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Young, Austen, Keats and Burns: a local perspective on the ‘immortal memory’

Back in 2020, I was asked by the 820th Mayor of Winchester, Cllr Eleanor Bell, to propose the toast to the ‘immortal memory’ of Robert Burns at her Burns night supper – at the Holiday Inn just outside Winchester. I had little idea of what was involved and no idea what to write, but thought it might be fun to try and add a local angle to my comments. After a day or two’s amateur research, I came up with something close to the following, although I have slightly expanded and corrected it before publishing it today. Given the short section about Jane Austen, it seemed particularly apposite to make it available today: January 25 is Burns Night and 2025 is the 250th anniversary year of Jane Austen’s birth:


Thank you, Madam Mayor, for the opportunity to say a few words about the life of Robert Burns.

I cannot claim any particular expertise or insight. Despite a Scottish heritage – the Tods originally come from Dalkeith in Midlothian – I can’t claim to have read all his works.  However I will try my best to provide some unexpected insight – and bring to light a few aspects of his life that you might know.

Born in 1759 just outside Ayr – the son of a tenant farming family.  He lived in difficult circumstances. His father continuously struggled financially – although the family made sure he got as good an education as they could afford.

He worked for many years as an agricultural worker and as a tenant farmer himself.  It was only following the spectacular success of his first published book of poems that his circumstances were transformed.

He moved to Edinburgh before spending all the money he’d earned in about 18 months and retraining as Excise Officer.

But then, tragically young, his health began to fail – and he died at the age of 37.

A man of enormous passions – he had, shall we say, a colourful love life – 12 children are known of – from at least 4 different mothers – only one of which he married – and there are more than 900 direct descendants of his alive today – but also great political passions – and a great ability to capture those passions and the passions of everyday life in verse.

I’m going to try something quite brave now and seek to find linkages between Robert Burns and Winchester

We know that Robert Burns is Scotland’s favourite poet.

But who was Robert Burns’s favourite poet?

Or rather who was the poet he most liked to quote…

And this is something we know – and we know the quote he most appreciated – and repeatedly cited in his letters:

“On reason build resolve
That column of true majesty in man!”

Described by Burns as “My most favourite quotation” in a letter on 10th August 1788.

He really likes this quote – in another letter he writes:

Come, then, let me act up to my favourite motto, that glorious passage in Young:
“On reason build resolve
That column of true majesty in man!”

And who is the Young he refers to?

The Reverend Edward Young.

Born at Upham in 1683. Educated at Winchester College. A true Winchester district man.

Taken from his poem “Night Thoughts” written between 1742 and 1745 – which some of you may know from the engravings prepared for it by William Blake.

And some of you may also know the quote:

Procrastination is the thief of time

Some of you may live it!

The reference to reason and resolve wasn’t the only part of Night Thoughts that Burns liked to cite – another quote – surprisingly relevant and surprisingly prescient for today’s world of fake news:

“What Truth on earth so precious as the Lie!”

and again, from the same, when Burns was unclear how one of his works would turn out, he cited Young’s:

“Tis nonsense destin’d to be future sense.”

And one of Burn’s most brilliant, insightful and oft-cited phrases

‘Man’s inhumanity to man’

also clearly echoes the same poem’s

”man’s revenge, and endless inhumanities on man’

Burns may never have set foot in our county, but if we believe his letters, one of our former residents clearly provided him with a fair share of creative and philosophical inspiration.

So now we know a bit of what Burns thought about a poet originally from our area.

I’m not going to claim any literary knowledge, but I am interested to know what writers from our area thought of Burns.

What, for example, did Jane Austen think of Burns?

We can’t know exactly, but in her unfinished novel Sanditon, sadly unfinished due to her death in our town only a mile or two from here, she has the heroine, Charlotte Heywood say of Burns:

 ‘I have read several of Burn’s Poems with great delight,’ said Charlotte as soon as she had time to speak, ‘but I am not poetic enough to separate a Man’s Poetry entirely from his Character; – and poor Burns’s known Irregularities, greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his Lines. – I have difficulty in depending on the Truth of his Feelings as a Lover. I have not faith in the sincerity of the affections of a Man of his Description. He felt & he wrote & he forgot.’ ”

While Burns may be Scotland’s favourite poet – I think we can see from that why Jane Austen is England’s favourite novelist.

They are, of course, the opinions of Jane Austen’s heroine – and not of Jane Austen herself. But would she have cited those feelings of ‘great delight’ if they weren’t feelings she had herself. I suspect not!

John Keats – one of our greatest Romantic poets – what does he think of the Scotland poet who helped blaze the way for the romantic movement.

