Invocation/Rehearsal at the Bike Cemetery

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    JMP 12 (3) pp. 257268 Intellect Limited 2011

    Journal of Media PracticeVolume 12 Number 3 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jmpr.12.3.257_1

    Robin baleMiddlesex University

    i c /r rf r b C r

    abstRaCt Robins article is drawn from a performance piece that he presented as a spokenword ritual. This was rooted in a series of written phrases and incantations found ata site in East London. Robin has named this site the Bike Cemetery. It is a namelesstriangle of land, not deliberately created but rather an unconscious by-product of theconjunction of a motorway and several other roads. Behind overgrown piles of rubbleand a scrubby growth of birch and bramble is a wall that forms the support forthe motorway slip road. This wall is densely covered with text, along with collagesmade from pages of magazines and some food packaging. Judging from the dates onthe images and the differing types of paint used, one can ensure that this was theresult of several work sessions carried out by one individual, on no more than threeoccasions in the early 1990s. Robins initial performance piece utilized material fromthe site (graveyard dirt) and Super Strong Lager. In this article, he attempts toevoke the performance and reflect critically on it.

    the bike CemeteRy and its publiC

    The place that I call the Bike Cemetery syntax demands that it must becalled something is a mere crumb of land in East London, situated less thana mile from the developing 2012 Olympic Park. It is defined and sustainedalong one edge by a slip-road, motorway bridge and embankment. Wick Roaddefines another of its edges. It is a spindly shit coppice with ghosts of plastic

    keywoRdspresenceperformanceinvocationspeech actsSustainable

    Communitiesrelational citizenship

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    bags rustling in its branches. The sort of place you might find yourself in,on a Monday morning. At first light, in the piss thin drizzle. Wonderinghow you got there. Knowing you were meant to be somewhere else. The BikeCemeterys particular intimacy with traffic does, I am sure, create insur-mountable problems for the most shameless speculative or even Private Finance Initiative builder of starter homes, and likely defeats slumlords withentry-level, buy-to-let flats on their minds.

    This article started life as a performative lecture about that place. The lectureinvolved re-presentation (or rehearsal, as I then called it) of a series ofmysterious texts. These have been written by an unknown individual, on a wall forming one of the Bike Cemeterys borders. My performative lecture was delivered to an audience of postgraduate researchers at the Journeys Across Media conference, whose theme this year was space. That perform-ance has now become this journal article. Here, some of those texts are onceagain re-presented, alongside my intensified critical engagement with them. Accordingly, this article negotiates three nested or overlaid discourses/spaces. These are shaped by three different forums and modes of address: theacademic journal, the performative lecture and the anonymous writings on the wall. I have chosen to treat the latter as a signature an index, of presence.

    These spaces will be differentiated typographically: the wall writings are inthe illustrations and also at the end of this article, in bold italic; excerpts fromthe performance text are in italic. This article is not intended as a window tolook through at a real place, or to give insights into a series of real places, or togive evidence of real persons who could have inhabited them. It is a wall thathas been scrawled upon over time, by different persons, who made a markand then left.

    I wish to point out in relation to Jacques Derridas critique of J. L. Austins

    Speech Act theory (Derrida 1988) the inherent, or rather constitutive,ambiguities within the category of presence. Austins term speech actsdesignates those utterances that do something through their utterance (e.g.I promise or I wager ). According to Austin, the signature is a mark thatdesignates the sometime presence, knowledge and assent of the subject who hassigned. It is a speech act, perhaps at one remove. In signing a business contract,for example, this will be relatively clear. The signature says, I was present hereat this place and time in full knowledge of what I hereby assent to. As Austinputs it, [] written utterances are not tethered to their origin [the speaking/knowing subject] in the way spoken ones are (Austin, quoted in Derrida 1988).The signature is counted as standing in for the subject who performs the act.

    My own re-presentation of the Bike Cemetery texts in performance is, perhaps,a further substitution. The last (for now) in this chain is this article.Derrida logically asserts that for writing to function, it must still operate

    (be readable) in the definitive absence of the writer. He asserts that, for thisavatar of presence to function purely (Austins evaluative), [] what mustbe retained is the absolute singularity of a signature-event and a signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event (Derrida 1988). So, Derridademands pure unrepeatable knowledge/presence. However, to be recognizedas such, he states that it must be repeatable or iterable ; it must already havebeen repeated.

