Heat wave

                                                Heat wave

At the moment London is suffering a heat wave. It seems as if people are never satisfied. Now all the complaints are

“It is too hot!”

However those who work outdoors are enjoying the heat. Since air conditioning is nor so common here most people are sweltering in the heat. On the metro you constantly hear advice about taking a bottle of water with you. And it will probably come to a point soon when trains will slow down as usually happens. The transport system never seems to be adapted to cope with extremes of weather.

For the moment a lot of people are enjoying it. The parks come alive with people sitting in groups taking in the sun.

In a country where this does not happen so often many people are grateful for the short interlude because next week we could have rain. That is the ever present threat!

The recovery

                                                The recovery

In a time when the last recession has been decimating the high streets of the UK and led to a massive drop in the living standards of most people in the UK talk of a recovery seems a bit rich. For the past five years at least people in work that is have seen bills rose exponentially while wage rises have been small or nonexistent.

The truth is that now the government and press is trumpeting recovery. However people are still losing their jobs and for the average Briton life does not seem to have improved much

“The new conditions are rubbish” My one friend told me after going for a teaching job.

“What they expect from you is impossible!”

This sentiment would actually be mirrored in the exchanges various people have ad generally new jobs created seem to have worse conditions than the last.

In general people are accepting lower wages and worse conditions of employment just to get jobs which seem to still be very hard to come by.

One f the problems is that in education the paperwork that needs to be done is about ten times what is was When Labour left office so the government is increasing the load of paperwork all the time.

And the recovery seems ever so distant for most people as there seems to be very little work out there. In addition costs are rising all the time. Housing costs and fuel costs particularly. For the average person very little seems to be working at the moment.

Wirth the relentless increases in costs with wages staying stagnant there is likely to be large political fallout. 

Cheap shops

                        Cheap Shops

A good indicator of the health of the economy for most people is what is going on in the high streets of towns. This tends to reflect what is happening in the world at large and at the moment many high streets in the UK look pretty grim despite all this talk of recovery. The sight of  boarded up shop is still common. It is as if the enterprise has gone out of the economy. One aspect of the recession has been an explosion of cheap shops and for most people still in work this is one thing that has reduced the cost of living. We have the pound shop, the 99p store and poundland along with many other independent 99p or one pound chains. A huge range of goods are displayed there and of course nobody now asks their provenance. In fact few care about why the goods are so cheap but only the price. One of the signs of this recession is that even the Middle classes now go to poundland. Before the crisis that would have been unthinkable.

However these sops offer a range of goods from kitchen utensils to toys and garden accessories. All are offered at the standard rates of one pound. People are going there to stock up on all the essentials. Now the range even included such staples as cooked food ad it is possible to buy pizza salads and cooked chicken wings in some of these outlets. In fact there is a never ending streams of traffic in these places and this industry is one that has certainly not been suffering from the recession. So difficult has it become that even the major British supermarkets such as Tescos, Sainsburys and Morrisons have started price wars among themselves.

Certainly one effect of the recession has been an explosion of these shops and despite the so called recovery which for most people does not feel like a recovery with jobs still being very insecure, it looks as if for the moment these shops are here to stay.

World cup blues

                                                World cup blues

Now England is full of world cup fever. The papers are full of it with timetables daily. All the doings of the England team are scrutinized in finest detail. One of the main points of conversation is the hatches and matches and dispatches of the world cup.

Yesterday I passed by one estate full of bunting everywhere. From every wall and balcony flags were hanging. The cross of Saint George was everywhere.

Its inhabitants in fact consider themselves one of the most patriotic estates in the country and it shows in their flags. The country is football mad!

How does one cope if like me football leaves you comatose? It is not as if I did not have the experience of playing it as a child but I cannot see the point of watching any sport. I would rather play it. To watch and get excited seems to me to be the ultimate in wasting time. I always sit and wonder if these people don’t have anything better to do with their time. Why not actually go to the gym or play a game of football instead?

Paradoxically it is one of the few circumstances in these days of glass ceilings when it is better to be a woman. As a woman you are less expected to get excited over football. You can get away from it easily probably not before having to provide a shoulder to cry on for some “world cup widow” whose partner is permanently glued to the television screen. You at least have a choice! And if you find world cup fever a bit too much you will always find solidarity with somebody of your gender.

If you are a man however the expectation is that you are going to be obsessed with football. Most of your friends are taking time out of their social lives to watch the games and Ooh and ah over every goal missed by the England side.  Certainly you can hear the shouts across the neighborhood with the televisions blaring results at every turn.

Of course if you are not obsessed with football you must be somewhat abnormal in fact a one man freak show. Your friends start to get worried about you and try to concoct schemes to get you interested in the game. You must be abnormal if you don’t like football. How can you not love the “beautiful game”?

One the other hand you do start to meet other men who will confess their guilty secret. They don’t like the beautiful game either. It all starts conspiratorially discussing how to survive the world cup and takes on a new dimension. You realize you have something in common. Besides, many women are usually not interested in football either. You begin to develop an alternative social life.

How long this will last I don’t know. At least you find the “abnormal” minority and the companionship of other “freaks”. At least this allows you to batten down the hatches and watch and wait till the world cup is over and better times return.

Park design in London

                                                            Park design in London

Potters field park is one of the new parks destined fairly recently. Unfortunately some of the trends become very evident in this place particularly that of new urban park design. Gone now is the urge for something naturalistic against the cold, hard lines of the buildings. We live now in an era of sanitized parks full of low plantings that make everybody feel safe.

