Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 3: Fire

It's a wet, miserable day, and I'm just getting the fire going.

Fire seems so intrinsic to human existence that we always feel more alive, somehow, when we are in the presence of fire. I've no idea how different this feels for people who have experienced the unpleasant side of fire, but for me the need to respect it, as well as to be enlivened by it, is all part of the magic.

An old house cannot really be true to itself without fire. The Victorian house, to my mind, is designed around a few fairly simple principles:

1. Shelter from the weather - in its original form the Victorian house is not especially good at this, prone as it is to draughty windows, leaky roof/wall connections and damp cellars, but nevertheless it fulfils the basic human need for shelter;

2. Front - generally the Victorians provided you with a grand front door and entrance way and a prestigious front reception room, even if the rest of the house was thrown together from bits of old rubble and driftwood held together with sand and horsehair - so it's relatively easy to show off;

3. Fresh air - the Victorians were obsessed with fresh air, despite the fact that outside air was usually anything but clean, and inside buildings this reflected itself in the high ceilings and sliding sash windows, which enabled fumes and soot from gas lighting and wheezing children to rise to the tops of rooms and be whisked out thanks to bracing draughts;

4. Fire - chimneys form the structural buttressing of the Victorian house, most rooms had open fires for warmth, and coal was delivered via a chute in the cellar, burned at will in vastly inefficient dog grates, and ornate chimney pots celebrated the affluent disposal of dirty exhaust gases into the city air;

5. Servants - if you could afford servants, they'd do your cooking and laundry in a miniscule corner of your house, and sleep in the draughty attic. If you couldn't afford servants, you'd soon learn to live like them, discovering how small a space it was possible to cook and clean your own stuff in.

Modern needs may have forced us to rebel against the tiny kitchens and sculleries, but the other principles seem to hold true to what we enjoy about living in old houses. However, the challenge of heating these big, tall rooms has taken us through the 20th century's era of big, clunky central heating systems, style-free gas fires, electric panel heaters, and "living flame effects" and has now rekindled our love of fire, but in the cleaner, more controlled guise of enclosed stoves with recirculating combustion chambers that minimise smoke emissions and create much more efficient heating than open fires.

In this, our first - and mercifully mild - winter in this house, we've survived almost exclusively on our Morso woodfuel stove. It has worked flat out while there is no other heating in the house, and because we're only living on one floor, it has coped OK. But the really interesting thing has been the way that lighting and feeding the stove has defined the rhythm of our day-to-day lives now for almost five months, in a way that we hadn't anticipated. It takes planning to make sure the wood supply is adequate, time to clean and prepare the stove, and practice and experience to work out how best to set the fire and work it up from cold into a proper inferno, and keep it going until bedtime. You learn to look at a scrap of wood, or a bit of log, and gauge how well and for how long it will burn. You look at junk mail in a new light - "Look darling, someone's sent us some more firelighters!" And often it is much more fun to sit and watch the fire than to see what's on TV.

The question of how "green" a woodstove is is a difficult one - really it must depend on the management of the source of the wood. Burning bits of old floorboarding and stud walling is kind of using up embodied energy in the building, and that can only go on for so long - but it has helped us through our first winter. However, it is hard to imagine a house like this without a real fire in it. One of the most intriguing things, though, is seeing how many bits of wood it takes to keep you warm for an evening, and completely re-evaluating the unthinking act of turning a thermostat up or down on a modern heating system, or putting the washing machine on. Suddenly each turn of that dial becomes directly related to the idea that somewhere, a few miles away, an extraordinarily big and fearfully hot fire is burning to supply domestic energy. Being closer to the fire brings you face to face with the basic issue of how to keep warm, and I don't want to forget that when the central heating is back.

Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 2

A bit like watching a TV series on the internet, I need to cram some of these blog posts to catch up.

Episode 2 is a technical one, all about energy efficiency. Just as I started writing this I learned that the Government has decided to scrap its proposals to tie in compulsory energy efficiency measures to home improvements through Green Deal finance. The plan had been that if you extend your house - increasing the space that needs heating and/or cooling, you would have to install measures so that your net energy consumption was at least no bigger.

The energy efficiency imperative in old housing stock is unbelievably enormous. It accounts for almost half of the UK's carbon emissions, and because so much existing stock will still be with us in 50 or more years' time, it puts the whole national carbon reduction strategy into the realms of farce, unless powerful measures for retrofitting are introduced. Sure, it's not fair to force people to stump up for this out of their own pockets, and the Green Deal is one way to spare their pain, by using their energy bills in effect as a loan scheme to cover upfront costs. But surely, compelling people to take action on their energy consumption when undertaking home improvements they'd decided to do - and pay for - anyway, need not be controversial. It just needs to be well-managed.

But no - the weedy Government has backed down again. However, one thing you can be sure of is that people with big, old, draughty, single-glazed houses with minimal insulation and ancient heating systems will be getting on the energy-saving case themselves and, I suspect, in their droves. The simple push for this is rising energy costs: big old houses are just getting too expensive to heat - and gradually it will make them unaffordable to live in. So people like me, whether or not they care about sustainability, really have little choice now but to start doing it for themselves.

A friend quoted to me a few months ago a mantra that there are 3 steps to doing this properly: insulate [the house]; a-rate [the appliances]; generate [your own energy]. In that order. That's why it's been a bit frustrating that there was a clamour last year for solar PV generation on roofs, whilst it's still weirdly possible to buy new appliances that aren't at least A-rated, and schemes to get serious about insulation are not getting much attention. There are some good insulation schemes, but these mainly apply to cavity walls - which pre 1930s houses don't have - and lofts - which you may also not have if you instead have an attic room or loft conversion. So older houses fall into the category of "hard-to-treat" and get left behind by the incentive schemes. My insulation needs to go inside my rooms, swallowing architectural features like lava pouring through quaint villages at the foot of a volcano.

But there is a big plus-side to this! I'm refurbishing anyway, and because I'm not eligible for an incentive scheme I can work out how to do it in a way that I think is architecturally appropriate, I can test out different methodologies and I don't have to let in a stampede of quick-fit installers who've just moved over from fitting hatchet-job replacement windows to cash in on the latest incentive scheme. I should also be able to measure the energy improvements in terms of their effectiveness and cost.

For my house, I have a kind of energy-saving shopping list, and it's really designed to make the house as liveable as possible. These are the main measures I want to install.

Insulate:

convert all windows from single-glazing to low-E double-glazing;

internally insulate all internal walls and roof;

insulate the ground floors (one suspended timber floor and three cellars);

thermally separate the cellar to give a cold room (to reduce refrigeration energy) and a hot room (to provide a drying room and reduce laundry energy);

provide some acoustic insulation against the party wall to improve privacy.

A-rate:

fit a new central heating system with condensing boiler feeding underfloor heating to all floors;

ensure all appliances are as energy-efficient as possible;

(hopefully) install a water meter and smart-metering of gas and electricity;

design room layouts, materials etc to optimise control and comfort at lower ambient temperatures;

use a high-efficiency woodfuel stove for supplementary heat on ground floor.

Generate:

install mechanical heat recovery ventilation from warm, wet rooms;

consider solar water heating.

I'll go into more detail on some or all of these measures as the project progresses. Tune in next time...

AW.

Bringing an Old House Back to Life, Episode 1

Well, it has been several months already since my wife and I bought a very delapidated, neglected Victorian house and started to resuscitate it, and this is the first time I've blogged about it. This is partly because I've been too busy, but also because I wanted to get a sense of how I really felt about it before I started writing anything down.

