The day I dread - turning the clocks back

Sunday 30 October 2011

 

5.45 am

The awful day the clocks go back: we say “go” back as if they did it themselves; an illusion fostered by the computers who do indeed change the hour without our intervention. Presumably the deed was done at 2.am – a tiny movement on the digital display; two becomes one. It’s an illusion because they can only do this if a human being tells them to. The other clocks, those run by simple electric motors simply keep ticking away recording the passing hours. These we have to reset by hand.

That’s an easy job – one finger does it in seconds, but how can I change my body clock? -  this strange bundle of neural impulses inside my brain which tells me it is time to get up. For years its waymarks have been drifting slowly forwards: it always feels more natural to do things earlier rather than later. It takes a continual effort, a constant vigilance, to wait a little longer for the next meal, to work for another 15 minutes when you feel like stopping, to stay awake another half an hour in the evening, and hardest of all to stay in bed longer when you feel like getting up.  While all you out there, the great consensus, are rejoicing at being allowed another hour in bed, I am wondering how I am going to do everything a whole hour later than my body requires.

Today I did not even begin the task. I am still firmly in yesterday’s time. As I go through the day I will find ways to delay things and hope to keep going longer in the evening. If I manage that, there is a chance I may wake later tomorrow. I will get there eventually but it will take at least a week.  Then I can enjoy the winter in the knowledge that next spring the tables will be turned: the arrival of British Summer Time will give me an extra hour. For a few glorious days we early risers will be on top of the clock, riding the hours. This adaptation will be easy, and if talk in the media is correct, we may never have to face the clocks going back again.

This computer may have changed its clock but the Blogger site still thinks it's yesterday - must be run by late risers!

The Cambridge Chancellor Election

We went to Cambridge last week-end, partly as a week-end break, but with a purpose: to vote in the election for Chancellor.

My feelings about Cambridge are very mixed. When I got involved with the Peterhouse society as a committee member I reacted angrily against the young-fogyishness of it, the innate sense of superiority which goes with the public school tradition. Despite this there is still lots to love about the place and especially the odd eccentric traditions which still have great power.

Nothing could be more typical of Cambridge eccentricity than this election. It is over 100 years since they last had an election for chancellor and when the relatively uncontroversial choice of Lord Sainsbury was put forward as a replacement for Price Philip nobody expected one this time. However, a local shopkeeper, Abdul Arain, said “What has Lord Sainsbury ever done for Cambridge town?” and stood against him. When the election was announced two more candidates were put forward… a radical lawyer and the student’s choice, Brian Blessed.

A normal institution would send out ballot papers to all who were eligible to vote, but not Cambridge University. In this election you have to vote in person in the Senate house. To be eligible you have to be a member of the Senate and only those with masters degrees or higher are members. So those with first degrees are excluded then? Oh no – you can buy a masters degree for £10 if you apply a couple of weeks in advance. I had taken my masters degree years ago so I am eligible, but another condition is you have to wear a gown, and if I ever possessed a master’s gown I certainly don’t now. Problem? – “Oh no sir we can lend you one.”

The idea of going to vote became increasingly attractive. Thelma likes Cambridge anyway so she was very happy to go, and booked a B&B. I got in touch with three of my old friends from student days: Nick Stern was not going though his son was. Jim Cuthbert, now resident in Devon, wasn’t either, and Vince Bodsworth couldn’t,  but said to call in at Cricklade if we were driving. We stayed Thursday night in Bristol and got to Cricklade (near Swindon) on Friday morning. It turned out that Vinnie was in America but Chris was pleased to see us and we had a good catch-up session before the long drive across country to Cambridge.

The B&B was out of the centre so we took a bus in. It was surprisingly cold and I didn’t have a coat so decided to go and vote there and then.

