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British Museum Grayson Perry Exhibition
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British Museum Grayson Perry Exhibition
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November 10 2011, 8:46am | Comments »
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British Museum Grayson Perry Exhibition
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AndyRobertsPhotos
British Museum Grayson Perry Exhibition
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November 10 2011, 8:45am | Comments »
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Australia Garden at British Museum
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AndyRob
Australia Garden at British Museum
May 12 2011, 11:12am | Comments »
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Australia Garden at British Museum
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Australia Garden at British Museum
May 12 2011, 11:11am | Comments »
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Australia Garden at British Museum
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Australia Garden at British Museum
May 12 2011, 11:10am | Comments »
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Flybe profit warning sends share price crashing down
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/05/flybe-profit-warning-sends-share-price-crashing-down
Flybe shares drop 25% as airline admits cash-strapped consumers are cutting back on air travel
This article titled “Flybe profit warning sends share price crashing down” was written by Dan Milmo, for The Guardian on Thursday 5th May 2011 16.42 UTC Flybe’s £215m flotation has come crashing down as the carrier’s shares shed 25% of their value in the wake of a profit warning over waning consumer appetite for air travel. The Exeter-based regional carrier bases its appeal on “affordable travel from the most convenient airport” but admitted that lower high street spending in the UK had affected demand for cheap flights since the new year, with domestic routes among the hardest hit. Despite warning of cash-strapped customers, Flybe also announced a £3 fuel surcharge on all flights from September. Flybe said the slowdown in consumer outlay, already indicated by trading woes at high street names such as HMV and Mothercare, had affected “discretionary spend” on air travel and triggered significant analysts’ downgrades. Flybe said it expected pre-tax profits for this year to be broadly in line with the 2010/11 figures, which put it heavily out of kilter with analysts’ expectations. Investors ignored Flybe’s defence of its “resilient and flexible” business model of flying from small airports such as Southampton and Norwich, and sold the shares heavily. Shareholders had expected a pre-tax profit of about £36m, not the £22m indicated in the trading update, and Flybe’s shares slumped 25% to 172.50p, far below the flotation price of 295p last December. Flybe’s new investors included George Soros, the hedge fund tycoon, who acquired a 3.4% stake on flotation and whose more assured bets included starting a run on the pound in 1992. British Airways owns a further 15% of the business. One of the pioneers of add-on charges including baggage fees when it rebranded from British European in 2002, Flybe said the £3 fuel surcharge would be dropped if the price of Brent crude fell below $75 (£45.60) per barrel for 28 consecutive days; its current price is $117 per barrel. Flybe also indicated cutbacks on its domestic routes as it flagged the possible disposal of surplus aircraft, believed to include the Bombardier Q400 turboprop planes that are used on its UK services. In its trading update the company did not expand on its strategy of building its presence in continental Europe but it is understood that Flybe is standing by plans to add 35 Embraer aircraft to its 68-strong fleet, with the option of buying 105 more. The £66m float proceeds have been earmarked for the expansion, which includes codeshare deals where it operates flights on another carrier’s behalf. Iata warning The International Air Transport Association (Iata) warned that the financial markets have taken a bearish stance on airlines. Airline share prices have underperformed stock markets by 17% this year, Iata said, and investors now fear that carriers will be hard hit by higher fuel costs – about a quarter of the industry’s cost base – and the consequent effect on demand as higher prices hit sales. “Financial markets, bullish over airlines through 2010, now believe the industry will suffer more than most in this high fuel cost and demand-shock environment,” said Iata. Flybe said demand from business travellers, who account for 45% of its customers, remained strong. “This sector has proved very resilient,” said Flybe, echoing recent comments by Iata, which said demand for business class travel was holding up more strongly than in the back of the cabin. The premium airline market grew 7.7% in February, compared with a 3.3% improvement in economy class traffic.
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May 5 2011, 12:46pm | Comments »
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Isles of Scilly turn heat on Jersey over ‘warmest place in Britain’ claim
Where’s the warmest place in Britain? The Isles of Scilly near Cornwall or Jersey in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, France. NB: UK, ’Britain’ and ‘The British Isles’ are not exactly the same places.
