10,000,000 – The total number of signatories to all anti-SOPA petitions

4,500,000 – The number of people who signed Google’s anti-SOPA petition alone

3,000,000+ – The approximate number of emails sent in support of the anti-SOPA campaign on Wednesday

2,583,000+ – The approximate number of tweets referring to SOPA/PIPA and the protest on Wednesday alone

511,111 – The number of people who ‘liked’ Mark Zuckerberg’s SOPA statement on Facebook (as of today)

115,000+ - The number of (recorded) sites taking part in the protest

45,000 – The number of WordPress sites involved in the protest (including Another Kind Of Mind!)

3,000 – The number of emails about SOPA/PIPA and the protest received by Senator Ben Cardin (D, Maryland) alone

101 – The number of Congressmen and women who now oppose SOPA/PIPA

34 – The number of Senators who publicly oppose PIPA as a result of the protest

31 – The number of Congressmen and women who opposed SOPA/PIPA prior to the protest

6 – The number of Senators who publicly opposed PIPA prior to the protest

If you have any more interesting stats on this, please let me know!

And a big thank you to all the visitors to Another Kind Of Mind on Wednesday who clicked through to find out more about the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign – however, it’s not over yet.

If you’re in the USA, you can still contact Congress using the forms here and here, or you can volunteer to call the Senate here. If, like me, you live elsewhere in the world, you can still have your say – scroll down here to petition the US State Department.

Undecided about where you stand? Don’t think that SOPA will affect you in the UK? Then it might be worth remembering that even Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web and made it possible for all the sites involved in the protest to exist in the first place, is strongly and publicly opposed to SOPA/PIPA….

The full text of SOPA can be found here.

UPDATE: The New York Times is now reporting that the Senate has postponed Tuesday’s vote:

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, on Friday called off a scheduled vote on the anti-Internet piracy bill that had rallied the World Wide Web and rocked Capitol Hill, and House leaders took steps to slow legislation as well.

Taking to the medium that helped organize massive protests against the legislation, Mr. Reid, Democrat of Nevada, announced a delay in the vote via the social media Web site Twitter. But he indicated the issue, which had been scheduled for a vote Tuesday, had not died.

So it’s still not quite over yet…

For more information on SOPA, PIPA and why this proposed American legislation will have an impact on all internet users, wherever they are in the world, see here, here and here.

Some new photos from Syon Lane Community Allotment, showing the site looking very different in winter! For some of my previous photos from Syon Lane, see here and here.

If I ever really felt depressed, I would just start putting on all my old records that I played as a kid, because the whole thing that really lifted me then still lifted me during those other times. It was good medicine for me, and it still does that for me when I put something on. Isn’t it wonderful that we’ve got all that good medicine? I think it’s got to be all part of our DNA, this mass communication through music. That’s what it is. It’s got to be, hasn’t it? Music is the one thing that has been consistently there for me. It hasn’t let me down.

Today is Led Zeppelin guitar legend Jimmy Page’s 68th birthday. To celebrate the day on which one of the greatest and most influential rock guitarists of all time was born, I found this fantastic quote from the great man himself. It comes from an interview he gave to The Scotsman in 2010 – and, personally, I couldn’t agree more with his comments….

Happy Solstice to you all!

(For more on the Winter Solstice see here)

Mulled wine (image by maoquai via Flickr)

We drink it every Christmas (in fact, I’ve already been glugging away at it over this last weekend!), and many of us see it as an integral part of a ‘traditional’ festive celebration. These days, you can even buy it ready-made in most supermarkets – although it really does taste much nicer if you make it from scratch (see below for some easy recipes to try).

We all know that it’s a spicy and warming seasonal tipple, but what exactly is mulled wine? Where does it come from? How ‘traditional’ is it? Has the recipe changed over time? And, more precisely, what on earth is ‘mulling’ when it’s at home anyway?

Put very simply, to ‘mull’ wine means to heat and spice it, often adding fruit to the mixture too. This process infuses the wine with the spice (and fruit) flavours, giving it that familiar warming kick. Other alcoholic drinks can also be mulled, including cider, mead, ale and brandy, as well as fruit juices.

Variations on this theme of adding spice to booze have been popular for centuries in many European countries, and there are historical records of a number of old English recipes for mulled wine – some of which date back as far as the fourteenth century, although these recipes were almost certainly very old even then.

