boycott the bigot

Last weekend was Pride across the UK. Despite the best efforts of the Mayor of London, hundreds of thousands of people paraded in towns and cities across the country.

Here in Leeds the celebrations were tempered somewhat by a Twitter storm emanating from a homophobic outburst by the proprietor of several city centre venues. Lewis Cuddy is co-owner of two pubs, The Wrens and the Central, as well as late-night bar Milo's.

So once again it's time for lots of people to celebrate the fact that they are all socially unable to be normal.Well done. When is Leeds first peado pride event? Or is it just the same thing. Bonkers.

Instantly confronted and insulted, he made no retraction. With his privacy settings turned right up, he thought his comments wouldn't be seen by the wider public and his customers. He seems unaware of the ability to tweet a screengrab.

As his comments circulated one or two of his friends defended him saying he had apologised, yet couldn't provide a link or quote to prove it. Challenged on Facebook about it he did not apologise in any way.

It's my bad for writing what I did but it was a status that was meant for my close friends. I assumed all my friends would take it in the same humour as all my other posts. I write constantly on my facebook wall with stupid comments and sometime close to the bone comments (as todays post) which sometimes get a reaction. No harm meant but I can see why a few people have taken it personal. I feel saddened if this cas caused any genuine hurt to anyone.

As Tom Flay points out, 'close to the bone' implies that there is truth in saying all LGBT people are unable to be normal and may well be paedophiles. He does not retract his sentiment at all, nor explain why he feels that way. He merely regrets that is has been made public, as tags on being saddened if - if! - it has been hurtful to anyone.

Like a man deciding to redouble his digging rate to get out of a hole, several days later Cuddy posted on Leeds Music Forum.

Good morning. My name is Lewis Cuddy and I am responsible for writing the said comment on my private Facebook wall.

I have tried my best to keep out of this whole saga but as someone who posts on here I think it is only fair to explain my actions.

Any of my close friends know that I have a massive problem with gay pride, not because of gay people but the attitude of the council to street parties. I asked the council last year after the leeds pride even on how I would go about closing the street outside milo for a massive band day. I was told in no uncertain way than unless it was for a minority event would this be allowed.

This is what angers me, why should a minority have different rights to the majority. Maybe saying that paedophiles should get their own minority event was a bit strong but clearly the people who my comments were aimed at would understand.

Grabbing a screen shot of something I wrote and taking it out of context is not only rude but a betrayal of friendship. Safe to say this person has been removed from my Facebook friends.

So quite simply that is it. Nothing more I can say.

Ps. To anyone who thinks I ruined the wrens, sorry. Without my investment and hard work the wrens would have been stripped out and closed down over a year ago. Probably just a rotting mess right now.

If we are to believe this reasoning - unmentioned for days in the aftermath of the initial tweet - then it shows an extraordinary ability to do logic gymnastics.

If his issue really is that Pride gets road closures of the kind he would like to have, surely his ire should be directed at the council who decide on these things, rather than one of the beneficiaries.

More to the point, why does he single out only one beneficiary? Many events get road closures in Leeds. There are far more LGBT people than amateur long distance runners, yet Leeds Half Marathon or the 10k Race For Life gets much greater road space. Where is Cuddy's bigoted rant about runners?
 
He says that maybe - maybe! - saying a paedophile event is equivalent to Pride is 'a bit strong'. He didn't only say that, though. He suggested they could already be one and the same thing. This is not just a homophobic attack but one that uses the darkest, most malevolent stereotypes. He maximises his contribution to the cancer of homophobia that ruins and even claims lives.

Later this month streets in Chapeltown will be full of the carnival. Will Cuddy be tweeting 'send the raping thieving n*****s back'?

As it stands, it seems his apoplexy at events in the city centre unorganised by is confined to Pride, and Pride alone. There is a well-known piece of pop psychology that says we know what virulent homophobia really says about a man's inner life.

But irrespective of who he is when he turns out the light, on the outside Lewis Cuddy is an unabashed homophobic bigot. As a publican he has a privileged position serving the community. It is incumbent on such people to serve everybody well. If you want to run a B and B but are a homophobe, tough. By the same token, public facilities such as pubs have no place in the hands of people who direct hate speech at a serious proportion of their clientele.

