The Challenger...revisited

"Don't fill your mind with science. Fill your heart with love." These words, or words very much like them, are attributed to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, subject of the recent BBC2 film The Challenger starring William Hurt in probably his best-ever character part. I watched it twice.

There was a profile on BBC4 recently. The man who died in Los Angeles in 1988 is reportedly returning to acclaim and popularity; a little film on YouTube, in which he talks about the beauty of understanding how something works, in this case a flower, has been receiving thousands of hits.

I have seen it and have also read chunks of the book he did with Ralph Leighton, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character, including the section on his experiences at Los Alamos during World War II, helping the US military to invent, on behalf of the Allies, the atomic bomb before the Nazis got there first.

Feynman said in the TV profile how much he enjoyed the intensity of the work and how he had watched through a vehicle windscreen the first test explosion in Nevada - "it's only Ultra Violet light that blinds you and Ultra Violet light cannot penetrate glass". He didn't, however, enjoy the consequences when the Little Boy bomb was exploded above Hiroshima in August, 1945.

Perhaps it was that which prompted the thought that there was more to life than the power of death encaspulated in scientific equations. Like the British philosopher Alan Watts, like the American poet John Berryman, Richard Feynman was a serious man unafraid to to strike out on his own against current orthodoxies. William Hurt conveyed this brilliantly in The Challenger.

Until this film I had never heard of Feynman; consequently I had no idea of the part he played in determining and exposing the technical fault that caused hot gases to leak from defective seals on the one of the two liquid hydrogen towers rocketing the Challenger shuttle spacecraft away from earth on the cold morning of January 28, 1986. The subsequent explosion 75 seconds after lift-off killed all seven astronauts on board.

The man from the California Institute of Technology only agreed to take part in the investigation in Washington because he allowed himself to be convinced that there was a problem that only he could resolve. Solving technical problems was one of his lifelong joys. As a kid he gained a reputation for mending faulty radios by thinking - asking himself practical questions and arriving at the probable answer.

So why would a prize-winning man of science say: "Don't fill your mind with science. Fill your heart with love."?  It sounds so Haight Ashbury, so Summer of Love. Little of the very little I know about Richard Feynman, however, suggests that he was an adherent of the flower power politics of San Francisco, or any particular philosophy. In fact he seems to have have been mistrustful of the value of philosophy.

In Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman! there is a section called Is Electricity Fire in which Feynman recounts his experience of trying to understand the language of a possee of professors, invited to meet and discuss the ethics of equality. A stenotypist asked him if he was a professor. Feynman told him he was a professor of physics. "Oh! That must be the reason," he replied. Asked to explain further, the stenotypist said he didn't understand a word when the "other fellas talk. But every time you stand up to say something, I understand exactly what you mean - what the question is, and what you're saying - so I thought you can't be a professor!"

So I'm inclined to think that Richard Feynman believed that you could only truly teach anything, only truly learn anything, if you loved it.

A few years ago in a moment of serendipity I wrote a short poem the third and final verse of which goes:-
I cannot share
what I do not have.
I cannot teach
what I do not love.

That's a proposition I'd stand by.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that," Feynman said.  This sums up, I think, what he was as a scientist and tried to be as a man.

The finale of Richard Feynman's short appendix to the official Challenger Report in 1986 reads:-
Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. 

They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. 

Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. 

I quote this to remind myself once again that the human capacity to learn from mistakes is only outstripped by its readiness to repeat those mistakes with greater expertise. This is especially so of large organisations in which money, power and prestige outweigh any other consideration.

In February 2003 the space shuttle Columbia exploded on re-entering earth's atmosphere. Part of the spacecraft had been damaged by a chunk of protective foam that had ripped away from the underbelly of the fuel tank during flight. Like Challenger, all seven astronauts aboard were killed.

In subsequent years other shuttle flights were damaged by flaws in either design or engineering. Richard Feynman's report and his final adjuration were forgotten.

---

Upon Finishing Lincoln: Team of Rivals...

