A million carbon calculators later, here I am

OK - it's time to tackle my own carbon impacts.

Sorry to get your hopes up. I can't actually begin to analyse the dozens of carbon calculators that have popped up all over the internet, but the question is, can I really understand even one of them?

Keen to become a bit more practical about my own carbon footprint, I decided to start with two sources I know of and would rely on: The Energy Saving Trust , and WWF's Counting Consumption Report. EST has a nice calculator that you can personalise and explore its assumptions. Counting Consumption looks at the UK-wide effects of consumption.

My EST carbon footprint is a mixed bag: my total is 7.86 tonnes per year, compared to a national average of 10.23 tonnes. My home energy (heating and cooking) impact is a bit below average and my use of appliances is relatively high, but my transport footprint is less than half the national average.

Is this good news or bad news?

Well, transport-wise it seems to be good news, because I don't drive much and I achieved my low figure despite generously allowing myself one short-haul return flight per year and one long-haul return flight per two years, which is probably a bit more flying than I actually do. Basically, my transport impact is low because I don't commute by car.

I'm a little irked by my appliance footprint, because all my white goods are A-rated, I don't have a TV and I turn appliances off when not using them. I suspect that it's my IT appliances that cause the spike, partly because my lack of commuting means I use computers more at home, and partly because the calculator may assume my household is using all its computing power simultaneously, which it rarely does. Nevertheless, if I am to rely on EST's calculator then appliance usage must be something to look at.

Home energy-wise, the bad news is that the things I can readily do are limited, either by lifestyle or cost. Because I work from home, my heating is often on in the daytime: I've done some work on zoning my heating so that I'm not heating the whole house to the same temperature, but the scope for reducing the heating time is scuppered. I already have double-glazing and a (fairly) modern boiler, so the real energy gains are to be found in increasing the insulation. Since I'm in a solid wall house, that not only means cost but also disruption. I'm still chasing draughts around, and that must always be a priority. The EST calculator tells me that insulation my loft could save me 1 tonne of carbon per year, which would actually reduce my home energy footprint to not much over half the national average. I have an attic room in my loft, so it would mean lining the walls and redecorating, but that just might be do-able this year.

Since appliances seem to be a problem for my household, I'm going to invest in one of those electricity usage monitors and conduct some scientific experiments on how to reduce this aspect of consumption.

So, starting from having a carbon footprint 77% of the national average, if I could wipe one tonne off my heating impacts and maybe save 20% of my appliance impacts (another 500kg) that would mean I'd made an overall 20% reduction in my own carbon footprint and would be running at 62% of national average (unless everyone else made reductions at a similar rate). This would make my household quite a low-carbon one, would it not?

Well, yes and no. For a start, I have identified 20% of savings but baulked at making much in the way of further reductions, so it's doubtful that I'd successfully continue to make carbon cuts. This is particularly relevant when my commuting impacts are minimal, because if my circumstances changed and I founded I needed to start commuting, that could easily wipe out the other gains I've made.

However, if we look at Counting Consumption we learn that in terms of ecological footprint (of which carbon accounts for about half) then our footprint per capita for food is roughly the same as that for our home and energy. So, by some crude extrapolation of the two information sources I've selected (to avoid delving into the many sources of more accurate information we could look at), we could estimate that my household's food-related carbon impact is about 4 tonnes of carbon per year. Bearing in mind that I try to avoid wasting food, don't each much processed food, do eat out quite often, grow a few of my own vegetables but would be very hard-pressed to give up eating meat, I suspect I need to do some more detailed calculations. But the real, revealing question would be, how much food (and drink) footprint could I save without noticeably giving anything up?

Over the coming months I'm going to test a hypothesis on the basis of my own lifestyle. My hypothesis is kind of threefold:

1) that there is a threshold level of personal, consumption-side carbon emissions that it is very difficult to get below, perhaps somewhere around 6 tonnes per capita per year, without a substantial change in the energy supply mix away from carbon sources;

2) that it is possible to measure and act upon personal influences on supply-side emissions, eg from energy, food, material and transport services, by focusing on the way personal behaviour affects their efficiency and impacts;

3) that this could change the way personal impact is measured and acted upon in the round.

Let's see if I can do it....

AW.

Travel news from Ethical Man

A blog that is well worth following is the BBC's Ethical Man, Justin Rowlatt http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/

I was prompted by his recent blog post about our transport emissions to do a little thinking of my own.

Rowlatt was trying - bravely if I may say so - to make a cold-hearted assessment of the relative carbon emission impacts of different modes of travel, and to dispel some of the lazy assumptions. So, for example he found that, on a grammes of carbon per passenger kilometre, one person in a car, a virtually-empty bus or a half-empty train were all at least as bad as flying; and that if you travelled everywhere in a fully laden car you would be giving half-empty trains a real run for their money.

His 'good science' message was, don't just assume that getting a train is a lower carbon option, but think about the full picture. He also had a 'pragmatic logic' message, which was that we should use public transport anyway, because the services will run anyway and by using them we are removing our car emissions and also reducing the emissions per passenger kilometre of the bus or train, by increasing its patronage.

In a sense, I'm with Ethical Man on this, but his rather easy answers to tricky questions left me uncomfortable. After all, isn't "it was going anyway, with or without me" a stock excuse for taking a flight? Hell, I've used it myself. Sure, there's a difference, because if a scheduled flight was regularly empty the airline would withdraw the service, whereas buses and trains are specifically obliged to run services during low-demand times in order to maintain the concept of 'public transport'.

