Space and Spaceability

Dark Star

2012-01-22T16:31:00.006Z

Community Orchard Management Committee meetings take place in our Committee Chair's house, a few streets away from ours. I usually cycle but, not wanting to risk my hand, I decided to walk this time. It's surprising how much longer this takes, and what gets noticed as a result, that would otherwise be missed. Like this odd piece of street furniture.

From the ground up to about my shoulder height, it was obviously a lamp-post. From there on skywards, it was empty space. Someone had come along with an angle-grinder, sawn it through at shoulder height, and removed it. They had then thoughtfully covered the hole at the top of the severed column with green-and-yellow striped plastic tape, of the sort that would say to an electrician "Earth".

Standing in the circle of darkness granted me, for once I could look up and see a few stars. But the whole thing begged far too many questions for me to concentrate on finding Cassiopia or a stray planet.

Who would carry off half a lamp-post, and why?

Our City Council are trying to save money. To this end, they are planning to replace the city's lamp-posts with more energy-efficient ones. Our local Councillor has even put "I like lamp-posts" on his facebook page. But according to numerous "Disgusted, Viking City"-type letters in the local paper, what has been happening "on the ground" is that lamp-posts have been disappearing randomly, clumsily and unaccountably from various streets throughout the city, and the only new lamp-post to have been seen anywhere has been put up right next to its predecessor, leaving the latter still in place, and both (allegedly) shining merrily away side-by-side through the night. To cap it all, the two are identical: there's no sign that the newer one is working any more efficiently, or cheaply, than the original. And it's every bit as ugly to boot.

But we might be seeing more than simply an everyday tale of mismanagement.

The price of scrap metal is soaring, and one consequence of the resulting crimewave is that the present right to sell scrap anonymously may not be in place for much longer. Metal marauders will be going on one last frantic binge, and what better cover than as Council workmen removing lamp-posts that everybody knows are due for replacement?

But what if someone even more devious is using the metal-marauders as cover?

What if Astronomers, fed up of the tyranny of ubiquitous light pollution, are having to resort to crime just to get a look-in, hiding behind respectable reputations and using all-night observations as alibi?

Tea Break

2012-01-18T17:51:00.007Z

We thought we'd have some biscuits with our tea...

We left one extra,
just like the quantity surveyor at JiaYuGuan gate...

He was client-focused!

Time for something a bit more esoteric:

Fighting the Cuts

2012-01-04T21:30:00.006Z

Some Wensleydale-and-honey sandwiches are more dangerous than others. Putting together this particular individual had necessitated opening a half-used jar of honey whose lid just...wouldn't...budge. But it didn't slip in my hands either, so rather than just grabbing a tea-towel I went straight for the Nuclear Option: one of those things that look like giant nut-crackers and hold the lid while you twist the jar. But instead of opening, the jar just imploded, taking what looked like a chunk of my hand with it.

Fast-fowarding through three hours spent at A&E, I am now two weeks into the stage of the self-made repair job. A body sends, or makes on the spot, items whose job it is to bridge gaps and prevent invasions or further damage. So, new skin and muscle cells start to assemble, white blood cells gather to fend off infection, and any potentially disruptive movement is minimised by a rapid message to HQ telling me that moving my hand hurts! My only conscious job in all this, in other words, is to leave the site well alone, free of outside interference, and let a body get on with it.

Sadly, this is rather inconvenient for my ambitions of digging the Plot.

Suppose, though, that instead of remaining un-dug for a couple of weeks, the Plot and its neighbours were simply abandonned altogether. How would they look if a visitor were to come back in ten, twenty, a hundred years' time?

Of course the bindweed would have a riot this summer, and doubtless the same the year after, aided and abetted by the brambles. But then, assuming nobody tries to graze animals on them, the Plots would start to do something new. You wouldn't see the self-seeded birch, horse-chestnut and hazel trees at first, they'd be shielded by the undergrowth, which by a happy coincidence is just how they like it. Left to grow undisturbed, long strands of fungi would thread through the soil, somehow coming to an arrangement whereby goods are swapped with any plants they encounter. Going by what has happened in other bits of abandonned land nearby, I'd guess the birches would start to show above the brambles in about ten years, followed by trees with heavier shade, which would put paid to the bindweed's ambitions. Ever seen bindweed growing in a forest?

Meanwhile some more shade-tolerant characters would colonise the ground: perhaps descendents of that sorrel I planted. Snowdrops and other early-flowering plants might get a hold. In twenty years' time, the Plots might be a good place to hunt for blackberries, hazelnuts and mushrooms. And of course, for squirrels.

Birch trees tend to expire after fifty years or so of hard work bringing minerals up from the subsoil and leaving them lying about on the ground for everything else to enjoy. So would anybody. Eventually, then, the Plots would become home to slow-growing trees of the type found in Britain's oldest forests, but perhaps interspersed with a few fruit and nut trees left over or descended from today's individuals. The Plots, then, would be the Ancient Forests of 2112.

And all we would have had to do to achieve this would be to leave the site well alone, free of outside interference, and let the earth get on with it.

Sadly, this would be rather inconvenient for our ambitions...

Secret shelves

2011-12-10T20:46:00.007Z

"Yes I'd love to come to the meeting...but...I'd be at a loose end in town for three hours". Not a prospect I relished at this time of year. Not only have I never really grasped the concept of shopping as a form of entertainment, but one of the three hours would fall in that awkward lull you get in every British city between the shops closing and the "evening economy" firing up. Two of the hours would be after dark, and all three would be cold. And windy. Then I remembered a conversation from earlier in the day:

"There's a library round the back of the_"
"Really?? Open to the public?"
"Yes. Until quite late. It's the City Archives. Anyone can go in"

I left my investigations til after dark. The building's less than a hundred yards from the nearest shops, after all. But you have to know where you're going: there's no light. There are lawns (black), gravel paths (audible), a couple of small car-parks (tenebrous) and, so I'm reliably informed, a legion of legless Roman soldiers marching silently through a basement off to the left somewhere. I feel distinctly under-dressed: my coat should be longer, my hair blacker and my face paler. I walk past a tramp who's looking through some large commercial bins, and then through a gateway in some iron railings ("CCTV in operation") into a velvet-black garden. The tramp decides that lost-looking people are more interesting than bins, and comes over: though he talks with some difficulty, he's obviously "in" on this Archive lark.

He tells me the velvet garden's infradig and if I'm looking for the library the door's just round there. I nearly walk in through a brightly-lit window: the door's right next to it, in complete darkness. It looks like the sort of door that usually has a sign on it saying "Do Not Use This Door". But it's unlocked.

Inside it's wine-chiller cool. There are huge heaters, in theory, but the heat simply soaks into the mediaeval walls never to be heard of again. The staff at the reception desk take time to explain what I can find here, but it all just goes in one ear and out the other as I marvel at how such a place can carry on existing just a hundred yards from shops that are desperate to sell anything to avoid going under with the high rents.

The huge tomes in the first room I investigate, are records from parishes all over the country. I spend some time looking for any of the (many) places with which I have any connection, but draw a blank and start to look for some science. What I find there, quite by chance, are some real eye-openers. J.S. Haldane pondering the social and ethical dilemmas that are (or at least, should be) still alive in science today. A fascinating account of the perils of how the then-new (late 30s) chemically-assisted agriculture renders soil weak and sterile, which wouldn't have looked out of place in this month's Permaculture Magazine. Who knows, if I'd been able to carry on looking, I might even have come across Farmers of Forty Centuries, (celebrating its centenary this year) in which the soil is named as the "staying power" behind China's achievement as the only ancient superpower still extant in modern times.

But it was throwing-out time at the Archives, and anyway I had a meeting to go to.

Sacred space

2011-12-02T19:04:00.007Z

For some reason, I only noticed the Facebook post the night before it was all due to start. I hadn't really been following any local news about the "biggest strike in a generation": how can you go on strike when you haven't got a job? But it was November, people would be standing outside from before dawn on the picket-lines, and the local wing of UK Uncut were organising a run of hot drinks and snacks. I signed up to help. What better way for someone unemployed to go "on strike" than by getting up at 6:15 and going to work?

The morning was still, dark and quiet. I passed two sets of pickets on the way into town: one at the Police station and one, of all places, at the Barracks. Who would police the day's march and rally? And what would the local regiment of Ghurkhas look like out on strike?

The venue for the tea-making had been described as a "Church Hall" but I pushed open a large arched door to find myself in the nave of what appeared to be a fully functioning church, complete with altar, crucifixes and the beginnings of a congregation. There were even hymn numbers on a board on the wall. But there was a bike-trailer parked in the middle of the room: this must be the right place. I recognised the Pastor: he had made a brilliant speech at a rally in the summer comparing wealth inequality to the suffering in a flood. It had moved me to tears. Now he is letting us use his church as HQ. There's a map spread out on the altar with all the locations of the pickets. They hadn't known about the barracks.

