Author Archives: Tom Bell

Fairport’s Cropredy Convention 2013

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Last weekend I was at Cropredy festival. It was the third time I’ve been to it, and I absolutely love it. Here are some awesome facts about it.

  • “Cropredy” is pronounced “crop-ruh-dee”, although you’ll hear a lot of n00bz calling it “crop ready” or “crop reedy”.
  • The full name of the festival is “Fairport’s Cropredy Convention” because it’s basically a vanity festival organised by 60s folk rock pioneers Fairport Convention.
  • It started when Fairport performed a farewell/breakup gig in 1979. A year later they decided to do a reunion gig. The next year they did another. And another the year after that. It’s been going ever since.
  • It always starts with Fairport playing an acoustic set. It always finishes with Fairport playing a three hour long headline set.
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India: the plan

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As almost anyone who knows me will already be aware, I’m planning to travel around India for a few months later this year. I’ll be blogging the journey on here as I go.

The rough plan is: fly out to Delhi on 16th September, buy a Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike, explore as much as I can in three months, return to Delhi, sell the bike, and fly back to the UK on 16th December.

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Beyond Belief on organ donation

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I don’t usually listen to BBC Radio 4‘s religious discussion programme, Beyond Belief, but I happened to be driving yesterday while it was on. The programme, broadcast on Monday 12th August 2013, and as of the time of writing, available on iPlayer, dealt with the ethics of organ donation.

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The evils of social networks?

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One of the events contributing to the current media and political fury over the evils of social networks and internet trolls has been the death of Hannah Smith, a Leicester teenager who committed suicide after apparently being bullied on Ask.fm.

However, it has subsequently turned out that 98% of the anonymous bullying messages Hannah received may have been posted by herself using other accounts.

If true, this backs up my point in a previous article that blaming these phenomena on the social networks themselves is dangerously missing the point.

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Iain Banks: the other secret Culture novel

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*** WARNING: SPOILERS ***

It’s an open secret that Inversions, the SF novel by the late Iain M Banks, is set in the universe of the Culture. The book itself disguises this: the cover omits the “A Culture Novel” strapline of the other books such as Consider Phlebas, the narrative is solely about events on a late medieval world, and there is no explicit mention of Culture society or technology. However, there are enough subtle hints in the narrative for anyone familiar with Banks’s other works to deduce that the two main characters are agents from the Culture, who have infiltrated the pre-industrial society in order to influence it. At one point, one of them tells a child a fairytale about a land where people can fly betweens suns using “ships with invisible sails”; in the Epilogue, the other excuses herself from a dinner citing “special circumstances” (the name of the Culture’s black ops department).

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The problem with #TwitterSilence

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On Sunday 4 August 2013, a number of Twitter users followed Times columnist Caitlin Moran‘s suggestion of a 24 hour boycott of the site, in response to a recent spate of recent media attention on abusive and harassing tweets directed at high-profile female users. The boycott was promoted with the hashtags #TwitterSilence and #Trolliday (a pun on the common misuse of the term “troll” for online abusers).

Meanwhile, many other women and men didn’t take part in the boycott, confidently and eloquently pointing out that the way to stand up to bullying is to raise your voice louder, not to be silent.

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Why is healthy food expensive?

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A friend of mine was complaining today about how healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food, and implied that we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic if things were the other way around. The suggestion is that people choose to eat unhealthy food because it’s the cheaper option; they would eat more healthily if that were cheaper instead.

That may be true to an extent, but it’s a chicken-and-egg scenario: a major reason that unhealthy food is cheap, is that it’s so popular. It’s a huge market, so producers, suppliers and retailers compete fiercely on price to get a portion of it. Also, because the market is so large, they can achieve economies of scale in the production of bad food.

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Indian visa tips

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I’ve just been through the byzantine process of getting a visa to visit India. Actually, once the package of documents was sent off by post, it was quite slick: I received regular updates on the application’s progress, and everything was completed and returned within about a week. But getting to that point was far from straightforward. For the benefit of other travellers, here are my tips for navigating the process:

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The difference between the British left and right

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I’ve just realised that whether we’re on the left or the right of the political spectrum, as Brits we all share one political belief: that the country’s going to the dogs, whoever’s in charge.

The difference between the left and right is just that the British right believes it goes to the dogs slightly less rapidly under a Conservative government, and vice versa.

No-one actually believes any party, even the one they support, can or will do anything to make things better. At best we hope that our chosen party, when it screws everything up, won’t be quite as catastrophic as the other lot would have been.

Sports doping: let’s be honest, they’re all at it

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Here’s a truth you already know, but don’t want to admit to yourself. Doping is endemic in sports. And I mean all athletes competing at the top level, in all sports: they’re all using substances to enhance their training and performances.

Consider the following three mutually inconsistent propositions:

A. Drugs testing in sports is a constant arms race against the dopers.
B. Only a few of the top athletes in any sport are dopers.
C. A small but significant number of top athletes are caught doping.

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