To blog or not to blog

As I write this I have the eager attendance of two strange men who are currently gauging the size of my flu, with the intention of giving my pipework a good seeing to, for, after three years of saving, we are finally getting our central heating system replaced.  Of course our old boiler just scraped through as being ineligible for the government scrappage scheme (it is rated F and would have to be G to qualify). Goodness knows what a G rated system must be – an open camp-fire maybe, a candle over a pan of water, or perhaps just sitting round an exposed kettle element. I thought the deal sounded too good to be true, and Mr Brown didn’t let me down.  This was all supposed to happen a few weeks ago, plumber booked, loft cleared, but the country was at the time crippled and helpless under a blanket of white unpreparedness.

I read an interesting article the other day that echoed my thoughts on the scaremongering prevalent during the snow – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8460245.stm – It questions the mathematics behind claims that the bad weather cost the economy hundreds of millions of pounds, and takes a somewhat more balanced view noting a few key points:

• Some businesses will have suffered, but others will have benefited. Our plumber says he was rushed off his feet with call-outs to burst pipes and broken boilers. Ditto panel beaters and the supermarkets who’s shelves were stripped in a frenzy of panic buying.
• Some businesses will simply have deferred work and whilst they had a lean time a few weeks ago, they will be doubly busy catching up with a backlog. People who, for example, didn’t get their hair cut then will need a cut and blow job eventually. The industry didn’t loose out – there is no less hair to cut in total. Manufacturing orders won’t have been cancelled – just delayed.  After all, the whole country was frozen so cancelling an order for Blivets from one company and placing it with another would have gained nothing.
• Other sales will have rocketed – warm clothes, anti-freeze, road salt (which probably had a higher street value than cocaine!) and of course fuel.

So whilst yes, there will have been individual losses and hardship, I doubt that this will show as more than a minor blip in terms of impact on the GDP. I can’t help thinking that there is something very English about making things out to be far worse than they really are. I have always thought that there is an inherent optimism in being pessimistic; if you expect the worse then you will be prepared for it, and if it doesn’t happen you will be pleasantly surprised. Maybe that is the English way. A stiff upper lip is only any good in a crisis. That said, you’d have thought the apocalypse were upon us with all the moaning and gnashing of teeth, prophets of lost profits and every news broadcast pre-empting the end of the world as we know it. Scares were mongered and the gloom of doom was upon us.  Yet we survived against the odds and life returns to its routines.

Over the past few weeks a bit of a row has broken out in our little local community. All the houses, along with two blocks of flats More about them in a minute), in our estate are tied in to a contractual relationship with our Management Company. The land is all leasehold (contractually we have to pay a peppercorn a year to the estate) and is administered by the Riverdale Management Company which is also responsible for upkeep of common ground plus the Leisure Centre. Last summer, the pool developed some problems and it transpired that many of the pipes had to be dug up and replaced. The upshot of this was a bill for £39,000, shared between all the properties (over £150 each) and demanded by the Management Company before the work would be completed.  Obviously this was a lot of money to find just before Christmas and resulted in an eruption of emotive reaction from the residents. We now see a community divided. Forget Northern Ireland, forget Iraq or Afghanistan – it is quite likely that WWIII will be fought in the hinterlands of Kersal Dale.

This seems to be a battle being fought by about four different factions: the management company and their legal representatives, the people who refuse to pay, the people who have already paid and are furious about any further delays and the resident busybody who is whipping it all into a frenzy yet refusing to show her hand. In among all this are demands that the company books be reviewed, accusations of skulduggery, insider dealing and extortion. People are up in arms and spitting blood. Families in one email distribution list are forbidden to speak with neighbours in another list. False personas abound, as people fear to reveal their true identities. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else amid accusations of being a spy for the management company or a blackleg who has broken the unofficial picket line. Of course, every niggle going back 20 years is now being raised, above and beyond the pool repairs, and we see added into the mix issues about parking, television reception in the flats, key fobs and the hours worked by the caretaker. Why do the residents of the flats pay the same as those in houses, when their upkeep is clearly more costly? Why has the intercom not been fixed?  Who are the members of the residents committee and why have they not been arguing the cause? Is Iris Robinson involved? If not, why not?