As often happens, it was quite an unexpected trigger that inspired me to start writing about the house. I was listening to a back episode of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, and one guest was the poet Paul Farley, who has been illuminating the mundane, suburban life of Northern towns. In the programme the discussion touched on one of his poems in which the cellar of a particular house is a living character who listens in, observes and comments on the goings on in the rest of the house.

This idea crystallised for me the reason why "doing up" an old house is such a personal adventure and one that can so easily be messed up. When you first take on an old place, it is a husk of the life that, until moments before you collect the keys, was being lived in it. If, as was the case with our house, the previous occupant had long since lost heart in the place, rarely bothering even to clean it, let alone tend to its underlying needs, you open the door on your first day to a sad, yellowed hangover. And your first instinct is just to rip it all out and start again.

The trouble is, ripping it all out is actually something you have to do quite carefully. It's a bit like using leaches to eat the diseased flesh from wounds, and making sure they don't start on the healthy stuff. An old house has usually been badly abused as well as neglected - previous shoddy workmanship is often more damaging than simple neglect. On top of that, there is now an urgent need to make old buildings like this much more energy efficient. This puts a lot of the architectural charm of sliding sash windows, high ceilings, plaster mouldings and fireplaces under real pressure - often to the extent that you have to destroy or bury those features and then make decisions about whether, and how, to replicate them.

But I think the biggest responsibility is to create a home that is beautiful, relevant and fully-functioning in the modern age, without either clinging nostalgically to everything that charms us about the Victorians, or becoming all "boutique hotel" about the place and having over-priced, overblown and under-usable details straight out of a lifestyle magazine. This is where a bit of time to reflect, and a sense of what Paul Farley was getting at with his cellar imagery, comes in. Because what we really need to do is to listen to the stories our house is telling us, and then to develop the next chapter. We need a way to discern which architectural features are fundamental to the house's character, and which can be altered in a spirit of progress. We need to prove that a house needn't be cold and draughty just because that's how it's always been, but that walls and floors needn't be completely straight and true either. And we need helpers, engineers and tradespeople who are also willing to listen to the house, and treat is part of our family, rather than just taking the "this is how it is done, so this is how we'll do it" school.

People often comment on how new-build houses lack character, compared to old ones. There are some technical reasons for this, to do with street layouts and the regulation, automation and standardisation of constructional details. You could argue that character comes from the element of educated guesswork that went into earlier generations of building. However, in much larger part I'm coming to learn that houses acquire character by telling the story of how they have lived, and of the previous lives that have been lived in them. So it's actually the adaptability of an old house that enables it to acquire character.

The first thing we did when we bought this house was to rip out the worst of the havoc that the previous occupant had left behind. This was not as cathartic as I had hoped. But the second thing we did was to have a drinks party for friends and neighbours; and suddenly we began to sense that this place was going to become home, and that it would be good.

The following day, we started the demolition.....

AW.

What the Dickens is Sustainability?

It would be remiss of me to let the bicentennial of Charles Dickens pass without a mention as one of history's great progressive voices. When I say progressive, I mean one who sees the role of public policy as being to tackle the needs of the have-nots, rather than to protect the privileges of the haves. It's also significant, in our evidence-obsessed age, that he made his point through the medium of fiction, full of caricatures and dramatic licence, rather than through a dry, factual presentation of the dismal, unfair and unhealthy society he saw around him.

At the "How to Plan for Nature" workshop in Hamburg recently, I was describing the move from a "conservative" approach to a "restorative" approach in nature policy. The conservative approach involves preserving the best of our natural assets, which is fine insofar as it goes, but results in those best bits becoming isolated and fragmented, and eventually declining, and any less-valued assets are allowed to decline anyway. The restorative approach attempts to reverse decline by enabling valued assets to grow, and also tackling deficit in other areas so that, over time, the net worth of our natural environment increases and degraded environments are renewed and nurtured.

It seems both inevitable and desirable that this paradigm shift takes place: it has been a long time coming, but is now increasingly enshrined in international policy on nature. Perhaps the terms "nature conservation" and "conservationist" will gradually be replaced in the lexicon by "restoration" and "restorationist", clunky though they may sound at present. Or perhaps, to we should try out the word "progressive"? Should we push the language of "progressive" environmental policies, in the sense of promoting the needs of degraded environments as a higher priority than protecting what is already well-protected?

Against this backdrop I was intriged to hear several discussions in the media this week about "Conservatism" in the sense of the ideological context of Conservative politics. I admit to a patchy historical knowledge here, but the underlying principle is that "not all change is good, and so some things should be conserved". A particularly interesting take on this came in Start the Week, where the outspoken writer Peter Hitchens identified Margaret Thatcher as distinctly non-Conservative and more extreme-liberal, and took the view that the UK's Conservative Party is no longer anything of the sort. Deregulation of the market certain seems liberal, or even neo-liberal, in that it simply favours those who can make money and sell things, regardless of their social class, education or connections.

What really interests me here is not the machinations of the UK Conservative Party, but what "conservatism" means in a bigger sense. If Thatcherism was not Conservative, but liberal, then are Liberals liberal, or progressive? Someone said, "If you want to see who has the power in a society, look who has the tallest buildings". The truth in this is self-evident and pithy: before the 19th century it was invariably churches that dominated city skylines, then these were dwarfed by the tall chimneys of factories, and more recently by skyscrapers consecrated to the banking gods. As an aside, in many UK cities the tallest buildings of the moment are hotels and apartment blocks, suggesting that sleeping is about the most powerful thing we've done since 1990. But more to the point, if "Conservatism" means conserving power in society for those who currently have it (the breaking of which is the driving force behind the Labour movement), then Thatcherism was about moving power away from left-wing trade unions. In Sheffield the former (empty) headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers may not be especially tall but it is certainly domineering. Thatcherism didn't really have a view on whom power would move towards, and to give the Iron Lady some credit she may have intended to move it towards 'liberals' like herself - but that's not how it turned out, because the free market took over. One way of looking at it is that the market saw a power vacuum and jumped in, and then established a new status quo that "conservatism" was all too ready and willing to protect.

So here are some challenging questions:

If economic downturn results in no tall buildings being built, does this mean there is also a power vacuum inherent in downturn?

If so, why does downturn seem to be a catalyst for "radical overhauls" rather than "improving things, but not throwing out the baby with the bathwater"?

Is a period of economic gloom therefore actually the perfect time to be articulating and pursuing environmentally progressive policy and not, as many would have us believe, a time when environment takes a back seat?

AW.

A Christmas Message

Christmas Days always seem to start strangely, and today is no exception.

It's 5am in Crozon, Brittany, North-Western France. I've been at least half awake since 3, and have moved from a fairly uncomfortable bed to a luxurious sofa. I read the first few pages of “Ray Charles: Man and Music” by Michael Lydon, sleepily became stuck on an image of the flatlands of Northern Florida, and then decided to give up and just listen to the ticking of the grandfather clock. I decided to see where the ticking took me.

By daytime, the room I am in is dominated by its south-facing sea view, a captivating and ever-changing panorama of skies and cloud formations, rocks, sea and shorelines that are one minute bathed in sunshine and the next minute cast into gothic silhouette. Stand outside after dark, and your eye is drawn upwards to the stars, especially after about 10.30pm when the streetlights are switched off and the backcloth of millions upon millions of distant stars show up behind the few prominent ones that townies like me can usually see. The dominant sound is the sea, washing back and forth on a pebbly beach about half a mile away, plus the occasional calls of owls having a pow-wow across trees or chimneys above and behind.