The kitchen was up some steps beyond the altar: thus, all the worshippers would have unwittingly been addressing their devotions to the Place of Food. And we're not talking just tea and biscuits here: we're making bacon butties, veggie sausages, and I got the plate-warmer up and running so that they could go out hot to the front lines. Someone had even brought a thermal picnic bag. Pickets had been briefed: they could phone and ask for food any time between 8:00 and 10:00 am. I stuffed bacon and sausages that someone else had fried, into buns which I then wrapped and counted into bags. Bikes and cars took them all over the city in the early morning sunshine: I hadn't realised how many government outposts there were here.

"Six bacon butties and two veggie sausages!!" A journalist from London came to the door and asked if our effort was being appreciated on the picket-lines but nobody had heard him and that was the first answer he got. We gave our stories. The strike, the backup and the public support were covered as a New Social Phenomenon the following day.

And no wonder: the breathing-space at the end of a working life, just like the one at the end of the working week, is part of life's pattern. You might try and remove it temporarily in times of war, but expecting 68-year-old dusties to lift our heavy boxes of bottles, or 68-year-old police to chase burglars, just because somebody in a bank isn't very good at risk assessment, is a poor show. Especially when, as in the Pastor's metaphorical flood, the people at the bottom go under, while those at the top lose nothing at all.

Ripper

2011-11-20T21:58:00.007Z

Sometimes people waiting at stations do odd things that stick in your memory. During one particular wait, standing in a shelter, I became aware of the sound of paper being ripped. Oddly, this was not followed by the obvious next steps of crumpling or binning the paper. And the ripping was being done at a slower, more deliberate pace than I am used to.

I looked up from my newspaper to follow the sound. It came from a magazine being read by a smartly-dressed middle-aged man, who happened to be sitting facing away from me. As I looked, he read one page, then having read it he very deliberately tore it out of the magazine, then into four squares, and then slid the four ragged pieces into the plastic sleeve in which the magazine, obviously some kind of professional publication in the field of his work, had been delivered. The next page received the same treatment. And the next. Most of the pages, as is usual in that type of publication, were liberally illustrated with photographs of smart, smiling people who were obviously "moving on up", and whose tales of success were being used partly by themselves as a networking excercise, but mainly by the industry "pour encourager les autres".

I began to wonder what particular industry was being featured. The cover of the magazine was obviously long gone, and I was too far away to read the articles. What I could tell, though, was that it would have been perfectly possible, and far quicker, to simply turn each page rather than tear it into quarters. The magazine would then have easily fitted back into its plastic sleeve, rather than forming an ungainly lump as it was now beginning to.

The reading and slow tearing went on until the entire magazine had been devoured. The shelter was quite crowded, and I wondered if anyone else had noticed this little tableau, and if so whether they, like me, had begun to find it disturbing. How often does anyone in the normal course of life deliberately rip up an image of somebody's face?

Perhaps I'm just a bit too sensitive. Perhaps dealing with people was not a strong point of this particular individual, or the line of work in which he found himself. Perhaps I'll not look up right now, because I am just too damn curious about what this man does for a living, and want to catch the words on the front of that sleeve in the split second between its being turned over, and being slipped into a briefcase...blink!

Human Resources Magazine

Angelic umbrellas

2011-11-13T17:03:00.008Z

Party fundraising season is with us once again. While for some this means plush dinners at £60 a head, for others such as our little party £6 gets you in to a lively gig with local bands happy to play for beliefs rather than hard cash, in the back bar of our local Picturehouse. And an excellent evening it was, too.

At the end of the evening, a group of us decided to walk home: it was a mild, windless night and our definition of "walking distance" is somewhat elastic. But my confidence (backed up by a glance at the forecast earlier that day) that it wouldn't rain, had turned out to be misplaced. Well, that's Climate Change for you.

Bring on the Angelic umbrellas. They were large, white, and standing in a wooden latticework box behind a leather sofa by the door: I hadn't spotted them on my way in. Anyone faced with the prospect of otherwise getting wet could help themselves to one, no matter how long or variagated their journey home. I was amazed: didn't this little enterprise cost the Picturehouse a small fortune in wayward brolly replacement?

Elinor Olstrom won her Nobel Prize for proving scientifically that this needn't be the case. A "common resource" (fisheries, fields, umbrellas) can be managed by its users, without the need for a typical "top-down" commercial or government set-up, as long as there is some other well-defined social structure, made up of its users, which is as large as the resource in question.

And so I wonder, how big is the Picturehouse Social Structure (note no attempts at an acronym!)? And how strong is our sense of belonging? Do we all think of the place as just a commercial enterprise (in which case we'd nick the brollies: "after all, we've paid for them"), or does it count for more than that? After all, people meet in its foyer and bars, and see classic "everyone should see" films (Walkabout, Apocalypse Now, Metropolis), which make it something of a social and cultural space as well as just a business.

And would you nick brollies from your own and your mates' social-and-cultural-space? 'Course not.

Image blagged with thanks, from "Fresh Eyes On London"

Mind the Gap

2011-10-03T16:04:00.005+01:00

There isn't really any excuse for a three-month gap in posting, so I'm not going to offer one.

But the Plot is coming along nicely: there are spuds, giant broccoli, tomatoes, strawberries, and reams of beans. Nearly all of these have suffered some horrble setback near the beginning of their lives, as I start to learn about things like Pigeons, Rabbits, Bindweed, and other pests the like of which one never has to deal with an an ordinary garden.

One evening, round about the time of the London Riots, a hot spell here in Viking City broke into a specatacular rainstorm. The following day I found out that some of the local likelies, apparently having had their barbecue rudely interrupted by unwanted water, had picked up their fire and come and taken shelter in the shed on the Plot. The fire itself was in one of those large old-fashioned metal bread tins. The shed is always unlocked, so nothing has to be broken in order to get in. We have kept it that way ever since discovering, one morning, a twentysomething victim of the recession who had apparently needed it and who had had the decency, and the good sense, to leave it undamaged.

Unfortunately, the local likelies weren't quite so thoughtful. Not bothering to realise that a metal tin with a fire in it is hot on the outside as well as the inside, they set it down on the shed's wooden floor rather than put it up on bricks like a barbecue. And it burned right through, leaving a large, ragged hole.

I took it philosophically: at least a hole in the floor won't let the rain in. But other Plotters said I should tell the Police, so I did.

So there are now files, fingerprints, DNA samples, and a large metal bar plus lock which we have been given to put on the shed door. Rumours of a CCTV programme are floating around. In other words, a lot of extra work for everybody involved (including the likelies, who I presume will shortly find themselves on a Community Payback stint).

I'm fairly laid-back about people using things, as long as no malice is intended and no damage is done. We all do it. Anyone who eats food, or uses energy, is using their surroundings just like the people who used our shed.

The trick is not to burn holes in it, guys.

The man who lost the plot

2011-07-08T17:08:00.007+01:00

I never met him. Whoever he was, he had apparently been using his allotment as a tree-nursery, which broke just about every rule in the book. It took the Council at least 8 years to evict him, or possibly just to wait for him to hang up his tools and retire. On 6th June (always my lucky day) Council workers with strimmers came and took away the worst of the undergrowth (the trees, apparently, were all long gone). Two days later we got the phonecall: the Plot was ours, free for the first year if we were up for all the work involved. We had been on the list for over 2 years: we signed up pronto. It even has a shed.

The first time I looked inside, it was festooned with cobwebs. No-one (at least, no-one with fewer than 6 legs) must have been in there for years. There were three old doors leaned up against one of the walls, and a pile of dust which, on being sneezed at, revealed some paint-tins, a bicycle-chain, a pair of scholls (sadly not my size) and, bizarrely, the mouthpiece of a recorder.

A few days later I returned, armed with a broom. I was met with exactly the same interior design (including the small but sturdy spade I had left there), but with one very unsubtle addition: in the middle of the floor was an empty Rizla-packet torn, shall we say, in that characteristic way. It appeared the shed (along with, so the owners tell me, most of the other sheds nearby) had a bit of a social life of an evening.

I set to clearing away all the cobwebs and dust (and the Rizla packet). I found there was a window (it doesn't let much light in though, being just a foot from the high wall of the garden next door), and cleaned and opened it. By the end of the day it was looking quite presentable in there. As I have continued work on the rest of the Plot, a few things have gradually been moved there: a rake, a pair of gardening gloves I found in the street (which are excellent, and a perfect fit), a carpet-square, a bucket and, in case Nature calls, a loo-roll which I tied through its centre to a beam.

So today, after some heavy rain which eases the work, I returned to the Plot to dig out some bindweed. In the shed, everything was exactly as I'd left it...except that the loo-roll was missing. Including the centre, which must have meant someone cutting or untying the string. Leaning out of the window I could see the said centre on the ground, and the sheets too, looking as if they had been useful for something before being defenestrated. But what?? Who had been crying? Or sneezing? Or getting dirty?

If only sheds could talk.

Stop thief

2011-06-09T22:16:00.005+01:00

I don't have the world's best memory for faces, but today I was the first to spot him: yes, the Erudite Space has its very own shoplifter. He slopes in, shambles around the shop, and puts small books in the ample pockets of his tatty, unappetising mac. He's particularly fond of Observer books and anything about transport. Let's call him Oswald.

