blogministrator – Page 5

North Yorkshire, Sept 2012

This summer’s tourism is more generally Neolithic than specifically Megalithic, and closer to home than Spring’s sojourn to the Mediterranean. I am in North Yorkshire – staying in a little cottage in Helmsley – and have hippy rock musician Julian Cope’s ‘Modern Antiquarian’ (1998) with me, along with Teeside Archaeological Society’s Brian Smith and Alan Walker’s excellent ‘Rock Art & Ritual’ (2008) all about the unique Neolithic Rock Art of the North Yorks Moors, and Durham Archaeology Professor Chris Scarre’s ‘Megalithic Monuments of Britain and Ireland’ (2007) for more general reference. I also have OS Landranger Maps 94, 99, 100, and 101, and GoogleMaps and the OS Maps on my iPhone4S, along with its compass and excellent camera!

The first visit – being in Helmsley – was of course to walk the couple of miles up the Cleveland Way to the picturesque ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, Britain’s first Cistercian institution, from 1132 CE.

A truly idyllic valley, it is little wonder that some six centuries later, the 17th century Fred Goodwin, Charles Dunscombe, upon acquiring the Helmsley estate (complete with ruined Norman castle at Helmsley as well as the ruined Abbey) should decide, not only to build the rather over-the-top Dunscombe Park country house, but to splash out on the then avant garde new-fangled ‘natural’ landscape garden known as Rievaulx Terrace, with its Tuscan and Ionic Temples, and its multiple vistas looking down onto the ruins of the Abbey. A really lovely place, this – you can imagine the late 17th/early 18th century posh-types promenading along here and taking Sunday lunch – apparently twice a year – in the Ionic Temple, built in Roman style but with Greek mythological stories painted on the ceiling. Its a giant fridge magnet proving to all who care to visit that Charles Dunscombe – commoner made good through the (then relatively) new wonders of modern banking – had been on the Grand Tour and seen where the Classics came from. His son married into blue blood and the family added a title to their conspicuous wealth.

But of course the main reasons to be in North Yorkshire are Neolithic: specifically the two sacred landscapes to the West and to the Southeast of the Moors, and the numerous sites – and in particular the rock art – up on the heights of the Moors themselves.

The sacred landscape to the West is the plateau of land between the Rivers Ure and Swale, roughly between Northallerton in the north and Ripon in the South. Cope’s book tells the story well and I refer the reader to his account for more detail. [I also refer you to the Friends of Thornborough website – in particular to news of a fresh application to quarry up to the edge of the site!] My own visit focussed upon two sites – the Thornborough Henges in the north, and the Devil’s Arrows in the south. Both these sites have survived the ravages of time only barely. As Scarre asserts, henges are Late Neolithic (3rd millenium BCE) cousins of cursus monuments, stone and timber circles, and stone rows, where the high bank is usually outside the ditch (unlike Stonehenge, which is both a henge and a stone circle, and where the bank is inside the ditch). Henge, therefore, is not the best word, frankly, but we’re stuck with it. These monuments are not numerous, possibly because they are quite easily ploughed out of existence by farmers who’d rather not plough round them.

The three Thornborough Henges are in a row, roughly Northwest to Southeast, and the best preserved is the one that is forested over – called Camp Wood. The next best is the central monument, whose outer bank has collapsed in several places, but which still rises here and there to a good height. The cursus monument – probably earlier than the henge – that runs across the southern edge of the central henge, is all but indistinguishable from the modern landscape – I think the single track tarmaced road probably runs along it. The southernmost henge is inaccessible unless you’re happy to walk through a field full of young bulls, or walk around it until you find one of the small breaks in the hedge where there is a white tube covering the top line of barbed wire where you can climb over. It is very depleted by the ravages of time.
The incessant beeping of trucks at the gravel pit described by Cope in the 1990s is no more – indeed the gravel pits are now reclaimed as a nature reserve a little way down Moor Lane that includes a useful car park where you can leave your car before exploring the three monuments. Visiting all three is a must – you get a clear idea of the depth of the ditch and height of the bank (and width of the top of the bank) in Camp Wood, and, without the tree cover, a good idea of the scale and grandeur of the henges in the central monument. From the southern henge, you can look north back across the tops of the highest surviving ridges of the bank around the central monument to the trees of Camp Wood in the north and get a real feel for how the three monuments may have worked together in the past, with a Processional Way of some kind linking the three, no doubt, though no sign beyond field boundaries remains of such a Way, that I could ascertain.