Beyond that, it's not about the LGBT people who walk through the doors at the Wrens or Milo's. It is, contrary to what Cuddy says, not something to 'take personal'. This isn't about individuals, this is about equality and freedom from fear and repression. An attack on the rights of anyone for their colour, sexuality, gender or any other aspect is an attack on equality itself.

That Cuddy seems too dimwitted to grasp that concept is disappointing. That he is not only prepared to add weight to bigotry but defend it is unforgivable. Whether he is an ideological bigot or just an overconfident, loudmouthed, hard-of-thinking bigot is irrelevant.

By his steadfast refusal to apologise, let alone examine his discriminatory position, he proves himself unworthy to hold a place in a community that wants to have tolerance and equality. Anyone who shares those values should not be giving him their money. It's time to boycott his pubs and get anyone who isn't a homophobic bigot to to the same.

spongers

As the government introduced the Welfare Reform Bill, complaining of spongers getting easy money off the state for doing nothing, I saw nineteen police officers milling about Leeds station with an airport-style metal detector asking - with no powers to compel - random people to go through to see if they were carrying a knife.

planes, trains and tory numpties

Just because the Euro elections are over doesn't mean you don't get political leaflets through the door. The Conservatives' parliamentary candidate for Leeds North East, Matthew Lobley, has been dishing out some.



Down there at the bottom we see that

the next Conservative government would invest in a High-Speed Rail link connecting Leeds to London, Birmingham and Manchester...

Matthew commented,' This will be great news for Leeds, reducing travel times and so supporting our Leeds economy and jobs. For too any years we have seen Leeds, the finance capital of the North, miss out to Manchester"

Missing out to Manchester? Would that be the Leeds that's had two-hour train journeys to London for a decade or two while equidistant Manchester only got that upgrade a couple of years ago?

Meanwhile, with no sense of irony or conflict, on the back of the leaflet we get this lament:

the news that BMI has scrapped its flights between Leeds and Heathrow is hugely disappointing to Leeds people.

Firstly, I wonder what proportion of people in Leeds ever used a flight to London. Of this tiny number, what subgroup could describe themselves as 'hugely disappointed' that the service was axed? Would anyone guess it was more than a sliver of a fraction of one percent of the amount needed to qualify as being representative opinions of 'Leeds people'?

The government has just announced a swathe of high-speed rail links with the explicit intention of killing off domestic flights, saying

For reasons of carbon reduction and wider environmental benefits, it is manifestly in the public interest that we systematically replace short-haul aviation with high-speed rail.

But this is seemingly not an issue to Lobley, a man who manages to talk about future energy policy without reference to carbon, and on his website only manages to mention it once, as "global warming", complete with quote marks.

For him, it's just that we need journey times cut. That'll make the train compete with the plane. Except the normal train already does.

Matthew and those hugely disappointed Leeds citizens will be relieved to know that Flybe have picked up the service and fly from Leeds to Gatwick.

Choosing a date and time at random, the 14.05 flight on 9th September from Leeds to London takes an hour and ten minutes. Add the minimum 30 minutes check-in time and it's 1.40. And that's before we recognise that the train terminates right in the city, whereas the flight leaves from outside Leeds and lands a good half an hour's journey away from actual London.

The 14.05 train takes 2 hours 17 minutes. So, there's nothing in it timewise and the train's almost certainly the better option on that front.

Not so with the price, however. The flight costs £24.99 including taxes. The train costs £84.00. What can we do about this incentive to take the high-carbon option?

In January 2007 David Cameron suggested

I think what we need to have is we've got to make sure that air travel more accurately reflects all of the costs. And, if you like, what the Economist would call the externalities, the pollution cost. I think that is important. And I think that would lead to a fairer competition between, between rail and air travel, particularly within the UK.

On 13 September 2007 the Conservatives published their Quality of Life report. The same day, in light of the report's recommendations, it was reported that

David Cameron will finally bite the bullet on green taxes today by backing the imposition of VAT on aviation fuel on domestic flights

Less than two weeks after the 547 page report was published, Cameron had read it and removed his teethmarks from the bullet.