We all know that in September 1819 he came to Winchester and wrote his famous ‘Ode to Autumn’ either on a walk through the meadows to St Cross or up to newly planted corn fields on St Giles’s Hill depending on whom you believe.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.”

(Intriguingly, Burns was also quite a fan of autumn. He wrote in a letter in August 1793 that “Autumn is my propitious season; I make more verses in it than all the year else.”)

But coming back to Keats, you may not know that the summer before he visited Winchester, he went on a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake District with a close friend.  And that he deliberately designed the tour to include Burn’s birthplace and his grave.

On July 13, 1818 he visited Burns’s birthplace and wrote to a friend about it.

Then we proceede[d] to the Cottage he was born in – there was a board to that effect by the door side – it had the same effect as the same sort of memorial at Stratford on Avon – We drank some Toddy to Burns’s Memory with an old Man who knew Burns – damn him and damn his Anecdotes – he was a great bore – it was impossible for a Southron to understand above 5 words in a hundred. – There was something good in his description of Burns’s melancholy the last time he saw him. I was determined to write a sonnet in the Cottage – I did – but it was so bad I cannot venture it here.

However after visiting Burn’s tomb, on July 2, 1818, Keats was rather more successful –

On visiting the tomb of Burns

The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun,
     The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem,
     Though beautiful, cold—strange—as in a dream
I dreamed long ago. Now new begun,
The short-lived, paly summer is but won
     From winter’s ague, for one hour’s gleam;
     Though sapphire warm, their stars do never beam;
All is cold beauty; pain is never done
For who has mind to relish, Minos-wise,
     The real of beauty free from that dead hue
     Sickly imagination and sick pride
Cast wan upon it! Burns! with honour due
     I have oft honoured thee. Great shadow, hide
Thy face—I sin against thy native skies.

So as we gather here in Winchester today – and ponder the greatness of Robert Burns – we are lucky to have two local guides to help us along the way – and one man who was a guide to Robert Burns in his journey to greatness.

Edward Young provided Burns with poetic inspiration and Burn’s favourite motto.

Jane Austen seemed unsure of Burn’s morals – but completely clear that we should read his poems with great delight.

And John Keats was so inspired by Burns that he designed a walking tour to visit the sites where he had lived and wrote poetry in his honour.

We can do no less than join them in our admiration.

So please be upstanding and let us join with Keats in honouring Burns, with Austen in delighting in his poetry.

And toasting the immortal memory of Robert Burns.

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Latest News Winchester

Reporting graffiti on telecoms cabinets

Like so many, I’m getting very irritated at current levels of graffiti – and there’s a lot going on at the City Council to get it under control.

Most graffiti in our area is removed by the Business Improvement District or by the City Council and both have significantly increased spending recently to get more removed. Strictly, neither can remove it from another organisation’s property without permission – and that includes the boxes owned by Openreach and Virgin Media – as well as substations owned by SSE – and equipment owned by Network Rail.

Each of these has places to report graffiti – currently as follows:

One tricky thing to handle is identifying which organisation a cabinet belongs to. Openreach has a guide to this (pdf) – but, if there isn’t an obvious logo or label (or even a barely visible faded one), the main trick is to look at the keyholes on the cabinet.

BT Openreach has triangular or star-shaped insert.

And Virgin has more conventional keyholes.

It’s always helpful to take a photo. Also write down or photograph whatever numbers are on the box in case it’s a useful reference. Openreach also ask you to use the What3Words app or website to get a useful link or set of three words to give an exact location – and I’ve also used this successfully with other organisations! If you don’t like using a proprietary system and want to use a more open reference or app, then the Ordnance Survey’s OS Locate app gives you easy access to latitude, longitude and National Grid references.

Any other comments or suggestions on how to get graffiti removed? Please add a comment below.

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Audio Technology

Fixing Bluetooth problem with TP-Link UB400

I recently bought myself some Sony Bluetooth earbuds for my phone, but I was keen to see if I could connect them to my PC too – so that I could use them in conference calls, for example.

But my computer didn’t have Bluetooth. So I bought TP-Link UB400 Bluetooth Adaptor online, because I’ve used and liked their stuff before. But when I plugged it in it didn’t work! Windows 10 kept telling me I didn’t have Bluetooth installed.

I went to the TP-Link FAQ for the UB400 – but nothing they suggested worked.

After a bit of Googling, I went to the Windows Device Manager, looked at the Universal Serial Bus controllers, and disappeared down a rabbit hole trying to fix the “Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed)” problem.

And only then did I go to the “CSR Bluecore Bluetooth” driver that also appeared on the list of Universal Serial Bus controllers when I plugged in the dongle. As an experiment:

  1. I right-clicked “CSR Bluecore Bluetooth and selected “Update driver”
  2. Clicked on “Browse my computer for driver software”
  3. Clicked on “Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer”
  4. Picked “Generic Bluetooth Adaptor” in place of “CSR Bluecore Bluetooth”
  5. Clicked “next”

and suddenly everything worked!

