Winter Solstice, Camelot Station

by John M. Ford, 1988


Camelot is served
By a sixteen-track stub terminal done in High Gothick Style,
The tracks covered by a single great barrel-vaulted glass roof framed upon iron,
At once looking back to the Romans and ahead to the Brunels.
Beneath its rotunda, just to the left of the ticket windows,
Is a mosaic floor depicting the Round Table
(Where all knights, regardless of their station of origin
Or class of accommodation, are equal),
And around it murals of knightly deeds in action
(Slaying dragons, righting wrongs, rescuing maidens tied to the tracks).
It is the only terminal, other than Gare d'Avalon in Paris,
To be hung with original tapestries,
And its lavatories rival those at the Great Gate of Kiev Central.
During a peak season such as this, some eighty trains a day pass through,
Five times the frequency at the old Londinium Terminus,
Ten times the number the Druid towermen knew.
(The Official Court Christmas Card this year displays
A crisp black-and-white Charles Clegg photograph from the King's own collection,
Showing a woad-blued hogger at the throttle of "Old XCVII,"
The Fast Mail overnight to Eboracum. Those were the days.)

The first of a line of wagons have arrived,
Spilling footmen and pages in Court livery,
And old thick Kay, stepping down from his Range Rover,
Tricked out in a bush coat from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg,
Leaning on his shooting stick as he marshalls his company,
Instructing the youngest how to behave in the station,
To help mature women that they may encounter,
Report pickpockets, gather up litter,
And of course no true Knight of the Table Round (even in training)
Would do a station porter out of Christmas tips.
He checks his list of arrival times, then his watch
(A moon-phase Breguet, gift from Merlin):
The seneschal is a practical man, who knows trains do run late,
And a stolid one, who sees no reason to be glad about it.
He dispatches pages to posts at the tracks,
Doling out pennies for platform tickets,
Then walks past the station buffet with a dyspeptic snort,
Goes into the bar, checks the time again, orders a pint.
The patrons half turn--it's the fella from Camelot, innit?
And Kay chuckles soft to himself, and the Court buys a round.
He's barely halfway when a page tumbles in,
Seems the knights are arriving, on time after all,
So he tips the glass back (people stare as he guzzles),
Then plonks it down hard with five quid for the barman,
And strides for the doorway (half Falstaff, half Hotspur)
To summon his liveried army of lads.

Bors arrives behind steam, riding the cab of a heavy Mikado.
He shakes the driver's hand, swings down from the footplate,
And is like a locomotive himself, his breath clouding white,
Dark oil sheen on his black iron mail,
Sword on his hip swinging like siderods at speed.
He stamps back to the baggage car, slams mailed fist on steel door
With a clang like jousters colliding.
The handler opens up and goes to rouse another knight.
Old Pellinore has been dozing with his back against a crate,
A cubical, chain-bound thing with FRAGILE tags and air holes,
BEAST says the label, QUESTING, 1 the bill of lading.
The porters look doubtful but ease the thing down.
It grumbles. It shifts. Someone shouts, and they drop it.
It cracks like an egg. There is nothing within.
Elayne embraces Bors on the platform, a pelican on a rock,
Silently they watch as Pelly shifts the splinters,
Supposing aloud that Gutman and Cairo have swindled him.

A high-drivered engine in Northern Lines green
Draws in with a string of side-corridor coaches,
All honey-toned wood with stained glass on their windows.
Gareth steps down from a compartment, then Gaheris and Aggravaine,
All warmly tucked up in Orkney sweaters;
Gawaine comes after in Shetland tweed.
Their Gladstones and steamers are neatly arranged,
With never a worry--their Mum does the packing.
A redcap brings forth a curious bundle, a rude shape in red paper--
The boys did that one themselves, you see, and how does one wrap a unicorn's head?
They bustle down the platform, past a chap all in green.
He hasn't the look of a trainman, but only Gawaine turns to look at his eyes,
And sees written there Sir, I shall speak with you later.

Over on the first track, surrounded by reporters,
All glossy dark iron and brass-bound mystery,
The Direct-Orient Express, ferried in from Calais and points East.
Palomides appears. Smelling of patchouli and Russian leather,
Dripping Soubranie ash on his astrakhan collar,
Worry darkening his dark face, though his damascene armor shows no tarnish,
He pushes past the press like a broad-hulled icebreaker.
Flashbulbs pop. Heads turn. There's a woman in Chanel black,
A glint of diamonds, liquid movements, liquid eyes.
The newshawks converge, but suddenly there appears
A sharp young man in a crisp blue suit
From the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits,
That elegant, comfortable, decorous, close-mouthed firm;
He's good at his job, and they get not so much as a snapshot.
Tomorrow's editions will ask who she was, and whom with...