We’ve put forward some different options, we’ve now looked at that and decided the right option, which is to not do VAT on domestic flights, that VAT on domestic flights was not an option.

So, if nothing else, at least Lobley's in line with his party leader, sticking his fingers in his ears and going lalala about aviation emissions.

veneration and defecation

Jim Bliss recently marvelled at what we can learn about a culture from its choice of statues. London, he notes, has a great diversity of figures,

But mostly it’s soldiers. Lots and lots of soldiers. Men who excelled at killing people from beyond the city walls, or who were cruelly killed by people from beyond the city walls. And we invite them back to stand silently among us. One of them stands atop a pedestal so high, you can’t really see him clearly.

He explains that Dublin, by contrast, has revolutionaries and perhaps the zenith of modern statue making, Phil Lynott.

But there is a backhandedness in statues that, whilst not making me enjoy being surrounded by giant models of killers, does give a bit of subversive balancing.

George Melly was once asked where he'd like a statue of him to be erected and he said he hoped there wouldn't be one. As those who do get them are inevitably and unendingly shat on in effigy by pigeons, a visitor from another planet might think they were the ancestors we most revile.

As Malcolm Reynolds said

It's my estimation that every man who ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sonofabitch or another.

But there's a hierarchy element too. George Orwell declared

What I like best is the careful grading by which the honours are always dished out in direct proportion to the amount of mischief done – baronies for Big Business, baronetcies for fashionable surgeons, knighthoods for tame professors.

By the same token, it's not only Reynolds' point that the bigger a fucker someone was the more likely they are to have a statue of them, but also that we'll make the statues on a greater scale and in greater quantity.

The plethora of grand guano targets of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington mean they're probably the most shat on people in British history.

There was a great hoo-hah about disrespect when a Mayday demo gave the Churchill statue a grass mohican. Yet this sort of thing is standard treatment for statues. Again, that martian might think that all statues were a form of bonfire Guy, seeing the founder of the NHS Aneurin Bevan with a traffic cone on his head. Or the one in Leeds where, in addition to his perenially repainted boots, the puffed up pomposity of the Duke of Wellington has just been augmented with a Homer Simpson mask.




It's as if Two Minutes Hate would be too genuinely angry, these figures are more dismissed than that, they get a Few Seconds Arsing About.

Wellington's statue is one of four on Woodhouse Moor, and collectively they spell out another form of disrespect. Wellington, Victoria and Robert Peel originally stood in Victoria Square outside the town hall, but were moved in 1937 to make way for a car park.

The fourth is Victorian industrialist and mayor of Leeds Henry Marsden whose statue gives the name to the area called Monument Moor. It was called Swing Moor prior to Marsden's arrival in 1952, when he was moved there from a city centre road junction where he was a hindrance to the increasing amount of motor traffic.

As I recently said about these statues on my Hyde Park History blog,

we used to venerate these folks in the city centre, but we've sidelined them to a peripheral park in order to make way for increased traffic. Collectively, then, they stand as a monument to the motor car.

Their moving is not a sign that we've stopped venerating things, just a physical acknowledgement of the change in what we worship.

and in the blue corner

The Tories - on such a hiding to nothing that they didn't even stand round here last time - have found a plucky individual for tomorrow's council elections called Syprian Pitkin.

Certainly a better name than the other candidates, but what does he offer?

For a start, none of the sly fake community newsletters offered by the LibDems (who set a new high on their gall-ometer by delivering a letter on blue writing paper, printed to look like it's handwritten from their candidate. Sheesh).

Syprian dishes out a proper, old fashioned, honest to goodness election leaflet. I'm resisting the temptation to treat its use of grammar, spelling and punctuation the same way I've treated his little placards in the local grass verges (oh the joys of steel toecap boots). There's no need for cheap shots when there's such bollocks in what he actually says.

People have attacked David Cameron for his all talk and no walk approach to policy making, but it takes time and consultation to come up with something that's as grand as a national or international strategy. In a local election there are always simple, straightforward concrete things to talk about so there's no need for Cameronian vagueness. You'd have thought.



