and the very concrete machinery, buildings, expertise and systems are abandoned due to lack of a buying market that can afford their products at a profitable price. All of that overcapicity which has been built up out of the relentless requirement to reinvest and expand will be scrapped, levelled, and laid waste at the greatest of human cost until enough real capital has been wiped out for the accumulation cycle to begin all over again. In the current circumstances the effects are particularly catastrophic because the downturn had been temporarily postponed for a couple of decades or so through the use of massively expanded credit, which could distort the outward shape of the cycle for a short while, but never the underlying forces at work in any free market system based on the private ownership of capital.

Posted by Andy Roberts

How is wealth destroyed and where does wealth come from?

How on earth would you ever end a game of 301 on such a dart board?

Posted by Andy Roberts

What's odd about this Dartboard? Found in an East London Pub

Having avoided traditional summer holidays the past two years, preferring to go abroad in the off seasons, I certainly won’t be cutting back on theatre breaks and other little weekends away or short breaks in the UK. Neither will hoards of other people up and down the country regardless of what the doom and gloom mongers would have us believe.

Some might be thinking twice about booking long haul trips to Oceana and Asia, granted, and the shopping trip to New York is looking decidedly passe but there’s never been a better time for squeezing in a little treat of a weekend, just the two of you, with a bit of style in London’s West End.

Hotel and Theatre Breaks in London

With the shrinking of the finance sector and slightly less demand for business trips to London, the big hotels have a few rooms going spare and these are being bought up by tour operators who can then offer even better value hotel and theatre breaks in London. The advantage of booking a hotel at the same time as your advance theatre tickets should be obvious really. To get the best out of a good night out at a top West End show you don’t want your shared elation to be instantly let down by a long and tiresome journey back with the night crowds. Instead, an after show drink in the hotel bar and a comfortable night allows the magic to continue though to the next day, with who knows what London has in store. Sightseeing, culture, chilling out on the river, fine dining - central London has it all with always more surprises, even if you only live in the Greater London area or home counties.

Theatre Breaks by Rail

Cars are practically useless in central London so it’s usually best to arrive by train. The extra fast east-coast line is proves increasingly tempting, with discerning citizens from Doncaster, York, Newcastle, Darlington, Leeds, Wakefield, Sheffield, Stoke able to arrive at Kings Cross London in just a couple of hours or less. It’s a great way to travel from Norwich, Exeter, Cardiff, Coventry, Manchester. Bung it all on the same booking transaction and you can save up to 40% on the advance rail fares.

Favourite London Theatre Shows

One or two musicals have closed recently and there are some interesting new ones coming up, but here is a selection which have become standard West End Favourites:

Les Miserables
Phantom of the Opera
Billy Elliot
We Will Rock You
Mamma Mia
Blood Brothers
Dirty Dancing
Sound of Music
Hairspray

New shows you can book theatre breaks for now:

Oliver
Imagine This
Carousel
Zorro

Theatre breaks Booking tips

* Try to be flexible with your preferred dates, but if you fancy a Saturday night or even New Year’s Eve these are still worth checking.
* If you have two or three possible shows in mind then you get more hotel choice and overall cost possibilities.
* Weigh up hotel prices against location eg The Strand Palace is very convenient for most of Theatreland but Billy Elliot and Wicked are on at Victoria. Some of the best value hotels are near Kings Cross or South Kensington / Gloucester Road so you might need a London black cab after the show.
* Extra nights can be good value so see if you can possibly make time for a three night stay in London and make the most of your theatre breaks booking.

Posted by Andy Roberts

Theatre Breaks

This might sound like a stupid question - “where does money come from” - but how many people actually know?

In recent days European and UK national banks have pumped billions of Euros and pounds into the economies to try and stabilise a volatile market. The US is debating whether to spend $700 billion dollars on covering bad housing debts. People are asking why should tax payers pay for the well heeled banking speculators mistakes, and will it be enough! Where does $700 billion come from? Where does one dollar, Pound or Euro come from?

