A time of reckoning

I had the privelege of attending my cousin, Charles Dumas’, book launch last night. China and America: A Time of Reckoning was launched at a small city soiree where chilled champagne flowed and superior canapes never ended. It was an elegant and sophisticated affair and belied the prescient lesson that underlined the evening.

Over two years ago, Dumas predicted the ecomonic problems that we see coming to a head today. As Anthony Hilton says in today’s Evening Standard, “Charles Dumas…spelled out before even Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve had seen the danger; the threat to the world economy that would be caused by the huge accumulation of dollars by China.” Now, Dumas is looking ahead to a not-so-rosy future and laying out what can be done to prevent getting there.

As far as I can tell, though, dollars and yuan alone do not paint an accurate picture of the power shifts at work. 

Commenting to Charles that he now must know China pretty well, he replied with characteristic mathematic confidence: “There are 1.3 billion people in China. You meet 13 people and you’ve met 0.01% of one 10,000th of the entire population. If you meet 26, you’ve meet 0.02% of one 10,000th. How much does this make you know China? Pretty bloody little.”

As power accumulates in China, so the West’s grip on their own future slides cripplingly out of reach. It is not the money that’s the problem, it is what the holders of the purse-strings do with it. Make no mistake, the purse is sitting squarely in Beijing and 1.3 billion people are waiting for a tug on its strings.

The sweet smell of manure in the morning

This was originally posted on Friday 18th but somehow it jumped offline over the weekend…

Ah! I love London in the spring time.

My walk to work takes me down past the ghettoised drunkards on Harrow Road, up through the chic cool haze of fashionable Ledbury Road and past the stunning whitewashed Regency splendour of Dawson Place in full blossom regalia.

And, this morning, through the cloying all-pervading smell of industrial mainure.

It transpires that the low-lying fug over London today has indeed been swept our way by the efficient and mirthful South Easterlies. The Met office has confirmed that a characterful little piece of France has settled above London and the smell, like our attention and gaze of interest, will soon wander elsewhere.

So, whilst those farmers in France plough their perfectly fertilised soil, readying their pockets of the continent for the summer crop, the suits in London panic and assume biological warfare has finally hit the capital. Oh how far we have all distanced ourselves from the land that surrounds us, the grains and vegetables that nourish us and the realities of modern production.

It’s good to know that at least the air we breathe is not packaged in a protective atmosphere.

OMFG!!! LOL!!!

Leave it to Charlie Brooker to neatly summarise everything I have ever felt about Boris…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/14/charliebrooker.boris

…and for AA Gill to do the same for Ken

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3778963.ece

 

 

Londongrad

So, the current Mayor has crept ahead again in the lastest round of elections polls.

It’s no dionysian whirlwind, but the upcoming mayoral election has whipped up quite the flurry in media circles. As to the outcome – it looks like your guess is as good as the experts’ at the moment.

The policies themselves are either similar on the large scale (greenifying London, cutting crime, improving transport), or negligible on the smaller, electorate-winning scale. The crepuscular soup of promises and semi-promises is a hard one to negotiate and I for one am not taken by any of the contestants so far.

It’s all up in the air and, spectator-wise, there’s nothing like a good down-to-the-line, nose-to-nose battle, especially when the stakes have never been greater.

For, if there is one thing the audacious Ken Livingstone has done for London, it is make London worth fighting for. No matter your political bent, race, sexuality, religion, educational background, Prius-piousness or tap-water-worthiness, the battle for Mayor is the hottest ticket in town and the audience is braying for blood.

And whilst you might not like his apparent love of glasnost (surrounding Lee Jasper, for example), committed perestroika of TfL and that irritatingly insoucient voice, he has succeeded in injecting a heavy dose of partiinost, or party-mindedness, into London life.

Whether it’s a party to which your precious vote is suited is another question altogether.

Dave makes it onto PA

I found a news article about Dave Leaning on PA news wire today! Dave is a great family friend – please support him at www.skinorway.org.uk

See below ‘Ex-marine skis length of Norway’ for more info, or fingers-crossed, in the papers tomorrow…

 

some guilt with your weetabix?

We analyse elections, oil prices and war in Afghanistan until the cows come home and in doing so we often confuse politics into an overstudied whirlygig. But one development on a global scale has gone relatively unnoticed, despite the fact that its effects will be felt by all at every level of society, in every country in the world.

Cereals – tiny, innocuous, homesteady grains, have reluctantly been thrust into the spotlight for their 15 minutes of fame.

Grain prices have shot up in recent months and here in London a mere ripple across day-to-day life will soon become a splash in everybody’s approach to food and living.  Any politics that directly affects our greedy appetites is a sure-fire way of getting peoples’ attention.

