Ashton’s speech today in Strasbourg – on the External Action Service – was just too much and I’m not talking about her proposals.

It’s rather that I’m not sure I can stomach the rollout of another new outfit. As Ashton’s star rises, the palatability of her personal style plummets.

So far, I’ve been unable to work out who’s responsible for these outrages but I’m keeping a close eye on the situation.

Below you’ll find my Fashtonometer, a scale that I’ve thrown together to enable me to measure the status of each new abomination:

Catherine Ashton’s dress sense should give all Member States cause for concern and is, I believe, a strong candidate for regulation at the European level.

Oude Kwaremont

The day after the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Juan Antonio Flecha’s thrilling victory in Gent, the weather turned decidedly foul. The riders set out from Kuurne to be buffeted by strong winds and heavy rain.

Undeterred we headed for Kwaremont, an arty Flemish village through the centre of which runs the famous Oude Kwaremont cobbled hill.

The Oude Kwaremont is a staple of the Flemish Classics. It is not especially steep in comparison with other climbs but unlike the others, it is significantly longer at over two kilometres from end to end.

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Kuurne Brussel Kuurne

A cold, windy Sunday afternoon on the Oude Kwaremont watching the 2010 Kuurne Brussel Kuurne.

 

Cobbles of the Molenberg

Eighteen months have passed by since our last visit to the Muur van Geraardsbergen and today the cobbled hill is transformed.

Back then we had walked the deserted hill under the grey sky of a sullen summer afternoon. Today the Spring Classics season is beginning, the spectators are already two deep at the roadside and the sun is threatening to make an appearance.

Roadside at the Muur

All around us on this the steepest section of the Muur, we hear the affable burr of some rustic version of Flemish. We’re comfortably anonymous as English speakers while opposite a small group of francophones gets a few raised eyebrows.

We arrived about an hour in advance of the race – the 2010 edition of the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad – and following some sagely advice from the Cyclingnews.com forum, we parked the car on Pachtersstraat near the Gouden Jezus statue and climbed an alleyway to join the Muur at the first corner.

It’s a long time to stand and wait when there’s a nip in the air, but the amateur cyclists passing by present a good opportunity to test camera settings. Today, despite the occasional glimpses of sun through thick cloud, the light is rather poor.

Everyone here knows when the race is due and the anticipation grows with each successive race car or motorbike, each urgently sounding the horn as it passes by.

There’s usually a brief, electric silence at this point but here the Flemish fans chatter on excitedly. Soon after, we see the pointing gestures of those who’ve picked up the sound of an approaching helicopter a few moments before the rest of us.

Another rush of motorbikes and cars, each with its own function in today’s race, and down on the corner the crowd burst into a funk of cheers and shouts.

Four riders emerge from the blur of colour and dig deep to hold their rhythm as the Muur unveils the ugly surprise of its harsh gradient. Thousands of eyes follow the struggling shapes up the hill and around the corner out of sight. There’s no Kapelmuur today, so their toil is almost over now the Brasserie ‘t Hemelrijck comes into view.

Below us now, the crowd erupts in another volley of noise and the whole peloton rounds the corner, sweeping into my viewfinder like a tidal wave.

The day’s eventual winner Juan Antonio Flecha leads the charge, his cadence uninterrupted as he stands on the pedals and stays low over the handlebars. Others grab at the tops of their hoods, struggling to find their own space in which to suffer.

Here at the Muur we’re watching the gloves come off.

Roadside at the Molenberg

Flemish cycling celebrates the Muur as a monument and maintains it accordingly. The Molenberg is celebrated because it is so unmaintained.

We hurried from Geraardsbergen through the feed station of tomorrow’s Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne, then beyond Brakel and Sint-Blasius-Boekel to the hamlet of Korsele, parking beside the church with about 25 minutes to spare before the Omloop was scheduled to arrive.

Parking was very difficult and I had almost begun to regret stopping in Nederbrakel to photograph the famous Rondplein. We did the walk from Korsele back down to the Molenberg at double time, finding once we got there that a throng of cars, cyclists and pedestrians had gathered in a sort of excited panic.

Police officers were still anxiously clearing the Smarre road when the first race cars arrived. Over the little bridge with the watermill after which the Molenberg is named, we hit the slopes and decided to stop just around the first steep corner where the houses end.

It had rained all week and here the cobbles were sharp and roughly laid like bad dental work. Between the stones there were deep ruts from snared wheels. One older, immaculately turned out spectator struggled past our perch on his bike, applauded by Flemish fans anxious to encourage anything on two wheels. A couple of bike lengths on, where the cobbles were even worse, the gentleman was left sprawling in the mud.

Many of the professionals fared little better. In pursuit of the few weary leaders, Tom Boonen tore up the climb twice as fast as anyone else, making it look too easy. Flecha, Haussler and Gilbert gritted their teeth on his wheel. Further behind, the gears were getting lower and Wesley Sulzberger showed the signs of some nasty injuries.