But right now, all of that is barred by the window shutters, and if I opened them I'd wake the rest of this sleeping house. I'm acutely aware of the darkness outside, but I can't actually see it. It's like I'm inside an envelope. I know where the opening is and how to open it, and what's outside it, but it's the wrong moment to break out, so instead I have to to focus on what's inside.

Despite the comfort of the sofa and the large pile of Christmas presents in front of me, it's the ticking of this clock that now completely commands the room. It's an impressive old thing, made of probably oak or walnut, and it ticks once a second with a very even rhythm. You know how the sound of some ticking clocks are affected by the weight of the hands, so that as the second hand is dragged up from 7 to 11 it becomes a grudging shuffle, 11 to 1 is all quiet before it stumbles down to 5 like someone running down a hill and struggling to maintain their balance, and finally loitering around 6 and gasping for a rest before the next ascent? Well, there's none of that. This clock just ticks. A slight up note on one tick and a drop on the next, but that might even be a trick of my ears. There are subtler shifts in rhythm. Sometimes I can picture heavy feet pounding up stone steps to a citadel, and occasionally there's something more rounded, like a chain of railway navvies passing blocks or bolts from one person to the next and making neat piles at the end. Yet no matter how long I listen, and how much imagery I try to conjure, the overwhelming sense is that time is just carrying on, at its own pace, totally disinterested in me or anyone else, and I'm helpless to try and tame it.

I start to ask myself questions and to try and play with this inexorable rhythm. Can I synchronise my breathing to it? Not really, I end up breathing too slow or too fast, can't quite get a natural pace. If I could get my heartbeat to fall into line, would it take the 60bpm of a resting athlete or the 120bpm of an incessant pop song? 60 is divisible by three, so why can I only hear these ticks in twos or fours?

Finally, after two hours of listening closely, I've picked up a new sound. In the interval between each tick, as the pendulum turns for its next swing, there's a faint sort of tailing off, slightly lazy or apologetic, like some threads on frayed jeans dragging behind the shoes of someone meandering along a quiet road. Its at odds with the clipped, 'very British' rigour of the rest of the ticking, and in a way I feel like I've found a way in, a chink in its armour. Gradually I realise that I've already conjured several different scenes out of this clock, and with patience it could give me more. Maybe there's something colonial about it: the way that settlers and civil servants in far-flung places tried to assert the reassuring rhythms of their homeland, and usually ended up with something slightly out of kilter. As though, perhaps, the unerring tick of the trusty grandfather clock, uncrated after a month at sea and put up reverently in office or drawing room, just ends up exposing the fact that everything around it will ultimately refuse to conform to its imposed order.

I've time for a coffee and some more about Ray Charles, before the family wakes up and Christmas begins. And before the clock's purposeful walk is drowned out by the chaotic dance of voices, pots and pans, plates and glasses, ripping of giftwrap and post-prandial snoring.

Happy Christmas.

Moving Target: Proceed with Caution.

I'm currently bidding for two pieces of work that both involve facilitating aspects of strategic planning. This puts my brain into a very specific gear, where I contemplate what good strategic planning actually entails and, in particular, why strategies are so rarely implemented properly.

I suggest that a major reason for lack of implementation is not paying attention to moving targets.

I'm often fascinated by the way in which driving a car offers lots of analogies for thinking about how life works. This is particularly odd when you consider for how short a phase of civilisation people have been driving cars, and therefore how alien it ought to be to our psyche in evolutionary terms.

Today I was driving my car in the busy morning traffic. Some people of an environmentalist bent will immediately think me a fool for even contemplating such a time and energy-wasting endeavour but, like most other people, I have a complex and self-fulfilling justification for doing it. I should add that I don't do it very often.

Anyway, part of my journey was on a fairly busy stretch of motorway, and I entertained myself by observing patterns in the traffic around me. What I noticed was that when I concentrated on vehicles much further ahead - say 10 or so vehicles ahead, I actually drove a little more slowly. I think there may have been several reasons for this. Maybe I was responding more to the average speed of the traffic, rather than to the ebb and flow of roadspeed of the vehicles immediately around me. Maybe I was noticing when cars a long way in front began to slow down, and slowing down accordingly, rather than only reacting when the car directly in front slowed. Maybe I was setting my speed on the basis of seeing a couple of hundred metres in front, and then instinctively slowing if my view was impeded by nearer traffic.

You can see where I'm heading. It occurred to me that perhaps we instinctively anticipate hazards and adjust our behaviour accordingly, but if we shorten our time horizon we don't allow for hazards that are beyond it. In a car, if we are only staring at the back of the car in front, the only hazard we anticipate is that that particular car will do something we need to react to, whereas if we look in front of that car we can begin to assess what that driver is responding to.

When we do strategic planning, we tend to look to a point in the future and see it as a fixed point in time: we are trying to achieve a series of goals by the time we get there. But then we draw our timeline and identify obstacles and interim targets along the way, and tend - instinctively perhaps - to try and tackle each one in turn, as we get to it. While we concentrate on the nearest target, we're not watching what is happening to the subsequent ones.

Of course, what is happening is that those further away obstacles and targets are moving and morphing, being influenced by the decisions we're taking (or not taking) now, and the people who are monitoring what is happening further into the future are not the same people who are responding to immediate challenges.So by the time decision-makers have formulated what to do about the most immediate challenge, the nature of the subsequent challenges has altered, and the strategy is already on its way to redundancy.

Therefore, making sustainable strategies implementable means we need to bear three things in mind:

1) We are always working towards moving targets, not fixed ones, which means we need to be alert for movement;

2) Future targets move not only due to changes beyond our control, which we can't predict, but also because the decisions we're taking now are shaping the future all the time;

3) If we focus our gaze on the more distant, longer-term goals, the nearer ones are likely to be less challenging, whereas if we concentrate on the nearer, shorter-term goals, the distant ones may well be more challenging than they are now.

AW.

The Unlikelihood Principle

This week I have been helping some friends insulate their house. It is an old, solid-walled, terraced house, and we are aiming to achieve energy performance not too far from that of a modern house by fitting insulated panels to the inside of the outside walls. The construction is basically 50mm of rigid, foil-backed insulation board plus a layer of normal plasterboard, ready for redecorating.

Now, the standard size of an insulation board or plasterboard sheet is 2.4m by 1.2m, and up until today (when these materials arrive) my main concern had been getting these sheets up the narrow stairs. However, today is very, very windy, and now I'm much more worried about actually getting them into the house in the first place. This recalls Venturi's Law*, that windspeed is directly proportion to the surface area of the material you are attempting to carry. Practical applications include design of racing yachts, and not choosing to transport sheet building materials on windy days.

I have lived in traditionally windy cities - Sheffield and Newcastle - for most of the last 20 years, and I know that even in such cities there are probably only about 10 or 15 days per year when it is genuinely, seriously windy. That means on any given day there is about a 1 in 24 chance of high wind. I would guesstimate that I carry sheet materials outdoors only about 4 times a year, so on any day there is a 1 in 91.25 chance that I'll be carrying a sheet of plasterboard across the street. Therefore, if I stuck a pin in the calendar on, say, 4th February, the chances that I'd find myself carrying plasterboard in high winds on that day would be 1 in 2,190. That would mean only one day in every six years would I encounter this unfortunate coincidence. However, anecdotal evidence contradicts this, since I'm pretty sure it's windy almost every time I try to carry something.

