Coalbrookdale by Night
by Philip James de Loutherbourg, from 1801.
Coalbrookdale by Night provides a view of the Bedlam Furnaces in Madeley Dale, downstream along the River Severn from the town of Ironbridge. It has come to symbolize the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire, in England. It is held in the Science Museum. Art historian Brian Lukacher dubbed the picture as "the best known example" of the industrial sublime, a genre that specialized in representing industrial settings. He said the picture is "a celebration of the energy unleashed by a coke-fired blast furnace and an early reckoning with its environmental consequences".
Margaret Thatcher, born 13th October 1925, died of dementia 8th April 2013, Conservative Prime Minister 1979 to 1990, notorious for breaking the trade union movement and the British coal extraction industry. Her government closed 25 unprofitable coal mines in 1985, and by 1992 a total of 97 mines had been closed; those that remained were privatised in 1994.The resulting closure of 150 coal mines, some of which were not losing money, resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and had the effect of devastating entire communities. Pouring concrete down the pits to ensure they could not again be worked was just the icing on the spite-cake.
Boris Johnson, Conservative Prime Minister 2019 to 2022, sold the British Steel Industry to the Chinese. Who bought it in order to close it down. According to Nigel Farage, that is. Now had Baroness Fucking Thatcher not crippled the coal industry, Britain would not now need to send Royal Navy vessels to protect the importation of vital coal shipments needed to keep Scunthorpe's blast furnaces operating, the government having finally woken up to the fact that Britain needs the steel industry and the steel industry needs coal, despite LoonyTunes Milliband and his determination to beggar the country with his Net Zero Nonsense.
This has been an astonishing week, culminating in the recall of Parliament from their Easter holidays for a Saturday sitting - the first since 1982, when MPs returned after the start of the Falklands War. Parliamentarians within a single day passed an emergency law through both Houses that allowed the Government to take control of the Chinese company, Jingye, which bought British Steel in 2020, reportedly for £50 million after it collapsed and was placed under the control of the United Kingdom Insolvency Service. We are told that the only viable option was to accept that China would buy British Steel, as the other tenders were not acceptable. The thought of nationalisation at that point clearly did not enter anyone's pointed little Conservative head. Nor that the Chinese Government might have another agenda for the future of the British Steel industry.
Anyway, turns out Jingye has allegedly lost £700,000 a day, stopped buying coke for the furnaces and started selling off its existing coal stocks. It took the workforce taking over the plant and locking out the Chinese management, fearing they would commit sabotage and industrial espionage, for Government to sit up and pay attention. The emergency legislation allows the Government to order raw materials for Scunthorpe's blast furnaces as it is feared that supplies are about to run out. Ministers are able to direct the company's board and workers and ensure that anyone at the plant "who takes steps to keep it running, against the orders of the Chinese ownership" can be reinstated if they are sacked.
It is almost unbelievable.
But ask the steel workers in Port Talbot, whose steel plant was closed down by its Indian owners, Tata Steel, with a loss of over 2000 jobs, last year, without the government lifting a finger to prevent it.
Sometimes one feels that the political classes hate the British working classes. One wonders why. The aristocratic classes seem ok with the working classes, although it wouldn't do to marry in. Royalty kindly enquires: and what do you do? and have you come far?
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Daffodils do very well in Orkney. This is a corner of the daffodil meadow that I planted in the walled garden - over a thousand daffodil bulbs, planted in cold, dark November by the light of a head-torch, so that come April they could reflect the sunshine and perfume the air. Until the gales put paid to all that. Probably why there's not much of a gardening tradition here.
I am not native here, not to the manor born, and a quarter century ago, when I was first here, a Stranger in a Strange Land, a pleasantry ventured to a Local Person would be received with a grunt, or subvocal, Fuck off, English cunt.
The first time mr ishmael and I attempted to have lunch in a café in Stromness, we claimed a table and sat down, bravely ignoring the stares of the other patrons, and read the menu. Time passed, whilst we puzzled whether clapshot or stovies would prove edible and what the fuck was a clootie dumpling. We decided. We waited. And waited. mr ishmael, you may recall, suffered from extreme food-ordering stress disorder. After 15 minutes, during which time no-one came near us, but the four or five obese women behind the counter looked at us, giggling and whispering, he said, we've got this wrong. It must be counter service. So up I went to the counter, where the women continued with their conversation, whilst staring at me. It was a bit like being in Wales. Eventually I said, excuse me? Sorry to trouble you, but could I order some food? One woman, looking me up and down, and clearly not liking what she saw, snapped: sit down. Its table service. someone will be over and take your order. So I sat down, and we waited. And waited some more. mr ishmael got very restive. Eventually he said, lets go. At which point, one of the large ladies thundered across and asked what we wanted. We interpreted this to be a request to take our order - but it might not have been. We asked for sandwiches and tea. She wrote it down and left. We waited and after another 20 minutes, mr ishmael started getting his coat on. This did the trick and the sandwiches arrived. Two hours from start to finish. For a cup of tea and a sandwich.
