Human Lifestyle

A very busy day.  Got up fairly early and added to yesterday's blog, as in the morning I heard news of Pete Postlethwaite's death, and that had been with me all day.  So today, I had quite a lot of reading to do, for this afternoon's Environment Forum meeting.  Barry Otley had asked us to read about Ecosystem Services, which is a way of valuing all sorts of things which don't have a monetary value... such as urban trees, wildflower meadows, or saltwater marsh.  So the value of urban trees, for instance, lies in their ability to absorb some atmospheric pollution, absorb noise, help cool the 'Urban Heat Island Effect', provide fruits/nuts, shade in summer, and if planted along pathways, can help make pleasant cycle and walkways.  Not only this, but having greenery around, such as trees, helps improve mental health and wellbeing.  All of these have been measured and well described.  So I read for about two hours, mainly documents Barry emailed to Environment Forum members. But there's plenty of info on the web, such as wikipedia for starters.

However I had three phone calls for Professor Fiddlesticks bookings, one next week, one at the end of the month, and one in the summer.

During the afternoon, Gill went to town to get clothes for the boys, and at 3.30 I headed off to the Guildhall for the Environment Forum meeting, which was very interesting.  It finished at 6pm but I chatted to Dan about Five Thousand, a new initiative which hopes to help jobless people gain skills etc through gardening.  Also chatted with June Tranmer and Edward Harland.

I got home just before 7 and had 3 slices of home grown pumpkin with rice for tea... the pumpkin had started to go off, so I'd rescued it by slicing it and removing the seeds and small area of mould, and roasting the lot in the bottom of the oven whilst something else was cooking.  So I've got another 10 slices of pumpkin to eat!  I'll have to do a family meal and try to hide pumpkin in it!

I had a late start as I was up and around doing things last night til a ridiculous time. But I had nothing planned for the morning, and in the afternoon I had three meetings one after the other, with not a lot of time between them, including a 'public appearance' for which I felt the need to be clean and well groomed!

So after breakfast/lunch I had a bath, and then read a bit more No Impact Man book. I'm just over halfway through.

At 3.30 I set off for the Environment Forum meeting at the Friends Meeting House. The attendees had received my version of the Allerton Waste Recovery Park response document, and we were also going to meet and discuss things with Kersten England, the Chief Executive of City of York Council, and also we needed to discuss our Vision Document. It was really good to meet Kersten England for the first time, and she responded to all our questions in the manner expected of a Chief Exec. The Allerton Park response is going to be reconsidered after we've heard more information next Monday, when some of us will attend a meeting which will discuss a 'Zero Waste Policy' which has not been considered by the Council. The Vision Document discussion was complicated, and over-ran, and I left at 6.10, which didn't give me enough time to get to the Planning Panel meeting. So I went home and Gill gave me pizza and broccoli, baked beans and potatoes. I had some quiet time before setting out for City Screen at about 8pm.

This was for the screening of No Impact Man. I met Guy and Ivana at the stall in the foyer, and other people started to turn up whom I knew. Dave Taylor arranged that the three speakers got complimentary tickets which was nice of him. There were about 45 people in the audience, many of them 'the usual suspects'. The film is excellent, has funny moments, some cute interludes with Colin and Michelle's daughter Isabella, and I really liked the fact that the story focuses a lot of the relationship between Colin and his wife. I missed the bit about the candles when I watched the DVD last night; they are not paraffin wax, but bees' wax, and therefore NOT of fossil origin, but renewable. For as long as we've got honeybees, that is.

The Question and Answer session seemed to go quite well afterwards... about half the people went as the credits rolled and the rest were happy to hear the discussion and a few asked questions or made comments. The most interesting observation (afterwards, in the foyer) was that when the film Super Size Me was screened here, the auditorium was packed. So what is it about a film which looked at the fast food culture by means of a guy eating nothing but McDonald's for a month which made it so popular, whereas a film about a guy giving up stuff for a year drew just a few dozen? Both films had the aim of drawing attention to an aspect of modern life... maybe it was because Morgan Spurlock's experiment was just one aspect whereas Colin Beavan's was about lots!

