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!

New Fossil Pliosaur from the Jurassic Coast

According to the BBC report:

The exact location of the find is not being revealed, as Dorset County Council does not want to encourage people to head to the spot. The area is unstable and prone to rock falls and landslides. Richard Edmonds, Dorset County Council's earth science manager for the Jurassic Coast, said: "This part of the coastline is eroding really rapidly and that means the fossils that are trapped and buried are constantly tumbling out on to the beach."

-- and anyone who knows anything at all about the Jurassic Coast will recognise this immediately as a description of the stretch of blue lias cliff between Lyme Regis and Charmouth, and not be deterred at all.

That aside, it is really rather irritating that the fossil is reported to be going to the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester rather than the Philpot Museum in Lyme Regis itself, where it would have made a fitting companion to Mary Anning's ichthyosaur.

Happy Birthday Rosie!

Hope you had a good one... Do anything exciting? Did you get down to Albany for a hol?


Our news here... nothing much going on: we've bought a new fridge-freezer, with the biggest freezer space we could find to cope with allotment and garden harvest. The five-door freezer comes up to my chest. The neighbour who pops in to water the plants when we go away pointed out that the old one seemed to be running its motor all the time whenever she was here, while her fridge hardly ever needs to, and once I started trying to keep track, I found that she was quite right -- every time I thought to listen for it, it was running... and the fridge door seal seemed to have lost its oomph. Since it was only mid-point in energy efficiency when we bought it ten years or more ago, seemed worth while now that all fridges are A or A+ energy-rated, to buy a new one.

Last weekend, Joseph ascended into the attic to haul down the eight or so plastic boxes where my winter plumage was stored, then return them back up filled with my summer plumage. Plumage includes footwear. So now I have boots and woolly slippers instead of sandals lined up along the bottom of the wardrobe.

Autumn leaves falling, autumn chill set in -- but temperature inside is still warm enough that our central heating thermostat hasn't yet fired up the radiators. So the insulation we put in last year is definitely having an effect -- without it, we'd have needed the heating a good month ago.

1) Swam 160 lengths (4 km) in 120 mins on Friday...

2) Ran plant stall for Wards Corner campaign on Saturday: raised err... Well, there was £64.55 in the tin at the end of the day, but I put in £10 change as a float at the start, and some of it was from the campaign marquee selling mugs/t-shirts/canvas bags... So probably raised about £40 in all, from a day sitting in chilly wind, far too close to noisy polluting heavy traffic. Interesting to watch the people passing: most simply didn't register the plant stall, just not part of their worldview. It was a minority whose eyes were caught by plants: seeing the green, their eyes were caught, they had to just scan and check out what the plants were, even if they carried on walking -- even if not really interested, recognising plants was part of their world view. And an even smaller minority actually stopped to see what was on offer -- and most of those who stopped to check us out bought at least one plant, because they were plant-people and interested in local community.

However, I did manage to come home with just one small tray of selected plants-- a succulent, warmth loving Jamaican herb whose names include 'Spanish mint' and 'Guyanese thyme', and a clutch of verbascum/mullein/Aaron's rod seedlings to plant out around the allotment. After selling off all my previous plant stock about three weekends ago at Lordship Rec show, I'd re-built the stock up to half a dozen trays full of plants cluttering up our little back passage. Sociable dinner followed, celebrating the birthday of the campaign's events impresario at Caribbean Spice restaurant in West Green. Then home to watch a Monty Python evening on the teev -- or in JN's case, fall asleep in front of...

This afternoon, Civic Society members meeting at Bruce Castle -- JN is secretary. This morning: email and computer catch-up -- and over to my Seven Sisters Permaculture serious quasi-professional blog, to muse on the concept of 'cultural ecosystem services'. I think if you click my user-name on the panel on the right of this Hanna family blog page, it will take you through to my user profile and show the link to Seven Sisters Permaculture blog...

Cheers, all -- howya going?

