Friday 25th August 2023 marked the end of an era and a sad day for Easton in Bristol. After 14 years of serving the public St Mark’s Community Café based at St Mark’s Baptist Church opened for the very last time after 14 years.
Of the local media outlets, only the BBC appears to have covered this event, but gave it a very sympathetic write-up.
Your ‘umble scribe has been going there 2 or 3 times a week for the past few years to enjoy baked potatoes, good cooking and the undisputed best cakes in all BS5, the latter baked by the remarkable Lesley, whose baking skills put my own late mother’s to shame (and that’s saying a lot, coming from a loyal eldest son!). My own particular favourites amongst her regular baked wares were farmhouse fruit, barra brith and anything with gooseberries or ginger. Furthermore, all the food served and the ingredients used to prepare it were ethically and locally sourced wherever possible.
However, this was a café with a difference: paying customers like your correspondent meant that the homeless could eat there for free. Below is a short video with interviews of both customers and café staff/volunteers to give an idea of what has now entered the annals of local history.
Although I’ll miss you all terribly, here’s wishing Lesley a happy retirement and I’d like to express my thanks to you, Nettie and all the café volunteers for keeping me fed over the years and being such wonderful people.
Not only can this particular driver not read, it would appear he is also suffering from colour-blindness. Are those double yellow lines denoting no parking at any time that I see to the left of the vehicle?
This driver is not only illiterate and colour-blind, but is also blissfully ignorant of the fact that parking restrictions extend over the full width of the highway from boundary to boundary, so parking on the footway (which some call the pavement. Ed.) will not absolve him or her from getting a thoroughly well-deserved parking ticket!
Walking up Whiteladies Road this morning, your ‘umble scribe spotted a picket line outside Broadcasting Brainwashing House as local radio journalists down tools for the third time in recent months to protest about cuts to jobs in the corporation’s local radio stations.
NUJ picket line on White ladies Road, BS8
According to the NUJ, “Despite the dispute winning huge support among the 5.4m loyal local radio listeners, MPs and councillors of all parties, a huge range of charities, non-league football fans, and community groups, the BBC is going ahead with plans to cut local content by almost half, with many popular presenters losing their jobs or choosing to go“.
Quality control at Reach plc regional press titles does not seem to be getting any better.
Ample evidence of this is provided by a story in today’s Bristol Live/Bristol (Evening) Post, which features a non-existent dog in one photograph, as shown by the screenshot below.
Spot the canine
To be fair to Bristol’s newspaper of (warped) record, the dog does appear in a subsequent uncropped version of the same photo with an identical caption.
Why the editor tolerates such duplication and lack of quality control is beyond the imagination of your ‘umble scribe. Perhaps s/he would care to explain in the comments below.
Bristol Live, the Reach plc local news title that serves Bristol (badly. Ed.) is not know for the restraint of its headlines; and one of yesterday’s was definitely what one could classify as sensationalist.
Indeed, judging by the headline war and mass killing have recently occurred in Studland in Dorset, if one takes the standard definition of carnage, i.e. “the violent killing of large numbers of people, especially in war“; and all relating to a car ending up in the sea.
Needless to say there is no mention of mass killings or hostilities in the report itself, only the minor inconvenience of cancelled ferry services. Could it be yet more evidence that the residents of the city’s Temple Way Ministry of Truth have a very poor understanding of the English language? They definitely have a tendency to use it like a blunt tool instead of a precision instrument.
On Tuesday your ‘umble scribe was at a meeting of the Bristol Clean Streets Forum, which brings together community activists, council officers responsible for waste management and enforcement and the council’s own waste management company, Bristol Waste.
A frequent plea your correspondent has been making for years was again repeated on Tuesday, namely to make greater use of the local media to deter littering, fly-tipping and other environmental crimes. as per the example of neighbouring North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Councils, who frequently have successful enforcement actions written up in the local press.
The meeting was informed that press releases were indeed issued to highlight successful enforcement actions but the local press preferred stories from the two local authorities mentioned above to anything produced in the newsroom down the Counts Louse.
Well, something finally happened yesterday. Bristol Live reported that the council had agreed to increase the charges imposed under its FPN scheme for environmental crimes such as littering. fly-tipping and fly-posting.
The Jane Street fly-tipping hotspot looking unlovely – as per usual.