This morning being Easter Monday I read the final pages of Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Abraham Lincoln. The President was shot by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and died the following morning in a hotel across the street from Ford's Theatre in Washington.

I had no idea that Booth was one of a trio of would-be assassins who planned to kill Secretary of State William Seward, Vice-President Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, all on the same night, at 10.15pm. One of the three dropped out. The other, a man named Powell, gained entry to Seward's Washington residence and with pistol and Bowie knife attacked and attempted to kill five people.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband Richard lived with the compiling and composition of this historical biography - 754 pages of text, two-and-a-half pages of acknowledgements, 121 pages of notes plus an index - for ten years. If like me, you had only the sketchiest notion of Lincoln's life and times, this book will give you the opportunity of widening your knowledge and deepening your understanding. It will also whet your appetite to know more the course of the Civil War, which began and ended in the month of April, 1861 to 1865, and the birth of the Republican Party in 1855 - the party of abolition. If you had fondly imagined that Republicans were nasty Tories and Democrats freedom-loving liberals, you really should read this book. Hopefully the surprise won't be too unpleasant. Also, how much more difficult was reconciliation between North and South made by Lincoln's murder? He was but a month or so into his second term when John Wilkes Booth shot him dead. 

Steven Spielberg's excellent film centres on the last five months of Lincoln's life and brings together in fiction two strands of hiostorical reality that were separate: the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress and the Confederacy's peace initiative. In the film Lincoln has knowledge of the arrival of the three peace commissioners in the North but doesn't meet them. In reality he met and talked with them for a couple of days, insisting that peace was only possible if the South accepted the Union and all that that would mean for those 13 rebel states fighting to defend slave ownership. In the film dramatic tension is built up brilliantly by confronting Lincoln with a dilemma: if the peace intiative succeeds and the war is concluded before the passage of the 13th Amendment, some state legislatures will fight shy of abolishing slavery. Abolition was a tricky constititional issue, capable of dividing men and parties as well as bringing them together. I was disappointed that Spielberg's central drama, played out in the House of Representatives on March 4, 1865, takes only a few pages in the book.

Fifty pages short of the end, I found an historical reconstruction of the Battle of Gettysburg on Youtube. This three day running fight, July 1-3, 1863, came close to being the end of the Union Army. Military strategy, tactics and weaponry are incidentals in the book because Doris Kearns Goodwin's book is not a military history, chronicling the details of battlefield events; it is the effect of such events on her quartet of Cabinet rivals - Lincoln, Seward, Chase and Bates, and their friends, associates and familes, that is her main concern. So it was the film that explained the terrible physical  repercussions inflicted by the 'miniball' musket bullet, a hollow-ended, partly rifled projectile that splintered bone like a wrecking ball and caused wounds to turn gangrenous. Lincoln rode through the sites of battlefields and often visited hospitals to talk to maimed and injured soldiers. He went south to visit Ulysses S Grant after the siege of Petersburg and the abandonment of the Confederate capital of Richmond. In short, Lincoln was a brave man who gazed upon the physical consequences of policy and did not turn his sad eyes away.

Lincoln and other members of his Cabinet took both pleasure and solace from poetry. For them it was not an affectation of culture but something as central to their lives as scripture. The idea that Lincoln knew and talked with Walt Whitman, who worked in military hospitals in Washington, was exciting to contemplate, to me anyway, because it is a natural reflex for me to make connections between disparate events and draw them together. So Whitman's Mississippi of a poem, Leaves of Grass, Robert Lowell's 20th century poem For the Union Dead and Allen Ginsberg's splendid poem about Walt Whitman, A Supermarket in California, came to mind as I read about the battlefield horrors of the Civil War. Though I have finished the book, I suspect that the book has not yet finished with me. That is how it should be.
  

It Was 40 Years Ago Today...

As everyone seems to be having a go at the subject, humour me with your patience while I unload my two pennyworth about the European Union.

