James Lovelock Starting the Week January 31, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment, Green in the City , add a commentThanks to Hughes Views, I realise that James Lovelock was on Start the Week on Radio 4 yesterday, and just listened to him. His new book is due out on Thursday, so I’ll be reviewing it in the next couple of weeks.
Lovelock has controversially made the case for nuclear power, and it was interesting to hear him expound on that. His stance seems to be that, given that noone else is trying to do much about climate change we in Britain should do whatever we need to to preserve our civilisation, and so building nuclear power stations (and better flood defences on the Thames) should be top of our priorities, ahead of renewable energy sources, better insulation and all the things I’m always advocating.
When challenged on the safety of nuclear power, he said that on a recent trip to Sellafield he had taken a geiger counter, measured the radiation there and found it to be no worse than in Devon which is, admitedly, an area of fairly high natural radiation. He also pointed out that in the wastelands of Chernobyl, plants are flourishing because humans dare not go there.
I have a lot of faith in Lovelock. He’s always been controversial, and sometimes his statements get seriously misunderstood as with the idea that Gaia theory means that the planet is somehow sentient, so its good to hear him directly. He’s not afraid to take a deeply unpopular position and defend it robustly. And he is sounding a wakeup call that is sorely needed.
I would like to ask him a questions though, and maybe they’ll be addressed in the book.
- Would he eat a salad made from the plants around Chernobyl, or a rabbit stew? Life persists in some very unpleasant places. As he himself has pointed out, what’s good for Gaia isn’t necessarily good for humans.
- Do not reasonable levels of radiation around Sellafield simply mean that, for the moment, the waste storage facility is doing its job? How likely is it that we will be able to keep that facility, or a better one, doing its job for the time it will take the contents to become safe?
If we had an open, transparent nuclear industry that was prepared to explain its actions clearly and assess the risks in a publc forum challenged by the brightest and best engineering minds available, then no doubt most people, including me, would go along with it. Until that unlikely day we are between the devil and, perhaps quite literally, the deep blue sea.
Crocus Quickly
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , add a commentThat was quick. The crocuses I bought at the Columbia Rd Flower Market the other day have flowered and make a lovely display on the bedroom windowsill.
The IT Crowd - Stereotypes January 30, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , add a commentIn a nice bit of marketing, Channel 4 have put the first episode of their sitcom ‘The IT Crowd’ online, so everyone who can work out how to do so can watch it.
The first episodes of these things are often a bit laboured as characters settle into themselves, and this is no exception, but has a few nice lines - the plonker senior manager telling the new hire he always sizes people up by staring at them, the new manager seeing the beautiful view from the top floor before being sent down to the basement - and will no doubt improve with time.
But did they have to make the female character, who is the new manager of the IT Dept, completely ignorant of computing? If the joke had been a Jewish accountant who wouldn’t spend money it couldn’t have been more stereotyped. It will be interesting to see how this develops, but it could easily be very very boring.
Decentralising Electricity Supply January 29, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden, Environment, Green in the City, London , add a commentIt is truly frightening and very sad, all these years after the big campaigns of the seventies and eighties, to see nuclear power being discussed as almost inevitable. How can we contemplate the immorality of foisting our pollution on our children to the 70th and 700th generation? And if the point is to secure the supply against the unreliability of gas supplied from Russia, how can we contemplate centralising supply into a small number of stations vulnerable to terrorist or military attack with consequences which are beyond contemplation?
Unless our quality of life is to reduce drastically, we will continue to use a lot of power for the foreseeable future, and there is no question that the crisis of North Sea gas production and fossil fuel usage is upon us. Camden is contemplating raising it’s heating prices to tenants in communally heated buildings by 58% this year, and no doubt more later. Private consumers are seeing price rises of 40-50% in this year. Some relief then to read in the Guardian yesterday about the idea of microgeneration and decentralising electricity supply. Philobiblion has also picked up on this theme, in the context of a more widely sustainable London.
The full report from Greenpeace, endorsed by Ken Livingstone, makes interesting reading. Essentially, it is proposing the creation of a regulatory environment which promotes the use of microgeneration technologies, owned by households and communities keeping generation close to demand. This has a number of benefits, particularly in reducing the loss of energy in transmission and securing supply by ensuring that a failure of a generator would affect only a small area, perhaps a single house. One of the biggest obstacles is the difficulty in selling locally generated electricity to the suppliers, and a regulation change is needed.
The technologies needed are already in use, and include small wind turbines on the roof, solar panels and, perhaps less sustainably, co-generation with gas boilers. This last makes use of the excess heat created by a boiler to power a stirling engine, which in turn powers a generator. Electricity is used within the house or sold back to the grid at an agreed price, thus using the grid as a type of giant battery. Although, at least at the moment, fossil fuels would be used to power the boiler there is no reason why this could not be powered using biodiesel.
