Category Archives: Ramblings

Clock worries

Mondays are generally turning into a day when I spend the whole day using the facilities of the Council.  I have several semi-regular meetings spread out over the day, including a catch up with my ward-colleague (a luxury after three-and-a-half years as the only Lib Dem in a ward), various sub committees and private briefings and so on. 

The meetings are spaced fairly evenly through the day, and though there are long gaps between them, if I went home each time, I’d spend most of the day travelling.  I can be more productive by settling down to work in the Council.

So, I’ve spent the day in the building directly under the bells of the clock.  Which have been wrong all day.

It’s quite unsettling.  It took me quite a while to figure out how it was wrong.  Mostly when you hear the clock, it prompts you to check your watch to see what time it is.  The times you’d sit and listen to the bongs to figure out the time are few and far between.

So, there were two sets of problems going on today.  I spotted the problem with the quarter-hour chimes quite quickly – they were quarter of an hour ahead of the real time, so at a quarter-past the the hour, they’d chime half past.  This meant that on the hour, you get the quarter-past, followed by a very long pause, followed by the hour bell. 

I’m guessing the Council House clock has two separate systems for the hour and the quarter hour chimes. In most clocks like this, certainly in the one in Leominster Priory that I used to wind from time to time, there is more than one separate mechanism controlling the various different bits.  The Priory has three separate systems that a) chime the hour, b) chime the quarter hour and c) play a different, long-forgotten hymn tune for each day of the week every four hours from 1am.  They are all tied to the same clock, but the striking mechanisms wind down at different rates, so sometimes if the clock winder doesn’t get his timing right, you get hour strikes and no quarters, or hymn tunes and no hour strikes, etc. 

It wasn’t until 1pm when the clock struck 12 that I realised that in addition to the quarter chime being wrong, the clock was also striking GMT during the BST months.  I’m pretty sure it doesn’t usually do that.

I do hope no-one has been relying on the clock today.  They’d have been greatly confused!

Nottingham on TV

Nottingham’s been on the telly a lot recently – or at least it’s been on ours!  Two fictional characters in two days have said they’re from Nottingham.

First John Smith, the human that Dr Who turns into in the most recent episode, said he was from “a house in Broadmarsh,” but for plot reasons couldn’t remember a great deal about it.

Then last night, we watched V for Vendetta – a bleak vision of a totalitarian future for a Britain kept on its knees in fear of terrorism, where the government bans free protest, locks up and tortures its own citizens, routinely spies on them, and prevents them from criticising the authorities.  In it, there was a lesbian character who found herself removed from her flat, locked away in a prison, has her hair shaved off, and is eventually murdered.  She was from a “a farm in Nottingham, Tottlebrook,” which made us both double-take a little.

Incidentally, I’ve started using Flixster on Facebook to record movies seen, ratings and reviews.  It seems really good – and will be even better when they sort out their engine properly to merge “Flixster-on-Facebook” with their main website http://www.flixster.com so that we can have the full functionality without having to be on Facebook.

Fascinating road-trip today

Ed Maxfield and Sutton Bridge Power Station Spent today 80 miles and more from here with Ed Maxfield in Lincolnshire touring a gas fired power station at Sutton Bridge and speaking to a migrant workers chaplain based in Boston.

The Sutton Bridge power station, on the River Nene and the far boundary of the East Midlands, was interesting, and I wish I could have taken more photos. The tour guide, one of the few members of staff at the power station, said I needed to be sure my digital camera was “intrinsically safe”, which seemed to mean being rock solid certain that it would not make any sparks that could have ignited a cloud of gas that could have escaped. They were highly safety concious – as visitors, we were equipped with hard hats, safety goggles and steel-capped boots to change into, and as we were going round, many of the areas had sweet-dispensers near the door giving out ear plugs to safeguard our hearing.

The power station has two gas turbines, and the waste heat from each of them is collected, turns water into steam, and this steam drives a third turbine. Each of the turbines produces about 250MW, and whilst we were there the whole plant was producing about 740MW. Compared to nearby small town Kings Lynn, which has energy requirements of about 10MW that’s rather a lot of power!

Some fascinating facts:

  • the plant uses in a second the amount of gas the average home uses in a year – 2% of the nation’s entire gas supply
  • steam is 17,000 times greater by volume than water
  • they use natural gas from the gas grid, but they take it out before the artificial smell is added
  • the plant was about 54% efficient, which is apparently good
  • They get through 100 tonnes of ordinary drinking water every day

Continue reading →

Two dreams

Last night, I had two weird dreams in quick succession that have stayed with me for an hour or two.

