So the government has decided not to go ahead with a contribution to the Stone Henge visitors centre. Obviously there will be howls of anguish but really, who cares? Stone Henge is there and it has a road running past it. If you want to see Stone Henge drive past it. I think there’s a car park there too so you can stop if you want.
But that’s not good enough for some people. They say we need a visitors centre. A visitors centre? Consider what that means. Consider all the other visitors centres you’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. A visitors centre is a themed set of shops and restaurants. It’s a mini shopping mall. If you want to visit a themed shopping mall go to Heathrow Airport but don’t insist that a prehistoric wonder requires an outlet of Star Bucks – it doesn’t.
I imagine that the driving force behind these centres are the retailers who will have captive markets. I notice that the plan is to place the visitors centre around a mile away from the stones and to eradicate the current road running past the stones. Probably there will be some bloody buses or a light railway to take people from the stones tot he centre. The obvious aim is to stop anyone seeing the stones without paying to get into the centre and be lured into the shops selling Stone Henge calenders and druid T-Shirts.
We don’t need this damn commercialism! We don’t need a branch of McDonalds at every tourist attraction. A Human being can live for about three days without water and weeks without food. The aboriginal people of Australia roamed the land and survived on what they found there. The prehistoric people who built Stone Henge had no access to sandwiches in polythene bags or coffee with warning labels or toilets with the constant sound of hand dryers.
You don’t need to buy refreshment. If you want refreshment go to the local mall. If you want to see a prehistoric wonder, get your cagoule on and take a walk over to the stones. Take a thermos flask with you and have a cup of tea while you’re there.
But please let’s not concrete over yet more of the countryside in the name of heritage.
Last week I visited Warsaw, staying at the Sheraton on Bolesława Prusa. A good hotel with plenty of marble. One evening I took a short walk north past the Charles de Gaulle statue onto a street named Nowy Swiat. Here can be found many restaurants and bars, probably frequented by the wealthy along with ex-patriots. After an excellent Indian at the Bhuda restaurant I took coffee at the Cafe Colombia while listening to an elderly American explaining to a couple young Poles how he admired the Russians because they had launched a military attack on a Russian cargo ship which had been commandeered by Sudanese pirates. “They picked on the wrong country!” he exclaimed many times.
On the aeroplane I had chatted to a Pole who had picked strawberries in Kent one summer in his youth. Sleeping in tents they had travelled from farm to farm. Now he was a business man travelling throughout Europe but he thought that perhaps he had enjoyed strawberry picking more.
The Russians will discuss World War 2 at the drop of a hat and he told me that when Hitler’s attention turned from attacking the UK to invading Russia this had been because the Russians had been massing an army on Germany’s eastern border. Proof of this, he said, were the thousands of Russian troops taken prisoner in the first few months.
Rondo Charles de Gaulle
This had never occurred to me. Like many Brits my knowledge of Eastern Europe during World War 2 is scanty and I had been taught that Hitler was a bit unstable and had invaded Russia merely because he wanted to take over the world. Of course this is Rubbish. With Great Britain at bay Hitler had turned his attention to a pre-emptive strike which, he must have hoped, would disable Russia.
Walking back from Nowy Swiat as the light faded I thought that Warsaw is in fact a great place to live. The public transport seems excellent and the buildings, though often blocky, are interesting and nature seems hell bent on tacking back the city with trees and grass growing everywhere. Almost as ubiquitous as the grass are the statues. I remarked on this to a Pole and was told cynically that the Russians love their statues. I got the impression that the former communist regime would throw up a statue at every intersection and I guess that after a while they must have run out of anything relevant and started building monuments to every petty bureaucrat. No offence intended to Charles de Gaulle who I’m sure played a great part in the history of Nowy Swiat.
I liked the mixture of the old and the new. The modern trams contrasting with those from the old soviet era; though noisy and drafty they have charm from having been designed before the obsession with efficiency ironed out every crease of character. I was reminded of the old open backed Route Master buses in London and how they rattled and shook.
Tram
Warsaw appears to have embraced capitalism and commercialism for it’s promise of a better future. It seems a city with a destination firmly in mind. Though not yet as rampantly commercialised as London, in some ways it is more advanced with taxis having TV screens in the headrest to beam advertising at the helpless passenger.
Unlike London, Warsaw has not yet choked on the obsession with materialism and the false individualism of choice.
