fatmansqueeze

Finisterre

fatmansqueeze — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:38:00 +0000

Arriving in England via London airports Gatwick, Stanstead and Heathrow (some travel to Dublin thence across the Irish Sea) travel to Portsmouth and board the ferry to France via Dieppe or Caen or St. Malo. Ferry to Santander from Plymouth. Although Roskoff is dull it is the entrepot for Finnisterre.

Be careful cycling among lorries (HGVs) in the ports.

Cycling based in or travelling from St. Malo is ideal and there is so much promice in France. A huge country never to be fully discoved and perhaps the most civilized place to go camping and cycling occasionally or habitually staying in cheap hotels and pensions. The weather in France is so kind in the summer. Its not surprising you only see French people outside the cities and cafe workers are often locals. The French have staggeringly beautiful holiday houses. There is always an excuse to take a day off in France: No-one seems to mind.

Dessau

fatmansqueeze — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:02:00 +0000

If you tire of London or England fly over to Berlin and cycle round Brandenberg and Mecklenberg to Leipzig by train or visit Karl Linea’s garden near Dessau. Remember this area is less compact than England and landscapes can be bleak with little obvious facilities. Then you may just chance upon a lonely treasure like Lausitz. The Lake District beyond Oranianberg is full of surprises and empty beautiful landscapes bejewelled with villages. From Leipzig follow the tram route to isolated lakes beyond the plattenbau seidlung

Access Brandenberg and Mecklenberg-Vorpomern from Berlin railway stations. The obvious journey is to Potsdam. There are other more obscure trips. North to outer suburbs beyond the S-Bahn Ring but within the Berliner Ring. Step out at colonies at the end of S-Bahn lines to seidlungen often modelled on English country houses which in turn themselves were modelled on German Landhouses. Some isolated Landhouses became derelict during the DDR era but are now revived.

It was common for former owners of these and other houses to reclaim them especially on the Berlin-Berlin as at Glindow(tbc) where the STASSI had occupied the better houses of disenfranchised former Germans.

Other destinations include direct south to protogenic Brandenberg towns with cobbled streets and not much else. Travel along allees across the region where there is sure to be a burgeoning tourist accommodation industry.

Travel to Frankfurt am Oder to access Stetin on the Baltic. By careful this is still Injun Country. Safety is not guarenteed so plan ahead. You can always return to the safety of Germany.

Acle

fatmansqueeze — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:42:00 +0000

Cycle in Germany as well as England. Fly to Hannover or Berlin from London airports.

The Ice Age left a swath of morraine deposits over Northern Europe and in comparison to England this landscape is featureless until east of Lüneburger Heide where there is is a fascinating landscape of linked and isolated lakes and rivers. An extensive area to explore by bicycle if you have the time. The similarity to East Anglia is intriguing: A combination of safety and conectivity for the burgeoning culture of a rational and balanced, if tough community which was the origin of Berlin.

Eaton

fatmansqueeze — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:08:00 +0000

There are more hominoids alive than have ever been born. When messolithic hunters clashed with neolithic settlers the numbers were biblical almost camp and theatrical as soldiers enclosed their own and conquered tribes in walled cities. They were to care for these like fondly regarded cattle. Leaders and captors regarded their charges as little more than animals. This syndrome exists fiercly now and today but subterrannean and very deep in the psyche of modern neolithic hominoids. In colder climes strangers wandering in to defended territory would end up in a bog or hillside ditch with some sort of fatal cranial damage. Refer to film by Nils Gaup Pathfinder about a boy who leads a Norwegian tribe to safety. This was all to be expected and lasted longest in Europe in Corsica, Donegal and Jarrow right up till only 150 years ago. Tribal insticts acted out by warring youths, teenagers and young adults. Societies with young populations are in a constant state of war replinished in the minus and kept young by the attrition of killing. The tribal elders would be in Maiden Castle wondering when death would come.

Much of England which was submerged in Roman times would be submerged again and Nottingham County Council logo becomes a tropical tree not an English Oak. Newark-on-sea becomes the capital of north Nottinghamshire and Cuckmere Haven is left to the sea.

However it is oil consumption which eventually causes shortages of food and the English perish last of all by vitue of having plenty of water and rainfall.

Food production from the great escarpment along a line east of Letchworth to Ashby de la Zouch gets redirected to the home market and the the last supper is quaffeddown with Suffolk Strong Ale and Stilton Cheese made in Cropwell Bishop.