There is a meeting scheduled next week between the residents and the solicitors. I expect there will be blood. And it is all pointless posturing anyway. The terms of the contract (which you have to sign to live here) give Riverdale the right to charge “any sum they deem to be reasonable” to cover “any repairs they deem to be appropriate”, so I expect their legal position is significantly more watertight than the actual pool itself! I agree that we have a right to know how the management fee is being spent and why provision was not made for repairs but, like with the snow, this is a massive over-reaction. Don’t mention the pool. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it. People speak in code, not willing to reveal on which side of the barricades they wish to hang their flag. “What do you think about the pool?” – “What do YOU think?” – “Well, I can see both sides.” – “Me too, I’m glad it is all out in the open.”

All this prompted me to look back through our deeds, to check the details of the contract and also to try to understand how Riverdale came into being. It seems Riverdale Management Company (in various previous guises) took over the Kersal Way estate when our houses were built. When we moved in we knew that this area had been flats but I had no idea of quite what had been here. My curiosity took me to a number of resources including a website chronicling the history of this estate – http://www.kersalflats.co.uk/index.html from which I have included some photos with kind permission of the site owner.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

This area was wasteland until the late 1950s, prone to flooding and little more than marsh bog, overlooking the old racecourse and nestling in the vale created by the crook of the river. Following a boom in manufacturing in the city and as a response to the post-war housing crisis, the government hatched a plan to provide high-rise housing in what turned out to be a massive experiment in social engineering. In what was one of the largest developments of its kind in the country (and a “model for future living”), twelve blocks of flats were commissioned along with a parade of shops, community and health centre, pub and play area. Building work took place from 1958 through to the late 60s. As they rose, the flats became a major part of the skyline, visible from miles around. The land was cheap as it sat in the flood plain of the river Irwell so was thought to be unsuitable for development, but needs must and the flats were raised on stilts, a double-edged solution which meant that when the river broke its banks in 1980 the flats remained dry but each was surrounded by its own moat.

At its height, the estate housed 3000 people, but declined from the mid 80s and became “A dumping ground for problematic persons, criminally orientated individuals, and the socially and economically dispossessed*”.  Families were relocated and crime flourished.  The thrill and promise of living in these new modern homes, with hot water and ‘space age’ lifts brought together a community, but it was not sustainable, investment dwindled, neglect set in like the mildew on the walls. Kersal Dale moved from des-res to dump, its reputation plummeted and in October 1990 eight of the twelve blocks were demolished amid much media attention.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

At the time the controlled destruction represented the largest explosive demolition ever undertaken and made national news. I have a vague recollection of seeing footage at the time, and copies of the videos are still available on the website. The intention was to refurbish the remaining four blocks which were passed into the hands of a development company, but even that plan was ill fated and a further two buildings were later demolished. All that remains are two of the twelve blocks, originally called Shakespeare and Shelly (they all took names of poets, as Byron was born and lived in Kersal), re-skinned, refurbished, revitalised and renamed.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

You can see from these two photographs how the flats sat in the landscape. I have marked the remaining buildings on both the old and new images, plus the location of our house. We would have occupied the ‘green’ area in the middle of the development.

When we were looking for properties in Salford I remember checking the Google satellite image for here and remarking how green and undeveloped it looked, never realising that until a few years previously it had been such a ‘metropolis’- not so far distant from Fritz Lang’s futuristic “city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners.”

Whilst I can easily map the old onto the new, see evidence of where the flats once stood, relate to the buildings on an academic level, I find it impossible to stand in our back garden and really feel what it would have been like to be surrounded by touring concrete skyscrapers. I can look at comparison photos and understand the layout, but I just can’t relate on an emotional level.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

This place was once the home of thousands of people, a community, families with lives and stories and experiences. They lived in flats which had open fires (no central heating) and windows that in winter were an inch thick in ice (a far cry from the minor inconveniences we suffered a few weeks ago).  Here I am getting a boiler fitted, where they had to lug sacks of coal up the stairs when the lifts were broken. They will have had a very different relationship to this piece of land than the one that David and I now court.

