It was one of those days which seemed to develop a theme of its own volition. The theme was litter, and it started in the early (ish) morning on my way into the office. A couple of guys were walking towards me and one of them casually tossed a small crumpled ball of paper on the floor, into a space at the foot of a balustrade. He smiled and walked on, laughing with his friend. Just behind me, a man who was probably a civil servant wearing a suit and trainers snorted in disgust:
"Litter bug!" and looked back in stern disapproval at the men. He turned back to look at me and said:
"Did you see that? Disgraceful!"
I nodded, clutching my Pret a Manger coffee cup in my hand and he went on:
"I hate that!"
"So do I," I mumbled and watched him stomp away in his trainers, shaking his head in disbelief.
I perched my now empty coffee cup on the bus ticket machine and left it there.
On the way home, as I was walking along the road, a chap came out of one of the shops and simply tossed a waxed paper drinks cup into the street. A small woman noticed him and said:
"Don't you have a bin?"
The man simply shook his head, smirking as he did so, and this response certainly got the woman's dander up:
"Disgusting!" she spat out, placing her hand on her hip in a challenging sort of way. I saw her point - frowning, imploring - toward a bin not 20 yards distant. This did not elicit a response from the loutish yob (whom I took to be something to do with the shop) in the doorway.
She carried on remonstrating with the belligerent shopkeeper as I moved out of earshot, surreptitiously tossing my empty pack of crisps to the floor as I went.
Tuesday is rubbish day in Enfield. The lorries start rumbling before 7 o'clock, and there are two runs - one for the landfill, and one for the recyclables. Folks put their waste outside on a Monday night in anticipation of the Vultures' arrival. My walk up the hill to catch the bus to work starts at around the same time as the collection. Something, for some reason, depresses me greatly about the bits of trash strewn across the pavement. Not so much the fact of rubbish being on the streets - after all, this is hardly Mumbai or any other ravaged Third World city with populated dumps - it's more the lonely, random quality of the items themselves. It's difficult to describe why, but perhaps a simple list of the things I've seen might convey the sense of desolation I feel.
Empty pack of fusilli pasta
Box of 10 dinner candles
Pack of Ülker wafers Sachet of Felix premium cat food Müller Rice pot
The sight of these random articles, ever so slightly soiled, lying on the floor before me, fills me with an intense sense of melancholy.
We live in a country where 23 out of the 29 members of our 'elected' government are millionaires. Is it any surprise that there is bugger-all attention paid to the terrifying demise of the world around us? If ever the phrase 'fiddling while Rome burns' was apposite, surely this is it. We watch our TV screens, our iPods and iPads, our Androids... and we see the utter havoc caused by floods in Pakistan.
We must of course remain optimistic. There is the inherent short-termism of our human race always at the heart of everything we do, but I see only the shadow. Any sense of humanity we might once have dreamed of is slowly but surely undergoing strangulation. What does it matter to some faceless, nameless internet commenter that the scarce resources in the most populous areas of the globe are becoming ever more difficult to find? Why should we give a toss when the people living in less fortunate countries than our own strike out across continents to seek solace on our shores?
At the same time, Francis Maude, George Osborne, David Cameron and 20 others in our 'cabinet' continue to cream the benefit of their inherited property, bolstered by bogus expense claims. None of this renders any action irrelevant of course. It's just that, well...
The country wallows in a morass of anticipation of the sword hovering over our bowed heads. While the disabled and hungry are robbed of their dignity and the meagre sums they hold in store nobody speaks a word of protest, yet when mention is made of taking £20 a week from those who already have enough to live on, our noble leaders beat a hasty retreat for fear of losing their vote. Let no-one mistake this first step towards Americanising the British welfare and benefits system, and yet the voices of anger which most alarmed the Coalition were not those of the left, bemoaning the end of universalism, but the relatively wealthy, who might be forced to cut down on an au pair or two. The Opposition presents a disheartening face for any who harbour hopes of reversing the trend of nastiness and greed which has characterised the political landscape for too long.