I enjoyed my cycle home and picked up one more plastic crate for Abundance York's fruit collections, and I realised I hadn't taken the crates round to Dave Broughton in my bike trailer like I said I would. I now have 11 to give him.

Later, at home and typing away doing my blog, playing Scrabble on facebook, a friend, Manuel Costa who's an environmentalist in Canada, I think, posted ths article about Germany getting the wobbles about 'Peak Oil' and it's well worth a read. Another challenging read, if you're interested in diet, meat and veganism, is George Monbiot's review of Simon Fairlie's book 'Meat: A Benign Extravagance. Not sure I'll be moving away from vegetarianism though.

A good day, partly as I had a deadline thrust upon me and I work well facing a deadline. But that was later. During the morning, I did some garden work, not much, but some. I composed a letter after lunch, to Kersten England, the Returning Officer for the City of York Council, and asked for a by election to be held in our Ward, as Roger Pierce the excellent Councillor has resigned. The other Councillor is nowhere to be seen, so effectively we have no representation in the Ward, which is a bad situation to be in and we need an election. Gill wrote a letter too, as to call an election, you need two electors to call it. I spoke to the Election Officer and he told me the date of the election and gave me nomination papers. I then popped into the Press and told them I'd just called the election. Exciting!

So, during the afternoon, the chair of the Environment Forum told me he was doing the mailout at 6 and could I have the incinerator report ready by then. This concentrated my mind and I took myself upstairs away from the distractions and wrote the report. I used the report written by Carole Green as a template, and massaged it and added to it, so now this document, about the Forum's response to the Allerton 'Waste Recovery Park' , is ready to be debated and then, probably after more alterations, adopted.

I had a Macaroni cheese tea with home grown cherry tomatoes exploding hotly in my mouth.

Then there was a LETS meeting at 7.30, and it was just me and Melody; we had a lively conversation and left the Seahorse at 8.20. I collected a pile of weeds from the Edible York public bed and then a pile of 10 plastic crates for the Abundance crew after that. The boys and mum were watching some sort of Dr. Who-based thing so I stayed outside and stacked some logs in the dark. I wanted to get these dry logs under cover before the predicted rain came, which it did.

Then I came in and settled down to watch the promo-copy DVD of No Impact Man, so I have something to think about before the screening tomorrow, and the Q+A afterwards. It is an excellent film, a documentary about the year-long experiment. I enjoyed it, and was right, 'No Impact' is not literally true. For instance, at one point the family decides to do away with electricity in their home. So they use candles for lighting, and a cool box instead of a fridge. The cool box is kept cool using a neighbour's ice cubes (impact!) and candles are made from fossil paraffin wax (fossil CO2 emission impact). BUT, the really good thing about the project is that millions of profligate Americans (and now, Brits) are exposed to the idea of reducing/eliminating their impact, and may, just may follow suit and do something positive re our shared environment.

Later, one of my New Zealand relatives sent me a link to a load of photos of the Christchurch earthquake, and I spent an hour looking through them. Amazing stuff! Glad no-one was killed.

We were woken early by an excited little boy who is 11 today... he had woken at 4am and was too excited to go back to sleep, so he'd been reading but was hungry, at 7.40. Gill got up and told me to go back to sleep.... I'm not an early morning person, and am up til 2am, whereas she sleeps in the evening when I'm doing things and she then gets up at 6am.

So, at about 9 I was woken again, the Birthday Boy had held on and wanted desperately to open his presents. So I decamped into his room and sleepily watched him open a box with some Lego figures in it, including a jester and a magician, and his older brother had made him a wand out of a stripped holly stick and in the split handle was a trapped pheasant feather, some kind of (imaginary) 'power' that I don't understand. I don't get make believe, never have really, it's an Aspergery trait.

