Carl Hiaasen's green mischief

http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/arcimboldo_paris/gaml1007_15.htm

If you haven't read Carl Hiaasen (and he's not yet well-known here in the UK) I hope you will. Much of the best and most original postwar writing in English has come from the US - I defy anyone to name a British writer to stand next to Thomas Pynchon, for example. Maybe it's that America is less hung up on its cultural heritage (having so many), maybe it's simply the literary efflorescence that accompanies economic and military expansion as it did in Elizabethan England, I don't know.

But things that grow also decay, and Hiaasen's very funny crime novels are a symbolic organic revenge for property developers' depredations in his beloved Floridian wetlands. He's attacked the Disney Corporation in Team Rodent (1998).

His viscerally-felt objections are partly ecological, partly moral, but also aesthetic. The developers are merely crass, gripped by a nearsighted obsession with money, and as long as they turn over the cash and get out that's all they care about. The retirees who flock South are similarly dumb and disconnected from their environment; for them, a condo close to the Everglades is like one in New York, just warmer in winter. A long-brewed reckoning awaits them all.

In the book I've just (re)read, Double Whammy, the arch-enemy is a ratbag TV preacher who has sunk his profits in a disastrous residential complex pierced by canals ("lakes", he angrily reminds his salesmen) which he hope will be a selling feature for keen bass catchers, but which for historical land-use reasons turn out to be nearly as toxic as Love Canal.

But Nature is fighting back, not least because it has recruited a former State Governor who has despaired of resisting the forces of capitalism and gone wild, living in the forest and only sallying forth to harvest roadkill for his dinners. In this book, he loses an eye in a fight and replaces it with one from a stuffed owl; in another, his long hair becomes braided Indian-style, with eagle claws hanging from the ends.

Even the lesser villains are mutating in the vicinity of nonhuman life, with which (as we now know) we share so many genes. Here, a kidnapper kills a pitbull and unable to remove its death-locked jaws from his arm, simply cuts off the head and carries on. When he and his victim pass through a traffic tollbooth, the changetaker calmly expresses her regret that she hasn't any Milk Bones to offer the creature; for in Florida, anything can happen and Man is beginning to forget his distinctive nature.

Hiaasen has a writer's fascination with language, which like the nearby primeval landscape burgeons beyond our ability to grasp it all. In the midst of his scorn for the daftness of fishing competitions, he gives us this rococo recital of its commercial artefacts:

"As was everything in Dennis Gault's tournament artillery, his bass lures were brand new. For top-water action he had stocked up on Bang-O-Lures, Shad Raps, Slo Dancers, Hula Poppers, and Zara Spooks; for deep dredging he had armed himself with Wee Warts and Whopper Stoppers and the redoubtable Lazy Ike. For brushpiles he had unsheathed the Jig-N-Pig and Double Whammy, the Bayou Boogle and Eerie Dearie, plus a rainbow trove of Mister Twisters. As for that most reliable of bass rigs, the artificial worm, Dennis Gault had amassed three gooey pounds. He had caught fish on every color, so he packed them all: the black-grape crawdad, the smoke-sparkle lizard, the flip-tail purple daddy, the motor-oil moccasin, the blueberry gollywhomper, everything."

Wonderful. And best of all, good triumphs over evil.

It's escapism, naturally. As Oscar Wilde said, "It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all."

But in stimulating our imagination, perhaps Hiaasen's gonzo tales and misshapen brood are preparing us to take the side of the angels, or at least that of the more enigmatic Green Man.

http://www.vosper4coins.co.uk/stone/GreenMan_files/GreenMan.htm

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Chris Ryan's "Killing for the Company"

Until not so many years ago, I naively took the view that fiction was made up and non-fiction was true. I now realize that much fiction is dangerous truth smuggled past the guards.

Chris Ryan's 2011 novel shows the usual expertise gained from his time in the SAS, and his characters shoot and stab (and are killed) with believable detail. I read this type of thing as a vicarious thrill, but perhaps also to inure myself somewhat to the horror of what humans do to each other. It's a sort of cognitive dissonance: imagining the awfulness so that I can be reassured that it won't happen to me and mine in reality.

But Ryan's books, blood-soaked though they are, don't seem to inhabit a completely bleak moral universe. This may be to do with the heart of the man: when Ryan called his wife after his escape from Iraq, almost the first thing he said was "I've done a terrible thing," referring to his having had to kill two people during his solitary flight through the desert. The profession of arms is a tough one, but soldiers can still have a conscience, even if they look at religion sideways. I get the feeling that Andy McNab manages to keep the side doors of his mind shut a little tighter, though his references to the incidence of suicide among some of his fellows, and to the need for the psychological counselling that is more easily available to American Special Forces, suggests that many who do what they have to do find difficulty in preventing emotional leakage from those shut rooms.

It's said that psychopaths do understand how other people think and feel; what makes them so dangerous is that they don't care. There are two such in this book. One is a female Mossad agent who kills man, woman and child without the slightest compunction. The other is a British Prime Minister called Stratton, who holds secret meetings with an American arms manufacturer and undertakes to get his country involved in the Iraq conflict. Years later, we see him as a peace envoy to the Middle East, with more hidden plans and connexions. Throughout the book, he shows a quick perception of others and a superficially charming manner, but has a mood that turns on a sixpence. And he's a first-class God-botherer with a messianic ego and millenarian enthusiasm.

Events come to a head in 2013, in a Middle East becoming unstable and with Western powers preparing for imminent direct military involvement.

