That restaurant was shit...

...but no, we can’t let you publish that in your newspaper, I’m afraid.

I have never eaten in Goodfellas on Kennedy Way in Belfast, but if a restaurant reviewer has, after due consideration of their responsibilities, decided to say in print that they didn’t have a good experience there, they are entitled to say it as long as it is true and fair comment.

A jury recently disagreed with that, saying that the Irish News was defamatory in its review. This will have a chilling effect on Northern Ireland’s newspaper reviews of restaurants, and that is wrong.

To correct the balance a little, I’ll make a few comments. First: all restaurants should be obliged to let people bring their own wine if they wish, because markups on wine lists are completely unreasonable. If I can buy a wine out of Sainsbury’s for £6.99, I don’t expect to have to pay double for it simply because a waiter brings it to me, uncorks it and pours some into a glass.

Second: save us from the tyranny of having 2 fixed-length sittings for dinner in average restaurants in Belfast. Deane’s Deli is a star offender here: it serves very good food, yes, and is popular; but it is not popular or superb enough to justify having to cram people in for only 2 hours per meal. And if it was that superb, giving diners only 2 hours would be virtually a crime.

Third: if your restaurant must have a bar, make it a bar. Reasonably-priced drinks and staff who know what they are serving and are always behind the bar. Your bar staff should not have to serve diners their drinks and deal with people having aperitifs or a few for the road as well.

Fourth: wobbly tables. Am I to enjoy my meal fully when the act of spearing food with my fork creates disturbances of a kind last seen off the island of Java on Boxing Day 2004? Will I delight when a tsunami of Riesling from an upended glass threatens to topple my precariously-arranged main course, leaving me with no choice but to soldier on and eat the resulting mush because they need the table in half an hour?

tags: [uk], [belfast], [libel], [defamation], [journalism], [restaurants], [food], [law]

The usefulness of Occam's Razor

Having quietly simmered all week over the gay adoption row currently enlivening the op-ed columns, I think the application of Occam’s Razor is called for.

Let’s peel away the first layer of superfluity: this row takes place within the context of an Act which does not legislate on adoption per se, but on the unacceptable presence of discrimination against lesbian, gay and bi people in the provision of goods and services in general. The Act, and in particular the proposed Regulations, state that, broadly speaking, refusing to offer any service of any kind to anyone on the basis of their sexuality will be illegal. That is the wider context of this particular row.

Applying our honed blade to the next layer, it becomes apparent that the Churches’ choice of Church-based adoption agencies as a stick with which to beat the Act is very deliberate. Adoption is an obviously emotive issue even if you remove the sexuality complication — it involves vulnerable children and all kinds of imaginary threatening demons are being conjured up by using it as the particular locus for discussion. The implication is that predatory people of the worst kind would be able to adopt children if the Act’s provisions removed the Church’s trusty protection of proper values in its own adoption agencies.

Why is the Church arguing on this issue? Is it that they genuinely feel the chalice of religious freedom will be dashed to the ground by the Act? If so, why do they not argue so publicly and ferociously against other laws?

The Razor says: they do not wish to be forced to act impartially towards people of different sexualities, and this is because they are homophobic.

Homophobia is the vein running under everything in this row; it is the vein which sustains the row. The question at issue is whether an organisation should be exempted from having to observe human rights because it is, to a greater or lesser extent, institutionally and traditionally homophobic.

The point of the legislation is that there is no place for homophobia in the ethics of equality. The Churches which raise objections do not do so out of a regard for the welfare of children. Their distaste for gay people is their motivation, and this should not be sanctioned by the law of the land.

tags: [gay] [sexuality] [religion] [rights] [homophobia] [church] [equality]

Info - Orange network down in Belfast!

What a bummer. And there I was, all ready to give them hell for accidentally barring my phone or something. So in case Google reaches this in time for it to be of any use, I’ve just talked to Orange, and they said the network is down in Belfast and will be down for possibly the rest of tonight, but will definitely be restored tomorrow.

Does anyone know how to claim money back from mobile networks in compensation for lost network time?

Lucombe Oak fallen!