We all breakfasted and I wrote a letter to the Neighbourhood Unit about the Funding shenanigans I've found myself having to deal with. Then before lunch, their friend came down to join us with a trip into town. I cycled in, stopping at Woodlands as one of my documents hadn't photocopied properly, and they wanted to re do it, and then to chat to some chaps who were taking down an Ash tree.

The boys and Gill caught the bus into town, and I'd arranged to meet them at the Museum Gardens after I'd met up with the Neighbourhood Unit to explain the position of York in Transition about 'sponsoring' another organisation, or rather, not being able to. I met them on the steps of the Yorkshire Museum, which has recently been refurbished. We spent quite a long time in there, and it is improved, although some things aren't yet labelled/numbered, and I spotted at least three mistakes, one was a spelling mistake, another a text layout error and there was a factual error too, but I can't remember what that was.. But I liked the use of the Tempest Anderson Hall as a film theatre, and I liked the more open space with the reference books visible on the floors above the exhibitions.

After this the boys wanted to wander through town looking at shops, my idea of Hell, so I cycled home via the Edible York Raised Bed,where I saw my friend Lizzie talking to the Radio York presenter next to his car with the aerial up. I stopped, and found out they were about the do an interview. Chloe turned up, and all three of us were briefly interviewed on live radio... what a surprise! I talked about the Transition to a low carbon economy where we grew more of our food locally, and the presenter introduced me as Compost John, responsible for 30 sacks of compost getting to this bed.

But I needed to get back, and when I did, I spent an hour getting about 400 or 500 kg of Ash logs onto my trailer, I think I did 6 trips, before the time came for my 4pm appointment, the York Environment Forum which I occasionally attend.

This was at the Guildhall, and was a special meeting to ask questions of Andrew Cousins from the Allerton Waste Recovery Park, or Anaerobic Digester/Incinerator plant. We had a series of questions and I asked a couple of supplementary questions based on the wide-ranging conversations I had with Andrew at The Hospitium. It was a good meeting and we agreed to write a position statement about this development. We also debated our Vision Document. We finished well after 6pm.

I came home and loaded lemon halves into a heap and came in quite tired to have pasta for tea.

I took the children into school, after inflating their tyres and oiling chains.
When I got back we both went to bed... so good to have some child-free time after a relatively tough Easter Holiday. But then I had to get on with my work... a post on the Community Care Blog which should have been in on Sunday or Monday. But there is flexibility, fortunately!

So did that and all too soon it was lunch time and after that I had to go to town to get some cheques out and attend a meeting I'd been invited to. This was the York Environment Forum, a 'replacement' to Local Agenda 21 and part of the wider Local Development Framework process, which in York is labelled 'Without Walls'. It was quite a lively discussion, and I was invited to join the group. It felt like old times, being up in Committee Room 3 in the Guildhall...

That ran from 4 til 6... and I sprinted home, trailer rattling and bouncing all over the place in order to get to the next meeting on time, the Hull Road Ward Planning Panel, at 6.30 in Archbishop Holgate School. I'm the acting Clerk so I have to be there, and I'm being sent all the paperwork so if I don't turn up, it doesn't happen. However, Colin was the only other person to turn up... maybe next time I'll send round an email reminder!

That only took 30 minutes so that enabled me to have a bite to eat before my third meeting, a York CRAG core-group, just four of us with some very intense discussions about how we run the group, membership issues and several other subjects. That ran from 8.15 til pub closing time... if one of the people there hadn't been quite so argumentative we'd have been away at 10pm. Never mind, I do like the argumentative-one's approach, it's not unlike mine except I've mellowed with age and have realised that things run more smoothly if nits are left unpicked sometimes....

So got in after 11 and had a few minutes chat with Gill before going on the computer to hook up with K on Skype as pre-arranged and we had a good chat and the cameras worked this time!