Thinking to my own situation then, what could I do? I live in a building with six other flats, where the freehold is held by Camden Council. There is not much roof space, although a small turbine is certainly a possibility if I could get the neighbours and the council to agree. I could replace my boiler with a combined heat and power unit, though a quick google suggests that most of the commercially available units are intended for rather larger buildings than my flat. It’s a technology worth keeping an eye on though, as with investment prices and capacities may come down. One drawback for me is that I don’t actually have the boiler on very much, and prefer to just put on another jumper.
Possible industrial applications are also interesting. I am currently dealing with the installation of a number of computers into a large datacentre, and we need to make sure that the heat dissipation capacity of the area we’ll be in is enough to handle the large heat output of these servers. Could that heat somehow be harnessed for generation? If so, there are hundreds of co-location centres all over London which may find they’re sitting on an easy way to reduce their power bills.
There is no one answer to the coming fuel crisis and the very present emissions crisis. There are many possibilities, including reducing usage, making usage more efficient, large scale renewables and small scale microgeneration which would hand back control, and indeed security, to households, businesses and communities.
Bookshop Crawl
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden, Reviews , add a commentYesterday, I set out to visit some of my favourite bookshops, looking for a couple of particular volumes, and just to see what I might find. One of the best things about living here is that some of the best bookshops in the world are within an easy walking distance.
First of all, Foyles. This shop is huge and probably has the highest number of titles of any shop in London. Waterstones in Piccadilly is larger, but devotes a lot of space to bestsellers making Foyles is the best place for finding a specific, but obscure, title. I found Brian Hayes ‘Infrastructure’ there, though it’s not so good on over-hyped business books, and I couldn’t find ‘The Little Book that Beat the Market’
Then across the road to Borders, which has good magazines and CDs, though its often quite a mess and the toilets do need serious attention. I found the Little Book there, but decided not to bother and bought Peter Temple’s ‘First Steps in Shares’ which I’ll review in a few days. I’m contemplating self-invested pensions and ISAs, and am thinking about doing a little trading for myself.
Heading back home, I passed by the London Review of Books Bookshop, small but perfectly formed with the most knowledgeable staff in the business. Give them a few obscure clues, and they always seem to know what you’re talking about. If its a wet Sunday afternoon, this is a great place to spend an hour or two, sitting on a chair with a good book that you’ll probably end up buying.
The Waterstones on Gower St, which used to be Dillons, is well worth a stop, if only for the Costa cofee shop in the basement though sadly customers are no longer allowed take in books they haven’t bought. I read Ian McEwen’s Saturday there when I wasn’t working last February, all for the price of a few coffees.
Finally, back to Somers Town for Amnesty International secondhand bookshop, which is always good for a rummage. The donors are often people who are sent review copies, so its not unusual to see a book or at least its proof here before anywhere else. It’s strong on politics, history, fiction and foreign language books, all for no more than half their new price and often a lot less.
Columbia Rd Flower Market
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : London , add a commentEvery time I venture into the East End, I’m amazed at how close it is. From Old St tube, the Columbia Rd flower market is only a short walk past Hoxton and into Shoreditch. Like Somers Town, these areas are very small and densely packed. I’d love to find a map with all the old districts shown rather than the huge boroughs - Somers Town, Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia, Hoxton - all the tiny places which are communities themselves. Perhaps I should have called this blog Somers Town Lady.
I digress.
The venture to parts east was to see the Sunday morning plant and flower market in Columbia Rd. Owning a first floor flat means I’m not much into gardening myself, though my window boxes are doing just fine, and mean I’ve somewhere to grow a few herbs and grass for the cat. The flower market is a treat, and the whole area a wee gem of little shops, cafes and tiny streets. At this time of the year, there are lots of bulbs, just sprouting, which is great if you’ve not planted any out yourself. I bought a rather elegant array of croci in a metal watering can, which should look good on the bedroom windowsill in a few weeks time.
Quoted in the Guardian January 28, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , add a commentCertainly not me, but the gentleman behind Hughes Views which is rather impressive. I have a couple of little ambitions for this blog, and my writing, in 2006. If I put them down here, I’m much more likely to put some effort into achieving them!
