Sleep Interrupted

Louise is away at the moment, visiting her aunt, uncle and cousin down in Devon. This makes me solely responsible for the children for a whole two days, which is a rare experience. So far so good, though.

This morning I took the children to do the weekly grocery shopping. We left fairly early to beat the rush, which wasn’t hard seeing that they’d been awake since 6.30 with me following (inevitably) shortly after.

We rocked out to some Kings Of Leon on the way. Later, Ben asked if he could buy the same “music stick” as me when he grew up. I asked him why and he said it was so that it could have cool music like mine on it. Go the Kings!

We drove through the now-characteristic British summer weather — grey skies and light rain — and easily found a spot in the car park. This was when I realised that I’d forgotten the carefully prepared shopping list. Oh well, I thought, I’ll wing it and probably won’t forget too much.

My… god! I hate shopping. Louise normally coordinates our shopping activities. If I’m in attendance, it’s more as mobile child minder and high shelf reacher than as an active shopper.

This time I had to make all the choices myself. Now, if I didn’t care about Issues then this would have been easy. But Fair Trade and Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley Bloody Eats-It-All have done too good a job at educating me to the plight of farmers and chickens and the environment in general, so now I have to think about everything I purchase.

Is that chicken from the UK? Is it farm assured? Where have those apples come from? What?! I can’t get apples from the UK? Oh, maybe that’s right: seasonal. So how far have these ones come from? Brazil?! New Zealand?! So, which of those is further? Can you get Fair Trade apples? Argh!

And don’t even get me started on China. Here’s a little challenge: Go into any homeware section of a supermarket and find something made somewhere other than China.

Now that last paragraph might sound a little xenophobic and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a component of the sentiment — I don’t like the thought of our country being beholden to another entirely alien culture on the other side of the planet. But… is it really right that a large proportion of the goods purchased in this country are shipped from halfway around the world from a country that has such differing standards to us when it comes to environmental concerns and civil liberties? People often ask “how can they make these so cheap?”– there is an explanation but I don’t expect they want to hear it.

So, I’ve managed to spiral this post from something cheery and life-affirming into a bitter rant on the injustices of the world. Perhaps I shouldn’t write at this time of night but it is kind of how I feel right now… I learnt about stagflation today. Yeah, the future’s looking bloody marvelou right now.

If ever there was an example of why turning your back on the world and creating a closed society is a bad idea, then the current insanity in Burma must be it. Sooner or later “the enemy” may turn out to be your only friend. We’re all in this together, or as some more eloquent said, we are one.

Tim, the inconvenient truth is that the film has some factual errors. That does not mean it has been robbed of its purpose.

If its core arguments are sound then the message will survive. The arguments’ scientific basis is sound. The High Court ruling only requires nine errors to be highlighted and for teachers to explain the political context — hardly a bad thing in itself.

Do we have to accept messages entirely without question because someone influential says they are important? I’m glad that important ideas such as climate change are held up to scrutiny because it makes it that much harder for self interested, short sighted politicians like Bush to deny.

I worry about the environment, which explains my goal this year of reducing my carbon footprint. The problem is I feel a sense of paralysis that comes from not knowing what I should do beyond the well known staples of energy saving light bulbs and switching off equipment at night.

This is why I sent off for the BBC and OU’s climate change guide. It actually contains quite a few interesting pointers such as theyworkforyou.com. I may include a few more of these links once I’ve taken a look at them.

The most enlightening thing I happened across was the Energy House. This shows you, very simply, the carbon footprint impact and related cost of certain improvements you can make to your household. What surprised me was that by far the most effective course of action is to switch to a “green power” provider (or green power tariff with many existing suppliers). I’ll certainly be looking into this now.

What prompted this? A post by Wil that should quash any remaining doubts you might over whether climate change is real.

The whole family went to Tim & Kathy’s engagement party this weekend and we all had a great time. The kids were well behaved and there were quite a few folks there who we hadn’t seen in some time. In the evening Louise held the fort and I went back. I was then party to an impromptu whiskey tasting lesson. Mmmm! Must get me one of those whiskey guide books.

Every time I meet up with old friends I end up reflecting on my current situation, due to the standard “so what are you up to?” questions that crop up. I had to laugh (somewhat explosively, sorry) when Dave put a twist on it saying, “so I suppose you’re in a management position now…?”. Yeah, right… err… no.

Compared to some other friends, in many visible ways, the progress of my professional life has turned to molasses. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a challenging job that’s paid relatively well and I have learnt, well, everything I know about (stupidly) large scale software development while there. But… I’m still doing much the same job with the same responsibilities I was doing 5 years ago when I started at the company. Worse, my raw technical skills have not moved on at all.

