Reassuringly Expensive
Radio 4 yesterday ran an interesting programme about High Flight a favourite poem of mine. The programme explores the history of the poet and pilot John Magee and of the poem itself.
The programme is available on iPlayer for another 6 days and is worth a listen; although I could have quite happily gone without ever hearing the King Singers sung version.
Yes really…
From the Guardian:
The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.
Reading The Spectator and The Third Estate it seems this is the question that The Guardian is being prevented from reporting:
61 N: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.
This would seem to be the report that Carter-Ruck are trying to supress.
It’s hard to belive that we, in the UK, still live in a democracy and not some kind of Orwellian state controlled not by Big Brother, but by Big Business.
But it’s also pleasing to see how quickly and widely this story has spread through the ‘blogosphere’, and that as of writing the top trends on Twitter currently include: Guardian, Cart-Ruck, Trafigura and #carterruck.
Maybe Carter-Ruck will think twice before slinging injunctions around next time…
I suppose I’m a relative latecomer to poetry having only started to appreciate it in the last couple of years. I don’t recall ever reading poetry at school, and, perhaps unconventionally, it was the use of poetry in films that piqued my interest.
This was followed by finding a book of The Nation’s Favourite Poems at a relatives house over Christmas which made me realise that I was aware of more poetry than I realised, and also that poetry was more accessible than I had previously thought.
High Flight by John Magee has quickly become a favourite of mine. I had always thought that it was much older than it actually is, and that it was more metaphorical in its view of flight. I was surprised and delighted to find that it was written by a WW2 fighter pilot about his love of flying.
It’s a wonderfully eloquent description of the joy flying brought him; made tragic when you learn that he died shortly after writing it – it was in the last letter his parents received from him.
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
Pilot Office John Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941
As I no longer have a links page or blogroll I’d like to draw your attention, if I may, to Biting The Big Apple; a great blog written by my friend Stephanie.
Stephanie and I worked together for a few years in London, then in 2007 Stephanie made the huge step of moving to New York to live and work.
Biting The Big Apple records that adventure and Stephanie’s thoughts and experiences of living in New York City.
It’s been really interesting re-reading a number of the posts with a new perspective following my first trip to New York.
Sam Brown recently published an interesting post on the value and merit of SEO: Why I think SEO is bullshit – in which Sam says:
For me, it’s all about my personal brand, Sam Brown is who I am and who I want to be known as. I do not want to be known as that “web designer from Scotland”. But herein lies the problem,SEO is a flooded market, everyone is trying to game the system, get a higher rank and profit from it, too many people spend too much time trying to get Number #1 rank on Google instead of focusing on improving themselves, their sites and their products. Doing this will not go unnoticed and links will grow organically.
I found this particularly interesting following my own experiments with optimising this blog for search. Shortly after that post this blog rose to 17 in Google UK’s search rankings; but then almost as mysteriously dropped to the mid 40s. At this point I decided I had done as much as I could, and really should listen to my own advice:
The biggest factor in getting that to happen is of course content; if you don’t have content of interest to people they aren’t really going to link to you are they?
Having said that I didn’t start writing more in an attempt to increase my search ranking. I have been writing and posting more because I’m enjoying it again, and because I feel I’ve got back to where I was when I started blogging: simply sharing my thoughts and the things I find online. A kind of digital scrapbook if you will.
Intriguingly, and reinforcing Sam and my points regarding quality and content, since I stopped focussing on SEO I’ve had articles linked to by a number of higher profiles sites including Boing Boing Gadgets. As the quality and quantity of posts has increased I’ve also seen the number of visitors increase.
The final surprise came last week. I thought I’d see where I sit in a search for David Hughes on Google UK. At first I thought I’d dropped even further down the rankings, but when I started from page 1 I was stunned to see that my little blog now sits at number 3 – on both .com and .co.uk. I was amazed.
I guess content really is King.
I just saw this video on Garr Reynold’s posterous blog and thought I’d share it with you; as Garr says it’s hard not to smile.
Garr Reynolds is the author of Presentation Zen a brilliant book on presentations and visual design. If you write or create presentations you should read this now. PLEASE.
Garr is based in Japan and his posterous blog is a fascinating stream of visuals from Japan and around the world. I highly recommend subscribing to the posterous blog or following Garr on Twitter.
His main blog Presentation Zen is also a great read with more in depth articles on presentation style and visual design.