Robert Hampton

Eurovision (aka Farage’s Nightmare) was an absolute delight this year. I watched it with laptop by my side, watching a constant stream of commentary and gentle mockery on Twitter. It felt like a club of bitchy gays had banded together online.

It helped that the show put on by SVT was one of the best Eurovision shows I’ve seen in ages. The aren’t many hosts that could capably handle a three hour telecast to 100 million people, but Petra Mede – a super-trouper if ever there was one – was great. She turned out to be that rarest of Eurovision hosts – one who does jokes that were actually funny. Here’s her interval act, Swedish Smörgåsbord, a brilliant musical number which celebrated Sweden while also offering enough self-parody to keep it bearable. Also, it contained the word “titties” and a gay wedding.

No real standout songs, apart from the Romanian entry Cezar, who delivered an amazing falsetto performance while dressed like a 1980s Doctor Who villain and surrounded by scantily clad dancers. It really was the campest thing imaginable.

Then there was the Irish entry, Ryan Dolan, who came dead last. Sorry about that Ryan – I voted for you, although I can’t quite put my finger on the reason why…

As expected, Britain’s song failed to make much of an impact, with Bonnie Tyler’s effort only finishing 19th. However, that hardly seems to matter in an overall fantastic show. The Hampton jury gives Sweden 12 points!

Remember a month or so ago, when Network Rail started work on Aigburth station? The works were either a much-needed refurbishment or – if you’re the people behind the Save Aigburth Station campaign – an act of shameless corporate vandalism on the most beautiful station in the world. Here’s my blog on the subject, should you wish to refresh your memory.

Anyway, EXCITING new developments have occurred. Network Rail has sent another letter to local residents, advising that it has bowed to local pressure and gone back to the drawing board.

I’m sure Network Rail’s change of mind is entirely due to grassroots community activism and is nothing to do with the fact that our local MP, Louise Ellman, is also chair of the Transport Select Committee.

The letter is reproduced in full below:

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Friday night I was in London with my good friend Ian Jones, to see The Book of Mormon, a minor production which has gained a small amount of “word of mouth” publicity.

Fun fact: we spent so long faffing about getting this photo taken we failed to notice that the interval had ended and everyone else had gone back inside. Luckily we managed to get back to our seats before Act II began.

This is certainly a popular show – I had to book the tickets in September for a May performance. Eight months of anticipation and excitement: could the show possibly live up to the hype? Minor spoilers for Book of Mormon follow.

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Leeds is a station that has a lot of trains. It took several minutes to comprehend the departure board as I sipped my overpriced coffee from the station café.

Somewhere in that massive list is the train I wanted – the service to Keighley, which was to take me to the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway for their diesel gala.

I haven’t visited the KWVR in a very long time. I can’t remember the exact date of my previous visit, but I do remember the old slam-door electric trains were still in use on the West Yorkshire commuter lines, which must date my visit to the mid-1990s. I do remember it was part of a family day out, and my mother insisted on dragging me away from the trains, alighting at Haworth to trudge up the hill to the Brontë museum, where she cooed over every aspect of the sisters’ lives for what felt like a bajillion hours. Very good authors, but I was not that interested in their kitchen, to be honest.

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This is a really strange advert for Adobe Photoshop, and I’m not talking about the terrible English dubbing:

The advert shows off some of the editing functions available in Photoshop, by way of a woman trying to arrange her family in a photo. It starts off with her doing some minor adjustments, but then it goes on to rearranging the composition, changing the lighting, removing Dad’s walking stick, and even adding a “Happy Birthday” banner that wasn’t there.

Are we really at the stage where people need to edit and touch-up family snapshots to look good? Is Dad’s disability really such a source of shame that the family need to remove evidence of it? Surely family snapshots should be a real, accurate of the event as it happened?

Why not go the whole hog and insert Justin Bieber into the photo? I’m sure Emma would have appreciated having him at her birthday party. While we’re at it, let’s change the background completely and pretend that the party took place on the Moon.

I disapprove, but I suppose for family photos this kind of image doctoring is harmless enough. Newspapers, on the other hand, should know better. The New York Daily News was heavily criticised last week for editing an image of Boston bombing victims to make their injuries look less gory (WARNING: images at that link show the graphic, unedited photos).