In reality, of course, trains in the UK are becoming so stretched for capacity that finding one that's half-empty is quite an achievement, and pricing structures have been cleverly (if irritatingly) designed to spread passengers across off-peak times. Buses are a bit different, because they do often run quite empty but also seem to burst unhelpfully at the seams whenever there is anything approaching a rush-hour.

Anyway, Ethical Man's analysis set me thinking: perhaps counting our grammes per passenger kilometre isn't actually the best way for us to plan on how to reduce our carbon emissions. Although on the face of it it's the most straightforward calculation, when you look at the variables (how efficient is my car, how full is the train, was the plane going anyway, etc) it's pretty difficult to say with confidence that we've made the best choice for the journey in question.

For a start, the greenest way to make a journey is of course not to make it at all, but that can be inconvenient or just rather unsatisfying. "Darling, let's go out somewhere today - how about going to the market in Buxton?" "No dear, think of the carbon emissions. Let's stay in and watch the lettuces growing in the garden."

No, the more I think about it, the way to think about transport emissions is to think of transport not as a series of thousands of individual choices, but as - dare I say it - a service. Let's say there's a train service running every hour between Sheffield and Leeds for 20 hours a day, with space for 200 passengers. 5 of those trains are full, 10 are half-full and 5 are virtually empty. So 20 trains are transporting just over 2000 passengers. Immediately we can see that spreading passengers from full trains onto half-empty ones won't make any difference. There are only three ways of reducing the per-passenger carbon emissions of the service:

1) carry more passengers in total;

2) make the trains more carbon efficient themselves;

3) withdraw low-demand trains from the service.

The third option is controversial and potentially counter-productive in the long-term, so even though it looks like an inefficiency it may be worth putting up with. The first two options are not controversial but do require all sorts of imaginative solutions, such as how to get commuters to travel at different times instead of travelling by car, and how to make railway vehicles more carbon efficient without vast expense on new rolling stock.

Thinking of each mode of transport as a service to society, rather than as myriad separate choices, has to be helpful, because you can start to see the particulars of each mode. For example in the road-freight industry there must be huge opportunities to tackle the problem of vehicles running empty on return trips: you could actually increase volumes of freight movement and reduce transport-related emissions simultaneously.

Now, how do we apply this to private cars?.....

AW.

Can Science Save Us?

...which reminds me - I recommend anyone in the Sheffield vicinity visits the 'Can Art Save Us?' exhibition at the Millenium Galleries. I may do another blog about it when I'm in the mood.

In my last blog entry I aired some thinking about the ways people believe or disbelieve climate science.

Coincidentally my wife and Green Empire co-director has just started reading Ben Goldacre's book, Bad Science. Visit his website http://www.badscience.net/ The book is basically about health science (or lack thereof) in the media and in marketing of health foods, supplements, cosmetics etc. We've all laughed at TV ads for shampoo with added pro-hypo-filamentorium-12. (Well, I hope we have).

Goldacre's premise is this: people who stand to make vast amounts of money have a habit of concocting misrepresented, bogus or simply invented scientific cases for the health benefits of their products, as well as being, erm, wide of the mark about their own qualifications. (Favourite quote: "Dr Gillian McKeith PhD or, to give her her full medical title, Gillian McKeith....") These products usually turn out to be ineffectual or might, in some cases, actually be harmful. Goldacre's answer is simply: live well, exercise, eat well, and be highly sceptical of apparently scientific claims unless you genuinely understand them.

Now, don't get me wrong - I am not, repeat not, a climate change sceptic. In fact I am worried to near paralysis when I read detailed papers on climate science, and so often avoid reminding myself of how bad things might actually be, for fear of being driven to drink. (Fortunately the pub is 40 seconds walk away so I don't need a chauffeur in any case).

If, on the other hand, I drew all my climate change evidence from the same newspapers, TV programmes and internettage that promote the kind of cod science about health that Ben Goldacre rightly despairs of, I would probably be wise to be suspicious.

In other words, what people tend not to trust is not so much the facts, as the sources. The impressionable amongst us will believe in climate change one week, and dismiss it the next, depending on what they've most recently read or seen on the telly. The more cautious of us will be generally doubtful until they see closely argued and referenced science - and you really, really hav to go looking for that. Especially since a lot of scientific papers are written in a language so dense that, well, you need to be scientist to spot the difference between the kosher and the kodswallop.

We have nurtured a generation that divides into the gullible and the cynical. That climate science appears to inspire doubt is, in this context, probably a good thing, since it implies that people are taking the issue seriously and will become passionate about tackling climate change once they are given impartial evidence from sources they trust.

In my work with WWF a few months ago I found that the ordinary people we interviewed craved impartial, robust information and despaired that they couldn't find it. All information in the public domain is assumed to be biased by political and/or financial motives.

We should put our faith in the wisdom of these ordinary people and do them the service of providing trustworthy information.

AW.

Are you the right age?

According to this weekend's news, I think in The Times, only 41% of people in the UK believe that climate change is man-made.

So only 41% of people believe what scientific consensus tells them. I wonder how many people believe that abstaining from junk food will prolong their lives? Believing something to be fact doesn't make you do anything about it: you have to want to do it at an emotional level. It's a fact that I'd lose weight if I ate less, but I enjoy eating so I tend not to cut down. I do a fair bit of exercise though, but only because I enjoy it.