    Let us return to the example of the contract. The signature must look like

    the signature of the one who signs; it must look like all other instances of it,in other places, at other times. In some senses, therefore, it must be a forgery.

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    This does not mean that there is a clear binary opposition between a purepresence and iterations inauthenticity. As Derrida states, iteration is [] inan asymmetrical way, [] the general space of [ its] possibility (Derrida

    1988). In order to draw attention to their iterative, repeated aspects, I havedescribed my performance and this article as rehearsals. Simultaneously, Idraw attention to these aspects of the Bike Cemetery texts.

    My performative lecture was delivered in an academic context. A commonstatus defined its proceedings. Postgraduate students with shared researchinterests and common goals were present, each with a specific institutionalaffiliation. In turn, this journal is directed towards a public that, as Michael Warner describes in his essay Publics and Counterpublics (Warner 2002),comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation. I want to stressthis definition. Warner makes the plausible claim that these sorts of publics areessential in thinking of the modern liberal democratic polity. To be addressing

    a public, I cannot be writing this for people I already know. For Warner,

    [A] public is a relation among strangers [] Weve become capable ofrecognizing ourselves as strangers [in the space of public discourse] even when we know each other. Declaiming this essay to a group of inti-mates, I could still be heard as addressing a public.

    (Warner 2002, emphasis added)

    To be a member of the public, as well as to address it, is a performative act.I practice predominantly as a solo performer, frequently in a public space,addressing an audience. It may also follow from Warner that certain kinds of

    performance create public spaces. My research involves investigation of theconnection, if there is one, between the performer and the idea of the public(s).

    Figure 1: Wolf Vanish (For reasons that I hope will become obvious, I am notpresenting any photographic evidence for the place I have chosen to write about. Instead, I have translated some of the words that make up the inscriptionsmanifested in that place into the form seen above, as a form of concrete poetry, atypographic game. Their glossolalia will appear in the text at various points. Theyare to be thought of as a background noise that underlies what follows, like theincessant but half-heard sound of traffic in a city).

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    dont really exist. The smaller identities of things in the edgelands haveremained largely invisible to most of us.

    (Farley and Symmons Roberts 2011)

    There is, however, an inherent problem. Insofar as it is successful, the edge-lands will cease to be edgelands. The writers imaginative inhabitation of thesespaces intends to bring them nearer, nearer to us, but in a very particular way.Its close-up enumeration of the smaller identities of things will bring those very things into the realm of the visible, the exchangeable into the bosomof community. The technique to neuter their uncanny threat is domesticationthrough naming. The proximity required to observe these specimens is thatof the local, the domestic; different in kind to the simultaneous proximity andremoteness of the back of ones own head the obverse of the face which isever present but perpetually invisible.

    In this article, I am faced with a similar problem. Writing about an edge-land or, indeed, a performance courts the danger of betraying what gives itsubstance. Peggy Phelan makes the point succinctly: Performance cannotbe saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulationof representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes somethingother than performance (Phelan 1993).

    The Bike Cemetery is one of those sites that, during my childhood on theoutskirts of London, were simply described as waste ground. The term stillhas value. Those were the places where, away from the adults administrativegaze, we would play our semi-dangerous games make our dares and bloodyinitiations into secret societies that had no function beyond their secrecy (andour fights). They were, and still are, an inevitable by-product of the fluctua-tions of industry and commerce, blank spaces left by failed factories or situatedin the interstices between parcels of land given over to newer enterprises. All

    processes create a surplus; nothing divides neatly without remnant. They arepart of the shadowy obverse of that phantasmagorical entity the economy.