I was twenty-three and about to leave London for Newcastle-upon-Tyne when it happened. I have no clear memory of the day Britain's entree to the European Economic Community, as it was deceptively called, became official, though I suppose fireworks were let off as they were tonight to bang in the New Year.

But I do recall arguments on radio programmes such as Any Questions? Those were the days of Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Conservative MP Russell Braddon, Methodist Minister Donald Soper, Tony Benn - formerly Anthony Wedgewood-Benn. The battlelines were drawn, if I remember rightly, between the high ground of being good Europeans and proactive members of the European club, and the low ground of Britain retaining its own identity as a sovereign state with historic loyalties and trading links with South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Because nobody wanted to be accused of living in the past and being a stuffy little Englander, the pro-Europeans won the moral argument and, two years later, the referendum. 

It's taken 40 years for us to understand that being pro-European is one thing and pro-European Union quite another. The problem has been, as some identified long ago, that we were sold an economic idea whereas all along the true purpose was political, a federal, supra-national superstate. Edward Heath and his cronies mocked those who warned of this as scare-mongerers, probably Leftie scare-mongerers. For a long time I was one of those who went along with the notion that the Common Market was 'a good thing' - the A A  Milne phraseology is deliberate. And as I got older and found being in the cities of Europe more interesting, this association with things European and the political set-up in Brussels and Strasbourg kept me supposing that the European Community was a good thing. Oh bear of little brain. It was mental laziness really; thinking didn't enter into it.

Also, part of me was reluctant to believe that even a monstrous entity that is now the European Union could be entirely without redeeming aspects - though what they are, I can only guess. 

My life is passing through this historical episode, like an insect making its way through an enormous capital city; but I can't weigh up or estimate the effect on me of the past 40 years of the European project. I think part of my historical imagination stopped after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and the end of Soviet Communism. Everything after that, even the bloodbath in former Yugoslavia, was consequence of the bigger cataclysm. And now the foundations of the project, with its vast superstructure of expensive schemes and initiatives, are slipping into the mud. 

In another 40 years, long after Alexander Beetle (me) has disappeared, another generation of Europeans may wonder what all the fuss was about. And it will then be up to historians and political anthropologists to remind them that Rome, which certanly wasn't built in a day or even a century, lasted a hell of a lot longer than the Treaty of Rome and its subsequent incarnations. 

Savile's Travails

'Great artist does bad things' is not news," writes Suzanne Moore in today's Guardian G2. Savile was not a great artist and known in the business as 'Jim'll Fuck it.'

All this was a very long time ago, as we keep being reminded. Those were the days, my friend, those guys thought they would never end. The terrible thing is, they haven't.

Many years ago, W T Stead, editor of the Northern Echo, shocked English society - still reeling from the Oscar Wilde trials - by exposing the trade in child prostitution in the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette.

Stead, who went down in the Titanic in April 1912, evidently was not one to pass by on the other side when his conscience was offended, unlike some of those belatedly declaring mea culpa over the dead body of Jimmy Savile. Esther Rantzen at least had the honesty to admit: "We all colluded in preserving the myth of Jimmy Savile" - or words to that effect.


The revelations about celebrity Sir Jimmy's sexual proclivities coincided with the disappearance of little Welsh girl April Jones. Anybody inclined to offer Savile's memory the benefit of the doubt, on the basis that you are innocent until proved guilty, is likely to think twice now. All the good he did with his charity fund-raising is going to be buried with his golden coffin. The words "paedophile and rapist" on the plaque commemorating his presence in Scarborough, where he had an apartment, are indicative of the public mood.

Suzanne Moore says Jimmy Savile "gave a lot of us the creeps for decades". I wasn't one of them. The vulgar bling, the absurd hair, the phallic cigar, I just took to be the costume accessories of the Rock 'n' Roll business - bigging yourself up for the cameras. I liked Jim'll Fix It. Never for a second did I imagine that the avuncular chuckling Jim was wondering how to get inside the knickers of the young girls who sat on his knee. His sudden headlong fall from public favour does not gratify me, though I can imagine the derisive laughter from those groomers of young girls in Rochdale and elsewhere, on the receiving end of society's righteous justice. The only difference was that white boy Sir Jimmy was allowed to get away with it.  