Clay Cross

fatmansqueeze — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:04:00 +0000

The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists.

NSDAP inter war Germany was hijacked early on by Adolph Hitler incorporating NATIONAL and SOCIALIST. In England NATIONAL and SOCIALIST translates to PATRIOTIC and LOCAL. And the English are profoundly patriotic. Germans and the logical German language tend to bring about chilling effects. This is not so in England or with the ambiguous English language. The point was that c1900 politics centred around Vienna caused or enabled rather, war and hunger. Novo Centa appears to be a pivotal date in Asia too as with the Boxer Rebellion. The East is East and West is West as thou say. Hunger is deterministic with a threshold and cut off point leading to conflict. German National Socialism was the only way to feed the Germans. Hunger in human beings is profound and deterministic leading inexorably to conflict with rival cultures especially spacially and geographically. No such geographical inertia exists now with hominoids able to change continents within 15 hours. The timescale involved Hitler Youth growing in to young men and fighting the Blitzkrieg.

The date of 1929 is equal to 2009 meaning a Great War will occur in 2019 whereby the settled peoples of the world will wipe out nomadic peoples. This is a fundamental conflict mode inherited from the Fertile Crecent. Refer to Lewis Mumford ‘The City in History’. As in the 1930s the economy like a doomed submarine bounces along the seabed for a decade culminating in inevitable world depopulation through The Third World War. Only war can officially signal the end of The Second Great Depression. The four horses of the Apocalypse will stop galloping off in to oblivion, only when millions have perished. The war will start no later than 2019 equivalent to 1939.

In England still an island the death throes will arrive later, the English being unable to be too beastly to their own poor and immigrants. Perhaps.

The BNP British Nationalist Party has no industrial backing as Hitler had, its higher echelons and party members being disenfranchised technicians and engineers. These right wing parties in England are doomed to fail because democracy cannot feed and employ people only DICTATORSHIP can do this.

There is no mechanism to back the party. Industry cannot openly back a fascist or racist party. The BNP (not Bank Paribas) will have trouble attracting members or support from ethnic minorities even though these groups are important to the English economy. Repatriation is impossible. Population pressure is too great. Who ever is in England now should stay. Gainfull employment for the local English in their own country must be found. As stated clearly here before: Cultures and Communities who know and trust each other must trade in blocks locally with each other, Europe with America but not with China (or India). The Chinese top echelon psyche is too simple and cruel. England will never prosper as a Chinese or Indian colony. Flights to England from India and China have grown exponentially in the recent decade with Asian entrepreneurs ingnoring European Law, Minimum Wages, Building Regulations and Safety. They expect their employees to be Indian and working as on the Bede Industrial Estate, Jarrow without rights and for less than 3 dollars an hour. It has long been clear the British Passport Office has been dominated by Foreigners particularly Indians. The flights are populated by cutting edge Chinese IT graduates and Asian Businessmen.

English people who have migrated to UKIP and BNP are near exclusively working class and are the opposite to the Conservatives up north as in Radcliff who seem to be Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts sneer at unemployment and poverty. It is clear left to the the mercy of the grown up Boy Scouts (still wearing shorts and a neckerchief) the working English tribe would perish by merely being ignored. A cold shoulder being shown and backs turned. Radciff was one of Richard IIIs team along with Tyrell and A.N. Other who spoke no evil, saw no evil, heard no evil.

If the British Conservatives got in to power in England no one knows what they would do. They have not said. In the European Parliament they have positioned themselves on the Far Right equivalent to harking back nostagically to the Mitford Sisters.

White Mare Pool

fatmansqueeze — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:07:00 +0000

In the summer of 1964 English industrial Landscape changed from coal and steam to electric and roads.

On Sundays Boldon Colliery, a pit village across the railway, was the destination.
A travelling fair visited the colliery town yearly. The pit closed. Evidence of railway lines and mining disappeared. Steam trains were replaced by diesel trains on the steep railway embankment, and the railway embankment portal to the countryside was removed to take the trunk road.

My own childhood was petrified at once.

Beyond Down Hill, Sunderland housing estates now surrounded Lumley castle:
Coal and the spiritulty entwined here since the thirteenth centuary, the monks of Finchale Abbey owned Lumley mine. The two cities of Newcastle and Sunderland collided under this hill in boiling hot June 1964. Poppies turned Downshire Hill red.

The A19 dual carriageway with a bridge over the River Wear was completed.