For a birthday celebration, we went to the finest hotel on the Kirkwall harbour front. By this time, we were accustomed to service that moves at the speed of a glacier in winter, and were pleasantly surprised when our dinner plates were placed before us, bearing a slab of roast beast with a good hunk of Yorkshire pudding and lots of brown gravy. This looks good, said mr ishmael. Let's hope the vegetables are hot. We waited for vegetables, perking up when the waiter threaded his way between the tables. Not for us. We waited, then started picking at our meat, just tidying it up, a little slice off the edges. Then we kind of got stuck in. You know how hard it is to catch a waiter's eye? They are trained to avoid eye contact, so you have to stick your foot out and trip them up as they go past. mr ishmael asked the waiter he'd managed to detain - there are vegetables, aren't there? Not sure, you see, because it could have been a Scottish custom not to serve vegetables, and there aren't any fruit and veg shops, after all. The waiter said, I'll ask chef. He came back eventually - maybe chef was in a snit, and said, chef says there are vegetables. mr ishmael said: Good. Where are they? The waiter said, I'll ask chef. By the time he came back, we had made considerable inroads into our roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Chef says that the vegetable have gone out. He looked about the restaurant. I think they've gone to that table over there - they have two dishes.
Well, can we have them?
No, the other customers have eaten them.
So, can we have vegetables from the kitchen?
I'll ask chef.
On his return, the miserable waiter told us: chef says you've had your vegetables. You can't have any more.
So, by and large, we stopped going out and tried to have nice food at home - there was the time I went down the street in my lunch hour to buy some cream from Cummings and Spence. 
I looked in the dairy fridge, but, not finding cream, I spoke to a woman behind the counter. Excuse me, could you tell me where the cream is?
It's Wednesday, she informed me.
Yes, I agreed, but could you direct me to the cream?
There's no cream in the week. No call for it. Come back on Saturday.
Things are much improved now, of course. Two of the establishments mentioned have ceased to exist.
There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish Plumber. The anthologies have been compiled and produced by editor mr verge, the house filthster, from the writings of our founder, in answer to the appalled and bereft reaction of ishmaelites to the passing of mr ishmael in January 2020.
You can buy the Quartet from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:
Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps
please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4
At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
13 comments:
I am surprised that Mr I showed such patience. Wicker Man shivers.
Ah, mr bungalow bill, being an expat, he didn't want to offend the natives. He did find the Genital Café particularly trying, however. This was a small establishment in Kirkwall, in which the counter had been lowered to allow it to be accessed by wheelchair users - both customers and staff. It was a social-enterprise business, so some counter staff were learning-disabled. He believed normal-height counters were essential for hygiene and objected to being required to look at the boy-bits and girl-navels of staff. This was the era when fashion dictated that fat girls had to wear jeans that skimmed their pubic bones and their thrusting round bellies were brazenly, if not sexily, proudly displayed. The current fashion is for fat girls to wear black leggings stretched so tightly that the rolls and dimples of backside cellulite threaten to bursten forth.
The other week, the local paper reported the unsurprising statistic that 75% of Orkney's population is obese. One is presented with the evidence every time one ventures out. I myself had to pay the Orkney premium of "the Orkney stone" after moving here - incomers put on a stone in weight in the first six months after moving here - you are generally safe if you just come for a fortnight's holiday. The letters column of the paper howled with denial and disgust - along the lines of "how dare they say we are obese?" Where do they get this nonsense from?" Why, from the NHS and the Scottish Government. I had a couple of Government researchers knock my door and barrel in with a height measuring device and a pair of scales. Until then, I had fondly imagined myself to be a person of pleasing curves and average female stature of five foot five inches. I haven't got over the shock of finding that I have somehow misplaced two inches and I am now five foot three inches, qualifying for the Marks and Sparks' petite range (which refers only to height, not width). And as for the pleasing curves - they have become Junoesque.
The thing is, that if you live in a fat community, you don't realise you are fat, because everyone else is and the shops sell clothes that fit you. Only when an individual becomes truly bariatric is it accepted that he has progressed beyond being a "well-made man". The same survey reported in The Orcadian, to such widespread hostility, found that the Scottish population is 50% obese, but that Orkney has done really well in the obesity stakes with it's 75% result.