Having spent a couple of years in London's East End working on Adventure Playgrounds in the early Seventies and seen what Lord of the Flies little beasts children can be, I don't have any tender illusions about childhood innocence. Remember, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both aged ten in 1993, tortured and murdered two-and-a-half-year-old Jamie Bulger by the side of a railway track in Liverpool. I saw two young boys, they were friends, having a scrap when one of them, with a swift underarm swoop, jabbed the other in the midriff with the blade of a penknife, drawing blood.

Our notion of what childhood is changes with the times. Long ago, girls as young as the ones fingered and fucked by Jimmy Savile were married off by their families. Arranged marriages of young girls and boys is still prevalent in parts of the world, especially Pakistan. England's Industrial Revolution was partly built by the little hands of childen underground in mines, off the ground in chimneys and on the ground in textile mills, darting between swishing belts of spinning machinery to pick up toppled bobbins. Opposition to Richard Oastler's Ten Hours Bill - to cut the working hours of children in factories - and to get them out of collieries, often came from their families, who needed the money. In Pol Pot's Kampuchea, young Khmer Rouge recruits sent professional  men and women to their death. The same happened in Mao's Red China. Children were the little angels of death. What did they grow up to be, those of them who survived?

The notion of what childhood is now means that what was common in the past is unlawful, and this includes watching kiddie porn in the privacy of one's own home. Society says that voyeurism of this kind tacitly condones the brutality of the actual act. Society is also apt to have double standards about sex in all its hydra-headed aspects. The American writer Camille Paglia has a lot to say about this in her book Sexual Personae. The following is an excerpt from a blog she wrote in 2007. The subject is paedophilia:-

The media makes it easier, as the tabloids often paint the crime in such ludicrously over-the-top and pseudo-emotive terms (monster, beast, rot in hell Moira Hindley, etc), that it actually almost makes a mockery of the seriousness of the crime and makes it harder for people to take seriously.

I do think some of the anti-paedophilia measures people enforce are misplaced and easy to portray as 'over-the-top'. But the misplacement is put out of all proportion, men whine and yelp about how some man, somewhere, wasn't allowed to photograph somebody's child at a football match, or about how a father wasn't allowed to host toddler's gatherings in his house on account of his being a man, instead of highlighting all these times where things went the other way.. where men were given positions of responsibility over children and abused them, where they were allowed to work with children despite having been accused of rape before, where they used the guise of photography to take photographs for their own gratification.

In almost every way our society fails to protect children from paedophiles.. it doesn't over-coddle them and over-protect them. If anything, it underestimates the liklihood of abuse.


Friend, no matter how rich, celebrated or well-connected you are, you don't have a natural right to get off on whatever turns you on. That's not a law of nature, it's the law of the land.

The Sound of Moozak

The Bradford branch of Waterstones has moved its poetry section to a narrow bookcase in a gloomy corner near the toilets. Probably the best place for a form of expression of less value to the general public than arse-wipes.

But while poetry has been shoved to the furthest, least accessible part of the store, the prevalence of all-pervasive muzak has intensified, not just in this book depository but in virtually every public place. Earlier this year the moozak at Bradford Interchange was changed from pop to light classical. The thinking behind this change of policy had nothing to do with upgrading the aesthetic experience of people waiting for the 626 to Baildon or the 680 to Smiddles Lane. Groups of yoof, it was decided, are less inclined to coalesce in public places to the strains of Peer Gynt or Swan Lake. The irony would be if Bradford's scallies started to develop an appreciation of Boccarini or Bizet.

The kind of bovine moozak piped in to assault the eardrums varies according to where you are. One cafe I used to go in invariably had some silly tart blaring out cliches about everlasting love with lots of reverb and echo. Cacophonous cack. Other establishments favour dire variations of rap with some silly bugger blathering on about the state of the nashun. Moozak for retards. Further evidence of the country's enthusiastic slide towards infantilism (the childish aren't responsible for their actions, know what I mean bro). This crap follows you everywhere you go. Either your hearing is eroded or your intelligance is insulted by repetitious statements of the obvious on railway stations and on trains...please take all your belongings with you, stand away from the edge of the platform. 

