Richard Neal, Captain of Southover Ringers

I’ve been captain since March last year. I decide what the band is going to ring and I organise the ringing according to the abilities of those present. Generally we rotate the captaincy; I have had two other three-year periods as the captain.
 
I learned to ring at Ripe when I was 11, so that's 44 years I've been ringing. Bell ringing is very safe. It isn’t true that ringers commonly get lifted off the ground by the bell rope. In all my time I've only ever seen one person go airborne.
 
We've got roughly 25 ringers at the moment, which probably means we are one of the three strongest towers in Sussex for membership. Our oldest ringers are in their eighties and our youngest ringer is about 11.
 
Monday night is the learners’ practice when we use our simulator: it lets you practise the technique but the sound is generated by a computer inside the belfry. Tuesday night is a more advanced practice on the 'open' bells.
 
We ring from 9.30 until 10 on a Sunday morning and from 6 until 6.30 in the evening. Sometimes we do longer pieces called ‘quarter peals’ on a Sunday evening. These take about 45 minutes. We send details of these performances to a magazine called 'The Ringing World', where they are published for other ringers to see and admire.
 
The art of bell ringing is to try and get a rhythmical, evenly-spaced sound from the bells. This is complicated to achieve because each bell is a different size, so it swings at a different rate… and a number of bells have something called 'odd struckness', which means the clapper doesn't swing evenly. A ringer will constantly attempt to compensate for these variables.
 
Here, we've got ten bells. The largest – our tenor bell – weighs over 17 hundredweight [885kg]. The normal number of bells is either six or eight, so we're lucky to have ten.
 
In the late 1500s and the early 1600s, a lot of church bells in England were fitted with a complete wheel on the bell. The bell rope wraps around that wheel, which enables you to turn the bell through 360 degrees and to control the speed of the bell. With a lot of practice, the band can learn to ring mathematical patterns that change the order of the bells. This technique is known as ‘change ringing’: each sequence by all the bells in the pattern is a single ‘change’. It's a very English art.
 
A ‘peal’ consists of at least 5,000 unique changes and takes about three hours to ring. Peals aren't always successful: if a ringer makes a mistake in the pattern and you don't achieve unique changes, you have to stop.
 
Bell ringing exercises the brain and the body together. You ring as a team and everyone is equal in that team, men and women, young and old. You never stop learning.
 
As told to Mark Bridge

TRINITY church, Southover High Street, Lewes

A version of this article was first published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 127 April 2017.
 

Bob Trotter, volunteer bicycle fixer
 
You’ll find us outside the Nutty Wizard every Saturday morning, at the junction of Cliffe High Street and South Street. From March we’re there from 9.30am until 12.30pm.
 
Dr Bike is a group of cycle enthusiasts who want to help local people to use their bikes more. We offer friendly help to cyclists who have fairly basic bikes that are in need of first aid. Most bikes go wrong because they haven’t been maintained: cables seize up through lack of oil, brake blocks wear out, gears go out of adjustment or tyres go flat. We can even sometimes unbuckle a wheel but that depends on the state of the spokes. Higher-end bikes or those needing more complicated repairs are better served by Lewes’s two Cycle Shack outlets.
 
At the moment there are around eight Dr Bikers in total, usually with three or four volunteers on duty each week. The service began in 1991, shortly after the first Lewes Green Wheels Day to encourage the use of sustainable transport. Pete Barnes and Chris Franks were the two original ‘doctors’. They were based outside Fitzroy House, the old library building opposite Boots, which is where Chris lived at the time. By 2014 Chris had moved away and the Farmers Market was being held on the precinct twice a month, so we moved our surgery to the Nutty Wizard building.
 
I've been told the Nutty Wizard was originally a public toilet before it was converted. It now hosts a youth club, book swaps days, language lessons, an occasional cafe and much more. Dr Bike helps support all this with any extra money we’re given.
 
We only charge trade prices for the parts we supply. Customers can make a donation for our labour, which pays for our insurance, tools and rent.
 
