Tag: Patrick McLintock
20.04.2011 13:29:38
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It’s May 1998 and I am eleven years old. Ronaldo (the fat one, not the greasy one) is set to be the star of World Cup 1998, before eventually succumbing to host nation France in the final. But it is the legendary yellow jersey of Brazil that has caught my eye, but where am I to find the exorbitant £49.99 to buy one – plus the extra cost of getting ‘Samaldo’ emblazoned on the back? I’d still be saving if I’d relied on pocket money. The only choice then is to root through the cupboards and flog my expensively purchased, now unwanted wares out of mums’ car boot at 6am in a Church car park in Radcliffe. But it was worth it, and I wore that shirt every day in the summer of 1998. As the first thing I ever saved up to buy, it’s a treasured possession, and one I can’t imagine ever parting with.
I went to dozens of car boot sales after this; sold things in ‘Loot’ magazine and, when my offered items became fewer and more valuable, I started using eBay – the online car boot sale. Just because the things I sold were no longer of use to me, didn’t mean they had ceased to be of any value. Similarly, I’ve just paid £0.01 for a guidebook of Venice from the ‘used’ section on Amazon.com. Presumably someone paid £14.99 for the book before heading to Venice. They subsequently went to Venice (or simulated the experience by reading the guidebook cover to cover whilst sat in a canoe with a Cornetto). After this experience, the book was relatively useless to them, so they offered it for sale. I paid a negligible fee and postage and got a book I needed at 20% of the price I would’ve paid in Waterstone’s, and they saved themselves unnecessary clutter. In theory, Lonely Planet need to print one less guidebook to Venice, which saves paper, ink, time, money and so on. In essence, this is collaborative consumption.
eBay and Amazon are household names involved in collaborative consumption, whilst ‘Loot’ magazine and car boot sales pre-date these by decades and centuries alike. Some of you may have heard of the CouchSurfers website? Register you sofa online and people who need somewhere to stay for the night (at minimal cost) will contact you from time to time to arrange sleeping on said couch. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but cheaper and greener than staying in one of Lenny Henry’s hotels...
But what about Relay Rides, where you make your car available to others in need of transport, again for a small fee towards petrol etc?
Or TaskRabbit, where those that are cash rich and time poor can post ‘tasks’ (such as walking the dog, collecting dry-cleaning, posting parcel) online, for ‘runners’ to complete for a mutually agreed fee?
What about Zopa then? If you’re as tired of the banking system as everyone else is, why not loan money from a peer at a competitive rate, making repayments at an agreed APR over an agreed time period?
Parkatmyhouse (alternative to the spiralling costs of NCP multi-storeys)?
swap.com (self-explanatory I think)?
Bartercard (services for goods, or vice versa)?
Thredup (for those fast-growing nippers)?
And there are oodles of tool-sharing groups out there for budget conscious DIY-ers.
Collaborative consumption is a burgeoning movement. Not only does it have the potential to save people huge amounts of time and money, but it also eradicates our obsession with possession and consumption, hitting the cause of our environmental problems instead of looking for ways to allow us to continue in our fatally flawed economic and societal paradigm.
Hybrid cars, eco-tourism and carbon offsetting may well be pieces of the jigsaw, but they are not the ultimate solution.
I’ll leave you with a little statistic. The average power drill is used for 12 minutes in its life. I have never driven down a row of terraced houses and seen every single resident simultaneously engaged in carpentry or other such craft. Thus, I would wager that one power drill could quite easily be shared between the average UK street. The same is probably true of DVDs, books, slow-cookers, bicycles and so on. Collaborative consumption – coming to a street near you soon.
For more information check out this webpage...
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11.02.2011 11:55:10
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So it's that time of year again; the weekend when cupid curls his finger around the twine and takes aim. In some cases, lets hope he strikes the bullseye and melds people in a bubble of happiness. In other cases, lets hope the little mite misses just a tad and actually severs the bonds that hold the more unsuitable couples together. I for one will bid a fond farewell to the unfortunate duo who seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that Poundland is a building soceity, and that by investing their jobseekers allowance there they are safeguarding their litter's future.
