The end of the world is…

…Nigh Very Likely.

Finally, the proof environmentalists across the world were waiting for. The damning evidence is written for all to see. Climate change is ‘very likely’, fairly likely, to be human-made. Possibly. Perhaps. Maybe.

Television and billboard advertisements across the country tell us ‘it could be you’ who wins the lottery. We have channel upon channel of auction satelite television channels encouraging us to play the odds to buy a combination toaster/pencil sharpener at a knock-down price. Apparently if your partner buys Cadbury’s Milk Tray for you, he may be committed enough to ski to your aid across a snow-covered wilderness. That’s if he can find any snow left on the planet.

The country seems so obsessed with gambling and super casinos at the moment, that science too has been taken over by probability rather than empirical evidence. Stataticians will now be hosting conference on polar ice-caps. Men with casio pocket-calculators will stand in front of the world leaders, talking about a 0.2 chance of ice-cap loss. John McCirick, meanwhile, will stand behind them on a hologramatic projector doing his hand-dance giving men in mackintosh coats in Ladbrookes the inside take on where they should be placing their money. Air conditioning companies probably.

I’d like to think I’m a fairly environmentally minded chap. I stood beside Europe’s biggest glacier in Skaftafell, Iceland, and this summer vowed to be more green. I drive a diesel car, which is lower in emissions and has better fuel economy and, because more people nowadays drive diesels and the government wants more cash, pay more in fuel duty as a result. I spend time making sure my recycling wheeled bin, the corresponding recycling crate, and the recycling bag are put out on time and with all the relevant waste sorted correctly. I ride a bicycle. I don’t hunt cute foxes on my days off or shoot colourful pheasants, and I try to avoid supermarket groceries because they are wrapped in too much packaging made in sweat-shop factories staffed by koala bears on a minimum wage.

I even like Al Gore. I’m a big fan of the US, but normally shout at their politicians when they appear on television. They tend to look like they all share a gene pool with John Wayne, with their wide-shouldered, arms-away-from-the-side stance. His film, Al’s that is not The Duke’s, brought the environment to the fore.

I’m so environmentally friendly that I don’t mind the one-size-fits-all justification of global warming for taking money from my pocket. Fuel duty, airport tax, road tax, gas and electricity bills, income tax. It’s only a matter of time before His Tonyness comes out and says fixed penalty speeding fines are going up because people who drive too fast are using extra petrol and are killing baby hedgehogs in Australia.

Yes we’re harming the planet, but if all you’ve got is a report concluding we’re ‘likely’ to be causing global warming you’d be better off keeping quiet for a little while.

It’s “between a 66-90%” ‘certainty’ we’re harming the environment? Every week millions play the lottery with a 14million to one chance. They’re hardly going to worry about playing the climate-change lottery – they have a better chance of winning. A better chance that we’re not harming the environment, and their expensive property that stands alongside the Thames won’t become a homage to Pompeii should a polar bear make a piece of ice melt by breathing on it after a takeaway curry.
This report is hardly going to make everyone start recycling tomorrow. It’s amnunition for both sides. A warship firing misiles in both directions. There’s a fair chance we’re killing the Earth, but now we have a “44-10%” chance we shouldn’t worry about putting that paper in the black bin rather than the green one.

There’s a lovely obituary to The Beautiful South on the BBC Website. Forget this environmental report until the statisticians have a better bet on offer, and take Paul Heaton’s warning to heart – “The world won’t end in darkness, it’ll end in family fun. With a coca-cola cloud cloud behind a Big Mac Sun”.

Non-stop party animals

I’ve just been watching the new BBC drama Party Animals.

Written by the team behind This Life, I had high hopes. The thing is I can’t remember the last time I watched 42 minutes of a film or programme and still had no grasp of who any of the characters were. I’m normally insanely irritated by the lovely Sarah, who can often watch 2 hours of films and ask who the protagonist is, but I have to admit defeat with this one. The sorrowful synth-string music is trying to evoke emotion in me as I watched one of the characters die in the street, but I’m not sure confusion was what they had in mind. Seriously, I had no idea who he was.

Here’s another top moment. Two guys are awaiting an announcement on who gets to manage a contract. “And the winner is…”. Thank God the other guy congratulated him by name, or I’d have been none the wiser. It’s scripted by a writer from Spooks, but I’m not watching that going, “so he’s MI5 then, that one with the Arabian accent?”.

