How the bicycle changed the world

Back at Easter, we went to the Netherlands for three days to visit Rotterdam and see the spring tulips. Outside the Keukenhof gardens, we discovered you could hire bikes to tour the flower fields on your own. They gave us a map and sent us off, telling us that if we got lost, we’d be the first people in seventy-five years.

For the next hour, until we got lost, we had one of the happiest experiences imaginable. The sun came out. Tractors and spires poked up from the colourful landscape. I waved to a train. We talked to a horse. There actually seemed to be a bit of destiny to it all. Little had I known that all those life-threatening cycles around East Belfast with the kids had been building to this!

Cycling has a lot to do with happiness: that’s one theme of Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by journalist and cycling New Yorker, Jody Rosen (Vintage, 2023). Walking the tulip fields would not have been the same. The epigraph to Chapter One has HG Wells saying, ‘Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia’.

And the link to happiness might have something to do with the link to flying. This is a motif in how bicycles have been depicted and written about since their invention. In fact, cycling in some ways is flying. The Wright brothers who developed the aeroplane, we learn, were bike mechanics, and their original models involved bicycles with wings. Thanks to Belfast’s John Boyd Dunlop and the Scotsman, Robert William Thompson, who separately invented the pneumatic tyre, we literally cycle on air. The chapter on trick cycling points out that normal cycling is itself a kind of gravity-defying stunt.

The pleasure also comes from the sense of power that the bicycle gives the rider. It’s a personal transport machine, and an efficient one. In the chapter on bicycle design and engineering, we learn how the bike’s components ingeniously amplify the fairly minimal effort of the pedaller. It’s almost an extension of human body.   

Two Wheels Good isn’t a chronological history. It looks at fifteen themes related to the bike, a disjointed structure which shows the many meanings and functions that pedal power has taken on around the world. The book tells us it purposely goes well beyond the Euro-American world where cycling originated. Rosen explains, ‘The issues that preoccupy bicycle advocates in the West – bike commuting as a planning priority and “lifestyle choice” – have little connection to the reality of the hundreds of millions for whom cycling is simply a necessity, the only viable and affordable means of travel.’ In short, ‘The vast majority of bikes and cyclists are nowhere near Denmark.’

Instead of obvious trips to Copenhagen or Amsterdam, we go to Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom famous for its Gross National Happiness concept, and where cycling is popular (the best riposte to anyone who says your landscape needs to be ‘low’ to have a cycling culture) as well as Dhaka, Bangladesh, a megacity which runs on over one million rickshaws. We are also taken to China, which once had the most advanced and certainly the biggest cycling culture in the world, but since the 1990s has been systematically destroying it in favour of the car. Fascinating cases, if a little randomly chosen.

Ultimately, the book is about humans’ relationship with a technology. There’s a remarkable chapter which is made up solely of extracts from newspapers and scientific journals from the US and Britain in the 1890s, showing the moral panic surrounding the bike boom of the day. Men were hysterical at the freedom the bicycle gave to women. Moralisers predicted the end of civilisation. Back then, the bicycle’s rival wasn’t the car but the horse – a mode of transport (and an industry) that symbolised a traditional and upstanding way of life.

Today, cycling in the West is closely associated with environmentalism, and it turns out that bicycles have a long history of showing up in support of progressive causes, from the campaign for women’s suffrage to Black Lives Matter. We hear how bikes were at the heart of the Tiananmen square democracy protests in 1989. One of the grim afterimages of the suppression of that movement was the square littered with hundreds of crushed bicycles.

But we also discover that colonialists and militarists have been bike enthusiasts (they were used by both sides in the Boer War). Countless lives were lost in forced labour plantations in places like Congo and Brazil harvesting the rubber that fed the West’s late nineteenth century bicycle craze. Bicycle manufacturing may still be as environmentally damaging as many other industries.

In the middle of all this is an incongruously explicit chapter on sex and cycling, or ‘cycle-sexuality’. Due to the wholesome nature of this blog, I can say no more. But it seems there are people out there who aren’t being figurative when they say they get turned on by bikes. 

Writing this book was clearly a personal journey for the author, an investigation into this thing that he loves and that has shaped his own life. Amid the analysis of the political and social meaning of the bicycle, we get many extended stories of individual cyclists in various times and places, including the author’s own. Some of these test the attention span, but they show the intimate impact of the bike in the midst of the larger historical currents.