Rivers of blood flow towards the Danube, staining the earth yet again and pouring poisons into the water supply. They say that 12 countries, through which the Danube flows, could be effected by the spill. Obama and his crowd have been exposed for hiding the terrible reality of another spill in the Gulf of Mexico, spinning the scientists’ numbers. The price of a gallon of ‘gas’ in the USA is on average between $2.50 and $3.00, which equates to about £1.50. Here in the UK, 1 litre costs around £1.19, which equates to about £4.50 for a US gallon.
Liverpool FC look likely to be not only wearing red socks very soon, unless those two lovely Americans can stop another American from buying out the club, leaving them with not a sausage from their ill-advised sojourn into the Premier League madness. Also leaving the red Scousers without the promise of a new ground and the attendant Caffe Neros, Eats’s and Boots’s these things inevitably trail in their wakes. Premier League clubs, it has been said, are responsible for 56% of the football debt in Europe, which is a sobering thought. A major contributor to that mountain are of course Manchester City, who have announced losses of £121,000,000 for the last year. Although Sheik Mansour is probably good for a few quid yet, I hear we are looking to expand Eastlands to boost ticket sales. Another way to do this might be to introduce a more formal type of gladiatorial event on match days, rather than just watching Nigel De Jong (the new villain of the piece) career into opposing players and break their limbs.
My team sit second in the league, above the Rags, and that is a heart-warming thought, though the style of play (Adam Johnson and Tevez excepted of course) which has brought us to this position is not one with which I feel comfortable. I have never believed in winning at all costs, and honestly (as I have said before) prefer to watch a good match which we lose than a crap one which we win. It does help that this recent turn of events also coincides with a sharp decline in United’s fortunes, and one can only hold out for similar catastrophes to befall yet another bunch of bloody Yanks who are siphoning off the meat headed fan money to cover their sorry arses.
Another winter approaches. Only 15 more (touch wood) till I reach 60...
Watching Joan Ruddock on the telly the other morning made me realise how far things have come, and how far they have yet to go. Smack bang in the middle of Corrie is an ad featuring (I think) Nigel from Eastenders about the crimes of carbon production. "Does it have a happy ending?" the nauseatingly cute girl asks Nige. Well I doubt it my dear, but let's wait and see. I have dutifully searched online for Act On CO2 and have become enormously embiggened by the whole cromulent process.
Joan is of course relatively close to my heart, along with Ed, and the other cronies who have made such sterling efforts to contribute to carbon reduction measures over the past year. Also close to my heart has been the Climate Camp, embroiled as I was in the protests at Whitehall Place a month or so ago. I was - to all intents and purposes - on the wrong side of the fence, facing the crusties as they sat in their canoes and chanted their slogans, while I fretted about the creature comforts of the SCS and the contract lead. I am following them on Twitter - even to mobile device level - but this is largely so that I can prepare to defend against, rather than mobilising the tent and the Special Brew so that I can join in another swoop. What can I say? I am a whore, like the rest of them. That includes you, by the way.
If we talk about sustainability (for what else is there when asking about climate change?) then we must take a holistic view. We have all (now, I guess anyways) seen the plantations of palm trees replacing the indigenous flora, partly to satisfy our insatiable need for recycled packaging, but mostly to feed our even more vampiric desire to defy the natural processes of life - i.e., ageing. If we can't accept the fact that we as humans are not sustainable, but that life itself must ultimately be so, then we are in big trouble.
The malaise spreads far and wide. Countless millions of tiny plastic bottles, made from a myriad of different oil-derived materials, line our shelves. Waitrose remove the word 'REDUCE' from the sustainable triangle, and even a hint of a drop in production levels causes unprecedented global panic in the 'money markets'.
Wherein, needless to say, lies the rub. While Cameron and Brown fall over themselves (actually, Brown probably falls over himself more - slap me!) to crow about their cuts, pay rates at executive level continue to be 'sky rockets in flight'. None of us can swallow that.
Television makes whores of us all. A cursory reading of Marshall McLuhan leads me to that aphorism, as does watching the first 3 episodes of Stephen Fry's Last Chance To See. I saw a copy of the book the other day, sitting alongside Jamie In America, and although I wouldn't dream of conflating the two, it did remind me that I had planned to review Mr Fry's latest televisual offering.