The inevitable bottlenecks began as team cars tried to keep pace with the front groups without running down their stragglers, some of whom were wobbling. Russell Downing passed by, a long, long way from home and the town centre criteriums of last year. The traffic jam aside, he looked to be coping well enough.

In the end it was Downing’s teammate Flecha who won the day after so many years of runner-up prizes. The winner of the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad need not necessarily be the fastest or the wisest rider in the field. He needs only to be the hardest and the luckiest.

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Omloop Het Nieuwsblad

At the roadside for the traditional first race of the 2010 Spring Classics season.

 

Carl Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet (1839)

Writing copy for online consumption still seems to be something of a black art. Most web professionals know what works, but figuring out how to achieve it is quite a different matter.

This article brings together a few of the themes that I encounter in my activities around the relationship between information design and editorial policy.

The shock of the new

Often I encounter writers and editors more used to ‘traditional’ communications, raised on a diet of press releases, white papers and speeches. Some may even express impatience with the business of writing online copy: normally this is just a mask for unfamiliarity.

Indeed it’s probably understandable that those who work with such copy will tend to focus almost exclusively on the message rather than the medium, particularly if their subject is highly specialised. If looks could kill, it’d be best not to mention the word ‘Twitter’.

Successful online delivery requires method, usually arrived at through trial and error and a healthy dose of self-restraint. Specifics are beyond the scope of this article but certain characteristics are essential:

• Brevity
• Structure
• Pattern

Writing styles and content management

Therefore when authoring content for online consumption, there tends not to be much room left over for personal style. Sometimes writers and their expectations need to be managed.

Consider a situation I experienced recently: a changeover of editors on a website consisting of 20,000+ units of content. In newspaper journalism the content model is often so strict that editorial changes are barely noticeable but here in public sector policy and statistics, the effect of the swap was both immediate and profound.

The outgoing editor had a fastidious attention to detail. He was concerned to substantiate all assertions very carefully and maintained a subtractive, minimal approach to copy. His replacement took a freer hand and preferred to discuss matters at length.

Both writers were drafting materials essentially on the same subjects, yet the texture of their respective outputs was markedly different: the former produced shorter items peppered with links and endnotes whilst the latter delivered lengthy paragraphs and fewer headings.

Involvement in the content writing process

When should the information architect take a hand? How involved should she be in the editorial process?

The answers to these questions depend on the environment. Some writers and editors will be interested in hearing about information architecture, others may be rather more buffeted by the tides of strong personality.

What seems clear to me is that some guidance is essential for those less familiar with the online domain, but any imposition of strict editorial rulesets will send out the wrong message and will probably be ignored.

Unclaustrophobic guidelines explained by common sense should be adopted more or less silently (not to say gratefully) by most writers and editors and negate the worst excesses of any prima donna. I outlined the seeds of this approach in an earlier article about testing content for relevance: it should just be a matter of turning principles into friendly advice.

Turning good habits into workflow

Here’s a quick reminder of the information design process at its simplest:

Data --> Information --> Communication --> Knowledge

Acronyms and abbreviations might well be the bane of modern communications. Why? Well, only prior knowledge gives access to the information, which is a subversion of the above.

In a technocratic environment, content writers risk making too many assumptions about the prior knowledge of their readers. In an international environment meanwhile, OTAN, PALO and EASS can all mean the same as NATO.

Online content writers should be encouraged to develop good habits and apply them regularly, then editors will ensure they’re kept up. The proper explanation of acronyms and abbreviations is just one example among many others that collectively form a corpus of editorial best practice and produce highly-skilled online writers.

Conclusion

Information design shouldn’t stop at the launch of a content management project or limit itself to technical development.

There is also an important role to play in the creation of institutional best practice and it’s a role that requires considerable sensitivity and lots of teamwork.

Internally, migrating and modelling content is a major task that depends on collective knowledge and must be completed in a collaborative context. Externally, the needs of the end-user must be properly understood and reflected in the published content.

Think of Italy and the Pisan belltowers and Roman arenas of our mind aren’t usually capped with snow.

However it’s February and Milan stands shivering in the shadow of the Alps. The taxi pulls away and we stand shivering in Milan. We think of our wintry trip to Florence some years ago.

We’re a day early for our appointment with Leonardo, so we get settled in. Within a few minutes, so does the snow.

Next morning the sun comes up and the white stuff starts to melt off, cloaking the city in a mysterious, biscuit-coloured haze. We walk through districts where lives are connected by buzzer and intercom, where business is conducted in gated courtyards.

Milan is content to let us browse while it gets on with the accounts.