Satisfied with my visit to the henges – a good two hours of clambering that made me grateful for my boots and long trousers, despite the heat of the late summer – I made next for Boroughbridge, a small town a short way down the A1(M) from Thornborough. As Cope describes so vividly, this dead-straight Roman road completely cuts through this landscape, and in its modern motorway form cuts one off from the surrounding landscape too, as you drive from junction to junction. But there is worse to come. Arriving at Boroughbridge you discover just how completely an ancient sacred monument can be disrespected in the modern era. The three Devil’s Arrows – a row of three supremely tall monuments of grit stone, scored by rainwater in great deep scratches from summit to base – are separated by the road, which cuts through them right next to the northernmost, and tallest, stone. The other side of the road, behind a tall hedge, the two remaining stones are completely inaccessible in the midst of a large field of cabbages. Heartbreakingly desolate, this ancient sacred site is quite desecrated, and after the briefest of visits I pressed on, eager to leave the place as soon as possible. Very sad.

The sacred landscape to the Southeast of the Moors has, I’m sorry to say, faired only a little better. The centrepiece is the largest monolith in Britain, the Rudston Monolith, erected on a natural mound c2000 BCE, and rising over 26ft in height, today capped with iron to stop it eroding. Around it stands the graveyard of a Norman church – Rudston’s All Saints Parish Church. Yet in the landscape of four thousand years ago there are no less than four cursus monuments – including the 2.5mile long Argham Cursus – that meet here at Rudston, along the little rivulet the Gypsey Race. Nearby are a number of ancient Howes – the finest outside of Wiltshire – including Willy Howe, where amidst the bracken and undergrowth of the tree covered mound I found a ‘Whiteleafed’ thorn tree, and added a strip of my handkerchief as a little offering to the tree, the Howe, and the landscape around. It was truly heartening to see that this Howe is not only visited, but clearly frequented by other Pagan-minded people who partake in one of the most ancient of customs – the making of Whiteleafed trees.

This concluded my visits to the two sacred Neolithic landscapes around the Moors. I couldn’t resist, however, whilst here, a few miles of the Wolds Way, and a glimpse of the Iron Age earthworks that comprise Camp Dale. Heavily agricultural now, the area is difficult to access beyond the bounds of the path, and the Camp itself inaccessible, but the earthworks remain, nonetheless, impressive! Tomorrow – the Moors themselves!

Corsica, May 2012

Wednesday was my trip through the heart of Corsica, taking in the Bronze Age sites of Cucuruzzu and Capula: the former rather dull, in all honesty, the latter re-occupied in the Middle Ages by Count Bianco, who ruled the whole of southern Corsica from here, leaving barely any trace of the earlier Bronze Age site save a single statue-menhir now reconstituted and erected at the entrance.

The Prehistoric Museum at Levie was well worth it – a regional museum with artefacts from Cucuruzzu and Capula and other sites around the south of the island, including the Dame de Bonifacio – a 35yr old disabled woman from 10000BCE. It became really clear here how the islands of Corsica and Sardinia were once one massive lump of granite – originally part of the Pyrenees – which had moved gradually across the western Mediterranean only reaching its current location as recently at 9500BCE – a blink of an eye in geological time. To repeat from the last post, not only all the obsidian found on Corsica came from Sardinia, where the main obsidian mine for much of Europe is found; there aren’t any metal ores on Corsica either, so all the bronze – all the swords and daggers on the statue-menhirs – came from Sardinia, too.