The man on the radio is talking about binge drinking in the UK and the mumblings in the political establishment is in favour of “banning cheap alcohol”. God knows how they plan to achieve this – I think I’ve heard arguments to stop super markets doing cheap offers.
As I have pointed out before, New Labour has embraced hyper-commercialism as it’s core ideology and subsequently perceive that their only lever for affecting alcohol consumption is price. Since the commercial revolution which engulfed the UK under first Thatcher and now Brown, controls have been removed from all aspects of commerce. We are now bombarded with advertising everywhere we go and everywhere we look. The emphasis on terming everyone a “customer” is key as it means that success is determined by achieving a sale.
In Britain and America we, rightly, tend to look very much askance at any type of social engineering and this includes government advertising exhorting us to some worthy goal. But this is odd as we do not even notice when large corporations attempt social engineering and this is exactly what is achieved by large marketing campaigns.
Our society is undergoing social engineering but the engineering is not devised by a national government with goals such as social cohesion or community responsibility. The goal of those that control social engineering is simple: Profit.
So while the government attempts social change by squeezing in a few sound bytes on a news program, the alcohol companies are able to keep up a relentless campaign which targets kids and tells them alcohol is stylish, alcohol is fun, alcohol is cool.
I saw a bit of video on The Sun web site which underlines the ubiquity of this message. The video was of a drunken reveller desecrating a war memorial. The story in the sun was full of outrage but the video had a little advertisement tacked on the front and the advertisement was for cider!
Prior to the commercial revolution, restrictions existed on the sale of alcohol. In my youth one could only buy booze at a pub or off license and the off licenses was generally part of the pub. I think it is understandable that we can now buy booze in super markets but this means little metro super markets in the centre of town too. Walking along Western Road in Brighton there are a string of little grocer shops which also sell alcohol and there is at least one which appears to do very little business in anything but alcohol and I suspect that the dodgy looking vegetables are just there for show.
Deliberate targeting of youth by the alcohol industry also plays a part in increased consumption with fruit flavoured vodka based drinks and high strength lagers. Another factor related to greater alcohol consumption is that the owners of pubs and bars have strived to make them more “efficient”. In our commercialised society efficient means that they generate as much money as possible and this means selling as much booze as possible. To achieve this the environment in pubs and bars has been modified in a number of ways. For example there is little room to sit down and the music has been turned up so that one must shout to be heard. I have been in pubs like this myself and when nobody can talk we just resort to drinking. Why do we stay in the pub? A good question. I guess it is that a majority of the people present have fallen for the marketing that a noisy uncomfortable bar is the place to be.
I am not arguing for draconian laws to curb alcohol. I like to drink myself. What I am criticising is the government’s lack of understanding and imagination when tacking the problem. I am criticising, once again, New Labour’s obsession with the market and commercialism. I am criticising New Labour inability to affect anything because of their obsequious relationship with bis business. I am criticising the fact that New Labour are now so scared of business that they dare not make any change that would affect someone in a pin striped suit. If New Labour had been in power in 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act would never have been passed because the slave owners would have whinged that their profits would be affected.
Before the government looks at the price of alcohol they should look at Targeting, Advertising, Drinking environment and Availability (TADA).
Moving the booze away from the fruit and veg would be social engineering
A tedious week at work. I reflected on the way the English language has been debased by commercialism when I read the words “Loyalty payment” and “Highly competitive exclusive offer”.
The ducks are still on the pond. The two males can be seen most days and mid week the female waddled out of her hut
2 ducks
and the two males sped after her. A tremendous fight ensued and at first we were unsure what was occurring. It became obvious that one male was earnestly pursuing the female while the other male tried strenuously to fend him off. After a while the female achieved some distance and the two males finished their fight with one chasing the other away. The hierarchy restored the female was left alone and the two males returned to being good buddies. A Pakistani colleague commented: “Just like the America, once their authority is established they want to be your friend”.
I watched an interesting documentary on Network Theory on Tuesday evening. Six degrees of separation and all that.
This year I ensured that I would see some of The Brighton Festival by drawing up a plan and booking in advance. Mostly this has been theatre but I was asked by some friends if I wanted to see some dance and I thought: what the hell, I’ll give it a go.
So on Wednesday evening I saw Aphasiadisiac at The Dome. This was not what I had expected and was inspiring. There was not much that most people would call dancing about it. The performance was created by a guy named Ted Stoffer and performed by a Belgian dance company named Les ballets C de la B.