I can't say whether Stratton is simply a great fictional villain, playing to the prejudices of many of the readership, or whether the writer has a genuine dislike for those who give the orders but never wield the knife or gun themselves. I felt that the work was climbing over the border fence of fiction.

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Perranporth

Perranporth, between St Agnes and Newquay on the north coast, is named after St Piran, one of the patron saints of Cornwall. He is said to have been flung by pagan Irish into the sea with a millstone around his neck, but miraculously floated. I have read a more secular explanation, which is that he came over in a light boat - a coracle? - and the millstone was placed in the bottom as ballast to provide stability in the choppy seas. What mystifies me more is why numbers of missionaries came over from Ireland in the Dark Ages, and why they waited until the Romans had left, when Rome's official religion had been Christian for well over a century. Perhaps King Arthur invited them.

The flag of St Piran - a white cross on a black background, sported by so many tourists' cars, is said by some to represent the melting of white tin out of a black stone in Piran's hearth. Again, I think we underestimate the ancients. I don't believe glass was accidentally discovered by Phoenicians lighting a beach fire, either. If our forefathers had been dumb but lucky then at some point they would have run out of luck and we wouldn't be here. Even the invention of bread remains something of a mystery, when you consider how many processes are required to turn wheat into something edible. I believe there were proto-scientists and technologists much longer ago than we flatter ourselves to think.

It was a beautiful morning when we arrived, and the beach was packed. What with striped windbreaks and mini-tents, the British seaside looks like a cheerful refugee encampment these days.

Parking is tight and a bit expensive on the seafront, but if you turn off a little way uphill, into Wheal Leisure Car Park, you may be lucky. There's loos there and a pedestrian shortcut down to the shops.

We had lunch at the Pavilion Boatshed on the beach approach. It has stylish décor and the chef knows how to cook fish.

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Resistance is use...ful

http://www.railway-technical.com/diesel.shtml

UKIP leader Nigel Farage caused a stir some days ago when he said that violent protest might be the only way southern European countries could save their democracies. I interpret his comments as a warning rather than a call to arms, and he has said this sort of thing to the European Parliament before now. The horrified reaction of some people might better be directed at those Western powers who vigorously encouraged revolution in Libya and have recently been subverting the government of Syria, to the great harm of many of its people.

Alternatively, Farage's critics could be consistent in a different way, by upholding the right of people here to demonstrate in rowdy ways when their voices are otherwise ignored - or at least, to show some understanding of why it happens. Have we so soon forgotten the Poll Tax Riots of 1990?

In the eighteenth century, when MPs came from boroughs with an electorate of as few as three voters and most men and all women were disenfranchised, and when the Riot Act of 1714 included the death penalty for serious damage to property, there were still occasions on which crowds would run through Whitehall breaking windows to show their displeasure, or (for example) surround Pitt the Younger's carriage shouting "Bread, bread!". Conversely, when things were going right they could show their approval directly, as when cheering men detached the Prime Minister's horses from his carriage, put themselves between the shafts and pulled him home.

Now, Downing Street is gated and guarded, and the noise of protest must not reach the leader's ears. Try to make a point by parking your truck outside, or even just reading the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, and you will be swiftly arrested. Often what is done in the name of security or public order is merely about preventing embarrassment to the powerful. Think of Brian Haw, who camped outside Parliament for ten years to shame the occupants about the Iraq war, and the squalid effort to silence him by using a new Act of Parliament (SOCA, 2005) - which he successfully overcame because his demonstration had started before the Act came into being. This shabby attempt should be periodically publicised as a standing reproof to MPs.

The fact is that when democracy is broken, people will find other ways than the vote to register their views. It's far from ideal, and the electoral reforms of 1832 and later were supposed to give a voice to the gagged; but if Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is ineffective (if not actually in agreement with the government of the day, e.g. on the European Union), then a dangerous pressure will build up in the machine.

Unfortunately, the cyber-spy society in which we live has enormously strengthened the ability of the powers-that-be to monitor and suppress dissent, and they don't like information being used in the opposite direction. Like Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have all annoyed governments by shining a light on the latter's filthier activities. Ellsberg was lucky, as it turned out: he got support from the Press, and an Alaskan Senator who put 4,100 pages of the secret documents onto the public record, and many of the public were behind him in his opposition to the Vietnam War. But the rulers have learned since then, and know how to frighten and confuse us so that we don't make the same kind of fuss on behalf of modern whistle-blowers.

And as for mass demonstration and direct physical intervention! Even the critics of the government are conflicted. For example, "Archbishop Cranmer" yesterday deplored fracking protestors' "claimed right to break the law; to enforce where they cannot persuade, for [...] the ordinary rules of democracy cannot apply to them." Yet today he observes, "A modern, secular democracy provides for no peaceful means [for the people to withdraw their consent], especially since differences among mainstream parties are fading away."

To those who govern us, silencing the people may seem like a good thing, but in the long run it is like a dried pea stuck in the escape valve of the pressure cooker, or an engine without a governor: the failure of proper feedback allows the machine to become dysfunctional to the point of self-destruction. Effective opposition makes the system work better; if only the Opposition understood.

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Charlestown, St Austell

If you're around St Austell or passing through, Charlestown is certainly worth a visit. It has visual beauty, historical interest (especially for those who have a nautical bent) and a number of good places to eat and drink.

The place was a commercial development started in 1790 by Charles Rashleigh, to cater for the export of the copper mined nearby (and later, the clay). In ten years or so the harbour, storage rooms and workers' houses were all built together out of local granite, so there is a quiet grey architectural harmony about the place.

