The Other News From England.

24th. July 2000.

Index of earlier issues - click here.

(Those who like digging about will find that there are hundreds of articles on many subjects to be found on this site.)

Old issues.

There are some much earlier Other News on this site. Click below.

early Othernews - 1992, 93, 94.

Bonnington Cafe and Bonnington Square.

This Saturday - believed to be Hugh Harris and Gabriele Gad - quiet old-fashioned jazz played by this popular piano/saxophone duo.

Bonnington cafe is a communally owned cafe in Vauxhall. The atmosphere is somewhat Bohemian, friendly, educated, and much wine (bought from the corner shop across the road) seems to get drunk. Good quality vegetarian. Cheap. The only lighting is usually candles stuck in wine bottles, and the furniture is a collection of odds and sods that people have thrown out. The overall result is relaxed and pleasing. People tend to spend the whole evening over their meal.

The cafe gets very full, but sometimes there is a list of telephone numbers of the people who cater there in case you should wish to try to make a booking. Most Saturdays are catered by Marguerite - but not all.

Bonnington Cafe, Vauxhall Grove, London SW8 UK. Near Vauxhall underground and mainline station, and many buses. Booking is difficult.

Economics.

There are one or two websites concerned with economics listed below.

Joe Punter's Shakespeare.

King Henry the 6th. part 1 Act 5.

ACT 5.

SCENE 4.

Camp of the Duke of York in Anjou.

Enter York, Warwick and others.

YORK:

Bring on the sorceress who is condemned to burn.

Enter Pucelle, guarded, and a shepherd.

SHEPHERD:

I've been looking for you all over, and now I find you here - condemned to die. I think I would like to die with you, my sweet daughter.

PUCELLE:

You're no father of mine. You're just a common shepherd.

SHEPHERD:

I am indeed her father, as all the village knows. She is the first child I begot in my bachelorship.

WARWICK:

How mean can you get? Won't you acknowledge your parentage?

YORK:

Shows what kind of life she's had - and now she's dying.

SHEPHERD:

Whether you recognise me or not I am your father and shed tears for you. Please do not try to stop me.

PUCELLE:

Go away peasant. You have brought this man to obscure my noble birth.

SHEPHERD:

Sod it. If she won't even recognise her father hanging is too good for her, so burn her. I wish she'd never been born, or had been poisoned during childhood.

(exit)

YORK:

Take her away. She has been alive too long.

PUCELLE:

Before you do that, do you know who I am? I'm not the daughter of a shepherd but one born of kings, virtuous and holy, chosen by god to work miracles on earth. I had no wicked spirits. As to you, you are badly polluted with your various lusts, have much innocent blood on your hands. Because you do not have any proper graces you find it impossible to believe that anyone could succeed by being virtuous, and so assume I am aided by devils. I'm even still a virgin, still chaste and still immaculate of thought> I shall ask for vengeance at the gates of heaven.

YORK:

Yep. Right. Take her away to be executed.

WARWICK:

And because she is a woman, do everything you can to expedite the matter, and thus shorten her torture.

PUCELLE:

Then I must tell you I am pregnant, and you will be murdering my unborn child.

YORK:

Gosh! The virgin with child!

WARWICK:

Is that all your great efforts come to?

YORK:

I get the impression there has been a little hanky-panky with the dauphin. I thought she might resort to this.

WARWICK:

Well, we don't want any more bastards, especially if the father is Charles.

PUCELLE:

It wasn't him. Alencon is the father. YORK:

Alencon! That git! It dies.

PUCELLE:

Please listen. I misled you. It was neither of those, but the king of Naples, Reignier who is the father.

WARWICK:

A married man, too. Most unacceptable.

YORK:

My! She's been shagging around a bit. Could be any of them.

WARWICK:

She's been pretty free and easy.

YORK:

Yet she's still a virgin! We've heard enough. Please don't give us any more of that stuff. We're not listening any more.

PUCELLE:

Then a plague and a pox on you and your families, and may the sun never shine in your lives, and you dispair and hang yourselves>

(exits, guarded.)