I know very little about dance so I don’t really have the vocabulary to describe it. I was impressed by the ability of the performers to use their bodies to communicate. I was amazed at their ability to create a mood or a feeling by the choreography. They played the music themselves using a trumpet, a saxophone, drums and an accordion. The music itself was very good and at one particular point the performers all came together and sat and stood in a very tight group of five directly in front of us while they played. I found the proximity disarming and became self conscious. It felt strange to go from being a passive observer to somehow being observed and almost part of the performance.
Other parts were good in different ways. The awkwardness of a couple sitting together was portrayed perfectly through body language and facial expressions. A girl played an instrument and looked around while two of the men ran around as though desperate to remain in the spotlight of her gaze. Extraordinary stuff which opened my eyes to the world of dance. The Youtube vid below is of a different performance.
On Friday British Gas turned up to survey my loft prior to getting it insulated. B&Q are currently doing some very good deals to insulate your loft with parts and labour included for £198.
I began cogitating on how it is not really in the economic interests of the gas company to insulate my loft. It is in their interest to encourage me to consume as much gas as possible while it is in my interest to consume as little as possible while ensuring I am conformably warm.
I read somewhere that companies are much better at cutting their costs than individuals are. This makes sense. Companies makes plans and prepare budgets to control costs whereas most individuals are not so rational.
But panning back a bit and considering climate change and The UK’s dire economic condition it is in the Global Interest and National Interest that I consume as little gas as possible.
So surely we have the pricing model wrong. The model is currently configured so that the agent which is most efficient at controlling consumption (The gas company) actually benefits from excess consumption.
I recall a similar conversation on the subject of taxation. Our politicians tell us we should be saving energy and cutting CO2 emissions yet the greatest part of our taxation is placed on work. Taxation has two effects, firstly and obviously, it raises money to be spent by the government but secondly it deters the activity which is taxed. This has been known for centuries from windows to tobacco.
So the effect of our taxation system is to deter work. Surely we want people to work so why not lift all income tax and place it on petrol? If it were done intelligently I could still afford to drive my 2 litre car 90 miles a day to work. It would just make it painfully clear how much money, and therefore petrol, I am wasting.
It seems to me that there are three entities who can control costs: The seller, the buyer and the government. With conventional pricing models the economic motivation are for the seller to increase sales and the buyer to reduce sales. The government is the third entity and currently pays for services which are deemed communal such as waste disposal.
And waste disposal too has a dodgy pricing model. It is currently in the interest of retailers to bulk our their products with wasteful packaging as this helps to sell more product and the waste disposal costs are bourn by the tax payer. There have been attempts to makes consumers pay for the amount of waste that they produce but the problem with this is that consumers can cheat by fly tipping. Far better to charge the costs of waste disposal as a tax to be paid by retailers.
I have thought for a while that the main deficiency with socialism is the lack of a feedback mechanism. Command economies continue to manufacturer products which consumers do not want and fail to manufacture products which they do want because the production is not influenced by the consumer. Capitalism gets around this problem but the current capitalist model encourages and rewards over production.
I read an article in The Economist a while back about the British aviation engine manufacturer Rolls Royce. This was deemed a successful company because of the innovative pricing structure it had adopted. Rolls Royce does not make it’s profits from the sale of engines and can make a loss on engine sales. Instead it charges it’s customer (the airlines) for engine air time. Each engine is fitted with various computer systems which relay telemetry back to a control centre in Rugby. Engineers can then detected potential problems early and perform preventative maintenance when an aircraft next lands.
This is an excellent idea. Rolls Royce can become a successful engine maker, gain market share and earn greater profits. But at the same time the manufacture of engines is not the driving force. In fact it would be in Rolls Royce’s interest to keep engines airworthy for as long as possible and therefore restrict engine manufacture.
I suggest that we could do with this sort of thinking when designing pricing models for all sorts of goods and services. We still use capitalism but design the system in such as way that production is not the driving force for profits.
On Saturday afternoon I visited The Old Municipal Market to see an artwork by Anish Kapoor entitled The Dismemberment of Jeanne D’Arc
The Dismemberment of Jeanne D’Arc
Yeh Anish, nice name!
The big blobby bits are the bits I’d seen clips of but I found the big red elipsical hole in the ground most effective. It appeared that Mr. Kapoor had opened up the ground to reveal that beneath the first few inches of dirt the living flesh of the planet Earth had been exposed. The Earth is alive!
