This weekend I'm away in a westerly direction to meet up with a few chums. It's a four hour drive there, probably more since it involves the Third Circle Of Hell, otherwise known as the M25 Orbital Motorway, but it should be okay.

I can't think of the name of the city I'm going to without thinking of an ancient episode of the comic strip Finbarr Saunders And His Double Entendres:

Finbarr's mother is discussing how her hairdresser's business is expanding. "She's about to open branches in Portishead, Keynsham, Avonmouth and Nailsea."

Mr Gimlet replies: "Ooh, she must be really big in the Bristol area."

[explanation if you really need it]

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Last night's telly: Who Killed The Honey Bee? [watch again through that link: does it work for non-UK people?] charting the sad decline of bees through "colony collapse disorder", and the possible horrendous knock-on-effect on agriculture, because of pollution, mites and other changes to the environment.

Most surprising fact was how it seems that bees now do better in an urban environment, right next to all that car pollution but also with a variety of plants in people's gardens and on waste areas, than they do in the mono-culture one-plant-for-miles of farming areas.

There's lessons to be learned here about diversity as much as anything else. Touching on what I said the other day about rapeseed, it's not the plant itself that's the problem, it's that there's so froggin' much of it that my nose is utterly overwhelmed.

The need for diversity also applies as much in the "human" humanities – sociology, psychology, applied political philosophy, and anthropology – as it does in economics or agriculture, but that's another forty-eight entries in itself…

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"I hate you!" said V. as I walked in the cafe this lunchtime.

She was of course referring to my hair, which I'd just washed and mostly dried, and I'd popped in to get a coffee with which to sit out in the sunshine and light breeze to finish it off.

"You're jealous of that?" I replied. "Wait 'til you see my legs…."

Odd, that. As I walked this morning to get a proper newspaper [having finally got fed up with either lies-tits-and-Amy-Sodding-Winehouse or "Beccles man slightly singed in Kenyan petrol fireball massacre" parochialism], along where the river runs through town, I noticed that the ducks seemed slightly bigger than usual.

Not quite this big, though.

On closer examination, though, it turned out that they weren't bigger; they were just four feet closer than they should have been, thanks to the swollen water level, which lapped at about eight inches below where it would flood the road itself.

It's not quite time for lifejackets and ark-building-and two-of-each-animal-gathering¹ - my little house is about another five feet above that road level, so it'd take much more of a rise before I was directly affected.

But apparently this is widespread across Eastern England: and drivers are being asked not to venture out unless absolutely necessary in othersuffolktownwotIworkin, which gives me a rather nice excuse to stay home and put my feet up.

East Anglia is fairly notorious for floods – people of a certain age still talk in hushed tones about 1953 here – and it's only getting worse as sea levels rise and this part of England sinks. There's massive coastal erosion, towns that have totally disappeared, and big rows about which bits of the coastline to protect and which to let go.

[Hey, Mr Government Minister! Looking for somewhere to build two froggin' massive new nuclear power stations because you've frogged up your energy policy over the past twelve years and now it's too late to come up with proper alternatives²? Why not try a fast-eroding and sinking coastline? Who cares if it's underwater in fifty years? You'll be dead and gone by then, right?]

It's not all bad news, though. One of the first towns to go underneath the waves will be Lowestoft.

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Stolen from b3ta's Squishtastic:

…followed closely by…

…funny that, they don't even mention Nicholas Parsons…

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 shoenotes:
1 For a brilliant and bizarre retelling of this story, try Jeanette Winterson's Boating For Beginners.
2 If we'd started twenty years ago when power shortages were first predicted, we could have a massive clean alternative energy infrastructure in place by now. Nobody in power gave a flying shit then, or at all until a couple of years ago. Now we've got to the point where it's too late to for the massive logistics of that kind of project, so we've got two choices: new nuclear build or sitting here hoping Mr Putin doesn't turn the taps off and leave us shivering. The first option looks like the least worst.

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Head-desk-thumping is the order of the day round here at the moment, with the long-expected announcement of a new round of nuclear power station builds in England and Wales¹.

It's the culmination of a ten-year political twatteryship, cooked up by neocon-Blairite policy wonks who know the real reason for this build is to maintain a flow of material for reprocessing in the next round of nuclear missiles, but won't come out and say so.

For ten years this government has known about climate change and the forthcoming shortage of power. Plenty of time to put in other plans – a big efficiency drive, and/or a big renewable programme [not just tinkering around for cosmetic purposes as happens now].

But no, they put off talking about it until now where we have to make the big choice: more nuclear power stations, or more C0₂-puffing gas stations, dependent upon a pipeline straight from Russia – who've already been noted for using gas supply for politics [see Ukraine].

Given those attractive options, I'd prefer not to be Putin's bitch either.

