pumpkinstrokemarrow

From where they sit, we have an extra million people (say) who are soaking up resources, particularly housing and jobs at the bottom of the heap. Housing and jobs which might otherwise have gone to our own young, bumping along at the bottom, on benefit and without qualifications or prospects. Jobs which might have carried a better wage if there were not so many people willing to do them. Good wheeze for the forruns who are better off than they might otherwise be at home. And a good wheeze for those of us who are not at the bottom of the heap because it means that lots of the goods and services that we buy are cheaper than they might be otherwise; especially the sorts of things that have to be grown at home, rather than grown in China. At least it seemed a good wheeze until the riots started.

Not that any of this is particularly helpful. As long as we are in the EC, in which free movement of labour is a founding principle, people are going to gravitate from poorer parts to richer parts, thus effecting a healthy levelling. But as I keep on saying, we also need the sort of levelling which means rich people do not earn thousands of times more than poor people earn. A multiple of ten should be quite enough to provide incentive and status.

Talking of housing, the business of backland development reared its head again yesterday. The business of buying up the large gardens which many houses have around here and turning them into small housing estates; something which makes the nimby blood in many of us boil. I am slightly more relaxed in that I recognise a demand for new housing, housing which has to be put somewhere, and with Epsom not being awash with brownfield, that somewhere either means in the green belt or in back gardens and I am not sure that one is particularly more obnoxious than the other. So if someone wants to sell their back garden, so be it. I just hope that the someone is nowhere near me.

All this prompted by a someone in Manor Green Road who wants to sell off a bit of their large back garden. This being the second time around, they have gone to a lot of bother to try and meet all the objections. The new house will be barely visible from the road. There will be no vehicular access, at least not until the dust has settled. There will be solar panels and houses for butterflies. Much respect for the rights of the trees. Someone has spent a lot of money with various kinds of consultants to prove how ecological and organic the whole thing is going to be. Plus there is a £16,700 douceur for the council on account of not having included an allocation of 28% of the living space of the proposed development to affordables; calculated according to some splendidly bureaucratic formula. I would be inclined to let them get on with it. In any event, it will be interesting to see how it all goes. Have the winds of development change advertised in the DT reached the Epsom & Ewell planning committee yet?

Last but not least, I have now actually finished reading something on my Kindle, having fought down the tendency to flick, just like on telly with a remote control. The something in question being the Demos report on suicide. Apart from the facts mentioned yesterday, the main conclusion seems to be that there is not all that much information about suicide in this country and that it would be better if there was a lot more. Bring on the databases! A further point being that because assisted suicide is illegal, primary carers might often turn a blind eye, and numbers may be bigger than they actually are, although I doubt if this would amount to much, make much difference to the big numbers. But I was irritated by the attitude of the authors that suicide is only to be regarded as a disease, something to be managed out of existence. No recognition that it might be a reasonable thing to want to do. No recognition that being depressed might be a natural & proper part of becoming old & ill; not necessarily something to be zapped with a suitable dose of prozac.

The Kindle was not too good at pdf files, of which this was my first sample. Its default mode of display was fit page to screen, which with the screen being fairly small, strained the eyes a bit. The alternative was to have a scrolling window on a larger page, which was legible but not a comfortable read. I guess a pdf file is too close to an image file for Kindle to be able to do much with it, Kindle being most comfortable with more or less continuous text which can be blown up and down to suit screen and eye, without having to bother much about layout. So maybe my opening position that the thing was not going to be much good for technical books was the right one.