On Saturday night I saw another small theatre production named Bane at The Three and Ten in Brighton. This was described as a “One-man comedic film noir parody.” Part thriller, art comedy the single actor played a plethora of characters and pulled it off brilliantly.
No round up of last week can be complete without mentioning the MP expenses scandal currently bubbling away in British politics. Last week The Daily Telegraph revealed that John Prescott had claimed for repair of a broken toilet seat twice. – You couldn’t make it up.
I have been to Cologne this week. Flew from Gatwick. God how I detest British airports! The Blair/Brown years have morphed every public environment into a disgusting shopping mall. You sit there, trapped, waiting for them to tell you which gate to go to while numerous shops play disparate music at you. What happened to the ideas of a departure lounge? The bread head bastards at BAA realised this was an ideal place to trap the public and flog them crap. Make the environment so awful and unendurable that you are forced to traipse around and eventually relent and buy some piece of crap.
Only at that last minute will the bastards announce the gate and you are allowed to escape and sit in some squalid glass box before being herded into the aircraft.
I frequently travel, mostly throughout Europe, and fairly often further a field and I can attest that British airports are the most disgusting I have ever endured.
And let me add that this compairson includes Lagos, Port Harcourt and Charles de Gaulle.
Photography
Warsaw 2010
Tags: Adolf Hitler, bars, Bolesława Prusa, buses, Capitalism, Charles de Gaulle, choice, commercialism, communist regime, Eastern Europe, false individualism, Germany, hotel, Indian, london, Materialism, Nowy Swiat, pick strawberries, public transport, Restaurants, Route Master, Russians, Sheraton, statues, Trams, Warsaw, World War 2
Warsaw
Last week I visited Warsaw, staying at the Sheraton on Bolesława Prusa. A good hotel with plenty of marble. One evening I took a short walk north past the Charles de Gaulle statue onto a street named Nowy Swiat. Here can be found many restaurants and bars, probably frequented by the wealthy along with ex-patriots. After an excellent Indian at the Bhuda restaurant I took coffee at the Cafe Colombia while listening to an elderly American explaining to a couple young Poles how he admired the Russians because they had launched a military attack on a Russian cargo ship which had been commandeered by Sudanese pirates. “They picked on the wrong country!” he exclaimed many times.
On the aeroplane I had chatted to a Pole who had picked strawberries in Kent one summer in his youth. Sleeping in tents they had travelled from farm to farm. Now he was a business man travelling throughout Europe but he thought that perhaps he had enjoyed strawberry picking more.
The Russians will discuss World War 2 at the drop of a hat and he told me that when Hitler’s attention turned from attacking the UK to invading Russia this had been because the Russians had been massing an army on Germany’s eastern border. Proof of this, he said, were the thousands of Russian troops taken prisoner in the first few months.
Rondo Charles de Gaulle
This had never occurred to me. Like many Brits my knowledge of Eastern Europe during World War 2 is scanty and I had been taught that Hitler was a bit unstable and had invaded Russia merely because he wanted to take over the world. Of course this is Rubbish. With Great Britain at bay Hitler had turned his attention to a pre-emptive strike which, he must have hoped, would disable Russia.
Walking back from Nowy Swiat as the light faded I thought that Warsaw is in fact a great place to live. The public transport seems excellent and the buildings, though often blocky, are interesting and nature seems hell bent on tacking back the city with trees and grass growing everywhere. Almost as ubiquitous as the grass are the statues. I remarked on this to a Pole and was told cynically that the Russians love their statues. I got the impression that the former communist regime would throw up a statue at every intersection and I guess that after a while they must have run out of anything relevant and started building monuments to every petty bureaucrat. No offence intended to Charles de Gaulle who I’m sure played a great part in the history of Nowy Swiat.
I liked the mixture of the old and the new. The modern trams contrasting with those from the old soviet era; though noisy and drafty they have charm from having been designed before the obsession with efficiency ironed out every crease of character. I was reminded of the old open backed Route Master buses in London and how they rattled and shook.
Tram
Warsaw appears to have embraced capitalism and commercialism for it’s promise of a better future. It seems a city with a destination firmly in mind. Though not yet as rampantly commercialised as London, in some ways it is more advanced with taxis having TV screens in the headrest to beam advertising at the helpless passenger.
Unlike London, Warsaw has not yet choked on the obsession with materialism and the false individualism of choice.
Once the old trams are gone they will be missed.