Berlin shows the way for museums

  Just returned from a weekend in Berlin which coincided with the city’s Museum night. During this Lange Nacht der Museen or the Long Night of Museums, all of Berlin’s museums, from the largest to the most obscure, throw open their doors over a Saturday night. The event last through Saturday evening into the early hours of Sunday morning (most stayed open until 2am) and compete with each other to lay on the best show providing bands, jugglers, comedians and so on to add something to their event. The tickets for the whole event were about £10 and included buses between the venues. Plus most of the shops stay open late too (we found an excellent bookshop near Friedrichstrasse open till midnight). Absolutely brilliant and it has been so successful in Berlin over the years that apparently other cities like Paris are copying the concept. 

So here is something for If Brian Paddick’s Mayoral manifesto (with apologies to the other Lib Dem candidates standing but they are certainly welcome to pinch the idea) open the doors of London galleries and museums for one night in the summer. Throw in a ton of performance art, a cheap ticket with free travel and you have a winner. Can’t see that not working in any city for that matter!

Also I can recommend an excellent restaurant for anybody looking for a good place to eat in an idyllic setting: Altes Zollhaus, Carl Herz Ufer 30 in Kreuzberg tel: 030 692 3566: web: www.altes-zollhaus.com. Let me know what you think.

    

Prescott’s farewell party gives nod to October election

John Prescott and his wife were spotted in his favourite Chinese restaurant, Mr Chu’s on Hull’s riverfront, on Wednesday putting the finishing touches to their plans for the ex Deputy PM’s farewell bash which, apparently,  is to be held there on Saturday. The fact that he is holding this now when Parliament has another two and a half years left to run surely confirms that the party’s senior figures have been tipped off that the General Election is imminent. Unless, of course, he is planning to step down himself anyway.

Rubik’s Cube – I was there

I see that aficionados are to celebrate the 25^th birthday of Rubik’s Cube. I thought it was actually much older than that but it reminded me of an incident from my youth.

 

I did my degree at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London in the mid-70s. I met a Hungarian girl there (her family lived in Birmingham and were expatriates from the 1956 revolution) and we travelled back beyond the Iron Curtain to see her uncles and aunts and so on who still lived there. One evening we went to see one of her cousins in Budapest who, with her husband, was a postgraduate student in the Mathematics Department at the University of Budapest. While were sitting around eating goulash and drinking plum brandy, the husband tossed me what I would call a ‘plastic device’. He said his Professor had developed it as a way of introducing his students to the concept of logic. He wondered whether if might be of interest to people in the west. It looked appealing but as a non-mathematician I didn’t quite get it so on my return to the UK gave it to my younger brother who immediately worked it out and then put it in a drawer. If I say that the Hungarian Professor’s name was Rubik and the plastic device tossed over to me that evening was a cube with different coloured squares on it you know where we are going with this! Suffice to say that within 18 months Rubik’s Cube had become the bestselling toy worldwide and I had had my hands on an early example. When the game became such a phenomenon part of me wanted to say out loud ‘I saw that years ago’ but then another part of me said probable best to keep quiet. Anyway it is one of those ‘If only I’d known’ stories which Radio 4’s Saturday Live feature and indeed they did this morning.

 

Interestingly, I had a second chance in marketing toys and games because some years later when I was working for a printing company in Ipswich the boss came back from meeting some Canadians in New York who had invented a board game. He had negotiated the European rights. He said it was called Trivial Pursuit.

  

Second tier football for the Addicks – I just hope it’s not a return to mediocrity

I have just been reading 442 magazine and its review of next season. Rather worryingly Charlton are favourites to win the Coca Cola Championship. I have been supporting Charlton since 1965 and I can’t remember us being favourites to win anything over all those years. Anyway the imminence of the start of the new season caused me to reflect once again on Charlton’s relegation from the Premiership. My emotions after the Spurs game which confirmed that relegation were of disappointment of course but gutted no. Relegation had been on the cards for most of the season after all.

I think it was the excellent Adrian Chiles, a long suffering Baggies fan, who during their two precarious seasons in the Premiership talked about the ‘hope that kills you as a football supporter’. In actual fact there wasn’t much hope at Charlton as I can remember. On only two occasions during the whole season were my spirits lifted to the extent that I genuinely thought we can get out of this. The first occasion was after the last minute winner against Aston Villa (I was listening to the commentary in the car at IKEA) and then the win against Newcastle.

There were some (a few) positives from the season: the performances of goalkeeper Scott Carson and Darren Bent; the fans and of course Alan Pardew. There are too many negatives to list here but in terms of performances and matches that sort of sum up the season you need look no further than the cup games against Wycombe and Nottingham Forest.

Overall I won’t miss the Premiership, not least the 30 second piece (almost always patronising) on Match of the Day showing the highlights of the Charlton game. Probably what relegation means to me is that after several seasons where Charlton on and off the field had made real advances, we are going backwards for the first time. Although I suppose it could be argued that on the pitch at least the last couple of seasons have been pretty poor fare. All of this compares in my mind to early November 2003 when we had just beaten Fulham 3-1 and gone fourth in the Premiership. We were playing some good stuff and Scott Parker was superb in midfield and in recognition had just been called into the England squad. We had Di Canio doing his stuff, his performances indicative of just what a good manager Curbishley was. The Board had announced that the Valley was to be expanded to over 40,000. All was right with the world. It seemed to be part of an irresistible rise started by our return to the Valley in December 1992. So I suppose there is a fear in me that we might return to mediocrity like so much of the 1960s and 1970s.

But next season will be fun for various reasons; something I will reflect on in a separate blog.

