Londons

I was in London briefly last week and realised how many Londons there are.  Above, the Duke of Buckingham's water gate, from the river to his London home.  In the days of James I, the north bank of the Thames stopped at the steps.  These days, the Victoria embankment has pushed the river back 500 metres or so.  The London Eye is on the South Bank and between the park and the Eye lies  Victoria Embankment (main road) and the Thames.  Hungerford Bridge heading for Waterloo station is to be seen to the right of the picture.

Already we have London parks, London railways and seventeenth century London.

Whilst we were in town, we went to the football at the Emirates (sporting London), to a play (theatre London, but as it was Kinky Boots, also possibly transvestite London and Equality London and even fashion London).

I attended a business event, so business London, we went to Borough Market (markets of London) and we also (more by accident than design) did a bit of a pub crawl in search of an old friend, so drinkers' London and social London.

My plan had been to explore what's left of Spitalfields before the iron boot of Beaming Boris crushes the charm out of it completely, but that will have to wait a month or two.  That would have been eighteenth century and Victorian London.  I also had a vague plan to visit Olympia for the Knitting and Stitching show and wanted to take in a couple of cemeteries (as London cemeteries are a rich source of historical detail).

I love London, but even a fleeting visit indicates that the appealing village nature of its centre is being blighted by creeping corporateism.  Covent Garden, once touristy but charming, is now much more geared towards very rich tourists and consequently much less charming.

All the same, Sam Johnson is still right

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
— Samuel Johnson

I just hope that this wonderful city remains accessible and affordable to the many, rather than an artificial playground for the privileged few in years to come.

Virtue of Necessity

I travel around a lot for work purposes.  Wherever I go these days, high streets seem more and more full of charity shops.  The Red Cross, Relate, PDSA, Cancer Information Services, British Heart Foundation  ....  the list goes on.  Visited an Air Ambulance shop on my way to a meeting on Wednesday.  All the items seemed very expensive as opposed to very cheap.  Maybe this is the way ahead, buy expensive tat and donate!!

Then went on to a Community Support association which had opened a shop to make up for now non-existent grants.  This is the reality of the pruned back State.  Nowadays, more and more people have to make do, hence the rising trend for upcycling, retro and vintage.  We may not want to make do, but if we have to, we'll make the best of things.  Brava the spirit of the Blitz, even if the latest Blitz was a government supported blitz on our bank accounts and standards of living.  And in one way, I'm all for recycling.  I am pretty anti- the necessity for food and clothing banks though, also child poverty.

I'm not old enough to remember post-War austerity, but what's going on at the moment seems like a new post-War austerity  - post class war.

I used to think (naively) that the general population was as committed to equality of opportunity as me.  How foolish I was in those days.  Yet history shows that very unequal societies tend to suffer from social unrest and violent re-organisation  - and those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

When A La Lanterne occurs, guess who'll be knitting by the guillotine?

Change Management

I already write a blog on these pages called The Virtual Space Traveller, but there are things I want to write about which don't sit comfortably under that heading.  I have itchy writing fingers.  I must have learned some interesting things during a forty year working life, maybe I should share some of them?

Forty years a wage slave and I still don't know any better  - sad really.  My father (a most interesting man, wish I'd known him better, he was ever present but oh so well defended) lectured in  Economics and then (when it became a main stream subject) Sociology, teaching himself as much as he needed to know about this fascinating proto-science from a vast array of very tempting looking books.  He had two Pelican paperbacks uncompromisingly titled "Work: 1" and "Work::2" which I read as soon as he'd finished with them.  Maybe that was where my fascination with work came from.

I know we mostly need to work to live and that living to work is unhealthy (work life balance is the key), but the range and variety of mankind's productive economic activity never ceases to astound me.

One of the most interesting things I've observed over my working life is the ever increasing pace of organisational change  - to a point where Change Management has become its own discipline with its own specialist practitioners.

I notice that we call it Change Management and Managing Change, not Progress Management and Managing Progress.  This may be because the relentless pace of change in the workplace doesn't necessarily mean improvement.  Sometimes I think that the culture of constant change in the modern workplace  is a corporate plot to keep the workforce perpetually stunned, bewildered and on the back foot, just in case they get too feisty.

Read such an interesting article the other day about the portmanteau career  -  the career which isn't one job but several, each one contributing its tithe to making a living.  Making a living isn't what many of us do either these days.  So many desk jockeys, completely out of touch with the reality of the wider world, participating in the global economy without much idea of what lies outside the boundaries of their own limited experiences, not making, crafting or creating but merely pushing data around.

That can't be a good thing.  There's so much data out there these days, how can it be possible to differentiate the relevant from the dross?

Small is beautiful, sustainability is a good thing and should be the way ahead, green, ethical and sufficiency are all favourite words and phrases in my world view.

Sermon over for this evening.  Good night.