Here’s a modern translation of a medieval recipe for Potus Ypocras, found on the fascinating Gode Cookery website. This is a version of mulled wine probably named for Hippocrates, the Greek father of medicine – hence the Hippocratic Oath still taken by doctors today:

Hipocras Drink. Take a half lb. of cinnamon; of ginger, a half lb.; of grains of paradise, 2 ounces; of long pepper, 3 ounces; of cloves, 2 ounces; of nutmeg, 2 ounces and a half; of caraway, 2 ounces; of spikenard, a half ounce; of galingale, 2 ounces; of sugar, 2 lb. If there is no sugar, use 2 quarts of honey

You might have noticed that the recipe doesn’t specify how much wine you would need – but going by the amounts listed for the spices, I suspect it would have been more than enough for quite a large Christmas party! This was quite a common tactic in medieval recipes, with the writer assuming the cook would know exactly how much of this most important ingredient to use.

Most of the spices in this recipe are familiar to us, but there are also one or two exotic-sounding ingredients here. For example, long pepper is actually a very specific type of peppercorn with a fiery flavour from the Far East. Spikenard also comes from afar, being the aromatic root of a plant from India. Like many spices, spikenard was very expensive, making it a real Christmas luxury only used by the wealthy.

Why might this drink be named after Hippocrates? Actually, the explanation makes a lot of sense, since he would have prescribed and made wine-based remedies using herbs and spices, which would then be sweetened with honey – you could say that this makes one sort of mulled wine extremely ancient indeed!

As with today’s recipes, there was much variation among medieval mulled wines. This version also dates from the fourteenth century, and was known as Clarrey. Unusually, this recipe uses white wine rather than the more usual red – although the word ‘Clarrey’ (taken from the Latin vinum claratum, or ‘clarified wine’) actually still survives in the form of ‘Claret’, which, oddly enough, refers instead to a red wine:

Claret. Take cinnamon & galingale, grains of paradise, and a little pepper, & make powder, & mix it with good white wine & the third part honey & run it through a cloth.

Although very short and to the point, this recipe is a little more helpful than the last, as it lists the relevant cooking methods – although it specifies no amounts at all, which suggests the medieval writer of this recipe was very familiar with making it!

Again, you’ll see some unusual ingredients listed here. Galingale is from Southeast Asia and is a peppery rhizome similar in flavour to ginger. It is still used as a seasoning in modern Thai cuisine.

The fabulously-named grains of paradise come from West Africa, and have an unusual taste described as similar to pepper, cardamom, coriander and ginger. They appear to have been used in Europe for over a thousand years, and remain in use to this day in North African food.

The use of such spices in both of these fourteenth century recipes, exotic though they are to us even today, shows that medieval food and drink wasn’t necessarily as boring as we might expect – particularly at times of feasting, like Christmas.

Moving forward a few centuries, we find the legendary Victorian cookery and household writer Mrs Beeton giving us her take on mulled wine:

To every pint of wine allow 1 large cupful of water, sugar and spice to taste. In making preparations like the above, it is very difficult to give the exact proportions of ingredients like sugar and spice, as what quantity might suit one person would be to another quite distasteful.

Boil the spice in the water until the flavour is extracted, then add the wine and sugar, and bring the whole to the boiling-point, when serve with strips of crisp dry toast, or with biscuits.

The spices usually used for mulled wine are cloves, grated nutmeg, and cinnamon or mace. Any kind of wine may be mulled, but port and claret are those usually selected for the purpose; and the latter requires a very large proportion of sugar.

The vessel that the wine is boiled in must be delicately clean, and should be kept exclusively for the purpose. Small tin warmers may be purchased for a trifle, which are more suitable than saucepans, as, if the latter are not scrupulously clean, they will spoil the wine, by imparting to it a very disagreeable flavour. These warmers should be used for no other purposes.

Unsurprisingly, this recipe is much more like a modern one, with detailed directions (although it’s a bit vague about amounts and timings too!). Despite being a little less precise than would be recommended by modern cookery writers, it is not surprising that the Victorian era gave us such a very familiar-sounding mulled wine recipe – it is they who gave us what we now see as a ‘traditional’ Christmas with all the ‘traditional’ trimmings.

I love the little bits of advice Mrs Beeton gives in her recipe about the right pans to use, how they should be cleaned and what to serve with the finished product (it all sounds very Victorian indeed) – although she does make the whole mulled wine process sound like a bit of a faff as a result; which it actually isn’t, as you can see from the modern recipes below…

As an alternative to mulled wine, mulled cider in particular has become a fashionable seasonal drink in recent years. You could even make this recipe with apple juice instead of cider as a Christmassy treat for designated drivers, non-drinkers and the junior members of your household:

You will need:

3½pts/2ltrs dry cider or fresh apple juice

2 apples studded with cloves

4-6 cinnamon sticks

5-6 allspice berries

Zest of 1 orange

Dark rum (optional – omit if you’re making the non-alcoholic version)

Slices of apple for garnish

To make:

1) Put all the ingredients into a large saucepan.

