Alice In Blogland

Feeling Creative

2011-05-22T09:58:00.016Z

Been meaning to try this for ages. Here's what happens if you hang a damp top over the bath and squirt bleach at it with a syringe:

Hoping I'll wear these a bit more now they're more interesting, and I've strategically aimed the bleach at a couple of stains that wouldn't come out any other way, so they don't look so grubby now either.

I think that if the fabric is dripping wet and the bleach solution weak then it runs more and you get a more blended, patchy effect, which is more subtle. Dryer fabric and neat bleach gives bolder shapes with sharper outlines. With this in mind I think next time I'll use a weak solution to make the colour patchy as a background, and then rinse, let it all dry completely, and use neat bleach to make more precise patterns over that.

One word of warning - gloves. I almost never wear protective gloves because I hate how they feel, but after rinsing these tops out my hands are distinctly sore and I wish I had.

What I forgot to take a photo of was the bathroom wall - luckily tiled - splattered dramatically with the red fabric dye that I also used on the orange one when the bleach didn't show up as much as I wanted. And the syringe full of red liquid on the side of the bath. Thank god no one called round just then.

Elderflower Champagne

2011-05-19T20:29:00.004Z

The very first elderflowers are just coming out in Leeds. They make the most delicious fizzy, alcoholic summer drink, and it's unbelievably easy. I'm making 20 litres in a huge plastic crate.

This makes 5 litres:

8.8 pints (5 litres) cold water

10 Elderflower heads (you can leave a bit of the stalk on)

1 and one fifth lbs sugar (2.4 Kilos)

2 and a half lemons (chop them up small, with rind and skins still on)

2 and a half tablespoons white wine vinegar

Mix all that together, and either put a loose lid on the container or make a lid by tying some cloth over the top.

Stand for 72 hours, stirring whenever you remember.

Then strain it into plastic bottles. Use screwcap plastic bottles designed to have pressurised fizzy drinks in them - other kinds can explode as the champagne becomes fizzy. Don't use glass bottles.

Leave for 2 weeks, releasing the fizz every 2 days (more at first).

Then drink it somewhere sunny.

Vote YES!

2011-05-04T09:31:00.001Z

Is your Cat confused about the referendum on the voting system on the 5th May?

2011-04-29T09:29:00.000Z

I Liked This

2010-12-16T21:22:00.001Z

Reteaching Gender and Sexuality from PUT THIS ON THE MAP on Vimeo.

Beating Police Repression After the Student Occupation

2010-11-16T21:15:00.004Z

I'm copying this here from Bristling Badger, in support of FITwatch and the students and in defiance of censorship. If you have a blog then please copy it there too.

The trashing of Conservative Party HQ during a student demo last week took a lot of people by surprise, not just the police and public but many of the participants.

Many of them had never done anything like it before. As such, they are largely identifable on the footage, and police have been arresting many.

FITwatch - a site that campaigns about police repression of protest, especially throught the use of Forward Intelligence Teams who film and photogrpah everything - published some advice to protesters.

The police responded by making the webhost take the FITwatch site down for a year. FITwatch nonetheless remain committed to their work.

In defiance of this censorship, and also to assist with the prevention of people who'd only trashed property from getting arrested, the offending post has been republished all over the internet. The more places do it, the more likeoly it is that the Met will give up and leave it be.

So here it is. If you think it should be in the public domain, please republish it on blogs and message boards.

=============================

The remarkable and brilliant student action at [Conservative Party headquarters] Millbank has produced some predictable frothing at the mouth from the establishment and right wing press. Cameron has called for the ‘full weight of the law’ to fall on those who had caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the expensive decor at Tory party HQ. Responsibility is being placed on ‘a violent faction’, after the march was ‘infiltrated’ by anarchists.

There are an encouraging number of intiatives to show solidarity with the arrested students – something that is vital if they are to avoid the sort of punitive ‘deterrent’ sentences handed out to the Gaza demonstrators. A legal support group has been established and the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees has started a support campaign. Goldsmiths lecturers union has publicly commended the students for a ‘magnificent demonstration’ .

This is all much needed, as the establishment is clearly on the march with this one. The Torygraph has published an irresponsible and frenzied ‘shop-a-student’ piece and the Met are clearly under pressure to produce ‘results’ after what they have admitted was a policing ‘embarrassment’.

51 people have been arrested so far, and the police have claimed they took the details of a further 250 people in the kettle using powers under the Police Reform Act. There may be more arrests to come.

Students who are worried should consider taking the following actions:

If you have been arrested, or had your details taken – contact the legal support campaign. As a group you can support each other, and mount a coherent campaign.

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography;

DONT panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn’t mean they know who you are.

DONT hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to ‘come forward’. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

DONT assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. ‘That isn’t me’ has got many a person off before now.

DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their ‘wanted’ list. Keep a low profile.

DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn’t a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal.

Otherwise you’ll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.

Click to Buy

2010-10-24T20:13:00.003Z

Who Asked Them?

2010-10-18T16:54:00.004Z

So apparently

"The leaders of 35 of the UK's biggest companies have expressed their support for the government's plans for spending cuts running into billions of pounds.

The bosses of Marks and Spencer, BT and GlaxoSmithKline are among those to have signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph." (BBC)

My question is, why on earth is this considered news?

These people have salaries in the millions, they're less reliant on public services than anyone. Why would anyone care what cuts they think are appropriate?

It'd be more pertinent to pick a random bunch of people off a geriatric ward or picking their kids up from nursery. Or how about asking some of the kids trying to escape war and slavery by seeking asylum in the UK?

Of course "business leaders" are going to support public spending cuts - lower tax for them, high unemployment meaning a nice cheap pool of labour, and opportunities to cash in on outsourced contracts and low property prices. Their opinion on cuts is as predictable as it is irrelevant. It's not news and should have been filed in the bin.

"GlaxoSmithKline Uses £7.8 Billion Profit to Distribute Free AIDS Drugs to Poor Countries" - now there's a headline we're all waiting for.

Hmm, this might explain a few things...

2010-01-11T00:34:00.000Z

Designed for Landfill

2009-12-03T22:33:00.006Z

The Sony Walkman turned 30 years old this year, at almost the same time as I did.

Back in the old days a cassette walkman had big chunky buttons, with “Fwd” on one side, “Rev” on the other side, “Stop” in the middle and a bigger “Play” button somewhere equally obvious. They didn’t have a “hold” switch because those massive buttons were never going to be pressed down by accident unless you dropped it on all four of them at once. Doing that would jam them for a minute until you thumped each button one at a time which would generally un-jam them again, sometimes leaving them a little looser but almost always still working.

One happy day “Auto-reverse” came along and removed the need to take the cassette out to play the other side, and at about the same time they got a bit smaller and only needed one AA battery instead of two. As rechargeable batteries slowly came down in price I’m sure I was quite contentedly musically mobile for a while there.

Unfortunately this got me hooked early, and for about twenty years now I’ve combined the activities of walking and listening to music, taking my mind off the massive heavy rucksack I’m often carrying usually via something trashy with the bass boost on. CDs are too flimsy a format to ever really be portable, but they got me used to skipping tracks and I eventually switched to the instantly-obsolete minidisk format. I’m now thinking about getting an MP3 player, but I can’t find anything that isn’t almost completely unusable because of basic design flaws.

This is all I ask…

1) I’d like one that takes a standard sized interchangeable battery, preferably a single AAA, with as long a life as possible. Nothing affects my enjoyment of a music player quite so much as it being silent because the battery has run out, and being able to carry a spare charged battery is the only practical way of making the thing truly portable.

2) I want something reasonably easy to navigate by feel so I can keep it in my pocket out of sight. Not just because I don’t want to get mugged for it, but because I need to pay attention to small matters like crossing roads, looking where I’m going, and generally not ending up like those earphones in a pool of blood from the road safety ads.

3) It’d be handy if it could be reasonably rain proof, or at least come with a rainproof cover it can stay in while I use it. I need this because I live in the UK where it rains quite a lot, and I plan to go out in that rain quite a lot with a portable music player. That’s the whole idea of it being portable. If I wanted to stay at home where it’s dry then I’d use my computer instead. I had a waterproof Sony Sport Walkman in about 1988 so I don’t feel I’m asking for the moon here, but water resistant electronics don’t even seem to exist any more. What happened there? It hasn’t stopped raining.

4) I’ll have it in any colour that won’t show dirt too much. I’ll try not to actually drop the thing in any puddles, but I’m not going to wash my hands before each time I touch the stupid thing. Black works, any other darkish colour would do, white would be bottom of my list.

I’m struggling to find anything that meets even the first two criteria, and I’ve now started just looking for something with as many visible buttons on it as possible.

How does one operate an MP3 player which only has one button anyway? Presumably the sodding thing changes function all the time and you have to keep taking it out of your pocket to find out what the damn button actually plans to do next time you press it. Or each side of the same button does something different so that you have to get it the right way up in your pocket, guess which corner of the circular button you’re stabbing at and then wait a few tantalising seconds to find out whether you’ve skipped to the next track, turned the volume up, turned the volume down or skipped back to the start of the track you were in the middle of. You can be tantalised for even longer if the middle of the same big circular button also happens to be “Pause”.

Touch screens? Horrible! Fine, I guess, if you’re sitting somewhere warm and dry (because I guess you can’t wear gloves), devoting all your attention to dragging the pretty little animated icons around. Not so much fun if you want to go anywhere where you might have to look away from it for a minute or where anything might bump it unintentionally. So you can’t actually put it in your pocket and walk, drive, do the washing up, exercise, weed an allotment or eat anything to music.

And why the hell are these things all white now? WHITE?? They’re supposed to be portable, and yet if you’d like them to stay shiny at least until the novelty of having something new has worn off you can’t put them in a pocket, can’t touch them if you’ve been reading a newspaper, can’t put them down on any surface that might have any dust on it or in a room that might ever have had any children in it. And it must take the potential resale value down to a small fraction at a stroke, because after just a few weeks use it’s going to be a highly unfashionable shade of yellowy grey.

And is it really too much to ask for corners that won’t rub off? Coloured plastic has been around for quite some time now and is available in a vast range of colours, several hundred of which would make very nice colours for the casing of a small electrical device. It’s really not necessary to coat it with a metallic finish of any description, and it’s going to look much better in a few months time if it doesn’t have a coating that wears off all the corners.

But the battery situation is just unforgiveable. Having agreed - more or less - on things like standard time, which side of the road to drive on, and roughly how many volts are going to come out of a socket in a wall, humankind went on to produce battery cells for mass consumption in some common standard sizes. Both AA and AAA rechargeable batteries are easy to source, durable, easy to charge and easy to replace – they’re the quite blindingly obvious choice of fuel for a small portable electrical device. So why would anyone decide to put a completely non-standard sized rechargeable battery in a portable device and then seal it inside so it can’t be charged outside the unit?

Because, obviously, anyone who wants portable music enough to buy one of these things is going to want to sit next to their computer all the time to recharge it. They take 3 or 4 hours to charge, so when the music suddenly stops half way to the 24 hour garage one evening, all you have to do is turn around, walk back home and sit next to a USB port for three hours and then you’re up and running again.

OK it means they can be ultra slim, but I can fit seven AAA batteries in the tiny fifth pocket of my jeans - it’d be well worth an extra 3mm width to be able to carry a spare battery around with me. For when the battery runs out. Which it is generally going to do while I am in the middle of walking and listening to something, rather than when I am conveniently sitting at home next to my computer.

Especially since some MP3 players have a battery life of an unbelievably low six hours - perhaps that’s so that you can’t actually get too far away from your PC before the battery runs out? I despair.

Google Number Ones

2009-11-24T18:03:00.003Z

That pesky Merrick has tagged me for a meme:

"Give me five great things that your blog or websites rank number one in Google searches, then tag five other blogs. Bonus points if you manage to have any sexual content in the phrase."

So here goes - this blog is number one in Google searches for:

bastards and medium sized shards of glass
skinny nearly-naked women in the weird ice palace thing
singing "Jingle Fucking Bells".
Everything was methodically sniffed, the back doorstep was peed on
be rather odd at an otherwise very pointedly Jesus-free event.

Bonus points, I think, not only for sexual content but for the mental images conjured up if you imagine these as one continuous narrative.

Gonna pass it on to Ralph, Dr. Rob, Dr. Shroom, and... of all people writing anything on the internet I'd LOVE to see Charlie Brooker do this. He usually has at least five great, original, hilarious phrases with sexual content in everything he writes, and then he gets it all published in the Guardian. Still haven't tried his Spotify challenge though, so he'll probably ignore me.

That only makes four other people I'm tagging, so if anyone else would like to volunteer then feel free to add yourself.

The Road by Cormack McCarthy

2009-10-15T19:25:00.004Z

Ohmygodohmygod - "The Road" is about to come out in cinemas, so if you haven't read the novel yet then you need to read it right now!

Seeing something on film puts someone else's images irrevocably in your head and makes it nearly impossible for you to create your own, so to get the most out of a novel you really have to read it before you see a film version. With "The Road," especially, the post-apocalypse setting draws on the reader's own fears and imagination so much that it's well worth reading before watching.

Basically a father and his young son try to survive in a world that, physically and socially, has been almost completely destroyed by some unspecified disaster. It's dark and horrible, with some nasty surprises, and a wonderfully intricate relationship between father and son. I hadn't realised until I saw a plug for the film that McCarthy had written it after becoming a father again in his sixties, which just adds layers to the play of love, fear and responsibility between them and makes the plot itself all the more poignant, even if you don't happen to already spend any time imagining what a post-climate change world might look like for anyone who survives that.

I warn you, there are spoilers for the book even in the blurb for the film, so beg, borrow or steal this book before you see it - do it now!

Sorry I can't find anything to link to that doesn't have at least some spoilers in it, and it's so well worth scaring yourself with in your own good time that I'm just going to link to Amazon so you can buy it.

It's Nearly White Poppy Time...

2009-10-14T17:40:00.007Z

I haven’t written here for a while, so instead of covering things I’m a bit late with I thought I’d skip ahead and remind you of something there’s still time to do something about.

It’s four weeks today until 11th November, when you’ll be surrounded by images of people wearing red poppies, marching, saluting and firing cannons, and when you might want to be wearing a white one instead.

So, here is where to get them, and here's a quote about why you might want to buy them from the Peace Pledge Union:

"The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers. Our work, primarily educational, draws attention to many of our social values and habits which make continuing violence a likely outcome.

From economic reliance on arms sales (Britain is the world's second largest arms exporter) to maintaining manifestly useless nuclear weapons Britain contributes significantly to international instability. The outcome of the recent military adventures highlights their ineffectiveness in today's complex world.

Now 90 years after the end of the ‘war to end all wars’ we still have a long way to go to put an end to a social institution, which in the last decade alone killed over 10 million children."

