Don't call me...

.... And I won't call you either.

One of the nice things about being a grown up, I am belatedly discovering, is that it's all right not to eat things just because you don't like them (no one can make you any more), and it's possible to say 'actually, I prefer not to use the telephone.'

For maybe seventy years, the phone was a necessary evil. But now, thanks to email and the wonders of SMS, it simply isn't necessary any more. (I always say, and it is nothing less than the truth, that without the advent of email, I would not have the career I have now. I simply couldn't have made the contacts if I had had to phone people up.) Evil? Well, not literally. But certainly I always found it oppressive. I hated making calls (the idea that you were imposing into someone's life), and I hated receiving them - being expected to jump to it the instant someone, be they friend, stranger or salesman, wanted my attention. But it wasn't just this seething resentment. There is something very strange and unnatural about a phone conversation. It is a conversation, and yet not a conversation. The visual cues which contribute so much to communication are totally absent. Now, I know this is also true of written communication, but the thing is, we know that's not a conversation; we approach it differently and make allowances for its inadequacies. It also has compensating advantages. A phone conversation on the other hand, is merely an inadequate conversation, an emasculated, shadow of one.

People say that with emails etc there's a danger of firing off a reply before you've thought about it properly. And so there is, if you're careless. But on the phone you have no choice. You have to reply instantly, to fill the void of silence. Under that sort of pressure, how easy it is to say the wrong thing, or for it to come across differently from how you meant it, especially when there is no kind or amused look to soften the blow. And everyone must surely know how heartrendingly frustrating it is to have a row on the phone, how hollow and fruitless.

But, as I said, necessary no more. In fact we will look back on the era of long-distance aural communication as a brief anomoly between periods when the written word was the only way to communicate over long distances.* In the nineteenth century there were up to seven postal collections and deliveries per day - scarcely different from emails pinging back and forth.

The written note gives us time to think, to formulate our thoughts, moderate our reactions, and craft our communication. It's no substitute for a face to face conversation, but it doesn't pretend to be. But unlike the phone call, it's a useful complement to it.

Also, people worry that 'text speak' is killing the art of letter writing. But - execrable as it can be - it isn't; the telephone was the greatest threat to that. Email and even text may actually, in a small way, be reviving it. People had lost the art of writing elegant English long before early SMS required them to abbreviate everything; those who did have that facility certainly didn't lose it as soon as the Nokia was in their hand; they (we) are the ones who write 1000 character texts complete with correct punctuation.

And while that may not be a very elegant rounding off, I must leave it there, and go and have some dinner. Early start tomorrow - we really are going to go and check on Chertsey, but it's going to have to be a day trip.

*Stephen Fry, I think it was, pointed this out.

Good plain cook

First of all, here is the gingerbread recipe which I promised Blossom:

4 oz butter
5 level tablespoons black treacle
4 level tablespoons golden syrup
3 oz demerara sugar
5 tablespoons milk
1 heaped desertspoon marmalade
4 oz self raising flour
4 oz fine oatmeal
2 heaped teaspoons ground ginger
1 heaped teaspoon mixed spice
1/4 level teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2 eggs

Put everything down to and including the marmalade into a saucepan and stir over a low heat until it's all melted/dissolved. Allow to cool then beat in the eggs, then beat in all the dry ingredients. Pour into a greased and lined large loaf tin, and bake at mark 3 for 1 1/2 - 1 3/4 hours.

It comes from what is probably my favourite cookery book, the Stork Cookery Service's Art of Home Cooking, published in 1963. Apart from the fact that it introduces margarine into absolutely every recipe (I substitute butter in most of them) it is, it is the perfect basic guide to plain cooking, including such forgotten delights as brown stew, jam roly poly, and a 'curry of cooked meat' featuring 1 large onion, 1 1/2 oz Stork Table Margarine, 1 rounded tablespoon curry powder, 3/4 pint stock or water, 2 oz sultanas (optional), 1 large cooking apple, 1 rounded tablespoon chutney, 2 teaspoons black treacle (optional), 2 teaspoons lemon juice, salt and pepper, and 3/4 lb cooked meat. Exotic or what?

Secondly, this coincides with two pieces in the paper today which have set me off. One is a long article detailing how exercise is not an effective way of tackling obesity (you mean someone actually thought it was? I always knew that was a flim flam put about by the food industry), and a news piece about how Jamie Oliver's 'Ministry of Food' cookery school may have to close owing to funding cuts. Now I don't particularly love Jamie Oliver (although nor do I hate him) but with or without his branding, the idea of teaching people basic cooking skills so that they're less reliant on takeaways and ready meals, has to be a good thing for their health and their finances.