Maybe it's the cold, maybe it's the national diet, maybe it's the heavy-drinking culture (Scotland is the Sot of Europe) - but while Scotland leads, the rest of Britain is catching up fast. Just have a look at your fellow shoppers next time you are in the supermarket and their over-flowing trolleys, and remember how people used to look in the Seventies, and how their shopping was contained in two bags, one for each hand, for balance as they walked home.
But, but, but Harold Wilson, mrs I. He closed more coal mines than Fatcher, allegedly, admittedly non productive mines, but, still. An he was workinclass just like ourKeir is.
An the Jeets who were given Port Talbort steel works, were given £500 millions of taxpayers monies to quietly close down n nothing more need be said about the eh mr rusty nutsack?
What most people seem to forget is that it was Fatcher who removed the limits on how much money could be taken out of the country, at any one time. Thus allowing the big Corporations to remove all their tax-free investments, accumulated over the years, at taxpayers expense, to ‘invest’ in foreign, low paid workers. Particularly engineering, cotton, auto and steel.
The more one ponders on these things, mr inmate, the more one's mind is boggled by the size and complexity of the scam that has been perpetrated on the majority of the people of this country by a very few. Not that we're special. I understand that the Parisian political and liberal elite are cordially loathed by the population.
Eating or narcotizing ourselves to sad oblivion is the way of the western world, Mrs I. Better than God.
But not of the Islamic world, mr bungalow bill. And the Islamic world intersects with the Western world in all the major European cities. We see how British governments have been in hock to the Muslim vote - J.D. Vance seems particularly disturbed by this, but then he's a devout Catholic, and for him, one religion is not as good - or as bad - as another. Don't mourn the demise of God-bothering just yet - the Abrahamic religions remain a massive force to be reckoned with. When I was visiting Birmingham a few years back, a mosque was pointed out to me with some revulsion, because it was not a new build, it was converted from the fabric of a nineteenth century Anglican church. I thought that was a very relevant use of a redundant, deconsecrated church - better than turning it into an antique centre or an all-you-can-eat-for-a-tenner fusion restaurant. And that is what the Christians did, when they were new kids on the block - tore down the pagan statues and claimed the temples for their own worship.
I have always liked this from Mr Belloc, Mrs I:
“ The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine – but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight”
I should sign to the above, sorry.
That is excellent, mr bungalow bill - I hadn't come across it. Thank you.
Good to see you back mrs ishmael, I trust your ailments have abated.
I see the English supreme court have referenced their primary school biology texts and had an outbreak of logical thinking. When can we expect Starmer to pronounce that such misinformation/disinformation is unhelpful.
Meanwhile in the demented dominion we have a general election in progress, the ruling party bereft of any talent or sense have drafted a failed Bank of England governer as leader. He was asked a question related to how many genders there are
https://x.com/stephen_taylor/status/1912664777718915210
he was less than pleased to answer, kindasorta answered correctly then immediately fell into old habits.
Congratulations to J K Rowling who almost single-handedly brought about the aforesaid decision of the supreme court.
Thank you, mr cascadian, I am much better now.
I fell about laughing when I heard that Mark Carney is now plaguing your politics. I suppose a chap has to make a living, but, from his outing on the X link you gave us, the man has trouble speaking - or maybe its trouble thinking. Good to know he respects all Canadians.
Trump, give him his due, issued his edict that women are women and men are grateful, and now the Supreme Court in Britain has agreed that the Equality Act refers to biological men and women - so that's the U.S. and Britain sorted. Maybe France - where all this deconstructionist Critical Theory originated - will be a harder nut to crack. And BBC news is fighting back hard, parading transwomen demanding entry to women's institutions, toilets and sporting competitions, claiming they are an oppressed, victimised minority. As if! Nah - just arrogant, entitled men, rebounding against female emancipation.
Government's respect for individuals in canaduh is conditional mrs ishmael, the slightest hint of non-conformance to their woke norms might get your bank account frozen, small acts of mischief might get you pursued through the courts for several years (see Tamara Lich and others). In short Carney's words are worthless.
Let's see where this ruling gets us, nobody should be surprised if we continued on the downward spiral. Our governments cannot allow truth to guide them, especially in the case of the covid "vaccination" debacle where the catch-all phrase misinformatio/disinformation will be deployed indiscriminately.
If one wonders how this propaganda propogates it has just been revealed that the Obama third administration (Biden) were bribing the whole world through USAID and pressuring the internet providers. https://x.com/nataliegwinters/status/1913689663786586134
My dear mr narcolept’s theory is that men in particular need to do something practical by way of work, and though mining was and is a horrible job with awful conditions it was something they seemed to be proud of doing. Closing the mines without creating anything to take their place was criminal.
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