The Big Three's morning meeting addressed formalising the centres within the DGM Music Network: conceptually, technically, physically, personally. The power available to a network flows between the centres, rather than being invested in the centres. But for a network to come to life, the centres have to be in place and clearly defined.
17.21 The Afternoon Shift has Pat the Demon Mastelotto continuing to serve the juice. Beast! Beast!
As an addendum to this comment from Rural Rides through Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire & up to Manchester: "much of the countryside enjoys a sustainable poverty. The poverty is economic, cultural & of the spirit". Another way of characterising this: what I experienced was (subjective, to be sure) a poverty of the imagination.
Some Diary readers may recall Peter Gabriel's musical response to Stanley Milgram's "Obedience To Authority". The two main points I took from reading Milgram were:
1. A large proportion of ordinary, decent people will do unacceptable things when someone else accepts (or appears to accept) responsibility.
2. If we are divorced from the consequences of our actions, the manner in which those consequences unfold are inappropriate.
For example: decisions taken by agribusiness, or committees in Brussels, impact upon the countryside in ways which take no account of the communities, individuals, spirits of place, villages, and body of common practices which accomodate the force of distant, politically based decisions. One of the craziest notions I've ever heard of, referred to as "set aside", is to pay farmers not to grow anything. Rather, to pay farmers to grow nothing. I have a friend in Cornwall who is paid "set aside". He is subject to satellite surveillance to make sure there is no activity on his land (and officials visited him, when cows strayed into a field, in response to satellite monitoring).
Perhaps I am sensibly aberrant, a tragic result of my Dorset upbringing, but this seems very queer to me.
Another example: government / official architecture. Identifit buildings, such as 1960s Post Offices, dumped on town centres without regard for existing streetscapes or local materials. (Planning permission wasn't required for POs until the late 1980s / early 1990s).
A good example of this: the Wimborne library. The late Miss Coles, a good and loyal Winburnian (whose house in town became the museum upon her decease) was approached in the 1970s by the council. They wanted part of her garden as a site for the about-to-be-constructed new library. Miss Coles, according to local legend, offered to donate her garden on condition that she approve the design of the building. Her offer was turned down, the garden was compulsorily purchased, the new Wimborne library was built, and the library moved 50 yards from Church House (where I drew out books as a young person).
Anyone interested in how an impoverished imagination might construct a library can now visit Wimborne and see how it's done. While you're there wander 100 yards into Wimborne square and see if you prefer Barclays' Bank architecture of the 1980s to the Georgian Crown Hotel (where I quaffed a beer or two as a teenager) which it replaced.
Another example: current building regulations enforced by regional planning authorities would prevent the present construction of any of the buildings which comprise the nation's architectural heritage. Stone clad bungalow? Sure thing! (This is beginning to change, after the fact).
In the next village down the valley from here is a rare example of succesful low-cost housing. A row of brick & flint cottages are in keeping with other village buildings (if you ignore everything built in the past fifty years, that is). The row is not cheap building, but low-cost housing. The differences between the two are care, commitment & the creative imagination.
The Chalke Valley solution would not be appropriate in London, for example. It honours the principle: act in accordance with time, place & person.
"Welcome the unexpected, but not the arbitrary."