You go into what looks like an interesting bookshop and what happens? Bored staff, clearly irked by the prospect of having to talk to people who might want to buy a book, for their own entertainment bang over the PA what they consider to be avant-garde selections of moozak designed to make suicide feel like an attractive alternative. 

Airports, cinemas, bakers, railway stations, bus stations, the doctors, the dentists, supermarkets, old people's homes  (where the telly must always be on loud) - everywhere, low grade, eardrum bashing, de-sensitizing noos and moozak is directed at you. It's a conspiracy. Big Brother is terrified of you having quiet moments in which you might actually reflect on your experiences. So your airspace is violated with incessant prattle and moozak. And if it isn't coming at you from the radio or a hidden PA, it's coming at you from some twat's intrusive IP3 or mobile phone. Yar! Hi, I'm on the train...the bus...the plane...the piss. Jacquetta's coming round to mine, isn't she? She's coming round to yours? I thought she was coming round to mine. The sound of silence died with Simon and Garfunkel. And, day by day, our peace and quiet dies with them. 

No wonder Charles Bukowski used to say the further away he was from humanity the happier he was. Ditto. Take the moozak-racket of modern life as far away from me as possible.

Who Can You Really Bank On These Days?

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," old Polonious advises his son Laertes in Hamlet, "For loan oft loses both itself and friend/ And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry."

A modern version of the drama perhaps should have Laertes played as a young banker. A Diamond geezer. Bankers were once the scrupulous, punctilious J Alfred Prufrocks of London (T S Eliot used to work for Lloyds). What are they now?   

Arthur Daley, the London spiv played by George Cole in Minder used to say "Stand on me" when he had to convince somebody that he was telling the truth. Del Boy Trotter, David Jason's wide boy in Only Fools And Horses protested his innocence in very demotic French. Alors du combat! Rod-nee!

Redtops loved Arthur and Del Boy. They were conservative working class heroes: chancers, opportunists flying by the seat of their pants, living by their wits, making the most of what little they had dubiously come by. Others, cultural interpreters perhaps, saw them as exemplars of Thatcher's Britain, the Loadsmoney yobboculture caricatured by Harry Enfield.

Little did we realise that these comic characters were prefigurations of what was to come. Those who thought the selfish Eighties was as bad as it could ever get were wrong. Boring old financial probity was defenestrated as building societies became banks and banks became casinos. In the City of London the holy skyline created by Wren and Hawksmoor was desecrated by the Nat-West Tower and other symbols of sky's-the-limit capitalism. But we didn't know the scale of the enormities of the Nineties until the summer of 2007.

Constraints were embedded in the financial market for very good reasons: to keep the bent from going crooked and offer the trusting public an assurance of honest dealing. In the exciting catch-me-if-you can ethos that Oliver Stone memorably caught on film in Wall Street, constraints were for wimps. Asset-stripping corporate raiders like Gordon Gekko now look tame compared with the real-life sub-prime species who Swiss Rolled debts and flogged them on.

This week the underhand price-fixing dealing of Barclays, RBS and their pals was exposed once again. Simultaneously, reports came out that some heath care trusts developed by Private Finance Initatives were in a state of terminal financial decline. This business with PFIs rang a bell. 

A few years ago I came across a book called Plundering the Private Sector by David Craig and Richard Brooks. I must have read it for I bashed out a paper to a friend who was trying to make a living in the regeneration game in Prague. The paper was called: BEWARE - CONSULTANTS AND PRIVATE FINANCE INITIATIVES. 