The Rashleigh name recurs in this part of south Cornwall. The family were merchants who bought the manor of Trenant (near Fowey) when that disastrous spendthrift Henry VIII dissolved (and sold) the monasteries. This didn't do the royal finances much good, because a great part of the cash had to be used to support the people who'd been turned out; but it was a Big Bang for money-minded Protestants and their descendants' terror of losing it all again is reflected in the 1688 Bill of Rights, itself the inspiration for the American Constitution.

At any rate, in Charlestown you have the Rashleigh Arms - good for a family meal in wood/brass/carpet surroundings; the cobbled car park is a feature, though it may test your car's suspension a bit. (In nearby Polkerris there is the Rashleigh Inn, right by the beach; and the Ship Inn in Fowey also used to be a Rashleigh family property. They're all good, as it happens.) And for the younger crowd, there's a couple of dockside café/wine bars that have a more modern décor.

But our favourite is the Harbourside Inn (at the Pier House Hotel). The food is good, some of the furniture converted from oak barrels, there's a window seat if you get in early enough, and the local beers are excellent. Most of all, the ambience is friendly and unstuffy. Behind the bar is one of those people who turn their work into art; his movement and multitasking are like a kata for engaging several opponents and he clearly enjoys the buzz of business. It's a treat to watch him. Popular on the taps when we went were the disgracefully logoed (this should cure Americans of thinking the British are reserved) Cornish Knocker and Sharp's Special - both flavoursome, but Doom Bar is what the manager rightly calls a "session" ale.

Something else not to miss is the Shipwreck & Heritage Centre. Divers will be particularly interested in the section on old diving equipment, including the heavy helmeted suits and an eighteenth century precursor made out of wood, but the range of exhibits is impressive and entertaining.

It's possible to walk along the coast in either direction, to Porthpean and Polkerris and beyond. Or one could visit either and end up in Charlestown for lunch or an evening meal.

To conclude, here are a couple of Youtube videos of Charlestown and the path from Polkerris to Charlestown, beautifully shot (you may want to mute the music):





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Cities - greener and safer than the countryside?

We tend to think of cities as dirty and dangerous, but both these perceptions may need qualification.

In a book published earlier this year, William Meyers argues that although high-density population areas consume a great deal of energy, per capita energy consumption is higher in extra-urban areas, and drops as population density rises.

He accepts that cities pollute, but "the world’s worst air pollution anywhere is in rural areas. It’s in rural areas in the third world, and it’s indoor air pollution. It’s because rural areas depend upon smoky biomass fuels, so you get higher levels of that kind of pollution indoors in rural areas. You breathe it in very directly. It’s the biggest contribution to air pollution doses for people, but it’s not visible." Rural pollution from burning wood and coal was a major contributor to the huge smog in the region around Beijing in January.

Similarly, a 2005 paper by Brian Christens and Paul W. Speer (pdf) suggests the incidence of violent crime is negatively correlated with population density. Their study, centred on Nashville, Tennessee, concluded that not only was it a factor, but "this environmental characteristic – population density – predicted more of the variance in violent crime than the majority of the other population  characteristics in the model."

There are other considerations that may affect one's choice of where to live, such as vulnerability to disruption of services; but ceteris paribus, it seems city living could be the beneficial model for the future. 

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Porthpean Beach

The couple on the next table at the B&B told us they'd spent the day there and enjoyed it, so we gave it the once-over. Porthpean Beach is less than a mile down a winding lane off St Austell's A390 ring road.

Map: Google Maps (search "Porthpean Sailing Club")

It's a small sandy beach, secluded and facing south-east so that it enjoys the sun most of the time. Vehicles aren't allowed on during the day, and the car park across the road is only £2 (with an honesty box for when the booth is unoccupied) - rabbits included.

The café was closed by the time we got there, but a group was burning some food on a disposable barbecue and children pattered about on the sand. The sailing club overlooks it and as it was after 6 pm, a car was reversing its trailer into the waves to release a dinghy.

It looks a good place for bucket and spade, as well as for older types to lollygag. When thirst calls, there's a footpath by the club that goes over the cliff to Charlestown, which has several of the nicest pubs in St Austell.

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Hashish hoo-ha hots up

And now Lee Child adds his weight to the cannabis legalisation lobby:

‘I’ve been smoking weed for 44 years, five nights a week,’ the author confessed. ‘I’m the poster boy to prove it doesn’t do you much harm.'

Yes, he is a successful writer, with compelling powers of description. I've read a number of his novels and the best for me was 61 Hours, set in the bitterness of a South Dakota winter. The cold and snow are major characters in the book, realized with extraordinary precision. I recall how at one point "spicules" of ice are blowing into Reacher's face and when he enters a house and warms up his visage is all bloody.

But smoking weed doesn't make you a great author, any more than hurling bags of empty whisky bottles into Sepulveda Canyon turns you into Scott Fitzgerald, or poking your fingers up your wife's nose and half-throttling her makes you a millionaire art patron.

Also, it's a bit chicken and egg, but Child's glittering prose covers a cold, cold underneath. Even as you read his work spellbound, you are aware of the utter bleakness, darkness and hopelessness at its core. He says he writes for angry people, and his first book was composed in spitting fury against those who sacked him from Granada TV. Now whether it's that type that turns to "bud", or the causal relationship is the other way round, I don't know. It's well-known that alcohol can induce temporary or longer-lasting changes in character, and maybe the cannabis has firmed up Child's laser-sharp vision and starved heart. All I know is that his books are a habit I have to break, a thought that came to me before he made his drug revelation.

Like the one about climate change, the drugs debate is so polarised that it's more like rival gangs of football hooligans howling at each other. And it misses the real issue, which is how things get decided.