Good stuff made great by the use of the conjunction 'boldly go', one of the phrases in English that has been rendered comedic forevermore, just like 'who you gonna call?'.

But it gets better in the next bit.



For god's sake, don't judge us by what we actually do! That's your worse judgement coming into play! No, use your 'better judgement', the one that believes the promises of people with a consistent record of breaking promises.

The biggest piece of unwalked talk is their green credentials. Syprian's leaflet uses an astonishing logo, whose higher design values strongly imply it's cut and pasted from some national tory leaflet



Erk? What happens if you vote Green then?

But remember, when there's a low turnout it's all about 'voter apathy' and a refusal to engage with the political process, not the fact that all the candidates are transparently deceitful bastards who appear to believe we've got the mental age of a brain damaged puffin.

All that said, I'm definitely going to vote tomorrow. As with the last general election, my reservations are squished by the fact that the BNP are standing and I want to minimise their proportion of the vote. Last time they polled 11% across Leeds, despite only fielding candidates in two thirds of the wards. Sometimes the bullet has to be bitten.

junkmailers against junkmailing

Another election, another heap of irritating electioneering.

Labour and LibDems round here are putting things through our letterboxes to tell us how hard they work for us, all of them slyly designed to look like they're regular and frequent newsletters. There's probably some central office template with pre-written stories about clearing graffiti and getting more police on the beat.

Fortunately, the Tories are on such a hiding to nothing round my way that they don't even field a candidate. But stepping into the void are the LibDems with this freesheet that, even among the blatant baby-kissing and condescending tone of pre-election news leaflets, is a real biscuit-taker.



Check that line at the bottom, 'working all year round - not just election time'.

Indeed, we do occasionally get Focus at other times. However, we don't get two issues in one month unless there's an election.

Nor have we ever seen a newsprint thing the LibDems delivered yesterday called the Leader. It was missing its strapline, 'not working all year round, just at election time'.

This being a student-heavy area, there are a lot of pizza and curry delivery businesses. My building only has 8 flats, yet we get between 30 and 80 leaflets a week through the door. They're a blight, to be sure.

So the LibDems tap into it with a 'No More Junk' bit in Focus, with a free card to put on your letterbox to say you don't want free flyers.

Putting free junkmail through your door with a card to say you don't want free junkmail through your door!

Are they as cynical and patronising as I think, or are they simply as stupid as they think their readership are?

leeds: live it, lease it

There's a real eye-opener in the current Corporate Watch newsletter. Depite living in Leeds, I had no idea about the extent to which we're being fucked over by privatisation of our services. The piece is called 'Leeds: Live It Lease It', a play on the city's slogan of 'Live It, Love It', which cost us £150,000 despite the fact that it's the slogan used by Hong Kong.

All the sell-offs are flabbergasting, but the thing that dropped my jaw to the floor was this

The supposedly state-of-the-art schools constructed by Mowlem as part of the £35 million Leeds 7 Schools Project were built without kitchens. 'Nutritious', pre-cooked, frozen food is therefore shipped in each day from Mowlem's catering facilities at a hospital near Middlesbrough.

On so many levels: FUCK!

It means that the food will have to be processed stuff, diminishing the nutritional value.

It means a round trip of over a hundred miles every day just to bring the food in, with all the extra resource consumption that entails.

It means that the provision of meals will always have to be contracted out, as the school has nowhere to cook.

It means that it can never serve locally produced, fresh food, prepared and served by local people with a relationship to the school.

As ever, PFI is benefiting the wealthy at the expense of the local people who are meant to be grateful.

and so this is christmas

The bard said, 'it's July but it's cold as Christmas in the middle of the year'.

However, in a magnificent cakey-eaty arrangement, for me it's July, it's hot and it's Christmas.

Living in the Leeds inner city area of Hyde Park, 1st July is one of the most important dates in the calendar. It's the time of many tenancy agreements ending, especially those of our large student population.

(That's a large population of students, not a population of large students).

