On this morning of all mornings, it feels like I should write something about the elections in the USA. As you might have gathered, though, I write most of these posts in advance, and so have no idea how the vote has shaken out. Depending on how tight the vote turned out to be, perhaps you have no idea what the result is yet either!

But one thing can be said with certainty: whoever takes the oath of office on 20 January, the threat to American democracy will not be resolved.

There’s a tendency in politics for narrow escapes to breed complacency.

The ‘no’ vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum begat a Tory complacency about referendums which led to a populace voting for Brexit against the Prime Minister’s explicit recommendation.

The resignation of Boris Johnson begat a ‘thank god that’s over’ reaction which did nothing to fix the constitutional problems his period in office exposed. It meant that when his successor was fined for breaking the law in office, eyebrows were barely raised: the standards we expect had been eroded that far, and no attempt was made to repair them.

The electoral defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden begat a complacency about candidate selection. There was much hand-wringing, but no practical action to re-energise either the Republican or Democratic races to truly find the best and the brightest. Lest we forget that the output of the Democratic process was a candidate who failed even to complete the campaign, let alone a term in office.

The resignation of Liz Truss begat a complacency about leader selection in the Conservative Party. This led to the same selection process being repeated this year, resulting in an equally absurd selection of leader. The lesson wasn’t learned.

One of my bugbears in healthcare is that ‘near misses’ are rarely taken as seriously as incidents in which harm occurred. We often miss the opportunity to fix systems before disasters strike. There’s an aphorism among some that ‘a Datix is never investigated like a death is’ (Datix is the error-reporting system in the NHS).

It feels to me like the response of our elected representatives is often based on that same principle. Every time we flirt with constitutional disaster, in the UK or the USA, the response seems to be to shrug and observe that it all worked out in the end.

But unless the underlying problems are fixed, unless the unflashy, unpopular hard miles of constitutional reform are put in, then one day, it won’t all work out in the end. Perhaps that day is today.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Unveiled earlier this year, this is Belfast’s statue of Winifred Carney, recognising her role in the 1916 Easter Rising and her commitment to social justice. As she was often described, she is depicted with her typewriter in one hand and her Webley pistol in the other.

The statue was unveiled on International Women’s Day along with one of abolitionist Mary-Ann McCracken. These are the first two statues of non-royal women at Belfast City Hall. In a bizarre twist, they were unveiled in the presence of actors dressed up as them, which was… a choice.

Photobombing in the background is Sir James Haslett, who was Mayor of Belfast from 1887 to 1888. He was also an MP and a chemist.

Next to the McKee clock stands this boondoggle that I’ve walked past many times over the past two decades. I’ve always wondered what it is, but never been able to locate any information about it.

It turns out that it’s a memorial drinking fountain… though the fountain itself has been missing for a very long time. It in fact predates the McKee clock by some decades.

On 29 September 1893, The Northern Whig recorded:

A memorial, of very handsome design, has been erected by the members of the Bangor Corinthians Sailing Club to the memory of the late Mrs. Arthur Hill Coates in the new Esplanade, Bangor. The memorial, which takes the shape of a water fountain of four jets, covered by a handsome dome, and standing upon a solid foundation of concrete, was erected by the firm of Messrs. McFarland & Company, of Glasgow, and bears the following inscription:—“Erected by the members of the Bangor Corinthians Sailing Club in memory of their sincere and true friend Mrs. Arthur Hill Coates, 1893.” The position occupied is the angle adjoining the Sandy Row Promenade, and it is scarcely necessary to mention that the new esplanade is considerably beautified and enhanced by the splendid structure.

The article in The Newtownards Chronicle on 7 October of the same year has fewer words, but I think is more accurate in its naming of the manufacturer as

Messrs. Macfarlane & Company

They at least agree that it is handsome.

The Royal Ulster Yacht Club has in its possession a letter to Mr Arthur Hill Coates which includes the line:

We also desire that at the same time you will convey to Mrs. Coates our warmest thanks for the great interest she has taken in the welfare and prosperity of the Club, and ask her acceptance of the accompanying diamond ring.

This happily suggests that Mrs Coates was aware of the esteem in which she was held before she died… and also rather suggests that there was a lot of money sloshing around sailing clubs in the late 1800s.

This is Bangor’s McKee Clock, unveiled in 1915. It’s known as the McKee clock as the local tax collector, James McKee, contributed £200 towards its cost.

It was not uncontroversial, particularly its location. The site which was eventually chosen formerly hosted the town’s bandstand. The Herald and County Down Independent of 17 April 1914 records some disagreement at a Council meeting about whether the bandstand should really be moved:

“The proper site for the McKee clock is on the present bandstand site … There is no need for a bandstand at all in the esplanade.”