Cenacolo Vinciano: Leonardo’s The Last Supper

Thanks to the efforts of Dan Brown and others of a similar stripe, it’s pretty tough these days to see Leonardo Da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper.

I’m thinking about this as a Dominican in a purple cloak and a natty little bonnet shuffles through the courtyard opposite. Between this prim old priest and I is a heavy gate, shielding one of us from the other. I’m holding onto my place at the front of a long queue.

Off to my right, there’s Bramante’s somewhat excessive apse of the Santa Maria delle Grazie. In 1943, everything between the apse and where I’m standing was rubble.

Fortunately The Last Supper survived intact. A temporary exhibition of photos in the Pinacoteca Brera later showed us the extent of the damage. Behind a scaffolded temporary wall, Leonardo’s masterpiece survives more or less unscathed, miraculous and mocking the destructive technology of our times.

Of course, Leonardo came to Milan as a designer of destructive technologies – among other things – and his fresco is nothing if not self-destructive. Painted in an experimental (or scornful, it’s tempting to say) mix of tempera and other materials, it was much deteriorated even in Vasari’s time barely a half century later.

J thinks Leonardo would have enjoyed the spectacle. A series of security doors to the climate-controlled space that was once the convent’s refectory. We gaze up at his work, fantastically restored in the twenty years up to 1999, and we wonder in whispers if the polymath who painted it could have foreseen his impact on posterity.

Biblioteca Ambrosiana

Meeting up with Leonardo again the next day, this time at the Ambrosiana where pages from his Codices are on temporary display, we encounter the man behind the legend.

Splendid are his grand machines and detailed studies of anatomy, but equally exciting are his marginalia: jottings of expenses, books lent, people to see. His humanity improved by unwittingly colloquial translations.

Cimitero Monumentale

In the cold morning sunshine, I feel a bit uneasy about being here in Milan’s enormous monumental cemetery. Most of the folks here are carrying bunches of flowers.

These people are visiting the dead. I’m taking pictures of their graves.

To call them ‘graves’ is actually a grave injustice. Mausolea would be a more appropriate description and in all the architectural flavours of the world. Toward the centre of the complex – and without a hint of ridiculousness – the dead are trying to outdo each other on their plots.

Precipitous pyramids and lofty cupolas and severe busts and weeping angels.

What’s fascinating is that this place somehow retains a real sense of peaceful dignity. I’m humbled, not by the magnificence of the monuments, but the sincerity of the gesture.

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Milan

J's special birthday visit to Italy's second city on a cold winter weekend.

 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Over in Britain, this was the week for which many people had been waiting. This was the week that put Tony Blair before the Iraq Enquiry.

Perhaps expectations were too high. Alastair Campbell’s recent pushover performance should have been fair warning of that.¹

Iraq Inquiry

Some were looking for Blair to somehow fess up for a whole decade of wrongs, not just Iraq. Most wanted answers on Iraq itself, of course, but that depended on the right questions being asked. ²

At worst, the Iraq Inquiry will be remembered as a complete whitewash; at best, it’s been used as a platform for self-justification instead of an opportunity to deliver some home truths.

We can therefore expect a further delay to the initiation of any healing process on Iraq, a conflict approved by the UK government without the approval of the UN or indeed the British people. ³

Meanwhile in Europe

Here in Brussels, we talk of a democratic deficit in European institutions: the remoteness of the European machine to the ordinary citizen.

Yesterday afternoon, as Belgium’s three major unions marched for “employment, respect for workers and social justice”⁴, a thick line of police and even thicker window glass kept out the worst of the klaxons and firecrackers on the Rue de la Loi. Spanish fishermen actually succeeded in breaking windows in 2008, but the question remains the same now as then: who’s really listening?

The appointment of Baroness Ashton as the EU’s top foreign affairs official was an ugly surprise. The sparks of Ashton’s meteoric rise tend to obscure the fact that throughout her career she has never been democratically elected to office. That there had even been talk of Blair as President of the European Council was unthinkable. The backroom horsetrading for these two jobs showed once again that the leaders of Europe are evidently talking, but not to the people who pay their wages. ⁵

In a flabby attempt to communicate with the outside world, the outgoing Barroso Commission experimented with online media. Some Commissioners jumped on the blogging bandwagon – with comments universally moderated by “The Moderator” – and the results were predictably bland. Next, there followed a YouTube channel (imaginatively titled ‘EUTube’) whose deliverable was a sort of ‘policymaking for dummies’, encoding Commission initiatives into over 250 embarassing video vignettes. ⁶

The upcoming Commission seems certain to deliver more of the same. French Commissioner designate Michel Barnier’s videos⁷ from last year’s European election campaign trail are no less laughable than those of EUTube.

Frustration in the United States

Few politicians have exploited the Internet like Barack Obama but after the horrors of the Bush years, expectations of him were always going to be unrealistic. Nevertheless, Obama was so audacious in assuming the responsibility of being voice of a generation that we believed he could deliver change.

