Saturday, 3 October 2015
Swanning About
For Hastings Independent
Swanning About
By Kent Barker
Here’s your starter for ten: where does the line: “Wear your hair long, babe you can't go wrong” come from?
Half marks if you identified T Rex’s Marc Bolan, and the
full ten if you knew it was from Ride a White Swan. One of those instantly recognizable tunes
from 1970 and the cusp of Glam Rock.
This meander down memory lane is by way of introducing the “Swan
Lake” pedalos at the Flamingo Amusement park on the East Beach. For years I’ve driven, walked or cycled past
them and always wanted to have a go.
They seem such an iconic image of Hastings. Mind you they’re not confined to the town. Other
attractions have them including Euro Disney, and you could even buy your own
for around £2000,
Don’t, however, try launching it on the Avon at Stratford.
The council there recently banned swan pedalos on the grounds they were out of
keeping with Shakespeare’s birthplace. I
personally wonder if it’s not more likely that they were worried that the real
swans that proliferate might have become confused. After all you don’t want the tourists
frightened away by a real bird trying to mate, Zeus style, with a pedalo Leda
do you?
Anyway, seeking some birthday amusement for my friends I
approached Flamingo Park and asked if I could hire the ‘Swan Lake’ boating pond
for an hour. The manager was extremely
accommodating and agreed to let me have ten swans at a discount.
The day dawned fine, the swans were lined up, bucks fizz was
served from plastic flutes and in we clambered.
Then some realities dawned.
Firstly it’s quite hard work pedaling, especially as they seem designed
for people with rather shorter legs. Secondly, should your foot slip off the
pedal, there’s the danger of bruised ankles as the pedals keep on turning.
Thirdly, steering is rather haphazard which is a problem because, fourthly, you
can only use about a third of the lake without running aground. Apparently the water is supplied from a tap
(rather than by the more obvious solution of pumping sea-water up from the shore)
and, whether for reasons of economy or flow, the pond is not sufficiently full.
Nevertheless a good time was had by all, though I think I’m
unlikely to follow the makers of Swandown
who pedaled all the way from Hastings to Hackney for a film project.
Anaerobic Anarchy
Times of TW.
Rural Protest Power
By Kent Barker
The woman was almost in tears as she described the night-time silence
around her home. “The only thing you can hear is barn owls,” she told the
meeting.
The village hall was packed. I
hadn’t seen so many there since the Christmas panto. And there was some of the same sense of
unreality. To start with signs had gone
up on verges all around the village advertising a meeting to discuss “The
Benenden Power Plant”. Power plant?
What, fueled from the closed Kentish coalmines? Or from a Russian gas pipeline
running through the Channel Tunnel? Or
perhaps there were plans to rebuild the nearby Dungeness Nuclear generator on
the village green?
No, in fact this was about a
planning application for a local farmer to install a 500kw anaerobic digester
on his land down a narrow lane a mile or so from the village centre.
Now a short explanation: anaerobic
digesters are like alchemy but instead of turning lead into gold, they do
something much more valuable. Putting it
bluntly they turn cow shit into electricity.
There is a sunken tank about the size of an Olympic swimming pool with a
concrete top and sides. In one end you shovel the s…. sorry, cow dung and
slurry, and out the other end some time later you get an inert digestate which
makes wonderful natural fertiliser.
What has happened in the meantime is
that, in the absence of oxygen, micro-organisms have broken down the
biodegradable material and given off two useful by-products: gas and heat. The methane-rich gas is used to fuel a CHP –
combined heat and power generator, while the heat can be used for homes, or to
dry the digestate to make transportable fertiliser or bedding for cattle.
AD plants can use a variety of
inputs including food waste or crops.
Our proposed plant was going to take straw and maze and beet as well as
the slurry. Oh yes, and some chicken
manure from a local producer.
A head of steam had been building among
opponents prior to the meeting. Entrenched positions were being taken. Email
lists had been drawn up. Anonymous leaflets full of misinformation had been
circulated. A Facebook page had been opened – complete with a photograph of an
elderly couple who actually supported the idea.
Several vocal objectors had already attended the Parish Planning Committee
meeting – which unanimously approved the proposal. But the objectors were really holding their
fire until they could have a go at the applicant, the farmer who happens also
to Chair the Parish Council.
The main concern was traffic movements. Where would the source
material for the AD come from? The
answer was the farm itself. Nothing
additional was to be brought in from outside.
But some people simply didn’t believe the answers they were given and
certainly not that it could actually reduce
traffic movements along the narrow lanes.
Then there was the smell. Now
muck spreading and chicken manure give off awful stenches sometimes for days on
end. This would be eliminated as the digestate
is odourless. But people remained
sceptical. As they did over the question
of noise. The generators and compressors
are in sound-proof enclosures. If I
recall correctly, at around 80 meters away the noise would be 27 decibels. Well
that’s just louder than a whisper and less that the ambient noise in a quiet
rural area. Certainly less than the 40
decibels of ordinary bird calls - let alone barn owls! But again the figures were frankly
disbelieved.