I'm not paranoid and I don't believe I'm being singled out. I first noticed the phenomenon when carrying architectural models from home to university in Newcastle, where the flimsy polystyrene versions of my designs were always destined for some destructive weather-testing before a tutorial. Since moving to Sheffield I have often noticed other architecture students putting their models through the same testing processes.

This got me to thinking: supposing I'm not a victim of Venturi's Law, but of something altogether more insidious: unfortunate unlikelihood. That's to say, the less likely it is that I'm doing something, the more likely it is that something unlikely will happen at that moment. The evidence for the existence of this phenomenon is strong. If you use a train every day, it will occasionally be late; if you use it once a year, it is almost bound to be late that day. If you cycle every day, you will occasionally get wet; if you cycle once a month, you are certain to get caught in a monsoon. If you eat oysters every day, you may get a bad one and be sick once every couple of years; if you eat oysters only on Christmas Eve, you will inevitably spend Christmas Day feeling very poorly and vowing never to eat oysters again. If you drink alcohol every day you might have five nasty hangovers during the course of a year, and maybe one evening to be embarrassed about; if you only drink on bank holidays, you'll still have five nasty hangovers per year, and at least three causes to be ashamed of yourself.

The question is, is it possible to harness this force of nature, this convergence of statistical fragility with anecdotal certainty, and turn into something positive and useful? Does fortunate unlikelihood also work? For example, let's say I currently spend 1 day in every 10 days looking for new business, and actually win a commission once every 90 days. Now supposing I only spent 1 day in 90 looking for new business, is it more or less likely that my marketing efforts would pay off? Or, if my friend Filbert asked 10 women to marry him, would he be more or less likely to get a positive response than if he only asked one woman?

I suspect the only way to answer these questions is by empirical experimentation, but there is certainly a direct application to research methods. A good example is the kind of questionnaires used in transport or retail research, which begin, "How often do you use this service/shop, all the time, often, or rarely?" Conventionally, the subsequent answers of frequent customers will be considered more significant, because their repeated patronage makes them more valuable customers. However, the law of unlikelihood dictates that the customers who use the service/shop very rarely are much more likely to have 'outlier' experiences - good or bad - and therefore focusing the research on those occasion patrons will enable more detailed study of how, and why, things might go spectacularly right or wrong for any given patron on any given visit.

A closing conundrum: my grandmother always used to speed up the arrival of a bus by lighting a cigarette. She probably smoked about 10 cigarettes a day, and used the principle that a bus was more likely to arrive if it was interrupting a smoke by doing so. It often worked, but not always. Given that I've smoked fewer than 10 cigarettes in 37 years, it is almost infinitely unlikely that I would light up whilst waiting for a bus, so I couldn't actually use a cigarette to summon a bus without destroying the unlikelihood of my doing so. On the other hand, a chain smoker would always be smoking when the bus arrived, but his decision to smoke would have no effect on the bus's arrival. Therefore, does the greatest overall power lie in actions that are only moderately unlikely?

AW.

*Note: Venturi's Law is different from, though not wholly unrelated to, the Venturi Effect. The main difference is that the latter actually exists.

The Book of Dave: in search of psycho-voltage

I've just finished reading Will Self's "The Book of Dave". In a nutshell, it's the story of Dave Rudman, an estranged, deranged and deluded London taxi driver who writes a cathartic, misogynistic thesis to his son. He buries the book, and centuries later it is discovered in a post-deluge age where it spawns a fanatical, fundamentalist religion.

Pretty much par for the course for Will Self, then, you might say. There are a staggering number of facets and ways to interpret this book. Readng a few reviews of the book, it is primarily seen as a biting satire of religions: the ease with which passing moods and memoirs of a few people in history can be magnified and mauled in the future. Self does this satire unnervingly well. Indeed, it strikes me that the more self-contained and fully-formed someone's thesis on life, the more extremist it probably is, because it will not have been honed and subjected to reasoning discourse. Had I written a long essay ten years ago entitled "People who will be first against the wall when I am king" (which, I assure you, I didn't) I can guarantee I'd now be mortified by it and desperate for it not to see the light of day. Of course, that makes this blog all the more worrying, because by the time I am mortified by it it will have been in the public realm for some time and there'll be no clawing it back.......

For me, though, the most striking quality of "The Book of Dave" is the way in which it creates two dramatically different versions of London. Few writers can have envisioned more different Londons than Self, as it his stock in trade, really. Yet the two (or more?) Londons here are so polarised: one is the personal, intimate memory-mapped city organised by the enlarged frontal lobe of a taxi driver's Knowlege; the other is a staggering landscape of an impersonal, dysfunctional authoritarian city-state painted with a big, hairy brush. The gradual swapping over of these two perspectives, so that we discover the personalities of the future and the authoritarian dysfunction of the present, is the real trick of this book. Thus it becomes a satire in the ancient classical tradition, as well as a homage to Dickensian social commentary on London.

A really interesting question for me is whether other cities or places could ever be such fertile territory. There are so many Londons, factual and fictional, but could there be so many Sheffields, England, or Bostons, Massachusetts, or Thursos, Scotland? I suspect that the big, old cities of the world, such as Barcelona, Moscow, Istanbul, could well compete with London on this, but not many others. I'd suggest that there are two crucial ingredients a place needs in order that it can exist more in the imagination than in the here and now:

it has to be physically too large for any visitor or inhabitant to ever feel they've really grasped its true extent (so any fiction within it is geographically plausible);

it needs a long enough, messy enough history that an equally long and messy future is assured (so any fiction is temporally plausible).

The taxi driver is one person whose geographical grasp of a huge city is likely to be better than most. You, like me, might be perplexed that taxi drivers in a medium-sized city like Sheffield often have a lesser knowledge of their patch than London cabbies, or even than many of their passengers. That it is so much less of a challenge probably makes it less worthy of knowing. On the other hand, we could speculate that a spatial Knowledge bigger than what is realistically knowable is what drives Dave Rudman mad.

In other words, a city so big that you can never really know it will drive you mad if you try, and knowing that it could drive you mad is what makes that city so different from smaller, knowable places. It has a kind of psychological voltage, which is what powers the imagination.

So, dearly beloved, we come to the bit where I pose a sustainability question. Received wisdom (and I often believe it myself) is that there is a natural size to settlements that lend themselves to being environmentally and socially sustainable. Too small, too dispersed and there are no economies of scale, not enough community. Too big, too dense and a settlement becomes unknowable, impersonal, antisocial, too hungry for natural resources.

But consider this: if that 'natural' size actually means a 'comfortable' size, might living in such a place reduce that psycho-voltage? Would the imagination and creativity of mankind suffer, and with it our ability to envision a sustainable future? Should we instead be seeking out the extremes - the teeming cities and the unending, open horizons, where unknowability fuels our minds? Is the unknown our friend, and comfort our enemy?

Happy New Year.

AW

The Santa Clause - an eternal mystery solved

I was in a teleconference yesterday where the conversation turned to the frustrating phenomenon of Christmas inertia. You know the problem: Christmas actually lasts approximately two days, and most people have about a week away from work, yet it is completely impossible to achieve anything work-related for a whole month, between 5th December and 4th January. How does this happen?

Then, realisation struck. We noticed that two crucial things happen during that month of crippling inactitvity:

1) public sector bodies (usually, though not this year, thanks to George Osborne) put out a huge raft of competitive tender invitations and then go off on leave, thereby condemning every consultant in the land to burning the midnight oil over Christmas, forgetting to do any Christmas shopping, falling out with loved ones, not being able to contact the potential client to discuss the tender, and resigning themselves to probably not winning the tender in any case;

2) Father Christmas miraculously breaks into every household in the world within about 20 hours*, to deliver gifts and raid the booze cabinet.

