OK consumers, relax

OK you can cease your frenzied clicking...I see in the small print that this new route to untold riches is available only to blogs in the US of A. The rest of us are clearly of too delicate a nature to be exposed to this unremitting consumerist onslaught.  

Typical, eh? I know times are tough but people in the rest of the world can buy stuff too y'know! Sometimes you just feel completely in the grasp of some teenage HTML coder who has more money than most countries and is using you to make even more. I read today that the Swedish bloke who started Spotify is worth about £123,544,235,355,656,222,000 and is barely out of primary school.

And my point is...? Er....blerrrrrrghghghgggggg.....

Cola and sex!

I think you can safely ignore this post. It has nothing to do with cola or sex. It is simply here to try and fathom out how this advertising lark works on this blog business. Supposedly, if I blog about something on which you might spend money, then all sorts of exciting brands will appear, begging me to allow them to advertise to my millions of followers. Then you, dear follower, will excitedly click on the seductive ads and I will make loads of money. Or something. So...we've done sex and cola, how about cars, burgers, beer, holidays, gambling...er...music!

Click on!

Chez moi, le deluge!

I paraphrase de Gaulle (I think it was?) as I watch the rain continue to fall and the level of the water in the moat rise alarmingly here at Marshside Acres. Yes it is now officially the wettest drought on record.  With more rain forecast for the next few days, we're saved from worrying about the grass and the veg although unfortunately, the weather does not reduce the volume of bird defecation. The gun remains high on the shopping list.

My main reason for lapsing into French was not for the sake of  a witty and topical pun (well I liked it) but as a nod to the elections currently underway across the channel. El Presidente is in a spot of bother it seems and is now reduced to courting the national front vote. No doubt he'll be promising further repatriations of those less than 100% francais, which sounds risky as that probably includes him. I've not been following all this too carefully but I gather his main rival is promising "growth" as opposed to Sarkozy's "austerity". If only life were si facile.

What can we learn from the French? The thing is that they are amazingly successful when you consider that they work short hours, have long lunches and even longer holidays and as a result have markedly uncompetitive labour costs. Like the Chinese, they don't seem to believe in markets but unlike the Chinese, they can't produce every possible consumer item at a world-beating price. They produce some decent wine and cheese but surely that's not enough?

Relying almost completely on nuclear power stations is a clever move, allowing them to laugh in the face of rising oil prices. So there's one lesson for us, as we plunge ourselves into poverty in order to pay for more bloody windmills. But here's another thing: they have a ruling class with a shared and focused mind-set.

The French booted out their aristocracy in a rather violent way some years back but since then have replaced them with something similar albeit without the titles and the laissez manger cake attitude. They have universities geared up to churn out a ruling class in the shape of politicians and civil servants. We used to have a ruling class who learnt on the job, i.e. on the family estate and it seemed to work pretty well, if building the world's biggest empire, making all the world's cotton fabric, controlling most of the world's shipping, etc., etc., is anything to go by. (I hear mutterings of "what about the workers!" but even Karl Marx was impressed: living in London he marvelled that in Britain, in the mid-19th century, you could buy five hundred kinds of hammer!)

Like the British aristocracy of yore, the French ruling class have the inner certainty that they were born to run the country and by and large, the rest of the population seems happy to go along with this. This is maybe because they trust the elite always to do what's best for France. While most of us float around in a kind of democratic vacuum, our futures decided by unelected wasters in the EU, the European Court of Human Rights, the European Central Bank, etc., the French make these extra-national institutions work for them (the Common Agricultural Policy) or just ignore them (the repatriation of gypsies).

We seem to have entered an age of "sham democracy". The Chinese and the Russians are making hay out of this but big questions are being asked in Europe as people find out that perhaps democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be (just ask the Greeks and the Irish) and what really counts is good government, not democratically elected government. In a funny sort of way, even the protesters at St Paul's and Wall Street were saying the same thing, as I've pointed out before. But how to you ensure good government without (or more to the point, even with) elections? Perhaps the French can show us the way.

With reform of the House of Lords on the agenda, now's the chance to re-empower our own aristocracy, not to mention the monarchy. Chic alors! Or as we say here, unleash the hounds...

Water shortage - God takes action

How's the weather with you? Well it's raining here, just like it has every day since the hosepipe ban came into force. I confidently predicted this outcome, putting my faith in a combination of sod's law and God's way of correcting the planet's little imbalances.

I don't know if you use a hosepipe but here at Marshside Acres it is pretty indispensable, whether we're trying to encourage a few acres of grass seed (we are) or tending the runner beans, so vital to man's well-being (see previous post) or cleaning the fleet of luxury motors. It's this last task that is exercising me today, my other half having inadvertently parked a car under the roosting place of some particularly loose-bowelled pigeons. So it came to pass that a few minutes ago I was outside - in the rain! - with bucket and sponge, trying to remove the avian excrement before it ate its way through the gleaming paintwork.

How silly did I feel? Groups of local peasants gathered round to chuckle at my endeavours, shouting incantations to our local feathered "friends"  to confound my efforts while all the time I became wetter and wetter and muttered reminders to myself about buying a gun (to shoot pigeons you understand, not local peasants, although now you mention it...)

All the while, the hosepipe hung mournfully in flaccid disuse. We are allowed to use it to top up the fish pond which means we could also use it to fill the many gushing ornamental fountains that dot the gardens here, as long as we bung a fish in them. (I suppose it has to be a live one.) And there is always the chance that when so doing, some of the water may find its way onto other parts of the garden, quite by accident you understand.  But otherwise, we're a hosepipe-free zone (honest).

So should we all get a nice warm glow from the knowledge that our abstinence is warding off the transformation of this green and pleasant land into a new Sahara? That's as well as the warm glow from drying out in front of the fire of course. I was wondering to myself just how much of the UK's water consumption is accounted for by domestic hosepipes when I spotted in the paper that total domestic water use represents only 8% of all the country's water needs. Blimey! Now how much of that domestic consumption goes through a hosepipe? Let's say it's 10% (although I'd bet it's a good bit less than this). This would mean that less than 1% of the UK's water usage is going to be saved by the hosepipe ban. Perhaps much less than 1%.

Now I'm all for staving off the drought but clearly, this particular measure is just a drop in the reservoir. This is very much in the same vein as buying organic vegetables (see previous post) or changing your car to one that does a few more miles to the gallon. You may get a warm glow of self-righteousness from all these things but if you really think you're saving the planet then you are suffering from delusions and descent into madness looms.

Buy a globe and one of Professor Brian Cox's excellent books on the solar system. Upon even the briefest of examinations you will see that the UK is a very small place in the context of the Earth and that the latter is an equally small place when compared to the Sun. These things are a lot bigger than you are so don't waste your time worrying about them and don't kid yourself that your actions are anything other than infinitesimally insignificant.

Instead, get an air rifle and set about those blasted pigeons. We've even got some nesting in the garage for goodness' sake! If you want to save the world, the best course of action is to praise the Lord...and pass the ammo.