From Levie the drive up through Zonza takes you past the Col de Bavella, the immense peak of the southern part of the island, like a punk haircut in ancient stone, riven by the ravages of time and erosion into the weirdest of shapes: the ‘Quarry’ at Filitosa but on an epic scale! The drive down the east of the island from there gives continuous glimpses of the most lovely of beaches, before the road turns inland again toward Porto Vecchio. Wishing to avoid this most touristy of towns, I climbed up to the mountaintop of Casteddu d’Araghju (quite a climb in the afternoon heat, I can tell you) to the Bronze Age Nuraghic-like ruins there, before heading back across country to Sartene, through the smaller villages back up to Levie and back down the winding road to my little gite.

Thursday, like Tuesday, was a quieter day for relaxation, but I did take in the lovely seaside town of Bonifacio in the early evening, stopping at the delightful Terrasses d’Aragon restaurant, where the food was every bit as good as the view, (despite the complaints of fussy eaters on Trip Advisor) and I was able to marvel at the short strait that divides Corsica and Sardinia – perhaps a teensy bit wider than the Menai Straits, and certainly too wide for a bridge, but much much closer than France is to Britain, which of course was also a walkable landmass at the same time, when mesolithic hunters peopled Europe.

Today – Friday – I have seen the megalithic site that makes the holiday, for me. Filitosa, as my last post I think made clear, was far too ‘interpreted’ for me. Today, after visiting the small alignment of Stantari, the slightly larger grouping/alignment of Renaghju, and the ‘poster boy’ dolmen of Corsica: Fontanaccia, all thankfully left fairly well alone, (albeit along a well signed, well fenced tourist walk), I struggled across fields up and down a long and winding dirt path with no signage – unsure I was even going the right way, though trusting the excitement in my heart – to the barely touched, mostly recumbent, weed strangled Alignements de Pagliaju.

Stantari had (at least) two of the later, Bronze Age (c2000BCE here) statue-menhirs, with their proud phallic heads and stony faced looks, standing slightly taller and narrower than their rough hewn neighbours. This made me think, strangely, of the Celtic Crosses in the Hebrides, which I had always thought were probably remodelled standing stones, the new religion recycling the monuments of the old. Here it was again – though in this case c3000BCE monuments remodelled in c2000-1800BCE. There seems some disagreement on the web about whether all of the menhirs in this particular alignment are statue-menhirs or just the two. To my eye, there were only the two, amongst rough-hewn others. But as the whole site was fenced off with barbed wire it was impossible to get close enough to really tell.

Renaghju, not fenced off, about 5mins walk down the path, was definitely all rough hewn – supporting my feeling that the statue-menhirs were later remodellings at Stantari. There seemed to be a number of alignments with nearby hilltops, in particular with the characteristic Corsican rocky outcrops shaped by erosion into weird and wonderful and eerie faces, animals, and rock-spirits. The alignments were however either very complex or the re-erection of stones quite haphazard.

Third in the circuit was the Dolmen de Fontanaccia, pictures of which I have seen everywhere in Corsica – hence me dubbing it the ‘poster boy’ of Corsican prehistory, alongside the most representational of the Filitosan statue-menhirs. All three of these sites, I have to admit, rather lacked atmosphere – that wonderful quality of megalithic sites that captures the imagination. They were all somehow too manicured, albeit far from being over-interpreted like Filitosa. Perhaps I am spoiled by the wonderful Historic Scotland, English Heritage, and National Trust, in the UK, who all do their utmost to protect, conserve, tastefully and almost imperceptibly renovate, and generally if possible leave well alone (with notable exceptions, of course….)

