To blog or not to blog

One of my biggest regrets in life is that I wasn’t aware of the Apollo moon landings. I’d just turned two at the time and have very few recollections from that period of my life, well beyond a sticker of The Magic Roundabout on the end of my cot and Mum’s very large Swiss Cheese plant which had delusions of becoming a Triffid and was probably the inspiration for Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors”. I have a vague memory of the layout of the house where we lived, but I suspect that is more from photos I have seen than any actual first-hand recollection. But the moon landings must have been so exciting. (Feel free to add your preferred conspiracy theory here – if you don’t believe they actually took place. Flag blowing in a wind that couldn’t have been there, horizon too close, wrong level of light reflection off the lunar surface, Michael Jackson killed by Martians, Loch Ness monster now residing in Area 51 bunker etc… )  The point is that for once there was something happening that captured the imagination of the plant. Maybe I have a somewhat sugar-coated view of what it might have been like, with the entire world watching to see Apollo 11 blast off from the Kennedy Space Centre; a world for once united. As a species we seem prone to unite at times of tragedy, disaster or the occasional pop person popping off, so when we come together to witness something good then that has to be a positive moment in human history.

Today marks the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, and I suppose provides an interesting check-point in how far the world has come – or hasn’t come! They say that we have more computing power in a digital watch than they had on board the lunar module, and I suppose that is the biggest change. The power of the information age with instant communication and all the benefits and problems that are associated. The Internet and mobile phones, which everyone has these days and nobody could possibly live without! How did we cope? I suppose we also have a better understanding of our planet, its resources and its fragility and it seems at last that we are recognizing that we need to get our act together to resolve some of these bigger issues. I’m no Greenpeace tree-hugger but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (see the link back there?) to realize that we can’t rely on fossil fuels forever, even if we found a way of extracting their energy that didn’t screw the atmosphere. Oil and gas are finite resources; they won’t be here forever. Nuclear technologies are touted as much cleaner; they don’t pollute the atmosphere in the way that burning coal does, but what to do with the radioactive waste? That has always seemed to me to be the dilemma with nuclear fuel – spent plutonium rods are not something we want hanging around.

The trouble is, there are several ways to look at things, and the world is lead by the people who have a commercial perspective. In simple terms, the process runs like this:

From a commercial perspective, every element needs to be commercially viable, from acquiring the raw materials as cheaply as possible to dealing with the waste with the minimal amount of cost. And in the nuclear industry the cheapest way to dispose of the waste is to bury it, at sea, in caves, or even, as some have suggested, to blast it into space. But as a process that sucks. Who in their right mind can think that it is a good thing to manufacture any product that is going to result in a waste material that is so toxic, so long lasting and so, well, ‘indisposable’. Well, the people who control the budgets I guess, but ultimately the consumers too; we want cheap. Look at the outrage when petrol prices went over £1 a liter. But cheap isn’t right. And therein lies the dilemma. We all want cheap power but it seems the cost of that is not so much economical as ecological. What we need is a process where the final part of the production line produces either safe waste or, better still, none at all. Take out the commercial aspects and a system that produces so much toxic waste as a by-product should never get the green light. But it is the financial aspects that take priority in all such matters, and who cares if the planet is uninhabitable in 300 years? But I’m a hypocrite I use electricity. I like my gadgets. I fly abroad. We’re a way off the perpetual motion machine yet, but there ARE alternatives. I personally really approve of wind turbines. I don’t find them offensive in any way. OK, so they change a landscape (not I didn’t say spoil), but not in the way a power station does. We HAVE to look to renewable. We live on an island, we’re surrounded by coast, and wind and sunshine and all that energy that just needs tapping. But again, it needs investment and a willingness to embrace change on a big scale. I thought we were moving in the right direction as a country, with our efforts in recycling. We do what we can to recycle, but even that has gone tits-up. A few years ago the council used to collect and recycle:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Cans
• Jars
• Bottles Glass)
• Bottles (Plastic)
• Plastic bags
• General plastics with the recycle mark on them (egg boxes, spread cartons, yoghurt pots)
• Domestic waste.
• Garden waste (if there was space in the domestic waste bin, but nothing more than that. We compost all vegetable waste, food peelings, egg shells and garden debris anyway)

They introduced new wheelie bins a couple of years ago and now they take:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Plastic Bottles
• Domestic waste.
• They also have a garden waste bin which you can request, but we compost anyway.

How is that progress? We WANT to recycle, but half the stuff they used to take now goes in as landfill. I know recycling costs money and the recession has meant that the end-users are not buying the recycled materials (we hear of magazine mountains), but the recession won’t last forever and surely we could stock-pile the waste so that when business picks up we have a plentitude (and thus, theoretically, using recycled materials would be relatively cheap?). I guess it is good I’m not a politician or a leader of industry, as I am sure things are not as simple as I’d like to think are!