Confused Blackberry

In my previous post here earlier this month, I uploaded a photograph of one of our apple trees which had put out some new blossom. (It seems to have been pollinated -- the petals of the flowers are gone and the buds at their bases seem to be swelling.) This morning, I came across another confused plant -- the blackberry, which had also put out some new blossom....presumably, to judge by its appearance, a few days ago. And that too appears to have been pollinated.

We wait to see what happens next. Perhaps not so much a white Christmas, as a petal-strewn one?

Confused Tree

Spotted this morning, although they've obviously been there for several days and I just hadn't noticed them until now: new blossom on one of our apple trees.

It's very unlikely that we'll get a second crop of apples -- the colder winter weather will kill off whatever fruits do form -- but it will be interesting to see just how far they do get.

Mangy Fox

We get foxes on our allotment: usually we see the evidence of them (nesting amongst the potatoes, rolling over young broccoli, little grey sausages of dried poo) rather than the creatures themselves, although yesterday one sauntered boldly past us as we were about our work of planting out peas and breaking up a fork lift pallet, and sat down on the neighbouring plot long enough for me to take its picture. As you can see from the photograph above, it's in terrible condition: presumably mange, although it also appears to be nearly blind. I imagine that whatever it's suffering from is what caused it to lose its natural fear of humans; I also imagine that when we go back to the allotment (probably next weekend) we'll find a dead body to be disposed of. Such is life.

Ticking Them Off One By One

I posted last month about our visit to Rye House Gatehouse and Rye Meads Nature Reserve; yesterday, we ticked another item off the list in my filofax with a visit to the former Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey -- a small town on the Hertfordshire-Essex border in whose church the body of King Harold was allegedly interred following his death at the Battle of Hastings, and which we first visited around ten years ago. At that time, work at the Gunpowder Mills had ceased and the site had been mothballed pending a decision on its future; it was eventually decided to transfer it to an independent trust and open it to the public as a tourist attraction.

Unfortunately. visitor numbers weren't anything like those expected, and the plans for the site were drastically scaled back: it is now open only at weekends in the summer months, in part because it is run largely by volunteers and subsists entirely from entry fees and donations. We didn't donate, but we did buy some stuff in the shop; and also bought tickets for a trip on the land train into the more distant parts of the site, which is otherwise closed to visitors because the remaining structures there are simply unsafe and because it's a recognised SSSI -- we saw evidence of badger activity (their latrines), many birds (but not the herons who were once there, and seem to have moved away), and I glimpsed a group of fallow deer which disappeared into the woods as we approached.

I even took a few pictures. (What a surprise, eh?) Here are, in order:

1. Part of the canal system used to move gunpowder, nitroglycerine, cordite and other explosive materials around the site;

2. One of the (partially restored) flat-bottomed barges used on the canal system -- the stern half would be canal-worthy were it attached to something that would float, but the bow half has decayed wood and holes in the bottom;

3. The so-called wildlife observation tower, formerly the concentrator for one of the explosives manufacturing processes. Note the round-arched bridge over the canal to the right of the tower; this is a characteristic of the site. The rules were that no one was allowed to cross a bridge while a barge was passing underneath, in case something fell on it and set off an explosion.

4. One of the buildings from which explosives ingredients were loaded onto the barges. You'll note that the canal has dried up. Note also the thick walls between each of the building's bays: these were intended to ensure that an explosion in any one bay did not set off a chain reaction in the others by directing the blast up through the roof of the bay, thus containing it. You can also see, just to the left of the picture, part of an enormous brick "traverse", again to guard against the spread of explosions.

5. A derelict gunpowder milling and pressing plant. The mill is the building on the right (the water wheel is the give-away) and the press is the contraption on the left, which would have squeezed the gunpowder into flat cakes to ensure its consistency and stability. The press would formerly have been housed in a wooden building, which has now disappeared. Between them is an enormous brick traverse, intended to protect the mill (machinery was expensive -- men were not) should the gunpowder go off while it was being pressed.