Popularity is one factor, hence the watershed release from the law's clutches of Keith Richard and Mick Jagger in 1967. The general millenarian mood among the young at that time was such that the Beatles felt they had to disassociate themselves from it the following year with their song "Revolution". Their influence could so easily have been used to spark a full-on revolt; I remember feeling disappointed, betrayed. Now, I feel thank goodness. They could have been the Pied Pipers for a suicidal anti-establishment Children's Crusade.

The bigger factor is power cliques. I think it's uncontroversial to say that we have a sham democracy and events are determined by a very small minority, the rest of us clucking away impotently. Otherwise, how do you explain the way our MPs feather their own nests while imposing austerity on the masses and robbing savers and pensioners blind with inflation and low interest rates?

Similarly, the elite who developed a drugs habit in the Sixties and Seventies have social and financial safety nets that aren't available to the poor, and Peter Hitchens is right to point out that they are shaping public policy simply to make it more comfortable for themselves, so that they don't have to put "Watch Out - There's A Fuzz About!" stickers on their study doors.

Like alcohol, marijuana is certainly pernicious for some, and perhaps not for others. There's also the question of how socially acceptable drugs are socially controlled. Lawrence Durrell's "Bitter Lemons" recounts how the old men would smoke dope under the Tree of Idleness in Kyrenia - but this was not for the young and the working population to do all day. And Carlos Castaneda's books about drug initiation in Mexico are cast in the mode of psychic pilgrimage and exploration, not daily casual use.

But to come back to the main point, it's not what I think that matters, or what you think; it's what they think, the people who currently run politics and the media - and business, doubtless with a grinning Richard Branson hopping impatiently from foot to foot to get started on the marketing campaign for Virgin Spliffs or whatever. The powers-that-be have overseen an explosion in gambling and loansharking, they've progressively loosened the leash on the beast alcohol since the 1960s, and legally available "soft" drugs are a-coming, like it or not, good thing or not. The news stories and celeb interjections are just part of the softening-up process.

As ever, the real drivers in the "debate" are power and money, and they'll tell you you're exercising your freedom as you bind yet another chain around yourself.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

Totnes: Cats Cafe

"I'll bring your coffee and then you can meet the staff," said the proprietress to my wife. There are six of them: a big black tom who lives under the counter, a woolly ginger who spend most of his time stretched full-length on his favourite chair, a b&w with a tail shortened by mishap (yet still named Felix), Glee the torty, a pretty grey-and-white affair called Lilac and Rolo, a bluish tabby whose favourite game is Scrabble "(especially in the litter tray)", as the profile scrapbook reveals.

Out came the cat treats for the customers to offer, and up came the staff, all cupboard love. This is when I entered the café, via the door-release airlock that seals in the workers until home time. Mango the ginger hardly stirred as I stroked his head; Lilac and Glee competed for the cat biscuits in the plastic containers we held.

Another lady sat next to my wife and we compared the cats we had owned, and how long they had lived; she now had five of them. She was a little disappointed at the obviously ulterior motives of the ménage here, but as I explained, they didn't know us from Adam.

I sipped my tea and glanced through the second book, full of cuttings about the therapeutic benefits of cats. We are such a valetudinarian lot these days, are we not; even sex is to be performed for the sake of your health. I simply like cats - and dogs, and so on.

But as the posters in the window informed passers-by, cats' cafes started in Japan for high-rise dwellers who couldn't keep pets. Cat lovers, the Japanese: Hello Kitty started there, and Maneki-neko, the lucky waving cat (I have one myself). I asked the owner how she had selected her team. She said she'd previously run a hotel-cum-cats' rescue and so had had the opportunity to assess their temperaments.

Children can't come in - because of insurance ("the White Man's Burden", as the Goon Show called it). Some visitors have asked if the café is for bringing their own cats; that would be something to see: even in a Pupil Referral Unit, group dynamics change radically whenever someone joins or leaves. The experience of a bring-your-own-cat playgroup would certainly be educational. Perhaps the café could charge corkage (or Korky-age, for Dandy readers).

We cleaned ourselves with the alcohol hand sanitizers and left, but we'll be back.

http://www.totnescatscafe.org.uk/

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Best pasty in Cornwall

Photo: BBC

While we waited for the minibus to take us from the field to Trevaunance Cove, I saw one of the parking stewards contentedly eating a pasty (end first; I'd heard that the Cornish miners used to eat the middle and throw away the grimed crust, but our hands are cleaner these days). I asked him, "What's the best pasty in Cornwall?"

"The best one in St Agnes is from the bakery, by the church." And so it was, as we found later. Or at any rate, it was excellent, even if we hadn't tried any other outlets there. And the cake slices looked dangerously good, and large.

But in the whole of Cornwall? Barnecutts in Bodmin, he replied, his mate adding that it was the best of the reasonably-priced ones. Even better, the men agreed, was Aunty Avice's, made "at the back of a garage" in St Kew. It sounded like Jeremy Clarkson's ideal sports car manufacturer, a couple of blokes bashing metal in a unit on an industrial estate.

Then we got onto the bespoke ones. One woman would "go mad" if you dared use any sauce with hers; though he agreed you should have a lot of pepper in the mix. Wikipedia mentions a combination sweet and savoury version formerly eaten in Anglesey, but Cornwall does them, too: my former co-worker Gary from Wadebridge was asked to bring one of his mum's pasties back for a mate in Birmingham, and she made one of these combos that was so big it filled the back shelf of the car.