This article titled “Isles of Scilly turn heat on Jersey over ‘warmest place in Britain’ claim” was written by Leo Hickman, for The Guardian on Sunday 10th April 2011 16.33 UTC Tourism officials on the Isles of Scilly are to lodge a complaint over a claim made by Jersey’s tourism office in a £1m TV advertising campaign that the largest of the Channel Islands is “the warmest place in the British Isles”. Met Office temperature records for Scilly obtained by the Guardian also appear to undermine Jersey’s claim. The Met Office officially recognises Scilly as the warmest place in the UK. A Met Office spokesman said that Jersey – 50 miles further south – does not fall under its auspices because “it is not part of the UK”, although “it had no reason to doubt” Jersey’s claims to be warmer. The small print on Jersey’s advert says it bases its claim on “minimum temperatures supplied by the Jersey Meteorological Department“. Tony Pallot, Jersey’s principal meteorological officer, said Jersey’s “mean minimum” for 1971-2000 – the period used by the Met Office to calculate all its mean temperatures – was 8.9C (32F). However, Met Office data for Scilly seen by the Guardian says the “mean minimum” for St Mary’s, Scilly’s largest island, was 9.4C over the period. On other measures such as hours of sunshine and maximum mean temperatures, Jersey performs marginally better. The council of the Isles of Scilly is also contesting the use of the term “Britain” in Jersey’s advert, arguing that the Bailiwick of Jersey is a British crown dependency but not part of the UK. It also argues that, geographically, Jersey is not part of the British Isles archipelago. Julian Pearce, the council’s economic development officer, said: “We shall be writing to Jersey to remind them of both our geographical position and our ranking as the warmest place in the UK.” He also said he was investigating whether the council had grounds to make a formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Jennifer Ellenger of Jersey Tourism said: “We stand 100% behind our advert and we have the data to prove we are the warmest place. We are politically part of the British Isles, even if not strictly geographically.” She confirmed the advert’s claim is based on the mean minimum temperature, but also on two further measures – average hours of sunshine per year and “mean annual” temperature. She added that another aim is to suggest the people of Jersey are the warmest in the British Isles, too. Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency for “Great Britain” – namely, England, Scotland and Wales – said it defines the “British Isles” as being “all the main and offshore islands of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands”. Malcolm Bell, head of tourism at VisitCornwall, which works closely with Council of the Isles of Scilly to attract 4.5 million tourists to the far south-west of England each year – 100,000 ofwhom visit Scilly – said he would be writing to Jersey Tourism in support of Scilly. He said: “When I first saw the advert I just laughed. It seems a bit desperate to base an advert on warmth alone when people who are only interested in that would just go to somewhere such as Dubai instead. “But the advert’s claim is also a bit cheeky. People want honesty in advertising. “Jersey might just about be technically correct in what they say, but it is bordering on unethical to stretch the truth like this when promoting your destination. We are in economically challenging times and we want to fight fairly for every customer.” Jersey, which received 685,000 visitors in 2010, has been challenged before over its tourism campaigns. In 1990, the ASA upheld a complaint against Jersey after it failed to substantiate a claim that it had more sunshine that anywhere else in the British Isles. In 1993, the ASA criticised Jersey for making exaggerated claims after it ran a newspaper campaign boasting that “our sandy beaches are always spotless and all of our golden beaches are scrubbed and rinsed twice by clear blue water”. The ASA noted that “on seven recent occasions large quantities of untreated sewage had poured onto bathing beaches”. Last year, Jersey Tourism accused the Met Office and the BBC of discrimination because it felt the Channel Islands were routinely left out of national weather forecasts. As a result, it said it was missing out on millions of pounds worth of revenue from prospective visitors. “Many people don’t have any idea just how lovely the weather is a short hop away from the mainland – meaning we lose out on valuable income,” David de Carteret, director of Jersey Tourism, said then. It was this grievance, says Jersey Tourism, that led it to base this year’s campaign around the “warmest place in the British Isles” slogan. Scilly v Jersey Number of islands Scilly: 145 (five inhabited) Jersey: 1 Population Scilly: 2,100 Jersey: 91,626 VAT Scilly: 20% Jersey: 0% Economy Scilly: tourism, daffodil farming Jersey: banking, tourism, Jersey Royal potatoes, Jersey cattle History Scilly: site of hundreds of shipwrecks, including five German U-boats during second world war Jersey: occupied by the Nazis from 1940-45 Sport Scilly: smallest football league in the world with just two teams, Woolpack Wanderers and Garrison Gunners Jersey: fields its own team at the Commonwealth Games TV highlights Scilly: An Island Parish Jersey: Bergerac Famous visitors Scilly: former prime minister Harold Wilson regularly holidayed on Scilly and is buried at St Mary’s Old Church Jersey: Alan Whicker lives on the island Languages Scilly: English, Cornish Jersey: English, French and Jèrriais Local food and drink Scilly: pasty; “scuppered” ale Jersey: “bean crock” with cabbage bread; cider
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“We are politically part of the British Isles” is a nonsense since the archepelago is a geographical entity and not a political one. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogIsles of Scilly turn heat on Jersey over ‘warmest place in Britain’ claim
Related posts:Ireland, Portugal … Britain? George Osborne only has Plan A David Cameron is uniting Britain. Against him Anti-cuts campaigners plan to turn Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square
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April 10 2011, 12:27pm | Comments »
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Honda considers suspending UK production after Japanese crisis
Carmakers Honda are considering a plan for coping with the parts shortage in Swindon as the global impact of earthquake and tsunami takes hold
This article titled “Honda considers suspending UK production after Japanese crisis” was written by Tom Bawden and Justin McCurry in Tokyo, for The Observer on Saturday 2nd April 2011 23.13 UTC Honda could be forced to halt production at its car plant in Swindon next month as the repercussions of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami reach British factories. At a crunch meeting this week, the Japanese carmaker will agree a plan on how to tackle the growing shortage of key components such as satnavs. Executives will discuss a range of options, including a temporary closure of the Swindon plant, which employs about 3,000 staff, or a period of reduced production. The plant makes about 165,000 Civics, CR-V compact SUVs, and Jazz superminis a year and is braced for a shortage of electronic, electrical and brake parts. Each car comprises about 20,000 parts, 10% to 15% of which come from Japan. A Honda spokesman said: “All scenarios are a possibility. There will be an impact, although it won’t be till May. We don’t yet know what to do to get around the issue, but a decision will be made some time this week.” Honda is by no means alone, with car manufacturers around the world expecting interruptions to production as component shortages spread worldwide. Toyota’s UK plants in Burnaston, near Derby, and in north Wales are to continue a ban on daily overtime and fortnightly Saturday shifts imposed around the middle of last month, while a Nissan spokesman said the group was “constantly monitoring the situation in the UK and all over its operations”. The shortage of parts in the UK is expected to become increasingly significant over the next month, since many components from Japan take six weeks to arrive. Paul Everitt, the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), said: “The disruption in Japan will have an impact on the UK motor industry, but the scale and timing remain very uncertain.” Initially, carmakers had hoped that most component manufacturers in Japan would be up and running in time to ensure minimal interruptions to overseas supplies. However, in the past fortnight it has become increasingly apparent that the damage and power shortages in Japan will have an impact overseas. Professor ManMohan Sodhi, an expert in supply chain management at Cass Business School in London, said: “There has been an aftershock in car manufacturing that mirrors the aftershocks from an earthquake. They may be smaller, but they are still significant.” In Japan, the economic damage caused by the crisis is already evident. Sales of new vehicles plummeted by 37% in March, the biggest monthly decline since 1974. Although none of the major car manufacturers suffered serious damage to factories, most cannot return to full operation until at least mid-May. Toyota had to halt production at all 18 of its plants in Japan immediately after the earthquake, although two have since reopened to produce a limited number of Prius and two other hybrid models. Honda said it would resume making parts for export markets tomorrow, with production due to restart at all its Japanese factories seven days later – but only at half their original capacity. The firm has not said when manufacturing will return to normal. Nissan, which estimated that its production fell by 55,000 vehicles in March, said it would resume normal operations by mid-April at all but one of its assembly plants. The exception is a factory in Iwaki, north-east Japan, located just 50km from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
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Related posts:Japanese nuclear officials fear crack in reactor core Fukushima factor adds pressure to economic fallout from Japan’s crisis Cost of insuring Japanese government debt jumps
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April 6 2011, 6:32pm | Comments »
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Marks & Spencer makes Paris comeback with Champs Elysées store
New Marks and Spencers shop to open in Paris France 10 years after controversial retreat. Items on offer will include food – by popular demand.
