it has been a year since musicians of bremen's gig at the babar cafe in hereford supporting haress.
horsemouth thanks to sproatly and the weirdshire crew for the gig and thanks richard and stass (of wildhare) for putting him up. (he also thanks the tube and train staff who got him to hereford and the cab driver who got them back to richard's).
haress have an album out (and very good it is too).
musicians of bremen do not have an album out (they have, however, accumulated a lot of demos on their soundcloud page).
last night horsemouth watched allison kraus and robert plant play glastonbury (with lots of antique musical kit) and very good it was too.
there have been some kvetching about how the rail strike affects people getting to the glastonbury festival but to horsemouth's recollection there is no train station at glastonbury (and what you would actually need is a train station at pilton several miles away). on the occasions that horsemouth went there he went there by car or by coach.
vast swathes of the country are poorly served by public transport - beeching's axe and the invisible hand of the market did for many railway lines, railway stations and bus services that would have been useful to horsemouth as a kid, the barry-caerphilly line to the seaside for example, the station stop at pontrilas (up to hereford down to abergavenny), the line running up from there through the golden valley to hay-on-wye (book heaven), the line hereford to hay-on-wye (that kilvert makes use of in his diaries).
when horsemouth's parents moved on his 16th birthday to the wilds of herefordshire horsemouth was not best pleased. he soon realised there was a bus into hereford to college at 7amish in the morning and a last bus out of hereford at 6.30pm. there goes my social life thought the young mule.
the solution was to learn to drive a car.
later on horsemouth solved many of these problems by moving to the city (where there was public transport). granted the infrastructure was decrepit, victorian and under-invested (leading to the kings cross fire) but in the course of his lifetime it has got much better. now, because the government has taken against the mayor of london, they are cutting the funding to TFL (transport for london) and this is likely to lead to the cutting of bus routes and in particular bus routes useful to horsemouth and many of the poorer people of the east end (who live in the cheaper, because transport poorer, areas) .
currently there are rail strikes and tube strikes. separately in the airline industry many staff were laid off during the pandemic and the airlines cannot currently run all the flights they might wish because of a shortage of baggage handlers etc. in the countryside the car is getting too expensive to drive (because oil pries are on the increase).
the transport union remain some of the few unions with clout - because, despite recent progress in this area, much of the work of capitalism cannot be done remotely, the workers must be transported to work, and because the supply chain and just-in-time nowhere can be cut off from fresh supplies of anything for very long without shortages and disruption.
currently the economy is profoundly skewed towards the interests of the bosses and the shareholders - vast profits are being generated from the wages that are being in real terms driven down. there is a 'cost of living crisis' due to inflation but we are told it cannot be resolved by paying the workers more, enough to live on for example, because that would be inflationary. no instead we must have more 'wage restraint' and more food banks. horsemouth contends that it can only be 'solved' by either reducing the profits taken by the bosses or abandoning the whole system of value production.
as bob marley notes 'a hungry mob is an angry mob' - but most people aren't hungry yet, or cold (that will come this winter). at the moment they are merely squeezed and inconvenienced. soon the tories will sacrifice the porker in chief, the scapepig. 'launch the scapepig!' but the tories don't have a readymade successor and critically they have not agreed one with the donors (who pay for the whole shit-show). starmer's de-fanged labour party waits in the wings together with ed davey and his 'at least we're not the tories' party. gawdelpus they are a sorry shower of shits.
horsemouth expects that much of this anger will evade recuperation by the parliamentary puppet show.
and so to the buses and trains. today is the first (full) day of the leigh folk festival. horsemouth will not be going. he is debating (with himself) whether sunday is really possible also.
the public transportation must be defended. rail workers and bus workers must be defended. the workers' share of GDP must be defended (and indeed expanded).
horsemouth also contends that the problems of capitalism are unresolvable and that the best it can do is stagger from crisis to crisis.
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