Previous posts about armistice here, here and here.

My Furry Flat

2009-09-15T19:57:00.006Z

Things which don't work so well with cat hair on/in them:

Velcro
Selotape
The filter in the washing machine
Hand-rolled cigarettes
The wheelie button on my computer mouse
Margerine

Things which work better with cat hair on them:

The cat

So, should I shave the cat?? Just look at her about to sit on the sellotape here:

Big Green 2009 Cancelled - "A Premeditated Political Decision"?

2009-07-28T00:59:00.008Z

The Big Green Gathering, which I wrote about a while ago here and which should have been on again this weekend, has been cancelled at the very last minute in what seem to be highly suspicious circumstances.

Police took out an injunction to stop the event going ahead, just days before the festival was due to open and while large numbers of people were already onsite building the massive infrastructure that a festival needs.

They'll have laid water pipes, put up marquees, made compost toilets, put up fences, built stages and bars, and generally spent a huge amount of time, effort and money already, and now won't see any revenue coming back in at all. There's no question that the festival will have done absolutely everything they could have done to satisfy the license conditions so it could all go ahead - the Big Green may well not survive the losses they will now suffer after cancellation.

On Sunday issues about security arrangements and traffic management apparently couldn't be resolved to the satisfaction of the council and the emergency services, and organisers had no choice but to surrender their licence for the event. Police have said "The event was not cancelled by the police or Mendip district council. The organisers voluntarily surrendered their licence yesterday; therefore it was their decision to cancel, not ours."

But it's obvious that such late cancellation was the last thing that festival organisers would have wanted to do, and the festival chairman Brig Oubridge has said that on the part of the police "It was a premeditated political decision made at least a week ago. There were going to be people from the Climate Camp here as well as Plane Stupid. It could be seen by police as a gathering ground of radicals."

The whole thing has started to smell an awful lot like what happened with the Smash EDO film. A campaign against an arms manufacturer in Brighton put out a film called "On The Verge" about their protests and the police harassment they'd suffered. Venues across the country which tried to show the film then suddenly had problems with their licenses from local councils, apparently after prompting from the police. Brig Oubridge's statement suggests that something very similar lies behind the cancellation of the Big Green.

It's highly sinister if local bureaucracy is being used by police, across forces, to disrupt activity that they dislike not for public order reasons but because it involves political opinions they disagree with. There's more at stake here than just this festival - John Vidal says in the Guardian that "Some observers believe the closure of the festival is part of a larger plan to crack down on all environmental protest." It's not just festival goers and stall holders who should be worried about how they spend their summers - political policing is everyone's problem.

As soon as the no doubt extremely stressed and worried festival organisers are able to tell their side of this story, a further statement will probably appear on the Big Green Gathering website. Until then, the one thing they’ll certainly need is as much solidarity in the form of cash as they can possibly get.

They’re asking for anyone who can afford it to consider donating the price of their ticket back to the festival rather than asking for a refund. I've just bought myself a BGG T-shirt from their online shop, which may become a kind of political statement depending on what emerge as the real reasons behind this year's cancellation, and which will bring them some much needed money in. You can also donate from their website if you have a credit or debit card, or cheques can be sent to:

Big Green Gathering Co Ltd
PO Box 3423
Glastonbury
BA6 9ZN

With much more of this story still to emerge, the London Climate Camp only a few weeks away and Ian Tomlinson still fresh in everyone's minds, it sure looks like it's going to be an interesting summer...

EDIT: Much more detail is now up in an article on SchNEWS here. It's absolutely astonishing.

ANOTHER EDIT: Bristol Indymedia is probably a good place to keep an eye on this story too.

Free Acid!

2009-07-22T20:44:00.000Z

There are hundreds of different products for getting limescale off toilets, sinks and kettles, and they all basically involve acid, which dissolves limescale if you leave it to soak for long enough.

There are also a lot of people, like me, growing hundreds of times more rhubarb than they can really handle because the plants get very very big and there's a limit to the amount of rhubarb crumble one can eat in a year.

Rhubarb is incredibly acidic.

Can anyone think of any reason I shouldn't boil up a load of rhubarb and use it as an organic, eco-friendly and incredibly cheap kettle, sink and toilet cleaner?

The Fabulous Wrecked Tent Project

2009-07-07T10:36:00.011Z

On the last night of Glastonbury I fell asleep in Merrick's tent, with a trickle of rainwater falling on me right in the middle and a small pond growing at my feet. I was warm and tired enough to fall asleep/pass out quite quickly, but instead of counting sheep I drifted off dreaming about groundsheet patches and reinforced seams.

It's a lovely tent - a modern dome design which is easy to put up, flexes in the wind and is strong and sturdy, but made almost entirely of cotton rather than nylon so it breathes and shades like cotton bed sheets. It was bought for Glastonbury 1995 and has been well used since then, but it needs some serious repair work to keep it in service much longer.

As I recently ranted, I hate the way so many people throw things away and buy new replacements rather than repairing and maintaining what they already have, and this tent is such a nice object in itself that I just couldn't resist making a project of it. I thought I'd post my progress here in case it helps anyone else not have to buy a new tent, and in case anyone has any tips as I go along.

I took the tent home with me, but instead of drying it out the whole thing was so grubby that I threw it straight in the bath to wash it first. I started off by handwashing the fly sheet, which is about the thickness of good quality bedsheets and tough enough to scrub with a scrubbing brush. The water coming out of it was only a very pale shade of brown after about the sixth rinse, so I wrapped it in a sheet to keep the fittings safe and put it in the washing machine to spin it halfway dry before I hung it up.

The previously clean white sheet came out so dirty that I changed my mind and put it back in for a proper 40 degree wash with soap.

With the fly sheet drying outside on the line I started cautiously prodding the inner to see if I could get away with not washing that. The inner is awkward because it's stitched onto the groundsheet, but 14 years of mud, sweat, mildew, squashed insects and ...whatever that is... really did need to come out of it before I could do anything else.

Although it will look great (and breathe better) after a wash, cleaning it isn't just for aesthetic reasons. Tiny particles of grit stuck between fibres will eventually wear and break them - some of the smaller holes in the inner look as though they might have been caused this way - and patches of dirt will affect the tension and flexibility of the fabric, making it impossible to sew it straight or with a consistent tension. Wonky or badly tensioned sewing pulls in some places more than others which causes further rips, and the inner fabric is so fine that a little will make a lot of difference.

So into the bathtub it all went, the groundsheet bundled up out of the way making it look like I had a dead body in there, and out came blackish water and 14 years worth of Glastonbury mud. The fabric was too thin to withstand the scrubbing brush so there ensued much energetic squishing, and the rips meant I didn't dare lift any of it out of the water as the weight of it wet was likely to tear it even more.

After 11 or 12 changes of water I concluded that the really black bits were a permanent feature, they'd probably look better when it dried and they add character anyway, so I left it to drip in the bath for a while and then spread the groundsheet out in my bedroom, with a chair inside it to lift the inner up to dry as best I could.

I just love how doing things like this doesn't seem to strike cats as particularly unusual - Mizzy walked right past this enormous thing she'd never seen before which was taking up almost the entire room, and paused only for about half a second to determine that it was wet and therefore not interesting.

By morning it was dry enough to get it outside, and when I put the poles in to spread it out properly it dried out in ten minutes flat in the baking hot sun. The next job will involve either waterproofing it or taking revenge on it for soaking me at Glastonbury. I'll keep you posted.

Mizzy Has Adventures

2009-07-01T13:06:00.009Z

A neighbour was looking after Mizzy for me while I was away at Glastonbury, and he said that the first time he came round, when he opened the door and she realised it wasn't me, she "did the cat equivalent of bursting into tears." I'm sure she settled down after that, but since I've been back she's been super-cuddly, wanting to sit on me and lick me all the time which is very sweet and makes me feel we're nicely bonded now.

The weather is really hot and I've got a few days of wellie washing and drying out the tent to do at home, so today I put a collar on her with a bell and a tag for my phone number, and let her out of the flat.

Everything was methodically sniffed, the back doorstep was peed on, she tried out some paving stones for rolling around on and she let me catch her again at the bottom of the garden when I started getting nervous.

Having a little sleep now after all that excitement.

Glastonbury 2009

2009-06-19T14:43:00.006Z

I'm going to Glastonbury Festival on Tuesday, and I'm so excited I can't think about anything else any more. If you're going then don't forget to use the property lock-ups (which is where I'm working). If you're not then the weather forecast below will hopefully make you jealous.....

Easier Than Making a Decent Paper Plane

2009-06-11T21:34:00.004Z

Daniel Harris of Freewheelers did a little impromptu survey of people on the Climate March last year to see how many had switched to renewable energy. Out of a random 53 of those people who had bothered to get out of bed, travel into Central London and march for the climate that day;

"7 people didn't know where their electricity came from; 24 knew they were using a non-renewable supply; 3 said they were moving to renewable electricity; and 19 said they were already on renewable thank you"

That's a bit rubbish, really. Only 36% of people marching for action on climate change had switched their own supply? It may be less exciting than dressing up as a parrot and a gorilla, but switching is a much more "direct" action and it's very much easier. I suspect that most people are just put off by misconceptions about how difficult it is to switch, given that almost no one understands much of the information given on their energy bills let alone which companies are "green" or which is the best tariff they offer.

But if you live in the UK and you want a green supplier then it's easy.

You really don't need to know what a kilowatt hour or a standard energy unit is. You don't need to shop around, because there's only one company, Good Energy, offering 100% renewable electricity in the UK. You don't need to compare different tariffs because they only have one, and not only is it not rocket science, it's easier than making a decent paper plane.

The most difficult part is the very first step – you’ll need to find a previous electricity bill. This is tricky if your filing system is anything like mine, but do it for the planet…

That will give you both your meter number, which will be obvious because it looks like this; and a rough idea of how much you spend per month on electricity. Go to the Good Energy website, click on "Join Good Energy" and fill in the form. It also asks things like your name and address, and they'll ask you to send them a meter reading as soon as you can, and that's it.

Uniquely among UK utility companies they actually answer the phone if you need to call them, so if you have any problems or if you'd rather do the whole thing by phone then you can speak to real human beings on 0845 456 1640.

However pretty the leaflets your current supplier sends you - even if it claims to be endorsed by the RSPB or Greenpeace - if you haven't done this yet then the very screen you're reading this from is unnecessarily damaging the environment, and it will continue to do so until you switch. Detail on whatever might have confused you about the "green" credentials of other suppliers is in Merrick's article "How Green is Green Electricity?"

But if all you need is motivation to just do it right now, imagine the embarassment of unexpectedly being asked to explain why you hadn't got around to it yet while wearing that parrot costume on a large climate change demo in the middle of London on a cold December day.

Don't Buy a "Green" Thing

2009-06-04T20:26:00.019Z

There are so many “green” products out there – from eco ironing spray to solar powered cherubic water features – that it’s easy to miss the simple fact that avoiding a purchase entirely is usually the greenest choice of all. The truly green alternative to a mains-powered water feature, for instance, is not a solar-powered one with a huge manufacturing, transport and disposal footprint, but an entirely non-electric one (like this made from a bathtub rescued from landfill), or just doing without a water feature altogether.

Making something pretty by re-using what would otherwise be wasted is a nice idea, and there are loads of projects and websites on making funky clothes, jewellery and desk tidies from reclaimed waste. But how often are you likely to wear a newspaper dress, how many pen holders could anyone really need, and how much jewellery would you avoid buying new if you mastered the art of making bottle-top earrings instead?

We’re so hooked on consumption that we’re coming up with ideas to reduce it by essentially consuming more. We’re inventing more “needs” that we can satisfy with ideas borrowed from sustainable solutions, while forgetting that we already have real needs far more deserving of our efforts to meet them more sustainably.<

Along with this, almost all products which are actually useful have just about succumbed by now to the natural state of decay known as the Shoe Event Horizon, which caused global societal collapse on the planet Brontitall in “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams:*

“The foundation of the Shoe Event Horizon theory is that when depressed, people tend to look down, and when they look down, they see their shoes. To cheer themselves up, they might buy themselves a new pair. Thus, in a generally depressed society, demand for shoes will rise.

In the critical condition, demand for shoes rises faster than the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases further because shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often; as the demand for shoes increases, cheap mass production causes shoe quality to drop even more. What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, this destabilises the economy to the point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.”

It seems to me that it is no longer economically viable to manufacture anything much other than cheap, shoddy products that don’t properly withstand normal wear and tear, that are deliberately designed not to be repairable by the average user and that are inherently disposable, thereby ensuring the future purchase of replacements as often as manufacturers think they can get away with. The result is that we’ve stopped expecting anything to last, we don’t expect to have to form the habit of maintaining anything, it rarely occurs to most of us to even attempt to fix anything that breaks and we’ve largely lost the skills we need to do so even if we wanted to.

How come so many people who grow their own vegetables don’t know how to sharpen the tools they use? Why, when everyone knows they should only boil the water they need, do they not also know to regularly de-scale their electric kettle to prolong its useful life? How many people use an energy efficient light bulb in a lamp, but throw the lamp away when it stops working because they don’t know to check and change the fuse? How many of those designing exciting “eco” clothing ranges throw away good versatile T-shirts from their own wardrobes when they don’t know how to get rid of a stubborn stain?

Instead of making very beautiful bottle-top earrings and pen holders, perhaps we should concentrate on things we couldn’t just entirely do without – basic clothing, tools, lamps, kettles, bikes, taps, everything that serves a useful purpose and is a solution to a real need rather than an invented one. We then need to teach each other about how these things are made, which designs are most durable, how to fix them when they break and how to maintain them so they break less often.

Why has learning simple repair and maintenance techniques yet to become fashionable the way "eco chic" apparently has, and where are all the reduce-reuse-recycle-but-see-if-you-can-REPAIR-it-first sites?

I’ve made myself a new “repair and maintenance” tag for this kind of thing and I hope you all have nice sharp garden shears now. I'll try to find something else to fix while you're busy descaling your kettle.

* Sorry to stereotype but I imagine I’ll now get Douglas Adams fans commenting that they’ve memorised the entire text of HHG and the planet Brontitall isn’t in it, so thought I’d better just mention that it’s only in the original BBC radio show and that memorising the entire text of HHG isn’t likely to get you a girlfriend.

Introducing Mizzy

2009-06-02T20:03:00.006Z

My good friend The Neighbour’s Cat suddenly and unexpectedly got sent to live with someone else just before Christmas last year. I had no idea she was going, didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, and for months afterwards kept thinking I’d glimpsed her out of the corner of my eye sitting on the windowsill or hiding behind the curtains.