Belvoir Forest’s Lucombe Oak (Quercus x hispanica ‘Lucombeana’) has fallen! Peripathetic is told that it was standing yesterday, and we didn’t notice any massively violent winds last night, despite the forecast, but there it is: a very rare and large tree, a shoot from the original Exeter hybrid, lost. :o(

Oh well. Wind, eh?

tags: [trees] [oak] [lucombe] [dendrology]

Miscellany

Did anyone know about Camden Town tube station in London being covered with rather exuberant graffiti over Christmas? I didn't, but the results are... colourful. Can’t say I think they’re art, but I do like it when staid British authority gets sneaked up on and laughed at every now and then. Unless, of course, the taggers in question actually damaged any tiles or fixtures, in which case I’ll ’ave ’em myself!

The BBC has compiled a list of 100 things it didn’t know this time last year. I’m assuming that’s the same as 100 things everyone didn’t know, but looking at some entries I’m not so sure. But they’re diverse — the torrid revelation that most Indian guys find standard condoms too big (can’t say the same), the worrying stat about hospital keyboards and MRSA, ditto cow farts.

Others I definitely did know — the consistency of the brain, coprolalia, cats frightening bears, the medical benefits of music, and that thinking about muscle can make you stronger.

A landscape architecture blog has a magnificent photo of a bit of the new machine inside CERN’s Large Hadron [*] Collider, while ages I posted a photo of a huge cavernous chamber there.

[*] I typed that, first, as Hardon Collider. Heh. Heheheh.

Get all your South Park episodes. And here too. Videos of cool and freaky physical properties here. Finally, if you like rocks and intrigue, read about Cerro Torre.

tags: [london underground] [tube] [weird] [cern] [southpark] [science] [climbing]

The Haul, 2006

It’s that time of year again. The turkey carcass has been bashed with a cleaver on an old wooden chopping-board, and reduced to stock in a large pan which has bubbled mysteriously on the stove for hours, releasing wonderful smells. Those smells have mingled with the smell of hot mince pies and the sweet, sharp rum butter which melts over them. You have sat down in your favourite chair by the Christmas tree, and in the warm glow of its twinkly lights you see a scrap of wrapping-paper, perhaps some gold ribbon, on the floor. The presents are all opened and you’ve been relaxing for — hopefully — days.

Now that I have, I feel able to open my eyes a little more, and think about what I’ve got rather than curl up with it and feel pure delight. In no particular order, there is a card from Jonathan, with a large snowball and two almost criminally cute kittens inside. There are a selection of books — from the world of the duel in Scotland to strange and wonderful things in the English countryside; from Joyce’s Dubliners to Donn’s poems, both editions in Folio. There are DVDs of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie doing their thing, and profoundly amazing footage of animals and plants doing theirs. There is a bottle of whisky — and another, and another, although I have claimed the last two as Christmas presents when they actually aren’t. They simply fit the mood and the season.

All these would mean very little without the tapestry of magic and homeliness around them. I walked today in cold air beneath a crisp sky, and caught a whiff of someone’s chimney on the way back. And to be able to take delight in these things, weaving them into the magic and the magic into them, and feel very good about the world, is what I’m celebrating here.

tags: [christmas] [presents] [atmosphere]

I hear sleighbells...

I was down in the kitchen asking dad why he wasn’t listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, and had some other radio station on instead. He said “Well, they keep preaching at me” to which I said “But It’s all Christmassy and festive! Get it on!”.

All these things are part of the tapestry of atmospheric richness which is so vital and beloved a part of the season, whether you’re religious or not. We damn well can delight in them, whatever our persuasions, and I certainly plan to. I hope the coming days are magical for every single one of you. Happy Christmas. :o)

tags: [christmas] [music]

Londonish things

Because I’m feeling rather Londonish, after spending a wonderful, peaceful, enlightened few days there over Thanksgiving at Jonathan’s place.

I’m not going to write about it now, though. The above picture will be enough to impart the magic. So, to business: Google maps and the British Library team together to create a London where the deep wells of history are placed over the streets. You must sink them yourself.

The St. Pancras hotel development seems... thankfully redbrick, but a large block in the sketches looks ominous. Old bricks used in new buildings do not matchmake naturally.

Travelling on the Docklands Light Railway is excellent when the weather is clear and the mornings crisp, and since London’s docks have always been its lifeblood, reading about them is an excellent way to jumpstart new adventures. As is dropping into an old London church or two.

tags: [london] [docklands] [architecture] [churches]

Shostakovich, and other things which matter

Sorry about the lack of recent posting. I’ve been rather wrapped up with work, not to mention the fact that a very good friend of mine visited last weekend and we talked about varied things instead of blogging about them. But while we’re on the subject, he's featured in a book which was published recently, so go buy.