Our most important piece of kit is the work stand, which holds a bike up in the air so the wheels can rotate. It means we can fix gears, brakes and punctures without getting a bad back. We've got a well-stocked tool box, puncture repair kits, cable inners and outers, brake blocks and, most importantly, lots of good oil.
 
I started volunteering in November 2013. I’d previously worked in the fire service with one of the other Dr Bikers but now I am a cycle trainer for East Sussex County Council, teaching Bikeability; a road-based version of the old Cycling Proficiency Test.
 
Whatever your views on global warming and green travel, cycling will make you fitter and is more fun – especially when you can pedal past traffic jams on our ever-expanding cycle route network. I often find I can actually get somewhere quicker by bike than by driving, so it's win-win. If the only thing preventing you from cycling more is a poorly bike, then maybe it's time to take it to the doctors!
 
As told to Mark Bridge
 
drbikelewes.com | facebook.com/drbikelewes

A version of this feature was first published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 126 March 2017.
 

Lots of people sign up for online courses but don't finish them, for all kinds of good reasons. They might be unfamiliar with digital learning, or they struggle with motivation. The idea of the University of Us is to get local people together to support and motivate each other, with the help of a facilitator.
 
At the moment I've got a group that's studying 'Start Writing Fiction'. When we meet, we talk about anything they've found difficult, and I explain what's coming up next week and how they can get the most enjoyment out of it.
 
The upcoming courses that I'm thinking of are a short course on using online tools, perhaps looking at social media skills, while another is about preparing students to go to university. And I’m also looking for a course on food production, sustainability and horticulture.
 
People can tell me their interests by using the contact form on the University of Us web page. When I’ve found an online course that looks good, I'll give them the instructions for signing up. The online courses are free or low cost; the University of Us fees depend on the length of the course, but are usually between £50 and £100.
 
I worked for the Open University for over 15 years and have an MA in Online and Distance Education, so I'm pretty good at spotting the courses that’ll work well. It’s all about helping people to enjoy learning.
 
universityofus.co.uk /  info@universityofus.co.uk
 
Interview by Mark Bridge. First published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 126 March 2017.
 
 

I love oriental rugs, especially the old ones. They are works of art, in my opinion, but it’s a dying art. Large-scale production in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan has stopped; these were the main countries. In a couple of decades, no-one will be making traditional hand-made rugs.
 
Old rugs are always the best. People made them to use themselves, with hand-spun wool, with vegetable dyes and with good workmanship. They’re strong and they last for a very long time.
 
Kilim is the Turkish word for a flat rug created by two types of thread: warp and weft. The warp is stretched on a loom, like a frame, and designs are created by weaving different colours of weft. Halı is the Turkish word for pile rugs; they’re created by warp and weft and also with knots to add depth.
 
I’ve worked with rugs since 1976. I was studying journalism in Turkey and started helping a rug company with their export business. In this profession, we say "once you get the dust of a rug into your lungs, it is addictive".
 
When I came to the UK, I immediately opened a shop in Brighton. In 2007 I moved my business to Newhaven, where I was already doing repairs and cleaning. Now I mainly work with the trade, although I still sell directly to local customers.
 
I buy stock that I can repair and clean. Experience is my advantage. I do every aspect of the business myself.
 
01273 517744 / kalkantrading.co.uk

Interview by Mark Bridge. First published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 123 December 2016.

My phone rings. “Hiya Mark, it’s Ruarri Joseph”. He pronounces his first name to rhyme with ‘brewery’, which deals with my first worry. “How’s it going, man?” Truth is I’m slightly star-struck, with a copy of Ruarri’s 2007 debut CD Tales of Grime and Grit in my collection.
 
That first album prompted many favourable comparisons, although Ruarri is cautious about being pigeonholed. “I think somebody once said ‘Dylan, had he grown up in Newquay’ [that was NME], which you can only take as a compliment, but any Dylan fans are going to give you a listen and go ‘what are you on about?’ Similarly, with Atlantic Records, they tried to sell me as the 'British Jack Johnson', presumably because I live near the beach. But again, no disrespect to Jack Johnson, that's not who I am. You're almost turning people away. If they're going to listen to you because of that, then they're going to be disappointed."
 