Delivering surveys in Heworth in the heat

I was delighted to be able to help out the Liberal Democrat candidate in Heworth Without ward in York yesterday afternoon. This is a seat the Lib Dems lost to the Conservatives by just 34 votes in May so with a by-election now pending the local party is taking it very seriously indeed. The snag with volunteering yesterday was the heat. Although I have delivered leaflets all around the country over nearly 20 years, I have never done so in such heat. The temperature when we finished was 32º Celsius! Pretty remarkable for Yorkshire. This heat, of course, is in stark contrast to the weather we have been having recently. I wonder if in future we will look back on 2007 as the year climate change really made its mark.

 

Anyway, good luck to Nigel and his team in York. I hope to be back there before polling day on September 6^th – I just wonder what the weather might have in store for me. Snow?

The Russians are coming – for your oil, gas, coal …

Two interesting stories today involving the Russians and energy.

On the one hand there is news that the Russians have ‘planted’ a flag on the sea bed beneath the North Pole. This is part of their quest to secure oil and gas reserves in competition with the Americans, Canadians, Norwegians and others in the Arctic.

There was a further story which examined how Hatfield Colliery was back from the dead and in no little part thanks to Russian investment. Whilst there undoubtedly is a place for clean coal technology linked to carbon storage under the North Sea, the fact that Russians see the largely moribund UK coal sector as one worth investing in is very illuminating.

 These two stories seem to suggest that the Russians aim to be even bigger players in terms of energy supply in the years to come, whether it be oil, gas or coal, at the North Pole or in South Yorkshire.

Happy Yorkshire Day

Today is Yorkshire Day. I suspect that this might pass most people by including those who live in Yorkshire. But I thought it worth commenting on and I did a piece for the Yorkshire Post today which is below.

Unfortunately Yorkshire Day will not be marked in any significant way at least not beyond the civic procession in Hull. Ignorance? Apathy? After all it’s not a public holiday. Perhaps it comes down to the fact that most people are on holiday on August 1^st and the people in Yorkshire at this time of year are, for the most part, visitors.

So maybe Yorkshire Day is wasted  in August and it should be given another date in the diary, preferably a day off too. I am sure everybody has a suggestion but mine is a date which breaks up the long haul between New Year and Easter: February 6^th, which happens to be the date when Fred Trueman was born!

Good reasons to celebrate our winning team

By Stewart Arnold

DESPITE the fact they were submerged into npower some years ago, I have a friend who, until recently, made his cheques payable to Yorkshire Electricity as a personal act of defiance against the loss of another Yorkshire company.

His cheques are nevertheless still banked, so I wondered what really motivated him to do this and it got me thinking about Yorkshire and what makes the attachment to Yorkshire companies and organisations so strong.Thumbing through the telephone book, this Yorkshire Day, one sees a lot of companies with Yorkshire in their name selling anything from eggs to damp proofing, from plywood to financial services.

If one adds to this the unequivocal connection with Yorkshire of the expression White Rose, there are literally thousands of companies linked to the county. Of course, this might just reflect the geographical scope of these companies to indicate their area
of operation.

In most cases, this seems unlikely. After all, the Yorkshire Bank is a national operation (well at least as far as Nottinghamshire, given their sponsorship of that county’s cricket team) and, of course, so is this newspaper.

No, the use of Yorkshire in the title is there to suggest to potential customers a set of characteristics
and values.

One can only assume that the Yorkshire brand has positive attributes given the wide range and number of companies operating under its name.

In other words, it is shorthand which says that if it has Yorkshire on the label, on the tin or in the title, then this is good stuff.

So what attributes does the term Yorkshire serve up? Underlying it is probably a quality product at a fair price and that nobody is being ripped off. For foodstuffs at least, it invokes a sense of wholesomeness in a reflection of the famous Hovis ad.

Or maybe it conjures up an image of Yorkshire itself: of dales and moors and Minsters and David Hockney and so on. This is pretty stereotyped, but at least a move away from the usual image of flat caps and whippets which is how others claim to see us.

What is also encouraging is the widespread use of the White Rose symbol to reinforce the Yorkshireness of the product or the company. That symbol has in turn become a powerful perception of the Yorkshire brand.

Interestingly, with the possible exception of Cornwall, I would
be hard pressed to think of any other English county or region which provokes the same sort of positivity when it comes to products and services.

In fact, I would contend that Yorkshire has the same sort of reputation as some of Europe’s smaller countries. After all didn’t a former Bishop of Wakefield in fact describe Yorkshire as a country in miniature?

A couple of years ago, I spent a few days after Christmas with my wife in Barcelona which, of course, is in the proudly independent region of Catalonia.

Over the years, fostered particularly during the Franco years, the city’s football club has come to represent the Catalan independent spirit. And, although Barcelona FC has such a strong following in the region, there is nevertheless an aspiration for a Catalonian national team.

Although not recognised by UEFA, once or twice a year a Catalonia team does play. On my visit, they had just drawn 1-1 with Paraguay in the Nou Camp.

I immediately thought that we could do something similar here, perhaps as a way of marking Yorkshire Day each year, drawing on the best

footballers born in the county to play under the White Rose against say Scotland or Northern Ireland.I even started to jot down a possible team. That’s when my
idea started to wither on the vine because I got as far as naming
Paul Robinson as the goalkeeper and was actually stumped to name another 10 players plus substitutes who we could put out to play international football.

And, perhaps, this symbolises the variation in the way the spirit or embodiment of different regions is expressed.

For some it is football. For others, such as ourselves here, perhaps it is in the expression of good quality products and services.

I suppose it can be summarised as a question of making brass over football and, given the current state of the game in Yorkshire, who can blame anybody for that?

Stewart Arnold is a former chairman of the Campaign for Yorkshire.