Craig and Brooks detailed the ways in which Tony Blair's Labour Government had, since 1997, conspired with private consultants to bring forth the brave new world of health care centres, hospitals, schools, roads and prisons, at an estimated cost to the public purse of £70 billion (2,800 billion Czech Crowns). Deloitte, Ernest & Young, KPMG and Pricewaterhouse Cooper did exceptionally well out of these deals. Consultants use private finance to plan, design and build on behalf of central government. Without the stewardship of a Thomas Cromwell these build now and pay later schemes accumulate colossal debt and inevitably lead to cuts in services and jobs to keep up the interest payments.

PFIs were thought up by Conservative MP David Willetts and were adopted by John Major's erstwhile Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont. Post 1997, PFIs were seen as a way of quickly bringing about huge capital-intensive building programmes. By 1995, Craig and Brooks estimated that 725 PFI schemes had been signed up, worth an estimated £46 billion.

PFI schemes, unless strictly regulated as they apparently are in the United States, invariably result in snowballing debt and revenue cuts. The authors listed five characteristics of unregulated PFI schemes: they are inordinately expensive; they are inflexible; the social costs are enormous; they offer no value for money. The fifth is possibly the most serious in its implications for a representative democracy: they are so convoluted as to be unaccountable.

I sought enlightenment from my friend Richard North, co-author of The Great Deception, a comprehensive history of the European Union in its various incarnations, and once upon a time researcher for the CP (Conservative Party). He explained what may seem obvious to you but was news to this bear of incalculably little brain:-

Public sector finance can be kept off the official accounts book; because it is classified as private finance it is not accounted for under public borrowing. Nor does it fall foul of the growth and stability pact rules of the EU. These rules state that a member state's annual budget deficit should not exceed three per cent and that total public debt should not begreater than 60 per cent of total Gross Domestic Product. For other bears of little brain GDP refers to the total amound of lucre spent on goods and services in the whole economy.

Transactions with consultants are 'off books',  fees are charged to the user and in Britain all-in-one packages complicate matters. These packages include service charges and other costs as part of an annual fee. These fees never appear in the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement figures because transactions are funded out of annual revenues. Stay with this, it gets better.

Newly built hospitals and hospitals that are part of a larger trust are paying full commercial rent for a site and commercial rates for basic services. Because the charges are so high, payments have to be found from money paid by the government to run the service. This means hospitals, deeply in debt, struggling with top-heavy management tiers set on by consultants, are obliged to lay-off nurses and close wards. The same applies to new technology IT systems devised and installed by private consultants to run vast public sector schemes. The cost runs into many hundreds of millions and often the systems do not work. Hundreds of millions of public money have been written off in failed IT schemes in Britain since 1997.

Why not simply borrow the money from the markets directly and cut out the middle man? Presumably because it wouldn't look good on the books inspected by the EU.

Most PFI schemes involve bungling. All-in-one packages are very difficult to monitor: it is impossible to tell how much each component part of the package costs. It is impossible to measure value for money. There is loss of accountability and accountability is the basis of democracy: without it democracy means nothing.

The authors of Plundering the Private Sector say in the mid-1980s the kind of unregulated nightmare current in the UK used to be the norm in the United States. The tide turned in 1996 with the Republican Clinger-Cohen Act. "The Act changed the way IT systems were bought and implemented in the US public scetor, forcing departments to take responsibility for and report to Congress on the results achieved...Since passing the Act the performance of IT systems consultancies in the US has been judged to have radically improved and government expenditure on IT has begun to fall....Under New Labour, the whole process of democratic accountability has broken down and been replaced by cronyism, profiteering, spin and outright lies."

Craig and Brooks recommended the abolition of PFI schemes and the disbanding of tiers of extra management and advuisors. Consultancy fees should be slashed by 30 per cent immediately. Excessive profiteering should be investigated by the Serious Fraud Squad.

That was then, in the days of innocence before the Credit Crunch, the Parlimentary expenses scandal, phone hacking and the latest banking scams. Nevertheless, I hope the above is of interest to those who, in spite of everything, maintain the hope in their hearts that change is going to come.

If You Build it People Will Come (perhaps)...