Equally, you don't have to believe in man-made climate change to do something about it. If the government gave you enough of a financial incentive to insulate your home, you'd do it, even if you weren't struggling with your fuel bills and didn't care where your energy came from. Farmers used to receive subsidies to grow food, so they did so, and if they received subsidies to grow energy crops, they'd do so, whether or not they thought energy crops were morally superior to food. Governments note: people tend to respond better to incentives than penalties, unless those penalties are really punitive. Tax on cigarettes, petrol and alcohol continue to rise without much effect on their (harmful) consumption. But customers love loss leaders and BOGOF deals at supermarkets.

People crave clear equations. Whatever you think about GM foods you will agree that scientific opinion is far less united than it is for man-made climate change. Yet people latched on willingly to the idea that GM was bad - in my view because they could see a straightforward equation: 'don't start growing GM foods, and nothing will go wrong'. Climate change is providing dramatic imagery with every flood and storm, but 'don't start burning oil' is not an option because we opened that particular can of worms a long time ago. So what is the use of acting now?

If people can't see how their own actions could solve a problem, they're unlikely to accept that their actions brought it about. People know that stopping smoking would be good for them, so if they continue to smoke they do so in the knowledge they're doing themselves harm.

People don't trust what they're told by the media or by governments. It's not so long ago that the public was told smoking was actually good for them. I'm too young to know how many people believed that. Now we're told it's bad for us. Should we be surprised that not everyone jumps to attention when the messages we receive are so mixed?

For all this, I think what the statistics really shows is that people struggle to comprehend the timescales over which our activities have an impact. The writer Charles Handy suggests that individuals can only look as far into the future as they have already experienced the past. That's why a 5 year old child finds anyone over about 12 to be unfathomably old. So, climate change targets are being set for 2050, 2080, ie 40-70 years ahead, and the actions we're being held responsible for began at least 200 years ago and accelerated in the past 50 years. Looking back or forward, only people over about 40 or 50 have a frame of reference for the timescales we're talking about.

Then we must add into the mix the fact that, the older someone is, the more they will have been worn down by the endless cycles of apocalyptic scares that never materialised, and by the perpetual sense that life and society has just got gradually worse the longer they've observed it. So their own empirical evidence tells them, that's just the way things are. Life's hard and then you die.

My reasoning is as compelling as it is unscientific. People under, say, 20 are so young in relation to the timescales for which we're apportioning blame and setting targets, that they are just daunted by it all. People over, say, 70 are cynical about whether anyone has any effect on anything. People between 20 and 40 or so are too busy trying to get careers, mortgages, marriages and children to worry much, although they are probably more likely to believe the basic science. So people in the 40-70 age bracket find themselves landed with most of the challenge: understanding the evidence and the timeframe; feeling guilty about their past excesses; affording individual action where it has financial impact; educating their peers and their young, as best they can, in the need to consider the future.

And I would guess (there's science for you) that the 40-70 age bracket is currently about 40% of the population.

The practical lesson of this must surely be that to engage different groups of the population in acting on climate change (or anything else) you need to relate it to a timeframe they can deal with.

AW.

At last, my car is redundant

I'm delighted to announce that my last, and perhaps most pressing, reason for having a car has finally been resolved, and I can look forward to not having one, unless it's just a toy rather than a mode of transport...

I noticed a while ago that I was often making shortish journeys (ie around town, or to the next town) by car instead of train, because my little wheeled tin box was the only place where I could listen to the radio in splendid isolation. And I know I'm not alone in this, but I have been known to extend my journey a bit to allow time for an interesting programme to finish, or a favourite song to fade out. Well, no more!

Yes, I've bought a little personal MP3 player! So now I can download podcasts of life enhancing things, like Radio 4 nuggets such as Start the Week or The Unbelievable Truth, or people talking nonsense I agree with about music on the Word Magazine podcast, or Introducing...with Tom Robinson from BBC6Music, and I can listen to these while I'm walking or using the train.

Esteemed reader, celebrate with me: I have joined the modern age, and I can tell you that a joyous aspect of this new life is that I actually want my foot-and-train journeys to take that little bit longer so my programmes can finish.

So there you go: after 10 years of ranting about changing people's transport behaviour I can reveal that the two most simple steps to leaving the car at home are these: online shopping; and a little MP3 player.

If only I had discovered this sooner!

AW.

A Flask For All Seasons

I'm on a Cross-Country train and have just been informed that "the lovely Janice...[long pause]...and the equally lovely Keith" are serving refreshments. In a startling case study of how progress can often be retrograde, Cross-Country recently removed their 'Retail Shops' - buffets to you and me - from their trains to make more room for seats. So now the 30-odd standing passengers have 6 more seats to squabble over, but the chances of getting a decent cup of coffee have been slashed for everyone. Janice and Keith must pick their times carefully, because between many stations there isn't time to push the trolley along the train, over or around the standing passengers. So even if the trolley had a built-in Italian coffee machine most passengers would never even get a whiff of it. I wonder if Cross-Country's accountants had factored in a dramatic fall in catering revenue when they made this particular decision....

Hence the return of the trusty insulated flask. For some time the flask seemed to have been demoted to a quirky accessory favoured only by fellwalkers and those slightly baffling commuters who dress like fellwalkers even when their most serious climb of the day will be steps on the station footbridge. Now, on this train, I can see at least three flasks without cricking my neck. Mine is, of course, the nearest, and I took great pleasure in filling it with freshly brewed espresso before setting off from home. No more acrid, dusty strainings at £1.60 a throw for me - I have the real thing, thank you kindly, Janice. Or Keith.