Much of the land remains vacant, decisions to redevelop now retracted following the current economic depression. Plans made a few years ago are no longer viable, and parts of Kersal are being reclaimed by nature, returning to the way they were only 45 years ago, with nothing but fading photographs to show the high-rises were ever here, but at least we have our leisure centre with its empty, leaky pool. I just hope that history is not repeated where someone decides it is not worth the effort or money to fix and it, like the flats, will fall into ruin.

* quoted from http://www.kersalflats.co.uk

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

If a UFO arrived in the skies above the United Kingdom last week the small green fluffy creatures from Alpha Centauri would be forgiven for thinking that we had never seen snow in our country before. It always amazes me how everything grinds to a frozen standstill and we fail completely to cope with what is, after all, an annual occurrence. Supermarket shelves are stripped bare, like an eviscerated carcass in a post-apocalyptic locust attack; road salt and grit pass hands with a black market value greater than cocaine; emergency services are stretched to their limits by calls to attend idiot drivers who have spun off the road having driven at speeds far too fast for the conditions. Accident and Emergency wards are bursting at the seams with ice-related fractures, sprains, broken hips and dislocated shoulders. I bet 90% of the injuries sustained were on people who didn’t really need to go out in the snow anyway. Trains get stranded in the Chanel Tunnel and Gordon Brown sweeps in, superhero cape aflutter, to coordinate Britain’s grit reserves. One assumes the bat-cave war bunker under Downing Street has sprung back to life and Mr Brown is seen saving the country from his twat-mobile. Schools are closed for health and safety reasons – presumably to ensure that the kids don’t slip on the ice. These are the same kids who are then left unsupervised to run amok, throwing snowballs at motorists or careering down hillsides on plastic bags to brain themselves on the brick wall at the bottom.

Maybe I am uncharitable but I have little sympathy for the people who put themselves forward for the Darwin Awards, by venturing out on frozen lakes and rivers. Clearly they fell into our gene pool by mistake too.

Quick tip: if anyone ever wants to invade Britain, do it when we have a light covering of snow, you will find us completely paralysed and at your mercy.

Our friendly Aliens must be pissing themselves as they watch us panic and thrash around, when our neighbours in Scandinavia are no doubt equally bemused by our inability to cope, as they simply lock on their snow tyres and throw another copy of Mamma Mia on the sauna fire.

Every year we are dealt the same rhetoric: we don’t get these conditions frequently enough for it to be financially viable to change our infrastructure and planning contingencies. So every year we are left with a metaphorical trousers round our ankles while our government has pissing competitions in the snow.

But our leaders want to have their iced cake and eat it too. On one hand we are told that it would not be economically viable to better prepare for these ‘freak’ annual conditions, but in the same breath they protest the billions of pounds lost to the economy caused by the snow. (That is, of course, fuzzy mathematics. Yes, some industries will have suffered due to lost production or revenue, but I suspect that just as many will have gained – I bet the AA has seen record uptake, the power companies will be rubbing their hands with glee and whilst bin men may not have been collecting rubbish, I bet they have been gainfully employed by councils for clearing roads. Panel-bashers and heating engineers will be quid’s in. If we haven’t bought bread, we HAVE bought de-icer. If people have been eating tinned or frozen food this week, they will replace those supplies next week. I expect the real costs to Britain.com will soon be smoothed out again.) There is much we could do to prepare for such conditions, which climatologists tell us will increase. In a world of advanced telecommunications, home computers and web-casts there are many businesses which could operate adequately with their employees working from home. We are told to not clear our paths for fear of prosecution if someone believes a driveway to be ice-free but slips on the patch we missed – maybe we need to look at more appropriate legislation which encourages people to clear snow.  Maybe if school catchment areas were limited to walking distance, for teachers and pupils, then there would be less need for closures in all but the most rural areas. I remember that if it snowed during my childhood we just took boots and a change of shoes, but still walked to school. We had snowmen competitions on the playing field, even if there were only a few teachers about. And that was before the mothers all had 4x4s and kids could raise a claim for negligence if they grazed their knee.  If we ran out of bread, there was always yeast and flour in the cupboard. Mother always had a couple of pints of milk in the freezer and the skills to cook up a fortnight’s worth of decent meals from the contents of her pantry.

