Thumbs Up for Eurotunnel.

Travelling to and from France to sort the hideaway we often use Eurotunnel. They sell a 10 journey car and passenger package for just under £400 which allows the actual crossings to be taken any  time over the next year and journey times booked or changed  on the Net at short notice on off peak trains.  Using peak times or a larger vehicle ads a surcharge but the flexibility is useful.

Using the tunnel is not as relaxing as a ferry, and Dover to Calais involves a bit more driving than some ferry routes, it’s not as cheap as the cheapest ferry, but it has the advantage that it’s quick, and given the impossibility of time planning a long UK road journey it’s useful. If there is space they often offer an earlier train when you arrive early and it’s only half an hour to the next train if you miss the booked time.

This time we gave them a puzzle. Having been in France last year when the petrol delivery drivers went on strike, a national pastime, and with an almost empty fuel tank we shelved our tunnel crossing home and headed for the nearest ferry port. Going last week but in the van not the car and with an odd number of crossings on the ticket we decided to go ferry and return on the ‘shelved’ Tunnel ticket.

So we fell through the gaps of the online system, it couldn’t cope with the outward journey in a car last autumn and yesterday's return in a van subject to a high vehicle surcharge. You could change cars, change times, but couldn’t change vehicle type for the return.

So we phoned and booked a high vehicle place, but they couldn’t take the surcharge over the phone and said we would need to report on arrival to pay rather than simply drive through the usual automatic toll gate. So we made an effort to arrive early, explained to the woman in the toll kiosk why we had a high vehicle reservation but hadn’t paid the extra. 

She intercomed her supervisor, asked us if we would like the just loading earlier crossing to save waiting, printed the boarding ticket and handed it over with a smile saying not to worry, the upgrade is free. 

Thank you Eurotunnel, and we will be using your services again.

Makes a change to uncomplain about something.

A Week Away From Political News.

I’m currently sitting in rural France, cheese and Calvados country, where I’m continuing to work on the potential escape pod and get it up to our standard of habitation.

It’s strange how being out of the UK for a week some of the anger and horror of the UK political scene gradually ebbs. Here a couple of cars go past each hour, the local roads are virtually empty by UK standards and free of potholes, the sun is warmer, the food is excellent, the locals are friendly, there are wild flowers along the roadsides, parking in the local town is free and the loudest noise today has been the bumble bees as they bumble around searching out the early flowers. The supermarket, when it’s open, which excludes Sundays and evenings (I’m sure the neighbours didn’t believe me when I said we had a 24 hour one near us in the UK!) sells locally sourced vegetables which have far more flavour than anything in a UK one. The bread is all fresh and tasty, making UK supermarket efforts taste like plasticized cardboard. At night it’s pitch dark, the stars are stunning, with no evil orange glow from the nearest town and the silence is unbelievable, the UK has a constant background noise.

The silly thing is that I’m further inside the EU here than at home. There are corrupt politicians here, politics still happens, but it seems much more distant. I don’t think it’s because I don’t have such a stake in it. People resent long-life light bulbs and new rules on septic tanks but it’s no big deal. They tend to nod quietly and ignore the rules which make no sense or intrude too much. The French state has always been bureaucratic but fill in the forms, jump through the hoops where you have to, pay the taxes, then it leaves you alone. It doesn’t intrude all the time staring you in the face like the UK. There isn’t the micromanagement or the obsession with political correctness and health and safety. You are meant to take care of yourself, think for yourself, and take responsibility for yourself. People do just that, and also look out for their neighbours.

This area is full of small tradesmen and small businesses. As most houses are detached and well spaced small tradesmen can, and often do, work from home without disturbing anyone, many houses have basements and outbuildings. Registered tradesmen are allowed a notice in front of their house, and driving around you see not just plumbers, electricians and carpenters but there is a geo-heating engineer (at least that was what I decided it translated to) and a medical supplies distributor not far from here. In the UK they would need the overhead of an industrial unit.

This area is rural and has quite traditional values, so even Paris is somewhat like a different country. Someone once told me there were only two nationalities the locals didn’t like; Americans and Parisiens! But I think part of the relaxed attitude is because the local commune is run hands on by the elected local Mayor. The Mayor has immense power, over everything from planning to housing benefits, and while I expect there is plenty of opportunity for cronyism there is also plenty of opportunity for quick common sense actions and decisions. Everyone knows who he is and where he lives, and he knows almost everyone in the village. Things get done, the village is always clean and tidy and well maintained and every year sees a few more improvements as needs show themselves.

It’s still possible to buy a small rural house round here needing renovation for under 50,000 Euro, I wonder why anyone is left in the UK?

The Power of Words

Words have power. We all know this but often we assume it refers to words when used as communication to transmit information when it’s actually the information that has power. Or maybe the words convey authority, that too means power.