Two Wheels Good is not a manifesto. It’s enthusiastic but doesn’t campaign. But for those of us who have suspected that there is something bigger going on with cycling, that a bicycle is more than the sum of its cleverly simple and effective parts and has much to do with politics and emotion and the good life, this book is enjoyable confirmation that we are right.  

Wonders of Donaghadee

I have written here before about my history of complicated attraction to miserable-delightful Protestant coastal towns. Well now I have a new one. Our household has been struggling to not go to Donaghadee. Once, we even ‘double-Donaghadeed’ – went to Donaghadee twice in one weekend, on Saturday and Sunday.

This craze started last summer when we discovered a café, Bridewell, on the main street. It’s housed in an old building, a ‘bridewell’ (a jail apparently). Everything about it is nice, though we mainly go there because it’s dog friendly. 

That dog is another reason for our trips east. Donaghadee beach is often non-existent, but close by, past the mile of mansions that overlook the Copeland Islands, is Groomsport. The coastal walk here takes you through a series of sandy crescents, grassy turf, and Gaudi-smooth rock formations. Keep walking and you’ll get to Orlock (pictured), a National Trust-owned area with a secluded, rugged path over muddy fields and stoney beaches and, probably, rum hidden in coves. It’s a fantastic trek.   

What about Donaghadee town (or ‘Donaghadump!’, as two different people called it when I tested out my Donaghadee-is-so-underrated thesis)?

It’s known as the homeland of loyalist media sensation, Jamie Bryson (yes, spotted on the street once), a male voice choir, and Wikipedia tells us that TV adventurer Bear Grylls spent the first years of his life there. In fact, it’s ‘the best place to live in Northern Ireland’, according to an advert for a local housing development which, amusingly, we spotted about twenty minutes after I had joked with Wife that we should really move to Donaghadee. I wouldn’t go that far, literally.

Donaghadee is also the Hollywood of North Down (not to be confused with Holywood which is the Holywood of North Down). The 2015 film, Robot Overlords, starring Gillian Anderson and Ben Kingsley, was filmed here, a story about invading machines from outer space which, it just occurs to me now, may well have been an allegory of the Ulster Plantation since most of the seventeenth century Scottish settlers entered through the port of Donaghadee. Of course, it wasn’t. Was it? The town is also the fictional ‘Port Devine’ of the BBC series, Hope Street. Last autumn, it was the location for a Nordic noir film set in the Faroe Islands.

The sea-front street curves past a great new playpark, the harbour, and towards what I am calling the ‘iconic’ white lighthouse. As I learned on Danders Aroon, an Ulster Scots walks programme broadcast on NVTV community television, and later proved myself, you can keep walking past the Pier 36 restaurant, through boat yards to the Commons, a coastal park, and then do a loop back to the town along the road. As well as our café, the main street has grocers and butchers, a few more cafés, chippies, ice cream, and ‘Ireland’s oldest pub’. And there’s a hilltop castle.

All it lacks is a train station, which, of course, it once had – until 1950.

So, criminal feuds aside, there is not much not to love about Donaghadee. Maybe it’s the Scottish surname, drawing me in mid-life to a coastline where Scotland is part of the daily scenery.

Whatever the reason, everyone needs places to anchor themselves. They come and go. Donaghadee, right now, is a welcome harbour.

Bluey and the meaning of family life

A few months ago, I came across Bluey on the BBC iPlayer, decided it was one of the best TV programmes I’d ever seen, resolved to blog and tell ‘the world’ about it, and then discovered it had been out for several years, had a huge following and won many awards, and even been named in top 100 sitcoms of all time by Rolling Stone.

So I’m late, but not wrong at least. And since I’d already mentally committed myself to writing a blog post (like all the other gushing tributes by adults on the internet!) here I go.

Bluey is a cartoon for small children. Bluey is six and Bingo, her sister, is four, and most of the episodes involve them and their parents in the house, playing elaborate games or going to some other sector of the kiddy galaxy – the park, the shops, the swimming pool. They are dogs, by the way. Dogs in Australia.

Why is it so good? Because it’s exciting. It’s sometimes surreal. It’s also grittily down-to-earth. And very funny. Oh, and sentimental, devastatingly sentimental. All at the same time. Just like the early years of family life.