Luckily there’s a welcome distraction in the setting. I love the pop art of Margaret Thatcher on the walls of the Tory offices. I want it. I want the T-shirt. I want the Ikea print. I want it as my screensaver. Both PC and mobile. Lovely. A bit of editorial comment from the writers maybe?

A secondary game can be found in spot the character-switch. The Labour researcher is Miles from This Life with less confidence, Raquel Cassidy has Millie’s work ethic, Geek researcher’s brother is Andrew Lincoln’s ‘Egg’, and Tory sex-kitten is Anna in Millie’s body, whilst everyone seems to have the social ethics of the one who buggered off to New Zealand so I can’t remember his name.

I’d love to think that’s what life in Westminster is like, wooden-lined corridors with offices full of History graduates beavering away at fax machines and PC’s trying to get policies sorted. The weirdest part is that the BBC has had a blog created for it. ‘Village Vermin’ is seen on the programme, it’s a machine to spread rumour and to faciliate plot changes quickly. But they’ve actually done it. The power of the blog to change the world. Or certainly the fortunes of a telly programme..

Song to Whoever

Challenge: See how many song titles you can find>>>

The day had to come. It had happened before and it was inevitable it was going to happen again. It’d been a few years granted, and this one didn’t involve a Seattle grunge idol and a firearm. Another of my farvourite groups has dissolved, and another contemporary reference when I’m telling friends about how my informative teenage years was wasted is lost.

The Beautiful South have gone their seperate ways. No more will they carry on up the charts. Their website tells a sad tale of “musical similarities”, no doubt tired of evenings spent in Harry’s Bar, or Rotterdam or Anywhere, discussing new musical directions. I’m sure it’s something you said, but I was hooked. I was your number one fan. I think a part of it was that you keep it all in. Perhaps if you’d given it a little time it would have all been as good as gold, or stupid as mud. But there was only so long after 19 odd years that you could continue to walk the tightrope of fame like a blackbird on the wire. Still, now everybody’s talking about it. No doubt a few bell-bottomed tears will be shed. So farewell Paul Heaton and The Beautiful South. Maybe just one last love song, to bring me back, bring me back…?

PS Apologies to those of you who don’t know the work of ‘The South’, I appreciate this may seem a little nonsensical…

How to waste away – I mean “a day”

A day off. I have nothing to do. Nothing. To. Do.

I say ‘nothing’, but of course I have plenty to do. I have a tax bill to pay, music to arrange, practice to do, a car to wash. It’s just they don’t seem to have any necessity today. They’re just there because I can’t ride my bike because it’s being serviced, and the sun’s not shining.

I’m going to add to this post during the day to see how my day pans out and shed some light on whether I’m a procrastinator or a ‘dooer’…

12.36pm – Having listed and prioritised at 11am what I wanted to have achieved today, I have now spent 1 hour and 36 minutes reading blogs, the news and generally larking around on the internet. On the plus side, I have come up with apost on John Cleese and Iceland. Not much to show for the day so far, but I have high hopes for the future.

12.56pm – Give up on trying to get through to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. It always amazes me at the inability of organisations to take my money. I am afterall offering my money, there’s no salesmanship involved. The Inland Revenue’s motto of ‘Pay taxes or die” is cause enough to pay up on time.

13.03pm – Give up and go to Tescos.

13.45pm – The hunter-gatherer returns triumphant. I have have hunted and gathered some ReadyBrek, Cornflakes and a Yorkie bar (they’re not for girls!). I also manage to pay my Self-Assessment Tax bill, after calling one line “for all payment queries” then another, apparently more relevant, number to pay my bill. The hunter-gatherer’s triumphantness turns to poverty.

15.41pm – The car is washed. It’s waxed in green wax and has some supposedly miracle formula on the windows to ‘repel’ water. I daydream about rain jumping, lemming-like off the windscreen on motorway journies. I was momentarily taken off-task by a ginger cat that meowed and showed me its toothache. I then noticed a number of cats, realising that my constant bird-feeding is having a more sinister result higher up the foodchain…

17.33pm – i have collected my bike from the shop, and completed the jigsaw that is storing the 3 bikes without them being damaged. I’ve also tried to tighten the sump washer on my car, having called in to the garage on the way home to query the tiny oil leak my car has developed.