2) Mix them together.

3) Simmer gently for half an hour, making sure you don’t let the mixture boil.

4) Carefully transfer the mixture into a heatproof bowl and ladle into glass mugs.

5) Add apple slices as a garnish.

To finish with, here’s a modern recipe for mulled wine – originally from the BBC Food website – with an optional (and traditionally British – but still unusual) twist. However, you can also clearly see that – give or take a few spices and changes in tastes – the basic recipe has changed little since medieval times:

You will need:

1 bottle red wine

60g/2oz Demerara sugar

1 cinnamon stick

Grated nutmeg

1 orange, halved

1 dried bay leaf

60ml/2fl oz sloe or damson gin (optional)

To make:

1) Put a large saucepan on the hob and pour in the wine.

2) Add the orange, sugar, bayleaf and the spices to the wine.

3) Heat gently on a fairly low light until the sugar dissolves.

4) Taste and add more sugar if necessary.

5) Remove from the heat and add the sloe/damson gin (if using).

6) Strain the liquid into heatproof glasses.

7) Serve immediately (with a selection of festive munchies for preference!)

Goldfinches on feeder (image via Wikipedia)

After a strangely warm autumn, winter is seriously kicking in now, with snow and winds of 100mph and more in some parts of the UK during the last week – and this stormy weather looks set to continue. It’s getting bitingly cold for us humans, but can you imagine what this weather is like for wildlife; especially for the birds in your garden?

Birds can really suffer in such severely cold conditions, particularly young adults and the old or sick. They all need food with a high fat content to help them stay warm in their roosts during the cold winter nights, and if they can’t find enough suitable wild food, they simply won’t survive.

Which is where you come in. As the colder weather begins to bite, putting some food out for the birds in your garden could help them get through the icy winter by supplementing their meagre wild diet at this time of the year – and hopefully give them a better chance of breeding come next spring.

Feeding the birds in your garden (or even on your balcony) is also an immensely rewarding process. It’s fascinating to watch as various types of birds visit your feeder or bird table – in my mum’s small suburban back garden, for example, just one bird feeder brings in more than half a dozen different species, including a very cheeky, very territorial robin who acts like he owns the place!

And if you have children, putting food out for the birds can be a great way of getting them interested in wildlife and the natural world, even if you live in an inner city area. Growing up in London, I can clearly remember as a child carefully hanging a bird feeder out by the kitchen window, and watching impatiently for any new avian visitors to it.

However, there is a lot of confusing and complicated information out there about what (and how) you should and shouldn’t feed garden birds, so I’ve put together a brief guide to show you how you can join with millions of other Brits in helping to look after some of our favourite wildlife.

What to feed:

This can depend on which birds you wish to attract as well as which birds are common in your area. However, at this time of the year, birds need food with a high fat content to keep them warm and ensure their survival, so try some of these: good quality bird seed mixtures, black sunflower seeds, nyjer seeds, peanuts (although these must be of good quality as cheap peanuts sometimes contain a toxin that can be fatal to birds), bird cake and food bars, fat balls, live mealworms, or fresh coconut in its shell.

You can also put good quality human food scraps out for the birds, including the traditional bread! Birds will also happily eat crumbled or grated mild cheese, lard, suet, pastry, stale cake, crumbled biscuits (moisten if very dry), cooked plain rice, potato and pasta, raisins and other dried fruit (soaked in water first), bruised fruit such as apples and pears and breakfast cereals.

What feeders to use:

Bird tables and bird feeders can be equally effective, but it’s really important not to put out bird food of any kind in those nylon mesh bags – birds, particularly small ones, can get their feet caught in the mesh, injuring and sometimes killing them. The holes in the mesh itself are often too big, meaning birds can easily access large chunks of food (for example, peanuts) that could be big enough to choke them.

A steel mesh feeder with holes of about 6mm will be just right for most birds, or use a special seed feeder if you’re putting the smaller sized bird seed out. If you’re using a bird table or tray, make sure it has a rim to keep the food in place, and small gaps to allow rainwater to drain away.

Make sure you site any feeders or bird tables in a clear area, away from any large shrubs or trees where cats or other animals could lurk, ready to pounce on your birds. You can’t prevent the local moggies from doing what they’re hardwired to do (although our cats were never particularly talented when it came to hunting live prey!), but you can minimise the effects by the careful siting of your feeders.