The featured buy in this post, however, is here because I’m aware that it’s nearly Christmas (all too aware — the local shopping centre has had its trees and decorations up for a week!) and you'’ll obviously be looking for meaty yet excellent value classical purchases for your friends.

This set of Shostakovich’s symphonies is just that. Conducted by Mariss Jansons, who grew up while Shostakovich was still alive and composing, the works sweep and leap and jerk from the speakers in all their schizophrenic splendour, and there are only a few stretches where he doesn’t quite hit the mark, and where the performances could be described as ‘tasteful’. It must be very easy to perform the symphonies badly, but there’s never any of that here. I picked up all 10 CDs for £35; when you consider that there are 12 hours of first-time discovery here, and many more for the repeated listening this set effortlessly merits, it’s damn good value.

tags: [common ground] [writers] [shostakovich] [classical] [music]

Someone just said...

“I feel so naughty when I get some, like it’s the 50s and I’m buying rubbers.” Maybe this is a Northern Ireland thing, but I always feel naughty when I buy them.

“I’ll take any extra time, any way at all.” I was about to say that I have just sat through a profoundly settling experience, but that doesn’t exactly fit. I have sat here, certainly, sipping my coffee and finding my eyes well suddenly with tears time and again as Keith Jarrett’s tendons exert the labyrinthine variances of attack which break upon your head as wonderful, wonderful music.

I will say, as an almost insultingly formulaic aside, that whereas Radiance is pottery still excitingly on the wheel, the Carnegie Hall Concert is a line of solid and varied bowls, glazed, tempered, jagged, which you will eat from with relish for years. It is to this time in his music as the Köln Concert was to... that time. And taking time, and playing with it in the most inventive sense, is his trademark, and the recent pastime of another:

“Getting there became happiness. And happiness became creativity. Ideas fluttered around me like butterflies. Oh, actually, those were butterflies. Happy, real butterflies...” I had heard Jonathan say this in my mind as if he were there in front of me. Actually, I had been reading the words, and before listening to the Jarrett, so that all those blushing chords were like smiles in a Greenwich kitchen.

I had been tipped off about the recording by him, after all, and one of the encores, entitled The Good America after the fact by Jarrett, simply put the full stop gently at the end of that particular certainty. You can live happily at home, oh yes you can, watering old roots and enjoying the spring of the earth. But there is a reason why, on going home after a long time away, you smile... while pausing and looking at the front door.

tags: [transgression] [music] [jazz] [beauty] [home]

Autumn

Coming home from London, where I went for a long weekend last Saturday, always leaves me uprooted for a few days, as if Belfast isn’t quite the right place and London a bizarre halfway-house somewhere between an absolute home and a seething excitement.

So, a lot more than a week on from the start of Autumn, I’m not going to try to offer a post on anything but how it felt to be walking around Tate Modern and suddenly see that these paintings, which I’ve featured on the blog here for 3 seasons, were suddenly there, in front of me, hanging on the walls.

Much larger than I imagined them, also, much more imposing and concrete — and very fitting that I should have been attracted to the online images by accident and then found them inside my favourite art gallery.

tags: [london] [tate modern] [art] [painting] [memory] [autumn]

Fallingwater

Now, before you think “Oh god, another Fallingwater post”: I know this building has been featured here and in many other blogs before. And I know that the particular way it’s featured here might not be entirely accessible to all readers, but then the real house isn’t either!

So I present to you: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater — rendered in careful, detailed 3D and available for you to snoop around inside! In Half-Life 2, though. If you don’t have that game, watch the video instead.

tags: [architecture] [games] [half-life 2] [3D rendering] [frank lloyd wright] [fallingwater]

Rip their little hearts out

I can’t quite believe that even Tony Blair is saying this: it’s possible to spot families who will have problem children, and if such families don’t accept help they’ll be sanctioned.

Mr Blair told BBC News his government had made “massive progress” in tackling social exclusion but there was a group of people with multiple problems.

There had to be intervention “pre-birth even”, he said.

What a profoundly invasive, not to mention insulting, mistake. For a start, there are plenty of lionized artists and musicians and painters who actually enriched the world and, not to mention because, they came from what Tony would call menacing backgrounds.

Further, what kind of information would the Government need to compile lists of such families if we had such madness on the statute book? Hmm? Any thoughts? Maybe ID cards? Maybe a lot more information about every individual than many people would be comfortable with.

