The decaying remnants of the Buran space shuttle

Only the most intrepid urban explorers have paid the survivors of the [Russian space shuttle] Buran class a visit, a mission that is itself almost intergalactic in its boldness and ambition. First, Baikonur lies in Kazakhstan's desert steppe - a full day's train journey from the largest city Almaty - at a point where both railway lines and roads terminate into a lunar-like wasteland. Second, it occupies a vast, heavily guarded site. Effectively a mini-republic leased to the Russian Federation, it was originally chosen by Soviet officials for its distance from settlements and prying eyes. The working spaceport contains relics from the glory days of Yuri Gagarin, the first man to fly into outer space, as well as launch pads for the current Soyuz programme. Somewhere in between lie site 112A and hangar MZK. Here, two incarnations of the Buran rest under a shroud of bird droppings, their cockpits stripped of instruments and their scaffolding in collapse. Explorers describe secretly hiking across the desert under cover of night, before shining their torches into this vast, echoing mausoleum to cosmic dreams.

The more important craft is OK-1K2 'Ptichka' - meaning 'little bird' - the second in the class to be built and intended for its first space mission in December 1991. Its neighbour is OK-MT, a test vehicle that was slated to be burned in the atmosphere as part of an experimental unmanned launch. Neither of these is the original Buran that made the only space flight. This was destroyed at Baikonur in 2002, when the roof of its hangar collapsed in an earthquake, resulting in the deaths of eight workmen. Broken instruments and torn blueprints are strewn around the complex. The buildings are occasionally patrolled by guards and, more regularly, by bats, which flit about the cathedral-like heights.

Where the American Space Shuttles occupy pride of place in national museums, these spacecraft have been left to decay in the desert. They are deeply ambiguous objects. On the one hand, they are a symbol of the past: of the Cold War, the space race and the former USSR, whose fragmentation left them marooned in Kazakhstan, far from Moscow. On the other, they whisper of an alternate future: of voyages never made, discoveries never celebrated, corners of the cosmos uncharted. In a small way, they offer a vision of a 21st-century Soviet Union.

- Oliver Smith, Atlas of Abandoned Places, London, 2022, p.154

See also:
Blog: Russians in Queen Charlotte Sound, 15 December 2023
Blog: Mr Putin departs Brisbane, 16 November 2014
Blog: Under a fire that seemed pouring from all sides, 9 October 2012

The UK general election under proportional representation

"Labour gained over 200 seats but their vote share increased by less than two percentage points to 34%"

The UK general election is just a periodic reminder of how unfair and distortional the UK first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral system is. While Sir Keir Starmer's Labour Party have stormed to a large parliamentary majority, it is not bolstered by the knowledge that a large proportion of the British electorate have actually voted for them. The above quote is from the BBC, which also notes that Reform won 14 percent of the vote but only five seats, which is 0.8 percent of the total seats. Notably, the Green party also won 6.8 percent of the vote, but only four seats (0.6 percent of the total seats).

Fortunately the Electoral Reform Society has produced a simulated UK general election conducted under proportional representation, which illustrates that to form a government comprising a majority of voters, Labour (236 seats under PR) would need to form a coalition or other similar arrangement with both the Liberal Democrats (77 seats) and the Greens (42 seats), giving a government of 355 seats. The Conservatives (157 seats) could equally form a coalition with Reform (94 seats) and the Liberal Democrats to give a government of 328 seats. The latter would be a flimsy majority, though.

Source: Electoral Reform Society, 2024

Robert Cecil's Elizabethan intelligencers

For more than a century, it lay undisturbed in the National Archives: a single sheet of paper, headed The names of the Intelligencers, with the power to unveil a hidden network of secret Elizabethan spies.

Now, the 428-year-old secret dossier of Robert Cecil, spymaster to Elizabeth I and the man who discovered the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, has been pieced together using this key document. It reveals how Cecil set up and used a clandestine espionage network to spy on European monarchs for the English throne.

The network was so extensive that the historian Stephen Alford – who has been hunting down Elizabethan spies and painstakingly reconstructing Cecil’s illicit files about each “intelligencer” ever since he found the list in the archives nearly 15 years ago – thinks it was “the first properly organised secret service” in England.

“There were lots of names listed – some I recognised, people in or close to the privy council of Elizabeth I, and lots I didn’t know. Eventually, I realised that the numbers next to their names were folio numbers and that this was really a contents page. That was a lightbulb moment,” said Alford, professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds. He has written a book on his discoveries, All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil, which is being published by Penguin. The previously overlooked document, which Alford thinks Cecil began to write in 1596, had been placed in a “miscellaneous” folder by Victorian archivists.

“I think I was probably the first scholar to take an interest in it,” said Alford. “The Victorians had a habit, where if they came across papers that didn’t make sense to them, that were a little mysterious and couldn’t be filed away in a neat and tidy way, they would scratch their heads and then stick them in a miscellaneous folder and ignore them. And that’s where historians now find really interesting stuff.”