Every bookshop in town has banned him from their premises, but I don't know how that works: I wonder if their own Security Guards, or the Police, march him bodily out into the street, and then I wonder how they stop him from just wandering back in again. I don't think he's ever been arrested. We don't have him banned for some reason, perhaps because we're a charity and we're just supposed to be kind and put up with that sort of thing. So someone has to follow him round the shop, firmly but gently taking books from him and putting them back on the shelves, and answering a string of questions, each one of which makes sense by itself, but which have no logical sequence, are often repeated, and don't really constitute a conversation.

I'm not sure he even knows where he is most of the time. I'd always wondered how long he had been like that, and what horrible trauma in his life had started it all.

A chap I'd earlier directed to the Computing section overheard me warn the Boss of Oswald's presence. And, incredibly, then said right out that as a ten-year-old train enthusiast he had often seen Oswald, then in his twenties but still trainspotting. It was apparent he couldn't fully look after himself even then: perhaps he'd lacked the sense of what other people are, ever since birth. The classmates had assumed he was the sort of person their mums had in mind when they told them never to talk to Strange Men.

All of which means that for the best part of half a century a succession of people have had to provide shelter, food, protection from arrest and accident, and protection of others from inadvertant harm, from Oswald's blithe irresponsibility. In all this time no-one has had the courage or the wherewithal to sieze the initiative and change matters for the better.

Which puts Oswald in unlikely company: the latest campaign by the charity who run our shop is highlighting the effect on the poorest people of a system that has provided shelter, resources and legal protection for large financial institutions, while struggling, and now failing, to protect others from being harmed by their actions.

Sometimes I think that it's time we should all stop just quietly putting the books back on the shelves, and start making arrests.

Advanced motoring

2011-06-03T19:11:00.009+01:00

There is a beautiful, tree-lined bike-path along the river, which forms most of my 15-minute trip into "work" at the aforementioned erudite space. The trees are protected by order of the City Council. Geese sit around and watch you glide past. Even the dogs are well-behaved. It is a total pleasure to cycle along: so much so that even getting caught in a hailstorm on the way home isn't too terrible.

There is only one road junction to get through after all that delightfulness, and it has helpfully been provided with one of these advanced stop-lines: a special green breathing-space for cyclists.

Of course, this is incredibly inefficient. Putting all those cars whose makers boast of how rapidly they can go from nought-to-sixty (because they haven't been allowed to boast of top speeds on car adverts since round about the time England won the World Cup) in a queue behind those of us who might, just possibly, make it from nought to six by the far side of the junction (on a good day) could be construed as a criminal waste of horsepower. But the Council is one step ahead: they've been listening to American physicists talking about waves. Who have found, interestingly, that rapid acceleration is one of the things that causes traffic jams: waves of still-ness, in the intervals between futile acceleration, propagate backwards along the road, bringing everybody to a halt in apparently random, unexpected places.

The people campaigning for a 20 mph speed limit on the city's smaller roads are beginning to use this to argue that a lower speed limit on roads which are at or beyond capacity can increase traffic flow...a bit like easing-off the tilt angle of a wine bottle so that the wine flows out smoothly and doesn't "glug". It would also help stop people driving as if they were late for their own funeral.

So there I was yesterday afternoon, sitting waiting for the lights to change, noticing once again that drivers are not always alert enough to actually stop before they end up in the "advanced" bit, because I've had to go all the way round to the front of some posh black thing in order to come to a halt on the small remaining bit of green space...when the full implication of the car's length, blackness, shininess and large floral display in the back window sinks in.

Erudite space

2011-05-31T21:17:00.005+01:00

It must rank as my favourite shop in town. And they're looking for people to work in it! Payscales are purely Imaginary, but in this case that's not the point.

I picked up a form and took it home to fill in. It took me days to get round to it: after all, what possible skills could a lapsed astrophysicist with a sideline in environmental campaigning bring to bear for working in a bookshop? Two weeks later I returned the form, with something vaguely convincing filling in the blank space. Then nothing happened, and I forgot all about it.

Until about a month after that, when a voice with a gentle Edinburgh accent arrived on the answerphone asking if I was still interested. I returned the call and fixed up a visit.

The funny thing about shops is the contrast between what you see on the orderly, presentable floor-space, and what lurks beyond. It's not unlike Backstage at the theatre, and in this case there are two whole floors of it. A dumb-waiter links them with the shop area, landing discreetly behind a revolving display of witty postcards ("Why should I tidy my room when the world is such a mess?"). In an office piled high with brightly-coloured former displays, shelves of incongruous objects (flower-pots, weighing-scales, lampshades...) and stacks of recycling-type boxes lurching under their weight of donated books, we arranged my shifts. I was to come back the following Tuesday morning.

The most straightforward thing to do is stock the shelves. Starting with "Politics", "Philosophy", "Business and Economics", "Science", "Sociology"... the weird thing about this is how many of the books turned out to be familiar to me: I'd either read them, seen them cited in books I'd read, read something else by the same author, or heard of them as classics of their kind. Perhaps it was just beginners' luck. Then there are entire shelves on "How To..." just about everything from tracing your ancestors, through winning at Bridge, to origami, knitting and boatbuilding. I seem to be the most agile person who comes in on either Monday or Tuesday so a lot of the shelf-stocking falls to me.

The following week they let me loose on the till.

The best bit is, nobody ever has to come in and browse secondhand books: it's not like, for example, shopping for food or clothes, which can be a bit of a treadmill: eat, work, get latest fashion, repeat... Here, by contrast, is a shop full of people who have only come in because they are genuinely interested in what we have to offer. Which, you could say, is the chance of stepping off the ordinary path, even if just for a short while, and into the wide, Imaginary dimension beyond.

The wet stuff

2011-05-02T22:09:00.005+01:00

You're a Brit (well, perhaps not, but if you were...). You take it for granted. It's a trade-off: your garden's always green, but sometimes you lose the entire Outdoors, and the planned activities therein, because water is coming out of the sky and making everything wet. You learn, by the age of about eleven, that if your clothes stay that way for any length of time life gets distinctly unpleasant, because you don't get the warm version here. You carry your own fallout shelter everywhere, just in case it turns up unexpectedly.

You curse it. You insure yourself against it (I'd love to see the Pluvius Policy quotes for Wills and Kate!). You use it as a metaphor for bad times, because it beat down and rotted your ancestors' food in the fields. Your children wish it would go away.

And then one day it does precisely that.

It hasn't rained here, at all, since the beginning of last month. "April Showers", that have been with us as long as the English language itself, have been cancelled.

I'd been wondering whether three barrels for collecting rain was a bit OTT for our small garden, but now I realise it is no such thing: they are rapidly emptying as we run around trying to keep everything alive. I'd put off planting seeds, waiting for wet ground to give them a good start: now they're in, but have to be watered nightly. A stiff East wind spends all day pulling what's left of the moisture out of the soil, and then, if I so much as touch it, pulling away the soil for good measure. Last month's RHS-donated trees at the Orchard and the Battlefield have had to be watered several times (in fact that was what some of us were doing during the Royal Wedding).

Manicured grass is going yellow. The NFU is advising farmers not to promise their buyers too much grain. Moors are quietly burning underground.

For once in my life, I really, really want it to rain. The irony is, I'm pretty sure that once it starts, it'll be with us all summer and I shall end up being sick of it.

The face that launched 500 trees

2011-04-27T22:23:00.003+01:00

I am looking back at a life's work. Thankfully the life in question isn't mine, though. It is the life of the Sustainability Subcommittee, now sadly demised.

It all started two years ago, when our local Green Party's chief Organiser of All Things, in the time-honoured fashion, organised it from her place on the Parish Council. I was an enthusiastic recruit, and became secretary (and ideas lab). Collectively we organised a Parish-wide cloth bag campaign, the installation of several cycle-racks, the introduction of Green Burials in the Cemetery (I've often wondered, but never dared ask, what was in the rest of their "Business Development Plan"!), a re-think of the Parish "Design Statement" so that it included proper environmental issues as well as just appearences, and the signing-up of the Parish Council to that pledge to drop energy use by 10%.

But best of all, we brought out the inner tree-hugger in our local City Councillor. The Parish signed up to "In Bloom". It sounds all prissy and ornamental, but actually the RHS have kind of eco-pimped it on the quiet over the past few years. Battle lines are no longer drawn simply on whose patch looks the prettiest, but also on how many (different types of) people are joining in, and how "sustainable" (including things like collecting rainwater, composting and growing food) the area is becoming.

The upshot of all this machiavellian shenanigans was that between them the Orchard and the Parish were given, by the RHS, no fewer than 525 native fruit and nut trees to plant. Finding places in which to do this, though, isn't as easy as you might think. Private landowners are never there to ask, and even if they were, they'd probably have other plans. Some of the common land is being deliberately kept tree-free, for the sake of beetles who prefer meadows. Built-up roadsides have infrastructure underneath. One of the flood plains is set aside for housing. And so on.

