What we're up to

1) Socio-cultural quota
We've had just one or two free weekends after the wind-down of the summer community events season -- and now the Xmas sociability is overtaking us, plus a bit of pre-Copenhagen CO2 action. Yesterday was food co-op and community cafe up at Lordship Rec/Broadwater Farm, then 'Passing shadows and Reflections' exhibition opening at Bruce Castle of photographs by our local notable wildlife photographer and founder of Friends of Tottenham Marshes David Cottridge -- abstract patterns and textures found in nature: lots of tree bark, lichen and the games water plays with reflections and light. This afternoon, there's an 'Open Studio' in Sylvia's big house a couple of streets away, for those of us living hereabouts who do arts and crafts to show what we do. Thursday is local Friends of the Earth Xmas meal (JN is treasurer and membership sec).

Friday is Wards Corner Winter Warmer -- fabulous fundraising knees-up with local bands, food etc -- do come along if you're in the vicinity!

Saturday there's the big climate march, followed by Totttenham Civic Society Xmas meal at the Ferry Boat Inn by the river and reservoirs. And the following Saturday is Friends of Tottenham Marshes Xmas social. Then we head to JN's parents in Lyme Regis the following weekend -- then back home to collapse for what we hope will be a nicely slothful Xmas at home.

2) Life aquatic
Just on two years ago, I took up swimming to counteract winter sloth and accumulation of insulating flab. Once I found that goggles, swim cap and ear plugs take the pain out of putting head under water, I've taken to it like a, err, fish to water, and finally mastered overarm (crawl, freestyle) and just recently, the modern 'wave' or dolphin breastroke -- though I still find it faster to keep head underwater for multiple strokes. So I now reckon 80 lengths (in about 55-60 mins) as a short swim, 100 lengths (in about 70-80mins) as normal swim, and 120 (in 90-100 mins) or 160 (in about 120 mins) for longer stretch. I've even started working my way through 'how to swim good' books: Janet Evans 'Total Swimming' is the best I've found so far. Now working on trying out the various stroke drills, and including more 'speed' lengths. Also having an occasional go at butterfly. So far, completely failing to somersault for tumble or flip turns at the ends. Aiming for three or more swims a week: this seems to have stabilised my weight, but not reduced it at all -- however, I tell myself, it should now mostly be muscle which is denser and heavier than flab.

3) Werking at home
Joys of laptop, remote log-in to werk IT system, mobile phone -- so much easier to concentrate at home on the thinking, writing, analysis and even reading that are supposed to be the core of my job. At least, once I switch into 'at werk'mode -- and home distractions are proving less distracting than open-plan office werk distractions. It gives back the couple of hours a day otherwise spent commuting, lets me grab swim bag and fit in the aquatic regime, and nip out to local shops or neighbours. The downside is the loss of face-to-face casual encounters with colleagues; however, none of my actual team-mates are located in the London office where I'm based. On balance, I used to find that it was only at the end of the day, when others started heading off home, that I could manage to focus down on the big stuff rather than juggling small, reactive incoming stuff -- now, at home, I can focus right down on the big stuff for most of the day, and feel more effective -- 'cultural ecosystem services' is my current favourite game. But it does make me feel even more semi-detached from the organisation, particularly the growing mass of bureaucratic process. On balance though, I think it probably does give the organisation better productivity -- and for me, it gives a sense of liberation and enjoyment that feels too good to be really legitimate...

4) Electrickery
Werk has a corporate commitment to cut the organisational eco-footprint by 50% (and has also signed up to the weaker 10:10 pledge). So its acquired some 'smart meters' for loan to staff. Ours arrived while I was down with a cold -- and as I emailed back, watching it provided about the level of intellectual stimulation I could cope with in that state. The electric kettle produces a huge surge, so I've taken to boiling kettle-full and filling up a thermos flask with the extra. As well as eliminating all the 'make another cuppa' switchings on, this means instant hot water rather than waiting about for kettle to boil. JN's old desktop computer is another big energy-guzzler -- much more so than either of my laptops (werk and own). Switching on the kitchen fluorescent light pretty much doubles the normal (.04-.07 kwH) background consumption of running a couple of CFCs, the CD system, a laptop and broadband. So far our daily usage totals have fluctuated between just under 300KwH to somewhat over 500KwH, with weekly totals between 20-25KwH -- or 10-15 kg CO2. I'm not sure how where that puts us in the energy efficiency league -- have yet to track down the info sources on that.

However, this year our central heating thermostat didn't switch on the boiler until at least six weeks later than the autumn temperature fall would previously have had us shivering -- we're certainly feeling the benefit of the insulation work we had down last year. No feeling of chill striking in through walls, so the inside temperature stays steadily comfortable.

Our other new toy on the electrickery front is new fridge-freezer, very tall -- maximum freezer capacity, five drawers, all the way up to my chest, to store summer fruits and other allotment produce. New luxury accommodation for our lavish fridge magnet collection.