But then finally, some 20mins or so further down the road, and situated on private land, with just a short little drive off the main road, blocked off with granite blocks, leaving parking space for only one car between the main road and the blocks, all under a rusting and defaced sign saying ‘Palaggiu’, I began the 15minute walk up into the wilderness, past an empty ruined hilltop farmhouse, with only the odd collection of rocks shaped into an arrow to guide my path (very tasteful I thought), leading finally to a completely rusted sign with an arrow scratched onto it pointing off the main track to what I had gleaned from the map was the site of the Alignements de Pagliaju.

The atmosphere here was truly amazing. The stones fair sizzled in the midday heat (as I did!) and for all that many of them were recumbent, those that still stood made clear how the original site seemed to have been laid out. I could discern something of a ‘T’ shape, with the top bar longer than the pillar, if you get me. The pillar seemed aligned with the very far distant peak of the Col de Bavella. There were so many stones in the central main alignment – I would guess originally a double row of stones, similar to that at Callanish – but as most were fallen, tumbled amongst the gorse and weeds, it was difficult to tell if there weren’t here and there single or small groups of stones between the rows, too. The stones in the ‘pillar’ of the ‘T’ were so tumbled, all recumbent in the dust, it was not possible from a short visit such as this to tell if they had even been in a row, though they certainly seemed to extend away from the main lines of stones in a perpendicular direction, roughly in line with the far distant mountain tops.

Over to one end was a group of massive granite blocks (such a frequent sight here) which I could climb to get something of an overview. Behind the blocks, seemingly at the entrance to the site, were the remains of a cairn, I don’t know whether contemporary or later than the alignments, that seemed to include internal cup-and-ring marks.

I spent over an hour here, in the baking heat, wandering amongst these enigmatic stones, thankful to the owner for leaving well alone and making it quite hard to reach, alone with the ancients.

Orkney and Corsica May 2012

It’s turning out to be quite a month for megalithic tourism!

I am blogging today from Corsica, that island in the Mediterranean to the north of Sardinia, with Italy to the east (to which Sardinia belongs) and France to the north, (to which Corsica belongs.) Both islands have indigenous languages older than Italian and French, and the road signs in both are bilingual. But the Sardinians speak several languages, and here in Corsica French is definitely uppermost. The islands were of course one large island, until the retreat of the last ice age and rise of sea level circa 8000 BC.

Anyway – before I tell you about my (solo) travels in Corsica, I must tell you what I was up to last weekend! For the May full-moon weekend, I drove to Orkney. [I’ll post some more pics here soon – WordPress is having trouble with pictures at present – a problem with the new server, I’m sorry to say – so these links to Flickr will have to suffice for now : Orkney Pics on Flickr]

It’s a nine-and-a-half hour drive from Manchester to Thurso, the little town on the very north coast of Scotland from where one takes the ferry to Orkney. Fortunately, after a busy week, I had with me trusted old friend and fellow traveller on various megalithic excursions (including the Isles of Scilly), Alan Slee, to share the driving. Leaving central Manchester at 7.30am, stopping for coffee once late morning and for lunch at the House of Bruar (an excellent and recommended stopover), we arrived in Thurso at about 6pm and stayed over at the Royal Hotel. It can’t be said that Thurso is a particularly thriving town, or that its 3* hotel was especially well appointed. The Station Hotel offered the better menu, and we supped there – the Cullen Skink being particularly good!

The 8.45am ferry from Stromness Harbour to Scrabster on mainland Orkney rolled rather threateningly in high seas for the first 30 of the 90 minute journey, but was soon in more settled waters and landed us safely where we could at last drive out of the ro-ro and onto the island, and head for our cottage for the weekend. I have rented a good number of self-catering cottages in the UK, some old, some new, some large, some small, but I have to say this one was one of the very best, ever: warm, cosy, a superbly well kitted out kitchen, lovely bathrooms – all in all an excellent place: Unigar cottages – highly recommended. Exhausted from our epic journey of Thursday, we achieved little more than shopping on Friday, stopping off at Rennibister Earth House on the way – appropriately enough a neolithic store house – and scrumping for mussels and limpets on a beach of the Bay of Firth to soak in salt water overnight for a seafood soup the following day.