I’d been thinking for ages about getting my own cat, and last week I finally took the plunge and answered a classified ad on Gumtree. Someone nearby needed a new home for a ten year old, overweight, black-and-white cat with dandruff, so I’m now sharing my flat with a fat old lady cat called Mizzy.

By pure coincidence she has very similar markings to Neighbour’s Cat, but measures at least twice as much around the middle and currently weighs about five kilos or 11lbs, which is a lot of cat. Apparently an “average” cat weighs about four kilos, which I worked out is roughly the equivalent of me weighing well over 11 stone instead of 9. She’s going on a diet.

She’s very chatty and friendly and lets me rub her belly, and her string chasing technique involves lots of amusing rolling over to use all four paws, so we’re getting along fine.

I’ll be adding her opinions to mine here if she has any interesting ones, although so far she’s still eating Go-Cat because I didn’t realise it was made by the evil Nestle, who she will be boycotting when we get to the end of the packet. She much prefers home-made toys like the string and a feather to the annoying jingly balls actually sold as cat toys, so that’s a good sign. We haven't discussed vegetarianism yet.

Sort Your Shears Out!

2009-05-28T19:54:00.006Z

Everyone’s been clipping everything in sight since we’ve had some sunshine here. On Monday the council used a petrol ride-on mower for all the grassy paths, the neighbours had a gardener doing their lawn with an electric push-mower, all the housing associations sent their hedge-clipping-chainsaw-thing man round and almost everyone else I saw was laboriously hacking at hedges and undergrowth with blunt shears while sweating a lot. So it might be a bit late to tell you this.

It’ll all need doing again in about two weeks though, and the simple non-electrified garden shears that most of us use are about a hundred times easier and more effective to use if you maintain them properly, so here’s how to sort out a pair of shears:

First wipe them clean so you’re dealing with handles and blades rather than a layer of plant goo and grit. Little bits of grit will totally mess up the sharp edges and the pivot, so rinse them even if they don’t seem muddy, just in case.

Close the blades together, hold them up to the light, and look between the blades to see how well aligned they are. If the blades are bent away from each other even a tiny bit then at best they’ll only cut part-way through everything. If they meet at the pivot and the tip but there’s a chink of light in the middle then you’re holding a pair of self-blunting shears. Blades bent in towards each other will scrape their sharp edges together every time you close them, so they’ll be blunt in no time even if you just open and close them without cutting anything.

Bend the blades carefully back into shape until they pass each other very closely and lie flat against each other – you shouldn’t see any light between them sideways-on when they’re shut. I tend to do this by wedging one handle between my foot and the ground, putting a brick under the part of the blade I want to bend, another brick under the loose handle to stop the blades closing together, and then pushing with slow steady pressure on the blade until I can just feel it start to move. Don’t hammer blades or apply pressure too fast in case they snap, and check the chink of light between the blades every time you may have bent them even slightly – a little makes a lot of difference!

Once you’re sure they’re aligned properly, sort the pivot joint out. If they’re stiff you might have grit or gunk in the joint, which a scrub with an old toothbrush in warm soapy water will probably sort out. If it’s rusty then take as much rust off as you can with fine sandpaper and wipe clean with something dry. Then work some oil into the joint so it opens and closes easily. If they’re still stiff then it might be worth undoing the bolt to sand the parts you can’t otherwise reach, putting the bolt itself in Coca-Cola overnight before cleaning its screw thread with a toothbrush and soapy water, then drying and oiling the whole thing before putting it back together.

Finally, you need a sharpening stone. If you’ve ever chewed a piece of grass you’ll know that it’s very fibrous, and so are woody things like hedges. Clipping the stuff will blunt blades quite quickly, so they need sharpening up again every ten minutes or so to keep them cutting easily, otherwise you’ll spend lots of effort just bruising grass.

If they haven’t been sharpened for ages then it’ll take a bit longer first time, but once they’re done they’ll only need a few scrapes to get going again when they start to lose their edge. If they’re very blunt or if there are any nicks in the blades, take them to a locksmith-and-cobblers shop first and ask nicely if they’ll grind them on their machines before you use a sharpening stone for a smoother finish.

Get the sharpening stone wet, look at the blade to see where the tiny slope at the edge is, then drag that sloped bit across the stone – you don’t need to press very hard. If you then look again at the blade the part you’ve scraped will be shiny, so you’ll see easily if you’ve got the angle right and with a bit of trial and error you’ll soon work out how to get a decent sharp edge on a blade – ask a good chef to teach you how to sharpen a knife if you're struggling.

Go off and cut things, enjoy the nice clean slicey noise they’ll now be making, remember to sharpen again a little bit every ten minutes or so, and you’ll gradually stop thinking of shearing as really hard and difficult work.

No petrol, no battery, no mains lead, no fuel costs, no sweat.

Ian Tomlinson - It Happens All The Time

2009-04-10T12:11:00.002Z

I went to protest against the meeting of the G20 in London last week. I listened to a samba band, chatted to lots of lovely random people, ate slightly squashed sandwiches in the sunshine and was nowhere near where Ian Tomlinson died.

To briefly fill you in if you’ve been on another planet for the last week or so; someone who had nothing to do with the protests was walking home through it all, and was hit and pushed over by a police officer in riot gear. Video of this happening was recorded on at least two different cameras by other people nearby - which you can see here and here - and we’ll probably eventually see footage from CCTV cameras in the area too. It is pretty clear that it’s assault. He died in the street soon afterwards of a heart attack, and it seems that police officers actively hindered the efforts of a medical student to give him first aid, and then delayed an ambulance attending the scene to resuscitate him.

Plenty has already been written about the G20, the protests against it, the police tactics used and the press coverage of it all.

The one thing I don't think is being said enough at the moment is that the tactics and behaviour of the police last week were entirely routine. Just about every major protest I've ever been on, as well as many smaller ones, has been policed in more or less this way – in fact you can always spot a first-time attendee at any protest because they are the only people still expressing astonishment at what they see police officers do.

Kettling, crap (i.e. obviously arbitrary) arrests, police provoking violence, hitting people on the ground with batons, shoving very hard with shields and intimidating people who aren’t even involved happens at almost every protest. Lots of us simply expect it now. Most people who are attacked by police officers never bring a complaint - it’s not usually possible to identify individual officers after the event, and onlookers are often busy being attacked themselves rather than filming what is happening. But it happens all the time.

I’ve seen countless protesters with head injuries, because lines of police often raise their batons above their own heads to beat indiscriminately down on crowds of people, after pushing them back so they’re packed too close together to be able to avoid the blows.

Every time there is any liaison between protesters and police, we ask them to ensure that all officers’ identification numbers are kept clearly visible precisely so that we can hold them accountable for this behaviour. Every time they fail to do this.

They actively prevent people from recording their actions by filming or taking photos. Even people who realise that media coverage is biased often have little idea how profound and widespread the bias is. Unprovoked and disproportionate police violence is massively under-recorded and under-reported, preventing any individual case from being seen in its wider context of routine police brutality.

If Ian Tomlinson had not died last week there would have been no investigation. If there had been no footage of the assault then it would have been assumed that the police had acted reasonably, and the attack would have become one of thousands of police assaults which go completely ignored every year. It’s a matter of time before someone else dies, and a matter of luck whether anyone will manage to get clear footage of it next time.

I hope the investigation into Tomlinson’s death doesn't allow everyone to narrow the focus of discussion to just this one fatal incident. It's high time that the whole nature of the role of policing at protests is called into question and that some real accountability is forced on the police.

Turn On, Plug-In, Opt Out!

2009-04-08T19:31:00.007Z

Starting today, Google will be collecting information on the web pages you view in order to target advertising at you.

They don't need your permission - if you don't opt out then the law apparently allows them to assume your "implied consent". They also have little obligation to make sure you know they're doing this, which one might think would tend to make it rather difficult for you to choose to consent to it even if you wanted to. Anyway, now you know, so now you can choose to opt out.

In fact I hardly ever see any advertising on the internet any more since I got the almighty Adblock Plus for Firefox. Honestly, even if you're the least technical person in the universe, if you use Firefox then click here, click on "Add to Firefox", and let it install. It will tell you to restart Firefox, and then you need to click on a filter to tell it which ads to look for - pick the first US one if you're in an English-speaking country. That's it.

It's easy, I promise it won't go wrong, and I swear I only see advertising on the internet now when I use someone else's machine which doesn't have Adblock installed. Then everything is suddenly plastered in the stuff, which the normal user of the machine usually insists they "never really notice". If they really don't notice that amount of junk on the screen all the time then advertisers must practically have electrodes implanted directly into their subconscious. Give yourself a couple of weeks without the distraction of incessant advertising, and then see how cluttered and shouty other people's experience of the internet begins to seem.

Google, however, will still be collecting information about the pages you view in order to target advertising at you, even if you're not actually seeing the ads. It's the data collection aspect that I object to most, so I still want to opt out of their intrusive scheme and stop them virtually spying on me in the first place.

Trying to find out how to do this involved having to read pages and pages of corporate drivel about how to "improve your online experience" by letting Google show you "the most useful and relevant ads online" which can be "tailored to your interests" with a system based on "transparency" and "choice".

To save you the sheer annoyance, click here, and then click on the big blue thing that says "Download the advertising cookie opt-out plugin". If you have more than one browser then you'll need to do this in all of them, e.g. you need to do this once in Firefox, once in Internet Explorer, and once in Chrome or whatever else you use for browsing the internet. (If you're not sure then you probably only need to do it once.)

After that they should bugger off and leave you alone, at least until the surgeons call round to give you that lobotomy you've implied your consent for by failing to let them know you didn't want it.

Eccentric-Looking Allotment Project No.97

2009-03-22T18:52:00.005Z

We're without water on my allotment site again this spring because of a massive underground leak. My plot isn't looking as wacky as usual at the moment either, since the bender greenhouse has bitten the dust and I can't put the tipi greenhouse back up until I find new poles for it, so this weekend I've been ressurecting my solar still which should help on both scores.

Our water is metered and not as good for some things as rainwater, so I always collect the rain in loads of mismatched plastic containers I've pulled out of skips. But for the last couple of years we've had no rain for weeks at just the time I'm trying to plant my seedlings out, and with vandals wrecking our water supply I've had to carry water in from the carwash around the corner just to keep everything going.

So how to collect fresh water on site when it isn't raining and the taps don't work? "The Global Warming Survival Kit" by Brian Clegg had an idea I thought I'd try out.

I already had a big hole in the ground, about three metres square and 30cm or so deep, where the tipi greenhouse used to be. I dug a smaller, deeper hole in the middle to put a big plastic container in, and then stretched clear plastic sheeting over the top and held it down around the edges with bricks. The idea is that water evaporates out of the ground, condenses on the underside of the plastic sheet and runs into the middle, where small stones keep the lowest point directly above the container to catch it all.

I got a good few litres a day this way over the summer last year, and when it does rain the sheeting also collects lots of water in the top, so now I should end up with a decent supply of water whether it rains or shines between now and planting time.

Of course today has been cloudy and windy, just to annoy me.

I've Forgotten How to Blog!

2009-01-15T22:35:00.047Z

I recently sent work-related e-mails from home and forgot to erase the automatic signature, which says http://alice-in-blogland.blogspot.com/. The recipient noticed, and then several other work people turned out to have read it too, including my boss...

I’m sure I must have left the same signature at the bottom of something or other I’ve sent my mum at some point as well, although god knows whether she’ll have figured out what a “blogspot” is or what to do with it, especially since it doesn’t begin with “www…”

For some reason I mentioned this blog to my half-sister too, who I’ve never met but who I’ve been in contact with for the first time recently by e-mail, and on whom I’m very much still making first impressions…

And then, before xmas, I went to a big co-op party where, (at least as far as the more coherent parts of my memory of the evening suggest,) about three different people said they'd read something or other I'd written here. Although come to think of it those could all have been the same person wearing different wigs…

Now every time I sit down to punch random musings into my grubby keyboard, I keep imagining my boss, my mum, someone who’s going to be my sister and every Leeds activist I’ve ever met, all in different wigs, all gathered around the same computer screen waiting for me to do something worthwhile here to justify the publicity. It's been making it a bit difficult to write.

I feel quite a lot like a rabbit again, this time one caught in headlights.

What if I say something stupid?

I suppose that question implies that I don't think any of those people have ever heard me say anything stupid before, which is extremely unlikely given the rubbish I come out with in person when I don't even have to be able to spell any of it.

Anyway, deliberately pitching to specific audiences is for advertisers, I'd rather write about whatever I want and assume that only people who'll tend to like it will tend to read it. I guess really I just can't decide what to blog about, and the more I think about it the less I can prioritise.

Plenty of better-informed-than-I-am people are already writing about Gaza, on which subject it's as much as I can do to suppress a scream every time I hear words like "proportional" and "right to exist" - some things I get too pissed off to even rant coherently about.

The UK government has just given the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow, which I probably will rant about when I've caught up on reading everyone else's rants and worked out what actually needs doing next about it.

And of course capitalism continues to eat itself, with some amusing and some scary consequences which so far haven't included me losing my job, being repossessed or having to do a masters degree.

So how to get this blog habit going again?

My most productive days often start with a lot of aimless but active flitting around, just feeling the caffeine kick in and tidying things up entirely at random whether they need it or not. I then usually start seriously doing about three or four things at once, while making huge lists of other things like taking the bins out and finding out where that smell is coming from (those two things are "on my list" right now), which I may or may not do when I lose momentum on any of my supposedly primary tasks, or if I somehow manage to actually finish any of them.

Sometimes I'll then suddenly be seized with a very specific project that I'm absolutely compelled to completely immerse myself in right this minute, develop and expand into all available physical and mental space, and concentrate on to the exclusion of everything else until it occurs to me that I haven't eaten for hours, I haven't slept for days and I haven't returned anyone's calls since last Tuesday. That's how shelving gets put up.

I think I'll have a good flit around, aimlessly tidy up this blog a bit and see what happens. Making a nice cup of tea is usually a good start.

Rabbit photo © MzePhotos.com, Some Rights Reserved

'Eds Up!

2008-11-26T20:43:00.003Z

Someone's somehow let that bastard Charlie Brooker back on the telly again. Watch the episode on advertising here before Tuesday 'cos I think they take them down again after a week.

BBC4, 10:30 on Tuesdays if you've got BBC4.

November

2008-11-08T18:11:00.003Z

So, November already. I've spent all afternoon raking up beautiful pink and orange cherry tree leaves in the garden, and planting bulbs which I'll now forget all about until they cheer me up on some still far away spring day next year.

I've just come back from Bruges, which is beautiful - all medieval architecture, horse-drawn traps and autumn leaves drifting through the November fog into canals full of swans. They have amazing lace, very tasty beer and every object, person or animal you could ever imagine made out of chocolate. I bought a chocolate Pope, just for the rather bizarre experience of eating him.