When to feed:

It hasn’t always been the case, but many people actually feed garden birds all year round these days. Theoretically, however, if you want to feed the birds in winter, you really should start putting food out as early as October (this allows the birds to get used to there being food in your particular garden), but even putting a feeder out when a cold snap starts is better than not feeding at all!

Make sure you put the food out regularly – early in the day for preference – and monitor consumption so you can judge how much food needs to be put out each time and whether more is needed at any point during the day. Try not to put food out in the evening as it may attract vermin rather than the birds you’re expecting (a lot of birds will be roosting by then anyway).

What birds to expect:

This really depends on where you live and what food you put out – but even in inner city areas you’re likely to attract a variety of different birds. Common visitors to bird tables and bird feeders include starlings, house sparrows, blackbirds, blue and great tits, robins, greenfinches and collared doves, but you’ll probably spot others too.

In some areas, you might attract more exotic species – a friend of mine in Liverpool gets regular visits to his feeder from a beautiful pair of woodpeckers (he also has owls in his garden, something I’m very jealous of!), or perhaps those colourful, noisy ring-necked parakeets might even pay you a visit if you live in the south-east.

At this time of the year, you might get some seasonal visitors too, as there are many birds from colder climes who like to spend the winter in this country. Fieldfares and redwings, for example, are Scandinavian birds who regularly overwinter in the UK, and they will frequently visit gardens where there are fruiting plants available to them – they love berries (see below for more on wildlife gardens).

Other information:

Make sure you clean your feeders or bird table regularly and clear away any rotten food and droppings that may be scattered around the feeding area – otherwise it can become a breeding ground for infections and other nasty bugs that can devastate the local bird population, as well as affecting other wildlife and pets.

If you’re putting food out for the birds, always put out a container of fresh water too. Like all animals, birds need to drink and bathe, so water is necessary, especially if what you’re feeding them is quite dry. You’ll need to check the water frequently for ice in this weather, replace it on a daily basis to ensure it’s fresh, and you’ll also need to clean the container regularly.

As a long-term tactic for attracting birds and other wildlife to your garden, it’s worth thinking about growing plants and herbs in your garden that will provide extra food (in the shape of berries, nuts, fruit and the insects that are attracted to many plants) for the local feathered population at those times of the year when natural sustenance may be short.

Finally, I’d recommend investing in a decent bird book which will help you identify any unfamiliar visitors to your feeders, and keeping it easily to hand for those moments when you spot a new bird in your garden – I’ve found my bird books very useful in situations like that (another good place to identify any mystery birds is the Bird Identifier section of the RSPB’s website).

Good luck and let me know if you spot anything exciting on your feeders this winter!

For more detailed information about feeding the birds in your garden, take a look at these useful guides from the RSPB and the RSPCA.

The RSPB website also has a shop where you can buy good quality feeders and bird food, alongside books and other bird-related goodies.

It seems that people indulge in a serious amount of hotel thievery at this time of year – and I’m not just talking about bottles of shampoo or those fluffy bathrobes either. Everything from tinsel, fairy lights and baubles to a Christmas tree and an entire Nativity scene have been pinched by guests from various Best Western hotels in the run-up to Christmas!

And that’s not all. People must check out and bring a Transit van round to the back of the car park. How else would they get a leather two piece suite home? Or a suit of armour? Or a twelve foot model Concorde? Or a papier mache full-size model of a man? Or even the entire movable contents and furniture from a hotel room (except the bed)?

Check out the infographic below for more bizarre details about the truly random nature of hotel guests’ sticky fingers!

There’s already lots to read, watch and listen to on the new site. You can find out more about the crises featured in the film, discover how The Crisis of Civilization came to be made, watch some of the archive footage used in the film, read how artist Lucca Benney created the film’s distinctive animated sections, listen to radio interviews with the director Dean Puckett and the writer and narrator Nafeez Ahmed, or even learn how you can help by subtitling the film or by putting on a screening yourself!

And on the subject of screenings, I have some equally exciting news…

After last week’s successful London premiere at the Whirled Cinema, we have three more FREE London screenings of The Crisis of Civilization coming up in the next few weeks! Forget the consumerist excess of Christmas and come join the team for one, two or all of these:

15th December 2011 - Transition Brixton, 6-8 Robsart Street, SW9 0DJ – 7pm

16th December 2011 - UBS Bank of Ideas, 29 Sun Street, EC2M 2PT – 7.30pm

19th December 2011 - Tent City University at Occupy LSX, EC4M 8AD – 8pm

For more information on how to get to these venues, visit The Crisis of Civilization website here.

