These awards are presented every year to people who make a difference in the part of East Bristol where I live. Nominations all come from the local community, i.e. friends and neighbours.
This year the awards were presented by local MP Stephen Williams, whilst the event was compèred by local broadcasting husband and wife team Pat Hart and Sherie Eugene Hart. Those honoured ranged in age from people still at school to pensioners.
The biggest cheer of the night was for Lil Stiddard, who received a standing ovation. Lili’s citation read:
It was 32 years ago that Lil and her husband became involved in setting up a club for older people in the community. Before Easton Community Centre was built, they met at the Chelsea Road Old Co-op. The floor collapsed with all the dancing the first time they used a temporary venue. At the age of 97, Lil is still active in the club, setting out the tables and chairs, bringing the tea and assisting the treasurer. “We are all human beings,” she says, “and need to learn to pull together.”
All the winners were photographed together at the end of the presentation.
Here’s a short film of vox pops shot at the awards.
Language is dynamic, constantly mutating and changing. One sign of this dynamism is the appearance of neologisms, i.e. newly coined word, or phrases or familiar words used in a new sense.
There are plenty of neologisms in evidence in this year’s Chambers Dictionary annual search for its word of the year, many prompted by or associated with information technology.
Chambers has this week announced that overshare is its word of the year for 2014, The Guardian reports.
“Overshare” topped a shortlist compiled by the Chambers editorial board, which included “bashtag”, defined as “a hashtag used for critical or abusive comments”, and “digital native” – “a person who has learned to use computers as a child”.
And the meaning of overshare? To reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life.
Zero Waste Week, now in its seventh year, is currently taking place in the United Kingdom between 1st and 7th September 2014.
The aim of Zero Waste Week is to “an opportunity to reduce landfill waste & save money“.
The theme of this year’s event is “One More Thing“.
Jane Street in Redfield, Bristol, shows in the picture below just what can be achieved with “One More Thing” in Zero Waste Week, in this case, one more instance of fly-tipping!
Image courtesy of Amy Harrison
As part of the campaign to clear up Easton and Lawrence Hill wards (under the #tidybs5 moniker. Ed.), I recently attended a meeting with Marg Hickman, my local councillor, and council officers (news passim). At that meeting I was informed by the officers that the problem of fly-tipping in Jane Street had disappeared since a local mafrish – a café used for chewing khat – had closed down following the UK’s outlawing of khat. Obviously the council officers concerned hadn’t bargained for the persistence of Bristol’s filthy fly-tipping community!
a third party smartphone app, such as My Council (which is available for both Android and iOS; and
telephoning 0117 922 2100.
The most direct reporting route is using the fly-tipping form as the report is sent directly to the department concerned, whereas the other methods require the report to be forwarded by its original recipient.
One of the oldest districts of Bristol is Redcliffe (or Redcliff. Ed.).
According to its Wikipedia entry, Redcliffe – the more common spelling – was once part of the manor of Bedminster before its absorption into the city of Bristol in the 13th century.
However, the spelling of Redcliff(e) has long caused controversy.
Richard Ricart, a town clerk of Bristol, in his The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar, written between 1480 and 1508 and recording the history of Bristol since the 12th century, refers throughout to Redcliff, although there is also an occasional unusual reference to Redecliff. Both appear in this extract documenting the digging of St. Augustine’s Trench (later renamed St. Augustine’s Reach. Ed.) in 1240:
This yere was the Trenche y-made and y-caste of the ryvere, fro the Gybbe Tailloure unto the key, by the maanovre of alle the Cominalte, as wele of Redcliff warde as of the Towne of Bristowe. And the same tyme thenhabitaunts of Redecliff were combyned and corporatid with the Town of Bristowe. And as for the grounde of Seynt Austyn’s side of the forseid ryver hit was yeve and grauntid to the Cominaltee of the seid Towne by Sir William a Bradstone then Abbot of Seynt Austyns for certeyn money therfore to hym paide by the seide Cominaltee. As appereth by olde writyng therof made bitwene the forseid Maire and Cominaltee and the seid Abbot and Covent.
Redcliff these days tends to appear mostly in street names, such as Redcliff Street – the ancient road leading from Bristol Bridge to the former Redcliffe Gate in the city’s medieval walls – whilst Redcliffe is the more common version.
A couple of quick text searches via Google of Bristol City Council’s website for Redcliff and Redcliffe gives the following results.
Redcliff: 1,120 results
Redcliffe: 4,020 results
However, confusion as the spelling of Redcliff(e) has a long history. This is amply illustrated by the painting below by James Johnson entitled Redcliffe Street. It was painted around 1825 and hangs in Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, has now stepped into this confusing orthographic and municipal muddle via the following tweet dated August 21st.
@wood5y I'm thinking of starting a campaign for the council to agree one way of spelling Redcliffe/ Redcliff and to stick to it. Are you in?