After his first CD, Ruarri Joseph decided that a contract with a major record label wasn’t right for him, so he recorded his next album independently. "I read somewhere once that I left Atlantic over a dispute because of creative differences. I think that's the story people have tried to paint. I don't recall that being the way it happened.” In 2009 there was a third studio album and in 2012 a fourth, Brother, which was a tribute to his friend Matt Upsher, who died in a surfing accident. I ask how his songwriting has evolved over the past decade. "I went through a time of being very pragmatic around it, certainly with the last solo record, poring over the lyrics and poring over how it came across. It wasn't an album that was for me; I wanted it to tick the right boxes for everybody that knew Matt."
 
The intensity of Brother, combined with its popularity, led to what was billed as the Ruarri Joseph Farewell Tour last year. “I felt like I needed a break from those songs. I'd sung them so many times over the course of three years and I didn't want them to lose meaning”, he tells me.
 
So Ruarri Joseph the solo artist is gone… and Ruarri Joseph the person has adopted a new identity. It’s William the Conqueror who’s currently touring the UK and will be visiting Union Music Store on Record Store Day this month. But is William the man or the band? "I like the ambiguity", Ruarri/William tells me. "Sometimes it's appropriate for it to be me and sometimes it's appropriate for it to be the band. That's just the way it happened. When I first started performing, I was William because I was doing it on my own, but then other people joined."
 
The name was chosen initially so that Ruarri could perform ‘secret’ gigs of new material whilst also touring under his real name. “William the Conqueror seemed like a name that was pretty far away from Ruarri Joseph and wouldn't raise any suspicions that it was me.” It’s not the kind of name I’d have expected a modest chap like Ruarri Joseph to have chosen, I suggest. "There you go. I was right." Since being chosen, the name has taken on more significance. "I realised that Ruarri Joseph had only been putting albums out since he had become a dad. I thought it would be cool to write about my life before that, about my childhood and growing up. William the Conqueror was the kind of name I probably would have given myself as a kid; that insane confidence that you can do anything, go anywhere, the world is your oyster.”
 
As William the Conqueror, Ruarri Joseph is finding songwriting much easier than he did under his real name. “In becoming William, it was a case of letting go and almost subconsciously writing the songs; having something in your mind and just seeing where the guitar takes you or seeing where the pen takes you.” He’s already written enough material for a trilogy of albums. “Maybe one way of looking at it would be that my eight years of being a solo artist have been like a kind of training or a PhD. I feel like I've found my voice since becoming William. The songwriting process makes much more sense to me now; it's like a faucet that's opened up. The energy that you have when you're young, when you first start, it's certainly something I've enjoyed trying to tap into again."
 
So far William the Conqueror has just released an EP, while the first full-length album is nearly finished. The band currently consists of drummer Harry Harding and bass player Naomi Holmes, who'd been in Ruarri’s backing band. “We have a nice chemistry when we play. I've enjoyed writing with their strengths in mind.” The EP is available digitally, on CD and on a 10-inch vinyl record as well. “I’m very excited about that, not least because my friend Tony Plant has done the artwork. It's a bit of a dream to have it done. That's a really lovely idea, to think that somebody is going to take a physical copy of your record and go to the trouble of putting it on. That's the way it should be. You want people to listen to it properly."
 
What music is on Ruarri’s turntable at the moment? “I got into Tom Waits around the time of CDs, so I have everything on CD but not on record. JJ Cale on vinyl is a winner every time. Bowie's Blackstar hasn't really been off the turntable since I got that. A phenomenal record. I'm a little bit out of touch. Maybe it's because I have the kids kicking around with their things which don't necessarily please my ears, so I retreat into the things I know I'm going to like."
 
Yet despite his striving for the perfectly-crafted song and the perfectly-produced album, Ruarri remains a big fan of live music. “When I started, playing a gig in a pub where I didn't have to do anything other than turn up made it all about the music. There's no better way to figure out whether a song is working. It's like a comedian trying out a joke. Playing live is absolutely essential to figuring out who you are as an artist.”
 