There were also hundreds of British tourists, many visiting World War One sites to commemorate Armistice Day on 11th November. I've written about Armistice before, and was annoyed that I'd forgotten to take my white poppy with me to wear instead of a red one.

Both of my previous posts on the subject prompted some interesting responses last year, and lots of people also got in touch to ask where they could buy white poppies. It's a bit late now to buy them online, but there is a map here showing all the places you can find shops or people selling them in the UK.

I'll be wearing mine on 11th November, when I always try to be in a crowded place at 11am to observe the silence. The silence of a large group is incredibly powerful, and it's a tradition I've always liked - I remember mass silences being called often during protests against the war in Iraq, and what it does to the mood of both participants and observers is quite moving.

I'm saving all the programmes I want to listen to on i-player until tomorrow, when I won't be able to turn the radio on without being assaulted with cannon fire, hypocrisy and Nicholas Bloody Witchell.

Back From Reality

2008-08-31T14:15:00.010Z

Right, first things first: I've been unexpectedly absent from this blog for a couple of weeks due to some Real Life stuff that isn't blog material. This has meant that I haven't mentioned the Daily (Maybe) Best Green Blogs 2008 yet, which has meant that I've only got three votes for the "People's Choice" with one day to go. You can vote here if you read this in time, but I think I may have missed the window for frantic self-publicity. Oh well. I've lost the top spot I had last year, but I'm frankly amazed to still be included in the Top 20 given the quality of all the others. I'm especially pleased to see Beansprouts in there, which I've liked for ages - Hi Melanie!

Second thing second: It's surreal, dark and part-animated. It's called "The Wrong Door", and it's on BBC3 at 10:30pm on Thursdays, or here on i-player if like me you still don't own a freebox digiview thing. In general I don't really like CGI animation - it so often doesn't move convincingly, and fails to be truly life-like while also missing out on the rich and distinctive characters and textures that scruffier stop-mo techniques can give. For a sketch show though it'll do nicely, especially if it matures a bit further into edgy weirdness.

Other things in no particular order:

Wasp thing - why are so many wasps dying in my flat suddenly? Is there something in here that attracts dying wasps, or something that kills passing wasps, or something that attracts lots of wasps which then die in average numbers given the time of year but it seems like a lot because there were so many to begin with? And how long will it be until I step on a not-quite-dead one with bare feet?

Fat furry thing - my neighbour's cat is back, along with quite a few extra rolls of cat fat she's acquired over the summer. As soon as she's settled down I'm going to start chasing her twice round the flat every day for exercise. I'm just cultivating a false sense of security for a while by putting a blanket on a table for her and rubbing her ears...

Good Advice

2008-08-13T17:40:00.004Z

(Click for a bigger version if you can't read the text properly)

I'm guessing it's probably from Private Eye.

NETCU Guide to Policing Protest

2008-08-12T11:03:00.004Z

I heard a rumour while I was at camp that a copy of the NETCU Guide to Policing Protest had been dropped by a police officer during one of their violent incursions onto the site. The NETCU guide is a handbook for police on laws relevant to protests with guidelines on how to interpret them, and police forces "are advised not to release this guide following freedom of information requests".

I've just found the entire thing in PDF format here, so I thought I'd link to it as a public service since it's not available through normal democratic channels.

I can't work out how to save it on my own machine because I only have Adobe Reader and none of the menus say "Save" on them anywhere - can anyone help?

Additional from Indymedia:

If you have any concerns about NETCU then get in touch with them

04.08.2008 22:56

They only have a postal address as a contact so here's a little extra:

NETCU
PO Box 525
Huntingdon
PE29 9AL

Tel: 01480 425091
Fax: 01480 425007

Email: mailbox@netcu.pnn.police.uk ***NEW***
Or try: netcu@cambs.pnn.police.uk

You can ask for Steven Pearl, head of NETCU, for all of your complaints.

Concerned Activist
Homepage: http://netcuwatch.org.uk

Lego Protest

2008-08-11T12:23:00.002Z

From Indymedia - E.ON’s replica of the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station has been occupied by one inch tall climate change campaigners. The drama unfolded at the Legoland park in Windsor – sponsored by E.ON – where the Lego Kingsnorth is given pride of place next to Big Ben and Canary Wharf.

More here

Climate Camp Ready for Action

2008-08-08T11:55:00.003Z

My plan so far for the day of action involves using some kind of floating thing to sail up the river, getting into the power station and find the manager's office. I'm told that on his desk is a big red button marked "STOP", and there is a prize of a bottle of rum for the first person to press it and switch the power off.

I went canoeing a few times when I was at school and it's only a few miles, and I've got an eye patch and everything so I'm sure it'll be fine. Until then I'm trying to put residents of Sipson (which is where the climate camp was last year) in touch with residents of Hoo, which is where I had a lovely pint of Kentish ale last night and chatted with some local people here.

Local feeling has been very much swung in our favour after some really nasty police behaviour, and rumours are rife of the ridiculous items confiscated from campers and locals alike, most of which are true.

I need to cycle to power the battery of this laptop for half the time I spend using it, and since I'm a slow typist and a poor cyclist I'll just point you at indymedia and our own onsite TV station VisionOn for further news, probably at least until Sunday and assuming I'm not either drowned or nicked by then.

Please send messages of support to the camp if you can, it's good to hear from the world outside the police lines occasionally!

Climate Camp at Kingsnorth

2008-08-05T17:20:00.006Z

Well, Glastonbury was amazing - having so little rain meant being able to sit on the grass, walk around a lot more easily and generally relax more effectively, without having to wrestle with waterproof trousers and stinking wet socks every few hours.

I came home to find the allotment knee-deep in weeds, and I've spent several weeks frantically picking all my fruit before shoving all my kit back in the rucksack to go to Climate Camp.

The camp this year is at Kingsnorth in Kent, where E.ON and the government apparently think it would be a good idea to build a new coal-fired power station on the site of an old one.

It would not.

As the camp paper puts it, "Building a coal-fired power station in the middle of a climate crisis ... makes about as much sense as a petrol-filled fire extinguisher" The existing power station is reaching the end of its 30 year lifespan, and building a new one would be a commitment to burning coal there for another 30 years. Coal is the most polluting form of fossil fuel (despite the impression that E.ON's greenwash tries to create), and six more coal-fired power stations are planned across the country if Kingsnorth goes ahead.

It's big and it's urgent, and it's now half a mile away from me as I sit in my tent flicking spiders out and eating carrots. I somehow managed to lose both my waterproof coat and my wellies at Glastonbury, but I'm surviving intermittent rain so far with boots and a drab stinky coat that I found in a bin recently.

Yesterday was mostly taken up with resisting some nasty police behaviour, but today I've been going to talks and workshops and generally getting on with what I came here for. The day of mass action is on Saturday, the police haven't beaten anyone for a good few hours now, and I'm trying to figure out the logistics of having a wash with a cup and a bucket inside my tent.

I'll keep you posted.

Seven Songs

2008-06-23T23:29:00.001Z

Merrick tagged me with this:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your [summer]. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

I should warn you that my taste in music is just as chaotic as everything else in my life, which at least should keep everybody awake. Sorry that I’ve been extremely lazy and linked almost everything to YouTube – please try not to get too distracted there by searching for talking cats.

Other disclaimers: I’ve gone for what I’m honestly listening to right now rather than turning it into “My Top Seven Tracks Ever,” and if you asked me again next week I’d probably pick seven completely different and equally random tracks. Also I’m totally useless at describing music, so you’ll have to use the links to find out what it all sounds like. Come back and tell me if you like them though.

1. “Two of Us” by Aimee Mann – cute, summery, close harmonies – yum.

2. “Oops Oh My” by Tweet and Missy Elliot – loud and dark and sexy. Strangely I find it sexier without the skinny nearly-naked women in the weird ice palace thing, but they’re here if you want them.

3. “Revolve” by Hush the Many – I first heard this a couple of days ago when Merrick did this meme, and now I can’t turn it off – thanks Merrick! I love animation, especially when it’s kind of dark and creepy.

4. “Bobby Brown” by Frank Zappa. Also pretty dark and creepy, although in a different way…

5. “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum – because I’m off to Glastonbury festival tomorrow, and because my mum warped my musical taste early on. She wants this at her funeral, which might be rather odd at an otherwise very pointedly Jesus-free event. Mum’s having Elvis instead of Jesus.

6. This choice shall be known only as “Malcolm Middleton – Choir Eddie Cointreaus 2008 Redo” – not because I’m deliberately trying to be obscure, but because someone posted me that link, it’s something their friend did, and I’m not even certain that I’m strictly supposed to tell anyone else about it. But I love it. So sue me.

7. ELO “Hold on Tight” Apparently when I was very little I thought the lyric was “Hold on tight ‘til you’re three,” and imagined that something amazing would happen to me on my third birthday. If it did I can’t remember, but I did hold on.

So, I’ve managed to do seven things I’m currently listening to without mentioning this by Howard Jones (discovered by accident when I got a Robert Knight song in my head) or the theme tune to the chipmunks. Phew!

Might do some more of this when I get back from Glastonbury, if there’s any call for it. I promise to tag seven other people when I get back too, but it’s very late now and I need to pack my tent, which I put up in my living room three days ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time…

Let Me In

2008-06-18T14:49:00.004Z

Everyone liked "Wake Up Cat" so much that I thought I'd better post the new one "Let Me In", also starring Simon's Cat

"Wake Up Cat" can now be found here

Change of Address

2008-06-15T13:42:00.004Z

I mentioned recently that I've been having big problems with bluebottle.com, who have provided my e-mail account for a couple of years now and who are crap. I just about managed to dump them before they dumped me this week, but not without spending several sunny days indoors staring at a stupid computer screen. Sorry if I’ve been ignoring you.

When I first set up my account I couldn't get it to talk to Outlook properly/at all so I ended up just leaving everything on the server, and it was oh-so-convenient to be able to access it all from any computer anywhere. This did eventually mean having two years worth of correspondence saved somewhere out in cyberspace and not backed up anywhere, but hey, that’s not a problem when it’s all working fine, and what could possibly go wrong…?

A few days ago, just as I was beginning to get warnings about having reached my capacity and needing to delete some old messages, Bluebottle sent an email to all their users to let us know that they're no longer going to be providing free accounts, we have ten days to download any of our correspondence that we'd like to keep, and then please would we bugger off if we're not going to give them any money.

“Panic” would be too strong a word considering the way I’d probably feel about, say, finding that I’d fallen into a polar bear’s private swimming pool, or being trapped in a lift for 41 hours, but I was pretty quick to send a pathetic message to Techie Friend begging him to come over and make it work please. Techie Friend being good at this kind of thing, it now does work in that all 3000+ messages that were on the server are now on my machine and won’t be deleted by Bluebottle. Unfortunately, the downloading process and the fact that I haven’t bothered to organise anything into folders for two years means that I now just have a very very long list of messages in no particular order. In fact it looks quite a lot like my paper filing system.

I've spent nearly four hours today putting thousands of messages into 38 sub-folders in Thunderbird. This is in addition to time spent persuading five Yahoo groups to use my new address, trying to somehow capture all the e-mail addresses I've ever used which Bluebottle holds onto forever in a massive, badly-punctuated list rather than permit me to keep a proper address book, changing 38 subscriptions to various accounts and websites many of which I'd forgotten I had, and writing to everyone I’ve ever met to let actual real people know my new address.

So, apologies to anyone reading this who has written to me recently and who I haven’t yet replied to.

If you still only have either of my old addresses then my new one is the same username @riseup.net – I will get anything sent to the riseup address, but the process of moving has left me with three different inboxes and a large folder called “dump” which is going to take me a while to sort through. I will reply to you all, but for the moment you are probably marked blue for “To Do” in a funky new Thunderbird folder somewhere.

I honestly don't remember it being this hard to change my physical address, although it has been a while since I've moved house and I'm probably forgetting.

On the plus side, I've got my new address talking to Thunderbird to avoid ever having all this hassle again. I can now do italics and different colours and all kinds of exciting things, and other people's text gets wrapped rather than keeping going for six feet or so off my screen to the right. Unwrapped text quite unfairly makes people seem very longwinded. I haven't even started on creating my own mailing lists yet, but look out world…

Wall-Painted Animation

2008-05-31T22:30:00.000Z

Wow, look at this...

Time warp

2008-05-23T22:48:00.005Z

At this time of year I feel as though anything I turn my back on for five minutes goes through some kind of time distortion effect where weeks of neglect happen to it in my short absence.

I spent two whole weekends recently doing nothing but weeding the allotment, and it now has dandelions in it that I couldn't possibly have missed only a couple of weeks ago - great big mature bloody trees have sprung up, with masses of seed heads crumbling gently into cracks in the soil all over the entire plot.

Slugs of course are well known for having the ability to warp time - this is why, for instance, courgette plants sometimes seem to disappear completely without leaving any remains at all. They apparently find it necessary to shred corn, so I'm growing a second batch of corn plants for them to eat when they've reduced the first ones to ribbons. At least the fox deli bar should prove cheaper this year, since a new plot-holder on my site works part time in a pub and can get us all beer dregs to use in the slug traps.

I have loads more seeds to sow, a strawberry patch full of buttercup, kit to repair before the festival season, a zillion things I'm supposed to have read by now and a flat that I can't even find the dirty laundry in any more. Socks, in particular, have been doing the time-distortion thing a lot recently. I've always found them to be prone to it.

I haven't posted here in over a month, and I have a huge backlog of things I wanted to ramble on about, some of which I'll try to get around to posting soon. In the meantime, you may like to amuse yourself with pie charts and Venn diagrams...

Back soon, perhaps with some more short and sweet ones until I've got RL a bit more under control.

Tinker's Bubble Photos

2008-04-20T22:05:00.003Z

I've recently been for a working holiday at Tinker's Bubble, an intentional community in Somerset. I keep thinking I'll write something about it and then I keep changing my mind about exactly what I want to write - every time I've been I've had quite complicated feelings about it.

I've just put some photos up on Flickr so I thought I'd link to those first - they're not brilliant, but they might give a general idea of what some of it is like. Some text to follow probably at some point...

Bluebottle.com Is Crap

2008-04-20T21:16:00.003Z

My STUPID e-mail account is TOTALLY inaccessible because NO bluebottle.com pages will load at all because bluebottle.com is so CRAP.

Apologies to anyone trying to contact me by e-mail - if it's urgent and you don't have my phone number then try leaving a comment here.

How to Sell Your Head

2008-04-01T10:01:00.000Z

I was going to write about the lack of advertisements in Sao Paulo, Brazil. But then I saw this:

Free Tibet

2008-03-17T17:39:00.004Z

The whole world is watching...

The Free Tibet Campaign is still updating its website with photos taken by protesters today. Here's another one:

They must be very, very scared.

