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.