Now over a year into his presidential term, he’s finding it very tough to do that. His healthcare bill, expected to bring basic healthcare to a staggering 40 million Americans who can’t afford it, was foundering even without the recent defeat in Massachusetts.

Even those who would benefit from Obama’s reforms are likely to vote him down because they’re angry and they’ve lost faith in government. ⁸

As self-defeating as it may seem, this is stark proof of the popular anger which continues to go unrecognised among the Establishment. Put it down to the mental instabilities of an isolated individual, as did the Pope and Silvio Berlusconi, and perhaps complacency obscures the growing Other of mainstream dissent. ⁹

Looking for alternatives

Iraq, the Lisbon Treaty, inertia over the financial crisis: all situations in which the voice of the people went unheard or ignored. Few would claim to be political experts but many today will agree that their leaders fail to represent them the way they want to be represented.

Certainly no-one would deny that the stale consensus of the late 1990s is long gone and that frustration is increasingly channelled towards populism and extremism. There are few signs yet that those in power are willing or able to do something about it.

Notes

1. Alastair Campbell at the Iraq war inquiry – Guardian.co.uk, 12 January 2010
2. Tony Blair’s unanswered questions – Telegraph.co.uk, 29 January 2010
3. Iraq war illegal, says Annan – BBC news website, 16 September 2004; Polls find Europeans oppose Iraq war – BBC news website, 11 February 2003
4. Manifestation des trois syndicats pour l’emploi le 29 janvier à Bruxelles – LeSoir.be, 22 January 2010
5. EU chooses unknowns for new top jobs – EUobserver, 19 November 2009
6. The EU Tube channel had 253 uploads as of 30 January 2010
7. Michel Barnier channel on Dailymotion.com
8. Why do people often vote against their own interests? – BBC website, 30 January 2010
9. Berlusconi has fractured nose, broken teeth after attack – CNN.com, 14 December 2009

• José Saramago
• Harvill Press (2001 edition)
• 

This was José Saramago’s breakthrough novel in the English language. His narrating personality is less obvious here but, even as he describes the events of three centuries ago, he still can’t resist the occasional modern reference.

There’s also an interesting, slightly bitter tone. This is a story that crosses the spectrum of 18th century Portugal, opening with the royal family and descending from palace to the street where we find our protagonists Baltasar and Blimunda. That initial sweep sets the pattern of the novel, with Father Bartolomeo Lourenço passing between both camps.

The priest has designed a flying machine that, in taking off, threatens to leave his faith behind as well as the ground. The two young lovers assisting him are also Saramago’s vehicle for showing us the hardships and poverty of ordinary lives. Thus the author wastes no opportunity to contrast the lot of such folk with that of the self-absorbed, near frivolous royals. Only in the queen and princess do we detect a note of sadness, for the freedom of their lives is severely limited by protocol, arranged marriage and the ugly male expectation of childbirth.

I felt that something lacked in Baltasar and Blimunda. We eagerly await the flight of Father Lourenço’s contraption for half the novel, the anticipation of which drives the story. However, while in the other half we’re supposed to all but forget about the magnificent machine while we witness instead a town’s struggle to build a ridiculous, excessive royal convent. Even so, Saramago’s capacity for critical observation is almost compensation enough.

• Graham Greene
• Vintage (first published 1951)
• 

Greene was in his writing prime when The End of the Affair was published. The book can nonetheless be considered a transitional piece: it’s an early prospect of the rich black humour the author would mine effectively in later works.

The novel is rather uneven. It describes in flashback and with extraordinary intensity the beginnings of a love affair between Bendrix the narrator and civil servant’s wife Sarah Miles. However, the denouement is somewhat more roughly carved, giving over much space to comic relief and muddled religious questions that do little to underscore Sarah’s predicament.

What Greene always excels at – and this is starkly obvious to readers living abroad – is the acute observation of the English middle class. The taut, serpentine machinations of this love affair are exacerbated by the ill-chosen silences of people who stay bound to the suffocating dogma of their society.

We paid a brief visit to the UK this Christmas, via the ferry from Zeebrugge to Hull.

My parents intend to move house next year, so this was also the last opportunity to see the place where I grew up.

We were also lucky to enjoy a nice bit of seasonal snow: enough to set the mood but fortunately not enough to block the roads!

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Christmas 2009

A seasonal visit to the UK and a last look at the family home before my parents move on.

 

Cononley is a small village on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park near Skipton in the UK. It’s also the village where I grew up.

This was a very short, post-Christmas walk around the hills above the village. The snow and ice were quite challenging at points, particularly in the initial climbing section.

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Cononley

A little White Christmas walk in the hills above the village where I grew up.

 

• Walking route: Cononley
• Distance: 6km

Larger map of this route