There are reports of people protesting outside Chinese embassies around the world today. There is no embassy near me, so all I can think of to do for now is to copy these images here. If you happen to live in London though the embassy is at 49-51 Portland Place, and will probably be very busy tonight.

The editor of the Guardian has written to the embassy about media censorship, which might be a good basic letter for the rest of us to change a bit and also send - names, addresses and e-mails here to send to. I'd probably leave out the phrase "henceforth unfettered" if you don't want to sound like a Guardian editor.

Personally I think I might give them a ring tomorrow on 020 7299 4049, although if I had access to a fax machine I think it would also be quite good fun to repeatedly fax those photographs of dead protesters to all the embassy fax numbers...

COMMENTS

Real England

2008-03-16T20:28:00.007Z

Hooray! Paul's new book Real England is out very soon, and small bits of it are readable now. They are currently unfortunately only available in the Daily Mail, which leaves me with a dilemma - can I really bring myself to link to the Daily bloody Mail?

I actually stole a copy yesterday before I realised I could read it online - if I'd been caught I wasn't sure if I'd be more embarrassed about shoplifting or about wanting a copy of the Daily Mail. Anyway, there will be more of it in the Mail on Monday, you really should read it and you really shouldn't buy the Daily Mail, so I'm just going to point you at it once.

That's it, I'm not going to do it again until it's in the Guardian, and then only if there aren't any "Fly to Prague for 20p" adverts next to it.

COMMENTS

Fallen Tree

2008-03-09T22:57:00.010Z

I went for a walk the other day about half a mile up the road from my house, and saw this:

Down at my end of the road police tape usually means either a recent shooting or a massive car crash, but at the posh end in Roundhay the police apparently isolate the public from fallen trees, presumably in case anyone fails to notice a huge tree trunk of maybe two and a half feet diameter and bruises their knees by walking into it.
Both the tree and the wall are probably about 100 years old. Somehow that's an impressive but not completely unimaginable length of time, and I stood for ages just looking at this massive dying tree, wondering things like how much it weighed, what the place was like when it was a little sapling, and how terrifying it must have sounded when it fell.

Certainly puts a few other things into perspective, anyway.

COMMENTS

The Scale of the Problem

2008-02-24T21:14:00.007Z

I've just stumbled across pictures of an exhibition called "Running the Numbers - An American Self-Portrait" by Chris Jordan in which "Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use in the U.S.); 106,000 aluminium cans (thirty seconds of U.S. can consumption) and so on." I love it, although I take his point that "the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended."

Below is my favourite single image, although each print takes several images to get the scale unless you're there in person. It's a small detail from one of six huge panels in which each folded prison uniform represents one of the 2.3 million prisoners incarcerated in 2005.

"The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits." Chris Jordan

COMMENTS

Life Explained On Film

2008-02-12T00:28:00.000Z

Half of Tescos up the road is now piled high with chocolate Easter eggs, and the other half is plastered with red plastic heart-shaped things. Thought I'd share "How to Survive Valentine's Day When You Are Single" from Video Jug - personally I'm quite looking forward to seeing lots of unsold chocolate go on sale at the weekend.

You can see such other useful things on Video Jug as "How to Get Out of a Car Without Showing Your Knickers," "How To Stop Leaving the Toilet Seat Up" and "What To Do If You Catch Your Parents Having Sex"*. Enjoy.

* Quality of advice may vary and is not necessarily endorsed by this blog.

Wake Up Cat

2008-02-06T23:11:00.002Z

This vid can now be found here. Highly recommended.

COMMENTS

Alice in Blogland Cooperative

2008-01-10T22:04:00.001Z

I wrote to BlogShares to ask about having found this blog listed there, and got this reply, copied from the comments on my previous post:

Hey! That's me!

Alice - what you stumbled upon is actually called BlogShares - it's a fictional stock market where players receive B$500 to buy/sell/trade in a market based on blogs (valued by, among other things, the number of people that link to the blog). For what it's worth, blogs start at a base value of B$1,000, so a value of around B$20,000 like yours is by no means shabby.

The exact message you found is from what we call artefacts - a way to manipulate prices of the market.

All that said, registration is open to all, the game is incredibly addictive, and a great time - we are also home to a player community unlike any other I've found. Also, there is absolutely no real world value to B$, our currency (unlike games like second life, etc).

BlogShares is the main site.

This is my reply:

Ah, ok, then I'm afraid there has been a misunderstanding.

Alice in Blogland is actually a fully-mutual cooperative. This structure prevents the sale of shares for profit, and is designed to ensure that a company or enterprise serves its users or customers rather than the expectations of shareholders. BlogShares looks like a very busy and interesting site, but because it is based on trading shares for profit, Alice in Blogland is unfortunately not eligible to take part.

The usual system of shareholding in a cooperative is that each service user (each reader in this case) becomes a cooperative member and buys a share for a nominal set fee, usually £1. This share cannot be sold for profit, but as many shares can be created as there are readers willing to become shareholders.

The cooperative model is designed to protect against distortion by markets, so that, for example, Alice in Blogland will not become one big campaign to persuade others to link to it at the expense of writing anything that people really want to read. This model also promotes and springs from a belief in equality, both by implying a democratic structure within an organisation, and by preventing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

I would love to take part in BlogShares if it were possible to do so with a blog based on the cooperative model, perhaps joining leaderboards of blogs with the largest number of individual shareholders. Please could you let me know if it would be possible to join in on this basis?

What I need to know now is, how many of you out there would like to try spreading a little not-for-profit love around the blogosphere? If a cooperative structure can be made to work in BlogShares, how many of you would become members of the Alice in Blogland cooperative by buying a share for a nominal, fictional amount on a fictional stock market site?

COMMENTS

Available to Trade

2008-01-07T18:34:00.001Z

Can anyone tell me anything at all about this? I don't get it, but it appears to have got me.

"Alice In Blogland was the subject of much speculation when analysts at several firms were heard to be very positive about its recent performance. Its share price rose from B$379.88 to B$554.63. Much of the hype was said to originate from J.T. Sage whose Oxford Dictionary (artefact) was said to be involved."

WTF???

COMMENTS

Glamorising War

2008-01-07T08:08:00.000Z

It seems I'm not the only one tearing up military recruitment materials - The Rowntree Foundation has published a report concluding that "Potential recruits to the armed forces are given a misleading picture of military life, including the physical risks and ethical dilemmas involved." More here from the Grauniad.

In the meantime, there will now be a brief window in which this point of view can be taken seriously by The Establishment. It won't last, but while it does I'm going to register a complaint about their T.V. adverts with the Advertising Standards Authority. They are obliged to investigate even one complaint as long as they are satisfied that there "is an issue for the advertising parties to answer," and a nice big official report in the news might just swing that one this week.

COMMENTS

Imagine My Surprise!

2008-01-04T23:02:00.000Z

Another paradigm-shifting cartoon by Marc Roberts from Climate Cartoons - the full version is even better, but it only fits here if I cut half of it out...

Wasting Time

2007-12-27T10:31:00.000Z

I'm back at work today and it's all very quiet, so I'm adding to my "Fun and Pointless" links and playing Cat Tetris. It's either that or catching up on data entry...

I've just re-read "Tim is a Homosexual" and correctly guessed eight out of ten programming language inventors or serial killers. These are all linked from Bristling Badger's blog, which has an extensive daft links list and a poll in which you can vote that Chris De Burgh "is the conniving minion of totalitarian shapeshifting lizards".

Now I can't get past level 41 in the Free Rice vocabulary game, and Friendbot just told me "You are not the boss of me, Internet Friend." Charming!

If I had speakers I'd listen again to the "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" xmas special, "Humph in Wonderland", but since I can't do that I'm actually now going to enter 85 names into a database and then bugger off early. Ho hum.

The Cat's Halo

2007-12-16T22:18:00.000Z

Sorry, yes, I am still alive! Trying to do too much in too little time...

Here's a quick cat post to keep you all entertained until I get around to telling you about the library book I've nearly finished reading.

Last week a friend gave me this very sweet knitted xmas fairy to put on my tree, which I'm dead chuffed with. The tree isn't up yet so she's been sitting on my sofa, and soon after I first got her home her pink fluffy halo fell off and had to be stitched back on.

The SECOND time I found her halo had come off I started to get a bit suspicious, and sure enough every time I moved it off the floor and turned my back again I'd mysteriously find it back on the bean bag that the cat likes to sit on.

It seems she has adopted it and plans to raise it as her own, and I'm going to have to find another halo for the fairy to stop my tree being toppled by a love-struck cat.

I can't even tell where the halo ends and the cat begins in this one...

Humbug. Already.

2007-11-27T21:29:00.002Z

Courtesy of climatecartoons.org.uk
(This hasn't come out very well, click on the image for a clearer version...)

Wiggly Leek

2007-11-17T20:58:00.000Z

Oh yuck. I've been really ill this weekend with a very nasty tummy bug thing which I'll spare you the gory details of. Suffice to say that my entire digestive system now contains only half a packet of bread sticks and five cups of chamomile tea.

I haven't been able to see any friends or go anywhere for fear of infecting people or falling over with dizzy weirdness, but I did manage to take a bag of fallen leaves to the allotment this afternoon to get myself a change of scenery. The last couple of years my plot has been pretty bare by November, but I've got quite a few things still growing this year which cheered me up a bit.

Although all my pumpkin plants died months ago in sheer disgust at the state of the weather and the slug population, all the onion sets that did nothing all summer are now visible under the frost bitten nasturtiums and have suddenly grown into proper onions, so they might just get me through the winter after all. The rainbow chard is bolting and I'm hoping to collect the seed, and I've got loads of huge purple sprouting broccoli that I'm already eating leaves from here and there.

I've also got my first really good crop of enormous leeks, and I brought a nice fat one home with me this afternoon. For some reason it turned out to be all wiggly on the inside:

I wonder why?

Hoping that by the time I've made leek and potato soup I'll actually be able to eat it...

Some More Thoughts on Armistice

2007-11-11T15:15:00.000Z

Rather than parading around in uniform and firing cannons (why do they always miss Nicholas bloody Witchell?), remembrance day makes me want to find ways to resist war and support others who resist. Remembrance is hypocritical if we do it while perpetuating the very conditions which cause the loss of life we mourn.

"When an ex-serviceman broke the Armistice Silence at the Cenotaph in 1937, with his loud cry of protest against the hypocrisy of praying for peace while preparing for war, he had made clear what everyone was beginning to realise: the people who shared the Silence were not of one mind about what Remembrance meant." Tales of Two Poppies

Via the very same politicians and officials who laid wreaths at the Cenotaph today, our taxes are used to actively market and sell arms to Indonesia, to Saudi Arabia, to countless despotic regimes which quite openly use them to oppress whole populations, as well as to more "respectable" democracies which might only use them for things like invading Iraq or preventing Palestinians from picking olives.

War cannot happen without funding, and a staggering amount of our money goes to funding the manufacture and distribution of weapons of war. As well as your taxes, if you have a pension then the likelihood is that you personally have your own money invested in war-related industries. Any other investments you have are also likely to be used in this way too, unless you make a personal effort to ensure your money is ethically invested. Last year my housing co-op added a requirement for ethical investment to our financial policy, so that our current account, contingency funds and high-interest account savings are not busy putting guns in people's hands while we're not looking.

There is a campaign for a peace tax to enable taxpayers to conscientiously object to having their taxes spent on war, and in the meantime I know many people who live simply and cheaply, deliberately falling below the tax threshold altogether as the only legal way to avoid paying for bullets.

This form of financial conscientious objection is easy. Far more courageous are those who resist conscription or leave the armed forces, especially as doing so can often be extremely dangerous. Franz Jagerstatter, for example, was beheaded for refusing to fight in Hitler's army, and in many places today objection carries a straightforward prison or death sentence, conscientious or otherwise. Still some people have the courage to choose this rather than participate in war.

Provision still exists in UK law for members of the armed forces to gain the status of conscientious objectors, i.e. to declare that they are unable to carry out their duties because they have ethical objections to doing so. However, they are not told about this provision and it is made very difficult - if you know anyone currently serving then please make sure they know about At Ease. Even if they are never likely to use these services, they have a fundamental right to the information and will not be given it by their employer.

CCCO is a bigger American organisation along the same lines, which I first encountered resisting the presence of the armed forces in American schools. British schools are also targeted by military recruiters, as are colleges, universities and youth clubs. I tear up and throw away any recruitment materials I find, and often have interesting conversations with young people considering joining up. They are recruited before the kind of age at which people often begin to take any real interest in current affairs, and although they may have considered the possibility of dying in action, the idea of giving their lives for the government or for oil rather than for "the country" sometimes sheds a different light on matters.

War is an odd concept. Murder, torture, rape - all kinds of horrors, seen in the context of war, become submerged in the bigger identity of a wider struggle on which people have opinions based on other elements of that identity. Fundamentally, war is simply a series of human rights abuses, and each murder, each incidence of rape or torture is no less significant for being part of a bigger picture. Amnesty International supports conscientious objectors as well as many other prisoners of conscience. As small a thing as writing a letter can give brave people the support and help they deserve. They too make sacrifices for us, they too guard our freedom. So let ritual not become a substitute for action.

Lest we choose to forget.

COMMENTS

Remembrance Day

2007-11-10T01:40:00.000Z

I'll be wearing a white poppy tomorrow, in remembrance of the bravery of war-resisters and conscientious objectors as well as civilians, children and soldiers killed in the name of war. Such a small word to stand for so much murder.

A prize for the first person shown on TV wearing one, and although I'll be keeping the two minutes silence I'll be doing it without uniforms, flags, marching or royalty. Glorifying militarism seems an inappropriate thing to do on such a day.

"I Was a Rat!" by Philip Pullman

2007-10-28T20:10:00.000Z

Another Philip Pullman book, this time aimed at kids but just as entertaining as an adult as it would be for a child. Little Roger was turned into a boy, and despite his best efforts to integrate, the whole mad adult world is turned against him by their own ignorance and the gutter press. It's hilariously literal and doesn't condescend at all, and the whole concept of tabloid newspapers is explained entirely accurately for children in just a few very funny pages.

Any fluent child reader should be able to manage this on their own since most of the difficult words are easily deduced by their context, although many like "malevolent", "furtive" and "squalor" would be worth the effort of looking them up, and you're obviously not really expected to know what "anthropoid" means anyway.

I remember in third year that my primary school ran out of books that I would read, since their libraries were arranged according to reading level, and could only get a purple sticker if they consistently avoided big words but contained the requisite number of purple-level words. Someone must have had to count them. This resulted in shelf upon shelf of books with consistent vocabulary, rather than anything with a plot and a sense of humour which might have motivated any of us to pick them up in the first place.