YORK:

Burn, you bitch.

Enter Cardinal Beaufort, attended.

BEAUFORT:

I have come to try to broker a peace between the two countries. Look. Here comes the dauphin to talk about it.

YORK:

Is this what all our efforts come to? Now we become all soft and make up? Like a bunch of cissy boys! Good god, I can see us losing all the ground gained back to the French.

WARWICK:

Be patient. We can bargain for very tough and beneficial terms.

Enter Charles, Bastard, Alencon, Reignier, others.

CHARLES:

As we are now offered peace, we have come to see what the terms of that peace are to be.

YORK:

It's no good, Warwick. I can't talk in such circumatances.

CARD. BEAUFORT:

The deal is this: You submit completely and declare allegiance to the English crown and we will leave you alone but treat Charles as a viceroy. Isn't that a wonderful offer?

ALENCON:

So you expect him to be less than he was before? That would be a bloody stupid thing to accept.

CHARLES:

Sod that for a game of soldiers. I'm already accepted as king of a great deal of France. Do you think I would be fool enough to give up that in order to become viceroy of the whole of France?

YORK:

If you don't accept, we'll continue to attack your country forever.

REIGNIER (aside to Charles):

We're not likely to get another offer so acceptable.

ALENCON:

I suggest we get a bit of peace by accepting, then break the arrangement when we feel like it.

WARWICK:

Well, Charles. What do you think?

CHARLES:

OK. But you do not have access to any of our garrison towns.

YORK:

Right. Declare your allegiance to the king, and declare that you will all behave like a bunch of faithful dogs, and we shall have some peace in this area of Europe.

All exit.

More next week.

People.

I HAVE known Davey since he was about 12 years old. He was the charming but irritating little git who let people's tyres down because the hiss made him giggle, who played about with bikes, made radios from basic electronic components, grew larger amd took to fiddling with cars (not other people's), became a car dealer, helped me in the early days of my transport business, became a mini-cabber, a driving instructor, developed from there to running his own driving school, then went abroad to start a van hire firm, had a couple of wives and a couple of kids, came back broke, and in 1991 woke up one morning unable to decide how to use his last £5.50p (£1 to feed the dog, £1.50p for breakfast, £2.50 for general shopping), and as he was trying to work out the best strategy the telephone rang (he had managed to keep a phone) with a customer for a central heating boiler repair (he had managed to learn ventral heating along the way too), he went to the job, borrowed the money to pay for a new pump from the customer, completed the job, paid some bills, kept the advert going that had brought that customer, and the calls have never stopped since.

This week, Davey told me he now employs 12 people, has a fleet of vans, a site of one or two acres in central London, turns over £1.3million, has a London house and another with housekeeper in the country, and would consider business to have been OK if he had a £300,000 profit on the year. He tells me one of the most pleasing things about his operation (not just plumbing, but all matters to do with building) is that he only employs really excellent people to do the work and can enjoy the craftsmanship of the finished job, "but yer know there's more 'er life th'n money. Matter o' fact I've had enough o' making money. There's so many things to do. If I can just pull off this large deal I am lookin' at now, I'll retire."

He told me about finding stolen handbags thrown into his yard, and giving them back to their owners, learning martial arts and self-defence, and how he wants to try being a magistrate. He talked about his kids with fondness, and about how he relates to his customers. I do not believe these things were designed to impress, but they nevertheless suggested a great deal of kindness (this was reflected in his two cats, whose behaviour told more than any self-promotion could).

The small boy who used to let your tyres down is now a pillar of the community, wanting to retire and do a bit of do-gooding! Next time you lose your rag with that little git in the flat downstairs consider what he might turn into in the future.

The way it looks to me, the young man who counted the £5.50 in his rented flat nine years ago will be retiring a multi-millionaire.

.......................................................................................................

The stuff that doesn`t often get changed now follows:

Biotechnology

Click here for an email that arrived in January 2000 concerning a proposed reasoned approach to this tricky subject

This website is about accounting investigations and fiddles. If you like to look at financial scandals (both hidden and public) this might be worth a look. I have not been there myself, but the books produced by these people, although difficult to follow, cover a lot of mysterious ground.