In the first one, in a house I was living in, I found out by measuring that there was an extra room that had been bricked up. When I got into the room, I found it was full of Lostlike electronics equipment and various spying things like old video cameras, still working, blinking lights, the works. There was a monitor and a VCR so I hit play to see what was being taped, and…

… it was a music video for a Wham-alike band of 80s male singers with bleached, brushed back hair like Spike from Buffy. And the video started with a comet going across the night sky.

Strange. So, after the alarm went off, I fell asleep again and this time dreamed I was in some sort of lecture / seminar room at the top of either the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State building or something like that, with the viewing platform visible through a window out of the corner of my eye. Rather than paying attention to the lecture I was distracted by the public, including one young woman in a chavvy red coat and a little girl of 5 or 6 in a little pink puffer jacket. Woman was encouraging girl to climb up the scaffolding to get higher than mummy. So woman climbed up the scaffolding and waved her arms – “Look how high mummy is, can you get higher?”. Little girl then climbed scaffolding and waved both her arms around.

It’s pretty obvious where this is headed, isn’t it?

Mummy at that point fell off, and the dream cut to the classic movie shot of person falling, from directly above, flailing arms and legs and screams.

And little girl thinks it’s a game and throws herself off laughing and chuckling.

And thankfully, that’s where I woke up.

Surprising windmill view

The Lib Dems in Nottingham launched their manifesto for the City Council on Monday this week, and the room we had booked for the event was the Large Hall at the International Community Centre on Nottingham’s Mansfield Road.

It was a good meeting – just one member of the press there, despite a fairly wide invitation list – but a number of party members turned up to cheer us on.  I understand that actually, the Labour party, who got David Blunkett down to launch theirs, only had two presspeople there, so we shouldn’t feel snubbed.  And the resulting story in the newspaper (one of a series of different party’s manifestos) was good coverage.

However, the point of this particular blog posting isn’t about our manifesto at all.  It’s something I noticed from one of the windows of the Large Hall of the ICC.

It was a long view across the city skyscape to Green’s Mill, the working windmill museum in Sneinton.  As the crow flies, it’s not that far away, but it is directly across the city centre.  There are many tall buildings in the way, not least the Victoria Centre and its flats, a large office block on the far side of the road, and a much older three storey shop/office complex directly opposite.

Of all the windows in the room, only one gave the exact alignment of buildings necessary to have the clear space across the city.

A few years ago, I would have assumed this was just a coincidence but since I have spent two years serving as a planning councillor,  I now know that long-views across the city centre are things that are routinely considered by architects, and are frequently a point that is specifically discussed at development control committee meetings when deciding whether to grant planning permission.

Of course, elected members have to take on trust what they are told.  Only architects and surveyors can know with any certainty how high a building will be, and what specific views will be obstructed and what not.  This information is presented in a variety of ways – photomontages with real photos of the city with mock-up versions of new buildings digitally inserted, or traditional line drawings from the architect showing relative heights.  And you have to decide how credible those reports are.  Are they showing an unusual vantage point?  Does “unobstructed view from the castle” mean the parts of the castle most of us have access to, or from the roof of the castle? And so on and so on.  However important it seems in committee, it’s unlikely that a permission will be granted on the basis of an unimpeded view.  So if, years down the line when the building is finished, it turns out that it is in the way, and it does block a certain view from a certain direction, it’s very unlikely that the Council will be able to turn around and say, “Knock it down, it’s too high!”

Planning councillors are seen in the local government community at large with the same sort of suspicion given in the wider community to the sort of people who like trains. I joined the planning committee two years ago as a sort of penance.  At the time, I was persuaded that it was in the Lib Dem’s interest for me to become, for one year only, the opposition representative on the council’s ultimate decision making committee, the Executive Board.  This position had a healthy remuneration, but it also makes a councillor ineligible to serve on the scrutiny side of the council, which is where opposition councillors spend most of their time.  So becoming an Executive Member Without Portfolio took me off most the committees I had been on in the previous two years.  As a way of balancing the load more fairly, they put me on Development Control, which I thought I would hate.  As it turns out, it’s now the committee I look forward to most, and one I shall certainly be making an effort to serve on in the new council should I be fortunate enough to be re-elected in 15 days’ time.

Wii attention to detail

Ace campaigner Ed Maxfield very kindly came to Nottingham yesterday to help out with delivering leaflets and canvassing in some of our key ward campaigns.

As a treat, he got to christen our guest facilities (which are nearing completion not because I have finally sorted out my junk mountain, but rather because much of the junk mountain has been relocated to the attic) and have a go on the Wii.

Although Wario left him cold, he was rather taken with some of the Wii Sports games, and really took to Wii Tennis. After a few rounds we found we were actually quite well matched, and some close games ensued.

Whilst we were playing this, I noticed a fab detail – whenever a point is won, the game replays the foul or the out, etc from a different camera angle.  The camera tracks the tennis ball across the court, and as it does, the four players there variously come into and go out of focus, depending on how far they are from the ball’s position on the court.