‘Games’ doesn’t really do justice to the suspensions of reality in which the family immerse themselves, and which give many episodes their plot. How these flights of fancy are created for us, the viewers, is beyond clever. In one episode called ‘Mount Mumandad’, climbing over Mum and Dad, who are collapsed in end-of-day exhaustion, becomes a mountain adventure for the kids, complete with falls, tents, and storms.

While the play sometimes stretches relatability, the details don’t. All the little incidental scenarios, interactions, and thought processes are achingly recognisable. In ‘Ice Cream’, Bluey and Bingo pester Dad to buy them ice cream because their cousin has been allowed one. Dad gives in, then says he doesn’t want one himself, then, in the seconds it takes for the card machine to work, decides amid panic and self-loathing that he has to have one too. I’d say scenes like this are as unflinching and truthful as the bloodiest of award-winning war movies.

Bluey also nails the vernacular that’s shared between adults when they are around kids – the eye rolls and passive aggression, suppressed annoyance at how other parents do things, smiles of solidarity with strangers. Brace yourself for a few hotly romantic moments between Mum and Dad. That’s right. Hot romance between talking dogs in a kids’ cartoon.

There are always big laughs. Bluey understands how parenthood is non-stop comedic juxtaposition: a fully-grown adult and a small new human trying to cope with each other is inherently funny. We see the daily, hourly, battle between parental logic and child logic – the child’s desire to execute tiny pointless projects and the parents’ desire to perform like a ‘good’ parent, or lie flat on the carpet. We see the humiliating lengths parents will go to appease their children. In the episode ‘Dance Mode’, Dad and Mum are repeatedly forced to dance in public by the rules of a game. Here, as so often in Bluey, adults and kids can laugh together at the different roles they play in the family.

And then the sentimentality. In real life, this comes from love and the passage of time. As kids grow, you’re always thinking back and thinking forward at the same time. Precious phases arrive and depart constantly, and the pain of it is that you often only see this in retrospect. 

The episode ‘Granddad’ ends in a poignant embrace between Mum and her dad, as they watch Bluey and Bingo swim in a river where Mum once played, watched over by her father. ‘Barky Boats’ gently deals with puberty, and the anxiety of children when they are about to leave behind the innocence which is all they’ve ever known. In ‘Baby Race’, Mum tearfully remembers her struggles with Bluey as a baby.

You’ll definitely need to wear dark glasses if you don’t want to be caught weeping into your jalfrezi during ‘Sleepytime’ which compares a mother’s love to the sun warming a planet, while an orchestra blasts ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’.

Perhaps the format of scores of six-minute episodes is the perfect way to convey the disjointed nature of family life; dramas, routines, and moods come and go. Each episode is cogent and multi-layered, like a poem, or song perhaps – the soundtrack is always central. Above all, Bluey reflects back to us how everyday moments become thrilling and transcendent, simply because of who is sharing them.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic, now my kids are older than Bluey and Bingo. But I’m intrigued at how the kids love it too, and maybe they are nostalgic for their old selves, are able understand their family a bit better, are seeing the future and past all at once.

Damn you, Bluey! Where are those dark glasses?

How to Learn about Palestine-Israel

I can’t expect to add much to the billions of words being spoken about Israel and Gaza at the moment. My main thought is that if human rights and non-violence ever sounded like good ideas, they really do now.

But since my day job is in education, and education about peace and conflict, I can’t help thinking about the role of learning in all this. A lot of people think that turmoil in the Holy Land is a topic about which it is very hard to learn.

A few unsurprising anecdotes.

The other week I was asked by a well-educated person for a good way to find out about the conflict. This person was unsure about information they’d come across.

Then, a few days ago, I heard a pro-Palestine activist from Belfast on the radio. The presenter described the activist’s position as ‘political’. In other words, it was a perspective, one among other legitimate perspectives, equal to the pro-Israeli speaker’s. It seemed that listeners were being told that if they wanted facts, they wouldn’t find them here – perhaps anywhere. The discussion, incidentally, was about possible BBC bias in the coverage of the Gaza war.[1]

And I’m remembering an argument I got into during a previous Gaza war in 2014 when the person tried to educate me by sending me a link to a pro-Israeli website. I said, ‘OK, but you do realise this is a biased website?’ and he said my view that his source was biased was biased. [2]

There’s an idea out there that facts on this conflict are very hard to get, and that we can’t trust many – maybe all – sources of information.