But nay, my whinge this week isn't about the great unwashed, rather about the absolute waste of everything that Valentine's Day has become. For starters, it has its origin in Christianity - some Pope or other decided it would be a good idea at some point - so if you're an atheist or a non-believer or of some other faith, there is a confusing issue to start with. Nowadays this celebration of love seems to be owned by a number of high-street card shops, lingerie outlets, chocolatiers and city-break touting travel agents. And I, constantly suspicious of what 'the man' is doing to distract the proletariate, am convinced the placement of Valentine's Day six weeks after Christmas is a conspiracy theory. Most people have just been paid for the first time following the glutonous spending in late December, and the coffers are back in the black. Put Valentine's on 14th January and it's a dead duck - nobody could afford the petrol to the garage to buy a cheap posy of wilting daffs, let alone an elaborate bouquet of roses. Seems to me old Pope Gelasius I knew what he was doing - probably links in to the Da Vinci Code somehow but I'll leave that to Dan Brown...
Anyway, back on to the waste side of things, lets look at the classic Valo gifts one by one...
Chocolates - Milk, yes. Milk means cows. Cows mean methane. Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas but is twenty-five times more potent than it's more famous cousin. I'm not going to get started on the over-packaging, or the food miles or the fact that they make you fat. Alternative suggestion - locally-sourced produce, or a nice pint of organic milk.
Flowers - According to the Guardian, 55 million roses are traded around the world on the 14th. That means that 55 million roses are put in the bin on the 21st. If you work from the estimate that each rose stem grown in Holland produces 3kg of carbon dioxide emissions, when you hand over that beautiful dozen to your loved one, why not also pass her a bag and a half of building sand, just to demonstrate the carbon effects of this oh so common gesture. Alternative suggestion - some kind of origami flower, or just one rose?
Cards - We all know the scores here don't we; "You had me at hello..", "Love you baby..." and "You're the only one for me... (until next year when we've split up because you were seeing the guy from work behind my back for three months and I only found out because you text the wrong person by mistake one night!)" The global postal industry's carbon emissions are three times that of the much-maligned aviation industry, with 12 million cards delivered by the Royal Mail alone on Valentine's Day. Alternative suggestion - send an e-card, make a card or at the very least give the card to your loved one as opposed to putting in the post. Or don't bother with a card and just tell her how you feel, you cold, awkward thing...
I could go on... jewellery and gold mines and exploitation of workers in developing nations, clothes to replace ones that are pefectly wearable, beauty products that contain palm oils that contribute to the distruction of the rainforests.
How do I ever buy anything you might wonder, if I look behind every product to such a degree?
The answer is simple, I don't. I keep my money in my mattress and only use things I find on the street. This year I'm giving gifts of half eaten chicken tikka kebab, shoe and damaged wooden pallet, all wrapped in an old tarpaulin and sealed down with spent Hubba Bubba. Somehow I don't think I'll have to worry about it next year...
Check this out for more cool stats and facts...
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07.01.2011 15:23:18
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I’m not going to get involved in politics in this blog. Partly because I’m not allowed; the very mention of one of Nyree’s infamous ear-bashings would make David Haye quake in his boots; and partly because I think most politicians are self-serving, self-aggrandising, self-obsessed prats and berks. I also know nothing about politics really, other than the fact that ‘Margaret Thatcher’ is an anagram of ‘That Great Charmer’. I smell ironnnyyy! Anyway, I digress...
I don’t know much about politics really, but I do know that those marginal parties that don’t have a realistic chance of gaining an outright majority for themselves can make fairly outlandish claims in their manifestos to try and entice gullible/extremist voters. The BNP promise to... well I don’t know, but it’s obviously madness. The Liberal Democrats make vague promises they actually meant to do the opposite of – they really should sack whoever edited their manifesto as they appear to have mistaken the word ‘eradicate’ with ‘triple’ in all the sentences relating to tuition fees. Easy mistake to make. Any WWE fans will remember one of the great wrestlers of the early 00’s – ‘Eradicate H’. Might be a bit of an obscure reference that actually... Where was I? Ah yes, and the Green’s, in line with their core policy, promised to create a sustainable society... by reducing a working week to just 27 hours...
The logic behind this is to eradicate (or is that triple?) economic growth, based on the idea that it is impossible to continue to accumulate wealth (often at the behest of nations we imprison in the chains poverty), whilst also reaching a state of absolute sustainability.
27 hours? It sounds like an innovative economic model, and a pirated copy of the new Danny Boyle film. Knocking off after lunch on Thursday? Friday night would be the new Saturday night, so you could go out on the new Saturday night and still watch The X Factor on old Saturday night, and then go out on old Saturday night as well, knowing that normal Sunday is there for eating eggs, ironing the curtains and making jokes about the “bloody squares what used to work thirty-eight hours an’ that!”
Everyone would be less stressed, so ailments like heart disease, high blood pressure, depression and the like would decrease (saving the NHS billions). People would have more time to exercise and stroll around, ridding the world of the super-obese (saving the NHS billions). And crucially, the majority would have more time to get green-fingered and start growing food in their gardens and on allotments, improving the general health of the nation (saving the NHS billions). At this point it is probably worth mentioning I don’t work as some kind of NHS fundraiser, just so you know.