Having lived in a house for a year before going back to the smaller accommodation at their parents', they leave a lot of stuff behind that gets stuck in a skip by their newly ex-landlord. The effect is exaggerated for the many overseas students who have to take all their belongings back in a suitcase.

This makes rich pickings for those of us who live here permanently. It's not just pizza boxes and burst armchairs. It's perfectly working electrical appliances, furniture, clothes, books, CDs, posters, all kinds of useful household stuff that would otherwise go to landfill sites. It's known amongst friends as Hyde Park Christmas.

There's a positive flipside too. If I've any tat I need rid of, it can be disposed of for free by dropping it into one of the skips paid for by the overwealthy landlords.

It is perhaps the only system of exchange that might genuinely merit the term 'free market'. Even dumping stuff in the skips doesn't cost the landlords anything as I'm removing as much as I add.

Not that it would bother me too much anyway. I'm in wholehearted agreement with George Orwell's opinion of landlords.

These people are just about as useful as so many tapeworms. It is desirable that people should own their own dwelling houses, and it is probably desirable that a farmer should own as much land as he can actually farm. But the ground-landlord in a town area has no function and no excuse for existence. He is merely a person who has found out a way of milking the public while giving nothing in return. He causes rents to be higher, he makes town planning more difficult, and he excludes children from green spaces: that is literally all that he does, except to draw his income.

yellow isn't green, it's blue

Here in Leeds, our City Council is hung. Sadly not from traditional stout British gallows (we're too busy exporting those to Zimbabwe); I mean it has no overall control by a single party.

Labour have the most seats, but a coalition of Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and the Greens act as the dominant group.

Even though the British National Party received more than half the number of votes the LibDems got, the BNP only got two seats compared to the LibDems’ 26. This allocation gives the LibDems a real political punch in Leeds. How do you think this party, so used to opposition, uses its power?

I live in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. It's a lot of terraces, many of them back-to-backs. Green space is at a real premium here.

The park that gives the area its name is especially treasured. As everyone lives tightly packed into houses with little or no private outdoor area, everyone treats the park as one big communal garden. In summer it's like a beach, full of people hanging out, music, games, a real vibe.

One section of it, Monument Moor, is under threat. The City Council is planning to concrete this green space and make it a car park.

The plan has a number of especially galling elements. Top of the list is that the considerable money for the plan - about £170,000 - is from the 'Parks Renaissance' budget.

You couldn't make that shit up could you? What kind of 'renaissance' does a park get being turned into a mass of tarmac?

Coming a close second in the fucks-sake stakes are the reports of the supportive public consultation, when in fact no real consultation took place and the first most residents knew of it was when there was a story in the Yorkshire Evening Post.

Trying to contain the ensuing furore, LibDem councillor Mark Harris wrote a letter to the YEP 'to categorically assure readers that no decision at all has been made for a car park on Monument Moor'.

No final decision, no; but the Council's planning application had gone in two weeks earlier. It was a detailed plan and a statement of intent: it is quite definitely a decision.

LibDem councillor Kabeer Hussain says 'I think the consultation could have been improved.' Doing it at all would have improved it no end for most of us, I'm sure.

He alleges, 'There is also a lot of public support for the car park,' even though his colleague Councillor David Morton has seen the responses and says reports, 'my sample of the survey returns showed a 100% opposition rate'.

Still, Kabeer tells us, 'it will be really nice - with shrubs, and trees surrounding it.' How many 'really nice' car parks have you ever seen?

LibDem councillor Penny Ewens also argues for the tarmac on the grounds that it will have nice neat trees. But, as the YEP's Oliver Cross explained, unmanicured land is far more valuable than car park borders.

I don't think anybody has so far argued the case for spare and useless land being left spare and useless as a matter of policy.

If the bit of scraggy grassland around HR Marsden's statue were to be used sensibly, there would be scarcely anywhere in central Leeds not dedicated entirely to cars, flats, offices, flat-letting agencies or more flats.

Coun Ewens says the car park's surface could be made of something softer than Tarmac, but it will still have to have white lines and pay-and-display machines and will, I'm sure, look so much like a car park that nobody will mistake it for a moor.