That’s not the sort of word power I mean, it’s the power of the words themselves that is often important. Poets, songwriters, novelists and journalists use this word power all the time, but we rarely stop and think why it works, often we don’t even notice it at all. One reason for their power is because of the unconscious emotional association we make to different words.

As a simple example think about this sentence; “The bright red car accelerated quickly up the road”. Nothing special about that, it’s a simple description. We think of bright red as a nice attractive colour. There is nothing wrong with accelerating quickly and roads are designed to accelerate on when driving off. The sentence is emotional positive or neutral, maybe the family going off on holiday. Change a few words. “The lurid red coupe accelerated fast up the carriageway”. Same event and the words mean the same but we get a totally different message. Now it’s a bad colour, the car is a fast one, the driver is violent, probably socially irresponsible, and carriageways are somehow faster than roads, the sentence now describes a bad situation.

The use of emotionally positive words in place of words with negative connotations is a staple method of the political correctness movement. “Intellectually challenged” is far more positive than “stupid” and the classic “gay”, with connotations of carefree innocent enjoyment is the emotional opposite of “homosexual” which carries the stigma of political scandals and sordid toilet encounters.

Such wordplay is far more subtle and more dangerous than ordinary spin. Spin simply exaggerates the good points and downplays the bad ones, at the extreme it is to lie by omission. Choosing the right words however is often so subtle as to be almost subliminal.

The global warming movement have always been good at extreme spin. Their data lies by omission, their models lie by omission, and their power generation ideas are close to fantasy without any regard to the problems. Most of us have long realised it has to do with tax and control, the environment was simply a useful (probably manufactured) artificial problem. But in any case the whole global warming senario had the great political disadvantage that it was all based around negative concepts, alarms and difficulties.

Recently the political movement has moved beyond talking about AGW or climate change or even mentioning CO2 levels. The latest references leave all that behind and increasingly talk glibly of our “carbon commitments” or “carbon targets”.  

 

This has the useful political effect of deflecting any criticism of the real environmental reality by removing the entire tax and control system beyond it. But more dangerously it uses an emotionally positive phrase to make it sound good. After all commitments are a good thing, targets are fun to hit. They have converted the language of the situation from a negative scare scenario into a positive aspiration.

To get the truth we need to remember that the only reliable forms of energy we currently have for many purposes are carbon based. We also need to understand that “commitment” used here doesn’t mean agreement, it means “ration”. What they are talking about is our energy ration.

That of course would be why they seem so lackadaisical about building new power stations and why they are trying to convince us that smart meters are for our benefit. We are heading for energy rationing, so don’t let phrases like “carbon commitment” fool you.

What to do with the broken light bulb?

Having builders in has left me short of time recently so I missed this excellent bit of news a couple of weeks ago.

It seems various local councils are now refusing to collect expired low energy light bulbs because the mercury content classifies them as hazardous waste and the vapour is dangerous if it escapes!

Just out of interest here  is the man who proposed the discontinuation of real bulbs and how he lives.

Product

This week has all been a bit of a rush, builders working in the garden, (why is it that employing someone, even a good tradesman, seems to be more exhausting than doing the job yourself?), someone to collect from the airport (what possible excuse can there be for Manchester Airport to charge £4 for an hour to park and pick someone up?), then there has been miscellaneous stuff to do in the garden while the weather was good (the tobacco seedlings are doing well Mr Osbourne and I’m sure the lack of additives will be good for my health). 

All in all an excellent opportunity to touch base with reality and avoid the media with their gung ho attitude to Libya where the New World Order is busy helping the good rebels, as against Afghanistan where they are fighting the bad rebels. The cynical might suggest that the differentiation between good and bad is connected with ownership of oil terminals or minerals but I’m sure there must be some high moral consideration that I’m missing.

Then there were the usual infantile hide and seek games of Clegg and Cameron as they pretend to be annoyed at the EU while they sign up to yet more of it, just how stupid do they think we are? This time it's bailing out Portugal. Isn’t it nice to know we are each allowed to give £300 to those nice people in Portugal, makes you feel warm all over with a glow of generosity. I was wondering whether to comment on the census, but I did that as a guest on Subrosa’s blog  a while back and I think we know what we are going to do with it by now, although its treatment may not be quite as dignified as intended.

And yesterday there were all those people protesting because they are scared the rest of us may stop providing them with free lunches and stuff. So Ok I’m happy to provide when someone is otherwise going unfed, or even temporarily when someone is between jobs through forced redundancy, but most of the freeloaders in London yesterday looked to me either better off than me, and thus capable of buying their own lunches, or else had made a lifestyle choice to scrounge off the rest of us.