"I Was a Rat" probably wouldn't get a purple sticker because "malevolent" almost certainly wasn't on the purple list, but even an "orange" reader would get enough of the plot to get hooked, and if it's too much work it'd be just as much fun for an adult as a child to read aloud, although make sure you're sitting close enough to see the illustrations.

"The Shadow in the North" and "The Tiger in the Well" by Philip Pullman

2007-10-27T23:11:00.000Z

Damn, damn, DAMN!!

I've finished another Philip Pullman book. He shouldn't be allowed to put back covers on them, it's such agony to get to the end. There should be a helpline number in the back before the ads for other books.

I didn't realise until I got to the end of "The Tiger in the Well" that it's the third part of a trilogy, which I'm reading backwards now because a friend has lent me the second book "The Shadow in the North". I've just finished that too, so I'm going to have to go out tomorrow like some desperate junky to find a bookshop selling "The Ruby in the Smoke" before the withdrawal gets too bad and I start burgling houses that might have a copy. I cannot get enough Philip Pullman.

It didn't spoil much to have read the third book before the second because I'd forgotten until a few pages beforehand about the untimely death of one of the characters, although knowing it was coming those few pages earlier did then mean spending a little longer in the grip of unbelievable nail-biting stomach-churning bloody tension. People who think of reading as a relaxing activity are not reading the right books.

The plots have me skipping compulsively down the pages, but I have to read every line properly to catch all the subtle expressions, tiny clues, and the beautiful, horrible, detailed and often smelly descriptions of Victorian London streets and houses which give as much character to the places as the people. I found when I was reading"His Dark Materials" that I constantly felt cold, and for the last few days I've been unusually sensitive to bad smells after reading descriptions, for instance, of a forgotten river flowing under London carrying effluent from the pits full of bodies of plague victims.

It's intelligent, riveting and utterly vivid. If you've never read this then go out and get it right now. You might want to fill a Thermos flask so you don't have to stop for tea breaks.

Farting Fish

2007-10-20T23:41:00.000Z

When I was eleven I desperately wanted a dog for christmas, but since my mum didn’t want to spend the next fifteen years traipsing around the park with it every few hours she said no. I offered to settle for a cat instead – a good few years had elapsed since our last cat had run away and I thought my mum had probably forgotten by then. She hadn’t. I tried for a hamster or something, but my mum also remembered the gerbils that had died just because we’d gone away on holiday and left them, so a few weeks before christmas I’d downgraded again to goldfish, which I also wasn’t going to get.

We went to some kind of grown-up house party, and as well as being told I’d grown and being forced to say something about what I’d been doing at school (hiding, mostly), I was asked what I wanted for christmas. Before my mum had time to roll her eyes, the other grown-ups realised they’d found something to talk about with a shy eleven-year-old, and whisked me outside to see the goldfish in their garden pond which had just had little baby goldfish…

We went home with six of them flapping around in a bag of pond water, and I kept goldfish for the next seventeen years.

They’re not the same ones now, although goldfish can live much longer than they’re usually allowed to – they have their reputation for dying only because so many people stick them in a stupid bowl, feed them too much, and say within their hearing that they’re probably going to die in a couple of days. They actually need oxygen and friendly bacteria too, but once that’s sorted out they’re happy and hassle-free for months on end, and don’t even leave hair on the carpet.

Just occasionally they need some help though. Today one of mine has been hanging uncomfortably from the surface of the water most of the time, and after watching it for a while I saw it fart, which I can’t imagine the other fish were very impressed by. It looks a bit bloated too, and has probably eaten far too much of the new plants I’ve just put in, the greedy little blighter.

There will be a small white bottle called “Fartozine” or “Aquafart” at the back of Pet City (fantastic shop) which cures gastro-intestinal bloating in freshwater fish but kills invertebrates and all the friendly bacteria in the tank. It probably costs five or six quid, has a 50% success rate, is made by some big pharmaceutical company or other and is flown around the world a couple of times just for fun before it reaches me. I’ve used stuff like that before because if a fish is seriously ill then I just want it to get better, but if I had wind myself I’d just eat something else to sort it out, and I don’t see why a goldfish can’t do the same.

I’ve been growing tee tree plants in my flat, and the last couple of times a goldfish has had a fungal infection or scratched itself on a rock I’ve put a couple of leaves in the water and it healed up in no time – curiously without killing off all the filtration bacteria, even though tee tree is anti-bacterial. My books say that mint and chamomile both help digestion and wind colic, so I’ve made the fish a nice cup of chamomile tea and chucked it in the tank with a mint leaf. The sick one actually looks better after about three hours, and now none of them should suffer from insomnia or painful menstruation either, according to the book.

So now it’s feeling better it’s started munching all the plants again. I can HEAR you all remarking on their three second memory span, stoppit! It’s not even true. Their short-term memory is supposed to be about SEVEN seconds, but they have a long-term memory too, and very good eyesight. They can recognise the person who feeds them, and can even be taught to do simple tricks, you just have to repeat things often enough to get it into their long-term memory.

I wonder if I could teach this one to make itself a cup of chamomile tea?

Number 1 Green Blogger!

2007-10-17T18:10:00.001Z

Oh wow, look - I’m apparently Number One Green UK Blogger!

Jim Jay of The Daily (Maybe) has done the chapter on "The State of Green Blogging" for the Guide to Political Blogging by Ian Dale. He’s included a list of the top 20 green blogs, and there at the top of that list with a number 1 next to it is THIS BLOG!

I’m a bit stunned really, I didn’t realise that anyone actually read it apart from people searching for “Are tea bags compostable?” on Google. Lots of people are obsessed with compost. Anyway, now you can vote for the "people's choice" blog out of the top 20 list, so if you'd like to further boost both my ego and my astonishment then you can vote here.

New Things

2007-10-13T23:42:00.000Z

Not many actual posts here recently, but I have been adding links so maybe now is a good time to point you at some cool and groovy things I’ve found.

Melanie’s Bean Sprouts blog is the latest addition to my blogroll since it’s more or less what my own blog would be like if it were better. Stephen Fry has also started a blog, with very long essays that I find a bit hard to read on a computer screen but which are so far typically chatty and intelligent.

I haven’t done many posts about my penchant for sick/weird stuff here, but at the risk of freaking some people out a bit I really like the Deviant’s Dictionary for its frank and informative explanations of unusual sexual practices. If that doesn’t give you any new ideas then try How Can I Recycle This? For some further interesting alternative uses for household objects…

A new addition to my “Fun and Pointless” links is Clones and Posessed Children, a sick and weird online cartoon book by an artist I wish I could find more from. If you like children more philosophical and with less blood then Calvin and Hobbes is subversive and cute at the same time, and I totally identify with the way Calvin’s imagined and real worlds overlap so seamlessly. Talking tigers rather than talking rabbits, but much the same “only child” thing going on there I think.

Feel free to suggest more, there’s plenty of room in the side bar yet and I’ll add any I particularly like to help you all kick your terrible Facebook addictions.

Kirsty is “looking forward to going out tomorrow night!” apparently.

Bastards

2007-10-07T00:30:00.000Z

We’ve been vandalised again.

All my neighbour’s apples were taken, from two three-year-old trees that had their first good crop this year which was almost ready to harvest. Her pumpkins were all taken, her peppers and chillis were thrown around the place, my pond was trampled and a couple of apples and a pumpkin thrown in it.

But what’s really weird and disturbing this time is that our bathroom sink has been un-plumbed and removed, as has the toilet cistern and one of the taps a couple of plots away. We hear there are gangs going around nicking stuff like that for the value of the copper in the pipes, which is apparently worth more than all the tools which were left in the shed and the bolt cutter that they left at the scene. Bizzare.

Free Burma

2007-10-04T00:48:00.000Z

Burma Solidarity Action

2007-10-03T21:07:00.000Z

From Leeds-Bradford Indymedia:

Around 30 activists blockaded a Total petrol station to protest against the company's heavy involvement with the military junta in Burma which is responsible for the deaths of several protesters in just the last few days.

Total is in a joint venture with the Burmese dictatorship in the Yadana gas project, which earns the regime hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Aung Sun Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader of the Burmese government under house arrest, says: “Total has become the main supporter of the military regime”. Read more here.

Recycling a Fish Tank

2007-09-15T22:24:00.000Z

I’ve had a four foot fish tank lurking in my kitchen for a couple of years now. There must be a lot of energy involved in making a fish tank, from the manufacture of the glass and the glue to the transport involved in getting it all from source to manufacturer to retailer to my flat, so I didn’t want to just throw it away without first applying “The Four Rs” as best I could.

The Four Rs are principles to put into practice as often as possible to avoid creating unnecessary waste, and they stand (depending on who you ask) for Reduce, Repair, Reuse and Recycle. Applying these principles to a large fish tank is proving pretty difficult, especially as I try to organise its final transport to fish tank heaven in a responsible way.

The tank was first given to me when I moved house a few years ago, and had been hanging around in the garden of someone else with an obsessive reluctance to throw away this kind of junk. It was already leaky when it came into my possession, but such a great new home for my goldfish was well worth the price of some tank glue and a couple of hours work learning to seal it. Its first year or so spent with me involved three of the “Rs”; reducing the need for a new one, repairing it and re-using it, and it was just the job both for housing the fish and for impressing friends and visitors with the “fixed it myself” factor.

And then…

At 3am one day my downstairs neighbour woke me up to alert me to several gallons of water coming through his ceiling from my flat above. My sealing job had lasted about a year and a half, but one corner had eventually given out and created a huge lake where my living room had been. Not about to either fix it at 3am or risk it flooding my very-nice-about-it neighbours a second time, I gave up and bought a brand new replacement as soon as the pet shop opened in the morning.

Once empty the old tank looked remarkably unbroken, so I promptly filled it with chives, basil, coriander and a few tender garden casualties to make a nice warm greenhouse in my kitchen, ingeniously re-using it to pamper tender plants for years to come. The plants hated it.

I spoke to someone at a hydroponics shop who concluded that a lack of light – despite the aquarium bulb I’d fitted – was probably causing the problems. Running more lighting would have been a complete waste of energy given the huge amount of natural light elsewhere in my flat, and the tank also grew mould all over the place because of the lack of airflow. The use I had found for my redundant tank appeared to be far better served by something I had already, i.e. a windowsill which came free of charge with the flat.

After a few more ideas failed to make it off the drawing board (Outdoor greenhouse – would crack with frost. Storage potential limited by shape and fragility. Model of Orac from Blake’s 7 – too long, etc.) I advertised it on Freecycle, a website where people give away unwanted things to other people who do want them. The first time no-one wanted it at all, and the second time although someone did reply, they then changed their mind about making it into a mini-greenhouse, possibly having foreseen some of the problems I’d had and probably also already in possession of their own windowsill.

Stockpiling onions, potatoes, jam and dried herbs this autumn I’m clearing space to put up shelves in the kitchen and have at last decided to try applying the final “R”. I dragged the tank down the stairs into the front garden by means impossible to describe without the aid of a cartoon sketch or two, and although by some miracle it didn’t slide down the staircase and shatter, it did get a very nasty crack through one side and now looks all dejected and out of place on the lawn.

Glass can of course be recycled, and the nearest bottle bank is all of a three minute walk downhill from here. It may take me a little longer than three minutes though, given that the tank is too heavy to lift and I can only drag it along a foot or so at a time. In Holland they probably just phone the council and ask them to take it for recycling from their doorstep, but since Leeds hasn’t quite caught up on this front yet my best plan so far is to take a hammer to it in the garden and break it up into pieces small enough to fit through the opening of the bottle bank.

I assume that the recycling process will remove the blood.

COMMENTS

Very Scary Slug Incident

2007-09-14T23:09:00.000Z

Stop reading this for a minute and go and look at Hedgewizard's blog right now - quick! It's very much funnier than anything here.

September 11th 1973

2007-09-12T21:06:00.000Z

Lots of people put 9/11 remembrance posts on their blogs yesterday, and although I've missed the 11th, I wanted to do my own here.

What happened to the twin towers was horrific, and by posting this I don't mean to justify it in any way. But 11th September is the anniversary of other atrocities too, including one that's less well known and more personally relevant to me.

This is a short documentary about the significance of September 11th 1973.

Que no nos olvidemos.

Talking Rabbits

2007-09-06T21:53:00.000Z

Thanks Mousie for pointing me at the Book Quiz, which somehow picked up on my troublesome talking rabbit problem. How on earth did it know about that? Quite uncanny.

You're Watership Down!

by Richard Adams

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you're
actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their
assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they
build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You'd
be recognized as such if you weren't always talking about talking rabbits.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Houdini

2007-09-05T15:15:00.000Z

This is my mate Dave getting himself de-arrested in Ireland - nice one Dave!

And this is why - nice one again Dave! Love to everyone trying to send Shell to sea.

Housing Co-Operatives

2007-08-30T17:43:00.000Z

I haven’t talked about my housing co-op here yet, and I’d meant to. Partly it’s complicated to explain to outsiders and partly I’m too busy doing it to talk about it, but it deserves a mention because living here shapes so much of the rest of my life.

The idea is something like this. The co-operative is a bit like a housing association, a company which owns houses and flats and rents them out to people who need them. Everyone who lives in a co-op property buys a share for £1 when they move in, which gives them an equal share of the business that owns the properties. We all help to do the work involved in owning and managing the properties, and we make decisions democratically between all the tenant-shareholders.

There are much better and more detailed explanations of this structure elsewhere, so if this doesn’t make sense then try the Confederation of Co-operative Housing info. The most important aspects of living in one, for me, are that my rent is cheap enough to allow me to only work part-time, and that because my neighbours all regularly meet up to do the work and socialise I’m part of this amazing little community – how many people in cheap urban housing can still say they know almost everyone on their street? Not to mention actually liking most of them.

Real communities are complicated though, and so is running a business. My contribution to the workload for the last few weeks has been re-writing our primary rules, which lay out the basic structure of our co-op and explain procedure for things like conducting meetings, getting ourselves audited and getting the work done.

Because we all contribute to decision-making here, we all need to understand the rules so we’re clear about what we can and can’t do. They also need to be legally watertight, and the version we’ve been working with up to now is virtually unreadable and unfit for either purpose:

“Rule 29

The instrument appointing a proxy shall be in writing under the hand of the appointer or of his/her attourney duly authorised in writing and shall be deposited at the registered office of the Association not less than two clear days before the day fixed for holding the meeting at which the person named in such instrument is authorised to vote, and in default the instrument of proxy shall not be treated as valid.”

It goes on. There are EIGHTY separate rules, some with not only a)s and b)s but also i)s and ii)s. I keep having to turn the Grammar-checker off because whole pages are underlined in green and marked “Long sentence”, and over the years we’ve spent a considerable amount of money asking solicitors to tell us what some of the longest sentences actually refer to. So, it’s going in the bin.