There are many different reasons for this idea.

1. The media feels the need to present both sides equally, and so doesn’t give us a steer.
2. The media focuses on immediate events and avoids the historical context.
3. Some commentators really are biased.
4. Some sources of information look biased i.e. are full of loaded words like ‘terrorist’, ‘anti-Semitic’, ‘fascist’, ‘Zionist’, or ‘colonial’.
5. There is more than the usual amount of, let’s say, informal sources of information (Christian Zionist emails, protest speeches, social media, blogs like this one).  
6. There undoubtedly is deliberate misinformation.
7. There undoubtedly are genuine disputes between the parties as to what has occurred in a particular instance.  
8. There is a broad spectrum of opinion among both Palestinians and Israelis, stretching from apolitical people who just want to go about their lives, to depraved militarists, and lots in between. It’s hard to get to grips with this.  
9. While the state of Israel is still relatively young, a lot has happened in the last century that has shaped how things are today. There is a lot of history.
10. Any long-running conflict takes a bit of effort to grasp.

One response to all this could be to switch back to Netflix.

But, a) rightly or wrongly, the media is covering the story around the clock[3], including ‘local angles’, so it almost becomes local news i.e. our business, and, b) depending on where you live, your country’s stance may be implicated in what is happening, so people should be informed.  

So, how to get past all this confusion, and learn?

What I did was read some (good quality history) books.

In the final year of my history degree, I chose a module on the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was not long after 9/11 and it sounded like something I should know about. The module was taught by a gentlemanly, Anglican Scotsman who was close to retirement.

There was no ideologizing, no anti-imperial or anti-terror jargon, no theory even. He did not split the class into ‘Israelis’ and ‘Palestinians’ and get them to role play. The lectures were all storytelling, all ‘what happened’. They were often boring. The professor drew maps with chalk, complete with little warplanes. I wrote two essays and a dissertation, spending a lot of time at the Middle East shelves in the history section of the Coleraine main campus library.

I’m not actually sure what my lecturer’s personal views on the conflict were.  But what I learned from this module was that Palestinians have been the serial losers in the century-long, and internationally-supported, project to build and expand the state of Israel, and that this explains the dire conditions in which Palestinians today must try to live.   

This is not a ‘contested narrative’ or a ‘political’ viewpoint. It’s a fact; in fact, it’s so factual, it’s silly to even say it’s a fact. There are other facts, sure, but they don’t deny the factualness of this fact! (As we should know in Northern Ireland, ‘whataboutery’ is not a valid way to argue.) It’s not even that complicated. But it’s a fact which was, and is, brushed aside by the kind of unionist pro-statism and Christian Zionism I grew up around.

I’m not saying everyone needs to do a history degree, though I recommend it. But it’s why I have a simplistic belief that it is possible to get to the heart of the situation in the Holy Land and do so through a fairly sober and undramatic route – if, that is, you are open to learning. I learned through other routes later, like reading NGO reports and doing a study-trip which engaged mostly with Palestinian Christians. But all this built upon what I learned in that dull module which explained how the region got to where it is today.

Of course, you don’t need to know any history to be opposed to the slaughter of human beings. You just need a minimally functioning moral compass. But some history will let you see that whenever this phase of bloodshed is over, the basic situation will still be the same, as it was the day before Oct 7.

It’s perfectly obvious who in Palestine-Israel has their human rights and who does not. Despite appearances, the problem is not a lack of facts, nor is it an impenetrable complexity. The problem is the ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that allow people to live with certain facts, like the denial of others’ human rights and mass murder.

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[1] Interestingly, most of what the activist said was not political opinion by any measure but was facts – the numbers of Palestinians killed compared to Israelis, and the many ways in which Israel breaks international law. I don’t even think Israel would dispute these facts. As far as I can see, the main approach of spokespersons for the state of Israel is not providing alternative facts, but excusing the fact of what is happening. They argue that all those dead Palestinians, and all those law-breakages, are a price worth paying for Israel’s ‘security’ and/or are justified by the Hamas attack (i.e. are justified revenge). It is straightforward for us, as observers, to work out whether this sounds reasonable.

[2] In return I sent him a link to a report by Christian Aid, what I thought to be a very mainstream charity, about the conditions in which Palestinians have to live due to the Israeli occupation.

