Jumping Back on the Wagon!

Whoa Boy! It's been a bustling three weeks and I'm well rested and eager to resume my work here in Ro'dam. I've spent the last week in England visiting Horsham, Brighton, and London where Luke and I (and then just I) toured such places as the Brighton Pavilion, Aquarium, and the Floundry Pub on Floundry Street in the North Lanes of Brighton (great pub and even better company - I highly recommend it to any and all visitors!). We drove to Stonehenge (in Barbara Bender's honour of course) and we took a special trip around Parliament in London. We trotted along a Jack the Ripper walk around London's East End and spent an afternoon at the Natural History Museum to see their permanent collection as well as their annual Wildlife Photography contest, which was most impressive! We watched the semi-finals matches in the Ladbrokes.com World Championship Darts tournament where I dutifully cheered for the Dutchman Raymond van Barneveld or 'Barney' who will most likely meet 13 time world Champion Chipmunk Taylor in the finals (I’ll be watching Tats!), and I joined the 10 million other English viewers watch the last Dr. Who episode (with this particular Dr. Who) on the tele. Cescarina treated us both to a long walk in Hampstead Heath and I also spent hours walking in Richmond Park (this park features herds of deer roaming amongst the herds of visitors) on New Years day. While I did feel a bit guilty about being so far away from my research, I thoroughly enjoyed my time and mollified myself by picking up opinions concerning my research and at times similar discussions around my main themes from a United Kingdom context.

Immigration and integration are very important topics in the United Kingdom as in the Nederlands at this point in time; the importance of these topics has grown over the last 35 years. From my latest personal experience, London proved to be comfortable in its diversity and welcoming yet I could still make out murmurings of malcontent concerning the ever-increasing levels of immigration in addition to sadness held by many of my friends over the ever-present racism that seemed to follow it. The idea of migration and the possibility of climate refugees in the coming years seem to have many worried at the current begrudging approach to these migrants and the role they played in society, which also helped me to understand the usefulness of a project such as my own.

I also felt security was an important theme. This I noticed during my walk in East London. As we learned about the gruesome details of the Jack the Ripper case, Luke and I noticed all the cameras set up on buildings where we were taking this tour. Throughout the 19th Century, London’s East End became synonymous with poverty, overcrowding, disease and criminality. It was the borough of choice for many generations of migrants and while thought of by many as a harbinger of all things indecent, the radicalism in this area contributed to the formation of the Labour party through the unions there and the eventual enfranchisement of women (thank you Wikipedia). Yet Luke and I couldn’t help but notice the abundance of security measures taken in this area by business person and home owner alike. Over the last decades this area has become a hot spot for gentrification projects and many young elites are now buying up refurbished properties and slowly changing the status of the area (in predominantly economic manner) and so in this way security can be seen as a feature of a renewal project in terms of protecting one’s investments or maybe as a way to begin edging unwanted people or behaviours out. The idea of security was further emphasised by the recent and highly publicized bombing attempt of a plane flying into the United States (from Amsterdam) on Christmas day. Another event, the attempt on the life of the Danish cartoonist who became famous for his vilifying cartoon of the Islamic Prophet, has also been widely reported on and so, security remained a prominent feature in my trip as well.

As all of these threads come together, I think it high time that I jump back on the band-wagon of research and get back to the grind. That, and because my mother told me that I had had fun and it was time to get back down to business.