Origins of Money

Money originated soon after the time when the simplest forms of trading began. Once people got the hang of surviving from day to day in a hand to mouth existence, they had a little spare time to themselves. Different people started to specialise in different types of work. So if I could make more than enough animal skin coats for myself and family, and somebody else could catch more fish than they needed, we might give some away to each other. At first this must have been how it worked. Descended from primates who lived in large social groups, we mostly looked after each other by instinct.

Early Humans

As things progressed, early humans who were genetically pretty much identical to ourselves became more efficient at simple farming, making pots and other basic crafts. The opposable thumb left over from gripping tree branches was a big help, as was the ability to form grammatical meaning out of vocal cries.

Surplus and Transport

The extended families grew into tribes and the tribes into larger communities. People wandered further afield and bumped into other settlements, sometimes specialised for a slightly different lifestyle. Rivers and coasts were the super highways along which regular travels could be undertaken and occasional trading relationships were established.

But there was only ever anything to trade as long as people were surviving reasonably well and had some spare capacity to create a surplus of worthwhile products. Without refrigeration, a surplus of fish became a stinking heap after a few days so that was no use. A good pot could be used for preserving foraged food for longer though, so a pot was well worth bartering for if you haven’t got one. But how many animal skins are worth two pots?

The Underlying Calculation of Barter

The calculation would have been based roughly on availability. If community A had produced a surplus of 4 pots since the last trade and commuity B had produced 8 extra animal skins then two skins for one pot would have seemed like a fair trade. As the surpluses grew and the number of parties taking part increased so the bartering became more complicated. One canoe is worth 9 animal skins so if I give you 5 pots you can give me one skin change, which I don’t really need, but I might be able to swap for some particularly tasty berries. In this example the animal skin is being used for its exchange value rather than its intrinsic value, and it’s exchange value is still linked to the amount of time and effort put into catching the animal and processing the skin, including some part of making the tools for hunting and scraping.

Precious Metal Coin Money

The inconvenience of carrying around skins, pots and canoes just for use as small change soon became a burden, so anything just as valuable but smaller and more transportable was preferred. In it’s earliest form, money was made out of precious metals and the value of the coin was related to the weight and value of the silver or gold. That is, to the amount of work involved in finding, mining and refining the precious metals. This worked so well you could set off from Phonoecia (Iraq/Lebanon) and sail across the Med, through the straits of Gibraltar, up past the coast of Gallicia all the way to the West of the British Isles just to collect some tin and drop off a load of grain.

Confidence in the value of metal coins was such that some people were even able to give up farming, boatbuilding, mining and pottery to become full time travellers and traders.

End of Where does money come from part one - more next week..

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Posted by Andy Roberts

Where does Money come from?

Various attempts have been made over the years, some successful, to reintroduce wildlife species into areas where they have become extinct in the past.

The ospreys in England are one well known example, and a similar scheme is currently underway to reintroduce sea eagles into Scotland. This season is the second in a five year plan to release young sea eagles taken as chicks from Norway and already there are some breeding pairs reported. They’ve been seen around the Isle of May in Fife as well as in the North West Highlands. But there is a problem. As the farming today programme on BBC radio 4 reported, crofters in Gairloch are complaining about the sea eagles taking lambs. It is claimed that as many as 50% of one farmer’s lambs have been destroyed and that conservation groups are not taking the problem seriously.

RSPB

The RSPB pointed out that there are only three breeding pairs of sea eagle in the Gairloch area, and it would be highly unlikely the birds were responsible for the loss of all of the lambs. A spokesman for the crofting foundation said “We feel they put the birds here without our consent and without asking our advice.” So there we have a conflict of interest that may be quite hard to resolve. Sheep have been kept on hillsides ever since the land was cleared but white tailed sea eagles are historically indigenous to the country. How do we decide when to embark on a reintroduction programme? If there were a way to compete with the greys I’m sure we’d all be in favour of the reintroduction of red squirrels into the english countryside where they have been wiped out. Some people would reintroduce the wolf into Northern forests. But if it were possible to bring back the sabre toothed tiger and let them loose on Salisbury Plain I somehow don’t think it would happen.

Who decides?