This weekend we all meet up to discuss the new rules and see if anyone can spot any problems with what I’ve come up with so far. Next week we’ll send it all off to the Housing Corporation for approval, and the weekend after that we’re having a big party to celebrate thirty years since this place first began.

It’s been a slog going through pages of legal-speak, trying to think of every possible future scenario that we need to cover and explaining it in English so everyone can decide what they think of it. The regulators have been breathing down our necks for a long time and can’t work out how we’ve kept things going for thirty years without everyone losing interest altogether. But a day catching up with everyone around a big bonfire, sharing the history of the place and the people and having a good old gossip is motivation enough. The only instruments around next weekend will be musical ones, and that’s the bit the regulators don’t understand.

What I Did On My Holidays

2007-08-24T19:41:00.000Z

Thought I'd share my fondest memories of the fantastic Climate Camp at Heathrow last weekend, partly as an excuse to throw in loads of links which also help explain why I went. In no particular order...

Two kids amusing themselves on the Rinky-Dink one afternoon at the camp by singing "Jingle Fucking Bells". With gusto.

People in the Yorkshire barrio* playing with a chess set they'd carved out of carrots.

Running from the campsite towards BAA offices through a huge field of shoulder-high dead broad bean plants, being chased by screaming riot and mounted police and wearing a summary of the Tyndall Report strapped to my hand.

Blockading BAA with a big fluffy white rabbit called Eliot, who was very happy to be there and got fed carrots by the people in "Grow Your Own" vegetable costumes. Watching people spotting him for the first time who naturally assumed they were hallucinating due to lack of sleep.

A very straight-faced policeman attending the open meeting at the blockade, and answering his mobile phone by saying in a Very Important voice "I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK, I'M IN A MEETING!"

Theo from Seize the Day singing the policeman song on the Rinky-Dink. It's about a policeman who decides to join the 365 blockade of the nuclear submarine base there, and as far as I can find out it hasn't been recorded yet. I promise you it's worth going to Faslane on October 1st just to hear him sing it to the police there.

Someone I think was called Cosmo doing Paul Allen's "The Mosh Song" on Monday night in the main marquee - much better than Paul Allen himself did it. Also Duncan, who I can't find a link for, singing "James Bond is an Upper Class Copper" and "Drugs vs Sport". Brilliant.

Going to the toilet, drunk, at about 2am on the last night and finding... a clean toilet seat and plenty of clean dry toilet roll! The whole thing was so well organised that I'm going to have to give up making cynical remarks about organising piss-ups in breweries by consensus. Eventually.

* A barrio is a "neighbourhood", usually involving a marquee with a kitchen and space to meet and sit around. Camps are organised into barrios so that people from similar parts of the country can meet, eat and work together.

Climate Camp

2007-08-19T12:04:00.000Z

So here I am at the lovely Climate Camp!

I put my stuff down in a marquee and walked straight into a tactics workshop consisting of several hundred people practicing dealing with police lines as Jedi Warriors and Storm Troopers. Very amusing, especially watching the pretend police get carried away with giving each other orders and shouting "BACK!", and the (for the time being) pretend protesters reacting almost primally to a line of hi-vis jackets, cheering when they managed to elbow and shove the pretend police around and break through their lines.

How useful any of it will be tomorrow I have my doubts, but it did give me a chance to look for familiar faces, of which there are plenty. I seem to have missed the party night yesterday and tonight is supposed to be a quiet night so
we can all get some rest, and concentrate properly on training about how to make quick decisions by consensus in affinity groups on actions tomorrow. Apparently.

Someone is gently strumming a guitar outside my tent, I'm in thermals in my sleeping bag and have my ear plugs in. If we get evicted in the middle of the night then hopefully I'll just sleep through it.

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Going to Climate Camp

2007-08-18T10:06:00.000Z

The cat's got her legs on the wrong way round this morning. She is actually fast asleep in this position!

I'm off to the climate camp today, and I might try posting a blog or two from there. See you there if you're going...

"Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt

2007-08-16T20:40:00.000Z

The story of Frankie McCourt's relentlessly awful childhood, told with both a lively, distinctively Irish sense of humour, and an authentic sounding child's voice and point of view. Both very dark and highly entertaining - read it in private so you can laugh out loud without caring about looking silly.

Cover photo etc

Don't go looking on Amazon - support independent booksellers!

Big Green Gathering

2007-08-09T20:52:00.000Z

Just back from the Big Green which was actually sunny – hooray! Very hot, in fact. Much indulgence in such activities as sitting on the grass, wearing dresses, going barefoot all day and eating ice cream, and about time too. I’d almost forgotten how hard it is to sleep in a tent in the sun though - more tent adaptations on the way…

I tried to stay away from all the gadget shops in case I ended up buying a solar powered twirly thing, which is the non-green alternative to doing without a twirly thing altogether, but I did find myself in a shop with house-related gadgets and had a chat about the Thermoflow which I think I might test out. It’s basically a magnet that you attach with cable ties to the outside of the supply pipe of a domestic boiler, and is supposed to save between 5 and 20% of the fuel because when all the ions in the gas are pointing the same way it gets used more efficiently. Sounds plausible, I think. As soon as I can think of a way of testing it I think I’m going to get one, pending the opinion of my plumber friends who are not trying to sell me one.

Topping all the other gadgets by quite a long way was the cycle-powered washing machine, which I can’t believe I’ve never seen before. Bike wheels go round, washing machine drums go round, it’s obvious, isn’t it? The water wasn’t heated, so if I made my own I’d probably put the water tank on one side with a mini-rocket stove under it made out of veg oil cans, but it did the trick with the small load I used it for.

I also got my very own gadget made in the crafts field. Loads of the food stalls give you wooden forks, but they’re pretty horrible to eat with so I got myself a small metal one for 40p at one of the tat shops. I kept finding myself trying to cut up potato skins etc with the edge of the fork, so I got someone with a cycle-powered grinding wheel to grind the edge down into a blade for me and I now have the ultimate bit of camping cutlery.

Also inspired by things I saw there, the next wacky structure to appear on my allotment will probably be a geodesic dome. I had a good look at one that had been put together with cable ties, and talked to the guy who made it about which were the long and the short pieces, which of course I can’t now remember. The trick is to have an 11% difference in length between them, apparently. I think I’ll make a model out of construction straws first.

So many projects, so little time…

Tents

2007-07-30T23:30:00.000Z

I just can’t get enough of muddy fields in Somerset, so I’m off to the Big Green Gathering tomorrow in a partly home-made tent.

What is it with tents? Folding poles and water resistant fabrics were invented quite a while ago now, surely it’s not that difficult to design something that basically works. It seems unlikely that people design tents who have never actually camped, but when I thought about getting a new one and saw the way some of them are made I started imagining them improvising budget versions of the product testing machines on those Ikea adverts. Everyone in the office stands in a row and blows on it at the same time: it’s windproof. Stick it under the water cooler: it’s waterproof.

It’s perfectly obvious, for example, that having to construct the inner first is going to get everything very wet when it’s raining, so why does anyone still design them with poles on the inside? And why oh why does my current tent have an outer door flap that overhangs the bloody inside bit?

After opening the door and watching it direct the rain exactly onto the end of my sleeping bag for about the hundredth time at Glastonbury, I recently bought a whole new tent from Cybercheckout.com, to more or less the same design but with a proper porch over the door.

“This tent is fully waterproof to 2000mm hydro static head (the recommended use for the UK is only 1500)” it said. “Abrasion, mildew and ultraviolet resistant” it said. “Fly sheet – 70 Denier Polyester (190T Threads per square inch)” . Very nice. Cut to me lying in said tent in a muddy field, a very long way from the nearest central heating, curled around the edge with a plastic bag in the middle to catch the steady drips running straight into the tent from the ventilation mesh right in the top.

So I’m back in the old tent again this week and will appreciate anew all the other things about it which are not shit. It doesn’t actually leak. It has loops for the pegs that can indeed be attached to the ground with pegs. The poles go in keepers that they fit in rather than on stupid pins that pull them too tight, and it now has a custom-built, rain-deflecting, transparent U.V. stabilised plastic porch. Oh yes.

No photos yet because I’ve neurotically packed it three times already, but if it works then I think I’ll patent it. If it doesn’t then sod it, I am definitely going to get a yurt and that’s that. With a wood burning stove and a horse to carry it for me.

"Saturday" by Ian McEwan

2007-07-20T20:54:00.000Z

The style and especially descriptions of music are good, but I'm still not sure what the point is supposed to be. What does any of it have to do with the anti-war march in the end? Why don't any of the characters actually go on the march? What's the purpose of having something so massive as a backdrop if you're not going to use it? Puzzling indeed.

Bastards bastards bastards...

2007-07-09T21:39:00.000Z

...bastards bastards bastards bastards.

My allotment has been vandalised. The greenhouse tipi that used to look like this

Now looks like this with several bricks and a saw bench inside it

The bender greenhouse now has ventilation

The shed has been relocated to the middle of a flower bed and repositioned on its side, leaving the green roof in a pile on top of some strawberries

And I will never again be able to safely stick my fingers into my soil because it’s all completely covered with tiny shards of glass. There is also a layer of large and medium sized shards of glass which I spent two hours today picking up without seeming to make much difference. There are at least three whole greenhouses in there in little bits, which at least might set the slugs back a bit.

This is quite pretty though

Sign a Petition!

2007-07-05T21:31:00.000Z

Got a message today about allotments in Guilford which are about to be built on. The message is copied below, and at this stage a petition is likely to be actually, practically useful. It's a legit "10 Downing Street" petition which asks for your name, e-mail and address, but this is only to verify that you're a real person and the only mail you'll get is notification of a government response if they issue one. Doesn't even involve getting cold and wet!

"We have been campaigning for many months to get our local council (Guildford Borough Council) to cancel housing plans on our local Allotment Site.

2 acres of woodland (some of it really ancient) and wildlife habitat are threatened by housing and being concreted over.

Oue message is that the part of Guildford where we live is already over-developed with Housing and we badly need to keep areas of open space to prevent our area becoming a concrete jungle.

And there are vast areas of brownfield land elsewhere in the town to build houses .. support us by signing our online petition today.

When you sign it you have to give your name and address but this will be kept confidential, all that visitors to the Petitions website can see is your name.

The address is: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/allotmentsgfd

If you are keen on preserving the Environment, or saving Open Spaces, saving Wildflife habitats - or even Allotment Gardening - then take a look at our Allotment Self-Help Group's website and you'll see the site & read about the open space & everything we're fighting for. You can find it at:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/washa

Please do pass this message on to your friends and Allotment colleagues - we need all the help we can get.

Many thanks

David Bird
Allotment Buff & Petition Organiser"

Dream Last Night

2007-07-03T22:30:00.000Z

Young soldiers going home. They arrived months ago in a 52 seater coach, and I'm watching as they all get back into the same seats for the long trip back. 52 out, 52 home.

Most of them look shell shocked, many are being carried onto the coach, but it's not until I see someone carrying a man over his shoulder down the aisle that I realise they're putting the dead ones back into their seats too, still in full uniform and propped up as best they can in their seats next to the living.

I start staring through the coach windows trying to work out which expressions are frozen in death and which in horror.

Where the hell did that come from??

Glastonbury 2007

2007-06-27T22:06:00.000Z

Just got back from Glastonbury Festival. The lights, the mud, the music, the tipis, the mud, the fires, the drums, the freaky circus people, the mud...

If only real life were like that.

Will write some more when I'm cleaner.

"A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" by Marina Lewycka

2007-06-17T20:59:00.000Z

Fun story about a completely mad family. The impressive thing was that I found all the characters and much of the dialogue believable. They're mad in a particularly Eastern European way, and if you have any mad and/or Eastern European family then you'll probably recognise them.

Don't go looking on Amazon - use independent booksellers!

Blake's 7

2007-06-16T20:51:00.000Z

For a long time I've been telling highly skeptical friends that even if they don't like sci-fi they'll like Blake's 7. It's got complex characters, moral dilemmas, cunning plot twists and political themes, and although the fourth series is distinctly patchy (especially when they all start kissing - yuck!) it's well worth persevering with. I saw the final episode a few days ago and I'm still in shock.

Did Blake betray them all? Or did Avon betray Blake? Will the resistance continue or does the Federation win? I need to watch it again, and if you've never seen it then so do you. Even if you think you're too cool for science fiction.

Pickled Slug Deli Bar

2007-06-12T22:02:00.000Z

Someone or something has pulled all the beer traps out of the ground and emptied them. I've met quite a few dogs who like beer so I think I'm going to blame the fox, who is probably right now telling all its mates about the nice new pickled slug deli just opened round the corner. It's some consolation that four cans of Double Dutch must have given it a pretty bad hangover, but I am a bit stumped for fox-proof beer trap designs. Maybe I should just make a very big one to catch the fox in?

I've also got a resident mouse which keeps making big holes in my no-dig bed and knocking all the onions over, but before I got too annoyed about that I noticed that the tadpoles are very fat now, they've all got big froggy eyes and a couple of them have even got tiny little back legs! First one to walk is going to be called Ralph. And is probably going to be eaten by a pissed fox.

Slug Blog

2007-06-03T21:44:00.000Z

It’s not fair! I’m right at the top of the food chain, I’ve got a spine and opposable thumbs and everything, and yet I still have to compete for my food with bloody SLUGS! I’ve just lost a second lot of courgette plants and something has got to be done.

I saw a friend’s lovely new veg patch and beer traps last weekend. I think I’ve tried beer traps before, but I seem to remember going about it a bit half-heartedly because I didn’t really expect it to work. Nothing really seems to work against slugs. Still, I was in the mood to see at least a few of the little bastards die so I thought I’d try it again.

Burying the pots was a bit of a faff, but not quite as difficult as finding a non-Muslim shop that would sell me lager around here - I ended up going all the way to Sainsbury’s and then spent ages persuading them to give me some Carling for 50p because the cans were so badly dented. By this time I was really starting to resent having to get the beer in for the slugs when they’ve already had at least ten marigolds, eight courgette plants, three broad bean plants, a dozen sunflowers and quite a few strawberries. I think my previous attempt at making beer traps might have ended with me just drinking all the beer at about this point, which probably at least made me feel better about all the slug eaten plants for a while.

However.

I persevered this time and I can’t believe it - they really do all obligingly drown themselves! Some of the pots were full to the brim with dead slugs the next day, and I actually had to empty them out to make room for any more.

I then started working out how much it would cost me to buy six cans of lager every time I went to the allotment and decided that it would be a good idea to sieve all the slugs out and re-use the beer instead. This bit is disgusting and if you’re eating then you shouldn’t scroll any further down the page…

Yuck. In a satisfying sort of way. I wonder whether they like elderflower champagne?