Now here's a silver train, stainless steel, Vista-Domed,
White-lighted grails on the engine (running no extra sections)
The Logres Limited, extra fare, extra fine,
(Stops on signal at Carbonek to receive passengers only).
She glides to a Timkin-borne halt (even her grease is clean),
Galahad already on the steps, flashing that winning smile,
Breeze mussing his golden hair, but not his Armani tailoring,
Just the sort of man you'd want finding your chalice.
He signs an autograph, he strikes a pose.
Someone says, loudly, "Gal! Who serves the Grail?"
He looks--no one he knows--and there's a silence,
A space in which he shifts like sun on water;
Look quick and you may see a different knight,
A knight who knows that meanings can be lies,
That things are done not knowing why they're done,
That bearings fail, and stainless steel corrodes.
A whistle blows. Snow shifts on the glass shed roof. That knight is gone.
This one remaining tosses his briefcase to one of Kay's pages,
And, golden, silken, careless, exits left.

Behind the carsheds, on the business-car track, alongside the private varnish
Of dukes and smallholders, Persian potentates and Cathay princes
(James J. Hill is here, invited to bid on a tunnel through the Pennines),
Waits a sleek car in royal blue, ex-B&O, its trucks and fittings chromed,
A black-gloved hand gripping its silver platform rail;
Mordred and his car are both upholstered in blue velvet and black leather.
He prefers to fly, but the weather was against it.
His DC-9, with its video system and Quotron and waterbed, sits grounded at Gatwick.
The premature lines in his face are a map of a hostile country,
The redness in his eyes a reminder that hollyberries are poison.
He goes inside to put on a look acceptable for Christmas Court;
As he slams the door it rattles like strafing jets.

Outside the Station proper, in the snow,
On a through track that's used for milk and mail,
A wheezing saddle-tanker stops for breath;
A way-freight mixed, eight freight cars and caboose,
Two great ugly men on the back platform, talking with a third on the ballast.
One, the conductor, parcels out the last of the coffee;
They drink. A joke about grails. They laugh.
When it's gone, the trainman pretends to kick the big hobo off,
But the farewell hug spoils the act.
Now two men stand on the dirty snow,
The conductor waves a lantern and the train grinds on.
The ugly men start walking, the new arrival behind,
Singing "Wenceslas" off-key till the other says stop.
There are two horses waiting for them. Rather plain horses,
Considering. The men mount up.
By the roundhouse they pause,
And look at the locos, the water, the sand, and the coal,
The look for a long time at the turntable,
Until the one who is King says "It all seemed so simple, once,"
And the best knight in the world says "It is. We make it hard."
They ride on, toward Camelot by the service road.

The sun is winter-low. Kay's caravan is rolling.
He may not run a railroad, but he runs a tight ship;
By the time they unload in the Camelot courtyard,
The wassail will be hot and the goose will be crackling,
Banners snapping from their towers, fir logs on the fire, drawbridge down,
And all that sackbut and psaltery stuff.
Blanchefleur is taking the children caroling tonight,
Percivale will lose to Merlin at chess,
The young knights will dally and the damsels dally back,
The old knights will play poker at a smaller Table Round.
And at the great glass station, motion goes on,
The extras, the milk trains, the varnish, the limiteds,
The Pindar of Wakefield, the Lady of the Lake,
The Broceliande Local, the Fast Flying Briton,
The nerves of the kingdom, the lines of exchange,
Running to a schedule as the world ought,
Ticking like a hot-fired hand-stoked heart,
The metal expression of the breaking of boundaries,
The boilers that turn raw fire into power,
The driving rods that put the power to use,
The turning wheels that make all places equal,
The knowledge that the train may stop but the line goes on;
The train may stop
But the line goes on.

Speech given at the 57th annual Nebula Awards, in acceptance of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award on behalf of Petra Mayer, presented by Amal El-Mohtar

(The ceremony can be viewed here)

Thank you, Amal. What a wonderful tribute.

This can only be a pale shadow of the speech Petra would have given you. She looked forward to the Nebulas every year, and she loved coming here and hanging out with her favourite bunch of people (and discovering new favourites with each passing year). I wish she were here to speak to you herself. There’s no substitute for her voice.