Before boundary changes preceding the 2010 election, Redcliff(e) was part of Kerry’s Bristol East constituency.
It has to be conceded that there is plenty of merit in Kerry’s suggestion, although she maintains she was only ‘moaning in Twitter’.
Bristol is nevertheless one of those places which changes at a glacial pace and place names in Bristol are frequently named after long-vanished owners/occupiers. For instance, most older inhabitants of the city still refer to the local authority’s headquarters as the Council House (pronounced Counts Louse locally. Ed.), even though one of the first acts of elected Mayor George Ferguson was to rename it with the American-sounding City Hall in a cosmetic exercise.
Does Kerry’s campaign have any chance of success? Your views are welcome in the comments below.
PSV Eindhoven supporters launched a vehement protest against the introduction of wifi at the their Philips Stadion ground during their side’s 6-1 home victory over NAC Breda in their opening game of the season, according to yesterday’s Guardian.
Fans displayed one banner reading: “F*ck Wi-Fi, support the team”. Placards with crosses running through the wifi signal were also held aloft before the match. Supporters’ groups believe the introduction of wifi is just the latest of a series of decisions by the club intended to gentrify the crowd at home matches.
However, the club’s website has a slightly different take on the introduction of wifi. The game against NAC Breda marked the test phase of the ‘Connected Stadium’ project. All visitors had free access to the internet, social media and email via the ‘PSV’ network. This is the first time in the Netherlands that a stadium has been equipped with a wifi network. The club is also asking users for feedback.
After the last Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum meeting where I talked about fly-tipping in my area of Bristol (posts passim), it was suggested to me that I devise a hashtag for use on Twitter and elsewhere to help highlight the problem. My answer was #tidyBS5.
The hashtag and its use have now been given another boost by publicity in the fortnightly Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Management email bulletin.
There’s also a meeting with councillors and officers on fly-tipping and rubbish in just over a week’s time to which I’ve also been invited. Let’s hope it ends in some proper enforcement and action to make scenes like the one below a thing of the past.
“Punk is dead” is a phrase recalled from my early twenties and apparently dates from 1978. Furthermore, “Punk is Dead” is also the title of a song by the legendary anarchist punk band Crass.
This morning a variation on the phrase drifted into my Twitter feed, as shown by the photograph below.
For today’s younger people, about the age that I was when punk first emerged, the leading lights of punk rock such as The Clash, Sex Pistols and their contemporaries have probably been added to the likes of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and other more typical exponents of “Dad Rock“.
Additional research has revealed that “Punk is Dad” is the title of a song by Berlin-based band Ohrbooten.
Could the graffito be cheap promotion for Ohrbooten’s offering – or is it just bad spelling? 🙂
On Friday Linguist Lounge’s Facebook page carried a disturbing report on the abysmal quality of interpreters – or more specifically one interpreter – used by Capita Translation & interpreting. It is reproduced in its full horror below.
We’ve received a report that today Capita sent an unqualified Portuguese interpreter to a court in England. The linguist is reported to have summarised court proceedings, using English terms for unknown words such as “guardian”, “placement”, “local authority”. The judge was said to have been made aware of this after the hearing, however, the defendant was left stressed and anxious, without any understanding of what was going on inside the court room.
When is the Ministry of Justice going to terminate its failing contract with Crapita? Will that have to wait until a change of government next year?
In the meantime Crapita will continue to be rewarded for poor service and public money will continue to be wasted.
One perennial problem in the Easton district of Bristol where I live is fly-tipping, the illegal dumping of waste.
Disgraceful! Trade & other waste dumped by communal bin for household waste in Stapleton Road, Easton
Some areas – such as Stapleton Road (see above picture) – have persistent problems and last night I gave a short presentation at the latest Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum meeting to try and encourage other residents and those who work in the area to get involved and make Easton a tidier place.
I’m pleased to say I received whole-hearted support from local councillor Marg Hickman, who is equally concerned about the amount of litter on the streets (are fly-tipping and littering related; does one attract the other? Ed.).
If anyone does draw attention to fly-tipping or litter on Twitter, you might like to add the hashtag #tidybs5. If you live elsewhere in Bristol you might like to adapt the #tidybs* hashtag, replacing the asterisk with the first figure of your postcode.
Yesterday I did learn prior to the Neighbourhood Forum meeting that persistence pays off: via an email from the city council I learnt that several traders on Stapleton Road are or have been served with fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping by enforcement officers. It’s a start, but I get the impression that fly-tipping will be as hard to eradicate as a Hammer horror film vampire.
Bristol will be European Green Capital in 2015. Unless it sorts out fly-tipping and other environmental problems in Easton and the city’s other less prosperous areas (like the plague of flies, dust and other industrial pollution in Avonmouth. Ed.), the accolade should be amended to read European Greenwash Capital.
Language is dynamic, constantly mutating and changing. One sign of this dynamism is the appearance of 