Bottles of bubbly were reportedly on ice. An expectant group of Bradford councillors, including the leader, Conservative councillor Margaret Eaton, and top officers, were gathered in an office in City Hall, confident of having some really good news to celebrate.

It was October 30, 2002, and the UK cities bidding to be the 2008 European Capital of Culture were about to learn their fate. A sustained marketing and PR campaign had been going on in Bradford for months. Bradford's cultural icons had been wheeled out likesupermarket trolleys for a good polish. The wonders of Bradford's industrial heritage and its modern multicultural diversity were 'the icing on the cake'.

Bradford was still coming to terms with the consequences of the 2001 Muslim riot. The authorities rightly thought that unless something drastic was done, the mud sticking to the city's reputation would put paid to any hope of future revival. It was an understandable approach, though its expression in the form of the Capital of Culture bid was, I thought, seriously misconceived.

The wider world was aware from the 1989 Satanic Verses book-burning episode, the long-running Honeyford Affair as well as the 1995 and 2001 riots, that Bradford had problems. Trying to hide them behind UNESCO's World Heritage status award to Saltaire (a Victorian model village three miles to the north of Bradford in the constituency of Shipley) was at least unwise. I was told that two of the Capital of Culture judges visiting Salts Mill were overheard to say: 'Nice place, pity about the location'. Meaning Bradford.

Though not a Bradfordian, over 37 years I have grown deeply attached to the old place. Real empathy comes out of a mixture of love and hate; feeling is empirical, not theoretical. I have lived, worked and suffered here. I have spent my money here, invested here. Any other talk is just the prattle of marketing - "brilliant", "vibrant", "visionary", "wonderful", and more "brilliant". Call me Mr Stupid, but I believe honest promotion of a place should include the flavour of lived experience, and that means the good, the bad and the ugly.

Why not promote Bradford as a place with an edge? I said. We can't hide the fact that this is the hometown of the Yorkshire Ripper and the Black Panther, not to mention the 1985 Bradford City Fire Disaster. Admit the bad and the ugly and then say in spite of that we have the good. There is beauty too. Dangerous it may be, sardonic and infuriatingly complacent it can be, but by God you won't nod off in Bradford. The damn place gets under your skin. And on a clear sunny evening, the skylines are breath-taking. I have sometimes walked home from work in tears, the sun beaming out of a cinemascopic South Dakota sky, reflecting off portals of pale yellow sandstone. The song of the place still sings to me after all these years, even after two riots, a football stadium inferno I was lucky to walk away from, and the odd threat from the odd political fanatic.

Pal: forget it. People like me, whose feelings were complex but at least authentic, were shunted out of the way for the prattlers. "Brilliant", "vibrant", "diverse". No hard feelings; but nevertheless short-sighted, I thought. The scene was set. Expectations had been worked on and pumped up. Then, on October 30, the news arrived. Bradford wasn't even short-listed.

"Are you disappointed?" Margaret Eaton (now Baroness Eaton of Cottingley) said to someone in a suit, as the news was reported on local television. The bubbly remained on ice. The disconsolate group of VIPs went across the road to the pub to inflate their spirits temporarily with a little alcoholic depressant. They needed it. This wasn't the first time Bradford's corporate expectations had come a cropper due to highly-paid people who should have known better, jumping the gun, counting their chickens.

In the 1950s, chunks of historic Yorkshire sandstone Bradford were bulldozed to make way for the brave new world of high rise office blocks faced in Portland Stone and multi-lane motorways bisecting the city centre. You can see this going on in the film Billy Liar, which was shot on location in and around Bradford. Somewhere under Prince's Way, opposite the former Odeon cinema (now wrapped in plastic sheeting, as though visited by Christo), lies the Students' Club. This was a cellar bar where the likes of George Melly and Humphrey Lyttleton used to play in the 1950s. It was visited by artists studying at Bradford College of Art, including David Hockney, Norman Stevens and others. Murals on the wall were said to be by DH himself  - 'Boris' as one of his brothers is said to have called him.

