Ukip still existing for some reason

I think that reason might be comedy. Mainly because the remarkable Aidan Powlesland is among the gaggle of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists now vying for the Ukip leadership. And in a three-way contest for the most ridiculous figure in British politics, Aidan is definitely the only candidate who could beat Lord Buckethead and Jacob Rees-Mogg:

Aidan Powlesland, who is standing for parliament in the rural seat of South Suffolk, told BuzzFeed News he wants to set aside £100 million for "an interstellar colony ship design" and £30 million for an "interstellar nano-probe fleet design" designed to attract the attention of Russian investor Yuri Milner, and will provide a £1 billion prize to any private company that can mine the asteroid belt by 2026.
Asked whether asteroid mining was a priority for most UKIP voters – compared to issues such as immigration controls – Powlesland replied: "I suppose the absence of the centrality of a proposition within a general dialogue doesn’t necessarily mean that the dialogue is heading in the correct direction."

...Powlesland's election leaflet also includes a pledge to cut the welfare cap from £20,000 per household to £10,500, abolishing all residential planning legislation to encourage housebuilding, repealing employment laws that entrench "political correctness" so companies can "hire and fire at will", and stopping road construction – because we will soon all be travelling by flying cars.

Other flagship policies include buying "ten flying aircraft carriers" for the armed forces – apparently reviving the large-scale zeppelin programmes of the 1930s – and investing in electromagnetic-pulse submarines. He would deploy 15,000 British troops close to the Russia's border, although in a symbolic gesture of friendship he would also make it easier for Russian tourists to travel to the UK.

In an age when entertainment value trumps sane policymaking every time, ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner.

Vote Powlesland. You know it makes sense. Especially if they give all the Ukippers a one-way ticket on the interstellar colony ship, Golgafrinchan B Ark-style.

More seaside Gothic

The remains of Skegness Pier (a photo I took some time in the late 1980s).

The 1817 foot pier had cost £20,840 when it opened on 4th June 1881. It included a 700-seat saloon/concert hall at the 'T' shaped head. Steamboat trips began in 1882. The pier-head saloon was extended in 1898, and new refreshment rooms were built at the pier-head...

... On 11th January 1978, a severe storm washed away two large sections of the pier and left the theatre isolated at the seaward end. Plans to link the two sections by monorail, and to build a new 1200 seat theatre and a 250 foot tower all fell through later that year when an application for financial assistance was rejected.

Work began on dismantling the theatre in October 1985 but, while this work was taking place, a fire gutted the building.

National Piers Society

Today the pier is only 129 yards (118m) long and no evidence remains of the old pierhead and shelters but what remains of the landward pier deck walkway has since undergone major refurbishment and is now once again a tourist attraction.

Wikipedia

Even after refurbishment, what's left of the landward part of the pier looks forlorn. Somebody once defined a pier as a 'disappointed bridge' and that's exactly what it looks like today:

-- Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book, what is a pier.
-- A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the waves. A kind of bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.
Some laughed again: mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench whispered. Yes. They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent. All. With envy he watched their faces. Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their likes: their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets tittering in the struggle.
-- Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.

James Joyce Ulysses

Swimmers

Just to prove that there's more to the English coast than desolate seaside Gothic, here's another old photo to lift the mood a bit. It was high tide somewhere in Dorset. I forget exactly where, but who cares when it's summer and the water looks this inviting?

Ozymandias-on-Sea

England may not have any abandoned temples in windswept deserts, “vast and trunkless legs of stone” and the misplaced pride of Ozymandias, but it still has its epic follies: places where grand ambition had free rein, at least for a while.

Visit them today, and you can see the high-water mark, the glorious moment followed by inevitable decline. Weston is one such place: its Grand Pier is awash with wrought-iron latticework, towers, and domes. The wonders of the world were to be gathered here, for Weston to delight in them, and they in Weston. Today, it is almost empty, an abandoned palace floating above the mud.

From Seaside Gothic by Edmund Richardson.

This reminded me of an photo I took many years ago, not in Weston, but on one of Brighton's piers. Three gulls perch on top of one of the pier's slightly rusty buildings, its windows reflecting the setting sun. I've always thought that the picture captured the faded, melancholy beauty of many an English seaside town and Richardson's article brought the feeling back perfectly.

Anyway, here's the picture in question (so old it was taken on 35mm and scanned):

It was the wurst of times...

Otto von Bismarck probably didn't say 'Laws are like sausages - it is better not to see them being made.' He certainly didn't say 'Zeppelins are like sausages - it is better not to see them being made', which isn't surprising, given that Otto died in 1898, almost two years before the maiden flight of Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first airship.

Surprisingly, wurst production does have more in common with Zeppelin manufacture than the shape of the finished product. Specifically, as this great piece from Edible Geography points out, the gas bags containing the hydrogen that gave the airships lift were made from cow's intestines, just like sausage skins. In World War One, producing one of Count Zeppelin's now-weaponised flying sausages used up as many cow's guts as thirty million or so regular sausages, so sausage production was banned in Germany and in all German-occupied territories.

'Zeppelins versus sausages' - like 'guns versus butter', only not quite so catchy.

