AUTUMN LETTER FROM NOTTING HILL
Having spent a week in the Shropshire countryside I returned to a very autumnal London, positively cold. The streets smelling of post carnival debris recently sprayed with power hoses, rather like a grubby kitchen sprinkled liberally with disinfectant.
In Shropshire I watched the liberation of Tripoli from the perspective of a number of satellite news channels, Sky, BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, Iranian Press TV and the Russia service RTN. Unsurprisingly Press TV provided undiluted Iranian propaganda, though RTN was little better and the accounts it provided of the Syrian uprising coming straight from the Russian foreign ministry, libelling the Syrian protestors in the process. Aljazeera provided amongst the best coverage, its reports nuanced and making real attempts at objectivity. The channel was on the hate list of the Bush administration and indeed if you believed everything said about the channel from those quarters you would think it the TV arm of Al-Qaeda, which many on the right in the US still believe.
Of course the destruction of Gadaffi’s gangster regime affords no satisfaction for the so called ‘Stop the War’ gang whose websites continue to ooze the standard anti American/NATO rhetoric and their extraordinary obsession with Tony Blair.
I returned not only to a post carnival Notting Hill but also post riot. I was astonished to watch a TV news programme concerning a restaurant in which staff had fought off looting rioters, this tuned at to be the restaurant at the end of my street, overlooked by my flat. So a spell in hospital had prevented me from observing a major scoop for this blog!
Now nowhere could seem so remote from the riot, the autumn wind blows a scrap of litter as the street surrenders itself to the change of season, England does autumn well as it does Spring and wet northern winters, the only season it does not do is summer, hence the rush to Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stanstead airports in July and August in a desperate rush to find the sun, however if you do spend the summer in England you enter the autumn season feeling cheated.
I visit the Library to find that the whole system for withdrawing books has been automated, I ask a young man with an identity tag where the History section is, he has no idea and wonders around like a lost soul, occasionally assisting someone puzzled by the automated system. I soon find the history section; much diminished and soon am also puzzled by the automated machine. He demonstrates how to have my library card read, the book code read and I confirm my choice, a small paper receipt is issued with the return date printed. This I will later write in the old date due strip, I will almost certainly loose the paper receipt.
I suppose with so many libraries closing I should be grateful, but I mourn the passing of the informed librarian with whom it was possible to have an intelligent discussion about books and more widely the steady reduction in human contact.
On Portobello Road my favourite butchers have closed and the travel bookshop featured in the film Notting Hill is also faced with closure, autumn being the season of loss these are all straws in the wind and profoundly depressing. I am a conservative with a very small c, wanting to preserve the best of England, happy in the knowledge that the other component parts of the UK including the strange land of my birth can look after themselves. However it is a doomed enterprise, the right wing ideologues who have been running the show ever since Thatcher will see to that, so that all that remains will be a memory as distant now as the working class solidarity that established the trade unions, the Co-operative and welfare societies and, not least, The National Health Service.
In Shropshire I watched the liberation of Tripoli from the perspective of a number of satellite news channels, Sky, BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, Iranian Press TV and the Russia service RTN. Unsurprisingly Press TV provided undiluted Iranian propaganda, though RTN was little better and the accounts it provided of the Syrian uprising coming straight from the Russian foreign ministry, libelling the Syrian protestors in the process. Aljazeera provided amongst the best coverage, its reports nuanced and making real attempts at objectivity. The channel was on the hate list of the Bush administration and indeed if you believed everything said about the channel from those quarters you would think it the TV arm of Al-Qaeda, which many on the right in the US still believe.
Of course the destruction of Gadaffi’s gangster regime affords no satisfaction for the so called ‘Stop the War’ gang whose websites continue to ooze the standard anti American/NATO rhetoric and their extraordinary obsession with Tony Blair.
I returned not only to a post carnival Notting Hill but also post riot. I was astonished to watch a TV news programme concerning a restaurant in which staff had fought off looting rioters, this tuned at to be the restaurant at the end of my street, overlooked by my flat. So a spell in hospital had prevented me from observing a major scoop for this blog!
Now nowhere could seem so remote from the riot, the autumn wind blows a scrap of litter as the street surrenders itself to the change of season, England does autumn well as it does Spring and wet northern winters, the only season it does not do is summer, hence the rush to Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stanstead airports in July and August in a desperate rush to find the sun, however if you do spend the summer in England you enter the autumn season feeling cheated.
I visit the Library to find that the whole system for withdrawing books has been automated, I ask a young man with an identity tag where the History section is, he has no idea and wonders around like a lost soul, occasionally assisting someone puzzled by the automated system. I soon find the history section; much diminished and soon am also puzzled by the automated machine. He demonstrates how to have my library card read, the book code read and I confirm my choice, a small paper receipt is issued with the return date printed. This I will later write in the old date due strip, I will almost certainly loose the paper receipt.
I suppose with so many libraries closing I should be grateful, but I mourn the passing of the informed librarian with whom it was possible to have an intelligent discussion about books and more widely the steady reduction in human contact.
On Portobello Road my favourite butchers have closed and the travel bookshop featured in the film Notting Hill is also faced with closure, autumn being the season of loss these are all straws in the wind and profoundly depressing. I am a conservative with a very small c, wanting to preserve the best of England, happy in the knowledge that the other component parts of the UK including the strange land of my birth can look after themselves. However it is a doomed enterprise, the right wing ideologues who have been running the show ever since Thatcher will see to that, so that all that remains will be a memory as distant now as the working class solidarity that established the trade unions, the Co-operative and welfare societies and, not least, The National Health Service.