Pasties are taken seriously, and this year the Eden Project hosted the second World Pasty Championships. In the company category, the winner was from Bath; but the runners-up from St Just and Scorrier, both in Cornwall. Among individuals, Cornishman Billy Deakin from Mount Hawke won the amateur title for the second year running, while the three top professionals came from Bodmin and Padstow. ThisIsCornwall ran a story featuring five leading makers at the time, back in February.

According to the Cornish Pasty Association,

"A genuine Cornish pasty has a distinctive ‘D’ shape and is crimped on one side, never on top. The texture of the filling for the pasty is chunky, made up of uncooked minced or roughly cut chunks of beef (not less than 12.5%), swede, potato and onion and a light peppery seasoning.

"The pastry casing is golden in colour, savoury, glazed with milk or egg and robust enough to retain its shape throughout the cooking and cooling process without splitting or cracking. The whole pasty is slow-baked to ensure that flavours from the raw ingredients are maximised. No flavourings or additives must be used. And, perhaps most importantly, it must also be made in Cornwall."

That last point is borne out by EC Regulation 510/2006 (pdf), which drew unhappy comment from manufacturers outside the county. But it's no more than DOCG for Italian wines and cheeses, and I rate Cornish pasties as a similarly fine, characteristic regional product.

The nicest we've had is a steak pasty from the snack shop opposite Fowey ferry car park - really succulent, with a rich, thick gravy. Made in town, we were told. Don't know if that counts as a traditional Cornish pasty, but so what.

Our researches continue.

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Nomad

Richard Dadd: Caravan Halted By The Sea Shore (1843)


Pounding up the packed M5 yesterday, I noticed that caravans are like a red rag to a bull for the rest of us drivers, even if they're doing a good speed. But I also used one or two in the middle lane as markers to see if staying in the outside lane is better than switching to whichever queue seems to be making better progress; it is.

And as I drove, I wondered whether there is a Best Place. Cornwall and Devon are so lovely, so do the people who live there go elsewhere on their holidays, and if so, why and where? You could do an experiment, perhaps using information from travel agents: find out where the majority in one location take their breaks, then go to that place and see where the locals take theirs, and so on. Would you end up somewhere that is perfect, or simply so poor that the natives don't go abroad? Would you end up back where you started? Would the trek never end?

Perhaps it is not so much about venturing into the unknown, as escape from the known. Gertrude Stein: "What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there."

Richard Dadd: Artist's Halt In The Desert By Moonlight

Arabs - the Bedouin kind - have long caught the British imagination. Like birds, they seem free. Some of the happiest-looking photographs of the SAS are taken when they're wearing their shemaghs, and the first couple of lines of the following quote from James Elroy Flecker's "Hassan" appear on the memorial Clock Tower at 22 SAS' Stirling Lines base in Hereford:

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

          Always a little further; it may be

        Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow

          Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

        White on a throne or guarded in a cave

          There lies a prophet who can understand

        Why men were born: but surely we are brave,

          Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

I suspect that Flecker originally wrote the scene as a stand-alone tribute to the heart's desire for the journey without end or final purpose, like Tennyson's Ulysses, and only afterwards turned it into a drama (all the rest is in prose).

And so, with regret, passing Gormley's awful Willow Man at Bridgwater (now thankfully dwarfed by the massive, gaudy-green decorated shed of the Morrisons depot) we took the Golden Road back to Birmingham, intending to return to the West Country as soon as possible.

CORRECTION: Not Gormley - Serena de la Hey. Apologies to both.

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Polluting the climate

There are a number of more or less feasible ways in which humans may influence climate, both locally and globally.

An interesting theory published by Professor Qing-Bin Lu back in May makes the claim that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) once widely used as refrigerants, cleansers, aerosol propellants and foam-blowing agents may have affected the climate as greenhouse gases as well as damaging the ozone layer.

The chemistry and physics behind CFC-induced ozone layer damage are fairly well established, although Professor Lu thinks the ozone-destroying reactions are initiated by cosmic rays rather than the usual explanation based on solar uv photolysis.

Whatever the initiating pathway to ozone damage, the Montreal Protocolcame into being in 1989 and appears to have been successful in controlling and reducing the use of CFCs linked to that damage.

However, Professor Lu claims that those same CFCs also warmed our climate because they happen to be powerful greenhouse gases.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B.

CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now shows that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

So we have yet another climate theory, but an interesting one because it seeks to account for both the late twentieth century warming from about 1970 to 2002 and also the recent warming hiatus from about 2002 to the present, data which the CO2 theory fails to explain. According to Professor Lu, as we phased out those CFCs, the warming stalled in spite of a continued rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Although the paper received some publicity at the time, such as here, here, here and here, it now appears to have sunk below the mainstream horizon. Which is a pity, because if nothing else Professor Lu’s work suggests we are some way from understanding basic climate drivers, let alone classifying them in order of importance.

In climate science, the elephant in the room is surely uncertainty.

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Would you notice?

From Bloomberg Businessweek

Xerox is now saying that some of its scanners can alter numbers in documents, even at the highest resolution setting. It blames a software bug for which it does not yet have a fix. “We continue to work tirelessly and diligently to develop a software patch to address the problem,” the company said in an Aug. 11 statement.

The problem came to light when German computer scientist David Kriesel scanned a construction plan on a Xerox machine and noticed that it changed numbers on some of the room measurements.

Would you notice such a thing? I'm not sure I would.

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UK carbon capture

Click Green reports:-

 
National Grid has successfully completed test drilling of a carbon dioxide storage site in the North Sea – a major milestone in delivering a storage solution for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).