Amazing scenes in New Zealand’s Parliament, which voted to legalise same-sex marriage today, with marriages becoming legal within the next four months. New Zealand is the 13th country to legalise same-sex marriage.

Maurice Williamson, an MP for the centre-right National Party, gave a brilliant, humorous speech in support of marriage equality:

The truly amazing scene though, came after the result of the vote was announced:

They started SINGING.

I was completely bored of Margaret Thatcher news by about 3pm on Monday afternoon, and subsequent events have not cheered me up. A “ceremonial” funeral costing in excess of £10 million? Turning off Big Ben? A massive militaristic procession through London? Bah humbug.

Watching Tory politicians falling over themselves to offer fulsome tributes was a bit nauseating. Amidst all the whitewashing of Thatcher’s legacy (Falklands and “sick man of Europe” talked up, miners, gay people and the unemployed overlooked), Glenda Jackson’s heartfelt tribute came as something of a breath of fresh air. I love how the Tory hecklers fail to knock her off her stride.

That said, the “campaign” to try and get Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead to Number 1 annoyed me too. As it is, all the campaign achieved was to put the BBC in an awkward position: the right-wing press attacked it for “disrespect” for even countenancing the playing of the song, then the corporation was accused by the left of “censorship” when it decided not to play it. I know it was just a bit of fun, but I can’t help but think that the energy would have been better directed elsewhere.

The rows over the funeral, the tributes and the song have demonstrated that the old divisions of the 1980s have resurfaced (if they ever truly went away). As the Guardian points out, the tabloid press is again ranting about “lefties”. A lot of the battles of the 80s are still being fought today.

Hopefully, after Wednesday, this extended Conservative Party Political Broadcast will finally be over.

Margaret Thatcher has died. She was a greengrocer’s daughter who rose to become the most powerful person in the country. Ironically, such a feat would be much more difficult today, thanks to the policies she encacted, which widened the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” in society.

Tonight, an impromptu celebration took place on the steps of Lime Street station. I find it rather distasteful, but I can understand the sentiment. I was only eight when she left office, but looking back I can remember clearly seeing the effects of her reign all around the City of Liverpool in 1990: the empty shops, the derelict factories, the miles of abandoned docks left to silt up – oh, and the bus service my family relied on was withdrawn shortly after deregulation.

Thatcher shifted the country from state-subsidised industries to a free-market economy. But in doing so she ripped the beating heart out of the areas that relied on those industries. The North East coal mining communities that were ravaged by the Miner’s Strike have never fully recovered. It was nearly two decades before Liverpool’s fortunes finally started looking up again – just in time for another Tory government to arrive and mess it all up again.

While the City of London and its associated service industries grew fat under Thatcherism, the North was shrivelling and dying.

Her government introduced Section 28, the hated law that prevented children from being taught anything positive about gay people. She told the Tory Party conference in 1987: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.”

She described Nelson Mandela’s ANC as a “terrorist organisation”.

There will be no celebrating nor dancing on proverbial graves from me, but I will not shed any tears. However, her place in history is assured, as a leader who stuck to her principles without compromise, pushed though drastic changes she believed in despite opposition, and left the political landscape permanently changed. What we need now, desperately, is a strong left-wing leader to do something similar, and save this country from the mess it’s in.

Further reading:
SevenStreets: Why Liverpool Won’t Mourn Margaret Thatcher
The Guardian: The lady and the land she leaves behind
Margaret Thatcher: Her role in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster

The original and best ARM operating system, RISC OS, is back on the Raspberry Pi. Here is a quick test run of the new system, along with a quick demo of Draw, Paint and BBC BASIC.

For more info go to my new RISC OS Pi page.

No

If you need a more detailed explanation, Owen Jones’s article on the subject (written before the headline was printed), is worth a read.

Zoe Williams of the Guardian, meanwhile, has a simple request to all those outraged by the Mail’s front page: “Don’t get mad, get even”.

The right wants to divide and conquer, using the politics of envy and hate so it can get away with its outrageous campaign against the poor. Don’t let it happen.

(hat tip to zone_styx on Twitter who created the Vile Product image)