At the weekend, Cllr. Marg Hickman, the cabinet councillor for neighbourhoods and a great supporter of the Tidy BS campaign, shot the video below at the junction of Perry Street and Stapleton Road – a notorious fly-tipping hotspot which your correspondent has been reporting to Bristol City Council for the best part of two and a half years.
The Post’s report states that Marg also sent the footage and photos to the city council in the hope Bristol Waste, which manages street cleansing and waste collections, will finally begin to get to grips with the problem.
According to the Post a council spokesperson said:
The refuse team emptied the bins this morning, and Bristol Waste Company have two men on Stapleton Road every week day, so they will clear up following attendance from the refuse crew.
One of the street cleansing supervisors has been sent to check the area to make sure everything is clean and tidy.
The council may have sent out a street cleansing supervisor yesterday to check, but one needs to be at that location 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since your correspondent reported another load of fly-tipping had mysteriously appeared in the same spot overnight.
Although progress on the ground may be slow, the Tidy BS5 campaign seems to be making better headway in the corridors of power since Marg’s intervention prompted Marvin Rees, Bristol’s elected mayor and past resident of Easton, to tweet on the filthy state of Stapleton Road, voicing his commitment to get our streets tidy.
However, Marvin and Marg have a big problem on their hands, as dumping litter and rubbish seem to be endemic throughout the city, not just in deprived BS5. Bristol’s annual Harbour Festival ended on Sunday evening and the Post noted in a separate report that the clean-up from the event is still continuing today, Tuesday.
Two of Bristol’s key arts providers – Trinity Community Arts & Artspace Lifespace – have launched a petition to save SPACE & Arts West Side, both located at 6 West Street in the Old Market area. The petitioners are urging Bristol City Council to keep the property as a space for community arts.
The two groups recently applied to the Council to keep Arts West Side for community arts use, but the city council has decided it wants to let the premises commercially, which the council estimates will generate £15,000 per year in rent – not even petty cash considering the council is facing an estimated budget deficit of £60 mn. forecast for 2019/2020.
This decision will have a huge impact on the grass-roots community art work taking place in the Old Market area, which sits in Lawrence Hill, Bristol’s most deprived council ward.
Trinity has been running the venue since August 2011 through Bristol City Council’s Community Asset Transfer Policy (CAT). The policy seeks to make publicly owned spaces across the city available for community use.
Emma Harvey of Trinity said: “We’re surprised by this decision, given the lack of commercial value of the premises and how it seems to conflict with the city’s vision of Bristol as an inclusive city of culture. We opened Arts West Side to support regeneration of the area. At a time when communities in Bristol are concerned that they are being left behind as other parts of the city prosper, it is sadly ironic that the Council themselves are acting as an agent of gentrification.”
There was good news this week for Bristol businesses with a yearning for high speed internet connectivity.
The Bristol Post reported on the deployment of ultra-fast 1 Gbps internet in the city.
While journalists at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth are quite competent at their main task of churnalism, such as copying and pasting the words of wisdom given in press releases by men in suits – as in the article in question – standards slip dramatically and the absence of sub-editors and the associated lack of quality control are patently obvious when Post staff try simplifying complicated technical concepts, as shown by the following sentence.
Shall we just examine the above sentence in detail? There’s plenty wrong with it both technically and grammatically, which schoolchildren sitting their SATs examinations at ages 10 or 11 years would be embarrassed to get wrong.
Firstly, those glass cables. The proper designation is “optical fibre cable“; and as is well known the correct use of terminology is important. An optical fibre cable is a cable containing one or more optical fibres that are used to carry light, whilst an optical fibre itself is a flexible, transparent fibre made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. So an optical fibre cable can be made of either glass or plastic, i.e. not solely glass.
Data from an internet connection is transmitted as light down an optical fibre cable. Light travels at the speed of light. However, it is the method for providing the internet connection which is “highly reliable and efficient, not the speed of light. The subordinate clause, i.e. “which is highly reliable and efficient is misplaced and should at any rate have been preceded by a comma.