Early indications are that the undersea site 65 kilometres off the Yorkshire coast is viable for carbon dioxide storage and will be able to hold around 200 million tonnes permanently. This is equivalent to taking ten million cars off the road for 10 years.

The drilling is a major milestone in its Don Valley storage work programme funded by an EU grant to advance CCS in Europe. The findings are significant as this type of storage site is common in Europe.

If we take that figure of 200 million tonnes of CO2 and compare it to a reported 35.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted globally in 2012, we may easily calculate that the National Grid CO2 storage project would accommodate global CO2 emissions for about two days. So after two days it would be full.

One might ask if that two days respite represents good value for money in terms of CO2-induced global temperature changes. Good value for the well owners no doubt, but good value for us?

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Re cycling

We’ve just returned from a week in the caravan at Minehead, Somerset. We use Minehead as a base for walking in Exmoor and the surrounding area. Not quite as rugged as Derbyshire, but a most attractive area for walking.

Withypool to Tarr Steps and back via Knaplock is a fine circular walk if you are ever in the area.

One thing we notice about these caravan jaunts is how many caravans and motorhomes have a couple of bikes stowed somewhere conspicuous.

Another thing we notice is how rarely we see any of these cycle owners actually cycle off somewhere. The cycles are unloaded from the car roof or the back of the motorhome right enough, but after that brief burst of activity they seem to lie around as a mute sign of good intentions.

Can’t do that with walking boots I suppose.

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Polkerris

We were lucky: a young couple having an in-car heart-to-heart vacated their space for us at the Rashleigh Inn. We'd gone there to catch the westward view over the bay, where the BBC Weather site had forecast a clear sunset.

It was a gray evening and the tide was out. Adults and children wandered over the harbour beach and wall. A wraith of mist stood on the sea over by Charlestown, as though someone had lit a bonfire on the water.

 

In we went and ordered a pasty, which turned out to be locally made and excellent. I nicked chips from my wife's plate. We sat at a long table under a large portrait of a sixteenth century Spaniard in his fine clothes and chain of authority, his gilded helmet beside him. A shih tzu and a Jack Russell-terrier cross fidgeted at our feet, while their middle-aged owners examined a property online and discussed ideas for refurbishment and building a new house on the back lot. At the bar counter, an old man with a bent back sat open-eyed and unmoving, while the evening swirled about him.

 

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NS&I to hit pensioners on Armistice Day

"Tens of thousands [of] customers with old National Savings & Investment savings accounts will see returns cut in November, it emerged today.

"The changes affect savers who took out an NS&I Savings Certificate before 1996.

Roughly £745m is held across 967,000 of these accounts, according to NS&I. The government's savings arm told The Telegraph that the return on 89,057 accounts, typically held by older savers, will fall from November 11, 2013."
 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/10233444/NSandI-reduces-rates-again-hitting-90000.html

The Telegraph also says:

"NS&I was created in 1961 as the Post Office Savings Bank to encourage saving and attract deposits for the Treasury to use running the country. These two tenets remain today. The simplest way to raise money is to offer alluring rates to savers. However, NS&I is bound by rules that force it to balance the interests of three parties: the Government, savers, and the banking industry.

"A flood of money going into NS&I coffers has upset this balance and the Government has ordered NS&I to stop taking so much money. As a result it has cut rates and accounts to dissuade savers. The latest version of NS&I Savings Certificates is no longer on sale."

Yet again, the Treasury shows that it has forgotten its own history, or feigns to have done so. As I have shown here and to my MP, both the Government and the Opposition expressly recognised a social obligation to pensioners to protect them from inflation, when Index-Linked Savings Certificates were first introduced in 1975. This was made clear in exchanges in both the Commons and the Lords (please see the link just given, for details).

I don't know whether the choice of Armistice Day for these new changes to take effect, is a deliberate insult to the elderly, some of whom may still recall the last World War, or simply another example of the crass, oblivious obtuseness that I am coming to expect from the finely-honed minds of the Treasury.

At least there is the option for existing holders to switch to new index-linked certificates - but the rest of us are excluded from making fresh purchases. And this still leaves open the question of how RPI may be manipulated in future to minimise returns to savers.

I read some general trends here: the Government is quietly abandoning its duty to keep inflation down, its grip on the public finances is slipping, and the public (rushing to NS&I for safety) can see that the Emperor has no clothes.

One commentator on the Telegraph article (1066goldberg) says buy physical silver; another (oldkingkole) says he doesn't understand the logic; I think I do.

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Not enough O2 in the H2O?

Adam Nieman: "Global water and air volume" (Science Photo Library)

Professor Jason Box is continuing his research into the effect on Greenland snow melt of particulates from fossil fuel burning and forest fires, and this set me wondering about how much atmospheric oxygen is being locked up by the same processes.

O2 levels have varied radically during last 600 million years:

(from Wikipedia article "Atmosphere of Earth: Third Atmosphere")

- as corroborated by analysis of ancient gas bubbles trapped in amber.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper in 2008, Peter Tatchell said that research by Professor Robert Berner suggested "humans breathed a much more oxygen-rich air 10,000 years ago", though I can't track down the original statement and suspect Tatchell may have misunderstood. (A paper by Berner on oxygen in the Phanerozoic era can be read here.)

Tatchell appears to be on firmer ground voicing concerns about air quality in cities, though what's in the air is more worrying than what's absent, as this article from last month's Mail Online India edition says. That said, cities that are prone to temperature inversion layers (e.g. Los Angeles, Beijing) may find that not only is smog locked in, but oxygen not replenished from the surrounding area as fast as it is being consumed.