(* This calculation is based on the fact that midnight varies around the world by 12 hours and there is an average 8 hours of darkness, so if Father Christmas sets out at sundown from the dateline and travels west he has about 20 hours until the sun comes up again. This does not allow for the fact that he has to start AND finish in the north, where the night is longer, whilst nipping down to Australasia, Southern Africa and South America during their much shorter, summer nighttime. Nor does it consider whether he discriminates against predominantly Muslim countries, where people are less likely to be interested in Father Christmas and booze cabinets will be few and far between. I am not a mathematician and will not be held responsible for inaccuracies in this calculation.)

These two observations provide incontrovertible, empirical evidence that Father Christmas and the Government are colluding in the annual implementation of a cruel and cunning manipulation of time-energy. This works by stopping everyone - except consultants and Father Christmas - in their tracks, using a bizarre formula combining gravity and cryogenics. People continue to eat, drink and shop, but are otherwise completely immobilised and are unaware that time has ceased to pass. The energy embodied in their eating, drinking and shopping is syphoned off to fuel Father Christmas's mammoth fleet of hovercraft, which set out across the globe on a month long endeavour to distribute gifts and gather up booze. When this work is done, time restarts, people find themselves swamped in wrapping paper and family discord, and civil servants return to work to find reams of verbose tender submissions stopping up draughts in their offices.

The question is, does the fact that we have stumbled across the solution to this eternal mystery mean we can, or should, prevent from happening again?

No-one visiting Sheffield over the past year or so will have failed to notice the giant Ferris/hamster wheel rotating slowly at the top of Fargate (just across from the Town Hall). Despite being a hilly enough city that the top of the wheel is several hundred feet lower than the view from my garden, Sheffield dared not be left off the list of British cities hosting a big wheel. I never went on it, because for me it wasn't worth several pounds to spend a couple of minutes up amongst the city centre rooftops accompanied by a running commentary....but I'm sure some people enjoyed it.

Last week I noticed that the wheel was being dismantled, presumably to be reassembled in some other lucky town, or possibly a victim of the public sector cuts. ("Wheel latest victim of cuts" would be an amusing local newspaper headline.) This did not stir much emotion either way for me, though on balance I decided it would be nice to have the big space at the top of Fargate back.

Today, however, an altogether more bizarre structure has appeared in its place, similarly fenced off from reality. It is a cone, about 30 feet across at the base and as tall as the surrounding buildings, covered in coniferous leaves, with a doorway at the bottom labelled "Santa's Grotto". I looks a little as if someone has indulged in a controversial, pacifist art project to temporarily camouflage a war memorial.

Santa Claus troubles me at the best of times. I vividly remember concluding at five years of age that Father Christmas didn't exist: I'm not questioning that St Niklas of wherever, on whom the Father Christmas legend is based, existed in the past, but I think I always knew the modern, red-coat Santa was a fairytale. My parents didn't try to persuade me otherwise, though for those first few years I did wake to find a sack of goodies had arrived unannounced on Christmas night. Not long after I remember my grandma taking me to a Santa's grotto in the local shopping mall. Firstly it struck me as odd that a stranger in disguise should ask me what I would like for Christmas. I probably requested lego. Even more odd was that he then proceeded to give me something totally different from my request, namely a very shoddy plastic rifle. Why ask me what I wanted if he had no intention of giving it to me? Why give me something I didn't like, and which didn't do anything (it wasn't anything fun, like a water pistol, just a bit of black plastic in the shape of a rifle)? As I look back at this now, I wonder if he was one of these depressed, estranged fathers or out-of-work actors, bitter about the hand life had dealt him, who gave all the kids toy rifles and found great entertainment in the image of dozens of small children running riot in the shopping centre with plastic artillery, like some junior battle re-enactment society. In any case, he wasn't Father Christmas, he was a very naughty boy.

I guess my suspicion of Father Christmas also stems from the fact that, to me, it makes much more sense that gifts would be exchanged between people who know and like each other, rather than being distributed by some abstract benefactor. At school, regular moral assertions from the teachers that it was "better to give than to receive" sat uncomfortably alongside the annual ritual of writing letters to Santa. The flipside to this is, of course, charitable giving, where the giving is done as an abstract concept and the giver's reward is to bask in the glow of their own benificence.

Now, of course, all these mysteries are solved in one fell swoop. All the letter-writing rituals and folklore are part of the conspiracy to keep ordinary people occupied while the incredible time-energy-warp is under way. And Sheffield's giant Grotto structure is, in fact, a gravitational refraction beacon that has been erected, and disguised as an entertaining quasi-natural feature, to facilitate the sucking of energy out of people and into Father Christmas. If we were to take direct action, dismantle the Grotto, poke Father Christmas with a stick through the ticket booth window, and cut down drastically on our eating, drinking and shopping, we just might be able to wrestle December out of his evil grasp.

On the other hand, we could work on tender submissions whilst nibbling mince pies and sipping sherry.

AW.

The heady whiff of nostalgia

In the past two days, I've suddenly been caught up in a whirl of emails from old friends from my time as an architecture student in Newcastle. Some of us haven't seen each other for 15 years, but enough of us still know one or two others that it becomes a bit like 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon - we each know someone who has contact details for people we considered to be long-lost. Now there's talk of a reunion, and I'm getting quite excited by the idea.

The odd thing is, I seem to have been already indulging in nostalgic thoughts for a few weeks. It probably started with tidying the attic and finding stashes of old photographs. The slightly demoralising thing about this was that, for a long time, I considered myself to be a serious photographer, so everywhere I went I took lots of artfully composed pictures of buildings, streetscapes, landscapes, animals, sunsets, interesting roadsigns....you get the drift; and yet it's the badly-lit, alcohol-laden group snapshots of friends that beckon to be kept and treasured. Just as well Facebook didn't exist back then, otherwise my profile might as well have been called "pictures of places I've been to that you might have been to too."

Nostalgia stepped up a gear last week when I paid a final visit to live music at The Grapes, in Sheffield. My own bands have played there many times and I've lost count of the number of times I've lost count of the number of beers I've drunk there of an evening. Live music at The Grapes has not so much been a victim of progress (it has managed to laugh in the face of progress) but of the mundane - a change in the personal circumstances of the owners. Whatever the reasons, a dark room above a slightly seedy pub has long been the best place to see live bands at their most up-close, their most exposed to the audience, and their most captivating. Absolutely everyone who ever played in a band since the 1980s has played The Grapes, and its passing is a very sad moment.

Then came all this reunion stuff. I've long been suspicious of reunions, seeing them as a dangerous mix of finding out how little you actually had in common with people, and competing with them for how successful you've each been in the interim. However, thanks to the modern age of email, social networking etc, we already know what we've all been up to and, hopefully, we're all content with what we've done and happy for the others. And, much more than that, our explosion of emails is full of instant humour and banter, so the ice will be well and truly destroyed by the time we meet. It probably helps that architecture was one of those very intense courses, where for several years we spent more time with these people than with our families, and now, 15 years later, it's still easy to recall an inflexion in a voice, a shared moment of mirth, midnight oil-burning equally suffered and relished.

