Reach plc local titles are an excellent source of exclusives, mainly due to the poor quality English of some of their employees.
Today’s Bristol Live/Post has one such exclusive, which also doubles up a secret classified for for very specialist workers in the construction trade, namely woodland builders, as per the screenshot below.
Your ‘umble scribe is glad to see that the generation of greenery has been modernised. Building woodland sounds much more contemporary and organised than just letting the shrubbery sprout naturally. It will also ensure more employment for those in the construction trade, which is always the first to suffer and the last to recover in any economic downturn. 😀
As seen yesterday on the fringes of Bristol’s Broadmead shopping ‘quarter’.
As it bears no imprint, your correspondent doubts this is official party political campaign material.
However, it is on a par with former Scottish First Minister Nicola Surgeon’s assessment of one of Sunak’s predecessors in the post, namely disgraced former party-time prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
Yet more Bristol street art, this time from the wall of the Coach at the junction of Braggs Lane and Gloucester Lane in the St Jude’s area.
Your ‘umble scribe is unaware whether the Twats being referenced are involved in Israel’s latest slaughter in the Gaza Strip, the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine, the US and UK attacks on Yemeni Houthis for their targeting of Red Sea shipping or any one of the manifold armed conflicts – whether international or internal civil wars/insurrections – which seem to afflict the world at any given moment.
Perhaps the artist Merny would like to comment below as to her/his motivation.
Bristol has a reputation for radical politics; a reputation that stretches back to the riots of 1831 and the 1793 Bristol Bridge riot. Some might even say its radical history dates back even further: in the 11th century, Bishop Wulfstan made it his mission to end the practice of selling Christian slaves to the Vikings Ireland and spent months preaching to the people of Bristol against the practice.
This radical tradition is continued by a new piece of street art which has appeared on St Mark’s Road in the Easton district in the last few days and clearly emphasises the area’s attitudes.
Saturday 6th January saw the first Barton Hill community litter pick of 2024.
The December event had been rained off at the last minute. However, this time the weather gods were beneficent and the sun shone.
All told five volunteers turned up, tidying the Ducie Road area, including its council-owned car park. In meetings with the council, your correspondent has been informed in the past that the car is supposed to be visited and cleansed by street cleaning crews once a week, although this appeared not to have been done well – or at all – in recent times.
Bags of swag
In one hour we managed to collect over 6 bags of general waste and recyclable materials for collection by Bristol Waste, after which three of us had another one our of usual interesting chats over tea and biscuits at the Wellspring Settlement before going our separate ways until next month.
As per usual, many thanks to Shona for organising and my fellow pickers for turning out on a cold morning. 😀
In the general torpor that obtains around this time of year, the proofreader at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth, otherwise know as the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live (a Retch plc publication. Ed.) has been caught in flagrante delicto asleep at his/her desk.
Today the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live published a piece on its website of great interest to price-conscious followers of fashion that would enable them to save hundreds of pounds, as per the screenshot below.
A saving of £1,288? That’s Hugo!
I’ve never heard of Huge Boss myself, but the paper’s author Emma Grimshaw clearly has as the name appears not just in the headline, but in the copy itself.
Primark fans are rushing to buy the chain’s ‘retro’ black dress. The £12 item also looks very similar to a Huge Boss outfit, but costs a fraction of the price.
Your ‘umble scribe has, however, heard of Hugo Boss AG of Metzingen, Germany which like its rival Huge Boss as per the Post/Bristol Live also sells ‘luxury‘, i.e. overpriced, clothing and fashion accessories.
In the world of intellectual/imaginary property, Huge Boss’ behaviour is known as passing off, i.e. misrepresenting the goodwill of an established company.
If the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live ever gets round to reporting the trade mark dispute between Hugo Boss AG and Huge Boss, your ‘umble scribe hopes it employs someone who knows how to proofread copy to do the job!. 😀
Further evidence arrives today of the continuing decline of journalistic standards at Reach plc titles – already a bar so low it’s in danger of touching the ground.
The proof: the author of this piece in today’s Bristol (Evening) Post/Live cannot even spell one of the title’s favourite clichés – much-loved – opting for a Bristolian sounding but meaningless much lover instead.
What is even more surprising is that the author is an award-winner within the journalistic trade.
If the qualityu control for press articles is as low as that down at Bristol’s Temple Way Ministry of Truth, your ‘umble scribe wonders just how much lower it must be where gongs for hacks are involved… :-D.
Lawrence Hill station (LWH), the first/last stop into and out of Bristol Temple Meads on the Severn Beach line, has been serving the travelling public since 8 September 1863 when services began on the Bristol and South Wales Union Railway to New Passage Pier north of the city on the banks of the River estuary.
For most of that time, services would have been hauled by steam locomotive, so there was more than a whiff of coal smoke, steam and nostalgia when your ‘umble scribe alighted from the bus to see a steam-hauled special complete with rolling stock in British Railways brown and cream livery pull up at platform 1.
Earl of Mount Edgcumbe steam locomotive at LWH
The train had been reversed up the line – note the rear red lamp on the front of the locomotive – so that the steam locomotive – the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe – could be turned around to haul the coaches back into Temple Meads one mile away.
The locomotive starts to haul the carriages back towards Temple Meads.
Eagle-eyed readers will note that the front of the locomotive in the second photo is showing a white light, not its previous red lamp.
Bristolian may exist as a dialect with its own idiosyncrasies, but within the city and county of Bristol itself, there’s one place where English is used in a peculiar way: the Counts Louse (as pronounced in the local vernacular; some call it City Hall – or a variant thereof – after its renaming by the then Mayor George Ferguson in 2012. Ed.).
In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote the following:
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Down at the Counts Louse, the English language has been used to conceal what is really going on behind its mock Georgian façade, particularly where funding cuts and redundancies are planned, usually couched in terms such as redeployment, restructuring and the like.
Perhaps the most famous use of such obfuscatory language occurred in 2013 when it was discovered – as reported by The Bristolian – that £165,000 in cash was missing from the council’s loss-making markets department (a department that’s supposed to make money for the local authority. Ed.). This was duly recorded in an internal report as ‘material income misappropriation‘.
We ordinary mortals have a much more succinct phrase than material income misappropriation. We call it theft.
That infamous bit of council-speak has now been joined by another phrase by Councillor Craig Cheney, the elected member in charge of the city’s purse strings, which was duly reported by the Bristol Post in relation to the evacuation of Barton House in Barton Hill due to structural defects.
Barton House. Image courtesy of Google Street View.
What Cllr. Cheney said to the local press while commenting on Barton House included the sentence below.
There’s perhaps not as much concrete as there should be.
Give yourself a pat on the back, Cllr. Cheney; that one sentence alone deserves its own special place in the annals of British understatement. 😀
In less light-hearted reporting on Barton House, it has now emerged that the government warned Bristol City Council in 2017 – six years ago – about the condition of Barton House and four other tower blocks built using the LPS building system and perhaps more scandalously that no structural survey of Barton House had been conducted since 1970, i.e. over half a century ago. Municipal neglect of the city’s infrastructure is endemic down the Counts Louse. 🙁
Bristolian may exist as a dialect with its own idiosyncrasies, but within the city and county of Bristol itself, there’s one place where English is used in a peculiar way: the Counts Louse (as pronounced in the local vernacular; some call it City Hall – or a variant thereof – after 