1 Beach Road

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/sep/26/1-beach-road-review

http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/33673/1-beach-road

I read the news today

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/09/the-monstrous-fact-from-bail-outs-to-debt-peonage/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-monstrous-fact-from-bail-outs-to-debt-peonage

Leaning towards the sea

"Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

The name of the chair

The Windsor chair makers in the forests were probably doing it since the 16th century but it may be that it was first done not by forest bodgers but, as a sideline, by wheelwrights in their shops. It wasn't called the Windsor or acquired the distinctive steam-bent bow back until the 18th century. And why 'Windsor', in Berkshire, when it was mostly made in the beechwoods of Buckinghamshire? It is thought to be because it was middle-men in Windsor who were first responsible for buying up the chairs and shipping them off to markets in London. Another nail in the coffin of the idea of the self-sufficient craftsman and an early case of London being where the money was. Metropolitan domination plays a role in the development of the Buckinghamshire beechwoods too. They were first actively managed on a large scale to send coppiced firewood for the domestic hearths of nearby London - nothing to do with furniture and bodging. But the canals and coal put paid to that trade and only then did the bodgers move in, finding a convenient and underused source of small-section timber. They continued to coppice much of the woodland but towards the end of the nineteenth century furniture manufacture in High Wycombe had become sufficiently mechanised in factories for it to be using a significant number of local large timber trees. It was, however, a short-lived phenomenon, because it very quickly became cheaper to import beech timber from Europe. Thus the substantial markets for both the coppice wood and timber of the Buckinghamshire beechwoods disappeared, leaving them to become 'amenity' woodlands (at least for the owners, if not for the masses). And, of course, it soon became the case that the complete chairs themselves, at least for the mass market, were imported.

Controlled crying

End of the world approaches – short paragraph foot of page seventeen.

Charles Dickens, where are you when we really need you?

The world is staring into the abyss, again; the cash dispensers and their multitudinous seas incarnadine are about to run dry. It is all in the newspapers, but fourth or fifth down the list of news stories. We are all tired of stuffing our trillions down the insatiable maws of the likes of Mr Bob Diamond, those overgrown infants of the financial classes who forever demand the attentions and gifts of their sleep-deprived parents in the small hours of the financial night, with the Lagardes and Trichets, those international financial Spocks, telling us how to raise our unruly off-spring.

It is time to leave them to their own devices. No doubt it will be extremely unpleasant for us all for a while, but life cannot go on like this indefinitely.

It is time to end the absurd litany of a system that so hypocritically prides and preens itself of having lifted half the world out of poverty, and out of every concept of dignity and culture. Time for a bonfire of the Candy-ed, Salmond-farmed Trumperies of grotesquely misnamed Qatari sovereign wealth, and the prostitution of be-Fostered ‘starchitects’ littering the face of the planet with one Ozymandias tower after another, the Gherkins, the Bananas and the whole naturally ventilated green-grocery of vanity. Time to end the Jobs-worth progression of oh-so-purely-designed electronic frippery, 4 succeeded by 5, 5 by 6, to the Seventh Seal of cadaverous consumer approval. So that the worm infested apple of our consumer knowledge leads us beckoningly out of Eden, hand in hand with faltering steps and slow.

Making hay while the sun shines

'US stocks fell ahead of S&P's announcement [of a downgrading of Italy's soverign debt rating] but staged a late comeback as fears of a near-term Greek debt default faded on news of a possible deal to advance new bailout funds to Athens.'

Or at least while the can is still moving.

Breakfast reading

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/09/europe-bank-debt-in-lurid-detail/