Swindon's rough ride in the Rough Guide

For my birthday I received a copy of the Rough Guide to Britain, and jolly good fun it is too. Rather like my nostalgic copy of England on $10 a Day, one of the best bits is the attempt to explain to foreigners how to enjoy Britain, and what's good and bad about the food, beer and so on. (I found the food part rather patronising, as it half wanted to sneer at the way some places still served old fashioned pub food of the nasty variety, yet at the same time rather bemoaned the way a lot of pubs have gone up-market. Get your act together, Rough Guide.)

Now there is a tradition the world over, just as we all have a tendency to Google ourselves, to look up places that are special to us when presented with a gazetteer. My birthplace, Rochdale, doesn't get a mention - fair enough. It's not exactly a tourist destination, unless you are into Co-operative movements. But my current place of residence, Swindon is a bit different. It is, after all, site of the impressive railway museum, Steam, not to mention the National Monuments Records Centre and (nearby) the remarkable Science Museum library.

I couldn't find Swindon in the index, but I know a bit about indexes and they are fallible at best. So I thought I'd check the text. The Guide helpfully has maps that show which section of the book a place falls in. The obvious one was Wiltshire - but Swindon was just off the top of this. It's not entirely surprising, as Swindon is right at the tip of Wiltshire. So I looked at the map above... and Swindon was just below the bottom of it. Yes, they have actually left a gap between the maps to exclude Swindon.

I'm sorry, but that's not very nice. Not very nice at all.

You can see more on the Rough Guide to Britain at Amazon.co.uk and at Amazon.com

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Search This Blog