So whilst the nuclear option is, where we are now, the least worst option – and I suspect that opposition won't be as strong as it would have been a decade ago² – someone, somewhere needs to stand up and say "What the froggin' nora have you been doing for the past ten years, you bunch of arsemunchers?"

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Part of me really does want to think "hey, let's apply the cock-up/conspiracy principle³ here; there's no great big plan, it's just they've spent the past ten years going 'ooh, it's okay, we'll think about it later'."

It's very difficult to do that on the above evidence.

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Declared interest: the writer of this blog lives not too far from the two Sizewell nuclear power stations, with a third anticipated soon. He'd much rather not have stupidities like radioactive seagull shit on his doorstep.

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 footfetishnotes:
1 Not Scotland, because the anti-nuclear SNP are in power up there and will block any plans for stations on their side of the border. Time to move north? . Also, Northern Ireland has traditionally not been considered for nuclear power because of the "troubles" – will this change now?
2 Partly from how nuclear has been spun as the "climate-change friendly power", and partly from how some eminent Green-type figures such as James Lovelock have now stated that nuclear is the only option capable of stopping climate change.
3 Also known as Hanlon's Razor: "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". Citizens under the current USA presidency take note…

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I said a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to use this blog more to talk about books and track what I've read and what I'm reading. The result is the Reading List 2008 page, which will be regularly updated and brought to the top of the blog. [I was going to do it as a separate page, but for some reason I can't do a page with comments open on WP, or maybe with this theme. Hmmm...]

I'm certainly not a book reviewer, and since I'm in the shadow of much more in-depth places like Eve's Alexandria I'm hardly going to give you great insights into what these books are like, but I figure one-paragraph reviews won't do any harm.

Any thoughts, recommendations, etc, would be more than welcome¹.

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TV cooks do something not utterly froggin' useless shock! Tonight on Channel 4 there's the first of a few programmes showing you exactly what happens to the animals that'll end up on someone's plate, starting with A Day In A Life Of A Battery Chicken.

Just because I don't eat the flesh, of course, it doesn't mean that I'm immune to involuntary participation in this – just where did the eggs come from in my fried breakfast at the cafe? – so it's not as if I'm sitting on any moral high ground here.

Neither is it that I look down upon flesh-eaters: at least, definitely not those who've seen the processes for themselves and still made the choice to keep eating meat. Nor can one condemn those whose food budgets just won't stretch to organic and free-range alternatives.

But anything which could prompt people to change – even if it's only a few who have the luxury of being able to do so – has got to be a good thing.

Now, after chickens, next comes Guantanamo prisoners…

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 footfetishnote:
1 Subject to the usual criteria; have you read the FAQ?

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More time was wasted yesterday at Toyota whilst they fiddled around with Priscilla's brain – long experience of hanging around psychiatric hospital waiting rooms has taught me to always carry a good book – only to be told after half an hour that they could find no reason why the malfunction light should have come on again, and there was nothing in the computer log to indicate an error condition.¹

It's been re-reset, this time free of charge, with the instruction to come and darken their comfy chairs again should it reappear.

And for the rest of yesterday – no light. Fingers, toes and other appendages crossed…

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It's been fairly amazing to notice how actually very attached I am to my car, and how a £350 bill and three weeks of uncertainty have affected me. Certainly last night was the best mood I've been in for some time.²

As a card-carrying Greenie, I should of course eschew motophilia, pointing to what a love of cars does to ourselves [and not just in environmental terms; anything else which caused over three thousand fatalities a year in the UK would be made illegal immediately].

There are two mitigating factors, though; the first is that I live in a fairly isolated rural town – it'd be two buses, two hours to work, not half an hour; and the second is that as someone who has in the past suffered from the ill effects of isolation leading to agoraphobia, a reliable and quick form of transport remains, in my self-estimation, an essential in keeping up my mental health, at least whilst my "healthy support network" continues to be scattered over a twenty-mile radius³.

I try to be responsible in my usage, and I'm trying to sow the seeds to make that support network more localized, so that there'll be less dependence on Priscilla's little beating pistons. That, though, takes time and effort – again, a side-effect of being in a small town in the middle of nowhere; the opportunities to "press the flesh" and get out into local social interaction are limited… especially when I don't drink.

So I console myself that at least I'm moving in the right direction on this issue, however slowly. Until then, Priscilla is going to remain a large part of my life.

I just hope that sitting around a plastic dealership showroom⁴ doesn't.

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 footfetishnotes:
1 Insert speculation on exactly which version of Windows is installed therein.
2 Or maybe that was just the aftermath of B's brief stopover in the interesting shop on Norwich Road…
3 Or even further if you count Max [which I do].
4 Free coffee, sure. BBCNews24 on in the corner, sure. Mostly attractive staff clicking around in high shoes, sure. It still isn't going to make it a pleasant experience.