In Germany there is a requirement for every household to clear the pavements outside their property and keep it clear of ice and snow during daylight hours. In fact, in many areas of Europe there is a legal requirement to fit winter tyres during the coldest months. People buy anti-slip pads for their shoes and wear a few more layers.

We don’t even require British drivers to undertake skid-pan tests experience before they are allowed to drive, so most people have no idea how to react when roads are icy. I was trained by the Cumbria Police Driving School and to gain my licence I had a full afternoon on a skid-pan, and had to show two things: firstly, that I could recover from a skid and secondly (more importantly) that I could drive at a speed and in a way that minimised the chance of skidding in the first place. There is no requirement to demonstrate these skills to get a UK licence, nor is anyone taught and tested on motorway driving, or how to deal with poor visibility. Is it any wonder that Mr Muppet ends up shunted into a ditch at the first sign of a frost?

It doesn’t help that our weather forecasts are so inaccurate. I appreciate that it is a very complex field, with conditions changing all the time, but if any other industry produced such poor results and offered such limp excuses, then they shouldn’t be paid their massive annual bonuses. Maybe bankers freelance as meteorologists, and use the same bit of seaweed to predict financial storms as they do approaching weather systems.  Arthur C Clarke famously said that any technology sufficiently advance is indistinguishable from magic. I wonder if the Met Office has not misinterpreted that as ‘if your technology is pants, bamboozle them with hocus-pocus’. In their defence, the Met Office do say “we can never create a perfect forecast system because we can never observe every detail of the atmosphere’s initial state. Tiny errors in the initial state will be amplified, so there is always a limit to how far ahead we can predict any detail.” So a ‘Barbeque Summer’ is rained off and nobody seems to have seen this cold spell coming. It seems that even short-term forecasts are as much guess work as science and just a few days ago we were battening the hatches ahead of more record-breaking low temperatures due to continue to the end of the month, and yet today it is a positively balmy 2 degrees above freezing and the ice is all but gone. If when working on IT contracts I had put together an estimate that was so far off track, I’d have been sacked on the spot. No wonder people still take bets on white Christmases – if it were anything other than guess-work, Ladbrokes would not take the odds.

But it is not all doom and gloom. We had a wonderful hour out on Saturday, taking photos in the snow. I stumble along as best I can and we can’t go far because I still can’t walk any distance. But the photos are all from just a few hundred yards away from our home and it always amazes me that this area is so rural when it is in fact in the middle of a major city.  Of course, blue skies and crisp white snow makes it easy to take a decent photo.

No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century that our world was about to end. As men busied themselves about their various concerns, worked and studied like the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet across the gulf of night, forces vast and cold and unsympathetic regarded our planet and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.

I was there the day that England fell. I, alone, bring witness and hope that someday, somehow, my words will be read and understood.

Lingdale in the 1940s

Our mystics had foreseen it, bent over their charts and globes, reading the signs, interpreting the ancient symbols but we ignored their warnings. Age-old lore told that this had happened before, many moons ago, in the days of our ancestors, but the wisdom of the elders was lost and we would never know what magic they used to survive, to withstand the menace, or how they endured the darkness to carry on the human race.  Their stories were legend, tales of how communities came together to face the danger, sharing food and shelter, managing to survive without the comforts we take for granted in our modern age. That was in a time gone by, a time of wonder and comradery and now our scientists and philosophers spoke in hushed tones of something terrible on the horizon, a gathering of forces beyond any man’s control. But we had closed our minds and dulled our senses, never really believing it could happen to us.