The Weight of The Fruit

After two wet summers in which the little fruit produced by the one pear and two apple trees in our garden -- most of what didn't fall off when still unripe was pecked by birds and nibbled by squirrels -- we've done rather well this summer. So many apples, indeed, that we've had trouble keeping up: most of them have had to be processed into jam (where the pectin helps set the blackberries, gooseberries or elderberries with which they're mixed), and others are being stored in the refrigerator until they can be eaten (either on their own or chopped into the morning muesli). And now the pears are coming ripe, too....

So here's a couple of pictures, of branches bent low by the weight of their fruit. Once free, they should spring back up -- but even then I think we'll have to do some heavy-duty pruning, to get the trees back into the shape they're supposed to be. That's "minarette" shape, as in keeping short branches close to the trunk, but obviously our trees have failed to RTFM and are behaving like full-size trees. But we'll learn them!

Wet stuff

4 km swim yesterday -- 160 lengths in 140 mins! Particularly pleased that I wasn't knackered afterwards, but able to settle down to 'working at home' -- with laptop on a tray across my knees, in my upstairs study comfy chair, with view of back garden and lots of little birdies playing around the bird feeders.

This weekend, we have the annual local street party on Sunday -- Joseph has made an info display on what being a 'conservation area' for local architectural heritage means; I'll be working on the book and/or plant stall. The last few weekends, we've visited Sutton Hoo in Essex, and Rye Gate House and nature reserve up the Lea. Next weekend, we're off to Lyme Regis and JN's parents for the end-of-August Bank Holiday.

Sutton Hoo is like Tolkien's Barrow Downs: a field where rich Anglo-Saxon burials, two of them inside ships, were found; the barrow down is on a ridge looking down on the Blacwater estuary, at the furthest point that ships could navigate up the river Debden. Around the pagan warrior burials there are later Christian-era Anglo-saxon bodies, some decapitated -- thought to be criminals who were hanged from a gallows up there, their bodies left with the ghosts of the heathen damned.

Rye House is just a local train trip up our river valley: it was one of the first houses in this country built of bricks, when they were a new-fangled architectural innovation. Then it was the base for an attempt to assassinate Charles II when he was due to ride along the road past it -- but he headed off early, so the assassins missed him -- but were caught when one of them betrayed the plot and got the chop themselves. Just the gatehouse now stands, on an island moated by a channel dug from the river. Beyond the old house, the wide flood plain is now nature reserve, partly managed by Royal Society for Protection of Birds, partly by the Wildlife Trust: Jospeh saw his first ever live kingfisher -- a fast-moving turquoise and russet streak that, every now and then, went into its nest hole in an artificial sandbank beside a weed-choked pool then headed back off towards the river to hunt more fishies. Masses of luscious blackberries ('please leave for the birds'), water buffalo keeping the grazing marsh grazed, grey heron, lots of wood pigeons.

Meanwhile, this is harvest season: masses of lettuce, runner beans, raspberries. Some blackberries. Tomatoes just starting to come ripe (a race against the blight which is taking hold on their leaves). Main job down the allotment is transplanting broccoli and cabbage seedlings so they can grow big and fat for winter harvest. Freezer already stuffed full -- but we think its time we got a new (energy efficient) fridge, and we've spotted one that offers an extra, fifth freezer drawer...

How are you all?

A Grand Day Out

One of many lists which I carry around in my filofax is of places in and around London to visit. I've had it for some years, and it gets added to from time to time -- and just as occasionally, a tick appears next to an item to show that it's been duly visited. These ticks don't appear very often, even though Judith and I tell each other at the start of every year that we really must make an effort otherwise we'll never see them at all....but then ordinary everyday life gets in the way and before we know it the summer's over, we've spent most of our time gardening, and places are closing up for the winter.