19.18pm – Starving, tired, and slowly getting demoralised by the amount of stuff that hasn’t been done today I admit defeat. After 60 minutes trying to write a flyer for a new string quartet venture, I have some nice pictures and layouts, but no words. Time for tea. I give up.

Things achieved today:
The car is clean. The bike is serviced and at home. The hunting and gathering is done. I’ve read lots of lovely blogs that weer very entertaining. I’ve paid my tax bill. I’ve done a nice layout for the Ardeton Ensemble. I’ve made a new friend in the form of ginger cat across the road.

Things still on the ‘to do’ list:
No music arranged. The house hasn’t been hoovered. The washing up isn’t done. I haven’t cooked tea yet. My registers aren’t yet all clean and tidy. I didn’t manage to design a new header graphic for this blog.

A good or bad result? Was I unrealistic in my goals? I can’t decide. If you’re reading this and I should have got something done for you today, I hope you take pity on me for either being a)too busy, or b)amazingly good at larking around and wasting time…

Cleesey jokes

I’ve been smitten with Iceland since going there last Summer. I spend a lot of time idly dreaming via the internet of where to see when we go back this year. I also like to read the local news, and blogs, some of my favourites have appeared on the blogroll over the last couple of months. It’s become a kind of foster-country.

Via Iceland Weather Report, I found this bewildering advertising campaign fronted by John Cleese for the rebranding of an Icelandic bank.

I’ve never been quite sure Cleese has managed his career all that well. After Python, then A Fish Called Wanda, perhaps he should have taken stock of his life. He’d made his money, had a nice life. Many would retire from public scrutiny at that time. Alice Cooper plays golf, Ozzy spends his time analysing dog faeces, surely there was a hobby for John. Parrot Conservation perhaps?. Other entertainers play the waiting game. Chevy Chase and Steve Martin spent some time away, bided their time and found the perfect time to come back into the public eye.

Cleese has never really had this skill. Maybe he needs a Sharon Osbourne figure to advise him. Fierce Creatures and Rat Race show a figure, once idolised around the world for his amazing skills, relying on cameos that rest purely on a former reputation.

Still, personality aside, the advert illustrates something of what has me captivated about Iceland. It’s a country with 1/30th of the population of London. It’s seen as something of a cute place – small and environmentally minded, with shadows of vikings and geological greatness. People have a fondness for it. Despite the cringeworthy backdrop of ‘Rule Brittania’, there’s something lovely about the line “why don’t you just call everybody?”…

Poop Poop screamed Toad

There are many times during my day when I long to have been born in another decade or time. When I enter my bank to give them money (give them money), and I’m ushered away from seeing a real cashier like police moving onlookers on from a crime scene. When I’m staring at a computer screen typing a letter and it freezes or shreds my work for the 3rd time in succession, and I look longingly at my fountain pen and notebook. When I type a text on my latest ‘updated’ mobile phone and it gives me ten words to scroll down before letting me enter the word ‘it’, and remember the days before predictive texting. Or before mobiles. When people used to talk. Or write letters. Or whatever.

It’s not that I’m anti-gadget, far from it, just that I like simpler things. I like listening to music from the age of vinyl. Rhythm and Blues where you can hear the wind rushing through closely-miked saxes, and the cries for mercy from trumpets screaming in their stratospheric registers. Guitars coming through amplifiers distorted by knife-cuts made on speaker cones. Despite all of my searching, my car radio only seems to be able to give chic-flick style ‘hits’ from stars like Beyonce, where the sound has all the stimulus and taste of a Bachelor’s Tomato and Basil cup-a-soup served in a Michelin starred restaurant. Or middle-class offspring of non-descript comedians pretending they’re ‘down with the kids’ by putting a glottal stop into every word until the sentence is completely harvested of consonants.