But perhaps the strangest piece of this nostalgic interlude has been snow-induced. My local neighbourhood is quite high on a hill, and we are in the grip of the biggest pre-Christmas cold snap for about 30 years. We have 15" (nearly 40cm) of snow here, and it keeps on coming. It's wonderfully picturesque, and when I hear someone complaining that it's "horrendous" because they can't dig their car out, I want to subject them to violence. I want to say, for God's sake, unless you're really ill and need the kind of medical attention that this weather obstructs, or you're genuinely poor and can't heat your home, then this is the exact opposite of horrendous. It's a magical, escapist world, where you can skip work, marvel at the snowflakes, throw missiles at your neighbours with impunity and, in the case of the students who live next door to me, ski to lectures.

Walking along the middle of a main road normally in thrall to the cars and buses, and seeing other people do the same, dragging their shopping home on sledges, laughing, hearing a hubbub of conversations because there's no vehicular traffic to drown it out, noticing how frenetically busy the local shops are when no-one can drive to the supermarkets.....It's amazing: all that has to happen is that water falls out of the sky frozen, instead of liquid, and our world is transformed into a magical, picturesque, and virtually car-free idyll. Suddenly, the principal role of men in society is to dig paths through this frozen water to help out old ladies, and play icy games with children and neighbours.

Before I know it, I'm being nostalgic for a time before our time - a world I never knew, where this kind of sociable, communal behaviour was commonplace; where an ASBO was administered with the back of a hand and horse-drawn vehicles used the warmth of the horseshit to de-ice the roads. I'm actually remembering fondly a past that I never experienced, and which probably didn't happen. A past where literacy and good sanitation were bourgeois fripperies, and Britain was a world power.

All because of a drop in temperature. So that's the answer: supporting local shops and services, driving less, being a good neighbour. It doesn't require swathes of policy and public spending, and partnership delivery initiatives, or whatever they'll be called next week. It just requires a massive snow machine.

See you at the sustainability practitioners' reunion dinner. In Lapland.

AW.

Solvitur Ambulando

I came across the Latin phrase "solvitur ambulando" - it is solved by walking - a couple of years ago, and as someone who has always taken pleasure and solace in walking this unsurprisingly had resonance for me. Then I forgot all about it, until this week.

I have often noticed how much better I feel when I am walking fairly long distances quite regularly. As a student in Newcastle I walked 10 miles most days: my flat was 2.5 miles from the university, so I walked there and back for lectures and then usually again to socialise in the evening. Most weekends a friend and I would go to the Coast or up to Hadrian's Wall, and walk then too. I had a succession of pairs of Dr Martens boots that clocked up several thousand miles each. I have never been fitter, nor more relaxed, before or since.

Back then I took it for granted: walking was a free mode of transport, and it was just something I did without really noticing. I only really noticed the magical powers of walking a few years later, when it played a big part in digging me out of an emotional trench. Since then I have had phases of walking every day, and phases when the habit has slipped, but I have absolutely no doubt that walking is pivotal to both my physical fitness and my mental wellbeing. I have noticed specific - and financially costable - benefits too: aside from saving on bus fares, I've noticed that a number of skeletal and nerve pains that normally put me on the physiotherapist's couch every few months almost vanish once I'm walking on average more than about 3 or 4 miles a day.

There is another huge advantage for me, which is that walking burns off the calories and toxins that characterise two of my other great loves, wine and cheese, both of which I consume to levels many people would think excessive.

Of course, not everyone can be expected to enjoy walking, but most people must have a comparable source of joy. There is quite a bit of news at the moment about Government trying to utilise an Index of Happiness. This is meeting with a mix of frustration from those who have long argued that happiness cannot be measured by economic indicators, and probably cannot - or should not - be quantified; and ridicule from those who think it all hippy nonsense. The latter group do have a point, though it pains me to say it, because of well-established correlations between relative income levels and key social indicators like access to health and education. In other words, the ability to pay for stuff is certainly a quality of life issue.

In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that "solvitur ambulando" could lead us to a pretty straightforward measure of happiness. Consider these two questions:

What is the thing in life you most enjoy doing?

What prevents you from doing this as much/often as you'd like?

Answering these questions wouldn't give a perfect measure of happiness, because having too much opportunity to do something you enjoy would tend to devalue it. Nevertheless, the more you think about them, the more useful these questions are. So long as you answer the questions honestly, they will reveal how you might wish to change your life to achieve greater happiness. For example, you might really enjoy making vault-loads of money, spending more time with your children, spending less time with your children, having casual affairs, getting drunk, writing poetry, raising money for charity, training for an Olympic gold medal, growing vegetables, foxhunting......The questions make no moral assumption about whether what gives you pleasure is wholesome or despicable, lucrative or frivolous. They can also get right to the heart of the barriers to your happiness, be they lack of time, lack of money, health problems, relationships, the postcode lottery or even, perhaps, the law.

Worth bearing in mind, before making a judgement about the legality of your preferred activity, that walking is not always legal (the Mass Trespass of 1926 being a notably unlawful stroll in the countryside), and much social progress has been made through protest, rebellion and direct action.

It is solved by walking.

AW.

Naked Ambition, or, “the future of sustainable access to airports”

I apologise in advance that this blog entry will probably give you more of an insight than you wished for into the inner workings of my brain....

We've all had those naked dreams: the ones where one minute you're minding your own business, doing normal things, and the next minute you discover you're naked, in public. You desperately attempt to avoid eye-contact with the disapproving throng, cover your embarrassment with a newspaper or, worse, a business card, and make a carefully timed dash for somewhere more secluded.

Quite how running as fast as possible would make a naked person stand out less in a crowd than if they sauntered will never be answered. Maybe the idea has infiltrated our subconscious from seeing streakers at sporting events, where speed is of the essence to maximise effect and postpone the inevitable rugby tackle from some burly, heavily-clad police.

Anyway, we've all had those dreams and I am no exception. Except that last night once such dream took an unexpected turn: rather than being ridiculed and mortified, I found, after a few minutes of the usual panic, that I became a cult figure, rather like those naked hikers that keep getting arrested. I still got some verbal abuse, but more often than not I just heard people saying, “Hey look, there's the naked guy”. Viewers of the unbearably popular TV series Friends will be relieved to hear that the word 'ugly' did not feature in these exclamations, but I won't take that personally either way.

Then came the really interesting and, I have to say, quite inspired part of the dream. I decided to use my new-found notoriety to do some good in the world - “put something back” as people often call it. I decided to set up a “pedestrian travel to airports” service, where passengers convene at convenient, city centre locations like bus stations or libraries, and are then escorted on foot to the local airport. By a naked man. Naturally, there was a small charge for this service, but think of all those car journeys to airports that could be saved, and all those tonnes of carbon emissions!

Of course, in the tradition of dreams, once the slightly unreal situation has been set up, the dreamer becomes an impartial observer, rather than a participant. So picture, if you will, the following scene. A sizeable group of sizeable American tourists has gathered at King's Cross station in London, ready to try out the new “Streakerbus” service that has started up between there and London Stansted Airport, from where they hope to fly to the next destination on their European tour. The service was recommended by Conde Naste as a 'uniquely, quintessentially English ideas that is right up-to-date in its attitude to environmental responsibility, yet steeped in a thousand years of travel history'. The tourists are mildly perplexed to find that their guide is stark naked, but after four days in London, little surprises them any more except the price of a bagel.