This article titled “Marks & Spencer makes Paris comeback with Champs Elysées store” was written by Kim Willsher in Paris, Dan Milmo and Marie Winckler, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 17.54 UTC Shortbread and Earl Grey tea are heading back to the Champs Elysées later this year as Marks & Spencer returns to France, a decade after its retreat across the Channel prompted street protests in Paris. The retailer replanted a British flag in the heart of the Gallic retail industry by announcing, 10 years after it quit the capital amid stern criticism from trade unions, politicians and ardent muffin fans, that it would open a shop on Paris’s most famous boulevard before Christmas. The retailer is opening a three-storey outlet on the Champs Elysées, towards the end of this year. What is more, following a clamour by British organisations in France and threats of a boycott, it will be selling not only women’s clothing and lingerie – as first thought – but also food. Thoughts of ready meals and cheddar cheese may still appal a nation that gave the world haute cuisine. But French foodies have a grudging respect for the venerable British retailer, and Parisians were excited about the “grand retour”. Comments on French newspaper websites were overwhelmingly positive. Audrey Guttman, 23-year-old Parisienne arts consultant, said: “Special occasions in my childhood were peppered with Marks and Spencer delights such as Bugs Bunny-shaped fried chicken and Percy Pigs soft candy. I was devastated when they left, and the same items coming in from London just didn’t quite taste the same afterwards.” However, like many she was doubtful about the uncool choice of location: “Really, Marks and Spencer, the Champs-Elysées?! It’s not 1999 anymore!” French blogger Wendy Nourry Breguet, 25, added: “As a Frenchie, Marks & Spencer has always been an Ali Baba’s cave of food, fresh products, spices, foreign foods, which are absent from most French shops.” Pierre Cornette, a 28-year-old gallery owner was less convinced: “M&S plays on its super image in France for quality and tradition, but I can’t really see how it’s going to sell its English products to a Paris clientele, above all in this age of organic produce.” As well as the 1,000 sq metre Champs Elysées shop, there will also be five Simply Food stores at “transport hubs” such as railway stations in Paris and a “handful” of larger shops in and around the French capital. A website, trading in euros, will be launched and will be the group’s first to permit international purchases and deliveries across France. The original idea was for the new store to sell only clothing and home goods, in accordance with the lease on the prestigious Parisian floorspace. But a campaign persuaded executives to change their minds. British-born Pamela Lake, a Parisienne since 1963, who spearheaded the “no food, no go” campaign, said she and her British and French friends were delighted by the company’s apparent change of heart. “It would have been commercial suicide to do otherwise,” she said. “I shall be there for my double cream, bacon, sausages and Indian food.” She added: “I phoned my friends this morning and said ‘we’ve won’. Everyone was so pleased. When M&S closed here it was practically a day of national mourning for us in Paris. Now the company has admitted it was the biggest blunder they ever made.” She said French friends who joined the campaign would be looking forward to getting their Christmas crackers, mince pies and Christmas puddings. “They’ve also missed the Stilton cheese,” she said. All M&S stores in continental Europe were closed as the company battled to turn around its British business. Last year the former boss Sir Stuart Rose said the decision to pull out of Europe was a mistake, calling it “tragic”. The company’s chief executive, Marc Bolland, said the company was “very excited” about its return: “Over the past 10 years the number of demands … from people for us to come back has been enormous.” He added: “Our company has changed in a positive way and France has moved on as well. We want to come back in an extremely positive way.” Bolland has declared he wants to speed up the group’s international expansion and said there was scope for faster growth, particularly in Asian markets. M&S has 358 stores in 42 overseas territories.
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April 1 2011, 4:36pm | Comments »
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Olympic stadium completed on time
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/29/olympic-stadium-completed-on-time
London 2012 Olympic Stadium designers hail ‘the beginning of the end’ of the construction phase as the main arena comes in on schedule and under budget.