Of course, having a steady job with good hours has suited me very well since Ben and Jess turned up. I don’t think I want to commit to doing more work, so perhaps I should just shut up and get on with my comfortable suburban family life. But… again with the but… it doesn’t stop me from feeling a bit left behind. Like being the last one to be picked for the football team at school (but that’s a whole other post).

Now, this is not some revelation I’ve had over the weekend. Much of the past year I’ve been broadening my knowledge and I’ve just started re-tooling my brain with a 1000 page book on C# and .NET. I’m not having a whinge here; I’m more the “so how do we fix this?” kind of guy. So, what am I saying? I don’t know, this is a blog goddamit! I don’t need to know anything!

Okay, I do know. Oh Magic Internet, please conjure up a job that pays more with lower hours. There, I said it, come mock me, arseholes.

Navel gazing aside, the party was great. I got to catch up with folks and started to have an interesting coversation with Tim on environmentalism. I was getting tired, though, and sort of petered out and couldn’t argue my (slightly confused) side, especially when posited with hard questions like “why does it matter if species die out due to climate change?”. Species aside, I would direct people to a post by Gervase Markam on carbon offsetting. Or not, the link is down at the time of writing. Interesting are his rebuttals to the comments; some of the links I will have to follow. (Whoops, almost slipped into Yodaspeak there.)

It’s infuriating, sad… worrying even when officials become incapable of using their discretion. That Mel Smith was prevented from smoking on stage… I’m lost for words. Hell… good intentions… something or other.

As if the news that the Arctic ice is disappearing fast wasn’t bad enough, today an 82-year-old man was detained under the Terrorism Act for heckling at the Labour Party conference. Unbelievable. Depressing.

I’ve been on holiday for the last two weeks — back to work again tomorrow — which is my poor excuse for not writing much here lately. So, here’s a random roundup of things I’ve been meaning to blog on…

It’s been a nice fortnight. We’ve been taking day trips so that Jessica’s routine doesn’t get interrupted too much. On alternate days we went to Longleat, Brighton, Didcot Railway Centre, Marwell Zoological Park, Monkey Mates and Coral Reef.

The car sustained the requisit monkey inflicted damage at Longleat, but Ben got to drive the car with me through the park, which he loved. He’s at a stage where he’s remembering events now, so we can ask him about seeing the animals and he’ll say things like, “Monkey on car!”. Today he even said, “We do painting yesterday”, which was both surprising and correct.

We had the best weather of the week at Longleat and it’s a really good place to take a family, with a lot of varied attractions in a very small area. My highlight was going on a water safari boat and seeing the seals in the lake effortlessly keeping pace when the boat was going at full speed.

Two days later in Brighton, the weather had turned and we got very wet. However, the day was saved by a visit to the excellent Doctor Who exhibit that’s there. A large number of props from the most recent series of the programme were on display. Louise took a picture of a Darlek on her phone and just today I heard Ben saying “Darlek on phone!”.

The only misadventure we had was Louise breaking her toe while clambering round the padded play area at Monkey Mates. Please send her your sympathy and psychic healing thoughts… and any spare Grade A pain killers you have knocking about.

Jessica’s progress is in danger of going unnoticed, so I’ll say that she’s started weening over the last few weeks and can almost sit up unaided and almost roll on to her front. She’s also bright as a button and disarmingly cute (but I would say that).

It’s also been a surreal week, from the highs of Live 8 and the Olypics to the lows of the Thursday’s bombings. On Thursday we watched it all unfold in front of us live on the BBC news — I’m not sure if continuous news channels are a blessing or a curse given how slowly actual information is revealed in these circumstances.

The only upside to this whole situation is that there hasn’t been an immeadiate, widespread call for the introduction of identity cards, but that’s another rant.

So that this post doesn’t end on a down note, I should also confess that I’ve taught myself to read the Tengwar; prepare to be bored! That reminds me — must blog about the Lord of the Rings marathon!

Hello, gentle reader! I would very much appreciate it if you would visit the Make Poverty History web site, follow the Join Us Now link, and sign up. Thank you.

I voted on the way to work this morning. This meant I was the second person into the polling station. We had to wait for a couple of minutes for the officials to finish setting up — strangely parchocial. I was disappointed to see that there was no Green Party candidate; while I’ve always gravitated to the Liberal Democrats, I’m coming to believe that none of the main parties have a radical enough approach to climate change.

Unlike, it would seem, most of the population of the UK, I actually enjoy elections. Or more precisely, I enjoy watching the results coming in. Two elections ago, I stayed up with Neil and Tim late into the night and we had a great time. Best of all, we got to watch live as Michael Portillo lost his seat.

So here I sit, when I should be in bed, watching the BBC’s coverage. Only two seats declared so far, but it’s starting to look interesting. I had to smile when I saw that BBCi has a dedicated Peter Snow channel — wall-to-wall CG swingometers!