5) Other stuff
This year we've been to Hadrian's Wall, Sutton Hoo, by Eurostar to Avignon and Provence in spring, and to the Loire Valley with its chateaux in September. I flew for werk to "Norderns Ark zoo north of Gothenborg in Sweden. I taught on a couple of permaculture courses for Friends of Tottenham Marshes, and we explored up the Lea to Rye House and the Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey. We post about all this and other stuff on LiveJournal, at headgardener" for me, and the_gardener for him. Oh yes, garden and allotment are doing just fine, just mostly closing down for the winter.

26 years -- that's older than I feel!

For our 26th wedding anniversary, my true love gave to me: a miniature'grow your own Hanging Gardens of Babylon': this consists of a (roughly) 3" sq 3-tier plastic ziggurat in three pieces (scale 1mm=1m?), a compressed peat pellet, a dozen or so quite large round seeds, and this 3" square, 32-page booklet discussing the 'Seven Wonders of the World' as identified by the ancient Greeks, the history, archaeological evidence for, and practicalities of how the 'hanging gardens' may have been built and kept watered: water lifted from the river to the top tiers in a 'chain of buckets' mechanism, construction in stone, tile and lead lining as sun-baked clay bricks crumble with moisture. The seeds should, the booklet says, germinate in 6-7 weeks time -- just in time for Xmas.

JN gave himself a similar miniature Stonehenge: again, probably in something like 1mm=1m scale. I am now looking suitably sized for Spinal Tap figurines to accompany it. They did not come supplied on a grow-your-own basis.

I took JN out to dinner at the Ferry Boat Inn on the Lea, between Tottenham Hale and Walthamstow: an old-fashioned traditional English gastro-pub, catering for the anglers who hang out at the Walthamstow Reservoirs across the road; bird-watchers who visit the Reservoirs as an SSSI, Europa 2000 Special protection Area under the EU Birds Directive, and Ramsar wetland site of international ecological significance. So the dazzling pair of sequin-decked mini-Beyonces, both almost loudly and excitedly screaming into their mobile phones throughout their meal (perhaps that was their way of conversing with each other, though they were the main background noise, was a bit incongruous. A gaggle of a dozen or so assorted young persons, probably students just moved into the first building completed on the vastly ambitious Hale Village regeneration/development site, fitted in better -- one floppy-haired terribly English Tory-boy with insistently posh intonation the only one who obtruded offensively.

Ho-Hum

Today is Judith's and my 26th wedding anniversary -- which we share, apparently, with World Toilet Day.

Jokes about busted flushes, down the pan, etc., are probably inevitable.

The Beginnings of the End of the Anthropocene

It must be an artefact of getting older, as I remarked to an old CND friend at the weekend, but I seem to be spending an increasing amount of time thinking about the past -- not the historical past but my personal past: the things I did, thought, said....presumably because, at my age, I now have many more years behind me than I am likely to have ahead of me, and it is therefore more personally fulfilling to recall my life to date than to address what might happen in the next twenty or thirty years.

Although, as a long-time New Scientist reader, I do feel rather jealous of those now in their twenties who will experience the beginnings of the end of what the magazine has called the Anthropocene: that period from 2030 to 2050, once average global temperatures have resumed their expected upward path after the temporary period of cooling imposed by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, when the world's agricultural and industrial systems begin to falter and implode. It will of course be a chaotic time for our species; but for anyone who manages to live through it, it should also be an extremely exciting one. I almost salivate with anticipation....although, knowing what I do about the life expectancies of males born in the early 1950s in the developed West, I'm statistically unlikely to see much of it.

On the other hand, I have already lived through some exciting times. The 1960s had pop and rock music and the 1970s had the collapse of the post-WW2 social consensus, but the 1980s had the struggle against nuclear weapons and for (as I put it a couple of days ago) "a Europe whole and free", even though that was more of an intellectual than an emotional campaign and one with a result that I scarcely expected to see in my lifetime. But "all that is solid melts into air" as Marx put it, and it was a genuinely thrilling and heady time, in the summer and autumn of 1989, to watch the old order crumbling by the day and a new world come, disoriented and disorientating, into being. I doubt that those who experienced it will ever forget it.

And for that reason I think I can just about accept not experiencing the beginnings of the end of the Anthropocene.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

-- and we, quite literally, slept through the opening of the Berlin Wall because 9 November 1989 was the day we moved from our rented flat above a shop in Pimlico to a rented flat on the ground floor of a house in South Tottenham, and were so tired out from unpacking boxes and sorting out their contents that we went to bed earlier than usual. And woke the next morning to the incredible-seeming news that part of what we'd spent much of the 1980s working towards -- a Europe whole and free, and free of nuclear weapons -- had come into existence overnight.

The surreality was compounded by "Sunny Jim" Callaghan popping up on Radio Four in that morning's Today programme to solemnly warn the Tsar Russians "not to take advantage" of the Wall's opening. Quite what advantage he thought Gorbachev might take (tanks as well as East Germans making day trips into West Berlin, perhaps?) could only be conjectured -- especially since it was Gorbachev's public abandonment of Honecker's regime the month before which had brought about the Wall's fall.

We have a piece of the Wall, brought back by Judith on a subsequent trip to the former East Germany for the public transport interests for which she was then working. Our very own piece of Cold War history. Quite where the intervening twenty years went remains at issue!