Finally, there’s that speed of light; it’s so reliable and efficient that its precise value is 299,792,458 metres per second (approximately 3.00×108 m/s). It is commonly denoted as c, as in Einstein’s famous mass–energy equivalence formula. Furthermore, c is the maximum speed at which all matter – and hence information – in the universe can travel.
In the slightly better old days when the Post still employed proper sub-editors, any decent holder of that position would have taken that sentence to bits and re-written it roughly as follows:-
“These fibre optic cables deliver an internet connection reliably and efficiently at the speed of light.”
Or alternatively:
“These fibre optic cables deliver a reliable, efficient internet connection at the speed of light.”
Unfortunately, local newspapers and their online analogues nowadays seem to have forgotten that quality matters and with quality comes a reputation and with the latter, authority.
Apologies for the short notice, but there’s a community litter pick taking place tomorrow, 15th June, at Owen Square Park in Easton (map) from 3.00 pm to 4.30 pm.
See the poster below.
Owen Square Park is having its grand re-opening on 18th June, so Tidy BS5 supporters Up Our Street were asked to get involved and support a litter pick just prior to the weekend event.
Like many, I was saddened to hear of the death of Muhammad Ali. As a young lad growing up in the 1960s and keen on sport of all kinds, he was a large presence on the TV sports programmes and the newspaper sports pages.
His achievements in the ring and his stand against conscription and the Vietnam War helped reinforce his reputation: he really did end up as “the greatest“.
However, news emerges via the Bristol Post that Ali’s death may not be all it seems: Muhammad’s demise could have been at the behest of Marvin Rees, Bristol’s newly elected mayor.
However, as per usual, it is merely a case of the endemic bad use of English, appalling grammar and ambiguity by the Post’s semi-literate hacks.
One of the joys of the illiteracy of the Bristol Post – the city’s newspaper of warped record – is the unintentional humour the manifestations of that lack of skill inspire.
Such an instance occurred yesterday when the Post reported, with a local angle of course, on the reopening of the inquest into the victims of the Birmingham pub bombing by the IRA on 21st November 1974.
One of the survivors – Frank Thomas – now happens to live in Bristol and the Post’s reported duly managed to get rumble and rubble confused, as shown in the following screenshot of the article’s first paragraph.
Should any passing Post hack wish to avoid future confusion, the definitions of rumble and rubble are helpfully transcribed below from Cambridge Dictionaries Online.
Rumble (n.) – a low continuous sound.
Rubble (n.) the piles of broken stone and bricks, etc. that are left when a building falls down or is destroyed.
Unfortunately, the reporter concerned fails to tell readers how the car was able to stay in the saddle, given the inability of the car’s wheels to fit into the stirrups. 😉
Very soon after graduating and getting my first job with Imperial Group, I was taught by my then manager to avoid any ambiguity when writing. Times have clearly changed!
Jack Lopresti, the MP for the Filton & Bradley Stoke constituency on Bristol’s northern fringe, has questioned the UK’s treatment of the Afghan interpreters employed by the British armed forces during their deployment in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014.
The former Army reservist said it was a “stain on our country’s honour” that Afghan interpreters who had helped British soldiers, including his own 29 Commando RAs when they were mobilised in 2008-09, had been “abandoned”.
He told the Prime Minister that many had been murdered upon returning to their country and pleaded that all of them be offered “sanctuary” in the UK.
The PM said there was a “very generous scheme” to help those who had not been translators [sic] long enough to qualify to come to Britain.
According to Hansard, the full verbatim exchange between Lopresti and Cameron is as follows:
Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
During military operations in Afghanistan, British forces were heavily reliant on locally employed interpreters, who constantly put themselves in harm’s way alongside our people. I saw with my own eyes during Herrick 9 just how brave these interpreters were. Does the Prime Minister agree that it is a stain on our country’s honour that we have abandoned a large number of them to be threatened by the Taliban? Some have been murdered and others have had to flee their homes, in fear of their lives. We owe the interpreters a huge debt of gratitude and honour, and we must provide safety and sanctuary for them here.