The problem then? If everyone works 28% less hours, it’s only logical that everyone is paid 28% less. Less money basically means less ‘stuff’, and we in the West are obsessed with ‘stuff’. I’ve no doubt that whoever is reading this (well done for getting this far by the way – I know it’s useless ranting but I find it very cathartic) currently has a pile of ‘stuff’ in their house that they got for Christmas that they simply don’t want. Probably £10-£20s worth? I’d say a fair proportion (say 50% for argument’s sake) of the nation has a similar pile. That’s £350-£700m already wasted. Or 118,043,844 work hours at minimum wage. Or enough to supplement the wages of 1,809,655 people on minimum wage to the tune of 11 hours, reducing their working week from 38 to 27 hours...
Is this ever going to happen? No, it is not. Are we more likely to spend billions on a nuclear deterrent system that means we can at least contribute to Earth’s destruction when Kim Yong-Il decides he’s sick of being “wonewy” and presses the red button? Yes. Are the Green Party ever going to be in a position of power that enables them to make this a serious debate? No. But neither is Nick Clegg, so nerrrr...
Ooo, just got political. I can hear Nyree stomping down the doors looking for me. Better dash...
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22.12.2010 10:26:39
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It’s an odd time, Christmas. The clichés and rhetoric will tell you that the chestnuts should be roasting on the open fire, grandpa should be wearing that new reindeer cardigan and quality street wrappers should litter the coffee table. There’s more to it than that though for me...
Forget the Buzz Lightyear figure, the Tamagotchi and the JLS tickets – Christmas isn’t about gifts. It’s about appreciating what you have. We give to those we love by way of expressing how we feel about them. The bows, ribbons and wrapping paper house the feelings we are otherwise incapable of communicating through words, acts or love. We become trapped in a self-perpetuating maelstrom of love and consumption, and each present has it’s own environmental or humanitarian impact, from the Chinese sweatshops banging out the latest iPods, to the exploited poverty-ridden Ethiopians that see a fraction of the money promised when you ‘buy them a goat’ through a household-name charity. But what would Christmas be without the presents, and their associated impacts?
To start with, nobody would go Christmas shopping, so millions of car journeys would cease to be necessary. Whilst the environmentally aware will be buying FSC certified wrapping paper and cards, the masses will be looking for the cheap and cheerful. No presents means there’s nothing to wrap in golden glittery bin-fodder, and in these days of austerity you’d be better of sending an e-card than wasting money on stamps.
Bright an early on Christmas day – Bucks Fizz at ten o’clock (that’s the drink, not the 1981 Eurovision champions). And here-in lies the non-present void. Dinner and trimmings will come later. The Doctor Who special will still be on at seven, and your auntie will still be snoring loudly on the sofa by nine. Is there nothing else that can fill the time between ten and eleven? No other way to express our emotions without plastic gifts and Bangladesh-made textiles?
A poem, a song, a sentence? A moment, a kiss, a hug? A promise of time...?
I’ve moved around a lot – Newcastle, Manchester, Cornwall, Uganda, London, Nottingham, Peterborough, Lincoln – since June 2009. You soon realise that a phone and an Inbox are only disturbed by the people who care about you, and about whom you care. Time is the most valuable gift, whether given or received – and it has absolutely no carbon footprint.
Don’t get me wrong – I love this time of year. I love buying people presents, and receiving them in return. But, with budgets tight and the Cancun talks doing nothing to protect our world, consider giving something other than a product to your loved ones on Saturday. There’ll be no cellotape mess, it’ll save you a fortune, and I’m pretty sure the memory will last longer than any pair of socks...
Having said all this, if you manage to reach a point where you are happy with what you have and exist in a euphoric state of contentedness, please get in touch...
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12.11.2010 12:08:41
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It's 11:24am on the 1st October 2010, and East Anglian hip-hop overlord DJ Tim Westwood has just hurled the following Tweet straight into the face of an unsuspecting planet earth:
"On a small ass train from Hull to Preston stoppin everywhere. People goin Blackpool drink vodka out the bottle. This is my type of ride"
I'm all for celebrities articulately endorsing sustainable transport, and here Westwood encapsulates the joys of a late-morning train journey between Hull and Preston with all the precision you would expect from a consummate BBC broadcaster of over 15 years.