This article titled “Olympic stadium completed on time” was written by Owen Gibson, for The Guardian on Tuesday 29th March 2011 19.51 UTC The designers of the Olympic Stadium in east London have hailed its completion as “the beginning of the end” for the construction phase of the 2012 Games. As International Olympic Committee inspectors arrived in the city for a three-day visit to check on progress, organisers hoped the good news on the completion of the Stratford stadium would overshadow an ongoing row with the British Olympic Association over how any hypothetical profit would be distributed. Lord Coe, the chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, watched Frankie Fredericks, a four-time Olympic silver medallist, lay the last piece of turf on the infield. The £486m stadium is the second major venue on the Olympic Park to be finished, after the Velodrome was unveiled earlier last month. “I do not want anybody to run away with the idea that this stadium is ready to stage a track-and-field championship tomorrow,” said Coe. “But as a chairman of an organising committee to be able to tick off this venue is terrific. It is fantastic. I think it will be an intimate theatre for sport and it has fantastic legacy potential, too.” Work began on the 80,000-seat stadium in May 2008 and the Olympic Delivery Authority, which is responsible for spending £8.1bn of public money on the infrastructure to host the Games, said its completion was a “huge milestone”. “The Olympic Stadium has been finished on time and under budget,” said ODA chairman John Armitt. “To complete a complicated project such as this in less than three years is testament to the skill and professionalism of the UK construction industry.” Rod Sheard, of stadium architects Populous, said he was looking forward to watching “this innovative design perform for the first time”. He added: “Its completion marks the beginning of the end of the construction phase of London’s Olympic Games.”
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March 29 2011, 3:35pm | Comments »
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Golden rower Tom James forces his way back into Olympic reckoning
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/25/rower-tomjames-olympicgames-boatrace
A Welshman Tom James heads the British squad‘s internal rankings for the boat race at the London 2012 Olympic games.
This article titled “Golden rower Tom James forces his way back into Olympic reckoning” was written by Martin Cross, for The Guardian on Wednesday 16th March 2011 15.33 UTC Tom James, one of the men who took a fours gold medal in Beijing, has made a dramatic return to the sport by heading the rankings of the British squad’s internal races, held last weekend. The Welshmen took a year out after Beijing 2008 and missed the 2010 season after an operation for a back injury. But the 27-year-old, who is still intent on forcing his way into the team’s top boat in 2012, surprised with his performance. On this form, it is likely that James could have a major influence on the shape of the British Olympic team. James will now be teamed up with Alex Gregory, a former fours world champion, who also came well in well in the internal series of races. Remarkably, though the two men have not raced together before, they share the same age and birthday. Britain’s chief coach, Jürgen Gröbler, will be hoping that this new combination will have enough synchronicity and dynamism to challenge his top pair of Andrew Triggs-Hodge and Peter Reed – who were told by Gröbler to sit out the trials. But despite being the anchor men of the British squad, since 2004, Triggs-Hodge and Reed – also Olympic champions – have recently suffered 12 straight defeats at the hands of New Zealand’s top pair. Now, Gröbler will hope that the new partnership of James and Gregory may just be the combination, either to beat Triggs-Hodge and Reed or push them hard enough to help them find more speed for the 2011 season. The 38-year-old Greg Searle is also a man in search of more speed. The Barcelona Olympic champion wants a second gold in 2012 but found the pace tough last weekend. While his physiology is still developing well, Searle knows he must be fully focused on delivering a better result in the next crucial trials race, now just four weeks away.
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Related posts:Olympic Games 2012 medal haul will beat Beijing, promises UK Sport London Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park London 2012 Olympics countdown clock stops
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March 25 2011, 3:37pm | Comments »
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Bordeaux uncorked
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/23/bordeaux-uncorked
The city of Bordeaux is gleaming after a makeover and the region’s conservative vineyards are casting off their haughty image and welcoming visitors for city breaks in Europe.
This article titled “Bordeaux uncorked” was written by Oliver Thring, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 22nd March 2011 12.30 UTC The English have always liked Bordeaux. It presents them with a neat and nifty range of familiar French staples: old patissiers, echoey churches, pretty cafes with unsmiling waiters, old cobbled streets, and women who swoosh past, helmetless, on bicycles. For a couple of hundred years, this land, Aquitaine, was English, a chivalrous region roamed by troubadours and ravaged by plague and perpetual war. And it’s near the sea, of course, just a few miles over the dunes from the chilly Atlantic breakers. Or perhaps the English see something of themselves in the proud, reserved character of the Bordelais. This is a town that never bothered with tourism, that didn’t have to: it had already made its money on spices, slaves and grapes. In 1855, Napoleon III oversaw a list classifying the “best” Bordeaux estates, a census of allegedly top “growths” that still dictates the hierarchy and prices of specific wines. Twelve bottles of Chateau Lafite 2009, a “premier cru”, are yours today for around £14,000. Whatever else, the 1855 classification was a shrewd piece of marketing. It cemented Bordeaux’s entitled, Gallic haughtiness even as the town itself went to seed. A decade ago, Bordeaux’s buildings were soiled by age and neglect, the town a shabby sump of rotting docks and stagnant industry. Things are visibly changing. Modern trams now purr and whine through scrubbed boulevards; in the main square, the Corinthian columns of Victor Louis’s Grand Théâtre seem to glisten. Over at the Place de la Bourse, they’ve installed the “miroir d’eau” or water