When you lose someone you love, sometimes you raise your head from the grief and shock, look out the window and think “why hasn’t the world stopped?” And you wish for a moment that everyone had known how amazing this person was.

So sinking into the abyss of Twitter in the aftermath of Petra’s tragic, sudden, early death, the consolation I found was that in her case, people did know. Even people who’d only heard her voice on the radio had a sense of her personality, and the authors and journalists and people from the book world among whom she’d lived and worked were dealing with their grief by raising her a cairn of words as only they could. So to everyone who felt Petra’s loss and wrote something, even a few words, at that terrible time, thank you. It helped.

It’s hard to think of Petra being gone. Petra was a force of nature, a tsunami of enthusiasms and brightly coloured plastic jewellery and baked goods and Doctor Who and Art Nouveau roses and Buster Keaton movies and elaborate costumes and loud singing and creative swearing and you could almost forget that you were in the presence of the doyenne of NPR Books, Petra Mayer of the razor-sharp mind and keen editorial eye, marshal to an army of reviewers and voice heard by millions for all her years on the airwaves.

Critics, especially in national media outlets, are to some extent gatekeepers; and editors even more so. But Petra was a gatekeeper who flung wide the gates, and would have ripped them off their hinges if she could. From the beginning, she sought out not just the authors she knew and loved, but the overlooked and the underpromoted. She sought out the work of authors and critics from marginalised groups— she couldn’t bear the thought of institutional bias robbing us of those stories, those voices. She widened her mandate to include not just SF and fantasy, but comics, horror, mystery and romance. And if she couldn’t fit in a review of your book, or if she read it after publication, it still might turn up in one of her Best Of lists or reader polls, or in the great work that drove her to distraction every year: the Book Concierge (now renamed Books We Love).

Whether you were an author or a reviewer, Petra was the person you always hoped would read your work. Petra had the book journalist’s talent for speed reading— she devoured books. But she savoured each one, and each particular blend of flavours would remain in her amazingly retentive memory.

As a reviewer, you would send Petra your work and it would come back better and clearer. She would discern your meaning through the layers of obfuscation and overthinking, and she would knock away your excess verbiage like the stone obscuring Excalibur.

Everyone here knows the hazards of making a profession of something you love— but in Petra’s case, that love never wavered. The world of American letters was lucky to have her— and she would have been even more of a presence had she lived to old age— but if she were here accepting this award right now, I know she’d say she was the lucky one. How many teenage nerds grow up to work with their icons? and to be admired by them? She loved every moment. She loved your work, and she loved you.

So, Petra would want me to thank all of you for this award tonight. She would want to thank Jeffee, Kate and the Nebula board. She would want to thank National Public Radio, all of her colleagues at NPR Books, and each and every one of her reviewers. She would give heartfelt thanks to her family, especially her parents, Elke and Jeff, and her longtime platonic life-partner Josh Drobina.

On behalf of the journalist, editor, reader, writer, and force eleven nerdicane that was Petra Mayer, I know she’d be overjoyed to accept this award. She would have longed to party with you afterward, but be assured that wherever you gather, she will be there in spirit. Thank you all.

Petra and I have been friends since around age 10. In middle school we fought a lot — largely because school was awful and we were in a continuously horrible mood for about 8 years. But by 9th, 10th and 11th grade we had settled into a friendship distinguished by public weirdness, extravagant modes of dress, sitting in the Bishops’ Garden playing guitars, singing, burning incense and eating crystallised ginger— the more fiery the better. And then, of course, there were comics.

We had this routine where we would go to Big Planet in Bethesda and buy comics, often from Jef, the nice (and extremely patient) fellow behind the counter. We’d dance up and down the aisles of colourful covers, calling to each other— have you read this? Ohmygod you HAVE to read this! I’m not letting you leave without this! Look, I’ll lend you mine, but you have to read this! (In retrospect, it’s not surprising that when Petra found her ideal career, it turned out to be, essentially, that.)

And then we would go around the corner to the Tastee Diner, order fries and chocolate milkshakes, dip the fries in the milkshakes and read the comics. In those days we read mostly indie comics, because those were sufficiently cool for us to be seen reading. We read our way through Sandman, Transmetropolitan, Preacher, Desert Peach, Finder and many other titles which are now problematic. It was only later that we discovered the joy of superheroes. As mature adults, we were ready to embrace the joys of fighting crime in colourful tights. (Anyone who’s ever read a 1980s X-Men comic will recognise a certain kinship with Petra’s fashion sense.)