Wild boar were once a common species in english woodlands and modern gastronomic tastes have brought about domestic cross bred boars, some of which have escaped and multiplied in the wild. Where this has become a problem they have been culled as an interloper, like the Canada geese in Victoria Park, Hackney. Who is entitled to make these decisions as to which species shall be allowed, reintroduced or culled? There is a difference between environmental concern and conservationism, habitat management, agricultural needs and possible pandering to a sentimental foem of tourism with attraction only to certain kinds of species which attract charity revenue.

Sea eagles have landed - video

Sea Eagles Update:

Lamb not on sea eagles’ menu, says RSPB

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ( RSPB ) described the claims of some crofters as nonsense and said that the birds would have taken only carrion. It said that the birds thrived mainly on a diet of herring gulls, fulmars and fish fed to them by friendly trawlermen.

another source: Timesonline

I’m not very happy abut the fulmars!

Lamb-eating sea eagles upset Scottish farmers

William Fraser, chairman of the Gairloch and Poolewe branch of the Crofting Foundation: “In a few years time there’ll be no sheep left on the hills,”

It has also been claimed that bird watching is a hobby that creates little or no income for an area, whereas crofting / farming is a way of life and an income provider. On the other hand, eagles and the largest birds of prey are more likely to live off carrion so most of the sheep may be already dead.

Posted by Andy Roberts

Sea Eagles in Scotland - problems of reintroducing species

Sometimes it can seem as if everything has been so interwoven and tangled up that it will never be possible to straighten out any one individual strand. But why would you need to anyway? The main thing from the subjective point of view is not to get washed up on the beach in the first place.

Posted by Andy Roberts

Untangle This

Lobster pot fishing

Loading up a small boat with lobster pots ready to put out from Anstruther in the East Neuk of Fife.

I’ve always been fascinated to watch the comings and going in these little fishing village harbours in Cornwall, France, Spain and now the east of Scotland.

“We watch the working boats come in,
to see what they have caught”.

Lobster Pots in Cornwall

The lobster pots in Cornwall landed in little harbours such as Coverack but also Newlyn used to be made of wood and wire but now they seem to be mostly plastic. The mouth lets the lobster enter a funnel shaped tunnel into the main chamber where some enticing bait is waiting. Then they can’t find a way out again. Small boats drop the lobster pots several at a time over the sea floor in known lobster feeding places, marked by a floating buoy so they can be picked up later. Those floating buoys used to be made of coloured glass and many found their way into Cornish pubs as ‘tasteful’ decorations.

Lobster Pot Fishing

Lobster Pot fishing is all about setting the baited pots in a known lobster habitat and then coming back in a boat to see what’s crawled in. This video “Mark & Dennis Chapter 2 Lobster Pots” taken in Dorset off West Bay captures some of the excitement of hauling in the lobster pots and seeing what’s there.

Posted by Andy Roberts

Loading Up The Lobster Pots

explore school of everything

Upon arrival at the school of everything homepage, you are greeted with the simple slogan in large bold type “Learn more”

and then you get the chance to either sign up as a person, or as a teacher.

Within the UK, this might  provide a vibrant alternative for all sorts of learning which are no longer covered by the run down local authorities’ adult education sectors. The school of everything also has ambitions to become a well populated international website on the global startups scene.

Posted by Andy Roberts

School Of Everything

Cormac Lawler:

About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain (Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental learning versus an alignment to known pedagogical forms. See Wikiversity_talk:Learning_resources#the_wiki_way.3F and below for some discursive material on this topic. It’s perhaps not an example of a change of guard as such (and the debate within Wikiversity’s development is not new), but I’m starting to see the tension as a pretty fundamental one for Wikiversity.

Andy Roberts asks:

Reading that discussion again on the Wikiversity page, it strikes me that both sides of the tension referred to are in fact agreed upon working within the same framework. The dispute, if I’m not mistaken is over the nature and quality of the learning resources which are to be accumulated in the Wikiversity. Neither side appears to be questioning the basic model of education based on learning from supplied content. The references to ‘experimental’ forms seem to remain within experimental forms of content provision, without questioning that preconception. Despite the claim that

“Wikiversity has adopted a “learn by doing” model for education”

the doing appears to consist entirely of editing pages to create more resources.
Do you think a bias towards conventional content based learning is built in to the wiki way?