I have heard that there has been some beastliness towards the programme (although it has not been easy to find too many dissenting voices. In fact, it's hard to find anything which is not either by Stephen Fry, or on the BBC, or on Amazon. But there you go) but I do not wish to be accused of bandwagoning. I am - as you may be aware - quite a fan of Stephen, and had been looking forward to the series coming out since I began seeing the tweets and twitpics coming in from exotic climes during filming for the series.
God knows, there are occasions when my mobile hardly seems to stop buzzing with his 140 character or less updates. I am also a long-time worshipper of Douglas Adams, and am sympathetically inclined towards the idea of highlighting the damage we are causing to our beautiful planet. But, after watching the first episode of LCTSI myself tweeted about a certain uneasiness with the thing. I thought I would give it a bit more of a go, though, and have watched the next three. I will continue to watch, but thought I owed myself a duty to elucidate the problems I have with it. So here goes.
The main thing, I suppose, is the chemistry - or lack of it - between the two main protagonists. Mark Carwardine is - IMHO - a not very likeable man, and there is an air of desperation about trying to establish some sort of characterisation for him, as an intensely knowledgeable, and just plain intense, individual. Driven by his love of wildlife and his unquestionable commitment to environmental concerns, he nonetheless comes across as a largely humourless git, and not a little supercilious. His practical jokes - most notably the rope around the dick routine in the second or third programme - are excruciatingly unfunny.
Along with that, and probably even more annoying to me, is Stephen putting himself across as some sort of air-headed schoolgirl, laughing at the lame gags, and being ridiculously impressed by the not very obscure facts that Carwardine insists on telling us. I understand that TV tends to pander to the lowest common denominator, and cannot assume that everyone is an expert, but I find it hard to swallow that Fry is unaware (for example) that rhino horn is used in traditional Chinese medicine, in direct opposition to his well-known schtick of being the cleverest man alive. This is the kind of thing he does regularly in the programme, and I do find that it grates more than a little.
Finally, while I understand of course that it is important to highlight these terrible things to the ordinary citizen, so that we may maximise the opportunities to do something about it, I am a little peeved (possibly - I admit it - also a little jealous. That beach in Madagascar did look rather enticing) that a programme about the environment again features TV personalities and their enormous retinues flying around the world to take pictures of the shrinking natural world, beating their chests and tearing their hair whilst contributing to the destruction of the planet. This is a minor point, as far as my appreciation of the programme goes, but it does contribute.
I don't know. A la Dorothy Parker, the best reviews are often pithy in the extreme. To summarise the review in one of the links above:
"How could it fail?... So why is this show leaving me so uninterested?"
Last year, there were virtually no flowers. This year, it's a yellow riot of colour (if there could be such a thing, as I always thought that riots of colour ought to comprise more than one hue. Maybe I'm wrong.) on the perennial shrubs outside the house. So I knew, even before these SERIOUSLY dog days kicked in, that we were in for a hot one. Hoo boy, was I right?
I am no horticulturist. Everything green (or yellow) I touch is destined for the scrap heap one way or another, but I do enjoy seeing (and occasionally sniffing) a good flower, so it has been a real pleasure to watch the bushes outside my house flourish so splendidly over the last couple of weeks, their efflorescence a defiant gesture towards the hard concrete, bus fumes and casual violence that serve as the leitmotiv of urban existence.
It has also intrigued me to see in action the basic biological drive of the living world, untroubled as it is by mortgage payments and England losing again.
If I may aspire to Attenborough-ness for a moment, the bushes produce smallish yellow flowers in great numbers, each one straining towards the light of the sun. They are short-lived blooms, which quickly turn to parchment before dropping off to allow others to take their place. Many insects frequent their bell ended stamens, for reasons good or ill, feasting on the meagre food within, or lurking in search of soft bodied prey.