On your average British weather day (starting off cool and dry, becoming increasingly muggy in the afternoon and then with a biting wind starting up around 7pm*) the flask is actually the perfect accessory, although it is rarely utilised to its full potential. Fill it with strong coffee in the morning for a lively start to the day. Refill with a good source of tap water around lunchtime and that will see you through the afternoon with cool rehydration. Then, depending on your mood, a third fill of either a herbal tea or a decent red wine will make a long journey home much more bearable. Furthermore, if you do go for the alcoholic choice you will be ahead of the curve when it comes to these drink-free zones in public places. No booze-addled ASBO-phile would have the foresight to pack a flask, so when you spontaneously snatch an evening in the park when the sun happens to stop by, you will be all the more free to enjoy it. (Culinary tip of the day - a very dry Chardonnay is the perfect accompaniment to fish and chips.)

I keep reading that tap water is growing in popularity as a backlash against over-packaged, overpriced bottled waters with high ecological footprints and questionable ingredients takes hold. This might be true of home consumption - where access to a tap is a fair bet, but when travelling I have seen little evidence of this. There is a capitalist logic that shops and public transport franchises can make money from bottled water, but not from tap water. However I think a bigger obstacle is infrastructure. When asking for tap water at a station cafe I was served a cup of boiling water from the coffee machine, over ice to make it cold. The waitress assured me I didn't want to taste the water from the tap, and I am inclined to believe her. Despite the exemplary quality of our tap water most public buildings seem to have a 'stagnation and disgustification' facility that makes drinking water from the tap very unpleasant, if not actually unwise.

If we hold with the argument that one path to sustainability is to replace an unsustainable PRODUCT with a sustainable SERVICE, then what we need here is a revolution in drinking water infrastructure for public places. Modern government would call this a Flaskholder's Charter: all public places would have dispensing points for chilled, filtered tap water and boiling water, so one could fill one's flask at a moment's notice. And of course, most people would be

delighted to pay, say, 40p for a high quality refill, so there is money to be made.

My fellow passengers and I have just been advised that Janice and Keith intend to serve us "quickly and safely throughout our journey". Damn. Just when I was fancying a dangerously slow cuppa.....

AW.

* Not to be confused with a British summer, which largely consists of water falling out of the sky in inconvenient ways. This does not, in itself, preclude the use of flasks, and may even encourage it.

We're S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G.

I'm currently reading John Grant's Green Marketing Manifesto, and very interesting it is too. One nugget I've just picked up is that eating locally grown, unprocessed food just once per week cuts about 2 tonnes off your annual carbon footprint - ten times more than you can save by reducing the temperature on your washing machine.

I became a convert to local food about 12 years ago, when I moved into a house with a large enough garden to be able to grow a lot of my own produce. Aside from the self-satisfied glow of growing your own, the main difference about local food is that it tastes so much better. This is hardly surprising, when supermarket fresh produce is bred mainly for appearance and longevity in storage, not for taste.

I probably end up in one supermarket or another a couple of times per week (though not usually for fresh stuff). I think it's hypocritical to criticise the supermarkets for wishing to expand their businesses. I am offended by many of their common practices, both in squeezing the juice out of their suppliers and in confusing, bamboozling and perfuming the customer into buying unnecessary or wasteful products. But the more I think about it, the more I am baffled by the willingness of the customer to be enslaved. Large-scale shopping is, by any measure, incredibly inconvenient. For a start you're at quite a disadvantage if you don't have a car (some people really only have a car so they can go to the supermarket). Then you have to drag a recalcitrant trolley around the shop, and the order you load things in it is completely perverse: soft, fresh, perishable fruit and veg first; then bread; then big, bulky but light stuff such as toilet rolls somewhere over half way down; and finally all those heavy, solid objects like fruit juice cartons and wine bottles. Whoever invented that convention was certainly either deluded or sadistic. Eventually your over-laden, ocean-going tanker of a trolley finds its own way to a lengthy queue of its brethren. Then you have to empty the whole thing out onto the conveyor, only to load it up again at break-neck speed, probably in the wrong order. THEN you haul it out to the car, THEN you find ways to put it in the car without it falling all about the place on the way home and THEN you have to unload it all.

The majority of people do this time and time again, as a matter of course, about once a week, for their entire lives.

Blimey.

But just imagine what would happen if we decided to stop this crazy hamster-wheel. The "retail economy" would grind to a halt. Acres of tarmac would stand as empty as abandoned airfields. A handful of (perhaps electric) lorries would deliver things to your house at pre-arranged times. You would have time to sit and read the paper and have a cup of tea, take on your 7 month old child in a nail-biting game of noughts and crosses or - controversially - tend to your vegetable patch. Chaos would reign and the end of civilisation would be upon us.

So before you pledge yourself to the 'eating local once a week' challenge, just be sure you've weighed up the pros and cons.

Five words for the next generation

The music journalist David Hepworth wrote recently (Word Magazine, July 2009) that "a generation is coming to maturity [that has] grown up in the waning years of a boom during which cheap credit and irrational optimism combined to shower them with information and entertainment that has been either free of paid for by someone other than the end user." Hepworth remarked on an education professional whose students, of politics, philosophy and economics, "found their information needs could be met by five headlines from Yahoo."

