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ASTM surfacing proposal – opposition mounting
In this brief post I can do no better than direct your attention to the joint open letter to the ASTM committee by the Chair of the UK Play Safety Forum, Robin Sutcliffe and Tim Gill. It makes cogent and informed points that underscore the reasonableness of those urging ASTM to defer passing its current… Continue reading
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A real and present danger to play provision
I need to alert readers to a real and present danger. Before proceeding, however, I enter a plea. A plea that you stick with this article despite the fact that the subject may – until now – have been a turn-off. I say again: I am about to speak about a real and present danger.… Continue reading
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Play England: Whither goest thou?
The newly minted independent Play England is to have its first AGM on the 28 November. It’s potentially a significant event, and that alone justifies sharing some thoughts. But first, congratulations and thanks to the current Play England trustees are in order. I have the sense that negotiating the decoupling of Play England from NCB… Continue reading
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Want to take a more balanced approach to risk? Here’s the tool you have been waiting for
For this blog I need do no more than direct your attention to Tim Gill’s blog entitled ‘Want to take a more balanced approach to risk? Here’s the tool you have been waiting for’ which is designed to promote the new Risk-Benefit Assessment Form published by Play Scotland in partnership with Play England, Play Wales and… Continue reading
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‘Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today’
To cut to the chase: I hold that a society or culture entrapped by a perpetual need to achieve, to endlessly generate quantifiable outputs, to obsessively ‘progress’ – slippery term that – is a society most likely to exhaust and dispirit its members. For rather too long, that’s pretty much the position that has been… Continue reading
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Dear Arthur…
Arthur Batram kindly commented on my last piece, ‘On Evidence. On the Political’. (See the comments section after that article) For reasons that I hope will become clear if you care to read on, I thought that his piece too rich simply to leave a short comment-type reply. So, in a scatter-gun sort of way,… Continue reading
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On Evidence. On the Political
I want to pursue the discussion about ‘evidence’ as it affects, or is said to affect, policy and funding decisions about play. I allow myself this indulgence in part because I suspect I am at least partially responsible for provoking comment on the subject; and of course Tim Gill is also thoroughly culpable in this… Continue reading
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The Here and Now and related matters
I was flattered to be invited to speak at Play Wales’s SPIRIT conference last week where I ended up talking about freedom, the here and now, and democratic space. To my mind the three ideas are inextricably connected to each other. Part of my talk took what might be called an ‘in principle’ critical stance… Continue reading
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Democratic space
It’s not an accident that we attach the adjective ‘democratic’ to either describe actual public spaces, or to mark our aspirations for them. Indeed, there’s a flotilla of warm words – ‘shared’, ‘communal’, ‘inclusive’, ‘accessible’ – that together act as a collective nod towards the features and atmosphere we believe a truly public, ‘public space’… Continue reading
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York College Nursery Prosecution – cause for concern?
Preamble, 28 March 2014 This is a corrected version of the article first posted on the 9 February 2014. In that post I erroneously said that the HSE was the prosecuting authority in the York College nursery case. That was wrong, they were not. I apologise for my error, now corrected. However, the general points… Continue reading
About Me
This is Bernard Spiegal’s blog.
I write mainly about Palestine/Israel and related issues; sometimes other stuff too
Bernard Spiegal 