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Some
explanations about the site.
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"The Harlow Riding"? Well, they have ridings in Tipperary, and in Yorkshire, and they used to have them in Lincolnshire, and even "in New Zealand etc"according to one book I looked at - so why not where I live? I wanted a term that indicates the area within which I spend most of my time, within a few miles of Harlow, within riding distance (a car ride that is). I thought of using the term "Harlow Hundred", but that, though a real historical area, was all in Essex, whereas my "Riding" extends both sides of the County boundary, and beyond. And "Riding"has some historical and literary resonances(1) that I like.
"The Moving Finger"? That was a title we had for a shortlived newsletter about people with learning disabilities trying to get a fairer deal in Harlow. I liked the title, and thought it fitted with the odd qualities of the Internet. Once again there's a literary reference(2).
"News from Nowhere"? This is the title of one of my favourite books, written a little over 100 years ago by William Morris. Nowhere means Utopia - and if you spell Utopia "Eutopia" what you get is the Greek for "good place". The pun, and the word, was dreamed up by Thomas More, who wrote the book of the dream.
It's a good word for meaningful puns in English as well. I noticed that in this site there are two examples among my links - "knowhere" and "knoware", which is in the Internet address (the "URL") of "gentle teaching".
"News from Nowhere" was also the title of a long-running column in the Anarchist paper Freedom. (I worked on Peace News at the time, where we had a column called "John Ball's Diary", which is also grounded in William Morris, and I wrote a lot of that.) (The New Statesman has a News from Nowhere column too, I've just remembered, but I think I'm a lot closer to William Morris politically and geographically than the Staggers is, especially these days.)
Anyway, living in Harlow, which has been described, not wholly ironically, as aspiring to be "a modest utopia", it seemed appropriate enough. (If we didn't have irelevant levels of government at Chelmsford, Westminster, and even to some extent Brussels, sitting on our backs, I think we could make it too.)
Now a bit about why I'm doing this:
"News from Nowhere" is the bit of the site where if I have anything to say, I can say it. For example here is where I explain why I've put this site together. Like most things you do that take any effort there are two sets of reasons - one is because it needs to be done, and the other is that there's some kind of personal advantage - sometimes it might be money, other times, such as this, it's enjoyment.
I've been jaunting around on the Net since just before Christmas. Folk music is a major interest of mine, and I know that there is a fair amount of it happening in my corner of the world - but information about it is not for the most part available except through the grapevine, which means people hear about things after they've happened. So once I realised that it is in fact quite easy to set up a Website, and that I have a good amount of free space provided by virgin.net, who are my Internet Access Provider, I decided to use it.
I will try to keep the information as up to date as I can, and as accurate as possible.
Technical note for those who care about such things:
I put this together using the FrontPage Express facilities which are in with Internet Explorer 4.0, working with Windows 95 on an Ast Advantage 7303. My access provider is Virgin.net. I signed up with them because they were recommended in the most useful book for people in this country using the Net. However though Virgin are pretty good, they are unwilling to provide any advice in relation to Internet Explorere 4.0. Still they do provide masses of free webspace.
I don't plan to put in lots of pictures and moving bits and so forth. There's plenty of that on some of the links I've included. I tend to get impatient waiting for all that stuff to get loaded, and either move on elsewhere, or build up a feeling of antagonism to whoever put it together. (And if you turn off the pictures the sites just look ugly, and that is annoying too.)
You know it's amazing how easy it becomes to rattle off this jargon without really having a clue to what it means. The thing is, this really is straightforward, and I advise anyone reading this to do the same - if they have anything that they think needs saying or doing.
The UK internet starter kit - Rob Young, Prentice Hall £14.99. (And thanks to Rob Young for helpful and prompt responses to my queries by e-mail.)
If you're having difficulties in loading this it's probably because you're trying to do it at some convenient time. I've got a suspicion that websites using free space may get put on the back burner or something, because I've been having difficulties with some getting hold of some others. Anyway, later in the evening, preferably after midnight seems to be better. Organised people get their computers to do it all for them in the small hours while they are tucked up in bed, the same way they make their video recorders tape late night films.
But I can't see too many people like that wanting to find out about the stuff on The Moving Finger. (Incidentally, is it "on" or "in" ? I suppose it depends whether it's to be thought of as a kind of telly , in which case it'd be "on", or a kind of magazine, with "in" being more appropriate. Or a kind of noticeboard, in which case it'd be "on" once more.)