The area will also be landscaped. One of the glories of the threatened piece of land (which, for reasons unknown, the council calls Monument Moor) is that no landscaper has laid hands on it.

The reasons are not unknown, incidentally. It's unsurprisingly named after the monument that stands on it. It's that aforementioned statue of Henry Marsden, Leeds industrialist and - oh ripe irony - Liberal Mayor of Leeds in the 1870s.

The LibDems like to imply they can be trusted to be all green and lovely but, as in Leeds, time and again their record in power tells a different story.

On the day the government said GM crops might go ahead, LibDems in Westminster were officially opposing it but in Scotland, where they have power and could do something about it, they weren't blocking it, they were unanimously supporting it and merely saying they'd ask farmers not to plant GM.

The infamous Newbury Bypass, a scheme now conceded by the then Tory Roads Minister as utterly unnecessary, was rabidly cheered on by those with local power - the LibDem council and the LibDem MP.

In the case of Manchester Airport's second runway - an monstrously destructive project taking nearly three times the land of Newbury - in Stockport under the flight path they opposed it but in Manchester, where their power was, they were in favour.

The Kingston Poplars tree protest was for a load of mature trees being felled to improve the view for new luxury flats. The council that gave planning permission? LibDems.

This is a party that openly admits it ‘starts with a bias for market solutions’. That is to say, if there’s ever a conflict between profits and the environment, profits win. As they ascend in the polls and get closer to national power, so they move to become just another Big Business party. The environment's all well and good as long as it doesn't get in the way of the wealthy and their markets.

It's a flipside to the way that as the Tories move away from power they start saying there should be good student grants and in-house hospital cleaning, conveniently forgetting who invented student loans and privatised hospital cleaning in the first place.

Indeed, David Cameron has twigged that the environment is an ideal issue for those who are firmly in opposition. Everyone wants it to be cared for but those in power are beholden to the markets’ hunger for growth, so environmental concerns can only be acted upon if they happen to coincide with profitability.

As the markets tend to regard the environment as raw materials or a cesspool, that coincidence is rare. Eco credentials must be ditched in direct proportion to the ability to act upon them.

The market is built upon the absolute requirement for perpetual economic growth. As I keep saying, it doesn’t take an especially brilliant mind to understand why you can’t have eternal accelerated consumption of finite resources.

As power drains from the cadaverising Labour regime, some of them now find they’re free to talk about this openly. One Labour MP is now readily comparing the intrinsic injustice and obvious ephemerality of economic growth to the Third Reich.

The lesson is clear; whoever's hands it's put in, power itself is the problem.

Now I see the LibDems literally just across the road from me, wanting to take away some of the tiny green space in a densely-populated, low car ownership, overpolluted inner city for the convenience of commuting drivers. In other words, favouring the rich over the poor, favouring industrialisation over the environment.

This season, yellow is the new blue.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

UPDATE: Following overwhelming public opposition, the Council has withdrawn the Monument Moor plan. The South Headingley Community Association's Sue Buckle was one of the main organisers of the campaign. After the announcement of the victory, she said, 'It shows what can be achieved if people are prepared to protest and make their views clear... It's the sort of outcome that gives people heart for bigger struggles.'

Amen to that.

kill the poor

Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm
Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar
Left behind a pretty young wife and a baby girl
A stack of overdue bills and went off to save the world
Been a year now and he’s still there
Chasin’ ghosts in the thin dry air
Meanwhile back at home the finance company took his car
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

- Steve Earle, Rich Man's War.

Those who've seen Fahrenheit 9/11 will remember the chilling cynicism with which recruiters for the US military target poor areas. Needing cannon fodder for the wars that maintain and increase their wealth, the super-rich never send their own kids to fight.

In the Second World War - despite now proclaiming it as a war against racist ideology - the Americans sent troops in racially segregated divisions. The South Park thing of 'Operation Hide Behind Darkie' was horribly true. In Vietnam, the proportion of black troops was four times the proportion of blacks in the population at large.