So to trivia, which is much less gloomy. One of the columns I usually enjoy in the Sunday Times is Jeremy Clarkson’s. Of course he plays the gallery, and goes out of his way to pretend to be a clown and get up the noses of the politically correct, but he often touches serious topics, and hits out at many day to day irritations. One of the things he mentions today is the annoyance of shower/bathroom products that are unrecognisable once one is in the shower (I strongly suggest you avoid imagining any visuals!)

As I am totally blind to small visual details without my reading glasses he has hit on a pet peeve that has bugged me for years. Standing underwater squinting to decide what ‘product’ is in the bottle before anointing one’s head with some anonymous concoction is indeed one of the daily random experiences of getting older, although it can afford considerable pleasure when one gets lucky there are risks too.

It’s quite obvious that package designers think it’s a fun game, especially when they make a range of unguents, soaps and liniments in identical bottles, proudly proclaiming the manufacturer’s name and marketing range name in large print but the actual product in the smallest possible type and the most unlikely location.  I would single out Tree Same Me and Jill Ette as prime players, although Jill Ette cleverly prints the product description in white against a yellow section of the label, which I think is probably cheating.

Even worse are those firms who don’t even say what the stuff in the bottle is! Somehow you are meant to have enough psychic ability to know that McCorporation Valley is an air freshener while McCorporation Elf is clothes washing powder while every instruction and endorsement on the container talks about ‘this product’. I suppose the sorts of people who can reel off the names of Xfactor contestants or boyfriends of ‘c’ list celebrities might know what things have what names, sadly I don’t! 

I think package designers for household products probably deserve a special hell of their own, even though it need be nothing like as bad as the one I would reserve for politicians.

A Budget for Man With a Van

What a depressing budget from Osborne! Another smoke and mirrors job from the ConDems that gives with one hand while emptying your wallet with the other.

The rise in income tax allowance is welcome, the low paid should never have been in the tax net in the first place, so throwing a few poor folks out is helpful, except it’s such a drop in the ocean when all the other taxes are taken into account and only pays them back for the VAT he already added to the cost of living

Not adding another pre-planned duty rise to petrol was a no-brainer, except that he carefully said it had been deferred, so no doubt he will slide it back with interest when he thinks we aren’t looking. But in any case he has recently added 5 pence a litre to the around 80 pence already taken in duty so are we supposed to be grateful that he hasn’t stolen another one? It’s frightening to think that 5 pence a litre is almost 25 pence a gallon and I can remember in old money when petrol, at 4s 11p per gallon, cost less than that.

The killer section, which he glossed over in a matter of seconds, was the plan for a carbon price. He even sounded proud that the UK was now the first country to set a floor price for carbon. Well of course he is first as most other countries have realised that the econut/IPCC alarmism and renewable energy windmill nonsense is a scam and totally ineffective and as a result have pulled back their plans. Osbourne, presumably spurred on by Huhne the Hopeless, seems to prefer to energy tax and energy ration our country back to third world status.  As a tax it’s ideal for government as it creates a whole new tax platform, hidden from obvious view and taxing every business, every activity and every man, woman and child in society. And of course as we are already forced to pay a ‘renewable levy’ in our electricity bills we instantly have a double taxation.

Then, the sting in the tail, with the vicious rise in tobacco duty.  Having raised the tobacco price to virtually the same level as illegal drugs does this overage schoolboy not realise what will happen? It’s essentially prohibition based on price, and the profits from smuggling will almost certainly draw in more people and probably organised criminals. 

But at least a couple of occasions in his speech raised a smile for me when he was forced to admit he couldn’t do what he wanted because his preferred plan was illegal, in particular the EU rules forbade him from adjusting VAT on petrol. The words ‘petard’, ‘own, ‘by’ ‘his’ and ‘hoist’ come to mind.

A glimmer of sense from Monbiot?

George Monbiot has spent years spouting nonsense about renewable energy and supporting the most nonsensical alarm mongering rubbish spouted by anti-technological man-made global warming proponents.

Maybe it’s the pleasant spring weather but he has just written an almost sensible column in the Guardian.

True to form he still hates technology, and the usual global warming claptrap still bubbles energetically below the surface, but for once he has made some logical deductions about Power generation.

He seems to accept that people have an irrational phobia about nuclear accidents, whereas in fact the safety limits are set so low that leaks lower than ordinary background levels are considered serious. Admits that an old nuclear plant, even when stressed way beyond its design, has caused far less pollution than many ordinary and ‘safe’ generating sites. And even goes so far as saying that some ‘green’ technology, even historic things that we think harmless and to be admired had a devastating effect on the ecosystem, water mills preventing fish breeding for example.

Now if only he and his friends would apply the same thought processes towards the irrational phobia of man-made global warming, the despoliation of the countryside by windmills and realise that Co2 is an eco-friendly plant food.