The truly ‘epic’ day, however, was Saturday, when we took in the Heart of the Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, comprising the Ring of Brodgar, the Stones of Stenness, Maeshowe Burial Chamber, and the neolithic village of Skara Brae. We rose early and went straight to the Ring of the Brodgar, arriving first before any other tourists, and were fortunate enough to have the site to ourselves. Once sporting 60 stones, this is quite simply one of the most impressive stone circles I have ever seen (and I’ve seen a few!) The central area is covered in heather and the signs clearly require visitors to keep to the path around the perimeter within the circle of stones. But the stones themselves are all so individual, so fascinating, that there is plenty to immerse oneself in without the desire to venture into the centre. The weathering of thousands of years is all too apparent on many of the stones, but the sense of mystery and awe seemed accentuated by the inclement weather that soon blew in from the Atlantic, bringing at one point a shower of hail to cloud up the lenses on our cameras. We completed the circuit just in time before the next tourists arrived at the circle, and as we left, gathered a few marsh marigolds to add to our lunchtime salad – a foraging delicacy plentiful in these parts.

From the Ring it is but a few moments drive down the Ness of Brodgar, past the site of the excavations where a Neolithic Temple – some say a kind of Neolithic Hogwarts – is being unearthed. The archaeological site is only open for tours during digging, for six weeks each summer, so all we could glimpse was the black plastic sheeting covering proceedings. What may have transpired in this temple, further excavation may yet give tantalising hints at. Leaving it for another year, we continued across the Ness to the Watchstone, and on across the bridge (reputedly in place for thousands of years) to the Stones of Stenness.

The Stones of Stenness is an amazing circle. Once twelve stones – (one has to wonder whether there might be some sexagesimal significance to the 60 stones of the Ring of the Brodgar and the 12 of the later Stones of Stenness?) – there is an aura of majesty around the tall and imposing stones that the Ring, with its smaller and more weathered stones, somehow lacked. The Stones of Stenness feels more like a grand chapel for the mighty, compared to the cathedral-for-all at the Ring of Brodgar. Behind it, at the Barnhouse ‘village’ site, one feels rather in the lodgings of a priesthood that ministered at Stenness, like the cells of an abbey, and one can almost envisage grand ceremonies undertaken by the elect at Stenness for vast geo-political strategems, by the monkish inhabitants of Barnhouse, alongside more prosaic public ceremonials for the masses undertaken at the Ring of Brodgar. In between, secret preparations and initiations in the Temple of the Ness prepared the priesthood for their labours.

Such imaginings are perhaps merely fanciful, yet in truth even the interpretations of the most knowledgeable of archaeologists are often little better. I rely a great deal upon the careful work of archaeologists but confess I rarely take their ideas of what life and ritual were like thousands of years ago without a good helping of salt. It is only a decade or so since even the idea of archaeo-astronomy – the alignment of Neolithic sites with solar and lunar risings and settings at various times of the year – became anything less than New Age rubbish as far as professional archaeologists were concerned. It is now broadly accepted orthodoxy across Europe. Stellar alignments of course remain very hard to gauge, as the night sky moves inexorably with the precession of the equinoxes, and what may have been true in 1500BC is yards off today. But – complex though their movements are – the sun and moon rise and set today pretty much exactly where they did 5000 years ago – give or take a few inches – and at Maeshowe, in particular, the Winter Solstice still lights up the inside of the chamber with startling accuracy. This chamber, built with four standing stones at its corners, and three more, shorter, stubby ones each immediately below the openings in the sides of the chamber allowing access to sub chambers, and all completed with the most amazing and enduring masonry in between, is quite literally the most accomplished feat of Neolithic masonry I have ever seen. Certainly more accomplished than Newgrange, for all the marvels of its corbelled roof, which I visited in 1996. Certainly more accomplished than the temples of Malta, where I visited in 2008, for all their gigantic size. Certainly squarer and more precise than the chambered tombs of Jersey (Apr 2009) and of the Isles of Scilly (Aug 2009). I was really quite stunned. This was masonry on a par with the Egyptians (March 2007): and they were later. And there is no evidence of any burial in this chambered cairn – only some tale of human and horse bones that were mysteriously ‘lost’ by the Victorian antiquarian who ‘found’ them in the cairn. The mystery of what this place was really for, remains.