Those students' views don't surprise me at all - less so having recently indulged in a binge of broadsheet reading around the time of the MPs' expenses/European elections/Labour leadership/Speaker unseating debacle. Hundreds of thousands of words were written over a couple of months, not to mention endless TV and radio airtime being swallowed up, yet if we're honest most of it was just rambling speculation. Much as students should, and must, study the ins and outs of their subject, you cannot fault their insight that analysis of news only becomes useful retrospectively. Most of what happens in any given moment is only worthy of a tickertape, or Twitter, summary.

With my sustainability hat on (in-built UV visor and life-raft, only £16.99 from my website) I couldn't help but notice David Hepworth's reference to to a generation raised on 'cheap credit and irrational optimism'. The phrase succinctly summarises most people's knowledge of the challenge of sustainability - not least as it is presented to them by the media and by policymakers. Fearful that the reality is too scary or politically uncomfortable, we habitually sweeten the medicine: for example, buying a new car is seen to be OK for the planet because the car's in-use CO2 emissions are lower than your previous one - glossing over the real problem of there being millions too many car journeys taking place than will ever be sustainable, environmentally or socially. Another example: supplying households with three, colour-coded wheelie bins each might stimulate more recycling but in terms of the overall amount of waste being generated, this wheelie bin acne is almost certainly making matters worse.

Yet both greener cars and more recycling make people feel better about their impact on the planet. These are cheap credits that breed irrational optimism.

I have lost count of the meetings, conferences and policy documents I've encountered where the importance of education has been stressed and re-stressed. 'The next generation will be faced with the really big sustainability challenges, so it is education that will ultimately deliver sustainable development.' Well, quite so; but not if we raise our young on irrational optimism and the illusion of a free lunch. I suspect we are softening the blow because we fear our children will turn around and blame us for the mess they find themselves in.

Yet there is another way to look at all this. In principle, living sustainability is cheaper, because it is about consuming fewer resources that cost money, and reducing pollution that is expensive to clean up. The main reason sustainable solutions are seen as expensive now - such as replacing car and aeroplane journeys with high-speed rail - is because we're designing them to sustain and perpetuate models of consumption, mobility and financial transaction that hindsight will show to be laughably outmoded. Where education should really come in is in nurturing a new generation of inventors and tangential thinkers who can teach humanity to tread much more lightly on the earth. The beauty queen's goal of 'world peace' will be essential to that future, so war-driven technology is an example of a longstanding habit that we shall have to break.

Each day, the news could be distilled into just five words: war, crime, money, scandal, sensationalism. The students who have noticed these five words repeating day after day are probably rather enlightened. Our suited old power-brokers clearly aren't, since they stay embroiled and enraptured by it all.

Perhaps the generation that doesn't want to pay for anything will actually invent ways of doing things for free.

AW.

When will there be a budget for the world?

I have just had to abandon listening to Alistair Darling's budget on the radio while I work, because to use popular parlance it was 'doing my head in'.

This is not a party political blogpost - but at this moment more than ever I have found myself thinking that our politicians are trying to gloss over the fact that they have absolutely no idea how to rescue the economy. By default I therefore assume that their 'expert advisors' have no idea either.

'Ecological budget'. 'Carbon budget'. These terms are gaining in use to refer to the idea that there are finite amounts of carbon that we can emit without pushing the planet's temperature over the edge; a finite extent to which we can ask the planet's ecosystems to support human activity; and the the idea that society could trade in these environmental commodities.

But surely there's a problem here. Are we not wrapping the environment up in the same language that our 'expert advisors' have developed to refer to the fiscal budget? And are we not witnessing a flagrant, panic-stricken plunge into greater and greater fiscal debt in order to try in vain to sustain an economic status quo? The idea that our decision-makers might adapt and adopt fiscal language for environmental capital, and then take on the same ideas of how to manage it. I can here the soundbites now...."This year we have decided to borrow from the planet 78% of the ecological capital we expect to have available in 15 years' time, so that we can sustain the rate of consumption our advisors suggest our voters quite fancy this year."

And the insanity and the fallacy of this argument will be lost among the political noise........

Grand Cleft Auto

I have just spent a few days working from the home of some good friends in the North Town area of Aldershot. By my friends' own admission it is not an area that seems, on the face of it, to enjoy a particularly fine environment: a lot of 1960s-70s era suburban sprawl across fairly flat terrain, enjoying neither the hubbub of the city nor the tranquillity of the countryside.

This makes the discovery I'm about to tell you about all the more startling. On Easter Sunday we set out on a walk to a pub in nearby Ash Vale. For the first two or three minutes you plod past some monolithic low-rise flats and through a small industrial estate and then....bang! You crash headlong into a most wonderful wetland corridor, a veritable artery of water, lush greenery and teeming wildlife, and the walk continues like that to Ash Vale and beyond, along the Basingstoke Canal.

I can show you where this is using the power of Google. Click this link

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=aldershot&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=15.111406,39.550781&ie=UTF8&ll=51.257108,-0.729947&spn=0.015604,0.038624&t=h&z=15&pw=2

Make sure you get the whole link, otherwise it won't work. The Basingstoke Canal runs east-west-ish through this map.

