Category Archives: Politics

Nominated

Ooh, how exciting – I’ve been nominated for an award.
nominated-most-humorous.png

It’s clearly a sop to make me make up my mind in favour of going to conference!

You can see the people I’m up against in the shortlist announcement.  I’m not being falsely modest when I say I don’t expect to win.  I’m in august company, including Millennium Elephant, who was in the running for Blog of the Year last year, and Don Liberali, who has… ways… of… influencing outcomes.

There’s public voting for “best design” category, but my category will be decided by an eminent panel of judges.  Nailbiting.

Now to go and see if I can remember how to edit my template.

TGV at St P

I’m watching BBC News 24’s coverage of the inaugural journey of the Eurostar along the high speed line to St Pancras – and I’m more excited than I really ought to be. We had vague plans to use the new service to Brussels later this year, but I suspect that will have to be put back til next year.

It is a bit of a national embarrassment that the only high speed rail in this country runs from London to the Channel Tunnel. I remember reading, but can’t now source, a factoid along the lines of 5,000kms of high speed track have been built in continental Europe in the time it’s taken us to get around 150kms from London to Dover. So, I’m very glad to hear that there are Lib Dem proposals to build more high speed track in this country, and look forward to hearing more about it.

UPDATE: Just heard on the hourly news they plan to drop the Bxl service.  That’s disappointing – don’t really want to go back to Paris right now, but haven’t been to Brussels since 2001.

Shower technology

We’ve bitten the bullet and decided to go ahead with the solar panel. It should be up by the end of next week. I’ve also requested a special controller that lets me keep a log of how well the panel is working. We’re not really going to find out over the autumn and winter, although it will make some difference to our gas usage.

In going ahead, I’ve learned that showers are much more complicated than they look.

Currently, we have a simple electric shower. Cold water at mains pressure goes into a little white box and comes out hot.

But with a solar panel heating our water it makes sense to have a shower fed by the hot water tank. This means more options than I’d ever thought about before.

We could have a pressurised hot water system, with the hot water tank at the same pressure as the cold mains. This would mean that the hot water tank could heat the water over 100 deg C – getting the maximum possible out of the solar panel. But the setup costs are much more expensive, so this gets ruled out.

Which leaves us with a gravity fed hot water tank, with a header tank relocated to the attic to give some pressure, but not as much as mains pressure. You can’t mix mains pressure cold water with a lower pressure hot water system, so some sort of clever has to go on in the bathroom.

You could have a separate cold water feed in the bathroom, also fed from a header tank. But this means an extra run of piping.

You could put a pump on the hot water system to bring up the hot water system to the same pressure as the cold water system. I was a bit worried about this option because it seems to me that it might be a way of using the water up quicker, and emptying all the hot out of the tank.

The last – and simplest – solution is to put a pressure limiting valve on the cold water feed to take it down to the pressure of the hot water. I think this is what we’ll be doing.

Lib Dem blog-meet

Just like we did last year we’re hosting an informal Lib Dem blog meet in Brighton. This year it’s in conjunction with LibDemVoice.org and LibDemBlogs.co.uk. We’ll be in Brighton’s Evening Star pub from 7pm onwards, and warmly welcome bloggers and friends to join us for the evening or part of it. The pub is very close to the railway station, and just over half a mile from the conference centre. People are welcome to join us whether or not they are registered for conference.

Further details available over on Lib Dem Voice.

Interesting cycling challenge

A panel on the City Council that I’m a member of has been in discussions with our transport department, and Pedals, our local cycling advocacy group.  In early September, councillors have been invited to join officers and local cyclists on bikes around Nottingham city centre to look at good cycle facility design – and also some not so good.

I’m definitely interested in taking part, but I don’t own a bike.  Not only that, but even if I did, I wouldn’t really know what to do with it.  I can’t cycle.  I never quite figured out the balancing thing as a child.

One early way around the problem that was discussed was to use a cycle rickshaw. That would almost work, but would make me feel ever so lazy.  Councillor Lord Muck.  I think it’s also been ruled out as an option, but I’m not sure why.

I’m not averse to learning to cycle.  It would be a good way of getting more exercise, and P has long been talking about getting a bike, and reminiscing of cycle days out in Clumber Park,  and also closer to  home.  However, I’m chary about buying a bike if I’m not ever going to be able to figure out the balance.

I also live halfway up one of the highest hills in the County which is a a major disincentive to getting on a bike.  In theory, getting into the city would be great – I push the bike to the top of the hill, then coast down the cycle path on the Woodborough Road all the way into the city centre.  Getting home again would be rather more of a challenge.  And we also don’t currently have anywhere convenient at home where bikes could live.

One last plan of action is that I’m in discussion with Pedals to see whether I could borrow a trike for the day.  In the longer term, though, a trike would be even harder to store at home.  And they look, ahem, ever so slightly nelly. Even with a big hairy biker on them.

Brighton Charter Hotel j’accuse

Mike points us to Overyourhead and a flickr photoset all there to heap shame on the festering cess pool that is the Brighton Charter Hotel.

I’m pretty sure I have stayed in the very room depicted, during conference season a number of years back.  It was a second year running at Brighton, and I’d had a bright idea.  The year before, I had spotted a number of top notch looking sea front hotels with signs in the window offering rooms at very low rates.  So my plan was to turn up at Brighton and trundle my wheelie suitcase up and down the sea front and find a top-notch hotel at knock-down rates.