Firstly, with this blog, I want to find my voice here, sustain 100 readers a day and get quoted in a quality daily. At the moment, its hitting about 20, which rather surprised me because I hadn’t expected that many so quickly. I’ve done a little bit of promotion through London Bloggers, and Tim Worstall kindly featured me on the day I got 36. My buddies over at Last Thursday have had a few peeks as well. I need to think a little more about the areas to concentrate on in here, and whether I should let it stay a miscellany, or concentrate on one particular area. I’m rather enjoying trying to blog every day, and I doubt I could do that with only one or two themes, so it will probably remain a grab-bag for a while.
Secondly, I’m going to start a second blog, to do with my business. I like to keep the two separate, because of the google effect of having a very unusual spelling for my name, which is why this one is semi-anonymous. The business blog will concentrate on my project management work in information technology, and probably be once or twice a week, to build up a portfolio of small articles to show off my deep understanding of the area and fabulous professionalism 
Thirdly, I’m determined to get published in the dead-tree press somehow. At the moment, I’m aiming for Smoke, A London Peculiar, and will see from there.
Watch this space.
A weekend in Malta
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany, Travel , add a commentMy favourite client decided I needed to do a site visit to Malta, and as a Kiwi suffering badly from mid-winter sun deprivation, who was I to say no? I stayed on over the weekend, to have a bit of a look around at one of the very few European Mediterranean countries I’ve not been to.
It’s always interesting to visit places which attract huge numbers of tourists in the summer during January when its cold and wet, and the tourists few and far between. Malta is an interesting place for a city break though, and by no means reliant on its beaches for its attractions.
Valletta must be the smallest capital city in the world, in one of the smallest sovereign nations. The walled city itself is tiny, and full of well-organised streets on a grid rather than the maze similar towns tend to be, and wandering around it in a morning is quite easy. There are plenty of distractions though, particularly the wonderfully Hapsburg Cafe Cordina, with a fabulous range of cakes and pastries, excellent coffees and an elaborately painted ceiling. Avoid the Knights Hospitallier exhibition though, especially in January when there are no other tourists around and its rather creepy down in the tunnels below the old hospital, with dim lighting and graphic diaoramas of the results of late medieval warfare.
Malta is fascinating because it has been inhabited for so long, and layer upon layer of history has settled into the limestone which covers the island. Two of the earliest sights were the highlight of my weekend. The Hypogeum was carved out of the rock between 3600 and 2400 BC, and goes down about 10M, in a way a Stonehenge in reverse. I’m intrigued by the idea that people came to this little place for about 1200 years, burying their dead and who knows what else. It’s very carefully protected, and only 80 tourists are allowed to go through each day, so book well before you arrive in Malta if you’re going in the summer.
On Sunday, I hired a car and risked the narrow, flooded, potholed roads to get to the temples at Hagar Qim and Mjandra, in the South of the island. By then the weather had cleared up, and I had a happy afternoon exploring the stones in the sunshine. It must be risky with such delicate monuments, but being able to get close to the stones, see inside and touch them makes all the difference.
I presume it is because of the limestone that these monuments were built, and still exist. There’s a particularly soft limestone here which is fairly easy to work, so although building these must have been a huge task, it would not be an overwhelming one. The stone was probably quarried locally.
Finally, Mdina, the ‘Silent City’. This tiny walled city was the capital of Malta until the Knights of St John built Valletta, and is still the archbishop’s seat as well as the home of members of the island’s aristocracy. On Saturday night, my colleague took my for dinner at the Medina Restuarant where we had an excellent meal in an old palace. The creme caramel came in slices, rather than those mean little single servings which are far more common, and the scallops were the best I’ve had in a long time.
My lasting impressions of Malta are of excellent food, welcoming people, solid rock built forts, churchs and neolithic ruins, and terrible roads.
Happy Chinese New Year, Oxford Circus January 26, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , add a commentTired and crowded on the tube, I really can’t be bothered getting out and going to the party in the pub near Oxford Circus. Just as the doors are about to close, something makes me decide to do it anyway, and I get off the train. Up out of the station, hitting the cold night air and there, in the middle of Oxford Circus are huge beautiful red Chinese lanterns. They lighten my heart like the Christmas lights of a month ago, and I have a fantastic evening.
Go see - they’re wonderful.
Aurora, just off Aldwych January 25, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Cafes & Restaurants , add a commentSometimes I just feel like a steak, veges and a glass or two of red wine. Tonight was one of those nights, and I was down by Aldwych so popped into the Ristorante Aurora, a fairly typical Brit-Italian. The downstairs is non-smoking, which doesn’t always happen in these kind of places and is very welcome when it does. Pepper fillet steak, beans and broccoli with a couple of glasses of vino de la casa was reasonably well done, but £24 seems a bit over the top for this.
Its not a bad bet if you’re heading for the theatre or in the area, but there are probably better and cheaper around.
