Richard Bornat

Another's Harvest

In 1946 my uncle, Dick Toms, was in the British Army in Calcutta. A committed Communist, he contacted the Kisan Sabha, a peasants' movement run by Indian Communists, travelled round Bengal learning about peasants' lives, organised unofficial help for peasant activities like new drainage ditches, and wrote a book about what he found, under the pen-name 'Alec Johnson'. It's a good book, well-written and well worth reading.

Bengal was then, despite British Government assurances, still suffering the after-effects of the 1943 famine. The book gives the lie to anybody who might wish to claim that British imperialism was a Good Thing: after 200 years of occupation, they couldn't even run Bengal fairly in the interests of its population.

Work

See my Middlesex page for past and future work.

What's the Phone Coop, then?

It's a phone/broadband provider for the UK. A real consumer co-op, if that matters to you (it does to me). Transparent pricing and good service. They host this page (and I forgive them for hiding it away for a while).

Connecting a TP-Link pocket wireless print server TL-WPS510U

I bought one of these things because it was cheap(ish), small, said it works with OS X, and said it supports WPA encryption. It does, but it took me a couple of hours to make it work, and another three to write this setup guide. But then I found that it wasn't very good in use, and I shelled out for an Airport Express, which was easy to set up and worked fine for a couple of years, then it burnt out. But it's so useful (Airplay and so on) that I bought another one.

Stuff you can hardly believe

I thought this was good

(in the USA it's great, you can even get it on a T-shirt) but then I saw this

(it's real: it came from here and it was titled "the crimes behind the world of DVD crime". A bit over the top, wouldn't you say?

Contact

email richard AT bornat DOT me DOT uk

Last modified: 29th Feb 2012 15:22:31 GMT by RB