We rapidly came to realise that edges were good, and that the best of these lay between the old battlefield (now a playing-field) and the main road. A date was set: perhaps a little late in the season, but then the season this year has been particularly cold. The RHS brief asked us to make an event of it, so we did: the mayor came along in her pink dress and hat to plant the first tree for newspaper coverage, and someone had thoughtfully provided Cava, fruit-juice and cake for all of us. It was, in short, a perfect day.

But don't trees take up space, rather than creating it? Well, that depends on who you are. Obviously if you're playing football on the playing-field, and someone's carelessly gone and planted trees in the middle of it, then they take up your space. But if you're some item of wildlife, or someone who likes climbing trees, then they provide special spaces just for you.

How space can save your life

2011-03-14T23:58:00.007Z

It's kind of horribly compulsive, looking at those arial pictures of Japanese tsunami damage. And of no help whatever to anyone who lived in all those houses that were there, and are now gone. Except to notice one thing, that might be useful in future: the few roofs still visible in the aftermath pictures all lie directly inshore from city spaces set aside for trees.

Japan Tsunami Appeal

Space, for kids

2011-03-02T20:38:00.009Z

It's the kind of space you don't know you need, until someone grabs it from you.

The 'phone was ringing. I'd woken up in the middle of the night and the phone was ringing. I turned the face of my alarm-clock towards the window to see the time: someone was calling our house at five to one in the morning. And presumably Dad was still at Valerie's, because he hadn't picked up the extension in the main bedroom. Funny, he always made it back by midnight.

I never did like that house: it tried to be modern, but it was so dark. The sitting room had three windows but it never seemed to get any sun at all. The house, in fact the entire village, "nestled", which basically meant you didn't see anything or get any light. Which was probably a perfect end to the day if you'd been up on the fells since dawn looking after cows or sheep, but for an urban type like me it was a bit of a drag. It may have been something like the same feeling that had caused Mum to go and live with Douglas: obviously, because there was nothing bad about any of us. It had only been last month and it had come as a bit of a shock. I remembered wondering whether Chairman Mao's parents had separated when he was a teenager. That would account for a lot.

Come to think of it, the brightest "room" in the house was, in fact, the upstairs corridor, the length of which I was now walking to go and answer that 'phone. It seemed rather a lot longer than usual for some reason. I tiptoed past my brother's room _tiptoed, for heaven's sake why bother? and how could he sleep through that racket?_ pushed open the door, and picked up the handset

RRant RRant RRant RRant hoose RRant RRant!!!

eh?

RRant RRant RRant Yew RRant!

Someone was obviously very upset and, to add a surreal twist, she had a huge Scottish accent. I didn't know anybody Scottish, except Douglas, and my Grandfather who lived in Scotland, and they were both very polite and softly-spoken. And of course, they were both men.

I'm, er, very sorry but I couldn't hear what you said_

RRant disnae RRant RRant RRant RRant RRant RRant wukkud RRant RRant RRant RRant RRant!

Well, let's apply some logic here. Though that seems rather difficult (why's that? Does logic need daylight in order to work? Why should it? And is that why school happens during daylight hours?..): this is obviously grown-up stuff, and therefore luckily none of my business, so whoever this is needs to talk to Dad, and she's already got his number, so all I need to do is_

I'm sorry, Dad's not here. He won't be back 'til_

midnight. Oops! And anyway if this happens again tonight I won't get my 8 hours sleep, then I shall be dozy at school and look like an idiot.

_er, 'til the morning.

RRant RRant wutch RRant wrang RRant RRant RRant RRant wurrus RRant RRant RRant Yew RRant RRant!

I decided the next best thing, asking if she'd like to leave a message, was probably a bit pointless, said goodbye as politely as it was possible to do when interrupting someone mid-sentence (which I then felt guilty about) and put the phone down.

Now that I was no longer being ranted at, I could think a bit. Supposing I'd made a terrible mistake, and it was distress I'd been hearing, not anger? What if someone somewhere really needed help? Well I could at least find out who it was: in the days long before 1471 was even thought of, but when there was still operators, you could dial 100 and ask for the last call to be traced, as long as the lines had been quiet in the meantime. I picked up the 'phone again_

RRant chuldrren RRant RRant RRant RRant RRant wrang RRant RRant RRant Yew RRant

but of course the connection only finished once both people had hung up. I remember wishing we had one of those machines that took calls automatically and taped the answers, like the detective in San Francisco:

This is Jim Roquefort*, at the tone leave your name and message, I'll get back to you

by the time I got back into bed I noticed that I'd misread the time: it had been five past eleven, Dad would be home by midnight, and I would get my eight hours. Just.

*****

"You wouldn't believe what happened last night", I began over breakfast. "This mad Scottish voice_"

"Oh, so she finally managed to wake you up without waking me, then" interrupted my brother.
"It's Douglas' wife" said Dad "Just ignore it". Like you can ignore a 'phone?? This was the 1970s, when phones were mighty chunks of engineering hardware that made a right royal racket, not the slim little items you get today that discretely slip out of your pocket and get lost in the park, or on the bus. And they were hard-wired in, too, you couldn't even unplug them. Or switch them off. And if you took them off the hook they turned into air-raid sirens. We thought of wrapping the 'phone in a quilt and stuffing it in the Evil Wardrobe, but somehow never got round to doing this every night.

*****

"Right, pay attention" said Mr Square "Who can tell me how to use one word to remember what Inductors and Capacitors do in an electric circuit?.. Lunchista?"

I always sat in the front row in Physics. My enthusiasm, terrible eyesight and the fact that, in the driech summer we were having this year, it was the warmest part of the lab, made it the perfect place as far as I was concerned.

"It's CIVIL, sir. C for Current leads...er..." Hang on, "I" is current. So what was the "C"?.."Sorry sir, I can't remember". This was so unusual that the rest of the class went quiet behind me. It sounded odd. Mr Square asked sympathetically if I was alright. "I...
(suddenly realised that saying in front of the entire class that I'd got woken up in the middle of the night by a mad Scotswoman on the 'phone, would probably not be a good idea) "...didn't get much sleep last night, Sir"

Some wag in the back row helpfully added "She was on the job, Sir", which sent a giggle round the whole class. Including me, because the idea was so utterly incongruous: I must have been the least likely prospect in the room for that kind of thing. Even if you included all the lads. "Get Lunchista on the job" added the class reprobate, in a flat tone that implied that he had tried, but found it completely impossible, to imagine.

*****

Douglas turned out to be an interesting and humourous friend ("A collective noun for people who run Universities? Oooh, how about "A Lack of Principles"?"), and Valerie turned out to be the sort of person you could really confide in. The dreadful dark summer of 1977 seagued into a delightful autumn, and the nightmare calls faded away. My old school reports, which turned up in a recent house-move, show a dip followed by a bounce. And I now have two extra parents.

But to this day I consider "I don't have to answer that bloody phone!!" as the statement of an inalienable human right. And of course, we have an answerphone.

*****

*we apologise for the unwarrented intrusion of cheese into this post. The gentleman's name was in fact Rockford.

Smile and say Cheese

2011-02-23T23:04:00.003Z

Readers may be forgiven for wondering why it seems to have become distinctly overpopulated with dairy comestibles here at Space, but bear with me.

It occurred to us in the early new year that the last time Fille remembered using her camera was on 21st December at 8:15 in the morning. She and I had got up early in the hope of catching the setting, eclipsed moon in the same sky as the rising winter sun: the Selenelion (last seen in these parts in Tudor times, so, a bit special). The camera, too, was a bit special: like the Selenelion it was bright pink, and full of things we would probably never see again in a lifetime.

Its absence started to tell round about the middle of the month. We turned over Fille's room (and in the process filled a rather large Oxfam bag). We moved on to Fils' room, then the two of them decided to tackle the top floor, which is their part of the house, as well as being the venue for the Astronomy mentioned earlier. Two more bulging Oxfam bags, and one cleared floor, later, we concluded there were no cameras anywhere there. The possibility that it had gone for good started to emerge: early in January, friends from overseas had visited. We'd all had a great time, and of course many trips had been made to local tourist attractions: everyone from Dracula to Wallace and Gromet (but not Lunchista) had figured in the ensuing sightseeing-fest.

Oh dear.

We turned the car over. Twice. Not forgetting every pocket, bag and rucksack (including those left in the garage, and then the rest of the garage for good measure), but still drew a blank.

A forensic listing of every venue, with dates, began to be drawn up. After failing to get a result with the first phonecall, I decided we needed some help with the list, and got back in touch with our "tourists" (email subject: "A long shot"). They were diamonds: having come all that way they could remember every single stop, with people, dates, and even whether or not the camera had featured in the mix. Between us all, we managed to track its last known movements back to a cafe in the Dales. No-one could remember its name, but that's what Google StreetView is for.

When I rang the cafe, it turned out that not only had the owners kept the camera, safe in its own little space in the cupboard behind the counter, they also remembered this particular posse of overseas visitors because of taking the time to chat about everything from bilingual families to buying flutes. How often do you come across people in business who make time, or indeed space, for their most eccentric punters?