Finally then, to cap an already amazing day, to the village where the people who worshipped at these great temples actually lived: Skara Brae. The wonder of this place is not so much in the finery of its furnishings, the layout of its dwellings…. all these seem, somehow, so natural, so thoroughly familiar. The wonder is that they have been dated to 3100BC. That’s contemporary with the temples on Malta – complete with strikingly similar stone dressers! The wonder is that they have survived at all. The reason? On Orkney, already by the time of the Neolithic people who began farming here in the late 4th millenium BCE, there were no trees here. Mesolithic man had long ago cut them all down. So the village – like the temples – was made out of stone.

Yesterday, in Corsica, at Filitosa, [see the pics on Flickr here Corsica pics on Flickr] I discovered another of these extraordinary archaeological/environmental cross-overs. Remember the Bronze Age warriors of the 2nd millenium BCE whose little metal statuettes are so common on Sardinia (Apr 2011), the island to the south where the Nuraghe were built? Well it seems that here on Corsica, where not only the absence of any obsidian meant it had to have been imported from the southern island, (from where most of Europe’s Neolithic obsidian haled) but also the lack of any metal ores, meant that the statuary of Corsica had to be in done not in bronze, like their southern cousins did, but in stone. So here, in Corsica, almost unique in all of Europe, one can witness the phenomenon of the statue-menhir – megalithic menhirs that, in the Bronze Age, were carved in the likeness of fierce warriors, brandishing swords and daggers – the latter undoubtedly imported from the neighbouring island to the south.

The weekend in Orkney ended on the Sunday, with a visit to the southernmost island of the Orkney archipelago (all one great island in Neolithic times, as were the Isles of Scilly, and islands of Corsica and Sardinia), South Ronaldsay, accessible over a series of causeways that link it, via a couple of small islets, to the mainland of Orkney, and, on its southernmost coast, the Tomb of the Eagles – a chambered cairn entered through a very low passage on a large skateboard. The roof was completely new, concrete, yet the aura of the place didn’t suffer too much from this reconstruction, and the skulls in one of the chambers set the place off as a truly eerie burial chamber, quite unlike the experience at Maeshowe. It must be said, however, that the private management of this site was not a patch on the professionalism of Historic Scotland at the World Heritage Site. Monday, all day, I drove, and drove, and drove….

Then on the following Sunday, an aeroplane, landing at Ajaccio, and a hire car down to a little gite near Sartene – not a patch on Unigar but sufficient for my needs, and Monday, the crown-jewel of Corsica’s prehistoric monuments, Filitosa – an extraordinary experience indeed.

Filitosa is a large and fascinating complex. There is evidence of several thousand years of occupation here, from the Mesolithic, through the Neolithic and Megalithic, and on into the Bronze Age. The rough-hewn menhirs familiar to the rest of Europe, and contemporary with the megalithic era in Malta (Mar 2008), and Portugal (July 2007), are in evidence, but much more striking are the later, Bronze Age statue-menhirs, carved menhirs that resemble both huge stone phalli and statues of warriors. To my eye both are implied by the artists who created these amazing works of prehistoric art, between three and four thousand years ago. The warriors they represent, resplendent in their armour, with their daggers and swords, wear helmets every bit as phallic as they look, and the statues are monuments to the virility of the warriors and to the fertility of their power. There is only oblique mention of the phallic symbology in the guidebook, in this Catholic country, but reference is inescapable.

