bish blog

Just bought one of these… The Owl

Now I can sit at my study desk and watch the instantaneous cost of the electrical goods in my home as they all consume, consume, consume their way through the National Grid’s finest mobile electrons! lol. They are on offer this month only, at £29.95 including delivery. Elsewhere they range from forty quid upwards.

I enjoyed the first five minutes of watching the pence per hour move from 9p up to 15p and down again as I turned on and off various bits of kit – lights, monitors, bass amp – and then had a minor heart attack as it went straight to 60p… Miss had put the kettle on!

I suppose this is as bad in its way as spreadsheeting my fuel-ups in the Prius (currently 52 mpg Imperial) but perhaps it will motivate us to reduce our already reasonable electricity consumption. Perhaps. Still, the kettle’s boiled, tea’s on the way… sit back, relax, watch. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

What a strange day! This morning we found one of the chickens with a badly infected foot – probably the result of a previous mite attack gone bad. I decided she was not going to recover, which meant I had to provide the assistance into her next cycle. Only the second girl I’ve had to send on, and the first I stunned with a bit of two by two. Having been … er, inspired by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recently, I bit my lip and wrung her neck. Not a pleasant task, even knowing how chickens flap about after death. What I wasn’t expecting – though perhaps given my druid tendencies I ought to have been – was the jolt of electricity I felt as her life ended; as if her life force was a shorted, discharging battery! The pulse ran through my hand and up my arm; slightly weaker than mains electricity but not dissimilar in nature. Was is my own nervous system under stress, or what?I have the idea we may raise meat birds before long, so perhaps this unpleasant task will become more regular (although, hopefully, never routine), but as a possibly diseased and somewhat aged bird she found a new home under the trees with the other chooks and guinea pigs of times past.

Later, Miss and I went for a walk around the village and came upon the stink of diesel where it oughtn’t be. On investigation we found diesel oil floating on top of a swiftly flowing drainage stream. The speed of the stream, after the recent rain and floods, did not prevent the oil slick from covering the whole surface in a rainbow scum, which showed the rate at which it was leaking into the ditch (seemingly coming up from under the ditch itself possibly following the water table). It doesn’t actually take a lot of oil to make a huge slick, but then it doesn’t take much oil to kill all the life in a normally healthy stream either. There was evidence of scorching on much of the vegetation, caused by the oil, all up either side of the ditch. I called the local council environmental department and the Environment Agency, and this afternoon we placed booms across the stream to stop the oil getting into the local river. Hopefully the cause of the contamination will soon be located and isolated. I was impressed at the speed at which the council Environmental Officer attended site, and at the cooperation from the adjacent businesses. Possibly I am slightly hyper about such incidents, working as I do in an industry with thousands of gallons of oil (all, usually, very well under control and safely bunded), but I’m pleased what could have been a long term leak has been identified and controlled.

Blessings of the Winter Solstice an’ all that…

Why, though, is it that while we are remonstrated at daily to turn off, not to leave on standby, to reduce reuse recycle… the media are so enamoured of fools with pretty lights all over their homes? Again this evening the local news channel showed a whole street done over in inflatable Santa’s, multi-coloured festoons and disco sound systems, the residents parading their lack of interest in global climate change in the race toward Commercialmas. One excuse for this ecological obscenity was that it raised some hundred perhaps thousands of pounds for charitable causes – but no-one seemed keen to factor in the extra electrical demand, not to mention the manufacturing, transportation and retailing costs of these (mostly) Chinese sweatshop produced twinkly lights. On the one occasion someone dared to mention carbon footprints they were practically censured by the presenter.

Perhaps it is a rebellion against the dark days, a reaction against the longer nights. The lack of sunlights leads me to be a bit SAD but I like the dark nights and I despair of ever seeing stars in these times of glaring floodlights and security lamps, let alone this tasteless lot. Well the longest one has just passed (though it was too grey to see the sunset and too foggy to see the sunrise) and the Sun will return in strength soon enough. And if you intend celebrating any other events hereabouts, have a good one. Bah humbug!