But this weekend just past we made an effort, and took a train up the Lee Valley to visit Rye House Gatehouse and Rye Meads Nature Reserve. There's not much to see at the Gatehouse, although the late medieval brickwork is worth more than a passing glance; one would probably see more from the roof during the winter, when the trees aren't in leaf, but as the property is closed to the public from October to March inclusive, only the Lee Valley Park Authority's maintenance staff ever have that opportunity. There's more at Rye Meads, mostly waterfowl; at this time of year, the meadows are being grazed by three water buffalo advertised as of Romanian origin (although how these animals differ from the water buffalo one finds in southern Italy was not at all obvious), and there was an excited notice in the visitor centre announcing that kingfishers had bred in the artificial sandbank in the northeast corner of the reserve. Predictably, the hide overlooking that sandbank was crowded; but we got seats, and waited. And waited. And waited....

When it arrives, kingfishers are less like the bird one sees perched on a branch on television wildlife programmes, and more of a linear phenomenon: a bright blue and red blur as it zooms down into the burrow (presumably with a fish in its beak), followed some seconds later by another bright blue and red blur as it zooms back out again in search of more food. In the fifteen minutes or thereabouts we sat watching, it zoomed in and out three times. But it does mean that, after a life of never having seen a kingfisher except on television wildlife programmes, I have now finally seen the bird for real.

Not something else to tick off, because we don't do that sort of birdwatching. But it was a grand day out just the same.

Avignon Old Town (Part 2)

Following on from a couple of days ago, a selection of some of the notable 18th and 19th century buildings in the old town. We begin with the Hotel de Ville and l'Opera (misleadingly renamed the Theatre; although opera en Francais does not have quite the same meaning as in English, "theatre" is not really a synonym); move on to what is now the Galerie Ducastel but was originally the Theatre Comedie, founded in 1660 and taking its present form in 1825, home to the opera bouffant tradition for many years; and then drop by two eighteenth century mansions which have been converted into museums -- the Musee Vouland, which houses a display of pre-revolutionary furniture and asociated objets collected by the 1920s industrialist Louis Vouland; and (in the very magnificent former Hotel de Villeneuve-Martignan) the Musee Calvet, based on but expanded from the collection of the 18th century's Dr Esprit Calvet: an engaging collection of paintings and portraits from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, which includes a number of singletons from famous Northern European artists such as Brueghel and Vlaminck as well as many pieces from less well-known French artists such as Nicolas Mignard, Horace Vernet and Jean Louis David plus any number of Provencal artists whose local fame did not survive their demise. But such is the way with art of all kinds....

Avignon Old Town (Part 1)

After a longer delay than I'd anticipated, I return with some photographs of Rue des Teinturiers, supposedly the most atmospheric street in the old town. It would also have been, at one time, the smelliest, for it was a street lined with workshops occupied by cloth dyers and fullers, who used the power provided by the water wheels to drive the wooden hammers that threshed the wool and cotton....and then tipped their waste dyes and other gunk back into the same small channel. At least the water flowed away from the centre of town, so that the smelliest smells were concentrated by the medieval walls, from where our walk along the street started. (Whether anyone would have wanted to buy cloth which they knew had been dyed and fulled in the workshops closest to the walls is left as an exercise for the reader.) The modern street is enlivened by sculpted blocks depicting a variety of scenes: animals, memento mori, whatever. Their exact function is a mystery, but then who said art had to be functional?

For those fascinated by the circumstances in which photographs are taken, these images were collected during a torrential downpour -- rain which had held off during the whole of our time in Provence but then arrived all at once on our final afternoon. We spent almost as much time standing in doorways waiting for the rain to pass as we did walking along the street.

Yet More Photographs

As promised yesterday, some views from the roof of the Palais des Papes, over Place des Papes. The first view is a general view southwest towards the River Rhone, just visible towards the top right of the picture; at the bottom right of the picture can be seen part of the exuberantly decorated facade of the seventeenth century Hotel des Monnaies, formerly the papal mint and now the music conservatory: it is seen to better advantage in the second picture. The third picture shows the view north, towards the Petit Palais, formerly part of the papal complex but now a museum of religious art, mostly of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the building is seen to better advantage in the fourth picture. The River Rhone appears again on the left of the third picture; if you look carefully, the Pont de Benezet can be seen to the left of the Petit Palais.

Next time: selected buildings in Avignon's old town.