The interpretive work undertaken by the landowner and the Corsican authorities has resulted in some slightly deceptive placements. The six small statue-menhirs on the central monument are the broken upper-halves of once taller statues-menhirs that were incorporated into the spherical dome-like structure built over the top of the end of the spur by Nuraghic-era people occupying the site later than the creators of the statue-menhirs. The Western monument, below the Central Monument, is very Nuraghic indeed, bringing my trip last year to Sardinia strongly to mind. The grouping of the five tall statue-menhirs by the tree below the spur is clearly recent rather than historic. In truth what is visible now is (necessarily) a melange of several different periods of occupation overlain with late-20th century interpretation and reconstruction. By far the worst part of this muddle, however, is the placement of small plastic installations emitting quite horrid ‘mood-music’ here and there around the bluff, in between narrative descriptions. These, along with the regular, taller, metallic ‘interpretation stations’ with buttons for different languages – which unfortunately do not offer an ‘off’ button – turn this central area of the site into a kind of outdoor museum, neither one nor the other, and the French commentary interspersed with the ‘mood-music’ is the permanent default. This I must say I found most off-putting, and it was only at the platform, under the tree above the group of five tall statue-menhirs, that, hands on the stone, with only the whisper of the gentle breeze in my ears, I could in any sense ‘feel’ any of the majesty of the place.

Climbing further up to what they have termed the Quarry, to my eye the most striking sight was the clear face within the rock – far more interesting than the so called ‘dinosaur’ to the rear of the rock formation. Here, indeed, it seemed the Goddess of Stone and Earth looked out across the entire site, with her eerie headdress and staring eye.

The Bronze Age hut foundations, perhaps the dwellings of the carvers of the statue-menhirs, were fenced off, and hard to see – quite a contrast with the Barnhouse or Skara Brae – and clearly insufficiently ‘mysterious’ for the curators of this tourist attraction. I have to say, in the end, that the overlay of interpretation at this site to a certain extent spoiled the experience, certainly when viewed in contrast to sites elsewhere where the interpretation is strictly separate from the site, and relatively unobtrusive, though the reconstructions undertaken by archaeologists are everywhere evident: even the Stones of Stenness had been re-erected from recumbency within the last hundred years.

Nonetheless, the site is well worth the visit, if only to see, and feel the majesty of the extraordinary art-work of the Bronze Age statuary.

New Server

Today this – and several of my other sites – cease to be hosted on my own dedicated server – my own ‘box’. Today the operation shifts to a virtual dedicated server, on a shared ‘box’. This is a sign of the times, in many ways, as hosting other people’s websites has become a big player’s game (long ago) and I am rather too busy in ivory towers to spend much time on something that has become something of a hobby. Virtualisation, moreover, is also a sign of the times, and this deal is a third of the price of the last one! Do I feel nostalgia? Well I never saw my own ‘box’ – it was kept in a locked warehouse in Nottingham, where the new, shared box, is, too. So no, no tears for the past.

Sodomy

Personally I am proud to say I have been guilty of sodomy much of my life. Thank goodness I live in a country where it became legal, by the time I was 4 years old, albeit only for 21 yr olds; and although in my late teens and early 20s I was guilty of under-age sex with other 16-20yr olds, when the age of consent was finally equalised at 16 my sexual behaviour became not only legal but represented on telly in a sympathetic and even competition-winning manner (as opposed to wretched and probably dead by the end of the story). How awful that a ghastly despot in a far-flung country should be able to use a charge of ‘sodomy’ as a means of suppressing an opposition politician. It sounds like some Byzantine early Christian Roman Emperor arresting a bunch of Greek Philosophers. How grateful I am to live here, and not over there.

Anwar Ibrahim sodomy charge dismissed by Malaysian judge

Bradley Manning

Cute gay boy being persecuted by a homophobic military machine that’s just been told to listen while they tell!
Yeah, he probably broke their rules. But it needed to be said. So I support him, against them. He should be rewarded for representing the people, regardless of whatever rules they’ve ever invented to try to stop him doing it.