[3] In 2022, more people died in war in Ethiopia than in Ukraine.

The Loneliness of the Belfast Cyclist

Why do more people not cycle in Belfast? I suspect it’s their desire to not do something insane. I don’t just mean to avoid danger. There’s a deeper and very natural aversion, that nearly all of us have, to acting out of kilter with the world around us.

This really struck me a few days ago, when cycling a regular route from East Belfast to the city centre.

To make this twenty minute trip, all I had to do was go into a ‘bus lane’ until I met parked cars, then choose whether to go into the traffic or on to a busy footpath, find a crossing to take me into CS Lewis Square, enjoy a momentary stretch of easy cycling until another pedestrian crossing, join the Ballymacarratt walkway, sail smoothly but alone until another pedestrian crossing and a tricky turn from Dee Street onto Island Street which is usually deserted apart from sudden fast cars, go right off the road through the pedestrian underpass into Titanic Quarter station gingerly turning two blind corners, power up a path, then down a hill which splits suddenly into a brief cycle path and footpath which didn’t have but often has broken glass, leaves, and overgrown hedges, then end up at another crossing at which I had to push the button and stop four thick lanes of angry, one-way traffic and endure the gaze of these four lanes of drivers, then join a marked cycle path, watch out for several intersecting roads and confusing traffic lights, until another crossing on to Queen’s Bridge. And there I was.

Higgledy-piggledy

The route did its work but made it very clear that it begrudged my presence, like a snooty waiter. And this is the main route for bikes from the East. The only other option is the ‘bus lane’ on the Albertbridge Road which is smooth, straight, and direct and where last week I was almost mowed down by a speeding motorcycle.

So higgledy-piggledy are the city’s cycle routes that they demand endless improvisation, adaption, and decision-making from the cyclist – the opposite, surely, of how moving people around a city should work. Nor what many people jump out of bed for in the morning. 

Alone in Wonderland

But the cycling environment isn’t just hostile. It has a thick streak of Wonderland absurdity.

Cycle lanes become footpaths become roads become car parking become cycle lanes again. I might return home via Titanic Quarter, where the cycle route goes from the broad plaza in front of the Odyssey, to the footpath, to a crazy green path that crosses a junction and spits you back onto the footpath, then another bit of green, then a stretch of two-way, protected cycle lane which stops and then restarts slightly to the right. Surreal. How law and the rules of the road can be applied to this kind of infrastructure, I can’t imagine.

None of this would be so bad if you weren’t alone.

Very, very seldom, do I find myself cycling alongside anyone else, so few are the cyclists – even on cyclable routes like those along the river. The times this has happened have brought me pure joy, and somehow, made the pedalling easier. When I’m waiting at traffic lights and another cyclist is there, I feel an urge to say hello. I might even consider high fiving, or sharing tales and gripes, or exclaiming ‘what a thing to be a cyclist!’, and generally befriending them like a lunatic.

Cycling solves everything

It seems you need to be both adventurous and optimistic to be a cyclist in Belfast. I am neither. So why do I do it? Of course, because Cycling Solves Everything. And, paradoxically, because I arrive feeling better. That’s what cycling does. If I drive, I’ll turn up at work, not with endorphins, but sixteen Nolan Show-induced anxieties and a stiff back.  

Let’s not forget aesthetics. Streams of bicycles look good! No one has ever sat on a bench or at a pavement table and wished there were more motor vehicles passing. But a load of people on bikes is eminently and mesmerizingly watchable.

Cycling, no doubt, is growing in Belfast. Some people don’t mind making these edgy, solitary journeys. (Though who would wish them for their kids?) But I struggle to get excited about announcements of new public hire bike stations, or cycle parking, when the thing that’s desperately needed are proper protected cycle lanes.

For now, cycling still feels depressingly radical, a little insane. If you come across me on a bike, do say hello.

On Placenames: Thoughts After a British Road Trip

I am just back from what would be called a ‘driving holiday’ (an oxymoron, I think) in England. After a delightful family wedding in the Derbyshire dales, my gang stayed a few days in the Lake District to break the journey home.

The Lake District is much hyped as one of the most attractive parts of these islands. I might be tempted to smugly dismiss it as ‘Ireland’. Those of us fortunate to live on the beautifully formed island just to the west can enjoy mountain-lake panoramas and verdant sheep-speckled fields without enduring an overcrowded Friday ferry and a punishing car journey.