It’s not that I want to go back to the days of workhouses or children up chimneys. Not all of them anyway. I’m not looking to upset Darwin by undoing Evolution either. I just like my life to be less cluttered by pocket organisers. Made less easy by labour-saving gadgets that make everything take 4 times longer. Less watered-down by safety harnesses and risk-asessments. I want to live finding things out for myself, doing it, rather than sitting on a sofa whilst the Sunday Telegraph tells me about all the stuff I should be doing but will never be able to afford to.
I’ve always been into cars, for as long as I can remember. I had the customary Lamborghini Diablo poster on my wall, but supercars were never my bag. I was always fascinated by the engineering of it all. Ladybird books lined my shelves as an encyclopoedia of how engines, aerodynamics and electronics worked, and I used this knowledge to aid my appreciation of cars. Everyday cars you’d see in supermarket carparks. Not just cars, I liked buses too, and lorries. I’d spend days reading about fleets of buses in hardbacked books, or watching videos of truck racing.

But like the rest of the things I enjoy, I like the simplicity and rawness of them. The supercars with their shiny gizmos that tell you you’re current line of lattitude and a picture of the nearest star constellation are all well and good, but give me a family hatchback and I’ll spend an hour admiring the way a design team has tried to tailor it to a lifestyle. Show me a modern engine and I’ll yawn profusely and openly as we stare at a big bit of plastic trying to pretend there isn’t an oily engine there at all. Show me an old engine and I’ll admire it’s hand-shaped rocker cover and a distributor cap placed perillously open to the elements.

I drive a diesel car, which is odd for a self-confessed petrolhead. I should be driving a modern fuel-injected petrol/rocket. The thing is, there’s still very little gadgetry going on under the bonnet. Diesel cars are still unrefined machines. Once they’re set in motion that’s it, they’re away and need a mechanical or electrical component to physically stop them from chugging away in perpetual motion. It’s got a turbo too, my car. That means that when I press the accellerator there’s a whine from behind the dashboard as a tiny spindle goes around thousands of times a minute sucking in extra air, and a second or two later I get pushed back into my seat as my car surges away like a plane on take-off. I can hear the mechanics at work and feel their effect.

Call me pedantic, but I don’t get that feedback from my PC. Yes it whires and whines, but normally only when it’s about to cause me a great inconvenience. Yes my mobile beeps when I press keys, but only to tell me I’ve done something wrong or am asking it to do something it can’t or refuses to do. All the modern inventions and improvements do the same thing. They remove the user from any interaction. We’ll soon have fridges to tell us when food is going off so that we don’t even have to sniff or taste the milk to check it’s okay.

This week Top Gear is back on the TV, and I’m going to try to do a week of motoring related posts. I’m indulging that boyhood love of cars. The thing is, driving a car is one of the few things you need a licence for. You have to be tested before you can do it. I could go scuba-diving, abseiling, edit a newspaper or start teaching Pilates tomorrow without any government certification. I think that’s something worth taking an interest in (the driving that it, not me teaching Pilates).

Fire the Canons

A number of pupils have been mentioning this video on YouTube.

I’m not much of a YouTube fan – I, like many I’m sure, assumed it was full of videos of people falling off chairs taped directly from Prime Time ITV1, and the ocassional bit of mobile footage of hoodies hanging out on street corners after CBeebies has finished.

This is funny though. Even if you think you don’t know Pachelbel’s Canon in D, trust me, you will have heard it. It’s in every lift. It’s played at every wedding. It’s a ringtone on every mobile phone. The world over. It’s like the arch-nemesis of cellists, Skelator to our He-Man. Seriously dull.

It’s worth watching just to see how many songs you recognise that the guy illustrates use the chord sequence. I caught GreenDay’s Basket Case, a bit of Rob Thomas and Matchbox20 with Push, U2’s With or Without You, Torn by Natalie Imbruglia, Avril Lavigne’s Skater Boy, We’re not gonna take it by Twisted Sister, Marley’s No woman no cry, and McCartney’s Let it be.

In the immortal words of Bon Scott of AC/DC – For those about to rock, we salute you Mr Pachelbel… Even if it is technically an ostinato rather than a true canon in D major.

The full video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM

PS For an extra bit of viewing – I recommend this guy, clearly a frustrated guitarist auditioning online for a job working with Meatloaf, doing his rock-god version.

HRH Prince of Carbon Neutral

There’s been a lot of fuss made this week about HRH Prince Charles. It all relates to the apparent absurdity of him booking empty seats on a plane to collect an environmental award. I’m sorry, but that’s not a hypocritical image. President Bush rolling up in a few years time to collect his Nobel Peace Prize astride the smoking gun of a Challenger Tank, that’s a hypocritical image.

