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Ian Bertram
UK
I can't pin my life down in one line!
Interests: photography, painting, collage, printmaking, digital art, mosaic, gardens and garden design, history, politics, philosophy, poetry and literature, film, science and technology, writing, music, genealogy, science fiction
Recent Activity
Heading for retirement
This blog is now retired. It will stay in being, but will have no further updates. Any future writing will be here (on art and art related matters) or here (everything else) Continue reading
Posted Jun 16, 2022 at Without the state
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Changes ahead
This blog has been pretty moribund for a while, largely because my original intent for it is no longer relevant. I'm going to recast it over the next few weeks, once I work out how to remap the domain, as... Continue reading
Posted Jun 15, 2022 at Without the state
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Do we really have too much development in the UK?
Think your country is crowded? These maps reveal the truth about population density across Europe Alasdair Rae, Author provided Alasdair Rae, University of Sheffield It’s often said that England is the most densely populated large country in Europe – typically... Continue reading
Posted Oct 4, 2021 at Without the state
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Making hardware 'open source' can help us fight future pandemics - here's how we get there
Making hardware 'open source' can help us fight future pandemics - here's how we get there elenabsl/Shutterstock Richard Bowman, University of Bath and Julian Stirling, University of Bath In factories and industrial estates across the world, exceptional efforts are being... Continue reading
Posted Jan 30, 2021 at Without the state
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Democracy is not a one time event.
The idea that democracy stops when you get the decision you like is getting more prevalent. It is an attitude that must be resisted. Continue reading
Posted Jan 9, 2021 at Without the state
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Public housing needs radical reform: here's how - republished from 'The Conversation'
Public housing needs radical reform: here's how Ben Allan/Unsplash, FAL Matthew Thompson, University of Liverpool Britain’s housing system is well and truly broken. House-builders sit on land already granted planning permission and drip-feed the market to keep supply low and... Continue reading
Posted Dec 7, 2020 at Without the state
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Why lockdowns don't necessarily infringe on freedom
Annelien de Dijn, Utrecht University Europe is dealing with its “second wave” of COVID-19. And governments seem powerless to stem the tide. Dutch political leaders find it difficult to convince their citizens to wear face masks. A large majority of... Continue reading
Posted Nov 13, 2020 at Without the state
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Another reboot
Technorati Tags: politics,blogging,writing This blog began a long long time ago in a far away country with a Labour government with some radical ideas - for a while at least until Tony Blair began to have dreams of being a... Continue reading
Posted Oct 26, 2020 at Without the state
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How could you, Bolsover?
I can’t deny that the outcome of the election is a huge disappointment and also a huge worry. With the most right wing government in years, Brexit now inevitable and the consequences of climate change looming over us, we are... Continue reading
Posted Dec 18, 2019 at Without the state
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The state we're in.
It isn't undemocratic to oppose government policy. That includes the policy of leaving the EU and it certainly includes the terms on which we leave. Despite the garbage like 'Brexit means Brexit' or the shouty 'you lost, get over it'... Continue reading
Posted Jul 1, 2019 at Without the state
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And so it drags on...
If the sort of chaos we've seen in the Commons and in Government over the past months had been reported as happening anywhere else in the world, you can be sure that Messrs Gove, Johnson and Farage would have wasted... Continue reading
Posted Mar 30, 2019 at Without the state
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Coping with climate change
Back in 2016, I argued that we needed to tackle reducing the demand for energy as if it was a major infrastructure project. Now the Independent Committee on Climate change have reached a similar conclusion. Of course, translating that report... Continue reading
Posted Feb 24, 2019 at Without the state
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A vision for social housing
The graph above is taken from the recently published report by Shelter. It shows the parlous state of social house building since 1923. I've written quite a lot about housing on this blog but this report makes it clear that... Continue reading
Posted Jan 11, 2019 at Without the state
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The art of pulp magazines
I've been reading science fiction since I was about 11. When I was about 13 or 14, a cousin gave me a pile of what I now know were Pulp magazines (sometimes just "pulps"). These were inexpensive fiction magazines published... Continue reading
Posted Jan 7, 2019 at Without the state
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Ocean Park - paintings by Richard Diebenkorn
I've been looking at the Ocean Park series of paintings and prints by Richard Diebenkorn (via this book, but also here.) There is something about them that keeps drawing me back. They are deceptively simple with subdued colours, apparently just... Continue reading
Posted Jan 3, 2019 at Without the state
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Crossrail and HS2 - again!
Back in 2014, I wrote a post looking at the dominance of London and the disproportionate spending on infrastructure in London and the SE compared to the rest of the country. Since then things haven’t improved. The bill for Crossrail... Continue reading
Posted Jan 1, 2019 at Without the state
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For sale on Etsy
I'm an artist printmaker, I took this up on retirement (for the second time) but even before then I was always taking photographs and have done so for over 50 years now. The visual arts have always been important to... Continue reading
Posted Jan 1, 2019 at Without the state
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June Whitfield
Probably not known outside the UK, but a great comic actor with perfect timing. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/gallery/2018/dec/29/june-whitfield-a-life-in-pictures Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2018 at Without the state
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An end to free movement
Up to now this has been a Brexit free zone, but inevitably as I disengage from Facebook, that must change. A frequent mantra from the leave side has been the call for an 'end to free movement of people'. It's... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2018 at Without the state
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Life on Mars?
Will we ever have significant settlements of human beings living off-planet? Not according to this post at Crooked Timber. The author, John Quiggin says bluntly " humans will never go out to explore this universe, or even le ave Earth... Continue reading
Posted Dec 30, 2018 at Without the state
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The decline of Facebook
Facebook usage declined in 2018 for the first time ever - at least in the US. It wasn't just a small decline either, but back to 2015 levels from 67 percent of Americans aged 12 and older to 62 percent... Continue reading
Posted Dec 29, 2018 at Without the state
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I used to use Sage, but that is no longer supported on Firefox, so I've just installed FeedBro. I'm in the process of rebuilding my list of sites.
Reboot
For the nth time, I'm going to try to restart this blog. I spent a while going back over some old posts and decided I don't want to let it go. I'm not going to change the name this time. The idea behind the title is still relevant and can be stretched to cover the other things I want to write ab...
The long tail and original art
One of my aims when I opened my Etsy shop selling vintage graphics was to have as wide a variety of images available as possible. It took me a while before I realised this was tapping into something called the... Continue reading
Posted Dec 29, 2018 at Without the state
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I'm on Facebook less and less these days. I left almost all the groups I was in. many of these were innocuous, like local history groups but despite that they seemed almost as bad as Twitter with unthinking aggressive and generally nasty posts everywhere. Brexit hasn't helped.
As I disengaged there I came back to reading blogs much more and that's led me to restart my own.
Reboot
For the nth time, I'm going to try to restart this blog. I spent a while going back over some old posts and decided I don't want to let it go. I'm not going to change the name this time. The idea behind the title is still relevant and can be stretched to cover the other things I want to write ab...
Thanks for this - I didn't realise you were on Etsy.
Another blogger returns and he offers prints
ANOTHER BLOGGER APPEARS to be rebooting original work and offers lovely prints to complement his writing. It's Ian Bertram from the UK, an artist I also follow on Etsy. You should click the image and see more of his prints. Like hundreds of bloggers I followed 10 years ago, Ian parked his onl...
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