I stepped into a different world – a world of privilege.  I must admit I loved it. As you might expect from what is at present rated the top university in the world, nothing is too much trouble for us “alumni”. There are men and women in gowns everywhere being as helpful as they could possibly be. One even sprinted across the Senate house quadrangle to pass on a message from Thelma that she would meet me at the “Combination Room” where they are serving refreshments. First I am lent an MA gown – longer and more elegant than the “bum freezer” gown we used to have to wear as undergraduates. Then I am asked my name and directed to the T registration table. Two attractive young people efficiently and graciously find my details, give me a little CU badge and direct me to the ballot box. There I put my first choice as Brian Blessed and my second as Abdul Arain.

All this takes place in the Senate house the elegant 18^th century hall where we used to sit our exams. The last time I was here was (according to the people with the register) in 1971 when I was required to hold one of the “praelector’s” fingers and was led into the hall with 4 others also holding a finger. (OK, seriously weird, but this is Cambridge University don’t forget). Then I was with my parents and some foreign girl asked to take my photograph. This time it was Thelma taking pictures. I was glad to hand back my status symbol and then we both went to enjoy our refreshments – seriously good coffee, tea and cakes in a fabulous medieval building.

I got my place at Cambridge by my own efforts from and ordinary grammar school in Swindon. It felt as if we were the future of the ancient universities in the sixties. The next lot of students were no longer required to wear gowns in the town, then all the colleges went mixed sex – it seemed that this wonderful world of academic excellence and ancient tradition was now part of the birthright of any Briton who could pass the exams.

Alas it was not to be. Cambridge is still a great place for free thinkers, it still welcomes people of all faiths politics and race, but its radicalism has been smothered in polite, friendly, liberal elitism. The public school boys have changed their accents to sound like the rest of us. They are less arrogant, but they still regard a Cambridge education as their right. They still give huge sums to their old colleges to keep the system going. (Although the money often enables the underprivileged to obtain scholarships  - see what I mean about niceness?)

How many of us lower orders are seriously going to travel to Cambridge to vote for a ceremonial office?  How naïve of me to think that anyone other than the establishment figure of Lord Sainsbury had a chance? A liberal lady don writing in the Guardian didn’t even consider voting for the “foul mouthed” Blessed. Sainsbury took over half the votes with Brian trailing well behind and the other two nowhere in sight – although the totally unknown Mr Arain did get over 300 votes.

Half of the next day we spent in another fabulous Cambridge institution – The Fitzwilliam Museum. They had an exhibition on called “Vermeer’s Women- Secrets and Silence”. Vermeer is one of my favourite artists, and although most of the paintings were by his contemporaries, the whole was a masterpiece of the curator’s art. All those still domestic interiors, those pensive women going about their peaceful occupations, turn out to have been charged with intense symbolism. They are full of mystery, allegory and didactic moralism. They are also wonderfully beautiful.

A second exhibition on the treasures of the Viennese court was even more surprising. The Hapsburg princes were immensely wealthy and spent vast amounts of it commissioning the most intricate craftsmanship imaginable. The skill employed in making some of the small artefacts on display is so incredible it looks like magic.

Then there are the permanent collections – it’s too much; our minds were so expanded we were exhausted and stumbled off to the Anchor pub by the river for some lunch. The town was heaving - thousands of young people mostly non-european looking.  What are they all doing here? I don't much like modern Cambridge - it's too big and rich. After walking a few more miles round the town we got the bus back to the B&B for a rest before heading out again in the evening. 

Evenings when we are away from home are a huge problem for me. I’m hungry before 7 but don’t want a big, long drawn out meal. If I go to bed before 11 I’m awake at 5 and have to face the prospect of 3 hours of tedium before I can hope for breakfast.

Live (amplified) music is OK if it’s in the right environment and something I can feel an involvement with. I used to be able to enjoy the theatre if it had a loop system, but that doesn’t work for me any more. Meetings, lectures and conferences are pretty hopeless. What’s left? Well cinema showings with subtitles are great but very scarce. If I watch telly in the bedroom I fall asleep even if it does have subtitles, and many hotel TVs do not.