mirror, the most beautiful puddle in Europe. We stayed at the renovated Hôtel de Normandie (7 cours du XXX Juillet, +33 (0)5 56 52 16 80, hotel-de-normandie-bordeaux.com, rooms from €95, breakfast €15pp), brilliantly placed in the city centre and near the successful, funky wine school, Ecole du Vin de Bordeaux (3 cours du XXX Juillet, +33 (0)5 56 00 22 85, bordeaux.com, two-day course on Bordeaux wine from €218pp). The city is cleaning up the knackered old cathedral, too, which the Pope consecrated in 1096 in an early example of urban planning. Sweaty local students pedal tourists around the town in flimsy plastic rickshaws, pointing out the sights in broken, demotic English. Food But parts of Bordeaux still seem timeless. The old city is spliced by rue St Catherine, one of the longest shopping streets in Europe, flanked by boutiques and shoe shops. Near the big clock, one of the few surviving landmarks from the medieval period, a spice shop called Dock des Epices (20 rue Saint-James, +33 (0)5 56 44 41 57, dockdesepices.com) fugs the street with the smell of cumin and cassia. I bought some livid purple salt flavoured with local wine – it goes beautifully with fish. A rather grand cafe, Baillardran (55 cours de l’Intendance, +33 (0)5 56 52 92 64, other branches at baillardran.com), serves exquisite canelés, the local delicacy of tiny cakes of caramelised custard. La Tupina (6 rue Porte de la Monnaie, +33 (0)5 56 91 56 37, latupina.com, lunchtime menu from €16, evening tasting menu €60) is a stalwart side-street bistro that’s been open for almost 40 years. It was one of food writer Jonathan Meades‘s favourite restaurants, and it appeals to a very English ideal of French hospitality. Inside, a huge hearth roars and spits, roasting chickens and braising lamb, and there’s a vast board of pink, fat-studded charcuterie. The restaurant is famous for the heavy cooking of south-western France, but my starter was a huge slice of beef tomato, thick as a pack of cards, criss-crossed with padrón peppers, while a main of roast veal with vegetables was similarly light. They play birdsong in the loos, which is somehow a very French conceit. Another fabulous restaurant is Le Petit Commerce (22 rue du Parlement Saint-Pierre, + 33 (0)5 56 79 76 58, le-petit-commerce.com, two-course lunch menu €12), a bijou fish place with rickety tables, brusque service and a refreshing lack of tourists. Wine Bordeaux’s wine industry has been typically slow to welcome visitors. Max Bordeaux (14 cours de l’Intendance, +33 (0)5 57 29 23 81, maxbordeaux.com) is a wine shop with a couple of spartan black and white rooms and almost nowhere to sit down. But you can drink some of the most expensive vintages in the world here on a relative budget: they serve it in 2.5cl thimblefuls. A scant sip of Mouton Rothschild is €15, and Lynch Bages and Château Margaux’s second wine are both only €4. It’s a cracking idea – borne, perhaps, of a sudden realisation that the world is threatening to overtake Bordeaux, that lazy reliance on history and standoffish tradition might no longer do in a future of cheap long-haul and boxed Rioja. Driving through the gnarled and corrugated vineyards of the Médoc, you can feel Bordeaux’s persistent sense of entitlement or noblesse oblige. Prim, privileged chateaux sit like dowager aunts behind forbidding iron railings and old stone walls, staring with miserly joy at the writhing lucre of the vines. Billboards of the most famous names in the wine world flick past: Latour, Lafite, Margaux, Pichon Longueville. The signs could just as easily say “Keep Out: visiting these places is almost impossible for ordinary people”. So it’s exciting that a few of the younger chateau owners are beginning to open up to visitors. The “tasting room” of Château La Tour de Bessan (Route d’Arsac 33460 Cantenac, +33 (0)5 56 58 22 01, marielaurelurton.com) is a rusty old telegraph building that somehow Tardises into a sleek, elegant space. They teach people how wine is blended here, letting visitors mix tannic and complex cabernet sauvignon with hot, boozy merlot. One rather grand chateau, Gruaud-Larose (33250 St-Julien-Beychevelle, +33 (0)5 56 73 15 20, gruaud-larose.com), even holds cookery courses alongside its wine tastings, while a wing of Château Marojallia (marojallia.com) is now a comfortable hotel. Perhaps the most innovative recent development is a place called, in bolshy Franglais, La Winery (Rond-Point des Vendangeurs 33460 Arsac, +33 (0)5 56 39 04 90, winery.fr). It’s run by a family of Algerian winemakers who came to Bordeaux in the 1960s. La Winery is a gigantic greenhouse branded in Trainspotting orange, its crystal panes in stark, intentional contrast with its forbiddingly opaque neighbours. They sit you in a bright room and you answer a series of questions to determine the wines you might prefer. The quiz asks whether you prefer pizza or curry, for instance, or the smell of “honey and apricot” over “loose tobacco and undergrowth”. A person working there told me, rather unsurprisingly, that they faced scepticism and hostility from the old Bordelais winemakers. La Winery’s approach might seem dumbed-down or gimmicky, but it makes a refreshing change from the esoteric babble of much of the wine world, and its very existence signals a partial shift from the reactionary model of the established Bordeaux wine industry. Outside the ludicrous prices of its most famous wines, Bordeaux faces a difficult task: how to retain its relevance against increasing competition from the rest of the world, a currency situation making export difficult, and a perception that it’s fusty and overpriced. But most Bordelais know they can ill afford to jettison the heritage that is the source of their fame. The true winners in this debate are visitors to the region, who can both experience a newly gleaming city and inspect those few vineyards that have opened their gates. Getting there
By plane: Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies to Bordeaux from Bristol, Gatwick, Liverpool and Luton; British Airways (ba.com) flies from Gatwick. By train: Eurostar (eurostar.com) from London to Bordeaux starts at £109 return.
Further information: Bordeaux Office de Tourisme (bordeaux-tourisme.com/uk)
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March 23 2011, 3:16pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
UK nominates 11 sites for Unesco world heritage status
The Forth bridge, St Helena and Lake District have been put forward for consideration as worthy sites alongside Stonehenge for Unesco world heritage status. The decision will be made in June not in Bahrain, as originally planned but in Paris.