More or less the idea has been to cut out undergrowth. Very few trees dot the landscape. In a park that is designed to about the new London assembly buildings all seems to point to a reoccurrence of the old socialist planning ideas of Eastern Europe. Every part of the ark must be clearly visible so there is a clear loss of visibility. The philosophy is that if you are not doing anything bad you have nothing to fear. All plantings are of low perennials with even trees kept to a minimum

At the moment this is a common theme of newly designed parks in London. Much is made of the fact that if there is too much undergrowth people do not feel safe . All the newly designed parks such as Burgess Park exhibit some of these factors. For the new planners any undergrowth is anathema and they have this belief that everybody supports their ideas. So a thicket is something to be eradicated and we will get groups of schoolchildren to carve a path so that all you see are the are stems of trees and nothing below but the cold, hard ground.

This vision is supposed to make people feel safe but actually cuts away and mystery and perspective in the design of parks so that Potter’s field park looks decidedly like an urban dystopia rather than a reflection of nature. Nature is now something to be controlled in size and rendered totally controlled and antiseptic. Little of course is said about the effect it has on wildlife. Some species such as blackbirds relish the environment of low shrubs which afford them protection ad safety. Such things are forgotten in the endless search for sanitization.

mobile madness

                                                Mobile madness

It is about twenty years since mobile telephones first entered our lives. Mostly in communications terms they are an absolute boon making possible communication across vast distances by means of texting and also pure and simple phoning. In fact to remember the days before mobiles were invented it is easy to wonder how we ever lived without them.

Almost everybody has one these days apart from a few technophobic individuals.  The technology is ubiquitous. Now of course the question is how did we ever live without them. Smart phones have married technology with new developments such as global positioning and use of the internet.

However human development has not always kept up with their use.

It is a common sight to see people walking along the pavements and across roads so thoroughly engrossed in what is going on that they are oblivious to what is going on around them. It would be interesting to see how many accidents are cased by this. 

The other development is of course people speaking loudly on their phones in places such as buses. This is quite amusing to me as I always wonder what these people would feel if they could hear themselves speak.

The scene is clear . You are sitting on the bus and somebody gets on speaking loudly about their lives and their relationships with people.

I sit with the thought “I don't know you from Adam but I know all your business” You hear people describe such intimate details of their lives in such loud and penetrating voices that you begin to wonder if this is a display of public exhibitionism or whether these people are intentionally unaware. Of course at the end of the conversation you feel that you know them as it is impossible not to listen

People describe such intimate details of their lives on these devices it actually boggles the mind. I have heard details of their business relationships, the deals they are doing, Who they are going to sort out, who they live with and such like.

In an age where there is a lot of worry about the spying of government agencies and such like and the question of the privacy of the individual it certainly means with some of these people monitoring would be so easy. You could just imagine recording a conversation and anybody could know everything about them. Surveillance would be so easy!

Stress of city wildlife

                                                Stress in city wildlife

A new study has just shown that animals are also susceptible to the at pace of city life. Birds have been shown to rise earlier and to encounter higher levels of stress. Several times when I have travelled during the night I have encountered pigeons hanging around all the fast food places. It appears the birds are awake longer than they would be in a rural setting. Birds in the city wake on average half an hour earlier than their forest cousins.

The implications of this are profound! Do we expect that they will get the same diseases as city dwellers get?

The evidence for this is now somewhat patchy. The dawn chorus starts earlier as birds wake up from the night and proceed to defend their territories. The day starts a lot earlier and they are reputed to have greater success in finding mates. In many ways we see the birds as a mirror image of ourselves. They keep the same times and in some ways like the pigeons I saw they stay up later and rise earlier.

This begs of course a massive question as when looking at wildlife in the city somewhat reduced in number of species it runs to how they deal with the stress. What would definitely e interesting would be to know if this causes the same sort of problems as we see in humans with negative medical effects.

As they share our city world with its bright lights and fast pace does it follow that they are affected by the same sort of problems. The original survey was done on blackbirds. They are quite a common species in the towns but there were calls for studies to be made on urban foxes as well. London has its fair share of scavengers with the main urban wildlife being foxes, a fairly ubiquitous part of our wildlife, crows and magpies, starlings and of course the pigeon.

How they are affected extends to what they are eating as well.  Many of the species that successfully make their homes in the city are scavengers. They scavenge all that humans eat and in this case it means dealing with takeaways. Most London areas are filled with takeaway shops bearing things like “Chicken and chips” and kebabs. In many cases the people who eat these are either drunk or spoiled and the remains are fast thrown on the ground to be picked up by the scavengers that lurk. Many times an old carton of chicken and chips is pecked on by the starlings, crows, pigeons or foxes who suddenly materialize on any morsel that has been dropped.

These birds materialize and peck at the discarded food. Most of the time they only search for that as do the flocks of crows that appear in the neighbouring areas looking for the trash left by humans. Scavenging makes food finding easy

Rubbish bins suffer the same fate as crows and foxes try in their turn to tale what is left. The question of course is if they eat such bad food, don they suffer the consequences as humans do and end up suffering various conditions such as clogging of the arteries and various circulatory disorders or does the fact that they lead active lives protect then from this?

This is a question we will find hard to k now as there is no knowledge of how much calcification and hardening of the arteries there is. Many urban birds partake in some way in the feast ! Yet nobody can say quite how it will affect them.