C:

It’s a fascinating question - and I think you’re right that it is to a large extent. However - and this is more on the basis of knowing the involved people, rather than on what is on the page I linked to previously - I think that there has always been a strong desire to take a broad look at educational activity, and what role a wiki can play in that process. For example, some of the “content” produced on a wiki can be a record of a discussion where someone asks a question, and people respond with answers, suggestions, and/or questions of their own. Some of the content on Wikiversity has been explicitly initiated and developed as a debate - eg en.wikiversity.org/wiki/War_and_Iran. I don’t know if that conforms to your view of conventional content creation?

However, this “learning by doing” is a tricky concept - and I’ve been
pushing JWSchmidt, the originator of this concept in Wikiversity, to be more
explicit in explaining to me and the community what he thinks it might mean
in practice - and in detail. So far, I’ve found the concept as applied to
Wikiversity to be infuriatingly opaque - and I can see that others do too.
It’s something that I’ve always wanted to clarify on Wikiversity - what do
we mean by learning by doing, how can someone be guided through or motivated
to begin in such a model, and what kinds of educational experiences can we
anticipate, so as to scaffold learners if, whenever, and however
appropriate?

A:

How might other learning processes be facilitated through Wikiversity? I’m thinking of the newer emerging learning models such as connectivism, which would place the emphasis on the network between people and the community above content. This might require additional tools to the document based wiki, but needn’t be entirely separate.

C:

I agree - and we’ve been discussing tools to facilitate just such initiatives on a centralised page: Wikiversity:Technical_needs including the SocialProfile extension www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile. We already have a ’sandbox server’ to experiment with different tools - but to actually get extensions and other innovations approved on a relatively small Wikimedia wiki is difficult when in the shadow of Wikipedia. However, with community mobilisation, and more developers’ resources at our disposal (a software developer hiring was just announced yesterday, and there may very well be more) - we should continue to build on the mediawiki platform to see what it can offer in the world of connected, collaborative learning.

I see we’ve forked into a discussion of Wikiversity - and it’s very welcome! - but I also very much wanted this discussion to focus on action research and issues that we’ve both experienced in an online AR context. I think I’ll leave this to my next mail.

Cheers,
Cormac

Earlier posts in this series:

• DARnet-interview-part 1
• DARnet interview part two
• Part 3: Questions About Wikiversity
• Part 4: Wikiversity and Wikipedia
  

Posted by Andy Roberts

Learning by Doing - interview part 5

The real summer of course invariably takes place in June and early July and this year was no exception so why are the school children, parents, students and education workers forced to take their annual rest time in August, the damp chilly fag-end of the season? Well legend has it that it all goes back to a time when the youth of nation were required on the land to help with bringing in the harvest. I was even involved in that particular agricultural tradition myself as a lad, picking up potatoes in the fields of Shortlanesend near Truro.

John Richards had a small mixed arable farm, a couple of old Massey Ferguson tractors, a hay barn and two daughters. So labour intensive was the work required at specific times of the year that small armies of child workers were recruited, happy to be exploited for a small pittance per hour in the name of doing some real, grownup work, passing the endless boring long days of summer and earning a bit of pocket money. In order to join in I had to cycle a small pushbike down the hill into town and steeply up the other side for a couple of miles just to get there. Upon arrival at the proper start time there was always a lot of waiting around to be done before you even knew what was happening. Some crucial piece of machinery would be waiting to come back from a neighbouring farm, or the key to the diesel pump shed had gone missing, we were waiting for a field inspection or somesuch holdup. Eventually perhaps just before lunchtime  we might actually get out onto the field and do some potato picking. The old red tractor chugged down the length of the field for once row at a time, pulling an attachment called a spinner which was like a big circular rake. It dug through the soil, scooped up the densely grown ripe potatoes and flung them up into the air. What happened to them next? They fell back onto the ground of course, and our job was to bend down and pick them up and put them into buckets. It was back breaking work in the summer sun, hour after hour. The buckets of potatoes were tipped into sacks, then the full sacks tied up with twisted wires and loaded onto a trailer. At the end of a good day, the trailer would be stacked full of half hundred weight sacks of good quality clean potatoes, but only if conditions were perfect. There was one thing that was guaranteed to scupper the whole process and that thing was rain.