He began scouring the archives for any paper which looked relevant and had “a little number in the corner” that matched the intelligencer’s number on the contents page. “I just had to hope that the edges of the paper hadn’t been torn. And because the manuscripts were so poorly kept before the 19th century – often stuffed into the chambers in the Tower of London – rats and mice got to some as well. Often, they were stained, sometimes you see teeth marks. It’s a miracle these papers survived at all.”

As he gradually built up each intelligencer’s folio, he began to see a pattern. “Each was like an office file, I think. It was on hand in Cecil’s office for when reports came in, or to keep a record of payments made.”

Most spies in the 16th century worked for courtiers and were normally “a bunch of rogues”, Alford said, who would turn up haphazardly and volunteer information on an ad hoc basis. The intelligencers on this list were different: “These were serious individuals, a lot of them international merchants, who were on the payroll.”

Previously, scholars thought that Cecil, whose official role was secretary of state to Elizabeth, had a “few spies, here and there”. But Alford’s research indicates that he had an organised network of more than 20 spies, in Lisbon, Calais, Brussels, Seville, Rome, Amsterdam, Scotland, Sweden and unspecified locations elsewhere. “He chose merchants because they travel, can read and write, speak European languages and have networks of their own.”

Each agent was paid to secretly send coded reports to Cecil, who decrypted them using the individual, bespoke cypher in each of their files, which also contained a record of their payments and all their secret communications. “By modern standards, the cyphers are pretty unsophisticated – they’ll suggest different letters for letters of the alphabets, or symbols or diagrams for the Queen or King of Spain, for example,” he said.

- Donna Ferguson, 'Uncovered: 428-year-old secret dossier reveals Elizabeth I’s network of spies', Guardian, 29 June 2024

Buddy of mine Bob White been owin' me five dollars for five years

Thursday music corner: Soul and R&B singer Moody Scott was born in Louisiana in 1944. He released at least seven singles from 1969 to 1975, on a range of labels, plus two further singles in 1983 and 1984. He also released an album, We Gotta Bust Outta The Ghetto. Scott's funky 1972 single I Don't Dig No Phoney, recorded with Dion & the Soul Brothers, provides a list of individuals whose integrity Mr Scott calls into question, either due to outtasight chicks failing to tell you about their other man, acquaintances who consistently fail to repay small personal loans, and Cadillac drivers who lack commensurately ostentatious accommodation.

Moody Scott - I Don't Dig No Phoney (1972)    

See also:

Music: Moody Scott - May I Turn You On (1971)

Music: David Batiste - Funky Soul (1970)

Music: The Stovall Sisters - Hang On In There (1971)

The totemic London A to Z

If you threw a house party in London in the late twentieth century, before the smart phone rendered it redundant, you could guarantee that the following morning there would be a dog-eared copy of the A to Z [street atlas] behind the sofa, or under the coffee table, probably in a Tesco bag. Everybody had at least one. It was an essential aid in understanding London. It joined the dots and threw up obscure names printed over hitherto unexplored grids of streets: Alperton, Shooters Hill, Honor Oak, Tooting Graveney, Shacklewell, Childs Hill, Ladywell. It invited you to create your own personal map of London, discover your own secret routes, your own special places.

What might be lurking in these locations, waiting to be uncovered on a cold winter Saturday? Corner caffs with Pepsi signs. Second-hand record shops and rickety street markets. Edwardian villas which could be the setting for any number of sitcoms, or could even be the location for Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow's home in Joseph Losey's Secret Ceremony. The photo of Syd Barrett leaning against a car on the back of 1970's "Barrett", has a late Victorian, monochrome backdrop which could have been any corner of London - hence, the photo romanticised just about every corner of London.

You could peruse the A to Z with the knowledge of who lived where - Sandy Denny in Wimbledon, before she moved to Muswell Hill, which was already legendary as the home of the Kinks. Arterial roads as grisly as Archway Road (Rod Stewart's place of birth) or Holloway Road (Joe Meek's studio) or Harrow Road (Mute Records HQ) could be made magic through their pop connections. 

Working out how to get from A to B, let alone to Z, was deeply intricate, slowly accrued knowledge. How do you get to Craven Cottage, or Claremont Road, or the Old Spotted Dog for a three o'clock kick off? When you put your transistor radio in a carrier bag, you remembered to stick your A to Z in there as well. 

- Bob Stanley, liner notes in Bob Stanley presents London A to Z: 1962-1973 (CD compilation), Ace Records, 2023 

Let them do what they want, say what they like, be who they are

Thursday music corner: Jules Shear (b.1952) is an American singer-songwriter best known for composing 1980s chart singles All Through The Night for Cyndi Lauper, and If She Knew What She Wants for the Bangles. He also hosted the first 13 episodes of the MTV series Unplugged, which included an appearance by Crowded House and Tim Finn, amongst others. He has released 14 solo studio albums since 1983, with the most recent being Slower (2020). 

The catchy Do What They Want appeared on Shear's 2006 album Dreams Don't Count. The Youtube link below mis-labels the track as Accustomed to Clearness, another track from the album.

Jules Shear - Do What They Want (2006)

See also:

Music: Crowded House, Tim Finn & Jules Shear - Throw Your Arms Around Me (live, 1990)

Music: 'Til Tuesday - J For Jules (1989)

Music: Jules Shear - Steady (1985)