These days it's not even poor non-white Americans being targeted. There's a scene in Gangs of New York where Irish immigrants arrive and queue up for processing at two tables. The first welcomes them to America and gives them citizenship. The second tells them that as a citizen they are liable for conscription, gives them their papers and sends them off to fight.

So it continues today, but without even making them citizens first. More than a quarter of American troops in Iraq are not even Americans. They are foreigners offered fast-track citizenship if they join up.

Despite the waffle from politicians about 'fighting for your country', wars are usually about fighting to get someone else's country. Our soldiers know it and say it.

Despite the LibDems' anti-war mask, Charles Kennedy has said the UK soldiers in Iraq are doing it 'for their country'. The only people doing that in Iraq, Charles, are the ones killing our soldiers.

As in the USA, in the UK recruiters like to come through our poor areas seeing who they can trawl.

As someone who both remembers the 1980s and has lived for a long time in inner cities, I can barely begin to imagine how grim these urban areas would've become after Thatcher's onslaught if they hadn't had the immigrant influx to keep energy and spark in them.

The celebration and spectacle of a caribbean carnival or an Asian mela are among the best things about a British urban summer.

This year, the Leeds Mela has several sponsors.

The main one? Royal Air Force.

so hard to beat

It's surprising how deeply John Peel's death has touched the national psyche, and how it continues to affect people and be a topic of conversation. Seems like we all thought he was a hero but somehow also thought the rest of the world thought of him as an old duffer who played bonkers music, often at the wrong speed.

After so much idle recreational grief at celebs dying, and all that sickening tripe about how Reagan was a good guy (let that make us forewarned and forearmed against anything other than vengeant jubilation when Thatcher goes), and how Diana was 'one of us', the aftermath of Peel's death is so very different.

There's something tremendously heartening to know that what he did and what he stood for meant so much to so many. That people really got it, they loved and respected him out of a real understanding of what he was about. I feel like it's been proven that my compatriots are kinder, more intelligent, more humane and more weird than I gave them credit for.

Even excruciating Radio 1 morning DJ Chris Moyles who is a reliably arrogant and boorish egotist - if you imagine Steve Wright as cocaine then Moyles is ketamine and Special Brew consumed on a heavy dirty comedown - was affected. Receiving a text asking if the mourning shouldn't be lifted after several days he simply told the author, on air, 'go screw yourself'.

Most weeks since Peel's death I've had a DJing gig, and I've made a point of putting Teenage Kicks into the record box. Most times I've played it someone's bounded up euphorically shouting 'JOHN PEEEEEEEL!'. Always celebratory, never maudlin.

At Aspire's superb all-nighter on the 11th I played an extended set in the Radio Savage Houndy Beasty room due to the rest of the Beasty boys misjudging their intake somewhat (one of the team urgently needed to dance and stroke people, the other two just sat there for several hours, wide-eyed and exhaling loudly through pursed lips).

After spinning Teenage Kicks I left a gap before starting the next record and shouted 'let's hear it for John Peel!'. It got the best enthusiastic cheer I've heard since the bit in Paul McCartney's Glastonbury set when he asked for a cheer for another John.

Speaking of which, Glastonbury Festival, the cultural barometer of Britain, has renamed the New Bands stage in Peel's honour. Though it was always a bit of an odd name anyway for the place that put on 'new bands' like John Cale, Spiritualized, Ian McNabb and Patti Smith.

Glastonbury's site is also one of the many places that have a touching personal eulogy.

Radio 1 had a commemoration night on 16th December called Keep It Peel, and the BBC have set up a special Peel page full of links and archive material.

Meanwhile here on the funksome streets of Leeds 6, he is commemorated in several ways.

Within a couple of days of his death, a stencil-spray appeared on walls, pavements and roads around LS6.



The front window of a house in Brudenell Street wishes that the simultaneous Bush and Peel news stories were reversed; PEEL FOR PRESIDENT, BUSH FOR UNTIMELY DEATH



And then at the corner of Hyde Park there's the statue of Robert Peel, godfather of the Conservative Party and inventor of the coppers. He's been sporting rather natty England face paint for several months now, but this week his plinth has been amended to suggest that we commemorate an altogether better class of Peel.