More distasteful still was the querying of how much ‘profit’ the farmer
would make from the plant. Had anyone
asked the questioner about his income or investments they’d likely have got
short shrift. In fact the £2 million investment would have a pay-back period of
around seven years.
Next to no one at the meeting tried to outline the macro
environmental benefits of AD: a reduction in use of fossil fuels and greenhouse
gas emissions, an increase in renewable energy use; reduction in biomass wastes
that would otherwise go to landfill.
But there’s another factor.
The protestors at the meeting, perhaps understandably, fear anything
that might alter the local environment. It’s why they’ve chosen to live in
rural remoteness. But the problem is that
the very countryside that they are so vociferous about protecting is created by
farming. So it seems to me myopic to object to anything that might make farms
more sustainable. I have my issues with
farmers – mainly over pesticides and hunting - but I recognise it’s a tough
business and it’s depressing to see people getting so aggressively personal when
Farmers do try to do something good!
Oh, and by the way, the power from the plant would be more than
enough to supply every ungrateful home in the village!
Church vs State
For Times of TW
Village Green separating Church and State
By Kent Barker
It’s the idyllic pastoral scene. Cricket
on our village green with St George’s standing sentinel at the southern end.
It’s the church—both as a building and as an institution—that has been at the centre
of village life for much of the past millennium. Historians may argue as to
whether it’s been an important ingredient in social cohesion or a force for
maintaining divisive social strata but you can’t argue about its influence. Even
today, an extraordinarily high proportion of the ‘great and the good’ of the
village are churchgoers and the rector is involved with a surprisingly
extensive number of local institutions and activities.
But this influence on village life
seems increasingly out of proportion to those who actually have anything to do
with the church. To start with only 16% of the population define themselves as
belonging to the Church of England and, of them, half never attend a church
service. Indeed, only 10.7% of people who
identify with the Church of England say they attend church at least weekly, (2014 British Social Attitudes Survey). Obviously,
in a Home Counties rural village, the proportions will be higher but probably
not massively so, and I rather doubt if the weekly attendance at St George’s is
much to write home about.
To digress slightly: I turned on the
radio the other afternoon to hear Eddie Mair of the PM programme announcing
that, to non-believers, the next item was likely to be pretty much
incomprehensible since it concerned a debate as to whether God should be known
as a ‘She’ rather than a ‘He’.
Apparently a group within the Church of England is calling for the
female appellation following the selection of the first women bishops. Now this
may seem to some about as important as the age-old theological conundrum: how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin? (The answer is: (a) none as angels
don’t exist or (b) an infinite number as angels aren’t corporal beings so don’t
take up any space.)
But it was the way that Mr Mair
phrased his introduction that struck me.
Here, for the first time I can remember, was a presenter acknowledging
that a large proportion of the population just simply don’t ‘do’ religion and
that Richard Dawkins’ contention that accepting the existence of God is
comparable to believing there are ‘fairies
at the bottom of the garden’ has more than a little resonance.
Now the point of all this is that,
in an age of non-belief, it seems utterly absurd that the Government have
effectively excluded the possibility of studying humanism at GSCE or A level.
The Department for Education says it worked with all the major faith groups to
develop a new "more academically rigorous". religious studies
qualification which would give students “better knowledge and understanding of
the diversity of beliefs in modern Britain”.
But that diversity clearly does not
include the ‘belief’ that there is no God. It’s a stance that even senior
Anglicans are uneasy about. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams,
along with 28 other religious leaders, wrote to the Schools’ Minister urging
him to revisit the decision. So far there’s been no suggestion the Government
are inclined to do so.
The same illogical thinking appears
to apply to the BBC’s Thought for the Day.
They define this as a ‘religious’ slot and appear to argue that humanism cannot,
by definition, be considered a religion. I think this nonsensical. What is
religion other than a belief mechanism? And an atheist or humanist believes just
as firmly that there is no superhuman controlling power, as a Christian or
Muslim may believe there is one.
And, while we are at it, shouldn’t
we be questioning whether, as a nation, we should have an established church? Given
that 50.6% of the population describes itself as belonging to no religion and, of
the half that do, only a small proportion ever attends a place of worship, why
on earth is secularism not enshrined in law or constitution as it is in the US?
In fact twice as many nations currently embrace secularism as have an
established state religion. We remain seriously out of kilter with world
opinion.
Which brings me back to the village
green. Halfway up on the right hand side is our popular and desperately overcrowded
primary school. Or, I should say, our Church
of England primary school. I’ve fought long and hard for new premises and
it appears that we may, indeed, be about to get them. But it will still be tied
to the ‘established’ church. In 2011, about a
third of all 20,000 state-funded schools in England were faith schools. Wouldn’t it be better if ALL schools were truly independent
of any particular religion, and that children were left to make up their own
mind on the ‘faries’ question?
Read more at: KentCountryMatters.Blogspot.Com
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