In this eco-friendly Tweet, Westwood's powerful rhetoric allows the reader no option but to picture the "big ass traffic jams” which contrast so strongly with the notion of a "small ass train". Westwood then goes on to praise how the Hull-to-Preston service is "stoppin everywhere", which is kind of like a slang way of saying "stopping everywhere". Frequent stops to suit the customer are yet another benefit of modern day train travel, a benefit which was never going to elude DJ Tim Westwood.
Five years ago, a “small ass train” would not have been Tim Westwood's "type of ride". On the contrary, Tim would have almost certainly stated his preferred “ride” as a "big ass truck" (to use the parlance). Let's not forget that in 2005 Tim had just become the grinning centrepiece of MTV's 'Pimp My Ride’, one of the biggest televisual automobile celebrations in all human history. I’m sure you’ll remember how Tim beamed away as Fiat Pandas were given nightmarish paint jobs, modified to the hilt, and kitted-out with their own fully-functioning cinemas, Olympic swimming pools and multi-storey shopping centres.
It would have been easy to condemn the Tim of 2005 as some kind of out-of-control, car-crazed enviro-monster. Fast forward to 2010 though, and Timmy’s train tweet shows the progress anyone can make towards promoting sustainability in just a few years.
One of my longest held beliefs is that we could each benefit from having our own sustainable transport role model, a trusted figure we can personally relate to. I find it easy to relate to DJ Tim Westwood because in many ways DJ Tim Westwood and I lead parallel lives. We are both products of post-war East Anglia and we both get healthy amounts of 'respect' on the streets, although mine is largely for my energy-saving work.
Given our many similarities, it follows in my mind that if Westwood travels sustainably, I should continue to do so too. Thoughts of DJ Tim Westwood travelling by train to ply his trade in the nightclubs of Preston and Hull strengthen my resolve to continue travelling sustainably, and also provide me with a general feeling of comfort in a way that is difficult to properly explain. Whilst the image of Tim Westwood boarding trains is arguably one that I think about a little too much, why not follow my example and find your own sustainable transport role model?
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15.08.2010 10:24:04
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It’s the summer holidays and that can only mean one thing, yes it’s time for the annual fun day at Woodfield Park .
Mick Steele from the Welland Residents Association invited us to attend this annual event and, as we had enjoyed this event so much last year, we are really looking forward to pitching the PECT gazebo and spreading the eco message to the residents who attend in their thousands, well nearly, mmm.
Last year Patrick and I gave away hundreds of free Warm Homes energy packs and we found our 500th survey participant for the Seeding Sustainable Communities project that I was working on at the time. This event was a great marker for us, it led to lots of conversation based around comments such as ‘this time last year’ and it was really great to sum up all the things we have achieved over the past year. Patrick has completed hundreds of surveys and is well into the second year of his project where he helps people find their way out of fuel poverty buy offering friendly and effective energy saving advice and I was promoting the Greeniversity, Peterborough’s green skill and green experience website.
Also joining us during the year was Sophie and her Green Team who have just completed their 2,000th free eco audit. At the event Scott and Chris from the Green Team spent the day helping people to identify ways they could cut their carbon. They even persuaded me that I should make the effort and get on my bike!
We were particularly lucky that the deputy mayor Bella Saltmarsh joined us at the PECT stand, Bella has been particularly supportive of PECTs projects on her patch and we are really grateful for all her efforts. We were also grateful to the Mayor who helped us to set up the stall then stayed around for a while helping to attract attention to the PECT stand.
The event itself was fabulous. Patrick loved the huge boot sale and I got both my dogs a new teddy each. I was able to buy a big yellow sunflower for my garden and the bees pleasure and some of the most delicious peaches I’ve ever had from the fresh produce stall. I didn’t fancy wall climbing, Patrick wanted to do bungie jumping but said that he had a medical condition that prevented him from doing anything dangerous – likely story!
Along with all those that attendedr we really did have a great time When works this good who needs Saturdays off?
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06.07.2010 15:42:40
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Warm Homes Peterborough is PECT’s community-based fuel poverty project, providing free energy-saving advice and products to social housing tenants, and reducing the carbon footprint of 5 Peterborough neighbourhoods. Having successfully worked with 750 tenants in its first year, the project’s second year has recently begun.
Whilst the likes of Brazil, Spain and The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been battling it out for football supremacy in South Africa, our very own Warm Homes team (complete with new signing Bacar) has been working with residents to slide-tackle fuel poverty in three Peterborough wards not visited last year: Paston, Ravensthorpe and East ward. Having been largely Dogsthorpe-based in our first year, these new areas have taken some getting used to.