Jukebox jury

2011-02-10T15:47:00.005Z

This may be an urban myth, but here goes.

In the days of pub juke-boxes, when it was the drinkers themselves who got to choose the music to accompany their drinking, rather than have the bar's owners foist upon them some landfill-type noise which, market research had shown, resulted in people buying more drinks, there existed in one particular pub a juke-box with a twist. You could put in your money and buy three minutes of silence.

For all I know it may have been not just any old silence either, but that famous one by John Cage whose length in seconds is deliberately the same as the number, in degrees below zero, of the coldest temperature physically possible (and no I can't resist the urge to say, how cool is that?). Somewhat longer than three minutes, the piece should, apparently, be played in three movements. Which in turn begs the question, what should the intervals between the movements sound like?

If the said pub ever really existed, I wonder, how often people availed themselves of this unique choice? Did the bar-staff occasionally wander on over and select the silence as a break in the evening's racket? Did people rush to buy their drinks in the short interlude in which they knew they'd be heard? Did people, as a result, end up buying more drinks?

Or did the idea die because people just felt awkward, thinking they had to make conversation because there was nothing to listen to all of a sudden?

The moon is made of Green Cheese

2011-01-05T17:21:00.006Z

Last summer, a friend of ours was a delegate at a conference of Mathematicians in France. The conference venue, as organised by the University of Toulouse, was the little village of Nant, which happens to lie in the Département in which Roquefort Cheese is, officially, produced.

Like all the best food produce, Roquefort has a Season. It so happens that early spring milk forms the raw material for the best cheese. After it is fermented, spores from a mould found in local caves (and subsequently named after them) are added, then the cheese solidifies and is shaped into drums weighing a few pounds each. The best time to eat it, if you really like a cheese that fights back, comes about four months later.

Those four months are best spent (I mean by the cheese, not by the prospective diner) in the region's caves, after which the cheese is exported all over the world (except, for a very brief interlude, to the USA, where it was named as a weapon in a Trade War). The caves, after that point, are empty.

At least, they are empty of cheese. However, with four months having elapsed since "early spring" we are now into the beginning of the tourist season. And, by a delightful coincidence, of the conference season. So along come our Mathematics delegates, to sample the delights of Roquefort and see the caves in which is born. So as to look the part, the caves are now graced with stacks of replica Roquefort drums. We're not talking packaging here, I mean models of what the actual cheese looks like.

And that, of course, begs a question to those of us who study, and comment upon, the wise use of Space in all its forms:

Unless the replica cheeses are inflatable or somehow collapsible, Where are they stored in the spring?

There's no getting away from it

2010-12-13T17:01:00.006Z

Of course everyone's known about Space Junk for ages. There's probably even a band named after it. But what I only learned today was that there's now so much of it that satellites can't be just left to their own devices up there with nothing but Kepler's Laws for guidance. Typically each of the hundreds of useful vehicles has to take avoidance action on average a dozen times a year, with its makers knowing that anything larger than a flake of paint can knock it out. It's getting a bit like a hairy dash round the M60 on the edge of rush-hour with the added excitement of knowing that every other vehicle on the road is being steered by a blind, trigger-happy robot.

And that is why there are now disposal plans, designated "graveyard orbits" and even talk of "Active Debris Removal", with the development of some out-of-this-world recycling technology. Houston, meet Mr Straight.

Meanwhile, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence goes on. Which begs the question, is there anybody else out there looking, and if so might they find us? If they do, will their reaction be a bit like that of a twentysomething lass, who's met this really fun-to-be-with bloke, but is rather put off him when she first sees the state of his flat?

Moral Hazard

2010-12-10T20:54:00.002Z

So I'm on my way through the short-cut to the shops, and there, sitting in splendour in the middle of the path, is a pile of muck (in the time it took me to go and get the camera, someone had obviously kicked it in exasperation).

It strikes me that this is a metaphor for our times.

The path of life is strewn with dogma.

"Our garage is full of junk"

2010-12-08T21:44:00.003Z

I can't remember the last time I saw a garage that actualy had a car parked in it. We have a garage, and I'm pretty sure the car has never been parked there: I can also be reasonably certain that the people who sold us the house (and whose idea it had been to get the garage built in the first place) had never parked a car in it either.

This evening events sent me tiptoeing through the snow to get something from the garage. It was the banner made by our local Residents Against the Incinerator group (every town should have one). Because of the low temperatures (it got down to a record-breaking -12 degrees the night before last) and the snow, I hadn't been in the garage for a while. Isn't it funny how you kind of look at things afresh?

There are seven bikes in there, though there are only four of us. But they all get used: when people are staying with us, we can all go for a bike-ride together. All the gardening kit is hibernating there (we haven't got a shed), as is the camping stove and the barbecue. There are four boxes of dry wood for the stove, other wood-related kit, a sledgehammer, and even two sledges (the people across the road from us have gone one better and have two canoes on their garage roof). There's a roll of loft insulation, although we haven't got a loft. There are two massive candles. And if you get bored, there's a coconut shy. And probably some coconuts too, but they're very likely to be past their sell-by, so you'll have to slum it with four massive jars of jam instead.

What would happen if we didn't have the space for all this, or if, heaven help us, we were suddenly gripped by the urge to have a clear-out? Well, somebody else from our Party would have to look after the coconut shy for a start. The rest of it isn't exactly standard fare for your local charity shop. If we were patient we could try and give it away on Freecycle, but whoever heard of someone in the throes of a clear-out suddenly becoming patient?

Anyway it's all a bit academic. Each bit of stuff has its day: the barbecue in summer, the sledges in winter, the gardening kit in spring and autumn. If we were to get rid of any, we'd only have to waste a lot of time and money buying anew the following year.

And where would all the old stuff go? Probably on that incinerator, that nobody wants.

Space below zero

2010-11-29T13:08:00.004Z

Here we see an ordinary, mundane, run-o'-the-mill British field, as seen all over the country, and as overlooked by all of us (except, perhaps, the good folk who earn their living from it)...transformed, at no cost to the taxpayer, into an exciting, free, and healthy place of family entertainment.

We even saw the field's owners, out with their family doing exactly the same: they didn't seem to mind at all that someone was borrowing the field next to their house without so much as a "By your leave".

Lightbulb Moment

2010-11-08T11:30:00.010Z

It struck me as being rather silly that, having splurged all our savings on the shiny new space-age roof, we were still stuck with 19th-century lighting in the kitchen. Yes I know, Halogen Downlighters are the weapon of choice for illuminating all those freshly-made-over homes in programmes like Changing Designs, Home DIY and Grand SOS, and they do look like miniature UFOs, but they are essentially little heating elements that happen to give off a bit of light as an aside, and use a technology that hasn't moved on a lot since that nice Mr Swan and his idea of a glowing filament in a vacuum.

The original bulbs in our kitchen had used 50 watts each, meaning each gave out about the same amount of heat as a person. There were 14 of them. Some people think it's ridiculously wasteful to burn nearly three quarters of a kilowatt just to light one room, while others think it's ridiculously nerdy to care. Hmm, guilty as charged.

So, shortly after we moved in, I replaced them all with 20 watt bulbs which were very nearly as bright. A green-minded friend pointed out that by doing this I had met a national target being talked about at the time, to reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions by 60% (the target has since become a more ambitious 80%, but I've yet to notice any practical difference). It also looked as if that this was as low as I could go without either taking the kitchen ceiling to bits to get at (and change) the transformers for those lights, or putting up with a very dim kitchen.

For the next three years there the new bulbs all sat, cheerfully putting 280 watts of heat into the space between the kitchen ceiling and the floor of the bedroom above. Until the arrival of the space-age roof, and the realisation that I really had had enough. I think it was hallowe'en that finally did it. Why had I never thought, until then, of gently pulling the entire fixture out of the ceiling and finding out what was lurking beyond, up there in the ceiling space? Come to that, why are there so many little dark spaces in a typical house, full of various busy connections which are so crucial to the smooth running of everyday life, and yet which remain so utterly unknown? There are cities in other continents with whose layout I am more familiar than the layout of the connections in our own house.

I turned off the mains, climbed on a chair and carefully pulled the chrome ring from the ceiling. It turned out that the only thing holding it in place was a pair of sprung "wings". And the only thing holding the connecting wire in place was, the chrome ring itself. Nothing else was fixed to anything, meaning that the entire connection (including that cursed transformer) could be eased out through the hole.

That was the difficult bit!

The easy bit is, buying fourteen cool versions of "GU10" bulbs and their connectors, getting out wirestrippers and a screwdriver, and getting on with it.
The amusing sequel includes being asked by various people, how did you do that?, and the possibility of a whole new volume of light-bulb jokes...

Winning the Game

2010-10-12T21:58:00.003+01:00

D'oh the Game!!

The Game, Fille explained, has only one rule: you must never think about it. Once you think about it, you have lost. Then, wherever you are, and whoever you're with, you have to tell someone "I've just lost the Game".