Because consider this: Tony Blair isn’t saying that the sanctions would be applied in situations where a parent applies to claim a state benefit. Hew’s saying, so far at least, that these sanctions would apply across the board — which they’d have to, if he’s serious about the menace of embryo hoodlums.

In other words: we’ll sanction families even when they haven’t asked us for anything if they don’t accept our ‘help’.

For that, you’d need information on whether or not they were having a relationship, not to mention their sexuality.

Just saying.

tags: [tony blair] [tyranny] [nanny state]

More stealing

Clock watching in Prague. I’ve tried to find something about the astrological clock there, and exactly what it's meant to signify. From this, I can deduce that the clock in Prague was showing just after 3pm when the photo was taken, and the sun is in Leo. Other stuff I don’t understand.

The saga of the maddeningly difficult Great Eastern, a cable steamer in the old days when you needed telegraph cables on the seabed to communicate long-distance.

Un rendezvous...

A photo site of the Lake District fells.

tgs: [clock] [astrology] [telegraphy] [rendezvous] [film] [cinema] [climbing] [lake district]

Heh!

Via the superb and thankfully ongoing Incoming Signals.

tags: [art] [photography] [seurat]

I can't bloody believe it

Not the fact that there’s a terror alert right now, though. Of course I can believe that. Of course I can see the insanity that is enveloping mass travel as a result of the overnight arrests is actually taking place. But what I can’t believe is that we’re letting it happen so... blithely.

Here we have, on the BBC website, people saying: “Well, I think the police did a marvellous job last night so of course they can reach into my life and screw around with it as much as they like. I’m completely happy to have my shoes x-rayed, and really rather comfortable with having to buy a book and throw it away before the flight if I wish to read in the airport bar. A complete absence of writing materials and music of my own to listen to is fine, and I have a laid-back attitude to having an additional 4 hours added on to the normal time it takes me to fly within my own country. In fact I am content to be treated as a potential terrorist along with everyone else, regardless of the certain and needless sense of threat this may cause among the wider population. The thought of sitting on a long-haul flight with toyless, blanketless babies delights me. None of this will really change my holiday and therefore my ability to enjoy myself, which of course is the point. We shouldn’t let the terrorists upset us. More tea?”

Well, I don’t agree with any of it. There. I said it. What we know about these supposedly well-planned attacks isn’t even extensive enough to give us knowledge that they were well-planned. What we know is sketchy at best, and at worst illusory. Of course what the police know is more detailed, but I wouldn’t mind betting there are massive gaps in their knowledge, and inside those gaps could lurk... possibly nothing massively terrifying at all.

I’m not for a second saying that this chaos is worse than 10 aircraft exploding over the Atlantic and thousands of body parts being fished out of the sea. However, it’s a significant, invasive, and self-catalysing over-reaction.

As plenty of people are saying in this Metafilter thread, there are real reasons behind why there are so few planned attacks that actually work. Very few people are actually plotting them. Fewer are planning to execute them. Fewer have enough money / organisation / resources to do so. Fewer are expert enough to slip below police radar for very long. And so on.

We’ve managed to stop... possibly something, possibly a white elephant, possibly something which would work and be nasty. And if all the people arrested turn out to be lurking denizens of snarling terror, we have also caused the other members of their cells to fragment and hide for another year or so. I really would not mind betting this month’s salary that if everyone could fly as normal today, no harm would be done. Statistically each of us is immune to actually being involved in a terror attack. So why the overreaction? Why do our governments encourage us to think that we really can live in a perfectly safe, cocooned world as long as we’re as careful as they say we have to be? Read this, and think.

Happier notes, which you really should read more of than my rant above: The time travel tube map — Herzog and de Meuron’s propsed extension to Tate Modern (I’m really not sure whether it’ll stand the test of time) — proposed islands in the Thames estuary, out in the water East of London, one ofr an airport (maybe they can build a prison there too, for all the travellers) — Seattle’s underground city: houses left behind as the city’s pavements rose above them.

tags: [terror] [london] [travel] [aviation] [london underground] [tate modern] [architecture] [subterranean city]

Mr Mayner writes

A few years ago, I walked up to floor 5 of a big bookshop in central London, hankering after a job, and who should be standing behind the desk but a certain Mr Mayner, who had been at Aberdeen at the same time as I had. And who I didn’t really know while there, but we said hello anyway. And then suddenly he vanished from the store.

We cut to about 5 months later. I moved back to Belfast, and walked into a big bookshop in the centre of Belfast, hankering after a book and a job, and who should be standing behind the desk but... yes, correct.