Sometimes I can manage to get a reasonable amount from films if there are lots of visual clues to what is going on. I should have known however that “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” would be almost the model of what not to watch if you are deaf. After an hour I couldn’t bear it any longer and had to get out. I wandered around the bit of Cambridge which contained the “Grafton Centre”. The shopping centre itself is horrible, but the area around, despite some typical shopping centre type shops, is one of restored old terrace streets with a few really interesting looking pubs and restaurants. We could have had a decent meal in good surroundings, but we had to eat quickly before the film, so went into the only proper restaurant in the Grafton Centre – a very pseudo-Italian place which served a horrible cardboard pizza.

It was a grim and depressing evening which rather spoilt the wonder of the day.

The arrival of the light

11 Oct 2011
I don't suppose anybody looks forward to getting up in the dark - a sure sign of  the beginning of winter. For me it comes at the end of summer,  in my favourite month: September. It's part of what I can only describe as a joyful melancholy which comes with the gradual slowing down of the natural year. It goes with clear, warm still days when leaves slowly spiral down and the over-abundant growth of the summer is cut back to reveal the plain brown earth. In the arable areas the big artificial looking fields of uniform cereals with their tractor-wheel tramlines give way to something much more natural - stubble, a friendly environment for the birds and animals.

Getting up in the dark in a nearly carbon-neutral home has its own interest too. Many of the lights take a while to reach full power; when they do it is with a warm, gentle light. I found this a bit irritating at first but now I look forward to the slow arrival of the light. Would we love the dawn as much if it happened suddenly?

Since this house is a recreation of an old rural house of mixed origin, we decided not to go for the full "passivhaus" concept of zero energy input, but a typically British compromise where we have chinmeys and fires. This decision is also re-inforced by my conviction that the hearth is something we humans have evolved to cherish. Why else would we have imitation hearths in houses with no chimneys: fireplaces with imitation flames and no heat? Radiant heat and fireplaces make us feel good. So we have a Stanley Donard solid fuel cooker. This is cleverly designed to be easy to light and to burn wood. We also have a large solar water heater and a calor gas boiler as back up. All three feed into a big heat store tank in a shed outside. (Need I add that both are well insulated?) The heat from the tank is drawn off at different levels for underfloor heating,  towel rails, upstairs radiators and domestic hot water.

Since the boiler only operates if the water at the top of the tank is between 45 and 52 degrees, most of our hot water in the summer comes from the solar and in the winter from the Stanley, and Stan takes some looking after. He is like a much loved but demanding teenager - temperamental and fussy and often hungry at the wrong time.

I always have an awareness of the temperature of the hot water. If we've had a cold night then the room thermostats for the underfloor heating will start "calling" (for heat) and warm water will flow through the pipes, bringing down the tank temperature. Then I need to light the cooker.

Sometimes it feels like a nuisance, but usually I welcome this link with the past. Lighting fires was for centuries one of the main jobs for the early riser. In the wealthier households it would have been the servants, but even in my own past I can remember my father rattling around with a coke-burning rayburn. Until recently most of the heat generated by domestic ranges was wasted. Now I know that only the small part which emerges at the top of the chimney is wasted; the rest is stored in the tank or heats the air in the house. Even this heat is stored in the walls. Our walls have an inner layer of blocks which are sealed off from the outside air by 100mm of insulation, a 50mm cavity and a second, outer layer of blocks. It's called "thermal mass" an has the effect of smoothing out temperature differences in the whole house.

The State of the World

29 Sept 2011

I’ve been trying to use Twitter as a less trivial way to communicate with large numbers of people who share my interests. I consulted the help menu and understand that to generate followers I have to be active. The messages I send out have to be noticed. The problem is I’m not willing to waste time pointing out the obvious, the vaguely amusing or the slightly surprising, and I’m too cynical to get involved in every-day political debate.

So, here is something important and controversial. PLEASE SHOW ME I’M WRONG!