We joke about how, in the X-Men and other superhero comics, death is a revolving door. But what it really is, I think, is a form of theatre. A favourite character will die so that the writer and the artist can give them that moment, and so that they can show all the other characters reacting, put those emotions on display. And then, after a certain interval, it becomes evident that you can’t really tell the story without that character, that the superhero team isn’t the same without them, and the fans are discontented— so a writer will find a way to bring them back. And that panel, the panel where you first see that character again, is always as beautiful as the artist can make it. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, it can feel like light is emanating from the page.

And God, I wish Petra were only comics dead. Because right now, a lot of us are feeling as though the story can’t continue without her. And the various teams she was a member of are feeling distinctly less super. All our powers are dimmed and lessened in her absence. Without her, who’s going to want to read the book? What editor okayed this decision? And what kind of douchebag author would write it in the first place?

Petra didn’t really give bad reviews, but she would definitely deem this situation unworthy of inclusion in the august archive of NPR. She would read anything, but her least favourite genre was where everything is terrible for no reason.

But I wish Petra were only comics dead. Because then, in some future adventure, we might hope to see her again. Perhaps in the lair of a mad scientist— always a popular choice for resurrections (and very Petra). Or in some far-flung corner of the cosmos, or an alternate universe— someplace with a lot of Kirby dots. When we least expected it, there she’d be, and we would fall to our knees in disbelief and weep for joy.

Even if it were one of those comics where she came back as Evil Petra in a cool new costume and extravagant eyeliner, somehow convinced that she must use her unholy powers to destroy us all, we would know what to do. We would play her some Magnetic Fields or some 80s rap, or put on an episode of Bake Off, or point over there and say “Hey, is that David Tennant?” And she’d immediately forget to be evil and go “ohmygod, where?!”

And you’d get that scene which we get over and over in comics, but we still can’t get enough of: that scene where a character’s turned evil somehow and there’s a big dramatic fight scene, and then their best friend or someone who’s been on their team for a long time will grab their arm and say “This isn’t you. I know you, let me tell you…” and the character is recalled to themselves by that recollection, that voice. And that’s absolutely what a friend is and does. A friend is someone who can tell your own story back to you when you’ve forgotten it. And Petra was such a great friend to so many of us, she knew so many of our stories and carried them with her. And even though we all know we’re bit parts at best, Petra could make you feel like a protagonist.

So what we have to do for now and later on, and maybe for the rest of our lives, is: to live our stories as though Petra were reading them. Because maybe, somewhere, she is. And when we arrive where she has gone, as we all must, the last thing we’d want is to have bored her.

Meanwhile, today, we should tell the stories we have about her. Tell the funny ones, the embarrassing ones— the ones that would make her want to come back from the grave to tell us to shut up— the ones where she’s great (which is all of them). Because, as she carried parts of all our stories, so we all carry parts of hers, and we always will.



I’d like to close with a short verse by Edna St Vincent Millay, one of the few poets (I think) capable of capturing the emotion of a moment like this:

For you there is no song,
Only the shaking
Of the voice that meant to sing; the sound of the strong
Voice breaking.

Strange in my hand appears 

The pen, and yours broken.
There are ink and tears on the page; only the tears
Have spoken.

[Originally posted to Twitter in response to a tweet by Greek Etymologies, which said:]

'Ecstasy' derives, via French and Latin, from ancient Greek ἔκστασις ("displacement, movement outwards"), from ἐξίστημι ("displace, change, stand aside from"), from ἐκ ("out of") + ἵστημι ("stand").

What a perfect excuse to link to John Donne’s poem The Ecstasy!

When talking about secular/amorous Donne, everyone thinks of the bed-poems, “Come Madam come,” “Busy old fool” etc

This is the opposite of that, a love poem describing a specifically non-sexual encounter.

Sex is present in the poem, both metaphorically and as a desired and looked-for thing. Towards the end, the future Dean of St Paul’s discourses on soul and body in terms that might make his holier parishioners blush.

But this is (most probably) still during the reign of Elizabeth; James’s Scottish Calvinism and its corporeal disgust were still waiting in the wings.

In these years the body is God’s creation in His image and therefore to be exalted. In Donne bodily pleasures become holy, and even the bodily pain of his future sickness brings him closer to God.

But in The Ecstasy, the soul is the protagonist; souls lead, bodies are specifically said to be unmoving (though not unmoved):

“And pictures in our eyes to get
was all our propagation.”

