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.