So that’s my solution! I hope it works for you too.

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20s plenty City Council County Council COVID19 Cycling Walking Winchester

COVID-19 and our local streets

I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges and opportunities that COVID-19 offers to the way we use our streets and roads here in Winchester.

The lower level of traffic is causing some immediate problems, such as increased speeding; revealing other problems, particularly in places where our pavements are too narrow for the number of people who want to use them; and also showing great opportunities, with a big increase in walking and cycling, particularly on our rural roads.

As we move into the recovery phase, we also need to do more to make our centres “social distancing” friendly. This means wider pavements and, learning from other countries, more opportunities for businesses to have widely spaced outdoor seating areas. People need to feel confident and safe coming back to our towns and villages knowing that they can easily move around in a socially distanced way.

What sort of measures would this give us?

  • We need to tackle the heavily walked and queuing areas where the pavements are too narrow and the roads are too wide. An obvious place to start is the one-way system. I’d like to see if we could cone the whole one-way system down to a single lane with the rest reserved for walkers and cyclists – single lane in North Walls – single lane in St George’s St – narrowed single lane in Jewry St – narrowed single lane in the upper section of the High Street. If possible, we also need to do something for pedestrians on City Bridge and Romsey Road bridge too (although given both are heavily used by buses, this will be harder).
  • We need to cut cars and lock in the change on roads where we have seen a dramatic increase in leisure usage. In my own area the road where this is most visible is Sarum Road. I’m sure there are plenty more. As a minimum, we need signage which shows that this is a road where cars drivers are not the priority users and should expect heavy foot and cycle usage.
  • On speed, we need to finish the job in Winchester and extend the 20 mph zone to residential areas across the whole city. We also need to narrow roads and widen pavements or add cycle lanes where there is a particular risk of people driving too fast. I would love to see up an uphill cycle lane on Chilbolton Avenue, for example.
  • We need to create space for businesses to use the highway for widely spaced outdoor seating. The most obvious option to do this is to fully pedestrianise the Square. We may need a couple of blue badge parking spots for people who need parking near the centre, but we should definitely stop through traffic.
  • Finally, one minor irritant that I know concerns some people. We need to revisit our push button crossings. Can we make them sensor or timer driven – so we don’t all need to push the button?

Make sense? Any streets, roads or priorities I’ve missed?

One of my responsibilities at the council is the City of Winchester Movement Strategy, so I’m already talking a lot with council officers and engineers at the City Council and County Council about how we can improve our streets. I promise to pass on any ideas that people send through!

Categories
County Council Latest News Winchester

Hampshire’s cuts to hit Winchester hard

A press release I sent to the Chronicle – that colleagues liked so much that they asked me to post it online. So here it is:

Yesterday’s meeting of Hampshire’s Conservative cabinet confirmed that they will go ahead with their reckless £140 million cuts. These will only cost us more long-term.

In particular:

  • Their cuts to health and care will mean that the NHS is unable to hit the financial targets laid out in its ‘sustainability and transformation plan’ – and will put health and care services under even more stress.
  • Their cuts to Household Waste Recovery Centres are almost certain to lead to more fly-tipping.

In a surprise decision, the Cabinet also voted to recommend extra money to support parish and town councils in covering for services cut by Hampshire – such as community transport, school crossing patrols and subsidised bus services – however the Conservatives still have not put anything in place to support the many areas of Hampshire without parish and town councils – such as Winchester.

There’s also still no sign that they are taking any account of the impact of the cuts in less well-off areas of Hampshire.

Martin Tod, Liberal Democrat County Councillor for Winchester Westgate, commented:

We’re paying the price for the Conservatives’ incompetent and chaotic management of Brexit and the economy. This has led to collapsing investment, the lowest growth in both the EU and the G7 and rapidly growing inflation. Aside from the effect on people’s cost of living and the very real threat to businesses and jobs, this utter incompetence makes it even harder to tackle the crisis in funding for council services.

These cuts are a disaster of the Conservatives’ making – Conservative MPs, Conservative Ministers and Conservative Councillors have all contributed to this fiasco – and it will hit local people hard. The Conservatives are now compounding their failure by deciding not to have any kind of plan for the many areas of Hampshire without parish and town councils.

This is a real threat to Winchester – and, along with my colleagues, I will continue to push for the council to put in place a plan for unparished areas – and to stop the most damaging of their proposed cuts.

And nationally, the sooner we can find a way to ‘exit from Brexit’ and focus on a plan to turn round the economy, the better it will be for jobs, for businesses and for our local public services.