In this strangely suspended wave of solar plenty, buoyed as we are by the ever-cheerful Andy Murray, there seems to be no end to their fecundity, with each rapidly fading petal set surrounded by four or five budding promises of unfurled jaundiced glory.
My mind wanders as I absent-mindedly pluck at the drying leaves, and I marvel at the seemingly endless stream of life bursting forth, straining its sinews to forward the future of the shrub, which is - in truth - a wholly unremarkable plant, whose name I do not even know. However, in these dangerous times of dire bee shortages, we must celebrate even the lowliest of pollinators, and encourage where we can their continued strength. Eros will win out.
It's very distressing to read (along with the bees, which is downright scary) of the decline in bird species, especially our dear friend the sparrow. I must admit that I didn't really pay a great deal of attention to the little blighters in years gone by, so the full effect of their decimation will have passed me by. What I notice now is that there are - seemingly - just as many blackbirds as there always were; an awful lot of magpies, and of course the inevitable pigeons. There is a nice little colony of starlings on the patch of grass outside Scotland Yard, where I occasionally sit and eat my lunch, and I always aim my baguette crumbs towards them in preference to the columbine filth who bully their way around.
Over Christmas lunch the other day in Crewe, I was interested to hear of the severe ornithophobia which my boss suffers. Pigeons apparently cause her to freak out, and she tells a story of a time in Stoke Newington when she saw a large number of the revolting creatures gathered around a load of Turkish bread in dumpsters behind the bakery, and - worse - actually flying around in the cooking area. She succeeded, by calling the Environmental Health Office, in getting the placed closed down.
I wondered if she was unable to watch the Hitchcock classic, but she told me that this film wasn't too bad as there are not too many close-ups of the beaked bastards in it. In any case, oddly enough, I guess The Birds is not really about birds.
Disney's Enchanted, on the other hand, was a total no-no, and she struggled to hold it together recently when she took a couple of young kids to watch this movie at the cinema.
I do have a repulsive pigeon story to top the Stokey bread one, but I forbore from sharing it with her, out of deference to her phobia. Oddly enough, I was working at Disney at the time, and the building was plagued by our feathered friends, who had managed to find their way into the office space on the top floor. I heard of a complaint about a smell coming from a riser cupboard and some strange scrabbling sounds, so went to investigate, accompanied by the cleaning manager and the handyman.
And what a sight was to greet me. One of the birds had found its way into the riser through a small crack in the wall on the roof and had made a nest in the floor void just inside the door. She had laid her eggs, which had hatched, but could not then find her way back out again - so had died of hunger. Her chicks (and I don't blame them for this) exploited the only food source available to them - the corpse of their own mother. As the door opened and the light spilled onto them, they did what they had to and begged for more food. I did what I had to do and screamed like a girl.
To the VLA site at Weybridge in Surrey, which is a sprawling mass of buildings (labs and offices) and several 'farms' dealing with all aspects of animal diseases - though mainly focused (for obvious reasons) on food animals. There are of course studies into rabies, etc, but the bulk of the work is concentrated on avian flu, scrapie, bluetongue, bovine TB and BSE, etc.
We were shown around one of the farms, where a study of the effects of low level BSE has been ongoing for the past 9 years or so. This was obviously once a normal farm, and the study is taking place in what appears to be a standard cow shed, though the necessary modifications, in place to ensure the quality of the scientific data, soon become apparent. It is a low level disease site, so the precautions for humans are minimal, at least for those humans not in direct contact with the animals.
Entering the building, we were signed in, and I was immediately struck by the sound of a radio (playing something like Heart FM) even though the door was locked and protected by pin code when we arrived. The Bangles sang Eternal Flame as we took off our shoes, swung over a low counter to don blue wellies and swap our coats for those dun coloured stockman's coats, marked on the back with the word 'gantry' and were led up a flight of galvanised steps.