I’ve become more and more convinced that our whole way of life is based on a myth; that concepts like “growth” and “progress” are built on sand. I’ve thought a lot about this in the last few years and I now believe that what is happening to our world is really quite simple. I’ve taken some of the basic principles of evolution (which seem to me to be only controversial if you are a creationist) and set them out as “rules”:

RULE 1

Go forth and multiply

This is how a living organism is defined – a structure that can reproduce itself

Evolution lays an iron rule on all of us living things:

“The whole purpose of your life is to pass on your genes. Success is measured by how many copies of your genes you can pass on.”

RULE 2

To multiply you need resources

 – food and a suitable breeding environment. We all need food; fish need water, birds somewhere to nest, humans need shelter, grass needs soil etc.

RULE 3

The food of one species is the offspring of another.

Every form of life is predated by another  - even top predators have diseases.

RULE 4

When breeding and predation are in balance population numbers remain stable

RULE 5

With a good breeding environment, few predators and plenty of food (abundant resources) any species is bound to increase its numbers.

It can’t avoid doing so. Every form of life is programmed to multiply in response to the resources available to them and to the pressure of predation.

RULE 6

It takes longer to breed than it does to eat

Breeding rate responds to the food supply, so at the end of the process there are more mouths than food to feed them. Some species – mice for example – can respond very quickly. If predation is removed and food is plentiful, numbers can double and double again in weeks, until within a very short time numbers reach plague proportions and use up all the food. Then the population crashes.

So what’s this got to do with humans?

We’ve got the better of most of the organisms that try to live off us – from sabre tooth tigers to smallpox. We have plenty of food and we have family planning. Whenever resources start drying up we find new ones, and we’ve been doing this for centuries.

My thesis is that the pattern is still there – we are clever enough to keep postponing the crash point but not clever enough to prevent it. What we have achieved with amazing ingenuity is to find more and more ways to cheat the process.  By exploiting coal and oil we’ve vastly extended the capacity of the planet to sustain human life and as a consequence human numbers have reached plague proportions.

It is this plague of humans which is threatening to destroy not just us but all life on earth.

The big question now is:

Can human ingenuity reverse the process before it’s too late?

Do Red Kites protect lambs from crows?

24 September

The village I live in, Cilycwm,  has one pub called the Neuadd Fawr Arms. (Neuadd Fawr means big hall and refers to the old hall up the road which is now in ruins) I got talking to two of our neighbours there, both fringe members of the farming community and both interested in birds and wildlife. The topic was crows, and Aled asserted that the Red Kites are beneficial to the farmers because they keep the crows off the lambs. Crows and Ravens are well know for their gruesome habit of helping themselves to those tasty morsels, the eyes, whenever a sheep or lamb  is down or helpless.

What's interesting about this is that Kites are not very powerful predators - they do not have strong talons or powerful beaks, whereas Ravens have virtual pickaxes on their heads. Indeed it is claimed that the kites need foxes or Ravens to open up the carcase before they can feed, so it wouldn't seem to make much sense to chase the corvids away.

Not only do the top corvids have powerful beaks, but Ravens are around 1.3 kilos in weight, the same as the largest female kite - males weighing in at around 1kilo. Kites do have a bigger wingspan though, and if you go to a kite feeding station it is clear that they are the top scavenger - the crows and magpies don't get a look in. (I've not seen Ravens at a feeding station, perhaps because they are naturally more afraid of humans).

If Aled is right, then the only thing I can think of to account for this is that kites look like eagles, and we can assume that, like most birds, corvids will have a natural fear of eagles.

When inertia is the biggest risk

13 Sept 2011

On Sunday afternoon I said goodbye to the Small Nations Festival. (www.smallnations.co.uk) It’s not the first time but I really cannot imagine a situation in which it won’t be the last. There were at least 6 people there I had never seen before;  much of what was said I could not hear, and I no longer care who is involved.  Apart from the hearing, these are actually  positives.  I had made a resolution not to speak, but did so only to say that the reason for my resolution (not to speak) was that I believed the most important thing for the festival now was to change.  It’s good that new people are coming in. It may be frustrating that so many of the new ideas cropping up are things we’ve tried before, but that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t work in a different environment. The last two years following the old pattern but with a much reduced budget have not worked and the deficit has increased.