So what's so special? Well, for me it's the way this place seems to defy the rules that environmentalists like me have been laying down for what greenspaces, greenways, wildlife corridors and so on should be, in one fundamental way: noise. For most of the walk the roar of the A331 dual carriageway, the descent of aircraft into Gatwick airport, and the steady grumble of a smaller A-road, are the first set of sounds that you hear, and incessant they are too. Yet somehow they make the drama of the place all the more significant. Coming out of Aldershot North Town on the Blackwater Path, you walk alongside a small river meandering along the backs of suburban houses on one side, and a series of large ponds on the other than seem to attract as many anglers as they do midges. You pass a telltale brick sluice structure under the dual carriageway labelled 'flood relief culvert' and suddenly you realise that this is what living on the brink of a floodplain in England could actually be like - it can be great! 400 days out 405 you can pop out of your back garden onto the footpath for a walk, a cycle, a spot of fishing or birdwatching; then occasionally you seal up the backdoor, set up the camping gear in the bedroom and wait for the waters to subside. All it would take would be a bit of re-planning, a little engineering here and there, and all these nasty floodplains would quickly be seen for what they really are - glorious oases.

Moving on a little further, you walk right underneath the thundering dual carriageway, past a little boxed off bridge pier where some unfortunate has set up a home that comprises two mattresses and some empty beer cans, and then up some steps onto.....my God! An aqueduct carries the Basingstoke Canal across the dual carriageway. First of all you can't help but stand on this bridge, with 5 feet of calm, quiet water behind you and a 50 metre strip of tarmac insanity buzzing away below. It's like standing within the frame of a racetrack computer game. The noise is relentless and these abstract wheeled lumps of metal whizz in bizarre synchronous patterns in opposite directions guided by some mysterious force. What a time-traveller would think arriving at this point is beyond me. Yes, it's alien to the landscape, and it affronts the senses. Yet somehow the way this road carves through the place somehow puts the rest of it into context, into relief. Without the road this place would be 'nice'. With the road, it is pure drama.

The scene becomes more interesting as you walk a little further along the aqueduct, glancing back to notice a narrowboat making a half-hearted attempt to catch you up. It dawns on you that you can see for at least half a mile around, and that the whole canal is raised up on an embankment that crosses a broad swathe of marshland with lakes, tall trees and all manner of birds. The builders of the Basingstoke Canal must have actually constructed an embankment at least 20 metres tall and probably 40-50 metres wide at its base, to carry a waterway across a wetland! No doubt a much easier solution than trying to create channels within the boggy wetlands and then build locks to follow the contours. But unless you came to this spot, and saw that it had been done, you'd never have believed it.

Of course, the canal might be the highway of its age but it nevertheless operates at walking pace, or sometimes these days cycling pace, never at the blinding speed of the dual carriageway. But it is still a massive human intervention into this damp, wild landscape. And what I can't tell from here is how much the lakes and trees of the wetlands have themselves been reshaped by man. Is the whole thing a giant flood management/reclamation area? There are certainly a lot of criss-crossing paths where the anglers are idling their day, and in one of the lakes there is a weed-encrusted brick structure, so that has a story to tell too.

And in the end what really strikes you is, for all this embankment building, road slicing, aqueducting, and all this noise, you can still hear the birdsong going hell-for-leather, and see the geese skidding to a stop on the lake, and walk through the web of a spider that has set up camp in preparation for an al fresco feast of midges. Nature doesn't care about our silly earthmoving capers and our 80mph toys. It doesn't care that we etch our developmental conquests on the bedpost of the landscape. It does its own thing, in its own time. I think it might even be laughing at us.

AW.

No Alarms and No Surprises

Various locations, Scotland.

Today started, surprisingly, with the hotel fire alarm going off. Having gathered the things I really couldn't do without (trousers, wallet, glasses) I venture out into the corridor where the alarm was incredibly loud, where a member of staff shouted 'False Alarm!' at me and I retreated to my room. False? It certainly made the kind of noise you would expect from a real one.

The alarm went on for 20 minutes, while I washed, dressed, packed and drank tea. It was set off, apparently, by someone using an aerosol in Room 16. So! It's not a fire alarm, it's an antisocial product alarm. Splendid.

3 Caffe Nero branches later I headed out to a small and, I have to admit, entirely godforesaken town. I feel genuinely sorry for people who have to live in such places - though I don't suppose they'd welcome my pity and would probably write me off as a Champagne Socialist. But walking back through the shopping centre to the bus station (as you must in these places - the bus station is always stuck onto/inside/underneath a shopping centre) I noticed that the piped music was piping Radiohead's No Alarms and No Surprises - an apt song for the town if ever there was one, as well as some kind of personal jibe at this morning's wake-up call. And at least, if this is any consolation, the good people of that sad town turn out to be aware of their fate, and of Radiohead. Do they want to change the record? Do they have a choice? Can we ever pretend to sustainability while people are living in places they know are crap?

Back in a proper city now. God's probably already at the bar.....

City Daydream Songs

You’ve all been there. You’re sitting or otherwise loitering in a public place, and one of your favourite songs starts to ooze out of invisible speakers. Your first reaction is a twitch of a smile and a languorous intake of breath, preparing yourself for the enjoyment to come. Ah, the excellence of your musical taste! Who is the kindred spirit who chose the music? Now comes a suspending of time, as you decide to ignore your companion or even miss your train in order to get the song in that special context. Then a disappointment when the next song reverts to unrecognisable muzak. And finally a nagging worry that, because you’re in a chain coffee shop, your favourite tune has been selected by an accountant, thereby dismissing your musical moment as a droplet in the oceanic, corporate, easy-listening soundtrack to our working days.

