I must report on this year's Peterloo commemoration before it slips by. After last year's event, when several hundred people turned up to hear readings by Maxine Peake, Christopher Eccleston et al, we deliberately decided to go for something a little different, not attracting as big a crowd but trying to refocus attention on our primary goal, the ( Read more... )

I must get on and give you my account of last week's Peterloo commemoration, which was our biggest and best yet. We usually do a formal wreath-laying on August 16, and hold a rally on the Sunday, but as Sunday fell on the 16th this year it was a single event, and our new idea was "the Peterloo Picnic" - Peterloo as it should have been, a peaceful ( Read more... )

OK, I'd better say something about Loncon3 before I move on. This was the first Worldcon I have attended, and I cannot be certain I will attend another, though many of us were saying we'd go to Dublin if they get it in 2019 ( Read more... )

I've been very bad at keeping up with my ramblings in various parts of the country since we went to press four weeks ago. This post is intended to catch up with assorted picture spam from March.

( Nine pics of Ely cathedral )

Well, I enjoyed The Aztecs, which I hadn't seen before. I was particularly fascinated by the scene where Ian and Ixta are fighting to the death, or possibly not - there was some argument about whether death should be involved - on a set of matting we used to have in our kitchen, though the Aztecs had got a bit more of it as their temple was bigger ( Read more... )

Today was the second half of this year's Peterloo commemorations, and I'd bought a new camera after the fiasco of the old one breaking down on Friday and preventing me from getting any photos of Maxine Peake reading the names of the dead and laying a wreath. So there are photos this time ( Read more... )

Today is the 194th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre. The wreath-laying ceremony under the plaque on the Free Trade Hall (now masquerading as a Radisson Edwardian hotel) was our biggest yet. The Peterloo Memorial Campaign had persuaded Maxine Peake, who performed Shelley's Peterloo poem The Masque of Anarchy at the Manchester International ( Read more... )

On Sunday I went to the final performance of The Masque of Anarchy, part of the Manchester International Festival. The Masque is a poem by Shelley written in response to the Peterloo massacre, though as the programme pointed out he had a rather hazy grasp of events as he was in Italy at the time. It's not an account of the massacre, but of Murder ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to post some photos I took during the Heritage Open Days this weekend.

On Saturday, I stuck to the far end of Didsbury. I started at the former Wesleyan College, which I remember as Didsbury Teacher Training College (when I was at primary school a lot of the students did teaching stints with us), though it later became part of ( Read more... )

Just heard that, as part of Heritage Open Days this weekend, Gorton Monastery will be hosting Gorton Visual Arts' project "Chaos" which they describe as "a contemporary visual representation of Peterloo... The collective pieces of casted plaster sculpture use present day personal carried items which may be dropped and lost during an event of Chaos ( Read more... )