“By no means; oh dear no. Bangor must always have a pierrot troupe and the best obtainable too, at that.”

“But a bandstand is for a BAND.”

This raises a question: what the heck is a pierrot troupe, and is it really so bad for it to be in a bandstand?

Originally, Pierrot was a stock character of a sad clown, frequently appearing in Italian pantomime or comedy from the late 17th century.

In England, the name became adopted for troupes of vaguely clownish entertainers who would put on variety shows of song and comedy. They were a popular feature of seaside towns, often performing on piers, and some troupes travelled across to Ireland to perform. The form mostly died out in England in the 1950s, though National Museums NI has photographs of a show in County Down from 1962, so perhaps they lasted a little longer there. Performing in bandstands doesn’t seem to have been uncommon.

Anyway, the bandstand was moved to make way for the clock: it now stands in Bangor Castle’s Walled Garden. Ironically, the local newspapers feature many advertisements for band concerts at the McKee Clock thereafter, suggesting that—perhaps—the bandstand was better located before it moved.

But the clock was well received too.

Did Joe Biden say:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

Or did Joe Biden say:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

There is an obvious third option:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters’ – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

Is the ‘garbage’ the demonisation of Latinos by his support act; his supporters as a group; or the demonisation of Latinos by his supporters as a group?

The context may be offensive and absurd, but there’s something comfortingly twee, normal, and reassuring about a dispute over an apostrophe amid an election of extreme rhetoric.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

It might be All Saints’ Day today, but I’m afraid I’m picking on just one of their number: St Columbanus, who walked this Earth back in the 500s AD.

He seems to have been a bit of a character: it is said that squirrels used to run down from trees and into the folds of his cowl to be close to him. I think this is supposed to be charming, but it frankly sounds like a massive hassle: he clearly had a lot to contend with.

His life is commemorated through a trail of seven bells in Bangor: the squirrels might have left him alone in death, but the Northern Irish are still keen to knock seven bells out of him. Poor guy.

And, as a rubbish blogger, I’ve only managed to take pictures of six of them. The first one of the trail is a giant bell, and I didn’t notice it, because I was too preoccupied with this: the oldest wall in Bangor:

The commemorative plaque omits to tell us when it was built, beyond a vague ‘13th century’, but it does let us know that the Council did some work on the wall in 2008.

Anyway, this means I can’t show you the first stop on our ‘interpretive art trail’ (not my words). So you’ll just have to imagine a giant bell with a wavy surface, commemorating Columbanus’s childhood journey across Lough Erne to the Island of Cleenish for his early education.

After leaving Cleenish, Columbanus went to Bangor Abbey… a time which is weirdly not commemorated on this Bangor trail. Instead, the second stop on our journey records him leaving Bangor to travel to Brittany.

While in Brittany, Columbanus worked to ‘root out the lusts of the flesh’. I imagine that being covered with squirrels might have helped with that.

He also founded a school in a former Roman fortress in the mountains. It became so oversubscribed that it eventually needed new premises, which he founded at Luxeuil:

While there, he met Gallus—another monk who had been taught at Bangor Abbey—who began to follow him. He originally came from somewhere on the French/German border, which will become important later.

The bells then seem to skip the bit of Columbanus’s life where he hid in a cave for a few years in search of solitude. They also have nothing to say about his spat with some bishops over the date of Easter: he wrote to Pope Gregory I and Pope Boniface IV on the point. Gregory ghosted him, and he folded before Boniface could reply.

I think this is a fascinating bit of his story, with much to say about the interaction between the divine and the human in the making of Christian festivals, and I’d definitely have dedicated a bell to it, but I’ve never been asked to make even one interpretative artistic bell in my entire life (to date).

Anyway, we skip ahead to Columbanus being thrown off a ship following a storm. The captain judged that the storm was god’s punishment for transporting Columbanus. Columbanus ended up at Bregenz in Austria, where he built an oratory:

And this is where Gallus’s heritage becomes important: as he could speak the local language, he played a big role in helping Columbanus convert the locals to Christianity.

And—local connection alert—Bregenz was twinned with Bangor in 1987 ‘in celebration of this important historical connection’ (not my words).

Since 2001, Bangor has also become a ‘sister city’ of Virginia Beach in the United States, though I regret to report a lack of connection to Columbanus. This relationship exists ‘because of the similar port area, military affiliation, and oceanfront tourist attraction’.