It didn’t work one bit.  All the hotels still had the cheap room signs, but reception staff all looked at my sandals and trundly suitcase and sneered that whatever the sign said, the rate didn’t apply during conference season.  They had rooms, but they were on nightly rates of well upwards of £100.

So I ended up in the Brighton Charter, which was much cheaper, but nasty.  Very uncomfortable beds with dusty bedspreads on top of mouldy sheets. Holes in the very thin walls.  Yes, a sea view, but no working telly, barely a lock on the door and shoddy plumbing. No kettle either.  I see room coffee facilities as an absolute essential when away at conferences.  It’s an outrage to have to pay retail prices to sustain one’s caffeine addiction.

Worst of all was what I heard at night.  Loud music is one thing.  Domestic violence in the corridors quite another. There was lots of slamming of doors and tearful jibes shouted through the walls.  I’m not sure how serious the argument was, but some fairly serious accusations were shouted about violence, leaving me unsure of the ettiquette.  Should I intervene and risk getting myself beaten up whilst also not achieving anything? Should I sit tight and let them sort out their own affairs?  It carried on for three nights.

After that, I was fortunate enough to move out, because my then boss vacated his room in the Brighton Hilton two days early, giving me a vital key card (easy access to conference bar without grovelling to residents) and a few nights of luxury to wash away the squalor. The room probably had more floor space than my entire house, and had a private sea front balcony.  A huge bath helped greatly with the final day hangover.

This year, however, I’m still in two minds about whether to go to conference.  I have paid to go; and I have a costly room reservation in a nice hotel. I have much more space in the room than I need, as I was hoping to persuade P to come down too, but that is not to be. There’s even a spare bed.  I can still cancel my reservation and not lose money; and I booked long enough in advance for the conference registration fee not really to matter to me.

It would certainly be nice to catch up with old friends, and make policy and generally do all of those conferenc-y things.  But is it worth the hundreds of pounds it will inevitably cost?

PM Twittering

No, not the Prime Minister, I hope he’s too busy to keep fishing his mobile out and firing a few off to the Great British Public.

No, it’s Radio 4’s PM.  Now you can have the wonderful Eddie Mair in your pocket.

Sign up by texting subscribe eddiemair to +44 7624 801 423 or popping to this link on the web.

UPDATE:  Eddie Mair is twittering every five minutes.  With any luck, the novelty will wear off shortly.

What a week to be away!

Cat Pic Week was rolling out automatically whilst I was away in France and Switzerland around Lake Geneva and the surrounding mountains.  I set up the posts to come out two-a-day for the week I was away, and hopefully they all came out nice and regularly.

Now, however, normal service will be resumed, and I will once again be posting at random intervals when the whim takes me.

I had a lovely holiday, and will no doubt be writing something about it in the coming hours/days/weeks.  We had plumbing and heating engineers in over the week we were away, and I may well talk about that too.

But first – what a week to leave the country!

The Prime Minister changes – a once in a decade occasion, and only the third time I can remember in my life.

We get a new cabinet, which I haven’t really caught up with – “Home Secretary Jaqui Smith” in a news bulletin caught my attention while I was away.

We have huge amounts of flooding across the country, including some parts of Notts.  I live halfway up a hill, so the flooding here was only that caused by the plumbers.

A terrorist outbreak on the day I flew home actually didn’t make flying any less convenient, once I had been forcibly reminded of the ban on flying with fluids which I thought had been a temporary thing last summer and not a permanent ban.

There are not one, but two Parliamentary by-elections in the offing, called with incredible haste.  I will have to get my diary out and figure out how much time I can afford away.
Ex-PM Blair goes off to be a Middle East Peace envoy, in a move that would have pushed Tom Lehrer out of satire, if he hadn’t already gone when Kissinger got a Nobel Peace Prize.

Pfft.  That’ll teach me to go on holiday.

Extension

When we first moved in, one of our earliest thoughts about what to do to the house was to replace the tired lean-to with a new conservatory.
About two months ago, in talking about what we wanted from a conservatory, we then started to think maybe what we actually wanted was an extension, and started to think about talking to an architect.

This week I found out by chance that it’s National Architect Week, and many practices, including the one a colleague used to extend is house, are offering an hour of time with an architect in exchange for a modest donation to Shelter.  We’ve got our consult booked for a few weeks from now.  This year’s theme is how to make your house more environmentally friendly, which is great.
What we’ll actually end up discussing with the architect by then is anyone’s guess.  The first few weeks of extension planning ended up with a fairly modest proposal.  Then it started to get silly, and the latest des res plan now includes glazing the full height of the house, a mezzanine, a retrofitted solar chimney for passive solar air conditioning.

One thing is certain: following a slightly bizarre set of events, all councillor planning applications to Nottingham City are now decided by the Development Control committee, of which I am a member. For obvious probity reasons, I wouldn’t be allowed to take part in the decision myself, and neither would any of my close friends.  So it will mean in a meeting like today that I have to leave the room while the rest of the councillors get shown photos of my house and discuss the relative planning merits of my plans.

It’s important to me that the extension is fairly green. Not least because since I have invested a lot of time extolling the virtues of sustainable development to the committee, it would be hypocritical of me not to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to my own house!

I’ve been trying to read around the subject of extending houses, but haven’t found a suitable google term.  “Extension” means something else in computing terms, which throws up all sorts of distracting hits in searches.

I did, however, find this lengthy horror story of a loft extension gone wrong. – I spent far too long last night reading it through as the nightmare developed step by step.  Eeep!