You guessed it, we were bound for the gantry, which runs the length of the shed, interspersed at intervals with lights, fans and speakers - for the radio of course. Below us in the gloom there emerged a group of cattle. I could see three, two standing and one sitting, and it was plain, even from the strange perspective I had, that they were considerably bigger than the beasts I have been used to seeing in the fields of Shropshire. Later, we were able to get a little closer to some other animals, which have been contained in slightly less barbaric conditions for over 10 years, and - let me tell you - these were monstrous mothers! With not much exercise and no slaughter, they are similar to fish in that they just continue to grow (though not to an infinite size) and end up developing problems with their joints, which are no longer able to support the enormous weight of their carcasses.
But back to the shed. There were actually four stalls in all, three contained three cattle each and the last, three sheep - infected, we were told, with low level doses of scrapie, in order to test the theory of scrapie causing BSE. As we walked along and the scientist told us what this crazy place was all about, I felt as though I was in a David Lynch movie, my feet squeezed into wellies that were too small for me, hands in the pockets of my stockman's coat, staring down at the morose giants below who trudged around in their own shit, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, listening to Heart FM. Mighty depressing, I can assure you, though others on the tour did not seem to share my view. Maybe I'm just a big softie.
Off to Exeter in the week to visit the Met OfficeHQ. Fascinating, captain. I was shown around the 24/7 Weather Desk, where the forecasting is done, and given a brief on how it's all put together. Needless to say, there's quite a lot to it. My mind kept flashing back to O Level Environmental Science and the wonderful geekery of weather monitoring stations and Stevenson Screens as I watched the multiple monitors displaying graphical representations of forecast models and plotting radar scans of rainfall. I was told that terabytes of data are received at the HQ from satellites every hour, and observations are recorded at 700 (I think, but it could have been 70) different levels in the atmosphere.
But best of all was a quick look at the supercomputers in the basement. These monsters (of which there are only two of equivalent type in Europe, they said) are responsible for the site consuming as much electricity as half of the city of Exeter. We were told that we couldn't enter the room for the risk that we would contaminate the delicate innards of the beast. They were in the process of upgrading their second SX-6 to an SX-8, and so we were amused when a workman strolled out of the room with brick dust all over his jeans and a lump hammer in his hand. As the door opened, that familiar, slightly high-pitched rushing sound of a computer room (though this one was somewhat larger than those I have been used to) emerged and we were looking at potentially 65TFLOPS. Fantastic!
Back at the Weather Desk, we were told that a forecast takes 64 minutes to be completed, and by the time it reaches the Chief Forecaster's desk it may already be 2 hours old, so he has to use his knowledge and experience to run the model forward and try to iron out any inconsistencies he perceives in the data. Once set, there are conference calls with various parties (including the likes of Helen Willetts) to ensure that the message of the forecast remains consistent. All in all, a truly excellent day.
Exeter seems nice enough, but I'm increasingly depressed by the similarity within our towns and cities. Everywhere you go, the same old shops, the seemingly endless parades of Caffe Neros and Lushs and Ann Summerss. There's a lovely cathedral, and the city is in a great setting, but it actually feels quite soulless. Maybe I'm not giving it enough of a chance.
The almost total lack of response to my last post clearly cannot be anything to do with the writing style, which was, I'm sure you'll agree, as sharp and incisive as ever. As with my beloved MeFi (which is admittedly US-centric, so posts tend to raise interest if they're about US politics (I couldn't help seeing the similarities between that interview and the hilarious Steve McClaren dodgy Dutch piece, BTW) Apple, Google or gaming) I've noticed that - alas - poverty doesn't sell sell sell.
"If you put the whole lot of 'em in a sack and shook 'em up, you still wouldn't get one decent one out of it."
This very issue was being mooted on the Moral Maze last night on Radio 4 (yes, I really do have a crazy life) and I was unsure what the conclusion was. That's the trouble. There's often a great deal of fascinating discussion, but nothing ever seems to come of it. It's all talk. Plus, I fell asleep before it finished.
A barrel of oil, I discovered, is 42 US gallons - not the standard 55 gallon drum with which we are all familiar (1 US gallon being equivalent to 3.78 litres or about 6 and a half pints, whereas an Imperial gallon is, as any fule kno, a good 8 pints) Interestingly though, an actual 42 gallon barrel is apparently rarely seen. As with many things in life, history has played its part in this particular anomaly, but I will not digress on to this point. Of the aforesaid 42 gallons, around 20 will be turned into 'gasoline' with this ratio said to be decreasing year on year due to the changes in the quality of the stuff being torn out of the ground.