I love that line. Donne is very into reflections — like his tears in A Valediction: of Weeping reflecting his beloved’s face and becoming something more by bearing that image, as a blank disc becomes a coin when it bears the image of a face— then the tear falls and shatters, and the lovers part.

Anyway. Read the poem. Slowly if you can. He most likely wrote it for Anne, who married him w/out her father’s approval. (Her Dad sent him to prison!)

They knew one another about 4 years before they married in secret. It was another 8 years before her family were reconciled.

Here’s the sonnet he wrote when she died after 16 years of marriage. The way he talks about her soul here is especially heartbreaking if you’ve just read The Ecstasy. Flesh is only mentioned once, as an adversary.

Donne was far from perfect; he could be intensely misogynistic. Ironically, he was vile to his daughter Constance in later life when *she* wanted to marry someone he disapproved of. (To be fair, the suitor, Edward Alleyn, was much older and a former actor, so Donne had cause for concern. The couple married anyway; Edward died after three years, and Constance later remarried.)

But flawed as Donne was, he was loved by someone who knew him well. Best any of us can hope for, really.

(Misogyny and angry disavowal of all this soul stuff here)

**********

Postscript: I find the terse style of Twitter unsatisfying to post here. I come here to write good prose, and this isn't that. I wouldn't crosspost at all, but I wanted to save some of my writing on other platforms in case they fold, or in case I have to leave them.

This thread doesn't really say what I wanted it to say, either about Donne or about love.

Last night I helped an old friend pack up her flat. She's about the seventh friend of mine to leave the country due to Brexit.

She was one of my first friends in this country; we've known each other since the year I came here to do A levels. She's Swedish and has lived here since she was 8.

For the past few years, she lived a short bus ride away from me. I helped her build all the flat-pack furniture in her place. It was only Ikea stuff, but we chose it carefully and were ridiculously pleased with our building skills.

Last night we watched the removal guys break it all up and throw the pieces into the back of their truck.

What we built didn't have any kind of market value, but it was of value to us.

This is far from the worst of the evils wrought by Brexit, of course. Couples and families are having to choose between staying in Britain and staying together. People born in the UK are being told to "go home," or seeing their parents and older relatives lose their right to live here. And all across this country, people are having to destroy or abandon the lives and relationships and places in the world they built with care.

What they built doesn't have a market value that the Home Office can recognise. But the small, human structures they built, their ways of doing things and connecting things and making things work-- families, jobs, neighbours-- have made this country better in a way that can't be measured. When people make their homes here, things get rearranged and cared for in small ways that add up to something greater that makes life here more liveable.

That's what we're losing.

[Posted to Facebook 5 February 2019]

I tried to find a recording of Noel Coward singing this, perhaps the most personal of his songs; but there seems to be none online.

In Coward's absence, Julie Andrews's delivery seems closest to his. Crucially, she doesn't sentimentalise or self-indulge; just delivers the words and lets them speak. I'd wish for a simple piano accompaniment rather than a soupy mess of strings, but she succeeds despite it all.

I'll never forget hearing Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan sing this as Elyot and Amanda in Act II of Private Lives, seated comfortably at the piano in Elyot's messy apartment. Like Benedick and Beatrice, Elyot and Amanda are a couple whose favourite form of intimacy is verbal sparring; but the music created a rare moment of calm between them, their shared voices becoming, briefly, another form of intimacy for these two turbulent characters.

On Thursday night, the newsroom of the Capital Gazette— a local Maryland paper not far from my hometown— was broken into by a man who shot out the glass door, then killed five staff members, four of whom were journalists.

I don’t talk about journalism much here. But the fashion for bashing “the media” as a whole is reaching my friends, and there are things that need saying.

I’m not talking about criticism of individual media sources, or inspection of biases— those are both healthy, and needed. I’m talking about people who say “the media” as though it were all one thing, from one source rather than many. Often it will come with an adjective: “the liberal media” or “the centrist media”.

To be sure, the Murdochs, Sinclairs, Mercers, Dacres and their ilk are not forces for good. Far from it. One should be suspicious of any site that puts a political agenda ahead of the facts. That isn’t journalism.

Journalism is the courage of reporters like Ibrahim Alfa Ahmed, who went deep into territory held by Boko Haram militia. As a radio journalist, his reputation made strangers trust him enough to give him hard drives and phones with material recorded in Boko Haram bases and training camps. If he had been caught with these, he would have been killed— but he escaped with his life and brought the story back.