The message that “business as usual” is actually the most risky strategy is a difficult one for many people to take on board. We see this most acutely in the majority view on climate change. Our way of life is based on modifications to things we’ve been doing for centuries; it has the weight of history behind it – why change when a few more modifications could put us back on track?

Last week we visited the only old school friend I have kept in regular touch with. He's having a hard time. Half a lifetime of prevarication has left him with no proper provision for retirement and a mortgage. He looked after both his parents during their last days but was shocked to find that his mother had changed her will in his sister's favour leaving him with half what he expected and not enough to pay off the mortgage. The recession has reduced his income to the extent that he is losing hundreds of pounds a month so his legacy is being eaten away. 

It's a mess and calls for a properly thought out strategy for getting out of it, but my friend is hampered by grief, anger and, worst of all, indecision. I tried to persuade him that a possibly risky way of making money was less risky than doing nothing. I offered all the help and advice I could think of but it doesn't seem to have had any impact. I am really worried for him.

Hayle - individual freedom vs pubic good

2 September 2011

The Towans are the collective name for the dunes which run north from the Hayle estuary, and each section has a different name - Riviere, Mexico, Phillack, Upton etc. Strange names for a strange place. Hayle the town has some things in common with the Welsh post-industiral towns - the ugliness of its housing for example. It is a place of great importance in the history of the industrial revolution, but unlike Ironbridge which has created a world class museum, the best Hayle could manage so far has been to convert part of the magnificent old Harvey's Foundry into flats. The huge harbour has been a half emply building site for at least the four or five years we have been coming to St Ives in September.

This is probably because Hayle also has some world class beaches, and wetlands. The huge and wonderful estuary is the warmest in Britain and owned by the RSPB who have done quite a good job of protecting it from development. The Towans or dunes (same word as twyn in Welsh?) are mostly owned by the National Trust who presumably have had to grapple with the thorny issue of caravans and chalets. The area behind where we are staying looks not unlike a badly planned prison camp. It is full of a haphazard collection of concrete bunglows, most of which look like the more utilitarian type of public toilet. These are in marked contrast to the few older, mainly wooden beach chalets that have somehow been allowed to survive. Most of these have been build and maintained with love if not with much skill.

The thorny issue is to what extent should the owners and custodians of these precious places try to fulfill the huge demand for places to stay on holiday. The big question is "what is the point of conserving these places if people can't enjoy them?" To the dedicated conservationist the answer is clear - to save our natural heritage - but most of us want a chance to stay for a week or two in a comfortable few rooms with a nice view. A typically British response to this shown a few hundred yards further away from the town from us. There a row of 20 identical new chalet caravans are lined up end-on to the sea. In each case the living area has a picture window looking out over one of the best views in Britain - the Hayle estuary with St. Ives on the other side. Behind the front row and offset from it is another row, each one of which has a partial view, and behind them a third row with a little slice of view. I assume there is a scale of rental charges according the the view available. The beach is a short walk away and by this means hundreds of people are able to have a good holiday, the Council gets its tax and the owners make money and provide some jobs. The beach is so big it seldom gets really crowded, so it sounds like a win-win situation.

The problem is that, in order to provide these holiday makers with their graded views, those looking the other way have their view spoilt by ugly metal caravans.

We had a couple of days in the Gower last week, and walked towards the Worms Head from Rhossili village. Rhossili beach is rightly protected as an international heritage site (or some such terminology).  Despite this there is a row of caravans right in the middle of it, and clearly visible from most of the beach. Why do we allow this to happen? Why should the pleasure of a few dozen families be allowed to detract from that of the millions who visit the beach over the years?

It's the same problem as public music, noisy sports, crowded roads, and any kind of recreation which has a detrimental impact on the public at large. How far do we restrict individual freedom for the greater good.