DCAP
I’ve made some posts in our Facebook groups about Ghost Ponds, the Common Crane, and Libraries of Things. With some of these, I’m throwing out ideas, hoping that someone else will be interested enough to pick up the ball and run with them (LoT falls into this category). I don’t know if this is useful or not, but there are so many DCAP relevant things that I think are worthwhile but that I don’t have the time/energy to do.
I need to print the 2025 meeting calendar and distribute it to libraries and noticeboards.
Our Treasurer has made some bank account proposals, and I think we’ll go with the Coop. Another member had expressed some ethical misgivings related to the bank’s fractious 2010s and the US hedge fund bailout, but as of 1 January, Coop Bank is fully owned by Coventry Building Society, and Ethical Consumer scores it highly.
Next week is the rescheduled ‘leaky homes roadshow’ in Burnham, with folk from Community Energy South helping us use a thermal imaging camera to find where houses are leaking heat. The weather conditions have to be right, though (dry, no wind, >= 10-degree temperature difference between int. and ext.), and currently, they don’t look favourable, so we may have to defer again.
Day Job
On leave until 6th January. Not thinking about it!
Everyday Life
Too much food and drink over Yule. Dry Januarying.
Thursday: C and I took the long walk along the sea wall to Holliwell Point and returned on Marsh Road. People shooting in the open farmland. Brent Geese wintering en masse on Strutt and Parker’s fields. We found a dead hare and a dead badger in separate locations on/by the road.
Started promoting this year’s Burnham Art Trail with the first call-out for submissions (closes 14th Feb!)
Aping folk I follow, I’m looking at PKM systems. This has also led me to ponder the fact that I was never taught how to take notes on anything and also to remember doodling through all my undergraduate lectures wondering what my peers were writing down.
Media
Films
The Wild Robot, Concrete Utopia, Furiosa
The Wild Robot was no Wall-E, nor a patch on Wallace & Gromit Vengeance Most Fowl. I enjoyed Furiosa but was baffled by Anya Taylor-Joy’s American accent and found the ending a bit addled. Apparently, George Miller said that after 1979’s Mad Max, all the films were folk tales as told by storytellers, exaggerated campfire tales that don’t necessarily cohere or accord with any canon. Which makes sense all the way up to the American accent. Concrete Utopia was my favourite of the three films I finished. I also started Megalopolis but 20 minutes in I was still waiting for a reason to say it wasn’t terrible and gave up.
TV
The Rig, Skeleton Crew, Silo
Silo is still good but the latest episode felt like padding. Skeleton Crew is distracting enough – it’s for kids, duh, but it has GenX nostalgia value if you were brought up on Star Wars, ET, The Goonies etc – and the episodes are short – candy, but not too much. I’m three episodes into Season 1 of The Rig and its initial promise has faltered as it sinks into ITV drama land. Narrative fiction deserves a chance to flower but life is also short; probably baling on this one.
Books
READ
- A Planet to Win Why We Need a Green New Deal
- The Case for a New Green New Deal
The internal American politics of A Planet to Win are a bit blah but it has more explicit Utopian visioning than The Case for the Green New Deal which is a drier read. The concept of public/communal luxury appears in both books though – which I think remains a useful muster point for future imaginaries. Pettifor makes a reference to degrowth which is both pithy and elusive. I struggled with the scaling elements in Pettifor’s book (when she writes about localisation it seems to mean to a national level ?). Despite their publication in 2019, both books seem like historical documents from another era. Since they were written we’ve had Covid, deCorbynisation, the Ukraine war, resurgent Faragism and a second Trump victory crystallizing the rise of the Far Right. With Biden’s IRA in the rearview mirror and Labour’s ‘green industrial revolution’ repeatedly eroded it feels like the GND needs a new render. Degrowthers also seem quiet right now, is the Green Left in a wait-and-see phase?
STARTED
- Wild Service Why Nature Needs You
- Blood on the Machine The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
Struggling with both of these tbh.
Music
Online
Watched the new Bobby Fingers, ‘Joe Rogan and The Black Keys Diorama‘ and some Corentin de Chatelperron content on YouTube. Podcasts have mostly gone dark for the Winterval but I caught Gareth Dennis’s Rail Natter Reasons to be Cheerful episode. Read a handful of stories across the news media about climate change and insurance, I’ve been following this for a while and it feels like there’s a turn occurring as the FIRE economy faces up to a world on fire. This might be an important element in a paradigm shift around mitigation and adaptation but the current pattern is distressed rout not #ManagedRetreat.
Future Thinking and Dreaming
Eurostar to Paris next weekend for my little brother’s 50th birthday
Speculative holiday ideas at two different scales:
- Cyprus over land and sea
- cycle Boulogne to Hoek van Holland
Dengie Bioregion 