As the night drew closer, slowly and with the inevitability of a ticking clock, a great darkness descended and it began. It came from the sky in the North, devouring starlight and eradicating the winter moon. Our eyes turned to the heavens and our hearts filled with dread. The beast approached and its breath froze the land to iron, a frosty harbinger of the terror yet to come. We felt it sting our skin, bite at our clothes as we huddled together in terror. Some of the younger ones were excited, they thought it all a big adventure, never guessing the torment that lay ahead.

As the world was bathed in a milky light we turned our eyes to the night above, and gazed in wonder at the advancing menace. Some of us were gripped in awe and fell to our knees in prayer as it all began. The Parson gave thanks for our deliverance, for surely Armageddon was at hand. He threw himself to the ground and made the sign of the angels, praying for deliverance.  The Artillery man stood helpless, knowing that no weapon would offer even the slightest protection.  Our healers and leaders scrambled amidst preparations which were woefully inadequate. And in our stupor we found ourselves paralysed, unable to take action to protect ourselves, nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide as the devastation rained down upon us.

Word passed around, from community to community, messages sent, warnings given. I was there, like everyone, capturing the scene, recording the events and trying to warn those at the edge of the destruction, willing them to get away while they still had time. Save yourselves! But of course there was no retreat for there was nowhere to flee. How stupid to think there was any escape from this almighty threat.

We heard reports that London remained free, and many set off in that direction, only to perish on the journey. Small pockets of resistance, brave souls against the forces unleashed upon us. We knew that we would never make it to the capital; the roads were blocked and travel was treacherous. And even if London stood today, it was only a matter of time. The London Eye would close as surely as we closed our minds to the destruction falling on us from above. News came in of small groups, families, friends found huddled together, trying to gain shallow comfort from shared body warmth, and physical contact as the blackness closed in around them.

For hours it continued, through the depths of night, relentless, and as the morning came those of us who survived the first attack gazed out upon a changed world. All that had been familiar was gone; all that we had known was buried. Nothing was recognisable. The places of our childhood wiped from view, our lands lay smothered, our homes buried beneath a shroud of despair. No crops would grow in our fields and our factories lay desolate and empty. Those weak of will had raised effigies to our invader, trying to appease the spirit that wreaked havoc among us. All around vehicles were abandoned, as their drivers had made a final run for safety, their tracks just visible as another wave of destruction swept overhead. In the distance a light, a sign that someone may have survived the night. But it guttered and died, along with our hopes.

As I write this now by the dying light of my final candle, I know I only have enough rations to last a few more days. I doubt I will survive much longer. A while ago I thought I heard a signal on the radio, but that has faded now and I know I am alone.

Lingdale in the 1940s

There was news of some survivors near the coast, but I doubt that their story is any better than mine. I have family in the Northern Wasteland, but they will have perished as reported conditions there were worse still. The last contact I had just brought news of their suffering, isolated without food and struggling to survive, terrible conditions deteriorating every hour. I heard the locals had fought to keep a track clear, so that vital supplies could be shared, although by now the community will have fallen, unable to withstand the onslaught but brave to the end. If only we had learned the lessons from history, tried to understand how our ancestors had coped. Maybe the outcome would have been different, but instead our world ground to a halt, falling apart, unable to function.  We remember those heroes who fought on against the odds, warmed by the flame of self sacrifice: the men of medicine who tried to calm the wounded; those who battled on in our power stations, trying to keep the fires burning; farmers in the fields.

Yet, in the stillness there remains a beauty and I see a lone creature out hunting in the wilderness. Life, of a sort, goes on. And while our own race may not survive to live and love, to sing and sigh, to dream and dance, perhaps somehow our world will recover. We may never really understand the forces that bore down upon us over these fateful days, and it is too late to wonder what we could have done differently, what actions we could have taken, what preparations may have been effective. The summer sun is fading as the year grows old, and darker days are drawing near. The winter winds will be much colder… oh, hang on a second. The sun is coming out. I think there’s a thaw on the way and the snow is melting. Ooops, false alarm. As you were.  Business as usual. Don’t know what the fuss was all about really.