    A digression into semantics is necessary here. It will be useful to thinkabout what this name waste ground implies. First, to consider the termsseparately, waste designates a thing similar to rubbish, surplus or perhaps(maybe we shall see this later) gibberish terms that refuse to enumeratetheir content. They blanket what they indicate in summary dismissal. No oneenquires as to the specific constitution of a landfill beyond its capacities as,for example, a methane extraction facility or recycling point; that is, beyond what is productive. As a verb, it demarcates the gratuitous, spendthrift act: wasting time, energy or money, to use the most common examples. It denotes

    profligacy and points out a denial of (productive) use of resources.The second half of the phrase ground is telling. To ground (usedas a verb) something involves bringing it down to earth. This is not alwaysa malicious act; it can mean to give something an argument, for example,or theory a stable foundation and a place on which to stand. The Englishcommonplace to stand ones ground, meaning to stay in ones position,literally or metaphorically, gives some sense of this. The use of the word asa noun retains, for me, some of those connotations. In that sense, ground issomething to stand upon, build on and act from something to go (back) to,for protection.

    As I read them, waste grounds provide a place to stand. Specifically, the

    Bike Cemetery is a place to stand. Here. In this context I allow the spatial andtemporal ambiguity of here its full resonance.

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    It could be that as soon as the first building was erected and the city wasfounded, there came into being a margin or a corner, only existing in relationto that building, only coming into existence with it. This site was where things were left, forgotten, hidden. Children, strangers and fugitives would go there,and it would be within sight and earshot of that first structure, just outside the window, just against the wall. This article is an attempt to trace the edges ofone such place.

    The ciTy addresses The subjecT

    London speaks its names; from the clear, rational syntax of the tube map tothe litany of street names, wards of boroughs, local authorities, health trusts,Local Development Agencies. And so on. It presents a syntax of contiguousand overlapping jurisdictions, designated by acronyms. Estate agents enthusi-astically rebrand areas: as the Queensbridge Quarter or Old Ford Village,or even the Airport Quarter. A lot of effort is expended in making the cityarticulate. It becomes its own sales pitch. It speaks its relations and (literal)values. The city addresses the subject, structuring them as subject/citizen, as itinforms her or him of their location and correct place.

    There is a scene of recognition: I recognize the place and I recognize myself inthe place, or even through the place. Louis Althussers concept of interpella-tion as described in Judith Butlers essay Conscience Doth Make Subjects ofUs All (1995) investigates this recognition. This process, she explains,

    [] appears to stage a social scene in which a subject is hailed, thesubject turns around, and then accepts the terms by which he or she is

    hailed. This is, no doubt, a scene both punitive and reduced, for the callis made by an officer of the Law [] The call itself is also figured asa demand to align oneself with the law, a turning around (to face thelaw, to find a face for the law?), and an entrance into the language ofself-ascription Here I am through the appropriation of guilt.

    (Butler 1995)

    The policeman and the guilt might seem out of place here, a bit overstated.However, a glance at the etymology of the word ban might make thisclearer. It is commonly used now to describe a simple prohibition, for exam-ple, the pub smoking ban. However, formerly in Middle English, it meant

    both to condemn and to summon (Barnhart 1988: 7374). Butler makes clearthat prior to the address (the hailing, the summoning) there is no subject,and neither is the name theirs. Nevertheless, turning toward the law isthus at once a turn against oneself, the turning back on oneself that consti-tutes the movement of conscience (Butler 1995). This turning, the simulta-neous coming into being of the subject when called, and the turning back ofthat subject on itself, is the structure of the ban. This is a summoning thatis also a condemnation another sense of the word was that of exile. Thelaw interpellates the subject, brings her into being, as she herself embodiesthat law. It is a set of practices; it is also a set of spaces. For example, thepublication that you are now holding, reader, is a set of demarcated zones,

    each of which is validated by a name (mine, here, for instance), which havebeen validated in their turn by the editorial board, and so on. My question is,

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    by what sort of address, what summoning and what name would the wastegrounds call us?

    Speaking simply, otherness is what is excluded, or discarded aslacking value, from a particular discursive framework in order to givethat framework some kind of coherence and legitimacy [] However,if it is indeed what enables a coherent discursive position to takeplace, then what is excluded as other is not marginal othernessis the unacknowledged presence resonating at the very heart of anydiscourse.

