The playwright Alan Bennett recently said that “England excels at one thing…hypocrisy”. If you needed any evidence that he was right, take a look at these results from a 2014 COMRES survey:
Archive for January, 2018
Hypocrisy Illustrated
Posted in Politics with tags Alan Bennett, BrExit, ComRes, Hypocrisy on January 3, 2018 by telescoperThe Old Year’s Blog Statistics
Posted in Biographical on January 2, 2018 by telescoperI’ve been back in the office (in Cardiff) today, where I’ve got through quite a lot of work – as well as doing my tax return at lunchtime – owing to the fact that there’s nobody else here. I’m about to go home and try to figure out which assortment of bins to put out but before doing that I thought I’d do a quick blog about the blog.
Once upon a time, in the good old days, WordPress used to publish the annual statistical summary page for its bloggers, but it discontinued that practice last year so now I’ll just write my own brief summary based on the data available via the usual dashboard. First, however, a picture:
Now, for those interested I got about 413K hits this year, just over 1100 a day, with about 212K unique views. That’s up a bit since last year, probably because I’ve posted more (442 articles this year, including reblogs). The two most popular posts were about the Bullying Scandal in Zurich and on the rumours surrounding a gravitational waves from a source in NGC 4993 (proved later to be true).
In 2017 there were 2610 comments on this blog, up about 10% on last year. No prizes for guessing who wrote the most comments.
Altogether since this blog started in 2008 to the end of 2017, it has been viewed 3,371,843 times by a total of 1,094,975 unique visitors (though, obviously, all my visitors are unique). I passed 3 million reads and 1 million visitors during the course of last year.
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Posted in Poetry with tags Dylan Thomas, Love in the Asylum, Poetry on January 2, 2018 by telescoperA stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds
Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds
Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.
She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies
She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.
And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
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Posted in Biographical, Politics on January 1, 2018 by telescoper
This is a picture of one of my old expired passports. It is, in fact, the first I ever had. It was issued to me in 1986, when I was 23 years old and a PhD student; I needed it to travel to a conference in France. It expired in 1996 (hence the docking of the top right corner) whereupon I had it replaced by a much better made Burgundy one.
I had never travelled abroad before 1986. I’m not from a wealthy family and we never had any holidays outside the UK. Given that, I’m grateful that I ended up in a career that allowed me to travel quite widely, within in the European Union and beyond.
I’m guessing that most of the people celebrating the imminent “return of the blue passport” recently announced by the Government never actually had one of these old-style passports, as they weren’t the colour of the ones UK citizens will have to carry after Brexit which will be Navy Blue, a tone much lighter than the blue of old passport, which is almost black.
This is, to me, just another example of the absurd hankering after an imagined past that never was that characterizes Brexit Britain.
Anyway, the colour of the next UK passport is of no real concern to me. Whatever its design it will not allow UK citizens to live and work freely within the European Union, so it will be of considerable less value than the existing ones.
Fortunately (for me, at least) I won’t be needing a British passport much longer and will have no need to renew mine for the downgraded version that will be mandatory after 2019. In fact when I get my Irish passport the first thing I’ll do is throw the old British one in the bin.
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In the Dark 