As the journey progresses, of course, they find that it is an epic adventure with a surprise at every turn. London Stansted turns out, inexplicably, to be nowhere near London, England, and after six days they're still walking. Since they turned off Holloway Road they haven't seen another coffee shop, nor even a fish and chip shop, so they're feeling quite disorientated. The small, plastic wheels on their large suitcases proved not to be up to the journey, and the convoy has now been joined by a small army of Big Issue vendors and out-of-work civil servants, recruited from outside Stoke Newington Job Centre, who are now acting as sherpas, carrying the suitcases on trolleys fashioned from stolen bicycles. When the main roads become too dangerous for such a modern-day caravan, the group takes to some long-distance footpaths along the valley of the River Lee, much of which is quite marshy, and some of the suitcases, plus one particularly cumbersome tourist, have to be abandoned for the greater good.

All the while, their pasty-fleshed guide marches along cheerily, pausing occasionally to extract a pebble from between his toes.

Eventually, after being thrown out of a youth hostel in Bishop's Stortford for being unfeasibly dirty and smelly, the now bedraggled, but substantially lighter, party of American tourists arrives at Stansted Airport. They are five days late for their flight, one person is missing, their sartorial elegance leaves much to be desired, they are totally disorientated (or, their own words, disoriented) and so desperate for caffeine that they might cause an international incident at any moment. In fact, they have all this in common with the rest of the passengers at check-in (apart from the Saudi-Arabians, who are immaculate, but rarely seen at Stansted) though they have brought with them a tale of an experience they'll never forget, but which no-one else will believe.

No wonder it was recommended by Conde Naste.

AW.

The Devil travels by bus

It was one of the few occasions when I wished I was a Tweeter.

I was on the bus, and we passed the front of Primark, where two police cars were positioned like beached whales on the pavement, their lights flashing, right against the shop's entrance doors. Two girls of about 19 were sitting immediately behind me and one said to the other, in a thick, Sheffield brogue, "Eh up, someone's bought summat again." The mixture of spontaneous wit and social commentary prompted me to text details of this event to my wife, and then to another friend. My wife's phone was switched off. The friend, however, replied quickly: "Bus?!!! That's the devil's mode of transport!"

"But the devil has the best tunes," I replied, reminding him of Lucifer's fabled good taste. I also hear that the devil wears Prada, which only goes to confirm that he hasn't shared a bus with me for some time.

As I mulled over this brief event, it occurred to me how splendid, and funny, it would be if the public service bus really was the devil's favoured mode of travel. A bus's average speed is about 7mph (11kph) so Satan's progress around the world would be pretty pitiful, certainly compared to that of Santa Claus - although this would at least give him plenty of time to weave his evil web around shopping-weary city folk. So one might argue that Old Nick was not hell-bent on efficiency. On the other hand, his reputation for suave moves and musical discernment might lend a much-needed air of coolness and style to a maligned means of movement. "As seen in Hell". "Devil-Endorsed". "Black Magic Bus". The advertising slogans would come thick and fast, a bit like buses about 30 minutes after the rush hour has subsided.

This same bus trip was also a revelation for me on another front. Finally, after at least two years of being vaguely aware of the facility, I registered that the bus stop I was waiting at was inviting me to send its identification number in a text message, whereby I could get real time bus times. So I did. Initially I was confused by a list of 5 buses all bearing the same destination and shown as being "1 minute, 1 minute, 1 minute, 1 minute and 17 minutes away", respectively. However, when four buses arrived in convoy I realised the uncanny accuracy of the text service, and swore to use it regularly. Once I know how long it takes me to walk to a given bus stop, and I have stored the bus stop's ID number in my phone, I need never miss a bus again. So long as my phone has a signal, which it often doesn't.

Actually, my nearest bus stop is directly underneath a mobile phone mast, and next-door to a funeral parlour. So maybe the devil has also sussed how not to miss his bus.

I did once travel by bus through a housing estate in a New Town in Scotland, which I believe is where the term 'Godforesaken' was originally coined, and there were a number of people using that bus whose vitality was in some doubt. There is also the Greyhound bus in the excellent film Ghostworld, which may or may not be providing a shuttle service between this life and another. So maybe there is some mileage in this Devil-bus theory.

In any case, I'm a big fan of integrated transport. Wherever you're heading, missed connections are a pergatory best-avoided. As is the P&O Hull-Rotterdam ferry, but that's another story....

AW.

Circular Arguments

I bumped into an acquaintance this week who asked me to Blog more often. Buoyed up by the idea that someone out there might actually be reading this, I decided to oblige....

"This is a city built on the circular. So if you want to understand it, you have to get into that circular frame of mind. And that frame of mind is everywhere...... You refer to others in the same circle. You don't think outside the circle."

(Angus Lordie in "The World According to Bertie", by Alexander McCall Smith.

We often find ourselves saying, "We've come full circle". Indeed, it's a phrase that comes around again and again. Circles are mathematically pure, structurally strong, visually appealing. Circles are socially both inclusive and exclusive: "He mixes in certain circles".

In the worlds of design and systems, circles represent a more highly-evolved condition than lines. Closed-loop systems and feedbacks make for more efficient, more responsive operation - and this tends to be better for sustainability, too. A linear system has a productive output and a waste output, but in a closed-loop system there is, in theory at least, no waste.

Of course, there is also a negative language to contend with in terms of management and decision-making: "We're just going round in circles". "We're back where we started". "This is a circular argument". Linguistically we're making an assumption that, if we have gone around in a circle, we haven't made any progress.

Perhaps the problem is that we're getting hung up on travelling IN A CIRCULAR MOTION, whereas we should be thinking about travelling IN A CIRCULAR ENVIRONMENT. The area of land bounded by the M25 motorway is infinitely more varied and interesting than being on the road itself (although there is a whole other essay half-written in my head about roads....that's for another day). A circular walk is attractive over a point-to-point walk for three reasons: one, you know that there is your home, a railway station or a pub at both the start and end of it; two, you get to travel through places en route; three, you never have to turn back on yourself in order to reach your destination. It isn't the circular line itself that is of interest, but the sights, sounds and smells that lie either side of the line. In that example, it's worth noting that we can be just as interested in what is outside the circle as what's inside it or, put another way, what it is that the circle is travelling through.

We know that the world is round and that the universe is governed by circular forces. We are also familiar with the argument that life is not linear, but circular (we do call it a life-cycle, after all), and we can extrapolate from that that time is also circular. So, in terms of aspiring to make progress, in society, art, science, politics, whatever, the question we should really be asking is, "How do we want this to look next time it comes around?"

In the sphere of project management (note cunning use of circular language), it would be particularly interesting to move from linear planning to circular planning. Imagine a Gant Chart (sorry, I know, I loathe them too) where the end of the chart is actually back at the beginning. Yes, it would be possible to draw a circular Gant Chart, but would it be useful? We'd have to try it, to find out. More importantly, we could ask these questions:

1. Are we bound to travel all the way around the circle in order to complete the project, or can we make shortcuts within the circle?

2. If different project partners need to be at the same place in/on the circle at the same time, are there different arcs they could take that would intersect at the right points?

3. What is the operational landscape (time, resources, people, decisions) that the circle is travelling through?

4. What happens if someone goes off at a tangent?

5. How do we expect the start/end point to have changed when we get back there?

6. Do we plan to go round again?

This week'd homework is to try applying circular project planning to something you're currently working on. I'll see you back here next week, to find out how you got on.

AW

The Rebellious Ethic of Sustainability, or 'The Happy Addict'

I was reading recently an article from the Guardian by Adam Philips, a child psychologist, about the pursuit of happiness. What children need, he argues, is not to be happy but to be absorbed: happiness prevails when children are absorbed and interested in what they're doing.

Philips also recounts the story of a young patient who had been torturing animals. The child said that the power this gave him over the creatures made him feel really, momentarily alive - and he associated this ephemeral, horrifying feeling of vitality with happiness. And if we're honest, we can all recall a time of being very angry with someone or something, when the whole world takes on a peculiar intensity.