Globally, there seems to have been a very small decline in atmospheric oxygen since 1990, according to an 18-year longitudinal study by Dr Ralph Keeling. According to a post on the Climate Emergency Institute website, the decline is even less than Keeling had expected, and it's possible that increased CO2 is stimulating the growth of vegetation.

Certainly the self-styled "Rational Optimist" Matt Ridley claims greenery is increasing, but I am inclined to take his professional bullishness with a pinch of salt. Surface spread as seen by satellite misses the third dimension: the UN FAO estimates (2012 forest report) that forest cover has dropped by around a third in the last 10,000 years, and the loss has accelerated from an average of 360,000 hectares per year since civilization began, to 5.2 million annually over the last decade.

Which brings us back to the carbon dioxide-global warming debate. CO2 is a "greenhouse gas" but there are so many other factors affecting the Earth's surface temperature that I don't think anyone can say which way the thermometer is going to move. However, if the sea continues to warm up there is a danger that the level of dissolved oxygen in the oceans will be reduced. A study reported last year in Science Daily says that 15% of the seas are "dead zones" and suggests that an increase of a couple of degrees - as has happened since the end of the last Ice Age - can have significant effects. Again, industrial pollution and waste dumping exacerbate the damage.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Oxygen_Depletion


The Tatchell article also refers to a claimed 30% drop in oceanic oxygen-producing phytoplankton in the thirty years since 1980, though this is disputed. Even if true, our gas tank will keep us going for the foreseeable future: the Earth's atmosphere has a total mass of some 5 quadrillion (10¹⁵) tonnes, a fifth of which is oxygen. There's so much that the CEI article concludes "even when fossil fuel reserves (mostly coal) are exhausted, the maximum potential loss in oxygen is only small (Broecker, 1970)."

Further, as this 1994 paper by Duursma and Boisson says:

"Oxygen concentrations are ... the consequence of larger terrestrial and aquatic loops in which factors of temperature, light, nutrients and co2 play a role; for longer periods, elements such as sulphur and iron are involved. Hence the present level of 20.946 vol. % of atmospheric oxygen is merely temporary, and will change in the course of millions of years. The question of an optimum concentration for sustaining life on earth is equally time-dependent; but bearing in mind that these changes occur over periods of the order of millions of years, evolutionary processes are likely to keep pace with oxygen changes."

Those evolutionary processes may or may not have a place for humanity in the long run, but we have plenty more pressing threats to worry about. One of which is that the health and productivity (for us) of the seas may be compromised if warming continues and subsurface oxygen is depleted.

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Driverless trucks and their social implications

"Mish" reports on the development of automated trucks, with what appears to be econohawkish glee - oh, the savings we'll make.

But this will be replicated not just in blue collar jobs but the white collar middle class that until recently felt their college degrees and head-expertise insulated them from the uncertain and lower-paid employment of their socioeconomic inferiors. Even fund managers might easily be replaced by machines, as I understand arm-waving, shouty stock market traders are being right now.

The debates over State benefits and the redistribution of wealth are likely to become more lively in the years to come, and people who used to take one side may surprise themselves by crossing the floor.

Besides, when few have a job, how will the demand for goods and services be affected? Business owners need not be complacent, either.

Is the future in community policing and shopping at LIDL?

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Wood gas: energy efficiency and financial economy

The previous post on wood-burning motorcycles may seem jokey, though there were some 200,000 woodgas-burning vehicles operating in Northern Europe in WWII (see History section).

In terms of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI, or EROI), biofuels generally seem very poor:

(source: Wikipedia)

But as this site points out, wood gas has some advantages: "Converting biomass to a liquid fuel like ethanol or biodiesel can consume more energy (and CO2) than the fuel delivers. In the case of a wood gas car, no further energy is used in producing or refining the fuel, except for the felling and cutting of the wood. This means that a woodmobile is practically carbon neutral, especially when the felling and cutting is done by hand."

It can even make sense in the more elastic terms of money: the UN Forestry Department did a study in 1986 and looked at power generation for a sawmill, using wood waste generated on site so that there was no purchase cost. The savings were significant:

As the sawmill example shows, there is plenty of mileage in intelligent problem-solving at the local level, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Long-term and big-picture planning are needed, but subsidies and other kinds of central government interference can skew cost-benefit analyses and result in misallocation of resources.

Of course, one could wonder why we zoom about so much in the first place:

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Peak bog rolls

As concern continues over future energy shortages, let's go back down Memory Lane to 1974...

January: bread and toilet rolls

September: sugar

... and, although we had about 1,000 years' supply in the UK, salt.

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London in the 1960s

See this Flickr collection - and contribute if you like. (htp: Dark Roasted Blend)

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Wood-burning motorcycle

htp: Dark Roasted Blend

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Update on bee deaths

According to Michael Snyder, about a third of US bees were wiped out this year. He goes on to discuss suspected causes and give a long list of important crops that require insect pollination.

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Peak Oil, EROEI and the Muffled Drum

An interesting thing happened last month. The Oil Drum, a well-regarded website + blog, announced it was ceasing operations and archiving itself for posterity. Well, everything has its day - we can all list blogs that were thriving a few years back but are no longer with us.

Some have suggested it was the extraordinary shale-based renaissance of US gas and oil production that did for the Drum. Probably not. But, fairly or unfairly, the Drum was associated with 'peak oil', which at its simplest is a view (or theory or doctrine or whatever) that global oil production - as a function of oil-in-the-ground - is doomed to peak, after which we start 'running out of oil'.