It seems that there is now a whole generation or more who have never learnt enen the simplest cooking techniques, even as we gorge on Nigel (Slater) and Nigella on the screen and on the page. I learnt to cook at school. From the age of eleven, we had weekly lessons in which a recipe was demonstrated, and then we got to do it. This wasn't every term, as the Sex Discrimination Act had just come into force, so I had to do wookwork and metalwork too, but it whetted my apppetite sufficiently that I opted to take Food and Nutrition at 'O' Level, much to my mother's horror at using one one of my precious options on something so apparently trivial. But no prizes for guessing which of my ten 'O' Levels has been most useful to me since I left school. We covered nutrition, food hygiene, purchasing and menu planning, and time planning, and we learnt all the basic skills like making a white sauce, pastry, victoria sponge and so on.

It's all a million miles from what my kids did at school under the name of 'Food Technology' - this seemed to consist largely of designing packaging, and, I recall, making a batch of biscuits every week, testing them on us, and refining the recipe. It was about the food industry, rather than home cooking. And that's where we've gone so wrong. And all the time the government is so in thrall to the food industry that they dare not even come out and say 'eating processed crap makes you fat', we're never going to get it right.

Anyway, enjoy the gingerbread.

Just keep coming

Dove's recent experiences struck a chord with me. I never really noticed it in Warrior; I suspect it didn't happen. But when steering Chertsey, this is one of the banes of my life. Chugging along, pretty slowly (I still only do pretty slowly, really. 3 mph would be considered rather racy) on a narrowish but not too narrow by a long way bit of canal. A green boat approaches in the distance. I keep going, trying to adjust my speed so that we'll meet in a wider or less tree obscured section, or before the bend of bridgehole he's just emerged from (yes, it is always a he). He sees me - or rather Chertsey's imposing fore end (but it can't just be that, if it happens to Dove as well) and rather than keep coming (let alone adjusting his speed, that would be asking too much) he tries to stop dead. Which of course because he's got a light modern boat with a tiny prop, he can't. He throws his morse into reverse, and the boat slews across the cut, right into my path. Great. So if I keep going I'll hit him and it'll be my fault. If we're still far enough apart, I can stop too. Then what? Well, sometimes he'll get the boat into the bank and get off, trying to hold it with a rope. I kid you not; this has already happened to me at least twice, and that's not counting the times they rather sheepishly say they were stopping anyway, 'for a coffee'. If there isn't space for me to stop, I now have to try to steer around a much wider obstacle (up to 50' rather than 7'), and hope that I'll do no more than nudge him, and won't go aground in the process. Then he'll look at me as if it's all my fault, especially if he's ended up on the bottom or in the trees.

So, the moral of this, and a plea, is just keep coming. I may look as if I'm heading straight for you, but I will swerve at the last minute, honest. And as I'm passing, still keep going; I need you predictably out of the way so that I can swing back in before the next bend/bridge/moored boat. Just keep coming, and keep steering, and we'll be fine. Oh, and I'm not radioactive either, so no need to keep a ten foot exclusion zone between your boat and mine.

Volunteers wanted to remove floating dead dogs

Perhaps this is what I missed by not going to the HNBOC meeting last weekend, at which a BW bigwig (might even have been the same one) was providing the entertainment with a talk on future spending and the involvement of the 'third sector', but never mind, I was able to read all about it in the Guardian yesterday.

Now I'm not going to get involved in discussions about whether this is the right - or only - way forward (probably not, but another time, maybe) but a couple of things leapt out of the article (shall I be cynical and say press release) at me.

The first was this:

Hales said: "Why does a taxpayer in Blackpool fund the Regent's canal in London?"

To which the answer surely is, have you not grasped the point of a national system of taxation, Tony? The point is cross-subsidy; in some areas services are expensive to provide (think of public transport in sparsely populated rural areas); in other areas economies of scale make services relatively cheap to provide. Some areas are rich and some areas are poor. If every area had to pay for its own amenities and services, inequalities would become even more entrenched than they already are. His example is in any case disingenuous; it is surely the super-wealthy residents of Maida Vale and the commuters of G.U. Metroland who have funded the Liverpool Link and the Lancashire, not the other way round.

This attitude sounds like the beginning of the end for British Waterways or a national waterways system by any name, and an argument for a break up into self-funding regions, which will, for all sorts of reasons, have vastly differing levels of income and of outgoings, and would in many cases find themselves in competition with each other. It also brings to mind shades of the post-British railway system (shudder). Will we see the return of stop locks and the Worcester Bar?