But, I asked, then surely everyone who hears you will also have lost? Or what if you're alone and can't tell anyone? And, worst of all, can't people just cheat, by keeping quiet about having thought about the Game?

Apparently none of this is important. And the Game is played only by honest players. It's going round Fille's school like wildfire: so much so that a mention of the Black Hand Gang (alleged murderers of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, who turned up in a History lesson) caused some classmate who had misheard the name to exclaim "D'oh the Game!". The next History lesson included a presentation, and one further unfortunate classmate, on being asked to put up the next slide, was greeted with a screen completely blank except for the words THE GAME written in large friendly letters...it transpired that the History teacher, when still a student, had also played the Game.

I came up with the idea that anyone who (as was common at my old school) was a victim of being called a Swat, should get their own back by sitting in the front row of the class wearing an otherwise-ordinary school shirt decorated with the words "the Game" on the back. Badges with very small letters spelling out "You've just lost the Game" are also doing the rounds.

It all reminds me of that Oriental tale involving a cheeky magician who said he had an extremely powerful spell which he was willing to deploy on behalf of some rich patron, but which, he warned, would only work if the supplicant would not allow any thoughts of monkeys to cross his mind during the long incantation. I have tried this and can report, after exhaustive research, that it is impossible.

But the more you think about it, the worse it gets. There are many other things which work well until you start to think too hard about them. Any long-practiced and long-ago-mastered physical skill, for a start, falls into this group, because thinking about it brings it out from the back of the mind, which is more in touch with muscles and long-perfected skills, to the front, which is where new things are learned.

It seems that the only way of stopping this happening is to somehow perfect the ability to think, literaly, of Nothing, and defend that thought of Nothing from all possible comers.

Not-so-good vibrations

2010-09-29T20:40:00.003+01:00

The noise didn't wake me up: I just woke up, at about 3 a.m., and heard it. It was one of those noises that are felt as well as just heard: a very low-pitched hum. I couldn't make out where it was coming from so, researcher by nature, I got up to investigate.

After walking all round the house I drew a complete blank: there was no obvious direction, and no obvious source. Just the same level of hum no matter where I stood, except it was slightly louder near the windows.

But when I stepped outside, it was gone.

Thinking it might be something electrical but invisible (there's quite a lot of that in our house, all installed by the previous owners and roundly cursed by me), I hit the mains. Still there. And next door was uninhabited at the time, so it couldn't have been anything there either.

I had to admit defeat.

Until I saw an article about a car in the USA which used noise cancellation technology to make the low frequency of its idling engine bearable for the driver. It turns out that this frequency (a few hundred rpm) is not too far away from the resonant frequency of crucial parts of the human body. Like the main artery, or even our brainwaves. Which probably explains why the sound of idling cars is so irritating.

But cars are not usually idling in traffic-jams at three in the morning: they are far more likely to be on some or other mission of mercy on our city's ring road, their engines turning over at some 2000 rpm: just at the point where "vibrations" become "sound".

Those of us who can remember offhand the speed of sound in air can work out the size of a "lump" of air that will resonate with these car engines. Resonance is a strange thing: it takes very little wave power to get something resonating, if it happens to be the right size and shape, and the results can be dramatic. Outdoor air will not resonate, but will quietly carry the energy to the air inside something of the right size, that will oblige.

Something, it turns out in this case, of four and a half metres across. About the size of a typical living-room.

As if that's not enough, windows will also resonate at similar frequencies.

Space-age roof

2010-09-17T11:55:00.011+01:00

Sometimes, when I'm walking along streets blessed with an absence of traffic, I look up at the roofs. Sometimes these are pretty and atmospheric, with gothic turrets, or art deco friezes, or perhaps they are thatched or gently undulating along the ridge where weight has been borne for hundreds of years. And sometimes, they are just ordinary. Our roof is, or at least was, definitely the latter.

And that is why we had no difficulty deciding to put its large, and previously idle, area to some use: making electricity. We invested in a project to install nine of these futuristic works of art:

On the big day, the British weather obliged with its finest, wettest, rain!

But the gentlemen who came to do the work were no sissies, and carried on regardless

In just one day, everything on the roof was finished!

Arty close-up:

Another atmospheric shot, with reflections of clouds (for people who like that sort of thing):

There's something pleasingly geometrical about that pattern (getting a bit carried away now):

It also co-ordinates perfectly with the décor in the room inside the roof:

It's an interesting coincidence that a set-up like this provides roughly the same amount of energy that a person would spend on physical work (for the curious, the daily average of 4 kWh is the same amount of energy as 3,440 food calories).

Someone Else's Backyard

2010-08-15T19:37:00.007+01:00

You can't deny that it's beautiful countryside. Nearly all countryside is beautiful, if that's where you happen to live. And you can't deny that it's unique. The UK includes four climate zones, and any number of geological zones, making for a huge number of possible combinations of the two, each resulting in a different landscape. All of which, in their own way, are unique.

So what of it? Well, a large overseas conglomerate wants to build wind turbines on it. And of course the locals are up in arms. Which, from where I look at the problem, is a terrible shame.

I look at the problem from the point of view of a physicist: we all use electricity, we're no longer "an island of coal...", our gas supplies are fading fast and we don't have any Uranium to call our own. But given that we have plenty of wind, and that we don't have to pay for it, worry about it getting used up, or risk it falling into the hands of terrorists, it seems only logical that we should use it. And if this means adding odd-looking new bits of infrastructure to a landscape already alive with ingenuity from times past (everything from an iron-age settlement, through a motorway, to a nuclear power station and a generous sprinkling of communications masts) then so be it.

This means that when I happen to see wind turbines, in whatever kind of setting, my first thoughts are...Good, someone's addressing our energy problem. Note the use of "our". If they're on wild hills, the wild space is still there, only with the addition of "our" now-visible wild wind blowing over it. The view beyond is still ours to see.

What's missing from my point of view is of course the question of whose wind turbines they are.

It's a sad fact of life that the usual way of doing things involves the large conglomerate paying large sums of money to the people who own the particular field on which they want to build, and nothing to anybody else. Which is immediately divisive. If the field's owners live miles away, and the nearest house happens to be lived in by someone unconnected with the deal, things start to get unfair. As far as I know, the bog-standard wind energy contract doesn't allow for near-neighbours to get a share of the loot. There isn't even a mechanism for the deal to endow the little town with cheap electricity, lower business rates or some kind of part-ownership of the new features in their landscape. However there is a mechanism for the government to pay the large conglomerate, to encourage it to do the right thing.

It gets worse.

Before applying for planning permission, the company had to show off its proposals in the town hall. They conveniently "forgot" to put up most of the photomontages they had prepared, and which now appear on the website of the obligatory protest group (which of course has some friendly-sounding accronym like "Save Our Fells Today"). The website is slick and professional-looking, and so it should be considering the help that Country Guardian can offer in these matters. Like every other piece of anti-wind-farm literature I've ever seen, it portrays the proposal as an "invasion", and the efforts to thwart it as a "battle".

The town council (until recently the parish council), like parish councils all over the country, are all, shall we say, of a certain age, and the conglomerate has the misfortune to be based in Germany. To top it all, while I was staying there a neighbour dropped by to ask, on behalf of his friend in the town council, if we'd like to fly a flag (many of the houses have poles for christmas trees) to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. The town council have to consider the wind farm plans and make a recommendation to the nearest city council. The latter happens to be in a different county...it goes on. There was, in short, a general feeling of being "got-at" which was bringing out the worst in people.

In a completely separate incident, there was a water shortage in 1976 following a particularly dry summer. The water board put out publicity asking people to use water sparingly, and people obliged. In 1995 England (but not Scotland) was again short of water. The newly-privatised water companies, whose newly-very-rich bosses had been front page news, put out similar publicity, and people just ignored it and thought, what a cheek. The sensation of being ripped off by large conglomerates overpowered the natural drive to "do our bit".

And so I wonder, would all this have turned out differently if the electricity grid were still a public service, making the new arrivals, in some way, "ours"?

Seeing further

2010-08-05T16:18:00.004+01:00

Even as I write, our local paper says, streams of energetic particles are hurtling towards the Earth, where they will get caught up in our not-quite-as-energetic magnetic field lines and redirected to the poles. I've always wanted to see the Aurora. It's one of those things, like a total eclipse or the great wall of China, that you feel you should see even just once in a lifetime. The local paper goes on to say that this time I won't have to travel far: this Aurora will be so energetic that those of us as far south as 54 degrees will get a good view, as long as the sky is clear.

It forgets to say exactly what the sky needs to be clear of.

Step out into the street and try to catch the aurora. Or indeed anything else in the night sky. Chances are that, unless you live in the middle of a field, all you will get to see is street lighting. It is so intense near our house that we could turn off all our own lights and still walk around and carry on most of our everyday business using just the spare light that spills in from the street. So, of course, could our friendly neighbourhood burglar. But I digress.

It's a tough call to ask for more darkness. Darkness sounds so, uncivilised. It gets used as a metaphor for ignorance, malice, or exile.