That’s quite some attention to detail.  A nice touch of verisimilitude.  I wonder how many people will have even spotted it?

It’s perfect! It explains everything!

Just one more episode of House before I hit the sack… just one more.

Bah, I’m as addicted to the programme as Greg House is addicted to V… (I’m not going to type it, it’s a huge spam magnet.)

House is not a good thing to watch during an election campaign. I get urges to berate voters and attempt to wittily browbeat them. The last few days have been keeping up with the leafleting, of course, but also starting to get our first voter contact of the campaign.

First job is getting nomination papers signed. In order to stand for election, candidates have to be qualified in one or more of the following categories: on the electoral register, live in the electoral area, work in the electoral area, own land or property in the electoral area. In addition to that, those of us putting ourselves up for election can’t be insane, bankrupt or have a non-expired criminal conviction. I bet you feel relieved already.
But having qualified candidates is just the first step. Once you have the candidates, you
then have to get them nominated. To stand in any given ward, ten people who are on the electoral register in that ward have to sign a bit of paper to say you can stand.

All well in good. In most wards where we are active, there is no problem finding ten people we’ve helped or who support us. But we also have to stand candidates in areas where we are less than strong. Areas where don’t have people ready to sign your form. Areas where what you have to do is find a nice long road, with loads of people living on it, and knock on doors one by one explaining what you want. “Hello. I’m from the Lib Dems trying to get candidates on the ballot paper in your ward, but to do that I need people who live here to sign a piece of paper saying they don’t mind.”

Amazingly, some people do sign. But you do have to knock on a lot of doors to get just ten signatures.

Printing problems

Urgh. I’ve just had one of those nasty Riso failures that gets you covered in ink.

The master roll got stuck. Subsequent attempts to unstick it led to the thin sheets tearing down the middle as the machine struggled to reattach them to the printing drum. The beast was making growling, grinding noises as she tried to reset.

Something remained, deep within the machine, that was tearing the master paper. This is a new machine, and I don’t know whether it’s possible to flip up the print table like you could on the GR range, so I found myself pulling out all the movable parts like drums, and discharge chambers so that I could see through and work out where the obstruction was.

Then, James Herriot-like, I had to get down on my hands and knees and insert my entire arm into the delicate parts to grab the offending bit.

Following that, also like James Herriot, I had to scrub my forearms with washing up liquid to get the muck off my elbows.

Poor girl. She’s sounding a lot more contented now. All in a Lib Dem’s day’s work.

Little Chef

I see from Iain Dale that Little Chef is in financial difficulties.  I completely missed this on any other news source, so thank heavens for RSS.

Little Chef used to be good.  We used to go there for family treats when we were little – in hindsight, that must have been a good value family outing for the years when my parents were struggling a bit financially.

Recently, I have been back during long journeys, and I haven’t really been impressed.  It’s pretty expensive for what you get. And the food is universally awful.  Processed, tinned, frozen.  Microwaved to within an inch of its life then plated.  A little bit of garnish.

Was it always so bad and now I’m ever so slightly more discerning than I was when I was under 10? Or has the quality declined in the twenty years since then?

I do hope someone will be able to take over all the restaurants and produce something of good value with good food all over Britain’s A roads.  It would be a shame to see them fall to an existing brand.  Too much of the roadside offer in this country is terrible at the moment.

Gridlock!

Traffic in Nottingham is usually pretty good – transport is one Council responsibility that works really well in the City.

But this morning, something was afoot, and the Mansfield Road, which is the arterial road from my house to the city centre, was jam packed at 9.30.  It’s usually pretty hairy from about 8am to 9am, but calms down rapidly after 9am.  So for committee meetings at 10am, I can be pretty certain that leaving the house at 9.25am will let me catch a bus and get to the city centre in plenty of time.

Not this morning. As soon as I got onto the Mansfield Road, I could see there was a problem – traffic in the inbound direction was at a standstill throughout the Sherwood shops.  There were three buses at the stop unable to move because there was nowhere to go.  I could see as far as the brow of the first hill, so I thought I’d walk as far as that to see if I could see what the problem was.

Once I got there, there was no end in sight to the traffic queue, and I was already much ahead of the bus I would have been sitting on, so I decided to carry on on foot into town.

It’s not nearly as far as I thought it was!  I have just checked on Google Maps, and door to door, it’s just over two miles. I thought it was closer to three.  In fact it only takes about thirty minutes to walk – about what the Government thinks everyone should walk every day.  The bus normally takes at least 15 minutes, and if you factor in the waiting time too, it might even be quicker to walk!

This morning, I squandered the health advantage of walking in with a McBreakfast, but in the future, I will be better.  Who knows, one day I might be thin!