By the time Simon Blumenfeld's writing career had begun, the East End he writes of in this - his final novel under his own name - had all but disappeared. In fact, this potted life story of Thomas Barnardo documents some of the changes which Blumenfeld would have seen himself, being born a son of Sicillian Jewish immigrants in Whitechapel. Through the eyes of his Barnardo character, Blumenfeld surveys the East End at the end of the 19th century, taking in its squalor and injustice and balancing it with the now familiar tropes of character and spirit to portray what must have seemed an impenetrable horror to the deeply religious Dublin medical student on his arrival in Stepney. It would be easy to characterise this as an opportunity for Blumenfeld to advance his communist views, but there is a tension here - while Barnardo wishes to see "No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission" and is seemingly unconcerned with the underlying political and social injustice, he regularly debates this with Haddock - "The Black Doctor" who sees no hope without societal change.

Taking it's factual cues from historical and the public records of the remarkable Barnardo, the novel fills the gaps with surprisingly effective supposition and dramatisation. Barnardo himself is sometimes unsympathetically devout, but bristles with energy and indignation too. Filled out with engaging characters drawn from his real experiences in the East End, the sharply drawn dialogue and edgy cockney wit which Blumenfeld deployed in the earlier, more controversial "Jew Boy" return. The scenes in pub and music hall resound with a reality which stems from first hand experience - as Blumenfeld was for over thirty years a writer for The Stage, in fact attaining the official record as the "oldest living columnist" during his time there. Topographically, the novel is tightly secured into the triangle of Stepney, Mile End and Limehouse - areas Blumenfeld would know well, and from which he draws rich descriptions of places, some now changed immeasurably. When the novel does stray out of this liminal zone it is a little more fanciful and blurred, echoing the strangeness of wealthy London to those who lived their entire lives in the East, and equally the horror and disbelief the upper classes felt looking in from outside.

This new edition of what is perhaps only a minor work in the London canon has been prepared by London Books in their attractive and interesting series of republished lost gems. It comes at a time when the welfare of children in society is under almost as much scrutiny as during Barnardo's lifetime. Blumenfeld lived long enough to see the man recognised and his charity flourish, and also to see many of his principles adopted as policy by successive governments. As such he makes a statement - that despite his staunchly left wing views and wish to see society become more egalitarian, he recognises the importance of Barnardo's christian mission in changing how people regarded 'charity'. It is of course hard to regard this from a 20th or 21st century perspective - and Blumenfeld resorts to dramatising the many unsuccesful court cases brought against Barnardo to show this opposition to his philanthropy. He creates an adversary too - knowing from his pseudonymous work in Westerns and war stories, that every hero needs his anti-hero. This is perhaps where the book wanders a little too far from the truth, with a moralistic parable which is a little predictable. That said, this is otherwise a colourful tale told in a tone of typical inter-war realism.

"Doctor of the Lost" tells a fair approximation of the sometimes forgotten life of the man behind the charitable juggernaut which now has a global reach. As a novel though, it works better - with many passages of wonderfully crafted descriptive work which provide Blumenfeld with the opportunity to explore his territory in the East End. It would be terribly easy to enter a debate about how much of it is truth - but the saddest truth is that the need for a Barnardo ever arose in Victorian London.

I don't usually write much about my wanderings in Scotland. Mostly because these are my holidays - properly relaxing breaks away from home, and away from the usual high-speed dashing around the rail network even. When I'm up here, it's a case of being somewhere unreachable, immersed in place and music - two of my favourite things. In a sense, as once hinted at by a former friend, what happens in Scotland stays in Scotland. Not that anything particularly lascivious or damning does happen - just that it's nice, just for a while, not to be analysing it. But today was a bit different, today I undertook a trip I'd been thinking about for some time and became, for a little while at least, a tourist.

The plan was simple enough - with an extra day or so up here by virtue of my travel arrangements, I could afford to spend most of a day through in Edinburgh. Setting off directly after the morning peak I had time for a leisurely start to the day, and also to lounge around a bit with coffee when I arrived. I'd thought about heading to Avalanche Records first off, but after wandering down to the Grassmarket to find them closed and due to open a bit later, I decided to do something rather unusual - something in fact, I don't often do until I'm fairly comfortable with a city. I took a ride on the tour bus! I don't do this on first arriving because I feel a need to grasp the geography before I fully appreciate it. Also, one of the key things for me is knowing how to get back to some of the spots - something you can never quite assess without a bit of prior knowledge. It also provided a means of getting a painfully dodgy foot back up some hills later!

After doing a full circuit of Holyrood, the New Town and sites in between, I found myself back at Grassmarket and skirting the drama which was being filmed and which was causing all sorts of traffic trouble, I walked around the corner to Greyfriars Kirkyard. About now, the sun came out and I found myself sweating up the slope into the surprisingly bright, open churchyard. The tombs were of a typically Scottish style, with only some of the more distant corners being inhabited by a small number of pretty mangy looking drunks. Skirting the edge I found the locked entrance to the Dissenter's Prison, and nearby the Black Mausoleum. Having read the spooky tales and claims made for these, it was hard to square them with this quiet bright spot - an oasis of calm in the bustle of Edinburgh.

Walking back, I called in at Avalanche and listened-in to a strange conversation about the 'youth of today' which could have come from the Daily Mail, before hopping back on the bus to Waverley. The clear blue skies over Arthur's Seat and the view of the city as we climbed Calton Hill were rather wonderful. I thought about heading for Leith, or maybe out to Stocksbridge - but that can wait for another visit. The important thing was that I made my peace with Edinburgh in some ways today.

Whilst my heart remains in Glasgow, I am rather looking forward to coming back soon.