What grips you about this experience is that it isn’t so much a highlight of your day as a gap in it. It’s like a very short siesta. For roughly three minutes everything around you, the work worries, the phone calls, the office politics, the self-important lawyers talking too loudly at the next table…..all melts away and you go into a sweet, indulgent reverie. Unless your companion won’t stop talking, in which case you make a mental to kill them later, when they aren’t expecting it.

That gap is your chance to manipulate time. No matter what else is happening, that song is your excuse to make time stand still, or to spend those few minutes at another moment in time altogether. Maybe the song was on when you first made love, or when your lover told you they were leaving. Maybe the song has been through enough experiences with you that it means everything and nothing.

Recently Mick Jagger was quoted as saying that the three and a half minute pop song is an absurdity, but one that seems to be standing the test of time. Mick, I have news for you: it is not an absurdity, it is an increment of time. You know how long it is going to last from the moment you hear the first chord. Your next 250 heartbeats are accounted for. The predictable flow from intro to verse to chorus, and so on, is a rock on which you can stand and safely watch the chaos around you. It’s long enough to let you catch your breath, short enough not to outstay your attention span.

So there’s nothing worse, is there, than when that song comes bursting out of your radio, or leaping spontaneously from the walls of a supermarket, only to be amputated in full flow by some idiot DJ who thinks we’d rather hear his self-satisfied prattle, or by Janet beckoning Darren to the checkout, or –worst of all – by a newsflash that rudely smashes the inherent shittiness of the world through the brittle privacy of your daydream.

All of which leads me to think that it’s high time for an answer to Desert Island Discs. Sure, if you were left alone on a sunny island for weeks or months on end, with ten songs, a pack of cards and a Bible, you’d probably pick the longest pieces of music you know, to give you chance to listen to them all the way through, time and again, without Kirsty Younge cutting in and sexily, but – let’s face it – annoyingly, stopping Bach’s B Minor Mass after 25 seconds to ask you about the time you took LSD with a gigolo. Besides, it’s a surefire way to become sick to death of music you’ve always held dear, and that, if nothing else, would probably make you want to end your time on the island by getting extremely drunk and then going for a snorkel with the stingrays.

Remember those charity adverts? Give a poor family a bag of flour and they can eat for a week. Give them a bag of seed and they can eat for a lifetime. Or something like that – and it’s true. Well, Desert Island Discs is a bit like that, isn’t it? Marooned on an island with ten songs you know inside out, and love like old friends, and after two days you’ve grown to hate them and you contemplate a watery grave with the bleak emptiness of a religious zealot who has lost their faith. No. Do not be tempted. Forget those songs. Leave them behind waiting for a triumphant homecoming if you survive your ordeal. Instead, take a harp and learn to play.

No, no, what we need is Fleeting City Daydream Songs. You are given a chance to pick ten songs that you may not own or, even if you do, haven’t heard for ages, but they do have a knack of changing your mood and shaping your day when you hear them coming out of the pores of the city. Here’s one for starters: Beck’s Devil’s Haircut. My ex who owned Odelay but I confess I never really got it. The muso in me feels I really should get Beck, but it doesn’t happen. What I do remember vividly is seeing Beck on Later….with Jools Holland, where he was trying, and failing, to teach the wooden boogie-woogie hero how to pronounce ‘Odelay’. So I am trudging heavily down Chain Pub Drag, and sneak a shortcut down Binge Drinker’s Walk. Half way along is a Goth shop selling clunky boots and things, and oozing joyously from its open door is Devil’s Haircut. The daydream begins….

Jenny was a Goth, about 19. She dreamed of being a hairdresser, doing those full-on punk-goth jobs on nice blokes with metallic faces. She noticed how hairdressing salons all have puns for names, like Curl up and Dye, Headmaster, Hairforce. One day, she said, I’m going to own a salon, and walking in will be like getting on a Ghost Train. Maybe there could actually be a Ghost Train, and it spirals up to a really light, white attic room with a huge mirror, and that’s where you get your hair done, and then when you’re finished you get back on the Ghost Train and you go all the way down to the cellar, where there’s a really, really dark tea bar. And the front of the shop will have these huge periscopes, so that passers-by will see the white salon and the dark tea bar, and it’ll attract my ideal customers and frighten the hell out everyone else. And I’m going to call it Devil’s Haircut……

That's how cities work.

Dickensian Walkways

London is going downhill.

There is a temptation to blame this on Boris the Buffoon, but I think that would be unfair since I don't believe he can have reached these crooks and nannies yet.

My stays in London are normally characterised by the following extra-curricular activities to pass the time admirably between the end of one working day and the start of the next: a London beer to gaze into; a Bangladeshi curry to warm the inner self; and - following a night of deep, dreamless sleep - the delights of the classic B&B breakfast experience. Anyone who has stayed in a London B&B will know the form: a flask of stewed tea and an English breakfast served by a stern Eastern European matron under the watchful but benificent eye of Pope John Paul II. 