But it is very nice. I was there a few times as a kid, and it was good to find that much was as it was, including the hazily remembered pencil museum and Ye Olde Friars sweet shop in Keswick, even if this time, I was more focussed on finding the nearest hipster café to shelter from the mizzle.   

And taking the car did throw up one unexpected pleasure of this trip: reading the placenames on road signs.

The first one that leapt at me was not far off the ferry at Cairnryan: ‘Haugh of Urr’.

What could that even be? Surely something more mystical than a mere village, but that’s what it is. Here is what the name means:

OK, but ‘Cumbric’?

Wow. And there was me thinking Britain was straightforwardly made up of ‘England’, ‘Scotland’, and ‘Wales’, and the ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ and ‘Welsh’. One placename and you stumble across all these ancient, buried languages, peoples, and kingdoms. Down the road, ‘Haugh of Urr’ is given a run for its money by ‘Gatehouse of Fleet’.

But it was in the Lake District that I really began to struggle to steer the car in a straight line. ‘Threlkeld’ was off to the left somewhere. My Scandi-sense told me this might be Nordic-Norse-Viking, and Wikipedia confirmed:  

The English Lakes – land of Wordsworth, Peter Rabbit et al, Victorian tourists sailing on gentle steamers – were inhabited by Vikings! Some of them came via Ireland and Scotland. In fact, numerous placenames in the Lake District have Norse origins, giving the region an enjoyable Middle Earth-Narnia aura.[1]

‘Aira Force’ is a waterfall. But don’t think ‘Delta Force’, think ‘Dettifoss’, or any of those Icelandic or Norwegian waterfalls with ‘foss’ in their name:

Some of the lakes including ‘Ullswater’ and ‘Windermere’ (surely as beautiful a placename as you could ever devise) are also of part Norse origin. [2] Worth a read is this blog post by Rory Stewart, who was MP for the area, in which he reports that Penrith, on the edge of the Lake District, has the highest concentration of Scandinavian DNA in England.

I could go on and on. One intriguing placename after another kept appearing by the road. That they were all written in the standard UK road sign typeface only enhanced the names’ poetry, whimsy, or strangeness.

Of course, placenames held no appeal when I was last in the Lake District 25 or 30 years ago, nor even when I last drove a car in Britain 15 years ago. I’ve found them a lot more interesting since encountering the Turas project in East Belfast which educates people about the Irish origins of placenames in Northern Ireland. The message is that our standard Orange-Green history is more complex than it looks.[3] While in the Lake District, I happened to be reading the truly brilliant Europe: An Intimate Journey by Jan Morris, the famous travel writer. She was a staunch Welsh nationalist, and one of her themes is how modern state borders bear only the loosest of relation to the actual cultural map of the continent.

That’s a good thing to remember. But maybe it’s best not to romanticise placenames too much, just as it’s best not to plant our identity too firmly in history of any kind. History often turns out to be not very firm at all. We might enjoy uncovering the Norse names of the Lake District then find, as is apparently the case, that they simply eradicated older ones.

I had a memorable time with my family last week in a place I had visited a long time ago. Perhaps that’s the only history that matters.

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[1] ‘Dale’, by the way, is from the Norse for valley.

[2] ‘Mere’ apparently comes from the Old English for ‘lake’, making ‘Lake Windermere’ a tautology, like Co. Down’s ‘Ards Peninsula’ which means Peninsula Peninsula.

[3] I’m reminded of how Claire Mitchell, in her superb book on the nuances of ‘Protestant’ cultural identity in Ireland, briefly shares a fantasy that joining some kind of Nordic-Celtic confederation might be the most appropriate political arrangement for Ireland, given the historical and cultural connections between all these green, chilly northern lands.

What I noticed in old holiday videos

I ended my last post with a mention of pedestrianisation, one of my current fixations. I had an urge to write a big juicy essay on the topic, but instead, I’ll just tell this little story about a recent epiphany.

In an uncharacteristic technological coup on my part, I digitised and edited several old camcorder tapes of family holidays from the last century. I have happy memories of these holidays, and the older you get, it seems, the more interesting your youth becomes.