    (Fisher 2001)

    This intimate otherness cannot be the subject of evocation through language,because it is language. It can, however, be invoked, called upon. The evoca-tion is the province of ekphrasis , an attempt at a copy, or picture, in words.Invocation is the place of magic, whether that of the priest and shaman invok-ing the goddess, or the judge and police officer manifesting through forms of words and costume the power of the state. Differing levels of presence areinvolved. Ekphrasis relies on the assumption that it is a depiction, and that thething depicted is not present. We can call a description realistic or unrealisticin relation to what it describes. It is not possible to have an unrealistic invo-cation. It can either work or not. Its relationship to the voice is clear. It is acalling upon, a summoning.

    The place

    A glossolalia already pushes up through the cracks of ordinary conversa-tion: bodily noises, quotations of delinquent sounds, and fragments ofothers voices punctuate the order of sentences with breaks and surprises[] Political, scholarly, and religious discourses [] all progressively closethemselves off to that which emerges where voice ruptures or interruptsa series of propositions, to that which is born where the other is present.

    (De Certeau 1996)

    But the city sometimes stutters, has moments of aphasia, or even Tourettes.

    The A12 started life as the A102(M). This was to be, when first mooted,part of an ambitious planned network of urban motorways that would havecrossed and encircled or gutted and strangled London. That scheme goes

    back to the post war London County Council, was inherited by the GreaterLondon Council and was quietly shelved after this section and the westwaywere completed in the early 1970s. The GLC was abolished in the 1980s. After that, responsibility for the road went to the Department of Transport.The road was reclassified in May 2000 as part of the A12. This name changewas necessitated by the transfer of authority for highways to the newly createdGreater London Authority. The GLA act did not give the Mayor responsibil-ity for motorways, but these roads were being transferred to the GLAs juris-diction (Marshall 2011). So the road to which the Bike Cemetery is attachedis itself an appendix, a vestige of something larger that never happened. Thetransitions of nomenclature from LCC to GLC to GLA involved shiftingpolitical functions and administrative content; naming is never a merelycosmetic matter. It creates a thing, defines its boundaries, and assigns.

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    The Bike Cemetery has no name outside the one I have given it. It seemsthat there is no authority accepting responsibility for it who could legitimatelyname it. Currently, the Public Health act of 1925 gives the most authoritativeaccount of who can name a street, a park and so on. It says that this is the job of Local Councils. Although developers can name the streets or blocks theybuild and residents might have the right to appeal to have a name changed,the Local Council has to approve and ratify the nomenclature.

    The fantasy of co-presence and knowledge in and through the name, thecommunity of determinate content, has long been with us in the West. Asthe Book of Genesis demonstrates, naming is one of the primal powers. Before Adam had to work, before he procreated, he and God named the flora and fauna of Eden. The Adamic language was so close to the origin that each nounperfectly encapsulated that which was named, so there was no excess or over-lap. Afterwards, the authority moved elsewhere and now, the nomenclature islegitimised by the relevant democratic bodies that is, by the agents of thattiresome abstraction, the People.

    What happens to that which falls outside the name? Escapes the power ofnaming?

    Outside of the name, the proper noun, we are left with words.

    sustainable Communities, the big soCiety oR,who lives heRe?Nikolas Roses term relational citizenship, as summarized by Mike Raco,describes the citizen and the community invoked by the term as politically,socially and economically active and self-reliant. They are non-dependenton the state, and provide for themselves through private-sector (market)provision (Raco 2007).

    Joe or Joanne Public. Their dead-eyed avatars grin vapidly at us from thepages of government health leaflets, or from the hoardings put up around thenext speculatively built debtors prison. They work out at the gym there theyare on an exercise bike; they enjoy a (moderate) glass of wine with friends;they make the most of the exciting retail opportunities in the brand newattractively landscaped public spaces see them gurning along whilst hold-ing a branded eco-friendly carrier bag. These are the Hard Working Britonsor Hard Working Families that successive governments have sworn to serve.These are the subjects who choose. From enlightened self-interest, moralconviction or whim, they vote, they shop. Amazingly, they are also meantto choose their emergency hospital. They do all this in their own name. Theysign credit agreements, mortgages, acceptable behaviour contracts, petitions[] and they protest wars with banners that say not in my name.

    the wRiteR

    The Bike Cemetery also attracted a writer. The wall of the slipway embank-ment is liberally graffitied. The texts, constructed from single words or shortphrases, heavy on repetition and play, are interspersed with collaged printed

    matter. Predominantly images of animals, fashion photographs from thelate 1980s. Some porn though not nearly as much as might be expected.