Which brings me back to my question about who ‘William’ actually is. After 45 minutes on the phone I think I have an answer. As far as I can tell, William the Conqueror is the man Ruarri Joseph didn’t get a chance to be. “I kind-of fell into the music thing accidentally. It was this crazy whirlwind thing and I never really found my feet with it all. This time round I feel like I know what I'm doing and what I want. I’m really enjoying it. The gigs feel really fresh. I've kind-of forgotten the Ruarri Joseph songs.”
 
Record Store Day is on Sat 16 April 2016; live performances by visiting artists at Union Music Store start from midday. unionmusicstore.com

This is an extended version of an interview first published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 115 April 2016
 

Device detection and responsive design explained

James Rosewell shows me a colourful roll of paper that's the width of an iPhone yet well over three metres long. But this is no celebratory banner. When I look closer, I can see it's a printed copy of the Wall Street Journal's mobile website. That's a lot of scrolling to do... and a pretty unfriendly user experience for anyone reading the news online. Why does it work so badly?

Responsive web design is to blame, James tells me. This method of website creation – often summarised as a ‘mobile first’ approach – involves starting with a small screen, then automatically adjusting the layout depending on the screen size of the device you’re using. It means that users may see several columns with features and photographs if they visit a newspaper’s site on their laptop, yet can be shown fewer columns if they visit on an iPad, or just a single column when reading the site on a smartphone.

It’s pretty clever but, as the lengthy print-out demonstrates, it isn’t perfect. “What that misses is the context of the device and how the user's requirements change”, James explains. “So what you see with news organisations, for example, is websites like the Wall Street Journal, where you go to the home page and you're effectively scrolling through three-and-a-half metres of content in order to get to the bottom of the page. In that particular example, the user has two directions they can swipe by mobile phone: you've got the vertical and the horizontal. Often, with responsive web design, the horizontal is being lost. There's no reason why that should be.” And in addition, advertisers aren’t likely to be happy if their message is lost somewhere in the middle of an apparently endless reel of news.

Getting websites to react intelligently to their visitors is what James Rosewell’s company specialises in. He’s founder and CEO of 51Degrees, a Berkshire-based company that was founded in 2009. 51Degrees enables websites to know what device is being used to access their pages: not just the screen size but also key features – does it have a touchscreen, for example – and even the specifications of certain components, such as the graphics processor. As a result, website owners can tailor their sites to work perfectly for virtually every visitor.

This means that visitors on laptops, tablets and phones could each receive a version of the site focussed on their specific needs. James describes how a bike company might analyse which devices their customers were using when they visited certain parts of the website. “They may find there's a lower propensity for people to purchase expensive bikes on a mobile phone but there's a far higher propensity for them to purchase lower-cost accessories.” Armed with that information, the company can then optimise the products that are being displayed, targeting desktop visitors with bicycles to buy and mobile visitors with accessories “so they can improve the experience and therefore get more people checking out and spending money”.

In order to work effectively, this type of web technology requires up-to-date information about new or updated devices. In the past, it hasn’t always had a good reputation.

“For a long time, developers have been told that something called 'browser detection' is not a good thing to do”, James says. “Browser detection typically means you look at the version of the web browser - for example, it might be Chrome 38 - and you then say 'okay, Chrome 38 is capable of x but not capable of y. Therefore I may use technique x but I won't use technique y.’ Of course, the problem is that Chrome 39 comes out, Chrome 40 comes out, so this logic has to be continually maintained. Once developers have released their project or website to the client, they’re not necessarily engaged in maintaining that data. This is seen as a problem, and rightly so. It needs to be updated.”