FPNs for littering will be increasing from £100 to £150, with the discount for early payment rising from £65 to £75.
Councillors also agreed to double penalties from £200 to £400 for breaches of the “household duty of care”, which requires residents to take reasonable steps to ensure waste produced at home is only handed over to licensed waste carriers for disposal.
Since 2017 the council has earned a surplus of £220,000 from these fines and these proceeds have been spent on measures to keep streets clean, including removing fly-posting, anti-littering campaigns, equipment to litter-picking groups, clearing graffiti and additional enforcement according to Kye Dudd, the Cabinet member for climate, ecology, waste and energy.
Ever since the so-called United Kingdom disastrously withdrew from the European Union, the supporters of Brexit have been promising Brexit bonuses. The first of these could have finally happened, if the photo below of a display in a foreign exchange bureau in Bristol is telling the truth.
$600 for a fiver? Your ‘umble scribe couldn’t believe his eyes! Have the economies of the EU27 gone into total meltdown in the last couple of days?
Perhaps all those air miles clocked up by Kemi Badenoch, Secretary of State for Patronising, are paying off as told to the Europhobic hacks at the Daily Brexit (which some still call the Express. Ed.)
Well, if Brexit really is going that swimmingly, your correspondent reckons he’ll shortly be seeing unicorns on the Downs – Bristol’s answer to the sunlit uplands.
Is this a Brexit bonus or a mistake? Have your say below in the comments.
Expressing political opinions on walls is a practice that reaches back at least 2,000 years to Roman times – as in the case of Pompeii and other Roman towns and cities – and possibly even earlier.
One wall at the start of Whitehall Road in Bristol has displayed various messages – all of them anti-Conservative – over the years (see posts passim here and here. Ed.), of which the one below is the latest.
It appeared some time before last week’s English local government elections. However, your ‘umble scribe does not know the extent to which this particular slogan contributed to the Nasty Party’s disastrous losses of over 1,000 council seats and – more locally – its loss of overall control of South Gloucestershire seeing as it lies on a well-used commuter and bus route between the city and that neighbouring local authority.
In 1647 during the English Civil War a series of discussions – the Putney Debates – was held in St Mary’s Church, Putney between 28th October and 8th November about the political settlement that should follow Parliament’s victory over Charles Stuart, the arrogant autocrat commonly referred to by history as Charles I.
A transcript of the discussions can be found here.
The main participants in the debates were senior officers of the New Model Army who favoured retaining a monarch within the framework of a Constitutional monarchy, and radicals such as the Levellers who sought more sweeping changes, including One man, one vote and freedom of conscience, particularly in religion.
Amongst those Levellers whose words were transcribed is Thomas Rainsborough (pictured right), a colonel in the army, who is on record as favouring government by the consent of the governed, as expressed below.
I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under; and I am confident that when I have heard the reasons against it, something will be said to answer those reasons, in so much that I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no that should doubt of these things.
Rainsborough was in particular supported by John Wildman and Edward Sexby. Sexby’s most salient contribution to the debates is as follows:
Our case is to be considered thus, that we have been under slavery. That’s acknowledged by all. Our very laws were made by our Conquerors… We are now engaged for our freedom. That’s the end of Parliament, to legislate according to the just ends of government, not simply to maintain what is already established. Every person in England hath as clear a right to elect his Representative as the greatest person in England. I conceive that’s the undeniable maxim of government: that all government is in the free consent of the people.
These sentiments were opposed by senior officers in the New Model Army, particularly Henry Ireton, and especially as they feared universal suffrage would remove the privileges that property ownership bestowed upon them.
In saying so, Rainsborough, Wildman and Sexby were men well ahead of their time, given the extremely limited nature of the franchise in those distant days. The franchise was not really increased to any great extent until the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the right to vote (but still limited it by a property qualification) and abolished the so-called rotten boroughs. Even after the extension of the franchise, in a city the size of Bristol with a population at the time of over 100,000, only 15,000 had the vote. Working class men like my two grandfathers did not receive the vote until after World War One. At the same time the franchise was also extended to women over 30.
The incompatibility of monarchy with democracy was highlighted and put to good comedic effect by the Pythons in their 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
You enjoy your bling bonnet day at our expense, Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, but just remember one thing: WE didn’t vote for you!
In 1647 during the English Civil War a series of discussions – the Putney Debates – was held in