Just as vividly as the trips themselves, I can remember the misery of coming back to Ireland. This was often at the end of August, right before school.

The videos show us walking around several towns in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, as it was in the corners of those countries that we spent a few holidays. All very nice, nostalgic, and very 90s. Unacceptable hair, excruciating teenage commentary, and so on.

Then I noticed an unexpected, but pretty glaring theme: pedestrianisation!

A main street. A lakefront promenade. A car-free mountain village. Or sitting in a square at a pavement café. The Mitchells were always in pedestrianised space.

Now, in a way, this was no big discovery. I knew, even back then, that ‘European’ towns and cities were much better at creating pleasant urban spaces than Irish and British ones.

But what I hadn’t thought about before was how this might have made me feel.

Those jarring homecomings. That post-holiday gloom. The undesirable Here and the desirable There! Maybe it wasn’t the contrasting weather, or being away in the last days of summer freedom.

Maybe I subliminally knew I was leaving behind a superior type of public space, one that simply did not exist in Ireland.

No more relaxed strolling, sitting outside, people-watching, listening to birdsong and rivers, examining flowers and architecture!

Wow. And if this was true, then my happy memories of the holidays of youth (which I think, if you are fortunate to have them, are pretty key in a person’s identity) I actually owe in part to something as mundane as a town planner, a committee, or a political party, having the good idea one day to let people walk around without cars driving close to them.

Imagine living somewhere like that.

Grim North Coast, One Year On: Slightly Less Grim!

This time last year, I did a blog post about depressing buildings and ‘public realm’ in the much sought-after seaside towns of Portstewart and Portrush. It got a big response, and I wrote some follow up thoughts. A week later, it appeared to inspire a supportive opinion piece in the Belfast Telegraph.

Naturally, as this year’s holiday approached, I was curious as to whether anything would have changed, for better or worse. And it turns out, it has got better! Marginally!

So here are a few ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots.

In the first blog, I pointed out the post-apocalyptic desolation of the children’s play park at the front of Portstewart. Happily, it has been spruced up. This wall…

…has had a nice lick of paint…

There are new seats and plants…

…and the prison yard lighting is now softened by this bunting.

The paddling pool also now looks healthier, and there is a new climbing frame, replacing the old broken one.

I had some pics of grim-tastic signage last year, and it was good to find these fresh new notices, even if they are a bit biohazard-y.

Another of my themes had been the assortment of plain weird buildings, one of which was this Portrush block of flats…

But it now looks like this. Ta-daa:

Round the corner at Ramore Head, the recreation area, where I have fond memories of playing tennis and crazy golf back in the 90s, had fallen into a long decline. But in the past year, it’s been regenerated, with this superb new play park…

Look closely, though, and you can still see that miserable little shelter up on the path.

In 2022, I also focused on the many dilapidated and frankly terrifying flights of steps in the two towns. They are as they were, apart from this one at the harbour in Portrush…

.

…which has a gleaming new railing, part of other public realm improvements in the vicinity.

Lastly, I’d had a big moan about the prevalence of pebble-dash finish on so many buildings in the area. I am pleased to report one success in the fight against this scourge. My exemplar, this one…

…is now history, and the building under development.

Overall, some good improvements. The bad news is that every one of the derelict buildings I photographed last year remains exactly as it was.

But credit where credit is due, small steps, etc.

Before I go, given that I’m currently drunk on my remarkable influence, I’ll just shout this out in the void: any chance of pedestrianizing Portstewart Promenade and Portrush Main Street? Only sometimes? Even remove one row of car parking from each? Just one??

How to write good academic subheadings

Subheading context

is not a good subheading! It’s not the worst either. But it’s the kind of thing I see a lot in student work and in published academic writing. It’s a fragment. ‘Context’ is a vague and overused word, including by me. No subheading is needed here anyway, not even ‘introduction’, since this first bit could only be an introduction.

Plus, how could something like a ‘subheading’ have a ‘context’? This subheading is the writer telling themselves that they are writing the opening bit. But it’s not helpful for the reader.

Doing good work

is another bad one, meaningless without explanation. (Read on to see where it comes from.)

I’m fan of subheadings. If a writer is not using subheadings, it may well mean they do not have clear, discrete thoughts with a logical flow and are trying to hide this from the reader.

But only recently has it struck me that subheadings must do much more than exist. They must do good work.