This article titled “UK nominates 11 sites for Unesco world heritage status” was written by Maev Kennedy, for The Guardian on Tuesday 22nd March 2011 01.00 UTC
The Forth bridge, the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where Napoleon died in 1821, and the Lake District are among 11 places the government will nominate today as worthy of becoming world heritage sites to be ranked alongside the Pyramids and Stonehenge. The government will also make a third attempt to have the corner of Kent where Charles Darwin wrote the book that changed the history of science recognised as a world treasure. John Penrose, the tourism and heritage minister, said: “Few places in the world can match the wealth of wonderful heritage we have available in the UK. The 11 places that make up the new ‘UK tentative list’ are fantastic examples of our cultural and natural heritage, and I believe they have every chance of joining famous names like the Sydney Opera House and the Canadian Rockies to become world heritage sites.” Places that failed to make the ‘tentative’ list include Blackpool, the former RAF airfield at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire, the Rows shops and half-timbered houses in Chester, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway. The government has been consulting on the type of sites which Britain should put forward after concern from Unesco, which has maintained the list since 1972, that it was increasingly dominated by castles and cathedrals in western Europe. There has been a conscious determination to broaden the geographical spread of the list and the types of sites nominated, leading to the inclusion of penal sites for transported convicts in Australia, four hydraulic boat lifts on a Belgian canal and the wonderfully named Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump prehistoric butchery site in Canada. Britain is nominating a judicious mixture of natural, built and industrial sites, including the slate industry of north Wales with its spectacular shale heaps still bearing witness to the days when Welsh slate roofed half the world, the Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire, Scotland’s beautiful Flow Country, the endlessly repainted Forth railway bridge which had the longest single cantilever span in the world when built in 1890, Gorham’s cave complex in Gibraltar, and Cresswell Crags, the limestone gorge honeycombed with caves which has some of the earliest evidence of human habitation in Britain and the country’s only known Ice Age rock art. The list is completed by two leftover scraps of the British Empire: St Helena and the Turks and Caicos. The government has still not given up on Darwin’s home, now in the care of English Heritage, where he wrote On The Origin of Species. Once the scientist found Down House in 1842 he left as rarely as possible for the rest of his life. He wrote the Origin and all his later work there and conscripted his children as assistants in taking observations on the fauna and flora in his own garden and the surrounding fields, which are remarkably unchanged. The government first nominated it in 2007 but withdrew on being warned the Unesco advisers were not convinced of its genuine scientific importance. It was resubmitted, with the ingeniously coined description “landscape laboratory” in 2009 to mark the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, but still failed to make the cut. The government, undaunted, will again add it to the list of proposed sites. The list of sites judged among the world’s most precious now runs to 911 in 151 countries: 704 cultural, 180 natural and 27 mixed. The new nominations were due to be considered by the world heritage committee in June in Bahrain but, due to the turbulent state of politics across the Arab world, the meeting has been switched to the Unesco headquarters in Paris.
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March 22 2011, 10:31am | Comments »
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Jets prepare to deploy despite Libya ceasefire
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/18/jets-prepare-to-deploy-despite-libya-ceasefire
Warplanes head for Mediterranean in attempt to increase prussere on Gaddafi as Nato envoys meet to back no-fly zone
This article titled “Jets prepare to deploy despite Libya ceasefire” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor, Nick Hopkins and Robert Booth, for The Guardian on Friday 18th March 2011 20.20 UTC British Tornado and Typhoon ground attack aircraft are expected to fly to bases in the Mediterranean as Britain, France and the US step up military pressure on Colonel Gaddafi despite his announcement of a ceasefire. The UK is also expected to set up a joint command centre with the US and France to co-ordinate operations that will be supported by a number of other countries, including Canada and Denmark. In further evidence of mounting determination to confront Gaddafi, ambassadors from Nato’s 28 member countries are due to meet to lend added support to the UN-backed plans for a no-fly zone. Nato also emphasised humanitarian operations, but suggestions that ground troops from Britain and other countries could be deployed in Libya were dismissed last night. “The absolute priority is to enforce the no-fly zone, and to secure maritime supply routes,” said a defence source. “Nothing else is in the mix at this stage.” Nato secretary general Anders Rasmussen said the UN resolution sent “a strong and clear message from the entire international community” to the Gaddafi regime to stop his “systematic violence against the people of Libya immediately”. To this end, an array of other British military assets, including reconnaissance aircraft and air-refuelling tankers, will be deployed to bases in the Mediterranean. Military commanders in the UK have called the entire effort Operation Ellamy. Though the MoD never talks about special forces operations, it is understood that SAS and SBS soldiers are already on the ground in Libya, providing information on likely first targets for any bombing raids. They could include airfields, supply routes and Libya’s anti-aircraft defence batteries. “Any operations will be highly targeted to ensure that civilian casualties are avoided,” said the source. It became clear that the complexity of co-ordinating joint operations with so many countries would stymie any immediate plans for air strikes to help the rebels. One strategic priority was to find a way of binding in Arab help for any attacks, even though this is likely only to be at a logistical and support level. The prime minister told the Commons that British Tornado and Typhoon aircraft were within hours of being deployed. However, Whitehall sources later admitted that no planes had left the UK, and nor were they likely