51Degrees provides a simple solution in two parts. Firstly, it has a team of ten people that maintains a database of detailed device specifications, adding more than 200 new models every week. The 51Degrees device database now holds over 28,000 devices and 320,000 combinations of device, operating system and web browser: a true ‘device detection’ service that’s much broader than mere ‘browser detection’. Next, it makes it easy for businesses (and their developers or designers) to use this data, offering a choice of automatic updates or a cloud-based service. “On-premise deployment is quicker, because it doesn't have to go over the internet to get the information. A lot of larger organisations prefer this because it keeps the technology in one place, which is easier for them to manage.”

Despite the amount of information involved, device detection from 51Degrees is remarkably quick. “It'll typically take well under one millisecond”, says James. In fact, his top-end product currently runs at 0.0016 milliseconds. “The time taken to do device detection is miniscule compared to the overall time it would take for the other components to render a page. A cloud service is naturally going to have a slower detection time because the request has to pass over the internet and back again; typically that process takes 10 to 20 milliseconds.”

Rather than charging for the product, the 51Degrees device detection is free and open-source. “That's a very permissive open-source licence”, James points out, “you can use it commercially, for example.” There’s then the option of a free data file, updated monthly with new devices, or the choice of chargeable weekly and daily data file updates.

That could easily be the end of this story. A story of how good device detection can enhance the user experience and provide financial benefits for website owners. However, 51Degrees doesn’t just monitor the number of new internet-connected devices on the market. It’s also capable of counting the different devices that visit 51Degrees-enabled websites. “Businesses and developers can enable aggregated usage-sharing”, says James “and that information can then be analysed. It's all freely available on our website.” So, for example, you can compare devices or operating systems across continents or countries – Android devices in Europe, maybe, or screen sizes in India – and see them as a graph.

And James has another technological trick up his sleeve. “One of the ways we've started visualising some of that data is in a 3D rotation of the world, where you can go to digitalglo.be and interact with that data. You can see in which countries different device vendors are popular, you can see the usage rise and fall as the time of day changes, and then compare one vendor against the other.”

The 3D visualisation was built with the help of Robert Bateman, Founder and Managing Director of non-profit software company The Away Foundation. It took around five months to develop, using the AwayJS framework, and was first revealed at Mobile World Congress this year.

Their map shows the world as a globe with varying points of light shining out from each continent. Each point is a representation of genuine user data, with on-screen options to view anonymised information for different handsets, countries and time of day.

“It pulls out things which you might not necessarily notice by looking at data itself”, Robert explains, “so it's a nice way of getting a feel for where your customers are, or where the hot-spots are for the different handsets.”

The digitalglo.be project is certainly an impressive demonstration of web technology and the 51Degrees data source. But what about apps?, I ask James.

“My thinking is that the app is not long for this world”, he tells me. “The web browser - as you can see through the digital globe - is now capable of high-end graphics, it has all the capabilities needed to produce high-end games, so why use a native app? There's no real benefit. A simpler world is available through the web browser.”

First published on TheFonecast.com September 2015.

I'm sitting in the Lewes home of a man who's been described as “Britain's greatest investigative journalist” but also as “a media-hating zealot”. So how does he introduce himself?

“I would say I’m just Nick Davies from The Guardian. It doesn’t make any sense, all this ‘greatest investigative reporter’ stuff, it’s completely unscientific.”

Our conversation starts with the subject of Nick’s adopted home town. “One of the few good decisions I made in life – with the mother of my children – was moving out of London to come here. Lewes has become a refuge where it’s basically peaceful and the air is clear. It doesn’t matter whether I’m going through a good phase where everybody’s saying ‘well done’ or a bad phase where everybody’s saying I’m the devil's seed, the people I bump into in the streets of Lewes couldn’t care less; they just treat me the same way. So it makes me feel extremely safe.”

In the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion, Nick wrote Flat Earth News, “a book about the media and why we so often push out stories that are full of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.” He then investigated ‘phone hacking’, which led to the closure of the News of the World newspaper and a number of arrests.

“The hacking scandal itself has got several years to run. There’s a lot of people awaiting trial. There’s a lot more people who’ve been arrested and are waiting to discover whether they will be prosecuted. Its ramifications for Rupert Murdoch have yet to work their way through, because there may be an inquiry by the FBI into the parent company. We haven’t finished on the implications for media regulation; there’s a tremendous struggle going on about what should happen. And we haven’t resolved the most important thing, which is about the political power of media proprietors.”