The second assertion that I would take issue with is this:

"And if I own a brand new flat in Birmingham, I'm not going to sit there and do nothing if the canal I overlook is full of floating dead dogs, or the tow paths are covered in dog shit, or the lock gates don't work, and the value of my property is going down. I'm going to get involved."

Has he ever visited an area where the streets are covered in dog shit and the street lamps don't work, and there may even be the odd dead dog, or cat, or pigeon or rat? And has he noticed the people getting involved? Because mostly, mostly they don't. If they're affluent and confident, they shout and complain until someone else (usually the local authority) does something about it; and if they're poor and depressed, they put up with it and don't see any possible alternative. And frankly, the eventual residents of all those new flats, bought-to-let-off-plan and now being repossessed or offloaded by desperate failed would-be property magnates, are likely to fall into the latter category. And I'm sure that most of them wouldn't even notice whether the lock gates worked or not, let alone care.

'Getting involved' is the New (and now somewhat tarnished) Labour mantra. It involves passing the responsibility for local problems onto the people who are suffering from them, but without giving them the power to do anything meaningful about it. The way to achieve things is by banding together, but you cannot do that effectively if everyone in an area is poor, poorly educated, and depressed. You have to spread that load more widely. At its best, at its (hardly ever reached) ideal, that is what the state does; that is what the state is for. In practice, it hardly ever works. The irony is, that in a small way, as a vestige of the glory days, that's what British Waterways, the forgotten nationalised industry fighting on without noticing that the war was over and the private sector had won, was doing.

Register of interest

I've just checked the National Historic Ships Register website, and Chertsey's entry is now up there.

Interestingly, the historical details which I painstakingly typed into the little box have been cleverly edited (possibly by a robot) to make it look as if they have been translated from Mandarin. No matter; you, dear reader, are not likely to think that I really write like that.

The measurements, in the column on the right, are another matter, though. I recall Halfie commenting how, on the certificate, the length had been transcribed into a metric measurement, to four decimal places, that bore no visible relation to the 71'6" which I had entered. And we can now see why. 71'6" has been rendered as 71.60 feet - OK, so that's only about an inch out and for all I know is more accurate anyway. But look at the beam - my 7'1" has been turned into 7.01 feet - it's lost nearly a whole inch where it really matters (I can go up the Llangollen after all!).

I do accept that this doesn't really matter. But. In some ways it does. What is the point of presenting something to four decimal places if it's not accurate? What, come to that, is the point of measuring a bloody great boat to four decimal places, when you haven't measured it anyway, only converted it from the much cruder measure of feet and inches. And what on earth are they doing expressing feet and inches in decimals? It's depressing because you'd think that they of all people would firstly want to get things right, and secondly would be satisfied with presenting boats that were built in feet and inches in feet and inches and so avoiding getting themselves into this mess at all.

Now, I have nothing against metrication. I am one of that fortunate bilingual generation who spoke metric at school and imperial at home, and annoy purists by using a mixture of both (ooh, that's seven and a half inches by 28 mm). I tend to measure in whatever fits best, although I visualise lengths better in imperial. But I am intensely annoyed by the insistence of the Guardian and the Observer in writing their recipes only with metric measurements. Metric may be good for many things but it is crap for cooking. For a start, if you used balance scales, you need more weights, because you have to have 2 x 200 and 2 x 20, and they don't stack neatly on top of each other. Scaling up or down is so much easier with imperial, because it's based on doubling and halving. But the worst thing is, it is obvious that quantities in recipes are still at some point being converted from imperial (with 25g being substituted for an ounce, even though 30g is nearer the mark) and you end up with all these odd little 5 gramme bits. Now, unless it's poison, or possibly something really expensive like saffron or gold leaf, five grammes is nothing, it's insignificant. But how it bloody complicates things, especially to someone like me who glazes over at the sight of too many numbers. So if you want to write recipes in metric, invent them in metric, with nice round figures, rather than inventing (or more likely discovering them) in pounds and ounces and then converting them.

And the same goes for you, National Historic Ships Register. If you want to know what my boat measures in metres, come out with a metric tape and measure it.

Recycling

recyclable - perhaps

Here is my first rant of the new blog.

Today is recycling day in my street. Now of course like motherhood and apple pie, recycling is undoubtedly a Good Thing, isn't it? I remember how when I was on the council, when it first developed its recycling policy, how pleased we were with ourselves, providing a lead in saving the world.