Journalism is the fortitude of Jason Rezaian, a journalist with the Washington Post. While working as their Tehran correspondent, he was taken prisoner for a year and a half. He was prevented from communicating with his wife and his mother. His illnesses went untreated. The charge was espionage: a frequent excuse used by totalitarian governments to imprison journalists. He's now free and writing again.

It’s not just in war zones that journalists risk their lives. I’m thinking of my friend Petra Mayer, a books journalist who found a homemade bomb in a New York street and phoned it in to the police and the newsroom.

I think of the tenacity of David Fahrenthold and Carole Cadwallader, who spend years of their lives combing through accounts, travel records, emails, interviews— finding the connections, the falsehoods, the illegal money. I think of the harassment, abuse and death threats they get from those who wish they'd stop asking questions.

Abuse of journalists has long been normalised in the online comments section, which few news sites have the staff or the resources to moderate effectively. Comments sections are also popular targets for professional Russian trolls working individually or in groups.

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump encouraged abuse of journalists. As President, he has continued that, calling them “enemies of the people”. His supporters have taken this as permission to step up their harassment.

Earlier this week, Milo Yiannopoulos texted two Observer reporters who had questioned him: “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.”

Meanwhile, journalists continue to annoy the powerful, ask awkward questions and uncover hidden truths. And the Rezaians, Fahrentholds and Cadwalladers of tomorrow continue to come up through local journalism.

On Thursday, the Capital's newsroom was attacked. Thursday night, they mourned their dead-- and prepared the next day's paper.

I haven't quite found the words to talk about Chris Bruce.

In life, when I would try to describe him to other people, they couldn't quite believe it. A stuntman, an equestrian, a swordsman, and later a a fight director and stunt coordinator; he'd worked on the original Star Wars (as a stormtrooper) and the 1970s Musketeers films (doubling, among other things, for Christopher Lee). He went out drinking with Oliver Reed (who, he said, "taught me how to fight like a bucko") and lived to tell the tale. He worked with the greatest fight directors in the business, and was never without a story to tell.

( Rest well, sir )

After this evening's (excellent) Messiah, the conductor and I got talking to one of the ladies who run things at the church, an older lady named Carolyn who had been singing in the first soprano section. She was telling me which museums I should go to in DC; she mentioned the Museum of African American History and the Native American museum. Then she said "And if you get to the Natural History Museum... in there, they have a lunch counter that used to be in a store called Woolworth's in North Carolina. I was arrested there while we were holding a sit-in, and I spent the night in jail."

( Carolyn's story below )

As someone who gets the majority of their news online, I am incensed over the proposed cuts to the BBC's website. That site is the beau ideal of websites: no ads, no messy Flash crap and the links stay good forever. (Or at least until now.)

Apparently the vast archive of written articles, recipes and general information are "competing unfairly" with commercial news sources. That is, they have too much good content, so they have to make it less and worse.

The thing is, that site is a perfect example of the BBC fulfilling its mandate-- which is to make information freely available to as much of the public as possible. That archive of news articles, historical précis pieces, recipes and general life information is OURS. We PAID FOR IT and are soon to pay more (since the licence fee will now rise in line with inflation). The government has no right at all to take it from us.

Compare and contrast the US-based National Public Radio's website (for which I occasionally write): That site is full of excellent content, much of which, again, stays archived forever. You can listen to years' worth of in-house mini-concerts by all sorts of musicians who dropped into NPR for a session. ( http://www.npr.org/series/tiny-desk-concerts/ ) They have much of the radio content archived, but they also have a huge amount of audio, video and written articles that aren't on the radio, including a huge "arts and life" section. And NPR is *one radio station*, not a multi-channel media juggernaut like the BBC.

It's not hard to see the fingerprints of the Murdoch empire all over the recent white paper-- the (paywalled) Times recently ran a story with the headline "BBC's entertainment and soft news costs rivals £115m". But there's also a broader Tory philosophy at work here: that things that are free and public always need to be *not quite as good* as things you pay for. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons they're so determined to kneecap the NHS is to drive people to spend money on private health care and private insurance. Similarly, Cameron and his cronies have realised that the only way to force online readers to pony up for paywalled content, or endure sites that vomit Flash and autoplaying video ads all over the page, is to make the advert-free content at the BBC less good.

Of course, the BBC isn't free; it's paid for by us. But the Tories have handwaved that away and made the decision without any consutation with license-fee payers. If you want to imagine the future, imagine a page-covering ad flashing up on top of the article you're trying to read, forever.

(Posted to Facebook 14 May 2016. In retrospect, this was the beginning of the end for the BBC.)