At about December 1997, in Steglitz, Berlin, I entered the raised garden of Begoniaplatz. 1600 miles and 35 years later, I wondered if I would ever go home.
From the flat window I watched the leaves fall off the trees till the very last one.

South Shields, a resort was freezing the day my two brothers from Ushaw college wearing loin cloth-like costumes swam in the cold North Sea, so bracing, there was talk of heating it with under water gas fires.
The heaving swell unhinged the pier.

On Saturday morning a van delivers pastel clothes for girls at No 17. Up on Perth Green, Durham colliery bands were marching, and there were even side show whippet races underway. This was the Neon Social Club Leek Show. The committee members seemed far too wealthy. The man at No 17 was on the committee.

My mother sewed and my father worked in a factory.
Although Jarrow had only one blackman, a whole community from Yemen lived in Reckendyke. Jarrow was Irish, South Shields maritime. We were socially Irish in an English field.

Historically Jarrow was linked by the worlds oldest coal railway line, into the heart of Durham via Sunnyside but that was already gone but occasionally there was still a 40 shilling cast iron trespass warning.

The arches at Tyne Dock were demolished. Newcastle stone was cleaned up and all trams sidelined.

Vince Rea’s gallery opened and closed. From White Mare Pool by nightfall I would be at Kings Cross.

Primrose

fatmansqueeze — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Under the basic principles of the cosmos the world should be created, be used and then destroyed only to be created again. In Jarrow this would be the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages on Bede Burn Road.

“We Unite To Assist Each Other”.
Durham Miners Banner
The colliery, a tangible focal point, a physical focus of unity often in an isolated village.

Everyman

Everyman, late-15th-century English morality play. It is the counterpart of the Dutch play Elckerlijk; which of these anonymous plays is the original has been the subject of controversy. When Everyman is summoned by Death, he can persuade none of his friends—Beauty, Kindred, Worldly Goods—to go with him, except Good Deeds.

Easington Sunnyside Kibblesworth

fatmansqueeze — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:07:00 +0000

For men born in the 1950s the landscape of North East England has changed so dramatically perhaps it will change again. The bowsers (Bowes) line penetrated via Kibblesworth and Sunnyside into the North East Durham hills. There is an active steam train beyond Kibblesworth. Even now there is some derelict land. Cycle here from Jarrow via Hebburn and return via Prudoe and Scotswood to North Shields. There is a train to Newcastle and Carlisle passing the the tidal reach of the Tyne upstream from Dunston Staithes. If arriving from Scandanavia try the Tyne Pedestrian Tunnel from Howden on the Wallsend north side. Coal could be extracted from under the north sea with technology not quite available yet. This would be a resurrection. Optically as in Boldon Colliery landscape change has biblical overtones. There is nothing quite like seeing young miners naked from the waist up as far as the miners helmet and encrusted lamp leaving the Saturday shift in a blazing June in 1964. In June 1964 very colourful (not black and white) mining village marching jazz bands massed on Primrose Jarrow opposite the Neon Social Club. With even wippet racing asides these were visual Philip Larkin scenes. Even now and in the future in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere the coal working stock look very strong and extracting coal is a young man’s game not for auld gadgees.

Black Middens

fatmansqueeze — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:32:00 +0000

The Black Middens are a shelf of rock off Tynemouth, notorious for drawing ships on to them and sinking them. In a dream, a jet black steam train emerges from the North Sea at South Shields laden with anthracite coal flanked by hills of coal in the sea.
The interpretation of this dream: A wish, a deep desire for Resurection, expressed through the visual imagination of an eight year old boy in 1963.

There is nowhere in the world quite like South Shields Beach: The quickly bracing wind and the purity and cleanliness of white rock, so necessary. The elemental seascape in silences.

The arctic weather sweeps in from the North directly off the North Sea making it more maritime and pure cold than say Kincardinshire.

Clouds arrive here as individuals and there is nothing quite like a cloud over Primrose or Tyne Dock.

Durham was stripped of coal and steel but there is still coal under the North Sea.

Black Middens

fatmansqueeze — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:32:00 +0000

The Black Middens are a shelf of rock off Tynemouth, notorious for drawing ships on to them and sinking them. In a dream, a jet black steam train emerges from the North Sea at South Shields laden with anthracite coal flanked by hills of coal in the sea.
A kind of resurection. Durham was stripped of coal and steel but there is still coal under the North Sea.