Anyway, Mr Ban tells us that his mate Abdullah has agreed to produce an additional 500,000 barrels of the black stuff EVERY DAY! That would equate to approximately 37,800,000 litres of Ford juice. Extra each day. I call bullshit on this one. Who knows anyway how much oil the Saudis have really got? A bit more trawling on Wikipedia about oil reserves made for some fascinating reading indeed, and inclines me even further along the path of believing that we really are on the way to hell in a handcart.
The Independent had a very sober and intelligent leader on Monday about the situation we're in, pointing out that any government which is serious about lowering carbon emissions and addressing the issues of world poverty needs to be looking at oil dependency pretty damn quick. Of course, none of those bastards are even remotely interested in that. Our wonderful economic model depends on ever-increasing consumption, and so the inevitable rise of the Chinese and Indian economies (who can blame them for wanting a Big Mac and fries instead of lentils, beans & rice? Who can criticise the desire to wander around a shopping mall before jumping into an air-conditioned 4x4 instead of carrying water for 8 miles just to make breakfast?) literally adds fuel to the fire and sucks the very life blood from our planet.
I admit it, I'm a Peak Oilist and I believe that if we don't do something NOW then we may as well kiss our asses goodbye. Terrifying stats show that in the US, energy from wind power represents 0.4% of total energy use and solar power 0.1%. So at the moment, despite the upturn in sales of solar panels thanks to the rising cost of filling up, it's extremely difficult to see how renewables can offer a viable alternative.
I don't think we're about to see Tina Turner straddling a Harley Davidson yet (thank God) but I also don't think we can just muddle through. Death by a thousand cuts is what we're due for, and some of those cuts will strike deeper than others - depending on how rich or poor we are now. I was wondering how I would cope if I was confronted with empty shelves at Waitrose like those we are seeing in Spain at present. The uncomfortable answer is that I almost certainly wouldn't cope very well at all, not being terribly well equipped to either grow my own veg or hunt local wildlife. Yet my own potential misery is as nothing compared to the (further) suffering already endured by those in the poorer countries of the world as they are denied what little they used to receive of the very basics of life, such as rice, bread and maize. None of us either can pretend that we didn't see this coming.
You may recall my earlier post about Rhydymwyn. Well, I have just returned from there. And boy, do I feel it! I haven't worked so hard (meaning physical work) for many years.
On the first morning we trekked from one end of the site to the other (about 2 miles) and were split into two work teams by the facilitator, whose name is Kylie. One team planted willow along the fence adjacent to the Alyn River, and the other (of which I was a member) weaved yet more willow branches to form an otter shelter on the bank. It was messy work, but not too strenuous, and there was a real achievement at the end of it - a sense of satisfaction at seeing the shelter take shape. It was then back to the hut for butties and tea, and I was thinking that this wouldn't be so bad after all. The afternoon, however, brought a rude awakening.
We all followed Dave's tractor/trailer combo to the big Jewson bags of medium gravel, sand and tree bark about halfway down the site, there to fill up the trailer with said gravel, plastic pipes and tools and move on to the work area, which was some considerable way up a hill. It was one of those hills with a false top, so that you felt you had reached the summit, only to turn the corner and see another 100 yard incline. We spent a few hours digging trenches, lugging heavy buckets uphill, and backfilling steps in the (yes, I know!) blazing sun, and by the time we'd finished, I could have kissed Dave for sharing his stash of Grolsch with us in the Education Centre.
A night of beer, food and corporate bullshit followed at the Antelope - disturbed by 1am Elvis sessions drifting up from the bar - to be followed in turn by a not too early start on a rain threatening morning. Our task was to move about a ton of compost from one location to another, create a tree nursery from old railway sleepers and fill it up with the shit we had shovelled earlier. My shoulders ache, my lower back is sore and I feel as weak as a mouse. But what a great feeling!