A little bit of light rain and we would carry on harvesting the potatoes. Never mind if we all got a bit damp, it’s was Cornwall so we were used to that. A sudden shower and we’d take cover hoping it would pass over. If the shower eased up we’d be back out again, even if only for a quarter of an hour before it got worse. But once the serious , persistent rain started up that was it. You can’t harvest potatoes out from muddy fields, at least not with the equipment available to a small family farm in those days. If it rained overnight there would be no work the next morning, then maybe not for the next week if it kept up. Maybe even a fortnight! Eventually in a bad year the potatoes would be left in for so long after they were ready that they’d just rot in the soggy ground, abandoned until it was time to plough them back in again, a breeding ground for blight and other fungal diseases.

So there’s nothing new about rainy, washout weeks in August, that’s quite normal and yet so often we feel cheated when the sun doesn’t shine endlessly through the summer season like in Portugal or the Mediterranean. Where does that expectation come from I wonder?

Posted by Andy Roberts

August Rain and The Harvest

• DARnet-interview-part 1
• DARnet interview part two
• Part 3: Questions About Wikiversity

Andy Roberts asked:

I’d be very interested to hear to what extent parts of Wikiversity have managed to break away from the idea of the “course”, the expert, and the content. If you have people transfering across from the Wikipedia culture then it’s going to cause problems, but you could always fork a minority project for the more revolutionary work if it seems to be getting defeated.

Cormac Lawler replies:

There’s a real challenge in allowing for different models of education to take place in the same space. As you point out (and as has JWSchmidt in the page I linked to), Wikipedians will inevitably bring a particular culture with them in the development of what they think Wikiversity to be. (Although I’d be hesitant to make a grand generalisation on that point.) So one of the major challenges Wikiversity faces is to allow different communities develop microcultures of learning that are appropriate for them. However this itself raises a challenge around whether a microcommunity might develop that has questionable practices (like, say, Nazi apologists - to take an extreme example) - and what then could be done in order to subject a community, resource or statement to educational critique - or indeed, whether someone could be banned or their resources deleted. This brings us to the heart of the question you asked of what this institution is and who it is intended to serve.

Some examples of ‘different’ types of learning projects/communities would include things like the reading groups and podcasting and filmmaking initiatives (both long in decline). I would also regard some of the research activities to be exploring different means of using wikis educationally - including my own, and the Bloom clock (a means of logging what plants are in bloom, but also of learning about plants). There is also a recent initiative to question ethical practices within Wikipedia, which is purportedly an action research initiative, but which seems to be running in different directions at once, including a fairly traditional one (which could well be the participants constraining themselves to conform to what *they think* Wikiversity is supposed to be, ie an educational content creation mechanism).

However, having said this, I’m still slightly disappointed in the breadth of initiatives on Wikiversity that seek to challenge, expand or break the mould of more traditional models. I still think that this process needs more time, but I had hoped for more examples of what was possible at this stage, two years into its autonomous development. However, of course, I regard myself as very much culpable in this respect!

Andy again:

Ten years ago you could find out just about anything by tracking down
the right bulletin board or newsgroup, asking a carefully explained
question, and coming back later to view responses or ask a
supplementary. Within a few days you’d have the best the net could
come up with. Now we have Google search, with all its limitations and
gaming, and google scholar for some of the hidden internet, but you
can still usually track down the author of particularly pertinent
idea, find out their online presence with a bit of luck and chance a
speculative email. So the backbone infrastructure of having
connections between devices all over the world will always find a way
to serve people who know a little bit about how to seek and connect,
no matter what infrastructure is built on top of it all, and I’m still
pretty optimistic about that regardless of whether we lose some
battles along the way such as net neutrality or the health of the
regime in charge of Wikipedia.

Yes, and for the health of the “regime”, see the ethical questioning project I linked to above (which generated quite a bit of unease and hostility in its beginning, and which may itself have ethical questions around it). I think you’re right to say that people will be able to find someone else to ask questions of - but it does seem to favour people who, as you say, already “know a little bit” about how to do so. I’d like to also help people who start from a lower base of social confidence or net-savviness - and this might partly be addressed through network, connectivist initiatives you mentioned in your subsequent mail. I think I’ll answer that one now, separately.