___________________________

Update - not quite such an obscure factoid as I'd assumed - I've just caught up with Channel 4's TV documentary Attack of the Zeppelins on 4oD, which also had the straight dope on the Zeppelins-versus-sausages model. As with most modern documentaries it was a bit CGI-heavy but, to be fair, it cut to the story quite soon and kept the inevitable 'here's what we're about to show you' in-programme trailer to a minimum. The documentary's still available on line for a short time, (if your device can use Adobe Flash Player - I'm not sure if regional access is limited) on 4oD.

Airships over Svalbard

In Britain, every schoolchild used to know who Roald Amundsen was - but only from the very Brit-centric point of view that he was the Norwegian who beat our own plucky (but less well organised*) Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole.

It's rather a shame that the full scope of Amundsen's achievements aren't more widely known in this country. Before reaching the South Pole, he was the first explorer to successfully negotiate the Northwest Passage. This was no minor "first" - mariners had been trying to find a northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific for around four hundred years when Amundsen finally did it.

Scott became "Scott of the Antarctic" after coming second in the race to one pole. Amundsen didn't just lead the first successful expedition to the South Pole but later, aged fifty three, acted as expedition leader and navigator for what was possibly the first successful overflight of the North Pole. On May the 11th, 1926, Amundsen and the crew of the Italian-built airship "Norge" piloted by its designer Unberto Nobile set off for the North Pole from their forward base in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (currently the world's most northerly settlement).

The expedition was threatened by cold, dangerous accumulations of ice on the airship, noise, cramped conditions and personality clashes on board (Amundsen and Nobile didn't get on and Amundsen described life under airship captain Nobile as 'a circus wagon in the sky'). Nevertheless, the "Norge" flew over the Pole a day after setting off from Ny-Ålesund. On May the 14th, the "Norge", with about seven hours of fuel left in its tanks made landfall at the settlement of Teller, Alaska.

Frederick Cook, Robert Peary and Richard E Byrd all claimed to have reached or overflown the North Pole before Amundsen, but all three claims are questionable on grounds ranging from navigational error to deliberate fraud.

In 1928, Umberto Nobile organised another expedition to the North Pole in the airship "Italia". This time, Amundsen wasn't involved in the expedition and Nobile was both pilot and expedition leader. The "Italia" reached the pole, but then crashed on pack ice off Svalbard. Ships and aircraft from several nations mounted a rescue attempt to pick up the stranded crash survivors.

Amundsen was part of that rescue attempt. He boarded a French seaplane, heading for the rescue headquarters. This was the last anyone ever saw of him - the plane was lost over the sea and no bodies were ever recovered. Nobile and several of his crew were eventually rescued.

In 1969, a movie called "Red Tent" about the "Italia" crash was released. It flopped at the box office and was, apparently, quite historically inaccurate. Nonetheless, it sounds intriguing - Sean Connery played Roald Amundsen, Peter Finch was Umberto Nobile and Ennio Morricone wrote the title music.

I haven't read what he's written on the subject, but I'm guessing that the story of the arctic explorers and airships over Svalbard must also have provided Philip Pullman with some of the imaginative background for the Svalbard chapters of "Northern Lights" (AKA "The Golden Compass"), the first novel in the trilogy "His Dark Materials".

There's a short summary of Amundsen's remarkable career here.

All in all, quite an exciting and interesting life and a pity that all we Brits remember is the sight of that Norwegian flag at the South Pole, crushing Scott's hopes of glory. But history seen from a particular perspective can be rather one-sided.

As an example, it's surprising what English people with a passing interest in history remember about the Hundred Years' War. Mainly, they remember the battles of Crécy, Agincourt and, possibly, Sluys. Three decisive English victories. I think I'd have to go a long way to find an English person who could name me a battle in the Hundred Years' War that the French won.

Yet that the one key fact about the Hundered Years' War is that the French won and the English lost. By the end of the Hundred Years' War, the English possions in France had all been lost, (with the exception of Calais which we hung on to for another century). I plead as guilty to being as ignorant as the average English person (I was vaguely aware of Joan of Arc's role in raising the siege of Orléans, but that was about it). So, let's add two more French victories to the list - the Battle of Patay that turned the tide against the English and the final victory at the Battle of Castillon.

Part of this is down to sheer jingoism, although I guess that William Shakespeare bigging up Agincourt did a lot to create a one-sided myth of national valour. Stories can be powerful things - like the legend of Agincourt, Scott's compelling tale of suffering and sacrifice on the ice has been burned into into the national consciousness, to the exclusion of other narratives, such as Amundsen's.

*for all his undoubted pluck, he could have learned a thing or two about keeping his people alive from Shackleton.

Age of wonders

Top blog discovery of the week. Streamlined steam engines, racing seaplanes, cars with fins, airships, robots, Battersea Power Station - behold the machine-age wunderkammer that is Dieselpunk - it's like an Eagle comic for the 21st Century.

The Great Sheds of Bedfordshire

Almost every time I pass Bedford on the A421, I make a mental note that I must visit the mighty airship sheds at Cardington as I whizz past them on the way to somewhere else. I haven't got round to it yet, but as you can see here, they're pretty impressive structures. The two most famous residents of the Cardington Sheds were the Vickers R100, designed by Barnes Wallis and N S Norway (better known by his pen-name, Neville Shute) and the Royal Airship Works' ill-fated R101. The crash of the R101 on an attempted trial flight to India in 1930 did for the British airship industry what the later loss of the Hindenberg did for Germany's Zeppelins.

Here's a short film about the R101.