Seems I have an opportunity to do some voluntary work at a government sponsored site near Mold in lovely North Wales. I'd never heard of it before, but it seems a fascinating place. Mustard gas and other nasties manufactured by those lovely chaps at Aldermaston (which isn't at Aldermaston after all) or wherever it was that they made them, were stored there up until 1945. It is now in the process of being turned into a greenfield site for the folks of Llay, Hope, Rhosllannerchrugog and other hell holes to walk their pit bulls in.
I will be with a few service providers, and carrying out path laying, tree planting, etc for a two day period. Gets me out of the office, and it's not a million miles from Oswestry. Well, it's 27.6 miles, according to Google Maps. Tidy!
Is it me, or is there a real sense of impending doom in the air? I feel almost as if the world is holding its breath for the new year.
Credit crunch, early desperation sales, political nothingness, all stuffed into one gigantic rubbish bag at the end of the Christmas period, taken away for landfill and slowly turned into methane gas - poisoning the environment still further.
Whatever the case, watching the news yesterday, I was particularly struck by the idea that people travelled to Sandringham to watch the Royal Family going to church! With the usual 'balance' for which it is renowned, the BBC spent an inordinate amount of time reporting this, without the faintest tinge of irony in tone. I mean, what kind of people are these? It's Christmas Day at the Williams house (say) in Melton Mowbray (say).
"Mummy! Daddy! Merry Christmas. Can we open our presents now?" "I'm afraid not William and Harry, we have to get started so that we can be in Sandringham in time to get a good spot. Don't want to miss out on seeing Her Majesty, do we?" "Not again, please! We never have Christmas at home, and I hate having to eat turkey sandwiches in a motorway layby." "Yeah, it's not fair. Finding Nemo's on later and we're going to miss it." "I thought you liked my home made Christmas special sandwiches, and we have the VCR..." "Yes, but you're recording the Queen's speech again!"
The ludicrous nature of all this was highlighted by a little puff on what the Royal Family do at Christmas. Ordinary English folk open their presents on Xmas Day, but not so for the Saxe-Coburgs. Oh no. In the German tradition, they open theirs on Xmas Eve. Says it all really.
On this, the third day of mourning over Saturday's farrago (sorry to link to yet another report on the game, but I believe closure is partly achieved by talking through a trauma) the observant among you will have noticed the subtle changes to the blog layout - black links, etc, etc. Tomorrow, this period of sackcloth and ashes will end, and I will revert to the usual lazer blue motifs. But for today I will post on an appropriately dark subject.
Every time I read one of George Monbiot's articles, I feel a sudden terror that the world will end (in any meaningful human sense) within my own lifetime. I have felt for some time that Armageddon was likely to happen in a generation or two, but the way things are going, that is looking frighteningly optimistic. As a father of two young children, this is a sobering thought indeed, and more and more evidence appears before us every day. And yet there is no action from those who purport to lead us. Worse than that, there is action in the wrong direction. This precious jewel of the desert that is the Western Spiral Arm of the galaxy, this mind-blowing Original Ball on which we live, might as well be a piece of shit we flush down the toilet.
I have friends who argue against me with feeling, who maintain that the resilience of the human race will out, that we will muddle through. Friends who say that love is the answer, and will guide us out of the gloaming. I have family members who believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated. My own feeling is that we are approaching the end game, or the end time, and that we will end up convulsing in a death by a thousand cuts, some deeper than others. Barring Bushco (and I include Mrs Clinton in that cabal) and a further catastrophic sortie into war, a meteorite thudding into us, or a Super Crash sending seismic waves through the global economy, I don't foresee a single event as finally pulling the plug. We will bleed slowly. But bleed we will.
