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The removal of the concert hall section of Brighton’s West Pier is an unforgivable act of council-sponsored vandalism. Brighton & Hove Council leader Mary Mears said ‘The removal of part of the West Pier will be a sad moment‘. She is gravely wrong, choosing to professionally downplay the scale of the political travesty that she and her colleagues have visited on Brighton & Hove. It is much worse than that, and I’ll tell you why, in unsentimental terms.

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Brighton punches above its weight in all aspects of culture except one: history. We have venues for music, galleries for art, cinemas for film, theatre for plays, groups for geeks, workshops for writers - the list goes on and on - but nothing for history. The Catalyst Club caters for it a little perhaps, but it doesn’t have a historical remit, it just happens that the subjects discussed there inevitably involve events from the past, which isn’t strictly history.

I’d like to go somewhere where I could hear someone telling me something interesting about a historical subject new or largely unknown to me. I was put off history at school by a bad teacher, but recently I’ve realised its import. It touches everything. It doesn’t matter what one does, the more history one knows, the better placed one is in one’s field.

So two alternatives present themselves to me. Either someone tells me about an existing historical lectureship group in Brighton (comments box below), or perhaps I could start one? I know from FlashBrighton how simple such groups are to organise; a venue, a few emails, and they run themselves.

What do you think?

In all seriousness; how can we? It has to be stopped. I am interested in practical advice that will make an actual difference, not just an egoistic debate. I have written to my MP about it, but that’s a technique to make pissing into the wind look efficacious; nothing has ever come of any letter I have written to any MP.

David Mitchell pointed out that the only successful political protest of the present Labour administration was the Fuel Protest, which was successful because it physically denied the whole country access to petrol. One million people marching prior to the invasion of Iraq - the largest march in the UK ever - had no influence at all on Tony Blair’s decision to go to war. Only when put under the kind of pressure that the Fuel Protesters created, will the government acquiesce.

Do we have to adopt their tactics? If so, how? And if not, what do we do?

We have about a month to act. Let’s hear some ideas.

I have been suffering with a problem for nearly three years: I sigh - or yawn, or both - all day everyday. It may not sound like much, but believe me it is. 2008 & 2009 were the two worst consecutive years of my life. They drifted by like a grey daydream, and I had no idea of why or how to solve it. I was just… well it’s hard to explain. Sad is the emotion, but it’s not right. Unresponsive is probably better. It’s like my heart went slowly to sleep, and I descended into a prolonged emotional torpor from which there was no escape.

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Every drop needs squeezing from 140 chars. Let me show you how that’s done. Here are four tweets - all of which can be improved - from four Twitterers I follow: Jeremy Keith, Aegir Hallmundur, Simon Warrick & Jenny Rolfe. These four were in a block and I chose them at random to show that any tweet can be improved:

1. JK: Estimating the geek to civilian ratio in this pub to be about 2:1 right now.
2. AH: Ooo, much criticism of the BBC in #thebubble. They’re only getting one series then…
3. SW: Since when did celebrity gossip and apologies for their behaviour become the most important news item on the BBC? Tiger Woods is not news!
4. JR: hmmm. just super glued a paint brush to my tights. think that means it’s time to stop making stuff today.

Let’s start with Jeremy’s:

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1. Tweet something amusing, or honest, or amusingly honest, for the undiluted Hell of it;
2. See 1.

Nettle roots go deep. Really deep. You never know how deep. They’re also rhizomic, which means they sprout long, tough underground stems - rhizomes - that seed new plants, and is the reason that they’re often found in clumps.

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Playing football last Friday I broke the little finger of my left hand. The bone has also twisted, meaning that I might need surgery to straighten it. This means my left hand is more or less useless. Just living simply becomes a chore. Anything involving water is particularly tough, the hardest two tasks are washing up and shampooing my hair. But more or less every activity involves both hands, I have sadly discovered.

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Whilst writing my first book Swindon Orbital earlier this year, I learnt something important about the act of writing. It was a crucial lesson, but not one I can share with you right now, because it went on to form the key idea around which my second book Blakes Road is being built, and to share it would be to spoil that.

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