June 22, in Protea Glen, in Soweto was inaugurated the first Sustainable Legacy Park. It’s a park that will be used to uplift communities, bridge gaps between the police and the people they serve, rescue street children, reduce crime, find sportsmen, provide new jobs and too many other benefits. In short is a project that is turning the dreams of a generation into a reality. (Richmark Sentinel reports)

The presence of the Italian squad, gli azzurri, 2006 world champions, was invited to the inauguration but they failed to go, allegedly because they were ashamed by the result against Brazil. Michael Trapido calls it a disgrace. I wonder, was the awful match against Brazil disgraceful enough? Besides, how can you compare the two events? The history and the future of Soweto with a game in the Confederation Cup? Shouldn’t the Italian team notice that there is a difference in importance between the two?

A few quck notes on my online reading. Ann Kirschner, academic and writer, wrote an interesting piece on reading habits. Having to read Dickens’ Little Dorrit for her book club, she decided to try out different formats, noticing that we have several options on how we can “read” a novel, having to make a choice among “a multiplicity of forms and platforms and technologies and interfaces”, choice that “could be dispiriting if you are inclined to worry about the death of the book”.
The question that is haunting us today is then “do I love books or do I love reading?”
Her decision to use different formats, namely paperback, Amazon’s Kindle, iphone text screen and an audiobook. She jumped back and forth from one to the other, according to the different reading situation, and tell her experience and thoughts in Reading Dickens Four Ways. Initially there was the paperback edition, the traditional book, with the inevitable nostalgic feeling (“In a book about how the present is haunted by the past, I was confronting my old self through the medium of the physical book, still in great condition, still fitting perfectly in my hands. How dare we think that anything could replace it?”), then the audiobook, which also has a past to remember. It started with audiocassette in the Sony Walkman, then mp3 players, and finally iPhone, which has the advantage of combining together a text and audio version (and also a mobile phone, of course). The audiobook has practical advantages (you can listen to it practically everywhere) and creates a peculiar atmosphere:
“Audiobooks also impose a certain discipline. I think of this as real-time reading: The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section. For Dickens, so naturally cinematic and plot-driven, that can have a breathtaking effect. It was my good fortune to be listening when Little Dorrit and Maggie spent their long night wandering the London streets. I shivered with them, I shared their exhaustion, and I sighed with the dull relief of returning to the Marshalsea prison”
Finally, there is the ebook, where the iphone seems to win over the Kindle, for easiness of use and for the possibility to highlight and annotate texts.
The conclusion of the piece is that as much as we love books, we love reading more. That is why I dare to agree with Kirschner when she said that “Regardless of format, Little Dorrit seized me no less forcefully today in its indictment of society’s ability to destroy through greed and crushing self-interest”.

If you spend most of your time in a city, you definitely yearn for the countryside. Margaret Gelling did for sure. That is why she spent a lot of time studying place names and their meanings:

“Early Anglo-Saxon settlers in England, observing, walking and working the landscape, defined its ups and downs with a subtlety largely missing from modern, motorised English. Dozens of words, none of them synonymous, described the look of a hill, the angle of slope and the way trees grew upon it. And after the Anglo-Saxons, no one looked at the landscape in quite that way until Margaret Gelling [...] When it came to understanding English place names, there was no substitute for donning your wellies and using your eyes.”

Modern landscape is  largely human-made, as Asa Briggs said speaking of England:

“There are as many varieties of scene in the English countryside as there are layers of history in English society. The landscape reflects the complex geology and varied weather of the island. Yet it reflects much else besides. Some of the wildest twentieth-century landscapes, like the bleak heathland of Dorset, were cultivated very early in the English history. ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, as the eighteenth-century English poet William Blake called it, is as much the product of history as its ‘dark satanic mills’. The seashore has changed too, although the presence of the sea and the nearness of all English places, however remote, to it, have always been significant in English history, as significant as mountains or deserts in other parts of the world. Nature in the form of hill or valley, lake or fen, copse or forest, has often consoled or inspired the English when events have mumbed or shocked, and the fear that nature may be threatened can still be strong. ‘This is our own, our native land.’ Local loyalties relate too to a sense of local landscape, and nature and culture – the latter a word derived from the land – are inextricably entangled in every part of England.”

Mainly for this reason, Margaret Gelling’s books are particularly fascinating.