Bold moves needed to stem the rot and create a new world

As the world teeters on the brink of who knows what, and the leaders of the G7 discuss it all on a conference call, here’s a few ideas for them:

Some statecraft is needed here: we need to leave behind the discredited ‘orthodoxy’ (epitomised by the extremist views of the swivel-eyed terrorist-Tea Partiers but followed in one form or another by most western governments) and wake up to the fact that the markets are a madhouse fundamentally at odds with the interests of the vast majority of the real world, and need to be reined in and chained down like a mad dog. After bailing out the banks in 2008, and then mismanaging the sovereign debt that ensued, world debt is now three times world GDP. So either we have calamitous defaults, or we print money and stoke up enough inflation to make the numbers add up. When world GDP is equal to or greater than our debt – in numbers at least – we can settle down and balance the books again. A litre of fuel may cost a fiver, rather than £1.40, but it’ll still be a litre of fuel.

Most importantly, we must wake up and realise that there is no ‘wisdom’ in the markets, only savage and feral self-interest that needs to be caged, tamed and closely monitored with robust and thought-through regulation that has not been written by the likes of Goldman Sachs.

Like it or not, the eurozone probably needs fundamental no-quibble fiscal union – effectively turning it into the United States of Europe with strong local government. And that means Germany picking up the bill for a while. They’re scared of it now, because its been their ambition for 150 years to dominate Europe again (for the first time since the collapse of the medieval Holy Roman Empire) and having gone the wrong way about it twice they’re baulking at having it given to them on a plate. But its the only way forward now. [STOP PRESS – first moves toward this now underway]

Here at home in the UK, I have to say the man still making most sense is Vince Cable. The rest of the coalition don’t seem to get it at all, and Ed and his crew have a lot of ground to make up yet before I’ll be convinced they’d be any better. Probably the best way out here would be fundamental Land Reform, enabling us to tax the 0.36% of the population that own 2/3 of the land of the British Isles.

And do I think it likely that the G7 leaders will take this advice? No. I bet they’ll all just batten down the hatches, declare even more austerity, and run the world economy into the ground. Having a meeting without China, is, after all, part of the hubris that brought about the problem in the first place. ‎“What we are witnessing is not just the decline of the US but the decline of the west.”

Soon, then, will come the defaults, and the rioting will really get under way.

Chaos as Ice Turns to Water

OK so the world can lurch on after a deal is finally being struck to stave off default in the US. The Euro’s latest sticking plaster is more likely to last as long as many hope.

But aren’t we being chivvied headlong – by a tea-drinking dog that believes the elite should be properly rich, that there should be those who are above, and those who are below – down a road in which the middle classes are those who are progressively being culled? Viewed from left field, although their consumption patterns are gargantuan, the super-rich – even the burgeoning global plutocracy whose hegemonic strategies dangle the tea-drinkers on their invisible strings – are probably individually (even collectively) responsible for much less of a climate change inducing carbon footprint than that being enacted by the great mass of the middle classes created since the second world war. This road, indeed, might actually be good for the planet. Along with a few nuclear power stations to reduce dependence on fossil fuel faster than we can create enough sustainable sources.

Pull the other one?

Strike Day UK

Remember when teachers, nurses, doctors, librarians, social workers, care assistants, bin men and lollipop ladies crashed the stock market, wiped out banks, took billions in bonuses and paid no tax?
No, me neither.

Government by media spin

Osama bin Laden

“Benjamin Ferencz, an American lawyer who was a US prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials and who lives in New York state, asked whether the killing was justifiable self-defence or premeditated illegal assassination. He would have preferred he had been captured and put on trial.

Ferencz, 92, said : “The picture I get is that a bunch of highly trained, heavily armed soldiers find an

old guy in pyjamas and shot him in the chest and head and that borders, without access to more facts, on murder.” He added: “Even [the head of the Luftwaffe Hermann] Göring had a right to trial.””

Ewen MacAskil et al Guardian 4/5/11