Technical Problems...

2007-06-02T23:07:00.000Z

For some reason I can't load Blogger pages at the moment - after about an hour I managed to get as far as "Help", and after another hour I found a way of sending someone a message about it, but this is the first time in ages that I've been able to write a post.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Pictures won't load either. The picture I was going to use is here.

Accidental Art

2007-06-02T21:51:00.000Z

Came home from work for lunch. Put an egg on to boil. Forgot about it and went back to work. Returned home four and a half hours later. Pretty, isn’t it?

Any idea how to get rid of the SMELL??

"Vida" by Marge Piercy

2007-06-01T21:02:00.000Z

Most fiction about activists makes me cringe, but Piercy's characters here are naive only because it's the 1970s, and she avoids reducing any of them to caricatures. The personal and the political are not just juxtaposed to prove a point but are completely interwoven, and give someone my age a much-needed insight into the roots of feminism and sexual politics. It also keeps you guessing until the end, which gives any book that essential compulsive quality. Seems to be out of print, but there are plenty of copies on Abebooks.

"Complicity" by Iain Banks

2007-05-26T21:05:00.000Z

Truly disgusting, utterly sick, very scary - loved it! Banks describes it as "a bit like The Wasp Factory except without the happy ending and redeeming air of cheerfulness". Had to put it down a few times to breathe and uncurl my toes...

Don't go looking on Amazon - support independent booksellers!

Composting Tea Bags

2007-05-24T18:33:00.000Z

I’m sure I’ve always composted tea bags, long before I ever composted anything else. In one house I used to just chuck them out in the garden straight from the kitchen window, since they don’t smell as they break down and apparently some plants like a bit of caffeine. I drink a lot of tea and I’ve never thought twice about composting the bags – it seems obvious, and I’ve been doing it so long I can’t remember where I first got the idea.

I’ve just used the last of this year’s compost on my seedlings, and emptying the bin this year I’ve had unpleasant surprises*. Pulling out odd pieces of plastic and woody bits I kept finding fluffy white fibrous stuff stuck in there, like duvet filling in small patches stuck fast to and tangled up with everything else. I pulled one out after another but they kept appearing, so I looked at different parts of the pile and found them spread out through the whole heap. Even the blackest, crumbliest parts had these stupid blobs in them, either solid little black lumps in stringy white** mesh bags, or stringy white mesh bags full of worms.

I’ve had several thousand cups of tea since I last emptied the compost bin and I’ve put every single used tea bag into the damned thing, and now every single one is sitting there waiting for me to take it out before I can use a year’s worth of compost. Since when are teabags not made of PAPER???

It’s dead fashionable to compost these days – even the Guardian is explaining how to do it – so there are millions of sites, books, factsheets and community projects out there to tell anyone who’ll listen how to put things in a pile and leave it alone for a while. After trawling through a few of them and rolling my eyes quite a lot (Q: My compost bin is full of pests! After only two weeks it’s all full of horrible woodlice and millipedes – what did I do wrong?) I finally submitted a question to WRAP.

After a long time, I got this back:

“The answer is that not enough companies specify their tea bag materials, which can be plastic or paper based. So, two batches of tea bags from the same tea company may have used different materials. You will need to contact the tea bag company I am afraid.”

Right. They get together a big organisation for “supporting compost producers and growing markets for compost products”, but encouraging tea bag producers to create something I can put IN my compost is left to me the individual. Thanks a lot.

I did give up at this point, but then another hour pulling all the little white mesh bags full of worms out of my compost spurred me on again to find a contact e-mail for “the tea bag company” and ask them. I got this reply:

“Thank you for your email and your comments. I would like to confirm to you that our Teadirect teabags are made from polyester which is fairly typical for all teabags as far as I am aware. Yes you are right, unfortunately they are non-recyclable and non-biodegradable.. The best method for disposal is to burn for heat recovery. I would be very grateful of any feedback you have with regards to any alternative teabags that you have come across which I would gladly pass onto our marketing department for their consideration as we are continually carry out research to find more environmentally friendly products. I look forward to hearing from you.”

How many tea bags would I have to burn to boil a kettle then?

Strangely enough, when they’re dry they do burn remarkably well, which leaves me with no way of telling which tea bags are still made from paper, since the usual test for man-made fibres is that they melt slightly (or a lot) when you burn them.

So, the question now is this; should I a) try to make WRAP or maybe the Guardian lifestyle and fashion department compile a list of compostable tea bags, b) ask all the tea bag companies myself which would be more hassle but quicker, or c) get a life, stop composting my tea bags and experiment with using loose-leaf tea, which would probably be more hassle in the end over the course of a lifetime.

Answers on a postcard if you wish, so long as it’s a bloody PAPER postcard.

* The first few were surprising anyway. The next 6000 were just unpleasant.

** Fellow gardeners will appreciate the meaning of “white” in the context of a compost bin compared to the meaning of “white” in, say, a Persil ad.

COMMENTS

My Neighbour's Cat

2007-05-20T12:20:00.000Z

Aaah, isn’t she sweet…

She couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this pot having been knocked over.

I expect the french beans suddenly attacked her, which would explain the big crash I heard and would have been why she was running away from it so fast. Poor thing must have been frightened.

Aaaah…

Spencer is a Genius

2007-04-24T20:06:00.000Z

A friend suggested that I cut a door flap in the bender greenhouse and then open and close it using laces like on a marquee. At last I can visualise a bender greenhouse door solution that might actually work. I've got loads of gaffa tape (never leave home without it) to reinforce the cut edges and could probably lace with the washing line I found with bits of concrete on it - I KNEW that would come in handy for something!

When I learned finger knitting as a child I had no idea that it would actually prove to be a useful skill later in life...

Budget Bender Greenhouse Part 2

2007-04-23T23:30:00.000Z

It looks a bit strange but not ugly, it certainly gets warm inside and it hasn't fallen down yet, but I am now having quite serious bender greenhouse problems.

The first thing I did after stretching plastic over the frame and burying it carefully around the edges was to go on holiday for two weeks, and in a fortnight of high winds the whole thing filled with air like a massive balloon and loosened itself so much that I've had to tie it down with string around the outside. It now looks as though I've netted a giant jellyfish. Trouble is, I can't think of a way of making a decent door for it, so opening and closing it currently still involves folding up the loose plastic around the doorframe and piling half a ton of rocks on it to weigh it down.

The recent hot weather has made me realise I'm going to have to put vent holes in it sooner rather than later, but I'm scared to cut the plastic in the wrong place because it was so expensive, and to top it all a couple of the willow branches I made the frame from have started to grow, which I'm worried will result in big spikey bits making holes exactly where I don't want them.

Arse.

Guns

2007-04-22T14:15:00.000Z

Listening to Radio 4 yesterday I realised that the reason for the huge traffic jam outside my window was that someone had been shot dead in a takeaway a few doors down the road from my house the night before.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/6581435.stm It seems he was killed at about the time I was watching Blake's 7 at a friend's flat next door.

Doesn't seem very long (although having looked it up it's about 18 months) since I last came home to find my house in the middle of a 1/2 mile police cordon, when a man held his former partner hostage in a house on Bayswater Grove and came out to shoot at police cars and put a few bullets through neighbour's windows. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/4344402.stm

I have decided that the next time I see some stupid film ad with guns in it on this street, which I frequently do, I'm going to vandalise it as thoroughly as I can and let them arrest me and listen to my reasons in court. It's just offensive.

Removable Seedling Shelf

2007-04-17T21:22:00.000Z

Casually put some very early seed trays on the windowsill. Fill the remaining space with the first tomatoes, and shove all your lovely ornaments out of the way to fit everything else in. Then knock everything over every five minutes, as the spring gets underway in ernest and there’s not a horizontal space left in the house that doesn’t have some tender seedlings growing on it. Sound familiar?

I have accidentally cooked seedlings that I’d left on the top of the grill, I have carried a six-foot ladder around my flat to water things growing on top of the wardrobes, I have been unable to reach my windows for months at a time because of the precarious arrangements of vegetable racks I’ve used to layer seed trays in front of my windows. I’ve had enough now.

This year I’ve been trying to make better use of the vertical space in my high-celinged flat, and with spring just around the corner I want to double the amount of windowsill space I can grow things on this year. I have a cunning plan.

This is what my living room windows look like

And this is my bedroom window

My plan is to construct a shelf half way up each window where the panes are split. I’m hoping that this won’t block out too much of the natural light coming into the rooms, but for my next trick I’m going to make the shelves completely removable, so that I’m not stuck with a huge window obstruction all year round.

To make the supports as unobtrusive as possible I’m putting in small batons on either side of the frames. Here is me measuring one against the inside of the window frame

I’ll be needing four, two for each set of windows, and a support shelf for the middle of the wider living room window. I sawed the wood for these to the right length in the middle of my living room, on a science lab stool I found behind Leeds University and took home on the bus, topped with an old chopping board that I rescued from a bonfire. Just in case you are having trouble visualising this:

It works a treat.

The next thing to do is to help the fittings (which will not be removable) to blend in, by painting them to match the windows. I used gloss spray paint, but would have used normal gloss paint if I’d had any. I reckon they will get fairly grubby with bits of soil etc spilling on them all the time, so I want to be able to wipe them clean when I take the shelves down.

A couple of thin layers of spray paint is the way to go, it just drips if you try to put too much on at once and thin layers are also less likely to chip off later.

To fix them to the frame I used 40mm screws straight into the wooden window frame. Then I cut the shelves to length on my homemade saw bench and put them in position resting on the batons. This bit actually took some time because after I’d found woodworm in the reclaimed floorboards I was going to use, neither local skips nor Homebase could provide me with suitable wood. Eventually a neighbour gave me some wood left over from her own shelves, thus saving the whole project just in time. Here is the finished product with all my little seedlings waiting for the sun to shine:

And I can of course use the time they take to grow to hoover all the soil and sawdust out of the carpet…

Tadpoles

2007-04-15T21:01:00.000Z

Sorry to have kept you all waiting - no doubt with baited breath - for my next installment here. Excuses include being in Mexico, then being in Somerset, then having a massive list of garden and allotment related things I should have been doing when I was in Mexico and Somerset. Some of this I'd planned to write blogs about, but I've been too busy actually doing it all to maintain a cyber presence at the same time.

I'm now back, everything is planted and watered and I've even got tadpoles in the bathtub on my allotment. Time to sit back and look at it all for a minute, and ask everyone to tell me everything they ever knew about tadpoles...

...for instance, I know you can't move frogs to new ponds and you're supposed to start with frogspawn, but is it ok to move them as tadpoles? The water will be different (I know a bit about that from keeping goldfish in an aquarium) and I think mine will be alright because I've used about half rainwater and half tapwater, to which I added chlorine-neutralising stuff designed to make it safe for fish. The tap water tends to be quite acidic around here though, and I've no idea what PH rainwater is likely to be.

And what do they need to eat? Am I right to think I can feed them goldfish food, and how much/how often should I feed them? What should I feed them when they grow into frogs - I'm hoping they'll eat all my slugs, but should I deliberately plant slug-attracting plants near the pond, or will that just stop them hopping further away to eat the ones that are near my crops? Will they get drunk if I also put slug beer traps down?

Suggestions for names would also be very welcome 'cos I guess I need about fifty. They don't exactly have distinctive personality traits yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Old Inefficient Lightbulbs

2007-03-09T22:43:00.000Z

This is a conversation I had in a forum on My Space. When I'm really bored, I sometimes talk to random Americans who are wondering things like which brand of dishwasher detergent is most eco-friendly and what they can buy to be more "green". Sometimes it gets interesting though, and I thought I'd share this one:

David, Maryland
I have a moral dilemma. These lightbulbs have been in my closet for the past 3 years. They are 75watt bulbs... about 10 of them. Five years ago I spent like $150 outfitting the whole house with new energy efficient bulbs (when they were quite more expensive), which only use 15watts each. What do I do with these old bulbs?! They are perfectly good, but I know I will never in my right mind put them to use.

Vinny, Wisconsin
give them to somebody who will use them.

David, Maryland
I have already thought of that. My problem with that is it defeats the purpose of reducing energy consumption. I feel that it would be like selling my perfectly good gas car to someone, then buying a hybrid car. I am merely passing on the inefficiency to another person. I want it to end with me... I don't want to pass it on. Hmm.... maybe I can bust the glass off from the metal part and put them in their resepctive recycle bins? LIGHT BULB!! I knew it was in me. Thank you for helping me through this thought process... LOL.
Wait a minute... does the recycling process take up more energy than the life of these bulbs? Jeeze... these light bulbs are going to be the end of my sanity!

Give Me Organic, Colorado
David!I'm so glad you posted this problem!I just changed 9 more of these light bulbs in my house yesterday myself, and while I was doing it I was thinking "What the heck am I going to do with all of these!!I'll be checking back to see what ideas people have. I'm with you though, it's like you don't want to give them away because it's like feeding the fire!

Aliya, Texas
There is NO good use for them, that is WHY you replaced them. Dispose of them properly.

VexxingVixxen, Georgia
I have a friend that recently changed religions, and instead of donating all of their books dedicated to the prior "religion" they BURNED them. I was horrified, but they explained it to me by saying that "if they were a reformed drug user, that they wouldn't pass along their used crack pipe to someone else".While a very poetic and noble way of looking at it, it is also very unrealistic.There are still plenty of crack pipes out there, and still plenty of light bulbs. Destroying yours isn't going to make a homeless shelter (or other worthy cause) stop using energy consuming bulbs, they will still buy them. Donate the bulbs and move on. :)

Alice J
Some ideas:

Make art with them, incorporating the paradox and conflict symbolised by the objects themselves into your work of art.

Write to your MP (should that be "congressman" in America? Or "congressperson???) and send them the lightbulbs. Explain your situation and ask that they either give you a logical way of re-using or recycling them, or use their influence to help bring about a ban on less energy-efficient lightbulbs. Might be quite effective if we all did it.

Paint them with glass paint and sell them on Ebay. Charge as much or more than your efficient bulbs cost, so that the buyer will be taxed for wasting the extra energy they'll use, and you will subsidise the purchase of your more expensive efficient bulbs.

Write to the company who made the inefficient bulbs, explain your situation and ask them to dispose of them in a logical way, since they created the problem in the first place. A mass campaign like this would be absolutely brilliant and could work with all kinds of products - let me know if you're up for spreading this idea around a bit!

Wire them up, stand well back, and run a high current through them so they explode. This will at least give you some enjoyment, and you could video it and put it on YouTube with an explanation, as an educational video about saving energy.

Give them to someone with a dimmer switch, as energy-efficient bulbs can't be used with dimmer switches. Of course you should also explain that you'd rather they got rid of the dimmer switch so they too could use energy efficient bulbs....