At its simplest, it is Malthusian hogwash. Of course, there are more nuanced versions than that, and the Drum shouldn't be tarred with the brush one would use for countering hogwash. Much more important is the concept of EROEI - energy return on energy invested, which has been another Drum favourite. And this concept really does bear careful consideration. Declining EROEI could be the end of civilisation as we know it for, in the immortal words of James Lovelock - "civilisation is energy-intensive". Better believe it.

So - no more drum-beat. But you'll not stop hearing about EROEI.


This post appeared first on the Capitalists@Work blog


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Are homicide and inequality inversely related?

http://www.libertarianprepper.com/the-sinister-roots-of-socialism/gini-index-usa/

 

 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

 

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Who's Who in the UK Government

See the full-sized list here (pdf).

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UK News media "among most corrupt in the world"

Transparency.org's 2013 interactive Global Corruption Barometer lists only 4 countries (out of 107) where the media are perceived to be among the most corrupt institutions: Egypt, Australia, New Zealand - and the UK.

Less surprisingly, political parties in about half of the 107 countries are also perceived to be corrupt. And that includes the UK.

Here, it's getting worse. When I first looked at Tranparency's surveys in 2008, the UK's overall perceived-corruption score had dropped from 8.4 the year before, to 7.7 (10 represented squeaky clean). The scoring is slightly different now - out of 100 - but for 2012 the British figure is 74, which I assume translates to 7.4 under the old system (the US scores 73).

Admittedly, these surveys are about the perception of corruption, and news-fed democracies may perhaps tend to be more cynical nations. But perceptions matter, and this decline in public trust, also shown in dwindling electoral turnouts, threatens the legitimacy and stability of our system of government.

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Interest rates will trigger the meltdown - Hugo Salinas Price

In King World News (2 August) Hugo Salinas Price alerts us to the threat of interest rate rises, which he describes as "fatal" and leading to worldwide "massive bankruptcies".

I'd known that derivatives are a huge market; what I hadn't realised was that the overwhelming majority of the contracts are related to interest rates.

The graph below is a visualisation of data from this Wikipedia article on the derivatives market:

Theoretically all the bets net off against each other, but we've seen what happens when a counterparty defaults (Lehman etc). Now consider that the annual GDP of the USA is only 3% of the notional value of interest rate contracts alone.

Frightening.

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Trees in the mist

Ronald Reagan is widely quoted as having said trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.

Not true of course, but not entirely without foundation either. Trees and other vegetation, particularly conifers, emit terpenes, aromatic chemicals whose generic name is derived from turpentine. The delightful aroma of pine resin in conifer woodlands comes from chemicals such as α-pinene and β-pinene.

Yet according to the National Physical Laboratory :-

• In addition to anthropogenic emissions, the earth’s natural vegetation releases huge amounts of organic compounds into the air.
• An estimated 1300 Tg C of terpenes a year are emitted, 10 times more than anthropogenic emissions.

 As far as climate is concerned, the NPL has this to say:-

• Terpene emissions are expected to rise sharply as global temperatures rise.
• As carbon dioxide levels increase, the earth will warm and higher levels of terpenes will be emitted.
• This will increase cloud formation, which will increase the optical thickness of clouds resulting in an increase in the reflection of sunlight back into space.
• Terpenes constitute a significant potential for feedback mechanisms in the climate.
• Terpenes also mediate the generation of ozone in the lower atmosphere.

 Dramatic stuff - even somewhat over-dramatic. Yet all this does not imply Reagan was correct because terpenes are not pollutants. They may be involved in the photochemical reactions which give that attractive haze over distant forests, but haze isn’t smog and doesn’t have the same effect on lungs and mucous membranes.

Without oxides of nitrogen from, for example vehicle exhaust emissions, tree terpenes alone would not cause the notorious photochemical smog which first appeared in Los Angeles in the 1940s and subsequently other large, sunny cities.

To my mind, this is why electric vehicles such as trams make sense in large cities, especially those where photochemical smogs are a problem. The issue isn’t CO2 emissions as many now seem to suppose, but old-fashioned air pollution such as oxides of nitrogen, unburned fuel and particulates. Sunlight just adds to the problem but that was there long before we decided to whizz around in metal boxes.

Electric vehicles are not pollution-free modes of transport of course. They are effectively powered by whatever is used to recharge their batteries, but any polluting effects are moved away from the city to the power station and subject to simpler and more stringent regulation.

Reagan pointed the finger at trees, climate alarmists point to CO2 and as so often a fog of dramatic misdirection hits the headlines.

Anthropogenic fog?

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World Tweet Like A Celeb Day!

Why wait to become famous to act like it? Let's make August 1st Tweet Like A Celeb Day and load up the Internet with our garbage.

Rules:

1. Tell everybody what you're doing, as often as possible - but only the unimportant stuff
2. Retweet everyone else's rubbish
3. No libel, insults etc

I have an extra rule, employed by the famous: to be a Twitter winner, you need at least as many followers as the number you follow. So I will only follow those who follow me, plus anybody who retweets my stuff.

Good luck!

UPDATE (2 Aug 2013)

Well, that was a damp squib! Mind you, I can't blame anybody, for I got bored talking about myself in very short order - how on earth do celebs manage it? So tiring.

On the plus side, at least one Twitter follower has delisted me, but I can't be bothered to find out who.

Who reads tweets anyhow? If you follow a lot of people then each message soon gets pushed lower down as the list lengthens. You'd have to be online practically all the time. Is this service tailor made for iPhone owners with OCD?

Thanks to Bill Quango and Paddington for their comments.

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