But now that there's so little of it left, people are beginning to notice that we're missing out on something. With darkness, our sleep is deeper. Wildlife can go about its business undisturbed.

And, ironically, in the end it allows us to see a lot further.

And a box of Space, please

2010-07-26T17:31:00.008+01:00

When we first moved in to the new Chateau Lunchista, it came complete with a small cuboid of green space, which we clutter up and the city council replenish every fortnight. Here it is:

It carried out its humble task to the best of its abilities, never letting us down. It didn't fall to bits, throw tantrums or grind to a halt announcing that it wouldn't carry on without "upgrades". It didn't even fiddle its expenses. All the fortnight's recyclable junk from Chateau Lunchista fitted within its confines (as long as we worked on it a bit). The city council delightedly announced at the end of last year that 43% of all our waste had managed to avoid ending up in a hole int he ground.

Then one hot summer afternoon last week, it became evident that someone at the city council had decided that their good citizens were in need of new space, and lots of it. The space, together with instructions on how to use it, was being delivered from the back of a van, all down our street. Here's our share:

Notice the sleek, black, shiny finish: light just falls into them. Press the black circle on the black flaps at the sides and the lid opens in a self-satisfied manner, revealing the even blacker space within. It is in fact so immaculately black that one feels slightly guilty for soiling it with such mundane detritus as squashed tuna tins, plastic bottles and dog-eared newspapers.

We suspect that Mr Straight, the colourful character whose firm provides most of the UK with its recycling boxes, has somehow developed an upgrade which, like the Tardis, encloses a space capable of extending into the fourth dimension, so that it can accommodate an infinite amount of rubbish. However, given that our new boxes are beginning to fill up in the usual way, we are guessing that the 4th dimension option has been disabled for now, perhaps pending some kind of licence application, or tests verifying that people will still be able to lift them. In the meantime a sort of rubbish version of Parkinson's Law will ensure that, with three boxes instead of just the one (yes the green box, complete with a new sort of fishnet covering to stop things blowing away, will still be out there strutting its stuff), people will put more rubbish out for recycling than the present 43%.

But that's nothing. Lunchista has heard industry rumours that Mr Straight has a team of cosmologists working on the ultimate piece of recycling infrastructure: a box containing its own mini-Black Hole, which will instantly compress any rubbish to a single point of infinite density.

It might be a tad difficult to pick up, mind you.

Brand Name Crisis Looms

2010-07-23T23:59:00.002+01:00

Insiders in the advertising industry are becoming concerned over what they claim is the very real possibility that, due to the increasing popularity of re-branding, mergers, splits and the shortening lifetime of companies, together with the sheer number of new products launched every year, the industry faces the bleak prospect of running out of new brand names.

An advertising executive, who didn't want to be named, said:
'It's our industry’s dirty secret, the Wolf At The Door, the Mad Woman In The Attic. Nobody wants to talk about it because its effects on civilisation as we know it will be catastrophic.

'If you think about it, the English language only has a finite amount of meaningful words, and we have been exploiting them as brand names for at least 80 years. All the words which convey something meaningful, along with most of the place-names, have been used up. You can already see the signs, with companies who wish to re-brand having to resort to 3-letter acronyms or meaningless quasi-Latin-sounding names. The same is true for all other languages, in fact most have fewer words than English.

'The signs that something is amiss are already there to see. You don't think any sensible CEO would choose to call their company Centrica, Avensis or Consignia do you? Or lumber them with some forgettable 3-letter acronym like, ooh I can't remember any but you know what I mean.’

Advertising agencies and management consultants are now hiring top lexicographers in an attempt to predict how long the industry can continue mining the English language. Predictions range from 5 years to just over a decade.

But one sceptic announced 'This is all bunk. Sure, we'll run out of meaningful words but so what? There are 17,576 three-letter acronyms out there, and if all else fails we'll simply do what Mercedes do now, and use numbers. OK so they don't have any character, but neither do today’s brand-names or products, and it doesn't seem to affect sales’

Eighteen

2010-07-16T11:47:00.006+01:00

Thirty years ago a thin young lass stepped into one of those red phone-boxes of the type you don't see any more except in museums and, possibly, next to the odd outdoor pool in places like Texas. She dialled a number, and asked the lady who answered, one question. The lady carefully read out three letters of the alphabet and, after a brief further chat, the call was over.

The lass stepped out into the morning sun and danced down the street singing her head off. I wonder if anyone in Lamorna, where we were on holiday at the time, remembers my 18th birthday? It was a coming-of-age that had everything: a sense of achievement (those letters being my A-level results), a memorable moment, and a step through to a new life.

Except, of course, that students aren't real adults, any more than is the newly-confirmed 16 year old, or the 14 year old Bat Mitvah, or indeed anyone who emerges from any of the long-established, but now no longer all-inclusive, coming-of-age markers in life. You grew up faster in the Iron Age: shorter life expectancy meant you couldn't hang about. So, all the best and most meaningful coming-of-age rites are completely out-of-phase with modern life. And we haven't bothered to come up with anything nearly as good.

This has always struck me as rather remiss of us. At no point in present-day life are we handed, unambiguously and in full view of all the people we care about, the responsibilities of an adult life, with the underlying message "You're one of us now. You know your stuff, and we trust you".

Sometimes, you step out into a wide new space and there are absolutely no landmarks. At what point can you be said to be grown-up?

In the shops

2010-07-15T19:30:00.001+01:00

Thief in the night

2010-07-12T17:49:00.007+01:00

Some burglaries are more bizarre than others. There was one particular thief, for example, who specialised in taking the hinges from people's garden shed doors. Not so that the doors could be opened and the booty taken from within, but for their own sake. Presumably, then, a collection of hinges adorn some mantelpiece somewhere, where the retired criminal can stand before the fire and reminisce to guests about a past career in the realms of the newly un-hinged.

The burglary at our house was only slightly more rational. The only things taken from within the house were a very old mobile phone (soon deactivated) and a nest of cake-tins (which only made it as far as the garden). And this after every cupboard, including the ones for whisky and the family silver (such as it is) had been opened. The car, which was on its last legs anyway, was fired up using my keys, but even that only got as far as the nearest field, where it was later found burned and abandonned.

And of course, like every victim of crime, we asked ourselves, "why us?". So I stepped into our burglar's shoes. They were (said the Polis who looked at the prints on the floor) size 8 Ellesse trainers. And of course they were a perfect fit.

So here I am, walking into the neck of our cul-de-sac late one October evening: it's that time of year when, all of a sudden, the evenings revert to getting dark at their natural time. The sudden change sends out a signal, and that signal is, right you honest Brits, you've had your ration of fun for this year, time to stay indoors now. Along with that comes a second signal, only audible to some: right you Burglars, it's playtime! The only setback is that burglars, like the rest of us, are visual animals and don't like it to be absolutely dark. Thankfully this street comes with a full complement of street lighting. Some houses even have extra lights which helpfully come on so that our burglar can see where the lock, or any other weak points, are. And indeed no research has ever shown that artificial light, by itself, helps reduce burglary.

Our house is set back from the street so that our burglar has to pass behind a high hedge and walk across the front drive, directly below our bedroom windows, before reaching the high back gate. Through the gate and out of sight of the street, the rest is plain sailing.

We set about changing the landscape so that it was more sociable and less burglar-friendly.

We are not allowed to shoot out the street-lights, but our neighbours got the council to blank out the part of the light that shone directly into four bedroom windows.

I bought loppers and took down the front hedge. All of a sudden our front garden became more sociable and less like a dingy Victorian parlour. We hired a firm who took up the concrete drive and replaced it with gravel. Not only did this look far more classy, it is also impossible to sneak across. Then we had a lock put on the back gate, so that any breaking or picking had to be done at the front, in full view of the entire street. And we don't keep the car keys downstairs anymore (although we do have door keys at hand in case of fire).

But I think the most convincing reason why we were never burgled again, even though re-burglaries are depressingly common, was beyond even the most sophisticated parts of "Designing Out Crime". There exists a community of burglars. They frequent the same pubs, clubs and gyms. They recognise each other by things like parking on disabled spaces without the inconvenience of actually being disabled. They talk to each other: sport, motors, bling (they like the same bling as everybody else), recent jobs. There was this most peculiar place I did recently. Well-off-looking semi, nice part of town. We got in and, I'm not joking, there was nothing worth having! It was all old stuff.

Well, yes. There's bling, and there's class.

Planet Football

2010-07-07T11:21:00.007+01:00

We follow England's fortunes in the World Cup. And, when England inevitably get knocked out, chances are that those of us who are football-daft pick some other team to cheer on: perhaps we know someone from that country, perhaps they're the plucky underdogs, their style of play appeals, or their fans are particularly entertaining. Any excuse. And of course now we can carry on watching and cheering.

I got into playing football quite by accident. Like any sport, it's far more interesting to watch once you can bring in your own experience. It gives an extra dimension to the match: "What's he thinking?" "what would I do?" "wow, that particular move is very difficult!" People's skill can be seen for what it is.