Mercifully, being angry doesn't make me happy. Nevertheless it is possible to understand how that fleeting intensity might be addictive. In fact, one could argue that all addictions are addictions to momentary experience and that, therefore, momentary experience is the element of the human condition that is addictive. Now here's a challenge: name a pursuit that generates momentary experience that is not, in some way or other, mortally (or morally) dangerous.

Is it the case that the whole point of momentary experience is that it blanks out any consideration of the past or future, and therefore of consequence? Are humans programmed to crave moments in life when they can forget about consequence, and escape the responsibilities of knowledge?

If we define 'functioning addicts' as those who are aware of their addiction, then these are people who utilise the momentary experience as escapism that helps them balance or manage the other, responsible side of their lives that faces up to its consequences. Obviously there is a danger that the pleasure of the escape becomes more attractive, on balance, than the alternative rewards of being in control, respected, responsible and alert to others' concerns. But so long as both aspects have comparable, complementary attractions, then there need be nothing wrong with being a functioning addict.

The trouble is, of course, that society appeals to people to limit their addictive habits by appealing to them to 'take responsibility' - for the effects they have on their health, relationships, and the dangers they pose to themselves and others. Yet often it is the burden of responsibility that the addict is running from. The trick, therefore, is surely not increase people's fears of what happens when they don't behave responsibly, but to make the responsible aspect of their lives a more attractive place to be, so that they instinctively re-balance in the right direction.

The odds are stacked against this being achievable. Not only is 'responsible life' a fairly troublesome place for many people, delaing with financial worries, inadequate housing, unruly children, sick relatives and so on, but the same political and media circus that criticises our irresponsibility also contrives to make the responsible world seem so fractious, tense, gloomy and ultimately doomed that there's very little temptation to get any more involved in it than we already are.

Surely this comes back to Adam Philips's happiness argument. Making the responsible world a happy place might be unrealistic, but making it an interesting place must be entirely possible. If we found living responsibly, empathically and sustainably an interesting, absorbing activity, instead of a chore, then we'd want to spend more time doing it.

Recently a commentator drew on the great environmentalist and technophile Douglas Adams, in countering claims that online social networking was destroying meaningful communication. This argument ran that for a relatively short period of humanity communication has been a one-way street, in which the printing, radio and television ages have broadcast messages to anyone who will listen, but done very little listening in return. I'm doing this now: I have no idea whether anyone will ever read this! What's more, professional journalists always tend to choose their own version of reality and find research and opinion to back it up. By contrast, for all its amateurism, social networking represents the globalisation of one-to-one and many-to-many conversations, with a whole new demand for self-regulating etiquette that people are clumsily learning from scratch without teachers or precedent. And they're finding it absorbing, and yes, addictive.

Whenever a social networking site loses its magic, it happens because the 'broadcasters' - advertisers, record companies, news corporations, have taken over the space that site occupies in people's lives. The public simply zone out and move onto another network.

Uncomfortable though this may be, especially for professionals, the solutions to so many big, intractable challenges, such as fragmented societies, terrorism, unsustainability, anti-social behaviour, may well lie in a world of uncontrolled conversations, momentary experience and addiction. The conversations in social networking cover the full range of views, from cringingly right-on to unpalatably right-wing, from politically correct to offensively hilarious. But I'm pretty sure one factor unifying them all will be a disdain for authority. Most people are quietly rebellious.

Making the world sustainable is not about promoting responsible, clean, well-mannered living. To live more sustainably, more healthily, more ethically, more frugally: these need to be the stuff of everyday acts of quiet rebellion and casual addiction. That is where fun, friendship, creativity and entrepreneurism are born. Ants can be well-organised, but only humans can enjoy being rebellious.

Psychocycle

I've recently become a cyclist. By this I mean that although I've probably owned one bike or another, on and off, for about half my adult life, I've never used one as a mode of regular transport until the last couple of months. My motivations were partly about getting more exercise, but also very practical. I have been making regular journeys recently for which bike is definitely the best option: walking takes too long, the bus is no quicker and costs a fortune, driving means finding somewhere to park.

Today the word 'psychogeography' came back to me via the radio, and it's timely, because there's definitely a psychogeography for each mode of travel. Cycling puts you in curious netherworld between pedestrians and drivers. Neither pavements nor roads are particularly well-suited to cycling, and the best way to negotiate a city by bike is to use bits of both. You can plod around with and between pedestrians, or put your foot down and keep up with the belching traffic. You have to be on high alert. There is always a risk that drivers won't make allowances for you, but a much greater tendency for pedestrians not to notice you and walk out in front of you, so you have to do all the noticing. More specifically, you learn a new knowledge of your city based on which gear to be in for which gradient, which streets to avoid because they're too steep to climb, where the dropped kerbs are, where the potentially capsizing potholes are, which traffic lights to approach slowly and which to hurtle towards at full tilt, and so on. Gradually you realise that you carry different mental maps of the same place, depending on the mode of travel you happen to be using at the time.

Today's really interesting experience has been going back to walking for a day, after several days of cycling. Suddenly it dawns on you that while walking is mode of travel, it is also a way of living - in a way that no other mode can really live up to - because only when you're walking can you really notice the world around you as space, rather than as route. You can observe, for example, how the demolition of a building has opened up a new vista of a street, and let a little extra light into that part of the city. That sets you off wondering what will happen to the demolition site. The law of averages suggests that within a few months there'll be a building of even less architectural merit than its predecessor and with at least as much skill at cutting out views and light. What if it were remodelled as a public space? What would the space be used for? How would the city make such a space an economically viable proposition? Would it make the city a better, more civilised place, or would it become a haven for shabby fellows contemplating their fate with a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine? Is building more shiny buildings, hiring armies of high-visibility 'city ambassadors' and imposing no-drink zones really an effective way to treat the Buckfasters?

Back to the reassuring whirr of chains, gears and tyres. Enough contemplation.

AW.

Youth of today, eh?

I'm currently reading Consumer Kids: how big business is grooming our children for profit, by Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn. The premise is that a range of companies selling things kids tend to like, for example sugary foods, clothes and computer games are being ever more inventive in worming their way into children's lives. Particularly useful to them seems to be developing loyalty to brands as soon as, or even before, children become consumers, so that these early habits continue to influence their buying choices when they get older.

It's entirely plausible and, I have no doubt, true. The bit that trouble me is, can we say for sure if this is a good, bad, or indifferent development in society?

The authors seem confident that it's a bad idea to condition children so early as consumers. But what if we were conditioning them to be sustainable consumers? Surely it's the principle that sustainability thinkers have been pushing for years. Get kids into the idea that wasteful products, excessive food miles, over-packaging and so on are bad things, and recycling, renewable energy and local produce are good things, and walking and cycling are cooler than driving. Then these values will stay with them as they grow up and gradually society will become more sustainable on a generational basis. Furthermore, they can pester their parents and grandparents to be more sustainable too. Good? Good.

So here's the rub: if the brainwashing of children was being pursued for morally splendid consumer choices, we'd probably be quite relaxed. But consumer choices that skirt the suburbs of repugnance are highly lucrative, and therefore are the ones more prone to trying out a spot of expensive subliminal messaging. In other words, we're making a value judgement as to what children should be brainwashed about, rather than whether or not brainwashing is a good idea.

I'm not sure it stacks up. I'll just get another [insert branded sugary drink here] and then see if I can work it out.

AW.

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.