So OK, recycling is a good thing, insofar as it's better than piling the stuff in landfill, or arguably - hot local topic this - incinerating it.

But frankly, it's not bloody good enough.

The government sets targets for recycling which local authorities have to meet, in some cases (although as far as I know not ours) by bullying and browbeating local residents, while almost completely ignoring the other two R's - reduce and re-use - which should come first. It is my contention that recycling is largely a flim-flam; a half-hearted sop to saving energy, resources and waste, and that the reason it is prioritised over the reduction and re-use of packaging can only be because of the power of the packaging industry.

Take the plastic bottles in my recycling bin. Some of them are from milk. We used to have milk delivered in reusable glass bottles. It cost a fortune but it was convenient and much less wasteful. However, the milk, sadly, kept getting stolen from the doorstep so we reluctantly went back to buying it from the supermarket where it comes in plastic bottles. These can be recycled, but to do so effectively requires very expensive equipment, and no small amount of energy. But why can we not have re-fillable plastic bottles (like we do with beer)? Or somewhere to get our own containers filled, which used to be the norm. Or why can we not buy it from the supermarket in returnable glass bottles the same as we can from the milkman?

What about all the shampoo and detergent bottles - not even any hygiene issues there - could easily just refill them. And indeed I could, if I was prepared to pay Body Shop prices for everyday use, and/or travel ten miles each way to the nearest shop that does Ecover refills (and that only washing up liquid, and more expensive than a new bottle). But no - there is clearly no political will to make manufacturers and retailers do this, so I have to wash the damn things up, store them for a fortnight, have them collected by one of a fleet of electric vans, to be sorted, baled, sold and shipped half way round the world to be turned into more plastic crap that nobody needs.

re-usable - spot the difference?

Look at the glass in the recycling bag in the top photo - quite a lot, given that we've just had Christmas. Now, in this separate bag are the Harveys bottles. When I next go into Lewes, I can take them back to the Harveys shop. There's a deposit of 8p on each bottle. They'll get washed and sterilised and used again. Now look at all the other beer bottles. Identical, but they've long since given up on returnable bottles. Who would bother, for 8p? Well, perhaps they would for 50p, or a pound. If the political will was there.

Or, if we can have doorstep collection for recycling, why not for re-using? Why not put that effort and energy into collecting, sorting and cleaning containers, and returning them to the manufacturers to be refilled? Leaving only the un-re-usable residue to be recycled.

Look at the plastic lemonade and cola bottles (in other people's boxes!). Look how much space they take up, even crushed, to store and transport. Remember when fizzy pop came in returnable glass bottles? Even I do, just about. I remember one of out teachers exhorting us to buy Corona for this very reason. (He was also a great advocate of wholefoods). Obviously we all thought he was a crank at the time, but Mr Roberts and your ilk, your time has come.

What will happen to the glass we send for recycling? Do you fondly imagine that it will be lovingly crafted into new bottles? Sadly that's very unlikely. Nearly all recycled glass is too contaminated with different types and colours to be of any use for making any but the crudest of new glass, and most of it ends up being crushed and used in roadbuilding. (But on the bright side, all that broken glass is called cullet, and isn't that a lovely word?)

Although the government tells local authorities they have to recycle, they seem to be allowed to pick and choose what they will recycle, and to do it only if there's a profit in it. I can illustrate this with an example that still makes me fume, even after I rang up the recycling officer and made her listen while I banged my head against the wall.

There are lots of different sorts of plastic. Something to do with polymers. Polystyrene can't be recycled, at least not cost-effectively, so no one collects it. It still has to be buried or burnt. Polypropylene on the other hand is highly recyclable and very desirable. Most yogurt pots are made of polystyrene. Some very trendy yogurt pots however are made of polypropylene. I was even told that they get incentives from the government to use this more recyclable material. So I carefully remove (and compost) the cardboard sleeve, and wash out the polypropylene pot, and put it in the recycling - and time after time they refuse to take it 'because it is a yogurt pot'. They don't give a damn what it's made of; if it's yogurt pot-shaped they don't want to know. So what the hell is the point of the government giving incentives to the company to use more expensive recyclable materials when no bugger will recycle them. And it's not a council decision apparently - it's the people to whom they sell the stuff. It's just easier for them to have a blanket ban on yogurt pots - get one in a bale and they won't buy it - forcing the local authority to do likewise.

So in short, if excessive, wasteful, non-reusable packaging is a problem, then why aren't the government actually doing something about it at source, instead of getting us to prettily rearrange the yogurt pots on the doorstep?