He’d moved back there too, and we got to know each other over plenty of coffee, conversation, 24, sage discussions about What Was Best (for us, for the world, for America, for bookshops, etc.), more coffee, apple pie, and an arguably, but pleasurably, obscene amount of cigarettes.

Then, pulled by the twin lures of freshness and romance, he went to Edinburgh, and then vanished again. Recently he turned up below Waterloo Bridge in London, thankfully sans cardboard box and with a commendably, though crashingly, dull job to boot. Something to do with numbers.

Thankfully, his new blog’s not at all about numbers. And it has a good author. Go read.

tags: [friends] [london] [books] [luck]

A few quick things

And all stolen too, I’m afraid. First: the excellent set of photos of a former Russian nuclear sub base at Balaklava. Second: a very fun and challenging movie quiz. Third: Metafilter documents other movie quizzes. Guaranteed entertaining frustration.

Fourth: there’s really nothing like having the freedom to call your neighbour’s daughter a retard. Specially when you make a huge warning sign to that effect, and stick it up in your front garden. How do people’s minds become so hermetically sealed to the world outside thier tiny lives? Lack of travel, lack of conversation, lack of vision. Sigh.

Finally, a nasty but essential recording and video from a person trapped in the World Trade Center as it collapses. Ugh.

tags: [submarine] [derelict] [movie quiz] [retard] [insult] [world trade center] [9/11]

French grapes will grow...

... in the UK by 2090, according to this very interesting and vaguely scary report in the Guardian. These prjections for how life will change in the UK are obviously only projections but they are conservative and reasonably certain.

In other words, as I was remarking to a few friends last night, I’ll not see a lot of snow again in my lifetime unless I emigrate. Snow in winter means a lot to me, so I may consider it! Taking info from the report, though, here’s how things will pan out:

When I’m in my early forties, winters will consist of heavy downpours of rain rather than continuous stretches of it; summers will consist of more heatstroke and food poisoning; some crops will die out because it won’t be moist enough for them; we’ll be planting beech trees in the North of England as their range moves up there; some tropical fish will be found in the Channel; the Lake District will be plagued by a huge increase in visitor numbers in summer, eroding its paths and causing more accidents for the Mountain Rescue Team to deal with.

When I’m in my early seventies, I’ll probably be getting ready to drop off the twig anyway but summers will *all* be hotter than the 2003 heatwave, increasing my risk of heat-related death; sea levels will be 30cm higher around English coasts, specially in the south; mosquitoes will be a standard and potentially malarial irritant in summer; climate refugees from much hotter European countries could choose to settle here, meaning we’ll all have more foreign friends, which will be a Good Thing.

And if I make it to being just over 100, I forecast plenty of alcohol, drugs, and young male prostitutes if I’m rich enough. Heh. But seriously: winter gales will increase and snow will be almost unknown; those French grape varieties could be growing on the slopes of the Lake District; lowland pine forests will start to disappear; capercaillie could be gone for good from this planet as even North Scotland becomes to warm for them to live; July and August will be truly scorching and far too hot for holidays; skiing will be for super-rich people again because current resorts will be well below the new snow line; and finally, we could become an outdoor culture.

Hmmm. I’m feeling rather hot this morning. But the warmth isn’t going to stop me having my freshly-made coffee. Oh no.

tags: [weather] [uk] [global warming] [grapes]

SS Nomadic returned

The SS Nomadic has finally made it home to Belfast, after a very long time in service and a long rest in the River Seine in Paris. The tender to Olympic and Titanic has been a restaurant since 1974 and will, provided around £7m can be found, become a museum permanently morred in Belfast’s historic dockyard.

My father and I were arguing, rather heatedly, the other night about whether the seven million will actually be found to restore her. I reckon it will. Belfast currently has grand plans to build a museum about our notoriously ill-fated export, as well as full restoration and sensitive tourist development of the dry dock and harbour areas where she was built, launched and fitted.

Those plans can’t all happen, and won’t, given the parlous state of support for the arts and culture here. But Belfast, and those abroad who are fascinated by the White Star Line and what it produced, should find the time, money, creativity and commitment to ensure that the money and knowledgeable manpower is found for this one cause.

So if you’re interested in donating to the charitable trust which is raising the money, go here, read about the people on the team, and give some money.

tags: [ss nomadic] [belfast] [paris] [titanic] [olympic] [ship] [harland & wolff]