Back to Columbanus, whose time at Bregenz wasn’t going so well: a war had resulted in the area being subsumed into Burgundy, and a few of Columbanus’s students had been murdered. So, like any man of God, Columbanus prayed hard for a peaceful resolution and stayed to help defend his adopted community ran off to Italy.

Gallus, however, stayed behind, in hiding in a little cell. Eventually, long after his death, an abbey was built in his honour. Little-by-little, the Swiss city of St Gallen grew up around it, and, in 1983, the abbey area became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Oh, and there’s also this:

Meanwhile, Columbanus was living it up in Milan, where he was welcomed by the King and Queen of Lombardy. He once again set about converting the locals:

The Bangor Antiphonary, a historically important 36-leaf book of hymns and prayers put together in Bangor Abbey about a century after Columbanus’s death is somewhat inexplicably in Milan, though no-one seems particularly vexed by that. I suppose to many in Northern Ireland, it’s better than it being in one of the London museums, where it would probably have ended up had it not been taken abroad. Maybe they’d have loaned it back to the locals occasionally, like the Lindisfane Gospel.

The King of Lombardy gave Columbanus a tract of land at Bobbio, near Milan, to build a monastery—where, ultimately, Columbanus died and was buried:

Twenty years after Columbanus’s death, Jonas of Bobbio wrote a biography of him—the first known biography of an Irish person. And in 2002, because of his history of travelling through Europe, the Vatican declared St Columbanus to be the patron saint of motorcyclists… which honestly feels like a stretch.

But as for the bells—well, I think that we have to count them as a success. I’d never heard of the bloke before I saw them, and now know I’ve written (and you’ve read) a 1,000-word treatise about him.

And that’s the power of interpretative art trails… maybe.

If I told you that a man stole billions of pounds worth of historical art purely for the love of it, doing nothing with it but hanging it in his bedroom in his mum’s attic, you’d surely want to read more. I certainly did, and Michael Finkel’s non-fiction account of Stéphane Breitwieser’s crimes did not disappoint.

Finkel weaves a propulsive tale, reaching from the fine detail of how Breitwieser stole individual pieces to asking questions about the nature of museums, crime, culpability and even art itself. It’s also a love story, exploring Brietwieser’s intense but complex relationships with his girlfriend, his mother and his father.

This was enormous, astonishing fun. I’d have liked a dash more of the reflection, philosophy and doubt, but this short is still worth your time.

Here are some passages that struck a chord with me:

He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art. They’re often crowded and noisy, with limited visiting hours and uncomfortable seats, offering no calm place to reflect or recline.

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Instead of an art thief, Breitwieser prefers to be thought of as an art collector with an unorthodox acquisition style. Or, if you will, he’d like to be called an art liberator.

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Before working art crime, Darties had spent a decade in antiterrorism. He sees parallels between art thieves and terrorists—crimes that destabilize society, with psychological fallout.

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When you wear your heart on your sleeve, it’s exposed to the elements.

Still visible in Redcar is a former local newspaper office, for a paper that has had quite a few different titles over 155 years. From 1869 to 1938, it was The North Eastern Daily Gazette. From 1938 to 1940 it was The North Eastern Gazette, then The Evening Gazette, and since 2014, it’s just been The Gazette. A bold decision, then, to carve the name above the door.

I have a history with the newspaper: as a student, I blogged for them for a while. I can’t remember how that came about, but I do remember having a bit of back-and-forth about the title of the ‘column’, as they wanted some reference to me being a ‘trainee doctor’ which seemed inappropriate to me as a mere medical student. It ended up being called ‘Simon Says’—hardly inspired—and it only lasted a year or so, after which their digital strategy changed.

This is Grant’s Clock on Whitley Bay’s promenade. Many sources—even including the local council which owns it—will tell you that the clock was “unveiled by Councillor James Hamilton Grant in 1933”. From the contemporary newspaper record, I can tell you that this isn’t true.

From the Sheilds Daily News, 13 April 1933:

Whitley Bay’s first public town clock was unveiled yesterday afternoon, Lady Gregg performing the ceremony, which was presided over by County Coun George Lang, chairman of the Whitley and Monkseaton Urban District Council.

The clock is the gift of Coun G Hamilton Grant, the vice-chairman, the pillar upon which it stands being provided by the Council.

[Councillor Lang commented that] it had been a common complaint of visitors that there was no clock on the promenade, and it would be a boon to them as well as to the residents. “People will be able to stay down here and spend their money until the very last minute, before rushing to their trains,” he added amid laughter.

The article also, somewhat mysteriously, says that “Coun Grant explained the circumstances under which he had offered the clock to the council”—but declines to elaborate. I can tell you, however, that he was elected as chairman of the Council about a week later. Make of that what you will.