I knew I was off to a bad start when I checked in to the B&B and found that the reception was a superficially glitzy affair (what happened to tired wood panelling and a stack of receipts piled on top of the computer?) - but my room was 'across the road in that building over there'. Have the absentee hoteliers now started buying up whole streets and turning them into MDF dormitories? My room featured a range of cheap-chic fittings last seen in the bargain bin at the Woolworth closing down sale, a telly perched on a fridge laden, inexplicably, with single-portion cartons of UHT milk (now there's a waste of energy), a pedestal fan that appeared to have just staggered back from a hard night in Soho, a washbasin with the plug stuck firmly in and a booby-trapped towel rail that gave way and deposited all the towels into the toilet.

Then came the curry: good food, I cannot deny. But why wouldn't the staff eject the two drunks who were shouting and swearing at each other and disturbing the rest of the clientele? Answer: because they are their most loyal customers. Hmmm...When all others have gone elsewhere 'because the food's nice but there are always those two damned offensive drunks', those two damned offensive drunks will still be bawling and brawling their way through the popadums. Will someone call a small business adviser? Well, he needn't be that small, so long as he knows his stuff.

But my God, the breakfast. It's official: B&B breakfast has attained new lows of DIY lovelessness.

"Good morning. Please sign in." This was the limit of my entire conversation with the waitress.

Having signed in, I put a teabag in a cup, filled it from an urn, filled a glass of juice from another urn, picked up two slices of VAL-U bread from a plastic-roofed plate, and a long-since boiled egg, slid the bread into the perpetual toasting machine, avoided the vacant glares of my fellow guests, sloshed it all down in about 4 minutes.... and that was that.

Come on, London, this is breakfast we're dealing with. I want to be glowered at in Polish, told off in Portugese, kicked into life by soupy Italian coffee and brought to within an inch of explosion by burnt Danish bacon and stodgy Irish sausages.  My day is ruined.

Oh yes, and the buskers on the Tube: why must they play along to backing tracks? It's awful.

Mind you, the Smoke did redeem itself gloriously this morning, thanks to a big green thing called Hyde Park, and a big yellow thing called the Sun. Proof that the environment matters!

AW.

Sustainable Travel Advice # 1: Sheffield to Finisterre

When planning a journey from Yorkshire to Brittany, remember these five pieces of essential advice to make your trip as sustainable as possible....

1. Travel by rail. Finisterre can be reached by sea or by air, but rail is morally and socially best, even if you are unconvinced by the environmental arguments. Why? Simple. On trains you are still treated as a civilised human being wishing to reach B, from A, in reasonable time and comfort. On boats, the experience of the sea is marred by 'on-board entertainers', and the strange idea that you might wish to buy perfume in a force 7 storm. And on planes, you are regarded as an unlikely hybrid species combining rampant consumer of processed foods, illegal immigrant and terrorist, too bent on evil to notice the internal contradiction in the demand "relax and shop".

2. British public transport is not well-tuned to the manoeuvring of increasingly large drag-along suitcases. This can be annoying. French public transport, on the other hand, is carefully and specifically designed to inhibit such luggagey monstrosities. The sight of a British passenger being surgically separated from her suitcase by an automated Metro platform barrier, modelled mockingly on La Guillotine, is enough to lift the spirits of even the most dispirited traveller.

3. If embarking on a 7 hour train journey be careful not to stub yout toe violently on the edge of the shower cubicle in your London hotel room just before setting off, as this makes the journey rather less comfortable, though it will make you very grateful not to have chosen 'road' as that most foolish travel mode.

4. 'Paris' is in fact a vast network of tiled pedestrian tunnels. The above-ground former city of Paris was demolished brick-by-brick in the 1920s by the misanthropic architect Le Corbusier, and moved to South America.

5. A good way to blend in in Paris is to pretend to be the subject of an arthouse film featuring a moody bohemian, minimal dialogue and dimly lit tracking shots in long, tiled, pedestrian tunnels.

Bon voyage!

AW.

Art House Days

This musing is dedicated to the continued existence of Kate Bush, and to the memory of Tony Hart.


I am currently running a little art exhibition at the Art House, Wakefield. The exhibition shines a few, tentative watts of electric light upon the elusive values that the landscape offers artists, and in turn (perhaps) the ways in which artists influence our view of the landscape and what it means to people.


As a photographer I know that the landscape is devilishly difficult to capture. Who would think that something that is so blatantly just there, and so much a part of our lives, could somehow elude being adequately captured by a camera. Looking at the photos in the exhibition it seems to me that it is the details, close-ups even, within the landscape that are most effectively articulated in art. What's more, the landscape only exists in that moment when it is pictured: sure, the same place might be there all the time but every time you look at it, visit it, it is slightly different. Even in painting, the same might be true: one picture in the exhibition is of Robin Hood's Bay, and simply uses colour to distinguish between land, sea and sky, but that use of colour seizes one moment in the individual's experience of that landscape.

I chose to dedicate this blog post to Kate Bush and Tony Hart because they are artists who, in my view of the world, have mastered the capturing of a moment, but in very different ways. Kate's music is personal, playful but not really accessible: much of it, from Wuthering Heights through Running up that Hill to her recent(ish) Aerial album conjures landscape (the same way that, for me, Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here has always conjured a dejected view over a windswept seashore, somewhere where there is an industrial scar just behind the scene so that you daren't turn around and break the spell) - and this is the only way to get an insight into the music - to see it. Tony Hart, on the other hand, made his career out of helping people - from their youngest years - to access art: he put the daubings of his young viewers on the television, he showed how art is created, he showed you how to look.

You could say that Tony Hart enabled me to listen to Kate Bush. Though I'll never be a painter.

AW.