The Prime Minister
We debated and discussed around the National Security Council table in the coalition Government and then announced in the House of Commons a scheme to make sure that those people who had helped our forces with translation and other services were given the opportunity of coming to the UK. We set up two schemes: one to encourage that, but also another scheme, a very generous scheme, to try to encourage those people who either wanted to stay or had not been translators for a long enough period to stay in Afghanistan and help to rebuild that country. I think it is important to have both schemes in place, rather than simply saying that everyone in any way involved can come immediately to the UK. Let us back Afghans to rebuild their own country.
If Mr Cameron cannot tell the difference between interpreters and translators, in spite of his expensive education at Eton College and Oxford University, I suggest he consults this handy illustrated guide. 🙂
Although they are more likely to be seen in upland areas of south-west England, Wales, the north Pennines and Lake District and much of Scotland, sightings of ravens are not unknown in the low-lying city of Bristol.
Common raven (corvus corax). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Your ‘umble scribe has seen single ravens around Temple Meads railway station, as well as in such inner-city districts as Easton. More often than not, I have heard the raven’s distinctive call before seeing it with the naked eye.
The largest number I’ve ever spotted at one time was a few weeks ago, when I sighted three ravens circling over Barton Hill, being mobbed by aggressive members of the area’s resident gull population.
Mythology and legend
Ravens have long featured in European mythology. In Irish mythology, the goddess Morrígan alighted on the hero Cú Chulainn‘s shoulder in the form of a raven after his death. In Welsh mythology ravens were associated with the Welsh god Bran the Blessed, whose name translates to “raven.” According to the Mabinogion, Bran’s head was buried in the White Hill of London as a talisman against invasion.
In Norse mythology, Huginn (from the Old Norse for “thought”) and Muninn (Old Norse for “memory” or “mind”) are a pair of ravens that fly all over the world, Midgard and bring the god Odin information.
In England a legend developed that the country would not fall to a foreign invader as long as there were ravens at the Tower of London (invasions are averted by the simple expedient of clipping the wings of the resident ravens. Ed.). Although this is often thought to be an ancient belief, Geoffrey Parnell, the official Tower of London historian, believes that, like so many other legends of the British Isles, this is actually a romantic Victorian invention.
In culture
In western culture ravens have long been considered to be birds of ill omen and death, partly due to the negative symbolism of their all-black plumage and the eating of carrion.
As in traditional mythology and folklore, the common raven features frequently in more modern writings such as the works of William Shakespeare, and, perhaps most famously, in the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. Ravens have also appeared in the works of Charles Dickens, J. R. R. Tolkien and Stephen King, amongst others.
Ravens have also featured in song. “The Three Ravens” is an English folk ballad, printed in the song book Melismata compiled by the appositely named Thomas Ravenscroft and published in 1611, but it is perhaps older than that.
The music and lyrics are set out below. The latter are in their original 17th century orthography, with the refrains in italics.
The ballad takes the form of 3 ravens conversing about where and what they should eat. One tells of a newly slain knight, but they find he is guarded by his loyal hawks and hounds. Furthermore, a “fallow doe”, an obvious metaphor for the knight’s pregnant (“as great with young as she might go”) lover or mistress comes to his body, kisses his wounds, bears him away and buries him, leaving the ravens without a meal.
Music for The Three Ravens
There were three rauens sat on a tree, Downe a downe, hay down, hay downe
There were three rauens sat on a tree, With a downe
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
They were as blacke as they might be. With a downe derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe
The one of them said to his mate,
‘Where shall we our breakefast take?’
‘Downe in yonder greene field,
There lies a knight slain vnder his shield.
‘His hounds they lie downe at his feete,
So well they can their master keepe.
‘His haukes they flie so eagerly,
There’s no fowle dare him come nie.’
Downe there comes a fallow doe,
As great with yong as she might goe.
She lift vp his bloudy hed,
And kist his wounds that were so red.
She got him vp vpon her backe,
And carried him to earthen lake.
She buried him before the prime,
She was dead herselfe ere euen-song time.
God send euery gentleman,
Such haukes, such hounds, and such a leman.
Your correspondent does not know what the three ravens circling Barton Hill found to eat, as dead knights are not exactly common in that part of the city. 😀