Last year’s dramatic riots in Latin America pricked all of our ears up, whilst just two weeks ago, New York magazine noticed that prices of ubiquitous NYC staples – slizes of pizza, bagels, hot-dogs – are resolutely heading north. Everything from flour to eggs and cheese (grain-fed chooks and cows) is affected.

The reasons for the world food crisis (and don’t go believing that just because your dough balls are piping hot and pillowy, London is spared) are like a knotted ball of string.

In no particular order: the Chinese have developed a taste for meat and the ‘westernised’ diet. It takes 700 calories of animal feed to produce 100 calories of beef. Modern farming is oil-dependent and more powers are competing for the same amount of oil, which itself is more expensive because of war with Iraq. Grain-producing countries, in particular, Australia, are suffering massive droughts – owed, in no small way, to climate change. This limits exports, affecting both import and export nations’ food supplies. Many mistakenly see biofuels as an answer to climate change, although one litre of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the ethanol contains. Deforestation has risen with biofuel production. The focus on biofuels essentially – and devastatingly – cranks the spotlight from the third world on to voter-friendly green wash. Each knot is a result of a twist somewhere else along the line.

Time and again we are reminded just how much economy and ecology are not mutually exclusive. Whether you believe that they can exist symbiotically, or like Paul Kingsnorth of Ecologist magazine, you see civilisation heading towards ‘ecocide’, the food crisis is a salutory and inescapable reality.

The sobering words of Paul Krugman of the New York Times encapsulate the situation pretty neatly: “Cheap food, like cheap oil, may soon be a thing of the past.”

Your Weetabix may never taste the same.

Granny smiths and piles of bricks

We’ve all taken a bite from the juicy credit boom, apparently.

None more so, it seems, than the Government. It has done the one thing that we are all warned against: spending too much and living a life on credit.  In the opulent boom days of yore, the powers that be in the Treasury offices used their watercoolers imprudently, photocopied everything and overdid the paperclips. (They must have registered a lot more of their mail, too – cost-cutting being one of the more logical explanantions for all of these embarassing security leak, cds-gone-missing, faux-pas. )

Back to the hoi-poloi. We all must ween ourselves off the magnums of Crystal, buy fewer pairs of Laboutins and try to cut back on the truffle-laden decadence of Ducasse’s monument to all that glisters.  Oh, and lengthen our mini skirts, apparently. We’ll try our hardest.

The truth is that the lack of long-sightedness in favour of complex, diversity-enhancing financial packages has brought with it risk that will be felt by the new home-owners, mortgage-holders and low-income families more than anyone else. 

And after all those home-improvement programmes and the buy-to-let rental fiesta, we now realise that real estate has stopped being real. What was once a chest-swelling pile of bricks and mortar is now a very long line of zeroes and ones in a computer chip many miles away. 

Not for the first time, I’m reminded just how easy my low income, high rent, no car, no kids, no mortgage, no responsibility lifestyle is. For to buy a pad in London these days is to part with much, much inner peace.

All of us will feel the bite, but for some the apple will taste a lot more bitter and the crunch a lot louder.

living roofs

I have a bit of a thing about grassy roofs. Green, herby, living patches of turf adorning the roofs above our heads. Mossy, breathing, soily and elementary – hobbity and understated and modern at once.

It’s the way they cross boundaries, merging living plants and foliagey nature with practical, pragmatic design and real building solutions. 

It’s all part of my slight obsession with Peter Zumthor and his deliciously earthy, enigmatic architectural design.

Like the art of Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Lang or even Anthony Gormley (in particluar, Ironmen at Crosby Beach), Zumthor’s architecture flows from the land, it takes a lead from the crinkles or sweeps of the earth, the local materials and natural watercouses that define and shape the area.

Zumthor’s buildings hum with energy and life, but sit serene and mysterious. His Thermal baths at Vals (with their seasonal living roofs) look and feel as if they have been hewn out of the surrounding mountain rock and water, reflective and flowing, binds it all together.  The brand new building and the prehistoric land merge and fit each other. It draws us in to the landscape and connects us to the space, adding another dimension to the constantly changing transcience of a natural scene.

Back to grass roofs. I hear that the UK’s largest grass roof is being built at Hemel Hempstead. Yards and yards of lovely elevated green grass and I feel strangely unexcited.

The reason? It is crowning an indoor ski slope. I know that we are not blessed with the geographical loveliness of Graubunden, but it’s just so horribly poetic that our largest grass roof will be sitting on top of a few hundred tonnes of atmospherically controlled, energy-intesive, chemically-laden, not at all natural man-made snow. In Hertfordshire.