This website is about the destruction of countryside and agriculture. Worth a visit if you want to find out about how it is thought the British countryside will fair under the ongoing creep of the multinationals.

This website is one to do with monetary reform.The British Association for Monetary Reform. If you are interested in economics it is worth a look. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~bamr1

This is a website about alternative currencies.Might be worth a look to those who have realised that you don't necessarily have to have money as such to be prosperous.

This is a website for something called The Green Guide. I know nothing about it, but am hoping it is something worthy. Please let me know if it is questionable.

This is a site concerned with one of the most unpopular planning decisions ever made in Greater London, the Crystal Palace Complex. It is so stunningly awful that only a handful of people who do not live near it appear to approve, whilst the rest are not entirely uninclined to mention such things as payola, freemasons....you name it! The site belongs to the London Borough of Bromley, but the aggro generated by it and the destruction of amenity caused by it will be almost entirely suffered by residents of adjoining boroughs and not the people of Bromley themselves.

This is a recycling site based in London, and offering materials to anybody. The organisation is a charity seeking to link suppliers of surplus materials with users. Especially good for the more ingenious designers amongst us.

The email of the people who run the above site is cs@london-recycling.demon.co.uk. They are called Creative Supplies. Look them up for more info.

Here's an interesting education site - particularly for those who have young children and are not quite sure what to do to avoid the worst of what`s on offer in the mainstream of education.They are called www.edrev.org.

early Othernews - 1992, 93, 94.

Early Other News essays.

There were a few essays that went out with the early Other News as a freestanding item. You can read these by clicking below.

Essays.

The Soup Designer`s Handbook.

The Soup Designer`s Handbook.

London Journey - a trip from Docklands through Beckenham and back to Docklands.

Friday Woodworkers.

(Friday Woodworkers are suffering a temporary break due to some of the episodes not having been fully edited at the time of writing. It may take some timne to fix this problem.

Episode 17.

(These articles were written in 1988, and were my first attempt at writing. Some people when shown these fell about laughing, some smiled faintly - and some yawned. I thought I was going to write a technical book, but it soon became apparent that I was much more interested in the people than the technology - and that is the main reason there are no drawings - although it might be rather good to do a couple of caricatures sometime.)

Index of Friday Woodorker articles (and a means of access).

Index of earlier issues.

Gabriele Gad on alternative therapy.

A READER COMPLAINED that it was not possible to go back more than 6 articles in Gabriele`s area. Regrettably this is because there is no index, and I have not the time to organise one yet. However, for those determined enough to find the early ones, they should be accessible by going to an early Other News and clicking through from it. This will not be fast, but I think will do the job. They started about November 1997 I think.

editor@othernews.co.uk

Cartoons and graphics.

drawings click here.

sheet music click here.

Consumers.

LEXMARK 3200 PRINTER.

In an earlier issue I told you about my feelings regarding Tempo retailers and the Lexmark 3200 printer I bought from them.

The Lexmark 3200 printer I got from Tempo must surely be the most uneconomical printer I could possibly have bought. The black cartridge only does about 250 pages of ordinary type - for £28! That makes each sheet cost 11.2 pence plus the cost of the paper and probably another 11.2 pence more if any colour is used! - ABOUT 22.4 PENCE A SHEET! Nearly a pound for every four sheets!

I wouldn`t recommend you to buy it - but also look at my earlier article for an idea of Tempo`s service.

Wanted

A person to help make up a subject index for the growing numbers of articles on The Other News From England. Email editor@othernews.co.uk

8- or more-track tape recorder. email pcj@gn.apc.org

All material on this site is copyright. Contact me if you want to use it. I am quite flexible. Educational non-profit use is free - but ask for permission and print an acknowledgement. If you can`t think what to print, put:

From The Other News From England. http://www.othernews.co.uk

Even better if you print the date of the article.

editor@othernews.co.uk

That`s all this week folks