Rock ‘n’ roll has always been rebel music. Or at least that’s how it started out anyway. And nowhere was it more rebellious to be into western rock music than the Soviet bloc of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a place where authoritarian leaders frowned upon western pop cultural icons like rock bands and blue jeans.

In the USSR, the government saw itself as all-powerful, and what it said went. This was reiterated by the two major media organs of the state: Pravda (or ‘Truth’), the official voice of the Russian Communist Party, and Izvestia (or ‘The News’), the official media outlet of the Soviet government.

These were powerful papers, but many Russians naturally took their on-message pronouncements with a rather large pinch of salt – hence the old Soviet joke that there was no news in the Truth and no truth in the News! It seems in some ways almost inevitable, then, that western music – the Beatles in particular – would have such an impact on Russian youth culture.

Ignoring Lenin’s dictum that music under Communism should not be left alone to “let chaos develop as it pleases. We must systemically guide this process and form its result”, young Russians began forming bands and creating an underground rock scene that eventually, towards the end of the Communist era, went as mainstream as it was possible to get in Soviet Russia.

By the mid-1980s, the hardline government attitude to this kind of popular culture was beginning to relax somewhat, and Soviet rock ‘n’ roll finally and rather bizarrely got what was probably the closest it would ever get to official, on the record, state-sanctioned approval. In October 1986, Pravda itself rather sniffily pronounced:

Rock and roll has a right to exist but only if it is melodious, meaningful and well-performed¹.

That’s rock ‘n’ roll told, then.

I dread to imagine what Lenin would have thought of all that…

¹ Quoted in: ‘Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945‘ by Tony Judt (London; Vintage Books, 2010), p.602.

You may remember that last month I wrote about the thought-provoking new feature-length documentary, The Crisis of Civilization. Since then, the film has received its world premiere at the Elevate Festival in the Austrian city of Graz, and a hugely successful British premiere was held at the Leeds International Film Festival – where the film had the honour of being chosen as a ‘Festival Favourite’!

So, what’s next?

The Crisis Team are now very excited to announce that the film is being publicly screened in London for the first time next week. Playing on two consecutive nights, The Crisis of Civilization will be taking over the Whirled Cinema in south London on Tuesday 29th and Wednesday 30th November, and the Team are inviting you – yes, you – to come along!

Both screenings are FREE and start at 7pm. Dean Puckett, Lucca Benney and Nafeez Ahmed will all be in attendance to introduce the film and discuss it with the audience afterwards. They’ll be happy to respond to any questions and comments you may have about the film and the issues it raises, so put your thinking caps on.

Seating is limited, which means you’ll have to move fast if you want to attend one (or both) of the screenings. Email the Crisis Team at info@crisisofcivilization.com with your details and they will reserve seat(s) for you. Please feel free to invite your family and friends too!

I hope to attend at least one of these screenings too – if you see me, come and say hello! I look forward to seeing you there.

How to get to the Whirled Cinema:

259-260 Hardess St

Loughborough Junction

London SE24 OHN

(You can also see the location of the cinema on a map here)

Tube: Brixton (Victoria Line) – the cinema is a ten minute walk from the tube station

Train: Loughborough Junction (Thames Link from Farringdon, Blackfriars or Elephant and Castle or from Sutton via Herne Hill)

Buses: 35, 45, 345, P4 (from Brixton/Camberwell)

For more information and regular updates, please check out the Crisis of Civilization Facebook page.

99% / MIC CHECK! / LOOK AROUND / YOU ARE A PART / OF A GLOBAL UPRISING / WE ARE A CRY / FROM THE HEART / OF THE WORLD / WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE / ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE / HAPPY BIRTHDAY / #OCCUPY MOVEMENT / OCCUPY WALL STREET / … / OCCUPY EARTH / WE ARE WINNING / IT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING / DO NOT BE AFRAID / LOVE.

The man who put all this together was 45-year-old Mark Read, who later told the website Boing Boing how much he has been inspired by the Occupy Movement:

I feel immense gratitude to these youngsters for kicking my ass into gear. I’m feeling so much gratitude to everyone, for putting their bodies on the line every day, for this movement. It’s a global uprising we’re part of. We have to win.

Since 1969, three thousand one hundred and eighty people have died in police, prison, psychiatric or immigration custody.

Think about that for a moment.