The story so far is told in Nick’s latest book Hack Attack, now due to become a film directed by George Clooney. I tell Nick that I was surprised how much of the hacking investigation involved his work. “There was a small group of people”, he points out. “Me and two or three MPs and a handful of lawyers – and then more journalists become involved. It definitely isn’t a one-man show but it’s quite a small group.”

Was there a point that Nick thought (or realised) he was becoming part of the story? “There was a specific sense in which I and the editor at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, were worried that we would become the story – which was that the newspapers involved in committing crimes might choose to punish us by exposing our private lives. That in itself would be scary – and if you consider the amount of distortion they would pour into it, it would be really very worrying. As it turned out, they went after one of the MPs – Tom Watson – and two of the lawyers. The News of the World hired a private investigator who specialises in covert surveillance to follow them and secretly video them, hoping to catch them out in some kind of inappropriate sexual behaviour that could be used to punish them, humiliate them and deter them from investigating. But that was fruitless because they didn’t find those three people doing anything. And as far as I know, they didn’t do it to me.”

Does Nick think his work has adversely affected press regulation… and can journalists ever be justified in breaking the law? “Well, we’ve got no regulation at all – so nothing’s changed there! You’re seeing the law being enforced, which is a rather different thing. I’m a hundred percent sure we haven’t reduced the freedom of the press.”

“I think just about everybody recognises that it can, in unusual circumstances, be right to break a moral rule or break the law for some important reason. What went wrong in some of these newspapers was the commercial drive to make profit simply took over. The breaking of rules and the breaking of laws was no longer exceptional, it was routine. And these are crimes which have victims.”

Yet despite his high-profile work in exposing wrongdoing, Nick admits the results aren’t always permanent. “I don’t have any illusions about the power of the press – or the power of a writer”, he says. “You expose the bad thing, the people responsible for it get very angry with you and make all sorts of threats and loud noises... and then they carry on regardless. I think we’ve reduced the level of crime in newspapers to zero for a while – but other than that, I don’t think we’ve achieved very much. That doesn’t surprise me. Words aren’t always as powerful as they were for Tom Paine.”

Tom Paine is the 18th-century democracy campaigner who lived in Lewes for several years, later writing works that supported American Independence and the French Revolution.

“Recently I was watching a documentary about Tom Paine. And it struck me that perhaps no human being in history – with the possible exception of Jesus – has ever had such impact on events, purely by using words.”

What books does Nick like to settle down with? “I read a lot of Henning Mankell, the Swedish detective writer. He’s telling you a good story but he’s also getting you to think about the world.” And journalism? “The best books by journalists or about journalists… I would say Harry Evans, who used to be editor of the Sunday Times. His memoirs, called Good Times, Bad Times, are just wonderful. Stories behind stories. All journalists should read it.”

“I like Tom Wolfe’s early stuff. His early stuff, when he’s just writing non-fiction, is incredibly well researched and vividly written. I think Charles Dickens is interesting, too. He worked as a journalist as well as a novelist. And he’s like Henning Mankell in his novels; Oliver Twist is a furiously angry exposure of child poverty in Victorian Britain. He’s telling a great story and trying to tell you something important about the world.”

Nick Davies is talking this month at an event arranged by Lewes Liberal Democrats. Does this suggest he might be considering a move into politics?

“No, no, no. I say ‘yes’ to local things. I’ve known Norman Baker for 20 years and I like him as a bloke. I think he’s got hidden depths. He’s very clever, politically, as well. So I’m perfectly happy to do it with him but I’m not going to go anywhere near mainstream politics. I’m going to carry on writing.” 

Hack Attack with Nick Davies and Norman Baker MP, Sun 14 Dec 2014, 6pm, St Thomas’s Hall, Cliffe High Street, free but £5 donation requested (redeemable against signed book)

This is an extended version of the article first published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 99 December 2014.