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    Monopoly money and food packaging. The words are not the usual. No politi-cal slogans, football chants, sexual slander or biblical quotations.

    This collage/text is not stashed in some private diary or splashed on the wallsof a private dwelling either. What is writing that is not public and yet not fully private? Writing that chooses as its site a place formed by the inter-stices of capital? Somewhere that is included in the city by its exclusion? Theanswer, I think, is a spell. The words have efficacy themselves.

    The style and content of both text and image make it quite clear that the whole wall over twenty feet of it is the work of one person.

    What to do with it? There are many available options. Most wouldinvolve domesticating either the place or the writer. To me, place/text/writerform some sort of unity (I would not say wholeness). Much work has been

    Figure 2: Ice Sun Lit.

    Figure 3: Rates Rats Kin Tective Wolf.

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    done to reclaim the word itself bears investigation the stories of theOther or the dispossessed to insist on their value, their right to visibilityand a place in culture. Yet to reclaim this site, the writer, the writing, fromlost-ness would be to do both a disservice. They are hermetic, belong tothemselves.

    There is utility. Turn the site into, say, a community garden, allotmentsor a nature reserve. Enumerate the varieties of flora and fauna; set up aneducation centre to teach local school children about recycling and healthyeating. Treat the texts on the wall as a form of inspirational street art and run workshops in graffiti for kids who have been excluded from school. One well-meaning person, when I told him about the place, suggested that it could beused as a space for the free and egalitarian exchange of thoughts and ideas consciousness-raising for the local community.

    Then there is empathy, imaginative reconstruction of the unique individual. Attempt to get inside the head of the Bike Cemetery writer and bricoleur. What drove them to write and assemble there? What personal traumas oraberrant psychology, addiction? Tortured artist, lunatic or both? Is there aspace for catharsis? Therapeutics?

    The particular identity of the writer is, perhaps, of no consequence. It isnot someone, a specific if unknown presence it is anyone, the mark of thederided universality of the public. The particular content of the Bike Cemeteryin its entirety is of no consequence. There are many signs of transient occu-pation. It would be the same if it was a car park or disused hard standing. Itis defined by its lack of defined use, its non-productivity. The approximationof a few rough nouns and verbs could cover it. What creates the importantunity of site/text/writer is anonymity and its simultaneous proximity andremoteness, like the back of your head.

    I have no need or obligation to reclaim or understand you. No need to rescue you your precious self from layers of tarmac andlegislation.

    We could be sentimental antiquarians fondling dry bones, drooling into theempty carapaces.

    You are like we all are landfill and now forgot. If you are dead staydead it is not my business to revive you.

    Your mouth is stopped with clay, broken tiles and all the vanished things sleeping like seeds swaddled in bin bags waiting for the day of their awaken-

    ing. I will leave the generations of poisoned earth to stop your mouth.This is not a matter of assembling your scattered bones reattaching thetongue to the withered larynx to hug you close and breathe life into you; as aventriloquist would.

    And if you have forgotten I have no mandate to remind you.

    In fact if you still breathe [] forget [] forget.

    You left no name no forwarding address and I respect your discretion. Iwill give you neither.

    It is not our business to cuddle history and tell it where it went wrong stillless to chide it. History is the province of the accident investigator.

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    (Readers are advised that speaking the following words is efficacious.)

    PREAYFENTIONTON COMPENSATIONTON

    HOLY GOST SPIRIT SAINT

    KIN TECTIVE WOLF

    DANKINFUNMENTEL TRANSATLANTIC TRAVEL

    KIN ELITE LIT

    ARK ALKA TRASH WOLF WOLF

    ALSATIONTON

    MIST SPIRIT FOG SPIRIT SMOG

    LIT ELITE RATES GK RATS

    CONVICTIONTON DISFIGMENT COMPENSATIONTON

    BANKRUPSEA

    EARS HEAR THEARS

    MAGTION TON ICE LIT SUN MILK

    WOLF VANISH WOLF VANISH WOLF

    VANISH WOLF VANISH WOLF VANISH

    WOLF VANISH WOLF VANISH WOLF

    HUNT BLITZ PRAY EVE SHEPHARD

    WARLORD

    GRITANT GRITANT

    To address you at all, I must have at least some suspicion that we share some form of language, or at least the possibility of one.