The question is, what do I do? What do we all do? Can we really change anything? A starting point, perhaps, is what do I do already? Well, here goes:
Low energy lightbulbs throughout the home
Cycle about 75% of the time, use public transport about 20% and the rest is car use
Recycle all my shopping bags
Take one plane journey (on average) every two years
Maintain the thermostat at 21C (despite a campaign to change it - it's a daily battle)
Conserve water and don't buy it bottled
Try not to be a rampant consumer of everything except alcohol
At work, energy is a large part of my job. I analyse the energy consumption of the buildings, find ways of reducing it and implement programmes for that when this is viable
Contribute to online forums (as well as this blog) about the issues and talk about them to anyone who will listen
What I don't do (there is a whole host of relatively easy other things I could be doing, I know, and I am trying hard) is anything in the area of direct action. I used to participate in Reclaim the Streets demos and was reasonably active (though not politically affiliated) during my student days. I was on the Poll Tax march and have been to a few anti-nazi demos, including the one in Plumstead which marched past the BNP HQ. I have stopped in recent years, preferring sponsored cycle rides instead. Age, and the demands and responsibilities of parenthood have restrained me, but I still believe that direct action is the best way to protest, and, ultimately, to bring about change.
Today, after reading George's latest column and the CiF comments in response to it, I visited monbiot.com to see what options were available. I found a few interesting ideas, and clicked on to the War On Want page - once a great campaigning group, whose efficacy was underlined by the fact that they were pursued so hard by the establishment, and those reds at the Daily Mirror, during the George Galloway years. Now, apart from joining and donating, their main modus operandi seems to be - send an email to this or that MP or minister, send an e-card to Coca-Cola. As a member of AI, I can't wholly decry this method of action, but I do feel it is somewhat limited in its effect. If it worked, then we would surely not be living in a world where Guantánamo bay existed. How many emails did Tony Blair receive before the boys went into Basra? Quite a few, would be my guess.
I would love to believe that love was the answer, I really would. But, Bob Marley (the song was called Survival, so, maybe...) said it: "every time I look around, the people suferring, suffering, in every way. In every way"
Picture from the Guardian Steve Bell section. I bought a t shirt with the design from these people, who sell lots of others as well. Cool.
Not naming any names, but a company I used to work for was a firm believer in business travel for its workforce. I was based in its European head office in London, and many of the middle and senior staff within the lines of business would travel to Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Milan and Madrid on a regular basis. Latterly, the 'emerging markets' were increasingly on the radar, and Budapest and Moscow (interesting to note that an HIV test is required for a business visa of longer than 3 months' duration for Russia) were added to the list.
Executives would make reasonably frequent trips to - again, not naming any specifics - the West Coast of the US. As I worked in Facilities Management, our department was a cost to the business (quite a significant one) and always in obeisance to the money masters and mistresses. "Budgets are tight!" the cry would always go up, "Tom (made up name) has told us that we have to come in flat, or even under, year on year." There were dire warnings that if we overspent in any area, no matter what, cuts would have to be made elsewhere.
All of these jeremiads were of course pure bullshit, and insulting to the intelligence of a trained baboon, but we played the game all of us, sombrely nodding our heads as we read yet another press release on the revenues, profits and share options of the company, whilst being unable to spend 5K on that essential chiller maintenance and made to look like a twat because of it. But there is no bitterness, as I'm sure is evident from this post, just a sense of confusion.
The head of our team - of our cost centre if you like - was a frequent business traveller and would journey to all of the cities above, sometimes as often as once each week. Or else he would hop from one to the other, spending a day, or even less, at each office. I'm not saying that his considerable talents weren't always strictly necessary in an in-the-flesh sense. Far from it. Though I did once travel with him to one of the offices (each of which, BTW, had its own manager or sometimes even a director) to assist with an office move. This activity is perhaps unique in an FM's worklife, in that a hands-on approach is often required to ensure that all the crap that can go wrong gets put right. Most of the rest of the time, like nearly everyone else, FMs are just, well, doing email basically. So, on this particular trip (where I made the mistake of going into Amsterdam for an evening with my friend James) what did our esteemed leader do? Email. Lots and lots of email.
Surely, in this age of video- and web-conferencing, in this age of the virtual presence, in this age of environmental consciousness, there's no need for all that air travel? Isn't it morally and financially corrupt to expend the vast amounts of money and CO2 involved? But then again, what the hell do I know?