Similarly to my Dogsthorpe induction, there has been much walking in circles, head-scratching over maps, and ambitious attempts to commit all nearby bus-stops to memory. As with World Cup squads, internal disputes occasionally threaten the cohesion of the plucky Warm Homes team. “I could have sworn it was just round this corner” is usually enough to prompt a raised eyebrow and a slight look of contempt from my colleague. Thankfully such rifts have remained civil. So far.
Most recently we’ve been knocking on doors and visiting tenants in Paston, and it’s encouraging that Registered Social Landlords appear to be as focused on energy efficiency measures here as we witnessed them being in Dogsthorpe last year. Unlike Dogsthorpe, where re-roofing appeared to be the order of the day, Paston has hosted a carnival of cladding. Yeah, I said it.
Whereas most of the properties visited in Dogsthorpe have insulated wall cavities, many Paston properties are not suitable for this heat-saving measure. In a solid wall property, or one with narrow wall cavities, the insulation choices are to dry-line walls from the inside of the properties or to clad them from the outside. One huge benefit of cladding, over-dry lining, is the reduced disruption to tenants’ lives during installation. Also it’s far more heat-conserving than dry-lining, making its higher price-tag worthwhile in the long run.
This wave of cladding in Paston has brought a temporary abundance of scaffolding to areas like Crabtree. Retro pebble-dash houses here are being transformed beyond recognition, with the new rendered layers of being painted shades of cream, brown and red. On a hot day in Paston you can start to mistake some of the terraced properties for neapolitan ice cream, particularly if it’s been a few hours since lunch.
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09.02.2010 15:16:01
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Heating is probably the most important use of energy in our homes, particularly for those of us who are vulnerable to cold.
However, a number of barriers to affordable warmth can exist. The best efforts of an efficient new boiler and central heating system can be in vain if heat then pours out through poorly insulated roofspaces, walls or draughty windows.
Likewise, bank accounts and prepay meters will be drained rapidly if homes are heated beyond the maximum recommended temperature (21c). Both of these barriers to affordable warmth also involve energy wastage and unnecessary CO2 emissions. Any inefficient use of energy (electricity, gas or other) impacts on our ability to heat our homes, both in terms of resources and personal financial cost.
The rising price of energy has been a contentious and highly publicised issue of late, an issue which makes it even more important for everyone to identify which of the various energy tariffs suit them best.
Some might wonder why only Dogsthorpe and Central Wards are being focussed on as part of the Warm Homes project. Fuel Poverty is known to be most prevalent in areas which suffer high levels of deprivation. Whilst such statistics are always broad; Dogsthorpe and Central Ward have been identified as suffering some of the highest levels of deprivation within Peterborough, making them strong candidates for any fuel poverty project.
Furthermore, Warm Homes Peterborough is only offered to tenants of Registered Social Landlords (RSLs), not home-owners or those renting privately. As a sector of society, RSL tenants are vulnerable to fuel poverty. A recent report from the New Policy Institute described how “RSLs house a very sizeable number of those in, or at risk or, poverty”. RSL tenants are also generally exempt from government energy-efficiency initiatives such as Warm Front grants and the new Boiler Scrappage Scheme announced over Christmas. Despite this, I have seen first-hand the impressive measures Peterborough RSLs are implementing to increase the energy efficiency of their properties, for example Cross Keys Homes’ work on roof insulation.
Read my first blog post about the Warm Homes project here...
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12.01.2010 16:44:28
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With Christmas Day less than 36 hours away, and after six months of door-knocking, surveying and energy advice, the first year of Warm Homes Peterborough visits came to a close. As the snow fell thickly in Dogsthorpe, the completion of the momentous 250th home survey marked the end of the first phase of this new energy efficiency project.
In the latter half of 2009 I became something of a stranger to the PECT office, and became something of a fixture in the residential lanes of Dogsthorpe and Central Ward, to the extent where one Eastern Avenue resident recognised and welcomed me into his home as “the young man who keeps wandering up and down our street with a trolley and a clipboard”. The same resident revealed how, after repeated sightings of me and my ‘office-on-wheels’, he and his wife had reached the conclusion that I was “just out looking for something to do”.
Whilst the last comment suggests I have some work to do on perfecting a purposeful veneer, the truth is that I was out to deliver energy efficiency advice to 250 Peterborough residents. Warm Homes Peterborough is a project funded by ScottishPower’s Energy People Trust, designed to combat fuel poverty (fuel poverty is defined as where more than 10% of a household’s income is spent on fuel). A wide range of factors can feed fuel poverty, but thankfully an equally wide range of responses can alleviate it.
I’ll be revealing more about how the Warm Homes Peterborough project works in future blog posts.
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