Now I am going to stick my neck out and say, that skill comes from love, and from space.

The love comes from within the person: they start playing whatever sport it is, and if they like the sensation, they carry on, so that practice comes naturally. But the space, in the form of spare land and intervals of spare time, has to be found. And that is why, unlike some of the people in our street, I never tell off the kids who play football there. Not even when, in one day, their ball knocked nearly all the newly-set apples off our tree (my excuse? It's a young tree, and should be concentrating on growing stronger, not on producing fruit).

I'd never thought about the sheer expanse of area in that small street, until I saw someone do something with it other than drive down it. Last year, during Wimbledon, a different bunch of kids were out there playing tennis.

But back to the footie crowd: doubtless as time goes by the keenest of them will be looking for a playing-field rather than a street on which to practice. And indeed, someone has crunched the numbers and found that people who live within walking distance of parks or playing-fields are, in the average, fitter and healthier than those who don't. Some Scottish researchers have even claimed that men are "less likely to die".

Which brings me back to my own footballing experience. One of the untold stories was the sheer difficulty of getting our feet on a pitch. We'd ring and book, or even turn up having booked, only to find the slot had been bagged by one of the local schools, who must have had to load up an entire class and drive them across the city for the privilege. Presumably this was only done because the school lacked playing fields of their own, the land having long since been sold off and "developed". Nearby potential England team material, having nowhere to practice of an evening, would have stayed at home and let their skills lapse. Perhaps the supermarkets that now occupy these spaces hand out those little vouchers that schools can collect and redeem for sports equipment.

Some people blame the lack of space for sport on England's high population density. Meanwhile, ever since they beat Slovakia last month, I've been cheering on our equally dense neighbours the Netherlands.

Thanks to a mystery Football Forum for the image I nicked for this post.

Ancient appreciation of space

2010-07-03T00:46:00.004+01:00

Shape clay into a vessel,
it is the space within that gives it value.

Place doors and windows in a house,
it is the opening that brings light within.

Set spokes within a wheel,
it is the emptiness of the hub that makes them useful

Lao Tzu

Now dry your hands

2010-07-01T15:36:00.004+01:00

I wonder how often an Office Move happens in a typical department of a typical enterprise. You know the sort: anything from a total re-branding (resulting in the buying of a whole suite of new furniture), through restructuring of departments (which usually boils down to several days spent wheeling filing cabinets around), all the way down to one single promotion, hiring or secondment that results in a cascade of shuffling-up because each part of the office is no longer quite spacious enough to fit everyone in comfortably.

Somewhere in the middle of this Richter-scale of general upheaval was an office move in another part of a building where I once worked. The reshuffle unexpectedly resulted in the boss's new office being situated right next to the recently-refurbished Gents' loo. By the time the problem came to light, it was too late to re-arrange things. The problem was the intermittent racket of the electric hand-drier, which broke the boss's concentration.

People talked about it over tea. They proposed Engineering solutions. Accoustic walls in the office, baffles in the loo, extra weight on the party wall. Someone suggested moving the drier, but none of the other walls was strong enough for four rawlplugs and a kilogram of metal. People whose time was charged at £50 an hour looked up catalogues of quiet driers on the internet.

I happened to know that every other loo in that building came complete with both a drier and a laundered towel. This included the Accessible loo: to be fair, using a towel can be awkward for someone who, for example, has broken an arm.

I suggested not having a drier in the loo next to the office, and just using a towel. But apparently that was a bit too radical.

Loitering with intent

2010-06-30T14:40:00.005+01:00

Readers of The Year-long Lunch Break may remember an elderly gentleman I used to say hello to every morning, very early, on my way to work. Taking a cushion with him, he would quietly let himself out of the old people's home in which he was incarcerated, and sit on a wall on the street corner to watch the world go by.

Here is the wall in question:

The busy junction it overlooks has recently undergone its second massive reworking in the last three years. I happened upon the team of workmen who were installing the strange pebbled surface next to the wall, and asked them what it was for.

"It's to prevent loitering", replied the workman, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. And as if, might I add, the prospect of having people pause at street corners and use the space to have a chat was somehow abhorrent. After all, while chatting they could always smile and wave at the CCTV that overlooks the junction, and on days when the technology wasn't working they would be useful as potential eyewitnesses to the many traffic accidents that (still) occur there. But non-moving people, especially those too old for the playground but too young for the pub, seem to be unwanted in urban design.

Now supposing town planners and architects took this anti-loitering idea to its logical conclusion. What we would find, as we walked through our towns and cities, would be a succession of spaces each trying to discourage a pause in our journey by being more repulsive than the others. But that couldn't possibly happen in real life, could it?

Street games

2010-06-28T22:33:00.009+01:00

I can’t claim to have helped organise the Conference. I can only claim that I offered to put the spare bedroom, and indeed the pleasant space that is our living-room floor, on a register of places to stay for delegates whose budget was unable to stretch to our country’s extortionate hotel room rates. I got assigned an Architect from Germany, who was due to turn up on the Sunday evening.

In the event, he was unable to attend. Which was probably just as well given that Germany were not exactly flavour of the month around here last Sunday night. I suppose it could have been worse: he could have been from Uruguay.

All that I could have been said to provide, therefore, was peace of mind for those whose job it was to organise accommodation. Spare capacity can be useful like that. It also entitled me to turn up for a day to listen to other people’s academic research findings. Everybody has their vice.

Leaving aside for now the main subject of the conference, one of the more lively sub-plots was the way people notice, and use, space. An "outdoor workshop" on this topic was being held that afternoon, so I signed up.

We were all led to the city's main pedestrianised shopping street, and asked to stand in a circle and call out our names. After this I was expecting a quiet spot of something like psycho-geography, but things didn't go quite that smoothly.

We paired up and did that party game where one person pretends to be the other's reflection in a mirror. Then we got into groups and did sequences of poses. Some of the delegates had their cameras and took pictures, so at least this made us look like normal, if slightly amusing, tourists. Finally two lines of about 15 of us each played follow-my-leader all around the street. At this point we really did get some funny looks: someone called out "What are you doing?" and I felt honour bound to give them an explanation. "Street games!"

I suspected some people might have been looking for a collecting-tin to drop coins into. Two onlookers even joined in.

I could tell from the variety of accents I heard during the first exercise that none of the others taking part would ever have to be seen in this street again. But that's not so for me. This street is the venue for our family shopping: every time we need clothes or other mundane stuff, there we go. I had always found it rather boring.

But once something "a bit different", whether surreal, bizarre or exciting, has happened to you in a particular place, have you ever noticed, that place is never quite the same again? I had never noticed until that day, for example, that the fairy-lights in the trees there remain in place all year.

Car adverts

2010-06-26T12:07:00.004+01:00

We've all seen them. The sleek shape of the new model glides effortlessly along the open road through spectacular scenery...mountains, deserts, coast. It's just you the driver, and the elements of Nature. One of which is, of course, the empty road. The scene bypasses all your everyday thoughts and goes straight to the back shelf of your brain, like a dream. There it sits, ready to soothe you during stressful or boring moments of your day, such as when you are stuck in a traffic jam. You might develop a passing fancy to buy the car. But that's not what's for sale here.

The advert's early pioneers shot their footage in the Scottish Highlands and islands. Then, to guarantee an empty road, they had to start filming at 4 in the morning in midsummer. Then they moved on to the deserts of the USA and Africa. Finally, in one notorious case, they flew a car to the Marshall Islands, just to the West of the International Date Line, to enable their latest piece of 100-year-old technology to catch the first sunlight of the new Millennium.

These adverts are selling Space. Which is getting more and more difficult to find. Nowadays they have to resort to computer graphics.

Art lessons

2010-06-25T15:51:00.001+01:00

You could take Physics or History, and you could take Chemistry or Art. At about the age of 13 we were supposed to decide whether to go for arts or sciences, and presumably to stick with our choice for the remainder of our working lives, only catching up on the abandoned alternative (by visiting art galleries, or by reading New Scientist perhaps) in our spare time, or after retirement. You still had a Job For Life in those days.

I chose Physics and Art.

This gave my teenage schooldays an interesting texture. For an hour I'd be cramming my head full of equations, vectors and graphs, then I'd tidy them all away to the back of my brain and sit in the light, airy (and in fact rather drafty and occasionally wet) art room and draw-from-life some random arrangement of objects placed in the middle of the floor. Although more relaxing than Physics, this wasn't as easy as it seemed. Transparent bottles and vases are particularly tricky, and as you follow their shapes with your pencil, do you ever notice how difficult it is to get them right?

The knack that I was taught was, to concentrate less on the shapes of the objects themselves than on the shapes of the spaces in between them. And it really works! It wasn't until years later that I found out why. The spaces are such unfamiliar shapes that trying to draw them means having to concentrate on getting them exactly right, whereas the objects themselves are too familiar for the brain to bother firing up this "concentrating" lark and it's far too easy to take short-cuts.

Of course taking short-cuts gets things done more efficiently. But sometimes you have to look beyond that.