to until the weekend. The day began with no clarity over the command structure for any operations – and whether they would be led or supported by Nato. These details were being frantically developed in the hours after the UN resolution was passed. General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, worked through Thursday night trying to secure agreement over who would do what and when, before attending the Cabinet meeting in Downing Street. He has been liaising closely with Air Marshall Sir Stuart Peach, chief of joint operations, who is based at the permanent joint headquarters of the three services in Northwood, to the north-west of London.The most likely scenario is that British fighters will be stationed at the British sovereign base at Akrotiri in Cyprus, where the RAF already has E3-D long-range air surveillance aircraft that are monitoring Libyan airspace. Nato is also operating 24-hour surveillance of Libya with Awacs reconnaissance aircraft based in Germany. British fighters may also be stationed at the Nato airbase at Sigonella in Sicily – Canada is sending six fighters there. “Once the decision has been taken about where they go, it won’t take the aircraft long to get there,” said the source. The Royal Navy still has two ships in international waters off Libya – the frigates HMS Cumberland and HMS Westminster. There are no plans to increase the number at this stage. However, the navy is working up a response force task group, which will include up to six different support and warships. That may be deployed in the weeks to come, sources said. The US already has a strong naval presence in the Mediterranean: a battle group of five vessels led by the ageing aircraft carrier USS Enterprise includes the nuclear-powered submarine USS Providence and the destroyer USS Mason, which both entered via the Suez canal last Saturday from the Red Sea. The USS Kearsarge is also in the area with a contingent of US marines on board while the USS Mason, a guided missile destroyer, was in port in Haifa, northern Israel on Wednesday. “Surveillance will be 60% of the strategy if the plan is to dissuade Libyan aircraft from taking off,” said Professor Trevor Taylor, head of the centre for defence management and leadership at Cranfield University. “And ground surveillance will be much more important still if the Libyans start using armoured vehicles because that will multiply the number of targets.” Barak Seener, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute, added: “Symbolically it’s very important to include an Arab element in any attacks. “Logistically they cannot provide very much, but it is important as a way of countering the accusation that this is an intervention which is colonialist and imperialist in nature.” Diplomats have said Arab countries that could participate in possible strikes might include Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The Arab League Agency from another era Hillary Clinton claims it was the Arab League’s recent statement on Libya that persuaded her the time was right to back military action in the country – the implication being that, unlike the invasion of Iraq in 2003, western intervention against Gaddafi has been legitimised by regional support. But do the 22 delegates who make up the league – almost exclusively ageing, male and appointed by autocratic governments that enjoy mixed support at best from their people – really represent 360 million Arabs, at a time when power relations in the Middle East are being radically reshaped? When the League of Arab States was founded in 1945, King Abdul-Aziz bin Saud, the then Saudi ruler, grandly declared that it would “enshrine the fondest hopes of the Arab people”. But today the high walls and carefully manicured gardens of the League’s Cairo headquarters feels like an anachronism, especially when contrasted with the grassroots energy that exploded around the corner in Tahrir Square as Egyptians toppled their president. Many are asking whether an institution originally designed to make the lives of British diplomats easier (they preferred dealing with a single Arab agency rather than multiple heads of state), and dominated through the decades by conservative political elites, has any role to play in articulating a unified voice of the Arab people on to to the world stage. At present all 22 Arab countries (alongside the four observer nations of Brazil, India, Venezuela and Eritrea) send one delegate each to the League. In the aftermath of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, their individual delegates from each nation stayed in place – shifting their allegiances overnight from a government of dictatorship to a government of the people, with no personnel change deemed necessary. The Libyan delegation has entered more murky waters; at the start of the crisis, Tripoli’s permanent ambassador to the League, Abdel Moneim al-Huny, tendered his resignation in protest at his leader’s “massacres”, and then promptly announced he had been reappointed by the people’s government in Benghazi to represent the Libyan population inside the League. Meanwhile, the Gaddafi regime appointed its own new representative, leaving the institution’s secretary general Amr Moussa with an HR headache. For now, neither of the rival delegates can attend Arab League meetings because Libya’s membership has been suspended, the first such action in the League’s history, although behind the scenes unofficial dialogue is being maintained with both men. The rest of the Arab world areis left with delegates appointed by their own undemocratic regimes, – who appear happy to deploy deploying the language of humanitarian concern in the case of Libya, but are noticeably quieter on brutal crackdowns against protesters in the Gulf and elsewhere. The League’s Chief of Staff, Hisham Youssef, believes that the winds of change blowing through this part of the world will strengthen his institution, not undermine it. “We’re moving in a direction that will hopefully lead to a more democratic region, and that in turn means a more democratic and representative Arab League,” he told the Guardian. Whether he’s right remains to be seen.
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March 18 2011, 5:32pm | Comments »
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English as she is spoke? Voice map finds American stresses not so loud
Project claims “evidence to show that British English is diverging from American English” rather than the other way around or convergence. Of course there’s no such thing as British English. If there were such a thing presumably, it would be some strange mixture of Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English accents, that doesn’t exist. Evidence of American influence in the British media is getting stronger.
