User:Ian Spackman
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[edit] Claims to reflected fame
Wikipedia makes me realise that I am not well connected: only one friend has an article here that I have spotted. But I seem to have no notable enemies at all, and there are colleagues, slight acquaintances and chance encounters to be found here.
So, I have shared serious smoking cubicle ghettos with Angus Calder, driven sometime punk-queen Briony Fer[1] to a station in an MG Midget[2], climbed snowy peaks in the Lake District with P. N. Furbank, played six-a-side football with Arthur Marwick, and drunk Hook Norton with Richard Middleton in Hook Norton. Mae-Wan Ho I nattered to at a party about colour theory. Andrew Harvey pointed out to me the “compact rhythm” of some trees. John Renbourn I met in a bar, but I was too speechless with admiration to say anything much. In 1971 or 1972 I donated a used high E-string to John Martyn when his snapped at Les Cousins.
Henry Fairlie’s brother failed lamentably to teach me any Latin. And (really scraping the barrel) I have loved a friend of a daughter of Richard Ellmann, a friend of the father of Martin Kettle, and a translator of E.H. Gombrich, Hugh Trevor-Roper and others. Richard Crossman served my mother China tea in his rooms at Oxford, but George Bernard Shaw refused on principle to give her his autograph.
But the biggest claim to reflected fame has to be that J. R. R. Tolkien once held open a door for me at the foot of a Merton College staircase up which he lived at the time. At least I think that’s who it was.
So do I need new friends, or does Wikipedia need new articles?
[edit] Politics
Impress me less and less as I grow older; but inasmuch as the Political Compass questionaire is to be relied on, I can at least take comfort from Time Elapsed not turning me into a World-Weary Cynical Tory Fart. It places me on the extreme economic left and as a pretty strong libertarian. An anarcho-syndicalist, then. Or something. (I place myself as a dead-centre and rather timid moderate on both axes.) So I guess I must re-read Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist. And so should you: whatever your (lack of) politics it’s a fascinating read.
[edit] Spelling
I have always been a proud member of the dyslexic tendancy that finds spelling difficult, stupid and boring. So I do my best to avoid it. But it is difficult to write for Wikipedia without producing words comprised of certain letters placed in a specific order. My intentions are to spell according to the British English standard with distinct ize over ise leanings.
[edit] Things I might find interesting to work on
[edit] Anarchists and other radicals
- The article Anna Maria Mozzoni, feminist and journalist, is interesting and could do with expanding.
- it:Giovanni Passannante, would-be assassin of Umberto I, should be translated.
- it:Sante Caserio could be used to expand Sante Caserio
- it:Luigi Lucheni could be used to expand Luigi Lucheni