He/We apparently paid for 60 seats to accomodate just 20 staff on a chartered flight to get him to Harvard. The Prince claims this was the most environmentally friendly way of getting there – being on a scheduled flight meant that he could leave his private/chartered plane at home. The press had a field day, as did Sian Berry in her New Statesman blog. Most people focussed on the waste of the 40 empty seats, and the fact that we could have put 40 members of the public on that plane too and made better use of the fuel and carbon emissions. Yes, but would Prince Charles really want to sit between two upper-class students on an Oxbridge exchange to Harvard, or be surrounded by 40 men on a stag-do from Doncaster?

Why is this an evil on the environment? Berry claims that in order to offset the carbon footprint from such frivolous seat-booking, the entire staff would have to cycle to work for a year. Fair enough, in my current cycle-frenzy that’s probably something to encourage. Maybe Charles should get a nice mauve helmet and spokey-dokeys for his wheels.

The thing is, haven’t we just had a hike in air tax to cover carbon emissions? Didn’t the government put £40 on a long-haul flight to discourage us from excess flying and to pay for daffodils to be planted alongside runways, or whatever else it is they’re going to do to make Easyjet planes emit butterflies rather than CO2? In which case, Prince Charles should be applauded. He payed 40 extra lots of air tax. Those seats weren’t wasted. Those 40 displaced people will have then paid their green plane tax on a different flight. He’s technically made a donation of money to the environment. With 40 less passengers, complete with luggage, that flight will have paid more fuel surcharges and airport tax than it used. Bravo Prince Charles for your small, but yet worthwhile donation to the government green tax fund. Expect a thank-you letter in the post from Chi Chi the Panda in Patagonia.

That is assuming our ‘green taxes’ are actually going to be used to decrease carbon emissions. As we know, very little of our road tax goes on making our roads safer or more environmentally friendly, so we have to have high fuel duty to tax those who emit more CO2. Except, all of this tax doesn’t go on public transport, so now cities want a congestion charge/tax to help pay for better public transport. I daresay 15 years down the line and if, by some miracle we ressurect Isambard Kingdom Brunel and he manages to make the buses and trains work, we’ll have to have a public transport tax, or bus seat congestion charge, to pay for more bus lanes and little green bus shelters for squirrels to hide under.

But I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the government’s air tax, and to HRH. I’ll pay my extra £40 in tax on a ticket to Iceland, but I jolly well expect to see at least a civil servant if not a junior minister planting leylandi and buttercups alongside Gatwick’s runway. I’ll also applaud Prince Charles on this one. Berry suggests he should have used a video link to accept the award, but how much extra electricity would that need, not to mention the amount of pollution and space-junk needed to launch and maintain the satellite. It’s nice to see some commonsense approaches to environmental issues instead of standing on top of the BT tower shouting, “This will be where I’ll have to live when global warming floods London in 100 years time!”.

H Harmam – MP for Blogosphere North

MP’s forays into the world of the worldwide interweb have often been a bit hit and miss. I can be a little bi-polar about them to be honest. In October I poured scourn on David Camerons dish-washing podcast, at the same time having Boris Johnson’s Blog on my blogroll over there on the right.

I’ve been reading Harriet Harmans’ blog this evening and it’s a mixed bag. Beyond the bland and functional exterior of her site (the whole thing reminds me of a district council’s website) there’s a blog, and it’s a fairly free-thinking one at that. Short posts lacking in that usual guarded and complex structure that most MP’s use to make sure there’s an escape clause from anyone trying to hold them to account.

Why do MP’s do it? They can’t really speak their minds. They’re politicians. We know they can never offend anyone or speak out against party line. We’re not going to see any great insight into her character – is she going to write “January 25th: Tony was being a right little brat in the meeting today”? I’m sure some are doing it to reach out to their constituents. Maybe this is good, maybe this is bad. Harriet seems to have already collected a few devoted activists in her comment boxes with her post applauding Hilary Clinton’s first steps towards returning to the White House. I just hope this doesn’t put other MP’s off of writing in this style.

Some Sunsets

Courtesy of the lovely Sarah’s gift of a tripod…