That’s three thousand one hundred and eighty people – all of whom were someone’s son or someone’s daughter – who died unnecessarily and often in deeply suspicious circumstances. Three thousand one hundred and eighty people who arbitrarily and tragically lost their right to live their lives, their right to a future, their right to spend time with their friends and families.

And very, very few of those families have ever had justice.

That is why the United Families and Friends Campaign remembers each and every one of these men and women, each and every year – and you can see some of my photographs from the 2011 march for justice above.

(Click on an image to enlarge it)

It’s possible that John can form some kind of nightmarish career out of his enthusiasm for unlistenable records and his delight in writing long and facetious essays… - RHJ Brooke, John’s housemaster, in one of his school reports.

Born John Ravenscroft to a well-off family in Cheshire on 30th August 1939, he spent his youth at Shrewsbury, a well-regarded public school, where he fell in love with 50s rock ‘n’ roll (much to the annoyance of some of his teachers!), before going on to do his national service in the Royal Artillery – which he didn’t enjoy very much at all:

The Army said afterwards, ‘At no time has he shown any sign of adapting to the military way of life.’ I took it as a compliment.

By the early 1960s he was in America, technically working as part of the family firm, but instead he was actually becoming more and more infatuated with the rock ‘n’ roll that was causing such a moral panic on both sides of the Atlantic at the time – to the extent that he ended up with a job at a radio station in Dallas at the height of Beatlemania (not because of any technical ability, but because his accent had a Liverpudlian twang!).

Being in Dallas at this time meant that he also managed to play a peripheral part in one of the most notorious events in American history – somehow blagging his way into the press conference in which it was announced that Lee Harvey Oswald was to be charged with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy….

Returning to the UK in 1967, John found a job at the pirate station Radio London. This period was the height of these illegal and highly influential radio stations, many of which broadcast from ships moored offshore. Because of the illegality of stations like Radio London and Radio Caroline, many of the DJs involved – John included – felt they had to use pseudonyms to protect their identities and broadcast with less risk.

It was here that ‘John Peel’ was born – and his show, ‘The Perfumed Garden’ clearly demonstrated his broadcasting style, featuring underground music, poetry, discussions on politics and letters from listeners. This was unlike any of the other DJs plying their trade at the time, and it sounded, as his later Radio 1 shows always did, as if he was broadcasting to you, the individual listener, and no-one else:

You had a remarkable two-way dialogue with the audience which is not possible to simulate on land. You put the show out completely on your own in the bowels of a rotten ship three miles out at sea. You knew the audience felt a little bit daring listening to you.

The law caught up with Radio London in August 1967, forcing it to close and putting John out of a job. However, the BBC were launching a pop station and he was offered a job with the brand new Radio 1, beginning his new show in October 1967. His trademark eclectic taste in music and what became known as the ‘Peel Sessions’ were part of the show from the start, creating a distinctive style of broadcasting unknown to the BBC up until that point.

Over the next thirty-plus years, the BBC – to their credit – let him get on with playing the music he liked, despite the odd spat – as he acknowledged in 1979:

They leave you to get on with it. I’m paid money by the BBC not to go off and work for a commercial radio station… I wouldn’t want to go to one anyway, because they wouldn’t let me do what the BBC let me do.

And the music he liked was music from every genre you can think of and then some. He broke (or helped to break) countless bands, giving many who later went on to superstardom their first chance at mainstream exposure via a Peel Session. He inspired music fans and musicians alike, as Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker recalled in 2006:

Like countless other people, I guess, the John Peel show was the place I really learned about music. Up until then it had been a mixture of songs from my Mum’s record collection that weren’t too bad and chart stuff – now, suddenly, for two hours every week night I was exposed to so much other stuff; the punk rock that I’d been searching for initially, for sure, but also so much more. Listening to the show became an act of almost religious devotion for me.

And the Peel Show became “an act of almost religious devotion” for so many other people, including me. I used to listen in bed, headphones attached to my little transistor radio, lying wide-eyed in the dark as John played yet another incredible track by yet another incredible band that I’d never heard before, introducing it in that wonderfully laconic, laid back voice of his.

I still remember hearing about his death. A friend texted to tell me and I didn’t believe it at first. Couldn’t believe it. Peel’s show was such an integral part of my teenage years – I had hoped he would go on forever. I genuinely couldn’t believe that I’d never be hearing that voice again, never hear him apologising for playing a seven inch at the wrong speed again, never be bemused or amazed by his choice of tunes again.

His love of music reflected my own, and he introduced me to some amazing bands and artists that I still love today – without him, I suspect that a very large percentage of my (very large!) music collection wouldn’t even physically exist, let alone be stacked up all over my room in ever-growing and teetering piles.