To illustrate all this, I’ll use a book that happens to be sitting beside me, a large, edited book about conflict resolution.

Examples of effective subheadings

That was a good one, I hope? It orients us to what is coming up in this section, and links back to the overall topic of the blog post. It is what we expect – a good feature of a subheading. Academic subheadings are not the place to be teasing, surprising, or arty.

My exemplar is a chapter on gender mainstreaming. The subheadings are:

Introduction

The roots of gender mainstreaming

The goal of gender mainstreaming

The practice of gender mainstreaming

Challenges to gender mainstreaming

Conclusion

Wonderful. We can see the land. We can see the horizon. There are even townspeople waving. We know where we are. Each subheading labels an aspect of the topic, and together they build up a picture of the whole.

Examples of ineffective subheadings

By contrast, the following package of subheadings, from a chapter elsewhere in this volume, is not so helpful:

Introduction

The identity paradigm

Stages of development as ongoing life projects

Basic human needs in Eriksonian perspective

Generativity crisis

Political ideas

Supervise the storytellers

Conclusion

The horizon is covered in a thick fog and we are drifting. Help! These subheadings have different structures, and it is not clear how they all link up and help to unfurl the theme of the chapter.

Now, you might say, just read the text, and it will all make sense. It might. But subheadings need to tell a story in themselves because the first thing the reader will do is scan them to see if this chapter is worth giving time to.

We’ve a million other texts to read. We need to smash the glass case, grab what we need, and get out of there. Let’s not make the reader work. As Stephen King wrote about fiction, the only thing the reader should have to do is turn the page.

Conclusion

is a very good subheading. It works for the reader, and it forces the writer to make sure they do have a conclusion.

And so my conclusion is this: first, make subheadings display a line of reasoning and relate to each other; second, don’t use word fragments but properly label what the section is about; third, use them to open up the overall topic. And don’t forget the…

References

Soul searching in Scandinavia

What a book this is, which I picked up thanks to the new Waterstones in Forestside shopping centre. In it, the author, Robert Ferguson, goes in search of the ‘soul of the north’ by exploring Scandinavian cultures, but you quickly realise something more profound and universal is going on. 

There’s a lot of history – the kind of history that you just didn’t have a clue ever happened. Things like Muslim raids on Iceland, a British naval blockade of Norway which caused a famine. We get novel-worthy portrayals of Scandinavian political leaders, explorers, writers, and artists, some known in the English-speaking world, many not.

Several chapters are set up as conversations with various Scandinavian friends – usually troubled and uptight characters who help Ferguson sift through obscure aspects of the Scandinavian experience on a shoreside walk, at a dinner party, in a jazz bar. Even the actor, Max von Sydow, makes a brief appearance to discuss Swedish and Norwegian emigration to the US.

The account of how Denmark, Norway, and Sweden fared during the Second World War is beyond interesting – an awfully important and underrecognized aspect of the war. One chapter tells us in forensic detail about an experimental and well-intentioned theatre production in Sweden in 1999 involving Neo-Nazi prisoners which ends in disaster. We are even told of a brief crossing of paths between the author and Anders Breivik shortly before he carried out his massacre in July 2011.

Through it all, Ferguson offers glimpses of his own story as an ex-pat in Norway since the early 1980s. He loves the place. A wonderful passage describes him taking the car ferry near his home now and again, having a waffle in the ferry terminal on the other side, and returning, just for the joy of it. Still a Scandi-phile, he allows himself to be challenged by his friends who are much less enamoured with their own societies.

A theme throughout is Nordic melancholy. Are Scandinavians innately depressive, perhaps due to the landscape and darkness, or the legacy of strict Protestantism? Or is this just a stereotype started by gloomy figures like Søren Kierkegaard and Edvard Munch, and then perhaps internalised by the Scandinavians themselves? Was it because the playwright, Henrik Ibsen, (‘a professional Scandinavian’ as one person calls him) wore black all the time?

All this is meant to be a journey into the Scandinavian soul. But you get the feeling that Ferguson suspects that this region might actually hold the key to understanding all of our souls, that his book is an expedition into human nature – our capacity for misery and self-destruction on the one hand and building happy and humane societies on the other. We know this duality, but as the book shows us, it’s particularly clear in cold, clean Scandinavian light. 

Recommended, but I think my next book will be a funny one.