I’d love to put up solar panels (we face south so it’d be ideal), or even a wind turbine, but they are just too cost prohibitive. Even with grants, we can’t afford the initial outlay – especially now that I’m not working. But wouldn’t it give the failing building industry a boost if there was a scheme to equip older properties with energy-producing devices? I had a look on the B&Q website today, Argos and Homebase too; you used to be able to buy a wind turbine from them. Can’t find the product in their catalogues anymore. I’d hoped that there would be demand for these sorts of green energy generators and that this would drive down prices but it seems the opposite has happened. As I said, I’m a hypocrite, I want to be green but I want to do it in a way that is easy and cheap, But for me and my present situation, easy and cheap is the only option available to me. Unless someone wants to donate a winning lottery ticket?

We grow some veg, but not enough to make any impact, although we are considering turning over part of the back garden to provide a small veg patch. We wash clothes at 30C, dry on the line whenever the weather permits, or else on a clothes horse (I can’t remember the last time we used the dryer). We don’t heat water during the summer as the dishwasher is more efficient for cleaning pots than it would be to heat a tank of water, and it uses less water. Similarly, the shower only heats what is needed, when it is needed. We have an energy monitor that tells us exactly how much power we are using at any time. At the moment I’m burning up 3.7p per hour. We have got that down by ensuring that nothing is turned on when it need not be, not leaving things on standby, using energy efficient light bulbs and even having automatic shutdown on things like the computers and printer. We’re saving to try to get our old boiler replaced with a combi version, as the current installation pre-dates Noah. We WANT to be green!

I don’t suppose a small veg patch in the back garden will save the planet, but if it means we can cut down on some of the packaging and air miles associated with at least a little of our food, then it is worthwhile. I don’t care if my carrots are curly or my peas are not of uniform size. There’s something special about eating your own produce anyway. If only I can deal with the bloody slugs! I know, God’s creatures and all that, but why can’t someone come up with a clean energy system that uses slugs! Bloody things. They munch their way with gay abandon through plants I have been nurturing for months. They perforate my peas, they pillage my potatoes, they rape my radishes and bugger the beetroot. I hate them. There is NOTHING loveable about a slug. You never see them in family units so I’m assuming even their mother’s don’t love them. And it makes no difference how many hundred of the buggers I catapult over into the tennis courts (actually, by now, it must be quite hazardous playing tennis over there, for all the splattered slugs, but that’s someone else’s problem – Wimbledon and me are not likely to become acquainted!), the slimy little shits just come back ten-fold. At least snails have shells – slugs are too bloody lazy to even grow those. They can’t even pick a gender and stick to it – the bloody things are hermaphrodite and they can live for 15 years! They serve no useful purpose other than as food for those further up the chain, but it seems that round here they are on nobody’s menu. They LOVE slug pellets, well the pet-friendly ones we are reduced to using because of the cats. I’m going to try the ‘tub of beer’ trick, but honestly, we’d need a brewery for the infestation I face every day. Honestly, I feel like I’m under siege here.

Maybe I should start up a ‘National Slug Catapult Tournament’, with prizes for the person who can project their pest the furthest. What do you think? Possible 2012 Olympic sport? Hermaphrodite hurling. I had thought about engaging Chinese-people-next-door in conversation and asking them if their brat had heard about the new craze for slug racing. I’d let them come round and collect as many slugs as they could, then take them to school for playtime fun. (How do you start a playground craze these days? Are any of the Blue Peter presenters on Twitter I wonder, could drop them a hint and maybe they’d do an article…Or even an appeal! “Send a slug to the Somalia” or “Molluscs for Malawi”– could work. I’m sure they are a rich source of vitamin something and they have a high liquid content which could provide a viable source of drinking water if each package of 10,000 slugs was sent with a mangle…) I have a couple of other ideas too – I wondered if Chinese-people-next-door might be persuaded that Lancashire hot pot is made from minced slug, and is what they should eat if they want to be a full part of our community. Or else (and I think this might be less successful) I could come up with a medical use for them and give something back to the NHS… Do you think maybe they could be trained to suck blood like leeches? Or, maybe their slime has healing properties. I may package them up in little bags with condoms to give out at Manchester Pride, on the grounds that a properly farmed slug can produce ample lubrication for even the most intense man-on-man action. “Never be caught in a tight spot again; always carry your handy slug-o-matic lube dispenser!”

And if all that fails, in deference to the historic events of 40 years ago, how much do you think it would cost to send the horrible, useless, grungy, spineless little bags of snot to NASA and get them to sling-shot them into lunar orbit on the next mission that passes that way? On second thoughts, they’d only turn round and evolve and come back to Earth for vengeance. Oh my God, what if Neil Armstrong had trodden on a slug on his way out to the launch pad and took slug DNA to the moon? Actually, didn’t I see something like that in the glass box on Torchwood???”