For generations of music fans, John Peel was almost like a member of the family – you know, the cool cousin or uncle who has a great record collection and loves to share his music. And that’s what he taught me, that’s what he gave me: the knowledge that good music is something to be shared, to be loved collectively, to be passed around your friends and family with enthusiasm and passion.

And I know I’m not the only one who feels that way, hence #KeepingItPeel.

John Peel – always remembered, still missed.

Photos from the one week anniversary celebrations at #OccupyLSX at St Paul’s Cathedral, plus the Tent City University State of the Nation Roundtable Discussion at Bank and the additional new site of occupation at Finsbury Square, EC1. For more information, visit the #OccupyLSX website.

(You can also see more of my #OccupyLSX photos here)

What is ‘The Crisis of Civilisation’?:

The Crisis of Civilisation is a new and thought-provoking feature-length documentary film, which, in the words of the film-makers, investigates

how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

Weaving together archival film footage and animations, film-maker Dean Puckett and international security analyst Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed – author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It – take you on a surreal journey through an alarming tapestry of global systemic failure.

This is also a film about ideas. Ideas that have gotten us into this mess and ideas that can get us out — If we want it.

You can find out more by watching this short video:

The film receives its official world premiere at the Elevate Festival in Graz, Austria on 23rd October 2011 and the British premiere will be at the Leeds International film festival on 9th November 2011 (details to follow) – but I was lucky enough to be invited to a very special ‘friends and family’ sneak preview screening back in June, which absolutely blew me away and left me determined to support the Crisis Team in getting this fascinating and timely film out to a wider audience:

The final home of The Crisis Of Civilization will be online for free. But before that we want to get it seen by as many people who wouldn’t normally watch a film like this as possible by putting on community screenings, getting the film into festivals, and coming up with innovative ideas to highlight the interconnected nature of the crises that we face. We are also working with Mercury Media to try and get it seen on the Television. This film is yours.

Which is why I’m asking for your help…

How you can help:

There are lots of ways you can help The Crisis of Civilisation…

First off, you could help crowdfund the project – Dean, Lucca and the rest of the team have been working on the film for free thus far, and money is badly needed to help promote it, enter it into film festivals, produce DVDs etc. Every little bit of money helps. For more information on how to donate, and the exciting goodies the team are offering in return for your generosity, please visit The Crisis of Civilisation Sponsume page – but please be aware that there is a time limit on this, you only have until October 26th 2011 if you wish to donate!

Or you could arrange an independent screening – get in touch with the Crisis of Civilisation team (see below for more details) and, wherever possible, a member of the team will attend the screening to answer any questions and talk about the project with the audience. If you can’t personally arrange a screening, but you know someone or somewhere that can, feel free to get in touch with the team too!

Or, it would be great if as many of you as possible could please spread the word about the film! Tell your friends and pass the information on to as many folk as you can. If you’re on Twitter, please retweet this blog post (or The Crisis of Civilisation website, or the Sponsume page – or even all of them!), or you could share on Facebook – or even blog about the film yourself. The more people who know about The Crisis of Civilisation, the better – especially if you or anyone you know can help with subtitling in other languages.

Finally… If you can think of any other creative or practical ways you could help, please get in touch!

How you can find out more and get in touch:

Visit The Crisis of Civilisation website -and find out more about the crises covered in the film in The Learning Machine.

Check out some more of Dr. Nafeez Ahmed’s work at his blog, The Cutting Edge – and on the Institute for Policy Research and Development website.

‘Like’ the Crisis of Civilisation Facebook page

Follow The Crisis of Civilisation on Twitter

All images and video via crisisofcivilisation.com – many thanks to animation legend Lucca Benney and the rest of the Crisis Team for kindly letting me use them!

These days we see that part of central London as being an area of very expensive real estate, but in the early 19th century it was almost exactly the opposite. Tottenham Court Road was then part of the notorious St Giles ‘rookery’, which was probably the worst of all the slums in London (Hogarth’s satirical and moralising print Gin Lane was set in 18th century St Giles).

Almost fifty years after the beer flood, when the worst of the rookery had been demolished in slum clearances, the writer and reformer Henry Mayhew could still describe St Giles in scathing terms in  A Visit to the Rookery of St Giles and its Neighbourhood (1860):

The parish of St. Giles, with its nests of close and narrow alleys and courts inhabited by the lowest class of Irish costermongers, has passed into a byword as the synonym of filth and squalor. And although New Oxford Street has been carried straight through the middle of the worst part of its slums—”the Rookery”—yet, especially on the south side, there still are streets which demand to be swept away in the interest of health and cleanliness…

In 1814, the area was even worse than this; lawless and poverty-stricken, it was massively overcrowded and had little or no sanitation for the many inhabitants who lived cheek by jowl in the old and poorly built houses of the rookery.