This article titled “English as she is spoke? Voice map finds American stresses not so loud” was written by Mark Brown, Arts correspondent, for The Guardian on Thursday 10th March 2011 18.54 UTC It is a common accusation that Britons are sounding more American these days, but new evidence suggests that may not be so after all. Try saying aloud these words: controversy, garage, neither, scone, schedule, attitude. The British Library holds recordings of thousands of people saying those six words and early conclusions cast interesting light on the way English is spoken. As part of the Map Your Voice project, library curators have also listened to many thousands of people reading extracts from Mr Tickle (part of the Mr Men children’s books) – “tickles are small and round and have arms that stretch and stretch and stretch” – in an attempt to provide a log of contemporary spoken English. More than 10,000 English speakers from across the world have so far contributed to the project. “We’ve had an extraordinary response, we’re delighted,” said the library’s curator of sociolinguistics, Jonnie Robinson. One early conclusion is that Britons are not necessarily pronouncing their words as Americans do. Take “controversy”. Americans tend to put the stress on the first syllable – which the Oxford English Dictionary says is correct – while a majority of Britons now emphasise the second. “This is something that linguists have been tracking for some time but this is wonderful evidence,” said Robinson. “It is a pronunciation that is changing in the UK but not in America. It is good evidence to show that British English is diverging from American English, and scotches the myth that we’re all sounding more like Americans. It seems British English speakers are changing the way they speak and Americans aren’t.” Why Britons are increasingly stressing the second syllable on some words – applicable and harass are others – is another question. Another word being studied is “garage”, which for the vast majority of British English speakers rhymes with “marriage”, but for Americans still mostly rhymes with “mirage”. Then there is “neither”, which most British people still pronounce as in “scythe” while most Americans “seethe”. On the scone (gone)/scone (bone) debate, all the American speakers said the latter while two-thirds of British English-speakers said the former. The project is part of the library’s exhibition Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices, which runs to 3 April. Robinson said: “We have had lots of non-native speakers, which is important because they are thought by linguists to have an increasing influence on the way English will develop. Non-native speakers hugely outnumber native speakers.” So far 10,000 people’s voices have been recorded for the British Library collection and curators hope there will be significantly more over time. “I think we will have a collection the like of which does not exist anywhere else; that number of voices reading the same passage is going to be great for linguists to work with and is a great snapshot of the way English was spoken in a huge number of places at the start of the 21st century.” As well as many thousands of recordings of Mr Tickles and the six words, contributors also say a word that is special to them. One man from the Yorkshire dales offered “brozzen”, meaning full after a meal. But one of the most popular offered is one not yet in the OED but which will probably be known to anyone under 16: “peng”. As anyone down with the kids will know, it means attractive. • Add your voice at http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/mapabout.html
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March 10 2011, 2:10pm | Comments »
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May Day matters both for solidarity and our souls
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/05/may-day-matters-both-for-solidarity-and-our-souls
By all means celebrate St George’s Day as well but keep May Day as a bank holiday
Bluebells on May Day
This article titled “May Day matters both for solidarity and our souls” was written by Cole Moreton, for The Guardian on Saturday 5th March 2011 06.00 UTC Workers of Britain, unite! Rise and dance at dawn, or charm a worm out of the ground – or do anything, really, as long as it’s daft. May Day madness is under threat, and it is our patriotic duty to save it. The government wants to move the holiday, to celebrate St George in April or the battle of Trafalgar in October. Business leaders want to extend the tourist season, which is fair enough – but some also say that it would be more patriotic. That’s nonsense. English people don’t feel much affinity for their patron saint, who’s from Palestine anyway. And even the finest tourist officer would struggle to sell Parisians on the idea of coming over in the gloom of autumn for a day that marks the crushing of the French. In contrast, there is no day in the calendar more wonderfully British than May Day. This is the moment when May madness hits and our unique passion for doing eccentric things is seen once more in all its glory. Worms will be charmed, maypoles plaited and the sinister Obby Oss will stalk Padstow. Men and women will dance at daybreak in Dorset, re-enacting imagined fertility rites in or near the dominant part – so to speak – of the hugely well-endowed chalk figure at Cerne Abbas. The May Ball revellers of Oxford will risk their privileged necks jumping from the Magdalen Bridge in evening dress, even as a choir sings. And those are just the headline-making events. Right across the country, May Day is when the British people exercise their right to get outside and do something really silly. “We are eccentric,” I was told by Lesley Prince, a social psychologist and lifelong participant in civil war re-enactments. “It is part of the British national identity.” Of course, most of these “traditional” events are not nearly as long-standing as people claim. The crab apple fair at Egremont in Cumbria goes back to 1267, but the world gurning championships held there – apparently inspired by the sourness of the fruit – is a relatively modern invention. Worm charming in Blackawton, south Devon, appears beguilingly ancient and rustic but actually only started in 1984, when a bored local at the Normandy Arms wondered what happened to grass when you peed on it. He rose from his pint to find out, saw the ground come alive with worms, and a tradition was born. But whether these events are old or new, people love them. The numbers of participants and spectators have soared over the last decade or so. They generate income – people have got to eat hog roast and drink real ale while they do this stuff, obviously – but that’s not really what it’s all about. The point is to celebrate just being alive. Just being us. People on the left tend to be as embarrassed by morris dancing and maypoles as they are by the flag of St George. They would prefer to keep May Day for the workers, and for international solidarity. Which is fair enough, we need as much of that as we can get. But such squeamishness misses the similarity between the two strands of May Day. Both share the same spirit – a desire to resist being ordered about and told what to do. The British people can be a rowdy, bawdy, rebellious, fun-loving, mischief-making lot – when we’re at our best. That spirit has got stronger again in recent years, so that even our old Etonian prime minister must appear to be a man of the people. But moving the May Day bank holiday would be a big blow to that independent spirit, not least because many of the things we like to do just can’t be done in bad weather, which is more likely earlier or later in the year. Those rituals need to stay where they are, and we need to learn to love them, because there is a serious point here. Britishness is changing before our eyes, as ideas and cultures from all over the world remake us. Rather than lament the loss of our old certainties, we can – and must – choose to celebrate the possibilities of new Britishness. That means being open to the new – but it also means being proud of who we really are, which is a daft bunch of eejits. Let the tourism chiefs go charm a few worms, open their eyes and see May Day for what it is: a fabulous – and highly marketable – festival of Great British Eccentricity. We need it, for our souls. And anyway, who’d want to go cheese-rolling in the snow?
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March 5 2011, 4:30am | Comments »
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Free UK Domain with Free Hosting
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/08/21/free-uk-domain-with-free-hosting
A free .co.uk domain name with free web hosting and website building tools Does that sound too good to be true? The site is called “Getting British Business Online” and is run by a collaboration between Enterprise UK, Google, BT and e-skills UK, with the support of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. So it’s like the British Government giving away free websites to local businesses, but paid for by BT and Google. All you need is an address in the UK and a mobile phone and they register a .co.uk domain name for you and hook it up with Google sites. Then it’s yours for free for two years to promote your business, and after that you can renew the domain through BT or possibly transfer it out. In fact it looks as if you can transfer out after only 60 days if you don’t want BT to administer the domain, but you don’t have to redirect it to free Google Sites, you can redirect it to the web hosting of your choice by dialling a freephone number listed at the terms and conditions. Getting British Business Online
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August 21 2010, 1:54am | Comments »
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