I arrived in Glasgow yesterday to find a city in chaos - a rail strike, the impending financial implosion at Rangers FC, and perhaps worst of all a city in the grip of Valentines Day. Also, the sudden realisation of the impact that devolving licensing of free events to Local Authorities may have on small arts and music events has stirred up something of a grassroots rebellion in the past day or so. In a sense tonight's show at The 13th Note is just the sort of thing which may well not happen if authorities decide to charge for such licenses. So, having skulked in my room last evening to avoid the deluge of nervously overdressed couples stalking the streets, I was eager to get out and about tonight, and this offered the ideal opportunity.

Having encountered Wounded Knee several times on record, not least on the really excellent "House Music" cassette at the tail end of last year, I was keen to see Drew Wright perform live. He took to the stage alone, with just an electric guitar. This was deployed as much as a percussion instrument as anything as he strummed out a hypnotic rhythm and started to sing. On record, there is rarely any instrumentation in the traditional sense to detract from Wright's vocal - and this was true tonight also, as his voice climbed and dipped around the rhythm. The lyrics of this extended first song seemed attuned to this too, with their reference to "the strumming of the strings of defeat and salvation". The small audience showed a great deal of appreciation to Drew's apparent surprise and delight as he continued with his setting of Burns' "My Love is Like A Red Red Rose". In the hands of Wounded Knee this became a strangely moody two string blues, full of menace and portent. Perhaps a highlight for me, unsurprisingly given my occasional theorising about music and place, described a series of walks around the countryside which rings Edinburgh as Wright observes "I am alone/never lonely". Referencing "The Highlands in miniature in your doorstep" the song revolves around a list of bus routes which make these remote country edgelands accessible. Given the themes of land, place and identity which thread through "House Music" it was good to hear this expressed on a local scale, with a genuine connection to the places clearly expressed. Wright closed with "The Deadly Wars", an old song unearthed during his residence at the School of Scottish Studies and again based on Burns. This short set was entrancing, magical and genuinely intimate in the tiny setting. Most of all, Wright's deep, resonant voice echoing around the room will stay with me for some time.

Sticking with the theme of place and displacement was Ian Nagoski. This was something of a different proposition, and one which could all have gone badly wrong with a testy and hard-to-impress Glasgow audience. The basic premise is Nagoski talking us through his development as a record collector. It will be a familiar story for any zealot or specialist - you start out feeling it's impossible to carve out a niche, and end up a specialist in a tiny area of expertise which is yours - and often pretty much yours alone. For Nagoski that specialism lay in the foreign-language 78s produced in dizzying number by the major recording companies in the US during the early part of the 20th century. Far from being a nod to a diversifying USA it was, even then, a commercial proposition - giving the Ottoman Diaspora something of home. As Nagoski admits, it was just as often schmaltz, rather bloody-handed patriotism or cheap titillation, but his breadth of knowledge of the lives of these long-dead and obscure artists brought the scratchy, aging recordings to life. It's easy to dwell on technical aspects when describing the unfamiliar in music, but Nagoski takes the social, political and geographical context and builds his stories compellingly around it. I sympathize entirely with this approach, and the concept of weaving new discoveries and their back-stories into your own narrative. I sympathised too with his thoughts on the nature of obsession and the need to create. I never dreamed I'd be sitting in the basement of The 13th Note listening to the thoughts of a quietly-spoken American enthusiast, punctuated by scratchy, pained wails transported from the distant past. If you told me I'd be here, I'd have speculated it wouldn't work. But, strangely - and compellingly - it did.

Finally, Nagoski departed by introducing The Family Elan. A three-piece focused on the multi-instrumental talents of Chris Hladowski which seemed to channel those disembodied, disenfranchised voices from their gramophone horn and deliver them afresh through thoroughly modern loudspeakers. On paper the band should be a bizarre proposition - heavily amplified bouzouki, electric bass guitar and in Mark Hearne a versatile and dynamic percussionist who is, for me, perhaps the hero here. The Family Elan are tight, taking the shifts in pace and geography in their stride as they switch between an Azerbaijani warning that you "cannot cross the mountain" and equally "must not stand on the pomegranates" alongside a trance-like, almost psychedelic take on Bollywood tunes. It's interesting to think about all those times Eastern music has influenced western - not least in the meandering 1960s love affair with mysticism. But now, oddly the reverse is true as Hladowski hefts his bouzouki, soloing like a proper rockstar and applying distortion and phaser to weirdly queasy effect. Their final track tonight, apparently from the north coast of the Black Sea ploughs a traditional enough furrow until it breaks down into a slow, trashy distorted grunge epic. It's either abject genius or superbly silly - but either way it's quite brilliantly played and hugely appreciated here.

Tonight was far from a normal night in many ways - but, it shows that no matter how diverse or eclectic the subject matter, the nature of musical or literary obsession is pretty much always the same. Whether it's expressed through a connection with a distant life, or as Ian Nagoski put it via a non-denominational 'prayer' to make things different to how they currently are, it's comforting to know I'm not alone in my approach. And given the rapt and respectful audience tonight, I think I may well have been in good company.

It's time for a new release of the most comprehensive XChat script in existence, courtesy of FireCat and FuzzyTheBear, along with a little help this time from ProGuy, Discipulus, Novaflare and Landrocker.

download lemmings-3.1.tar.gz

New Features Include:

• sysinfo for Windows
• sysinfo works on multi-processor and multi-video card machines
• ignore functions
• channel info and identify functions
• convenience functions for common channel operator tasks (kick, ban, etc.)
• insults
• expanded preview functionality
• newsflash
• comprehensive code cleanup

I also updated the install script to detect and remove old versions as requested. Its as easy as:


Congratulations, everyone on a high quality new release of Lemmings!