Cheers,

Cormac

Posted by Andy Roberts

Cormac interview: Wikiversity and Wikipedia

With it being a larger venue, I noticed on the meetup site that there are still two places left at the time of writing, which would be unusual this close to the event normally. So the London bloggers group is slowly developing into an enjoyably friendly and interesting regular event, with occasional sponsorship, some presentations and now even a competion with a great prize. It’s a trip on an Airship no less., something I’ve always fancied but unfortunately the deadline has passed - doh!

Actually one of the reasons I missed the date was because entry to the London Bloggers competition was by writing about your local pub and why it’s so good. Where I happen to live, all the local pubs are pretty dire right now so it’s hard to find inspiration on that particular topic. Local pubs are an important community resource in smaller towns, village and city centres as well but in London they tend to be more like retail outlets which happen to sell some drinks or else shabby old buildings with few customers where the manager is just keeping things ticking over. So we tend to have to get on a bus or train to visit a pub which we’d want to be in and that actually sells something we want to drink, and if you’ve taken transport to go out of your own borough then that hardly counts as local does it.

Even if I’d decided to write about say the George at Wanstead, which was lovely and cool inside on the hottest day of the year and sells Westons Old Rosie and Organic Vintage ciders on draught, I’d have had to mention the funny group of old men who hang around on weekday afternoons, the Friday night meat market, the gauntlet of smokers crowding the entrance and the highly strained relations between bar and kitchen staff which ought to put you off eating anything that comes out of there.

Posted by Andy Roberts

London Bloggers new venue, competition and pubs

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Viewed from Island Gardens at the tip of the Isle of Dogs across the river, because the DLR train service to Cutty Sark was suffering from delays on Sunday. The buildings were designed by Sir Christopher Wren just as he was limbering up to build an even bigger dome on top of St Paul’s Cathederal. So the ones atop this Greenwich College were kind of prototypes.

The aim of our trip was to enjoy an evening cruise but that was cancelled too, never mind. Another surprise was to see a giant ferris wheel next to where the Cutty Sark is meant to be.

This is just opposite the Greenwich College site, more or less.

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Posted by Andy Roberts

Greenwich Naval College - A fine Greenwich College

The Times business observes:

The airline industry has been crushed by the price of kerosene and deserted by passengers fed up with delays. After decades of disappointment, false dawns and virtually bankrupt Channel Tunnels, we have finally arrived at the age of the train and the evidence is in the crowd at St Pancras.

Traffic growth on Eurostar increased by 21 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007, with growth in the second quarter supposedly at similar rates. So the combination of fuel prices, airport delays and the shaving of 20 minutes off the London-Paris Eurostar journey time has boosted income by 25 per cent according to The Times.

When the channel tunnel was first mooted in the 1980s, a lot of people were expecting a road tunnel they could drive through. More said they would be afraid to go into a long tunnel under the sea, and would stick with the ferries, though it was feared the ferry companies might be driven out of business by the new tunnel. The roll on roll off ferries from Dover are still running, providing cheap cross channel deals for slightly less urgent freight transport, but it’s the short hop airline routes between the south of England and the business cities in the North of France, Belgium and Holland which were always the main competiton for the Eurostar express trains, with their city centre to city centre advantage.

So the problem now is that the old award winning Waterloo terminal for Eurostar is closed while the new St Pancras Station is getting near to capacity already. So why didn’t they build it bigger or else plan to keep both running, giving travellers a choice between South and North London connection points for the Eurostar Paris trains?

I suppose the shortage of waiting areas at St Pancras might be eased when the Stratford International station comes into service, taking some of the strain for passengers heading for Paris breaks originating from East London and the City. I’ve heard it has already been built but can’t be opened because it’s in the middle of an Olympic Games 2012 building site.

If you’ve never been on a Eurostar Paris trip, here’s a longish video from youtube which gives a nice impression of what the journey is like.

Posted by Andy Roberts

Eurostar Paris trains from London getting busier