Sunday 15 August 2010

Extract from "Where The Fox Goes,"

      All he could do was press on.  He would get to the Nativity play.  Perhaps someone he knew would spot him walking and offer him a lift. In an unusually gritty voice, he started to sing one of his favourite hymns as he trudged back up the hill.
     "Who would true valour see
                 Let him come hither:
      One here will constant be,
                Come wind, come weather."
     The mist was closing in now and it  swirled around in the wind.  Sometimes he could see a fair distance, before it rolled in towards him again.
     Ahead of him, he heard a voice.  He was certain that he heard a voice.
He stopped singing, but the voice of a young woman carried on.
     "There's no discouragement
       Shall make him once relent
      His first avowed intent
                      To be a pilgrim."
     Alan caught sight of her, now.  His fellow chorister was wearing a red head scarf, a blue rain coat and gum boots and she was walking down the hill towards him.  She waved to him, a joyful, friendly wave and turned abruptly into the hedge and disappeared from sight.
     He could still hear her singing and he hurried up the hill, joining in.
     "Who so beset him round
            With dismal stories,"
   Where was she? There was a small gap in the hedge and the singing came from the other side.
     "Do but themselves confound:
           His strength the more is."
      Alan walked through the thick hedge and came out onto a wide expanse of grass leading into the mist from which he could still hear the singing, exultant and floating further away as the singer hurried on.
     He raised his voice to carry with hers.  He didn't care what he sounded like, he just wanted to join in.
      "No lion can him fright,
       He'll with a giant fight."
The words of the hymn rose through the mist, bravely,
     "But he will have the right
                       To be a pilgrim."
Alan knew where he was now.  He was walking on Beatrice's Way, a raised swathe of land, which ran directly across the wasteland to the almshouses and the road in which St. Mary's Hall stood. It was an old green lane used by the drovers, but he was amazed that it was still clear.
     The girl's voice, sweet and soft in the damp air led him forward in the right direction even when he couldn't see more than a few yards ahead.
He sang now, without fear and with a sense of inner peace that he hadn't known since Mary was alive.....

Later in the story,

     Alan made contact with his friends and feverish activity went on for several days.  Documents were found and copied, advice was taken, opinions sought until he knew the case was complete.
     They decided to hold a public meeting in the church hall and invited their M.P., the developers, the council planning committee members and the general public.
     On the night, Alan was surprised by how many people he knew had turned up.  There were numbers of grandparents whose battles he had fought when they were young, with their children and even grandchildren.  The local vet was there and a couple of architects he had approached, when he had needed to provide alternative schemes.
     The history society was well represented and to everyone's surprise, the owner of two of the empty factories was there.  The general public was considerable: people from throughout the town who had played in the wastelands as children, walkers' groups,  the chairman of the allotment holders' association. Teachers, who used the wastelands for educating the children about the environment, people who went there  from the town when they needed space to think,  bird watchers, bat watchers, the list was impressive.  The natural history society was there in force.
      People were standing at the back of the hall, because there were no more seats left.  Both sides spoke....
(copyright. J.R.Birch 2004)

Saturday 14 August 2010

Where The Fox Goes.

     This post is in addition to my usual ones.  As well as Everyone Can be a herO, I have recently put onto PDF the first novel I ever wrote, updated and rephrased in places, but nevertheless,  a book of the early nineties, which were surprisingly relevant to our current situation.
     This was the time just before nearly everyone had a  mobile 'phone and most people weren't conversant with computers, unless it was for work.  It was also one of the last times I remember when kid had more freedom and used to play outside.  It was another time of factory closures as trade was moved to places where they paid less and made more profit.
     I first wrote it as a television series and sent an outline to Alan Yentob, in 2003. This series never happened (!)  but it actually makes a better book anyway. We are flogging it for a pound a pdf on my website,  www.insideoutsider.co.uk  when I can get the Home Page on line.
     A fox makes it's way through a town and the surrounding countryside, the path it takes leads it through the gardens,allotments and landscape of the families in the book.   They  have cut backs and job losses and the allotments and wastelands are under threat from a developer.  This is a book in which Christians are not afraid to sing hymns as they walk down a country lane.  These same paths were trodden by Christians in the times of the enclosures and it is their commitment to the people around both in the eighteen nineties and in the nineteen nineties which counts in the plot. It is a family book and it also contains the story of a lost cat, who, like the fox, touches on people's lives, arousing compassion and affecting their lives for the better.

Monday 2 August 2010

Raising the temperature... Whose water is it anyway?

     A week or so ago I reported the good news that all we have to do is to eat organic and bring back the world to an organic system of food growing, as well reforesting, to not only stop global warming but reverse it.  This came in the form of an article and alert in  organic byte #227 from the Organic Consumers Association via a tweet.
     Never in the history  of mankind , surely, has such an important  piece of news been delivered in such a singular way!.... but there it is... you don't  need to do anything more fancy than going back to growing food the way our great grandparents did, to save the world.   
     This cannot come soon enough.  This week, I had a news update from The Ecologist, the ecological early warning  e magazine,  reporting on a paper by a Canadian researchers, headed by  Daniel Boyce, a PhD student at Dalhousie University, published in Nature.
     It appears that while the beneficial mycorrhizal fungi in the soil can seqester back all  the CO2 we produce and more, given half a chance;  the phytoplankton in the surface layers of the sea have not been doing so well.. In fact their numbers  have been going down worldwide each year by  1% since 1950. The Northern hemisphere has lost 40%.  This seems to be due to the temperature of the water going up.
     The Phytoplankton produce half the world's oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to Boris Worm, another member of the team.
     You can find mention of it on the internet.. CBS has a short report, for one, which is where these figures came from, and which the link is to,  but there are others.
     It raises the question, do the billions and billions of gallons of water, sucked in by the nuclear power plants every day around the world, which also suck in and kill billions of small marine animals, have a crucial role in this?
    From some figures I obtained from Beyond Nuclear, by  going to  " Licensed to Kill"  (or go to 'Animals' and choose it from the drop down menu, or key it in their search box),  "Once Through" systems can raise the temperature of the water taken in by up to 25 degrees Fahrenheit when it is returned to the sea. These temperature changes and the huge volumes of water being returned to the surface layers of the seas makes me wonder if the very air we breath depends on their being closed down?  It may depend on no new ones being even considered..
 If these "once through" plants were all forced to close down until they had been retro fitted with cooling towers, it would reduce this problem..but before you think that's the answer, just look at the problems with cooling towers and tritium leaks and ask yourselves whether that is an especially good answer.
     In this country, Sellafield can take 4 million gallons of water a day from Wastwater,  a beauty spot in the Lake District, to keep the high level liquid wastes from boiling,  that's a lot in a year, but unlike the nuclear power plants, you can't shut down the cooling to the tanks, because the radioactivity in them causes the liquids to get hotter and hotter, and the wastes have to be kept cool for years and years.  Meanwhile, local people are complaining about a hosepipe ban!
     There are alternatives and you are entitled to a secure future... all of you.  But don't worry about global warming, you can still munch your way out of it.  Will there be enough for everyone... well, if you read "Don't Panic, Go Organic", also in the OCA., of course there will.