The Meux Brewery had been on its site at Tottenham Court Road for a number of years, and was famous for its huge vats used for brewing various beers – the biggest of which strained under the weight of a mind-boggling amount of over half a million litres of beer or porter.

On the evening of 17th October 1814, the iron hoops which held this vat together finally gave up under the strain and it burst, creating a chain reaction in the brewery’s other vats. They burst open too, and almost one and half million litres of beer swept out into the streets in a huge alcoholic tsunami, sweeping all before it.

A report from The Times vividly describes the effect of the beer flood on some of the poorly housed local inhabitants:

The fluid, in its course, swept every thing before it. Two houses in New-street, adjoining the brewhouse, were totally demolished. The inhabitants, who were of the poorer class, were all at home. In the first floor of one of them, a mother and daughter were at tea: the mother was killed on the spot: the daughter was swept away by the current through a partition, and dashed to pieces.

The tide of beer swept through houses and the local pub, the Tavistock Arms, trapping a teenage barmaid under the rubble it left behind. She was one of nine fatalities that evening – the youngest being only three and the oldest in her sixties. Some drowned, often as inhabited cellars filled with beer, some, like Eleanor Cooper the barmaid, were killed by falling rubble or swept away as the force of the flood battered away at the old and crumbling properties of St Giles.

One victim, however, died as a result of alcohol poisoning – presumably thinking they could help the situation by drinking as much the flood as they could! Some sources describe locals rushing outside with bottles, pots, pans and any other container they could find to fill them with as much beer as possible (tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing if you had been a poor Londoner at the time!).

Once all the beer had finally drained away, the brewery was taken to court over the disaster – then, as now, people naturally wanted someone to blame. However, the judge and jury eventually decided that the flood had been an ‘Act of God’ and that no human agent was responsible for it.

The brewery itself carried on, despite losing a lot of beer (and – obviously – money) in the flood, until the building was demolished in the early decades of the twentieth century. Today, much of the area is mostly a building site for the controversial Crossrail project – if you were to visit, you’d really never know that this was the site of such a strange and tragic moment in London’s history…

The Occupy movement is spreading. Yesterday there were Occupy actions in cities across the world, including here in London. As ever, I was there, armed with my trusty camera – and you can see some of the results above.

Follow @OccupyLSX on Twitter or Facebook for more information on Occupy London, or check out their website – they’re currently camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral (with the cathedral’s tentative blessing!) if you are interested in visiting and finding out more. You can also email them with any inquiries at: occupylondoninfo@gmail.com.

Update: On Sunday evening, #OccupyLSX issued an initial statement, which you can read here.

A few photos from the UK Uncut action against the NHS Bill on Westminster Bridge yesterday.

Ahem. Anyway.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve had my nose buried in Things Can Only Get Better, John O’Farrell’s amusing 1998 memoir of being a Labour Party supporter in the 1980s and 1990s, which I first read about ten years ago. Although I find much of O’Farrell’s work very funny (he wrote for the legendary TV satire show Spitting Image at its height, and is responsible for the highly amusing NewsBiscuit website), I don’t always agree with him – for a start, his devotion to Labour reminds me why I don’t support a specific political party and won’t be going into politics any time soon (or at all!)

However, his vividly despairing description of why the electorate shouldn’t have voted Conservative in the disastrous 1983 general election bears repeating here, as it has resonances that echo through to today and the horrific policies of our current ‘coalition’ (read: Tory) government. It seems little has changed…

What did people think the Conservatives wanted to do for them? These arrogant, remote and vicious people who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Did they have a history of helping people worse off than themselves? Did they have a record of granting more freedom, improving living standards and fighting inequality? Had they wanted the abolition of child labour? Had they wanted the abolition of the slave trade? Had they wanted to grant the right to form trades unions? Had they wanted shorter working hours or the establishment of a decent basic wage? Had they wanted universal suffrage? Had they wanted votes for women? Had they wanted the National Health Service, the Welfare State, universal state education, or anything else that improved the rights, power and prosperity of the majority of ordinary people in Britain? Of course they hadn’t. Why did people think that the Conservatives might suddenly have their interests at heart now? (p.77)

And always remember – they still don’t have our interests at heart today either…