THE RATHBONE ARCHIVE David Irving THE RATHBONE ARCHIVE David Irving. October 2013. David Irving asserts his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Acts 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication, in part or in whole may be made without written permission, or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Rathbone’s Rambling was a daily blog which ran on the Talk Porty website from 22 August 2005 to 10 December 2012. Inevitably a number of the posts have now disappeared. Reading through those that survive, I have edited out those which were only meaningful in their immediate context (i.e responding to other things that were happening on the website) and those which were eventually subsumed into Howff tae Hip Hop and other work which will hopefully appear on here in the future. Those that remain after that sifting process are archived here. Unfortunately the accompanying images have proved impossible to transfer over, so you’ll just have to use your imagination! Instead of trying to present them chronologically, I have grouped them into topics: Prologue Life with the Rathbones Arts and Crafts Music Politics and other heavy stuff Boxing and other Sports The Wonderful World of Oz Comics Books, Films and other Cultural Artifacts Postscript Unfortunately the accompanying images have proved impossible to transfer over, so you’ll just have to use your imagination! And remember, this is stuff for dipping into, if not ignoring altogether …. PROLOGUE My friend Stan asked me a good question last night. It was :”Why do you do it?”, meaning why do I spend half an hour every morning gobbling my breakfast and trying not to get crumbs in the keyboard of this laptop while writing this piece. I suppose one answer is to go back to August 2005 and the first bit of rambling: After the infamous Dalriada Spladoosh I mentioned that I sometimes found it difficult to get involved in Porty issues as living so far away means that I feel a bit 'out of it'. There was then a discussion on the Porty Diaspora and it was suggested that I start a blog to keep people informed on what I am up to, and maybe other Porty exiles could do the same. So that’s the official line, but Stan’s question was a bit deeper than that. Is it an overweening ego? Maybe. I’ve always been a bit full of myself, in an understated, quiet way of course. Is it attention seeking? Maybe, but if it is it’s unconscious. I’ve never been short of self confidence. Is it arrogance and/or vanity? Maybe. As my kids will attest, I am both perfect and can do anything..... I’ve been telling them that all their lives. Then there are other types of questions: Is it an attempt at entertainment? Maybe. You will have to be the judge of that, but I assume that it is because the number of views goes up every day, so people must be coming back for more. Is it Art? Again you’ll have to be the judge of that. Art is anything you want to make it (some pretentious basket said that, and it wasn’t me). Is it science? Now that’s where the questions get really interesting..... take Erkki Kurenniemi. Erkki Kurenniemi is one of those names which just trip off the tongue. Some of you may be familiar with his electronic music. Some of you may be more familiar with his documentaries. Most of you probably haven’t the faintest idea who Erkki Kurenniemi is. Erkki Kurenniemi believes that at some point in the future medical advances will increase life expectancy to the point where there will be no living history because people’s memories will be so long that recording history as we know it will be distorted. Consequently he thinks it is incumbent on us to maintain a day to day record which can be archived for use by these semi-immortals in the future to understand what life was like before they were born...... a bit sci-fi, but potentially feasible. Consequently Kurenniemi registers, one way or another, every trivial detail of his life. He takes at least a hundred photographs a day. Records the sounds of his daily life. Videos his every movement. Produces cassette diaries of how he feels. He has been doing that for decades. He looks forward to when he can directly download his consciousness into a computer. Some people consider him slightly dotty. I think he’s worth a google. So, let’s look on these ramblings as my contribution to the great Porty Archive and hope that in a couple of hundred years some semi-immortal will learn a little bit about what it was like to be spladooshed. LIFE WITH THE RATHBONES Since the houses at the end of the street started falling into the old mine workings, peace has reigned. Unfortunately, there was a small paragraph in the local paper last week to the effect that an Order has now been placed before Parliament under the terms of the Mine Works Act 18somethingother. So it looks like they are going to get around to backfilling the holes and shoring up the buildings at last..... which is good news for the fourteen families who have been out of their homes living in digs for the last nine months.... but bad news for the rest of us. It means that the school will re-open. All those bloody cars blocking up the street morning and afternoon. All those idiots thinking that they can take a short cut to avoid the speed bumps on the main road. That imbecilic tune on the ice-cream van. They will all be back. On a personal level, it has been another year of battling with my feet. A case of mind over metatarsals. If it hasn’t been the achilles tendon it has been the knees. When it hasn’t been the knees, it’s been disappearing chiropractors. To add insult to injury I moved on to new shoes last month. Inevitably they rub in different places and I am now nursing a blister where blisters have never been before. Still, only two half marathons to go this season and then I can ease back until next March.... The creative highlight, of course, has been Radio Free Porty. Thanks a lot, Dada, I have enjoyed every minute of it. Thanks, too, to all the other D.J.s for making it harder to compile sets because they have already grabbed the fandabbydozy tracks. (You know who you are, Americana...OK?) For your delectation in the coming months, October sees the thirtieth anniversary of Mrs R and I getting hitched, on which she will no doubt have some pearls of wisdom. In November I am going back to Kenya to supervise the building of a nursery for aids orphans at Kilifi. In December I have to make up my mind if I’m prepared to carry on as Environmental Convenor. In January I shall renew my vow to spend more time with my guitar and in February Jim Jam and I will realise that we have left it too late to do justice to the Bimbo preparations. March sees the start of the half marathon season again, and I’ll be back to ruining the metatarsals. It’s a hard life. ☐ ☐ ☐ I've been watching the repeats of Heimat on BBC4, and getting hung up on the logistics of developing the village into the town. The little details of the area around the war memorial change from episode to episode.. How did they do that? Start with the town as it was in the 1980s and work back in time, demolishing things, or start with a small set and keep adding?? Pity the DVD hasn't a "making of Heimat" featurette. I suppose it would be possible to pull together a Porty Heimat. Virtual Memory. To take one example, when I was small the area at the junction of Adelphi Place and the High Street was the tram depot. The trams used to go from there up to the Post Office at Waterloo Place. Then, when I was about nine, the trams were replaced by buses with signs on the back of the seats saying ' no spitting on the bus' and little metal plates for striking your matches on before you lit up your Craven A. Apart from a few memorial feet of track outside the Post Office, the tramlines were torn up, the depot was torn down and the flats were thrown up. Now I notice they've got nice little railings along the front and Mrs. Wright has put out her plant pots to add a bit of colour. Then there were the shops in front of the villas in Bath Street, now all gone. Molly Hood's, where you had to take your sweetie coupons until rationing was lifted. The Barbers where you didn't need coupons to get something for the weekend. The Greengrocers, where the parsley actually tasted of parsley. And the chip shop which served real chips in real newspaper and is now the last to go. Which brings me to Rathbone house from whence I came, replaced long ago by nothing much. The garden went even earlier to accommodate some rather attractive public conveniences, subject of another thread on this forum, glimpsed in this early seventies photograph.