Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Pampas blasted
The pampas grass has been bashed about by the recent rain and has maybe lost a third of its plumes. Still looking OK though. Was reminded when doing a bit of Autumn tidying up around its base how vicious pampas grass is. And it seems to keep its edge well after dying. Got away with one small cut.
Finished picking the George Cave - now at about their best although I had already eaten the better specimans. Picked about half the remaining Blenheim Orange. The whole lot assembled on a meat plate offer a wonderful array of deep reds and oranges. Quite unlike anything presently on offer at Mr S. If only I had a digital camera with which to capture the moment.
On the other hand, we find that the largest local garden centre, adjacent to the Chessington World of Adventure, now sports an off-license department to add to the bistro, the clothes shop, the furniture shop and last but by no means least the Christmas accessory shop. The new department stocks the all-important Newcastle Brown so it can't be all bad. Of the garden centres near us, this one seems to have done by far the best job of exploiting its space - formerly given over to such tedious things as plants - and turning it into a suburban shopping opportunity. Presumably without too much bother from the planning people as they qualify as part of the not-to-be-upset-at-any-price agricultural sector - a qualification they can presumably keep until 5 years after the end of the reporting year in which they sold their last plant.
On the way back from Cheam, I came up with an excellent way to refine my oil tax proposal - this last being that, if we are serious about the ecomegasdisastrous on our hands, we need to cut consumption of oil and that the easy way to do that is to tax the stuff. Easy and effective. However, the great unwashed are not into this. In the same way as they want more hospitals but get the hump if you raise income tax (another efficient way of raising money - or at least it used to be) to pay for them. (Perhaps also, the great unwashed are rather confused as to whether the answer is socking great hospitals which make lots of dosh for the PFI contractors or socking great new contracts which make lots of dosh for the doctors who just happen to be sitting in the right spot at the right time). So the new wrinkle is to intoduce a swingeing great tax on all things oily but reduce income tax in such a way that two changes taken together are tax nuetral but eco-efficient. Bad eco-behaviour is punished and good eco-behaviour is rewarded. And the prices of low oil services will fall. Then, when people have got used to the idea of the new tax and have forgotten that you promised that the change would be tax neutral, you disconnect the oil tax from income tax. I think this would be a great way for Great Britain to aquire a bit of moral kudos in the wide world. We could of done it in the sixties with unilateral nuclear disarmament, but sadly, I think the moment has passed when a gesture of that sort would have all that much moral impact - although it would save a good deal of money. But this oil tax thing would be new and topical. We could strut our stuff at the United Nations. The developing world might be brought to think that we still deserved that all important seat on the security council.
More important, we had a most amusing nervous green woodpecker the other day. It was very thirsty and was keen to get a drink from the garden pond. However, it was clearly very nervous about cats which might be waiting to pounce. So from the kitchen, one saw a woodpecker head sticking up from out of the hollow containing the pond, peering about for about thirty seconds, then down again for a five second guzzle. This went on for some minutes. Now if the woodpecker was a human (to indulge in a bit of counterfactual), I imagine that the stress of all this would have given it a heart attack. The fact that, in so far as I was aware, there was no cat in the vicinity, being irrelevant. There might well have been...
Finished picking the George Cave - now at about their best although I had already eaten the better specimans. Picked about half the remaining Blenheim Orange. The whole lot assembled on a meat plate offer a wonderful array of deep reds and oranges. Quite unlike anything presently on offer at Mr S. If only I had a digital camera with which to capture the moment.
On the other hand, we find that the largest local garden centre, adjacent to the Chessington World of Adventure, now sports an off-license department to add to the bistro, the clothes shop, the furniture shop and last but by no means least the Christmas accessory shop. The new department stocks the all-important Newcastle Brown so it can't be all bad. Of the garden centres near us, this one seems to have done by far the best job of exploiting its space - formerly given over to such tedious things as plants - and turning it into a suburban shopping opportunity. Presumably without too much bother from the planning people as they qualify as part of the not-to-be-upset-at-any-price agricultural sector - a qualification they can presumably keep until 5 years after the end of the reporting year in which they sold their last plant.
On the way back from Cheam, I came up with an excellent way to refine my oil tax proposal - this last being that, if we are serious about the ecomegasdisastrous on our hands, we need to cut consumption of oil and that the easy way to do that is to tax the stuff. Easy and effective. However, the great unwashed are not into this. In the same way as they want more hospitals but get the hump if you raise income tax (another efficient way of raising money - or at least it used to be) to pay for them. (Perhaps also, the great unwashed are rather confused as to whether the answer is socking great hospitals which make lots of dosh for the PFI contractors or socking great new contracts which make lots of dosh for the doctors who just happen to be sitting in the right spot at the right time). So the new wrinkle is to intoduce a swingeing great tax on all things oily but reduce income tax in such a way that two changes taken together are tax nuetral but eco-efficient. Bad eco-behaviour is punished and good eco-behaviour is rewarded. And the prices of low oil services will fall. Then, when people have got used to the idea of the new tax and have forgotten that you promised that the change would be tax neutral, you disconnect the oil tax from income tax. I think this would be a great way for Great Britain to aquire a bit of moral kudos in the wide world. We could of done it in the sixties with unilateral nuclear disarmament, but sadly, I think the moment has passed when a gesture of that sort would have all that much moral impact - although it would save a good deal of money. But this oil tax thing would be new and topical. We could strut our stuff at the United Nations. The developing world might be brought to think that we still deserved that all important seat on the security council.
More important, we had a most amusing nervous green woodpecker the other day. It was very thirsty and was keen to get a drink from the garden pond. However, it was clearly very nervous about cats which might be waiting to pounce. So from the kitchen, one saw a woodpecker head sticking up from out of the hollow containing the pond, peering about for about thirty seconds, then down again for a five second guzzle. This went on for some minutes. Now if the woodpecker was a human (to indulge in a bit of counterfactual), I imagine that the stress of all this would have given it a heart attack. The fact that, in so far as I was aware, there was no cat in the vicinity, being irrelevant. There might well have been...
# posted by Jim @ 5:24 AM 
