Quite Random

Bugger.

Friday, and another week grinds to a close. I’m mystified by the same problem Adrianne’s having – my trousers have all shrunk. My 501s are hanging in there, but I had a very depressing moment the other day when I put on my North Face trousers, the ones I wore throughout 2005, and when I finally relaxed, the popper popped open and my gut, Homer Simpson-like, reinflated, jiggled, and settled. Shit. Too much booze, too much chocolate, not enough doing energetic stuff. I’m drifting, as Marwood put it, into the arena of the unwell. OK, I haven’t broken my ankle or anything, I just feel turgid.

At home we waste food on a scale I haven’t achieved in several years. Buying food in fits and spurts, poor meal planning, taking things out to defrost before throwing them away a few days later, letting things dry out in the fridge, cooking too much, leaving leftovers, buying takeaways. I hate it. I could control my consumption living on my own, but sharing with someone else hasn’t made it as easy, and perfectly good food keeps ending up in the bin. It’s heartbreaking, I have got into bad habits, and I have to stop it.

Humans are eating the planet. There are currently six and a half billion of us, increasing to nine and a half billion in the next forty to fifty years. Yes. Within your lifetime, if you’re lucky, there will be just under fifty percent more people on the planet than there are now. Food production is already responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than anything else, from food processing and packaging to agricultural production and livestock emissions, and yet food production is contributing to climate change that will decimate agriculture in many parts of the world.

I like not to get too carried away with alarmist predictions for the future, but really, we’re screwed. Soylent Green, anyone?

Give me strength!

I really want to do this course. I really do find it interesting. I really, really want a change of direction in my life, away from making pointless bloody websites and indulging the every whim of lunatics, and towards doing something exciting and worthwhile. This matters to me, and apart from anything else I’ve paid good money to do this course and spent a lot of time on it already.

So why the chuffing hell can’t I concentrate on college work? Here I am blogging about it, no problem at all typing out how pissed off I am about being unable to concentrate, and yet all I have to actually do today is type something about the effects of excess plant nutrients on a watercourse ecosystem.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the shit seems to hit the fan whenever I have an assignment due. Last time – moving house, succession of friends experiencing personal turmoil, bout of minor depression. This time, close relative breaking an ankle and a stinking cold. Next time, who knows – war with Iran, hepatitis and an alien invasion?

As if that’s not bad enough, a cat just ricoched off the desk. I think it was after attention, however it landed on an item of my course material which acted as a non-stick device, and the cat slid off backwards as quickly as it appeared.

So, a new idea. Reverse psychology. I’m going to blog about the effects of excess plant nutrients on a watercourse ecosystem. Ha! brain, not so sodding clever now, are we?

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Get out of the Tube

A big problem with travel in London is that many people don’t need to take half the journeys they do using public transport, particularly the Tube.

At weekends, the Piccadilly Line is choked with tourist traffic moving around the West End and Covent Garden. The front end of some Tube trains is practically in the next station before the back end has left the last one, and some stations are mere minutes away from each other by foot, but those unfamiliar with using alternative routes stick to the Tube despite congestion, overcrowding, and in the summer, dizzying heat. In one day in early December 2006, the London Underground network carried four million people, and the average almost every day is three million. That’s a billion or so noisy iPods, smelly armpits and bad tempers every year. Walking has got to be a more attractive option – cheaper, healthier, less stressful by far, and London is a damn site better looking when you’re not thirty feet underground.

The Real Underground map illustrates clearly that the Tube Map everybody knows isn’t an accurate representation of the geographical arrangement or distance of stations (it’s basically a circuit diagram, having originally been designed by engineering draughtsman Harry Beck in 1933). Fortunately, maps such as the one on the right (see shortwalk.blog.co.uk for more info) provide information on the walking times between stations, printed versions are available providing walking routes as alternatives to taking the Tube, and Walkit.com provides a fantastic resource for planning walking routes in London.

TfL’s Journey Planner also provides some useful information on getting from A to B, including walking some parts of the way, but doesn’t focus on walking, or cycling, and won’t give routes using exclusively either mode - apparently, TfL haven’t been overly keen on supporting development of Walk It - digital-lifestyles.info quotes a TfL official as saying that it would be “counter-productive to invest public money in another journey planning tool specifically for walking”.

See also Going Underground, Underground Etiquette, and the London Underground song (NSFW lyrics).

Carbon Neutral with that?

Lucy Siegle points out in today’s Observer that everything is going ‘carbon neutral’. Offset anything from your flight abroad to your Porsche and even your Mother’s Day flowers.

Welcome to the latest new money-spinning venture - and while we’re on the subject, damn it and why didn’t I think of getting into this sooner? – carbon offsetting.

The idea is really very simple. People want to be able to continue doing things exactly as they always have, still wish to be able to fly abroad, still wish to drive large cars five minutes to the supermarket - so why not offer to alleviate any pangs of guilt they might be experiencing by taking money from them and promising to remove their CO2 emissions? Brilliant. No work involved, bung a bit of money at the problem and away it goes.

Except it doesn’t work, at least for the most part. Siegle points out that only four companies conform to the Gold Standard for carbon credits:

• Pure
• Carbon Offsets
• Global Cool
• Equiclimate

Some carbon offsetting companies plant a tree for you somewhere in Wiltshire, and you have to assume that the tree grows to adulthood and eventually offsets all of the CO2 emissions you hoped it would. At the same time (and I speak from experience) they are quite likely to try and flog you a commemorative keyring, luggage tag and certificate – so before you know it, one short haul flight within Europe, and you have paid fifteen pounds for a bunch of tat and the promise of a carbon neutral holiday. All this, and the company has done nothing whatsoever to counteract pollution from businesses.

The companies listed above don’t even plant trees. They sponsor renewable energy initiatives in places from the UK to India and Brazil, and buy and retire credits from emissions trading programs, which in effect restricts the right of polluting companies to even pollute in the first place.

Monday bullets

All unrelated…

• To give the fox in my garden a glossy coat, I should feed her Marmite sandwiches with garlic.
• Sky TV shows so many adverts, they should pay me to watch.
• With Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai just having been arrested and beaten by police, it is all the more exciting and timely to be meeting the human rights campaigner who has twice performed a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe, and been beaten for it himself – I’m looking forward to meeting Peter Tatchell on Thursday evening, and if you’re interested in human rights and green issues, you should come too.