    To understand that you are you at all, we cannot share a language beyond acertain extent. Too perfect a congruence might lead me to think that you are,in fact, me.

    To recognize that you are not me, there must be something ill-fitted;misunderstandings/translations; a separation.

    But should there be no point of contact at all nothing to misconstrue, leaving

    only dumb incomprehension, then you would be invisible. In fact, you wouldbe indistinguishable from me.

    RefeRences

    Barnhart, Robert K. (ed.) (1988), Chambers Dictionary of Etymology , London:Chambers.

    Butler, J. (1995), Conscience doth make subjects of us all, Yale French Studies , 88 (Winter 1995), pp. 626.

    Cameron, D. (2010), Our Big Society Agenda [Homepage of ConservativeParty], 19 July, http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2010/07/

    David_Cameron_Our_Big_Society_Agenda.aspx. Accessed 15 September2011.

    http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2010/07/http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2010/07/
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    De Certeau, M. (1996), Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias, Representations , 56(Special Issue: The New Erudition), pp. 2947.

    Derrida, J. (1988), Signature event context, in G. Graff (ed.), Limited Inc.,Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 124.

    Farley, P. and Symmons Roberts, M. (2011), Edgelands: Journeys into EnglandsTrue Wilderness , 1 edn., London: Jonathan Cape.

    Fisher, J. (2001), Storying art (the everyday life of tricky practices), ArtCriticism , 16: 1, pp. 1224.

    Marshall, C. (2011), Ringway 1, 16 July, http://www.cbrd.co.uk/histories/ringways/ringway1/. Accessed August 2011.

    Phelan, P. (1993), Unmarked: The Politics of Performance , New York: Routledge.

    Prescott, J. and Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2003), SustainableCommunities: Building for the Future , London: Office of the Deputy PrimeMinister.

    Raco, M. (2007), Securing sustainable communities, European Urban and Regional Studies , 14: 4, pp. 30520.

    Warner, M. (2002), Publics and counterpublics, Public Culture , 14: 1,pp. 4990.

    SuggeSted citation

    Bale, R. (2011), Invocation/rehearsal for the Bike Cemetery, Journal of Media Practice 12: 3, pp. 257268, doi: 10.1386/jmpr.12.3.257_1

    contributor detailS

    Robin Bale is a London-based artist and poet. He primarily makes impro- vised spoken word pieces that sometimes utilize simple props and latterly,digital technologies applied to sound and voice. His work has often beenperformed in public places: the concourse of St Pancras Station, next to thebins and a busy bus stop in the centre of Luton, several town squares inLapland and on a bridge at the borders of the 2012 London Olympics site,amongst others. These pieces were intended to polarize the space they aremade in, drawing a sharp distinction between different sense of The Public between the performer, who chants, shouts and pours beer, the audience andthose who just happen to be passing by on other business. He received an MAin sculpture from the Royal College of Art and is in receipt of a scholarshipto study for a doctorate in Fine Art at Middlesex University with the workingtitle of The Performer and the Polity: Making (a) Public. He was one of the

    selected artists for the Fresh AiR Platform performance event in 2011.E-mail: [email protected]

    http://www.cbrd.co.uk/histories/http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=0899-2363()14:1L.49[aid=7012541]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=0899-2363()14:1L.49[aid=7012541]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=0899-2363()14:1L.49[aid=7012541]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=0899-2363()14:1L.49[aid=7012541]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=0899-2363()14:1L.49[aid=7012541]http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.12.3.257_1http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.12.3.257_1http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.12.3.257_1http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.12.3.257_1http://www.cbrd.co.uk/histories/http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=0899-2363()14:1L.49[aid=7012541]http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=0899-2363()14:1L.49[aid=7012541]