In the 1990s, planners demolished old Rawson Market in the belief that a proposed £40m leisure development in central Bradford would provide the wherewithal for a replacement. The developer walked away and for about five years, Bradford had a hole in the ground where Rawson market used to be. The lovely Java Cafe, the best cafe-bar in town opposite the Alhambra theatre, was refused a short-term lease in 1998. The building was demolished to make way for a proposed peace museum. For several years there was a hole in the ground. Eventually it was levelled and fenced off. Half the central police station was knocked down before planners realised the cells underneath the building were still in use by the adjacent magistrates court. The exposed end wall, opposite the derelict Odeon, was eventually cladded tastefully with plastic-looking glass.

Given all this (there is more), the ludicrous impasse over the Westfield site (see the blog below) comes as no surprise. Not long after a smiling Councillor Eaton formally handed over the bulldozed site in November 2005, Westfield put in a subterranean car park and foundations for the pillars that would support the super-duper shopping mall. That done, they left. Everybody waited for them to return with bricks and mortar. To date they haven't. And so Bradford has yet another hole to add to its municipal collection.

There are those who maintain that a concrete and glass retail complex is the way to revive Bradford's fortunes. I am not one of them. Nor is my friend Richard North. "More people are shopping online. Instead of a shopping mall, create an experience from which commercial opportunities arise," he says, which is the exact reverse of putting up a £200m-£300m monstrosity in the hope that it will prove to be a shopping experience. "Build on Bradford's heritage," Richard says. "Make the place a visitors' centre by creating cafes, places of entertainment and commerce." Part of the site, converted into a temporary park in 2010, is where the Occupy Westfield people have pitched one of their tents. The ten-acre site is a natural hub, between two railway stations, Bradford Cathedral and City Hall. It would be an ideal place to relocate the J B Priestley Archive, currently buried two floors down under the University of Bradford, and the Mechanic Institutes Library. And why not create an archive to commemorate the Independent Labour Party, founded in Bradford in 1894, as well as museum commemorating other luminaries and reformers who made a difference - Humbert Wolfe, Margaret McMillan, Delius, David Hockney, Jim Laker (born in Frizinghall), Richard Dunn, who tried to beat Mohammed Ali, Len Shackleton, World Snooker champion genial Joe Johnson?

Regeneration through culture has been done before in Bradford, spectacularly so by the late Jonathan Silver at Salts Mill. Between 1987 and 1997, the year of his premature death, he created the world's biggest single collection of David Hockney images alongside high-tec industries, a Diner, art galleries, offices, a bookshop and a performance space. He converted a run-down textile mill at the bottom of a hill in a village three miles outside Bradford into a place now visited by thousands annually. I watched him do this and wrote the book Salt & Silver: A Story of Hope, a double biography of Titus Salt, the industrialist who built the mill in 1853, and Silver, the former men's wear shop owner, who restored and revived the building's magnificence.

Silver, who loathed bureaucracy, never had a blueprint or masterplan. He started off with 53 David Hockney pictures which he put round the walls of a former spinning shed of 10,000 square feet. Admission to see them was, and remains, free. Like the farmer in the movie Field of Dreams, who builds a baseball pitch in the middle of one of his cornfields, Silver had a dream. His consisted of combining culture and commerce and making the result exciting and profitable. True regeneration, he showed, only takes place when an entrepreneur or a group of people seize the initiative and become empowered. In contrast, development occurs irrespective of human factors: developers put up speculative buildings whether or not they have tenants for them. Silver got the culture which in turn attracted high-tec entrepreneurs from Pace and Filtronic Components plc.

Interestingly, Jonathan Silver was never invited to City Hall to explain to planners and politicians how he did it. Not once. Those who advised them to take serious note of what was happening in Saltaire were ignored. After all, hadn't the corporation wanted to demolish Salts Mill before Silver bought it - to make way for a motorway?

In light of all this no one should be surprised that the council  subjected an historic part of Bradford - Forster Square - to the wrecker's ball in the earnest hope of attracting a big developer as a dance partner.