environment

Bike to School Week

The week beginning Monday 10 June is Bike to School Week.

The idea is to encourage children to travel to school on their bikes. Cycling is good exercise and reducing car mileage has to be good for the environment; and it teaches children basic roadcraft. Moreover cycling is fun; it’s something I wish I was still able to do.


Yes, if you’re going to start cycling there are a few things you need to think about, but they’re not difficult. Firstly, ensure that your bike is in good working order: check the tyres, lights etc. You should plan your route, so that you know exactly where you are going and what the road junctions are like — and always make sure that someone knows the route you will be taking. And last, not not least, be safe and wear a helmet.

Teachers!? No you’re not excused; you’re expected to join in. Bike to School Week isn’t just for the kids!

Find more information on how to get started over at www.sustrans.org.uk/change-your-travel/children-and-families/schools/bike-school-week.

environment

World Oceans Day

Another “world day” this week comes around on Saturday 8 June; it is World Oceans Day.

World Ocean Day is the planet’s biggest celebration of the ocean and the theme for World Ocean Day this year (and next) is ‘together we have the power to protect the ocean!’. Yep, we’re all being asked to do our bit to help protect our oceans.


Oceans are incredibly important to the whole balance of the planet. We get most of our oxygen from the sea. They provide us with water to drink and bathe in … fish (and plants too) to eat … not to mention pharmaceuticals etc. The oceans probably also contain more unknown species than terrestrial environments; scientists are discovering hundreds, if not thousands, of new pelagic species every year.

In short, oceans are a bit of a miracle! But a miracle that we are polluting with plastic and chemicals, and whose life (especially fish) we’re raping unsustainably.

There’s a whole raft of small things you can do to help. Find out over on the World Oceans Day website, http://worldoceansday.org/.

beliefs, nudism, personal

Nudity and Children

A few days ago there was a piece in the the Portsmouth News, the local paper for the eponymous city on England’s south coast. The reporter, Liz Bourne, asks “Why do we think nudity is shocking for children?” and comes to the conclusion that it isn’t.

This interested me because, aside from my interest in nudism, local papers are not often known for their liberal views. But here was a balanced and reasonable article which said essentially children aren’t phased by nudity, even when “a little squeamish about wrinkly bits” and we can all understand why some people want to be nude even if it isn’t for us.

Here are the nuts of the article:

In my experience, children love nudity. When very young, two of my children both enjoyed stripping off and flouncing around with the sun on their bare skin. On several occasions my son was known for taking all his clothes off in a rage, usually in the most public of places … Although not encouraged, within reason I did accept it as an expression of their innocence and, in my son’s case, frustration of being restricted by clothing. Now that they are older, they are less keen to bare all. And when news of the naked bike protest was revealed, they were struck with both bemusement and horror.

“Ughh, all those saggy old men”, one declared.
“Won’t they get cold?” was another reaction.

But as a parent of three impressionable children, at no point did I feel the need to sign a petition against the protest. By making a point about nudity being ‘offensive’ and ‘indecent’ aren’t we sexualising it unnecessarily? Children revelling in their own nudity isn’t sexually motivated. And the naked cyclists had other things on their agenda. By protesting against it, isn’t this linking nudity with a sexual element, which is much more skewed?

I explained to the children that the cyclists were protesting against global oil dependency and our inherent car culture, as well as how vulnerable cyclists are on the roads. With this information, they understood the purpose of the nudity and, although still a little squeamish about wrinkly bits, accepted that if this is how some people wish to express themselves, so be it.

The protest took place in the middle of the day — a school day — and passed without incident … for research purposes, I took a couple of snapshots and showed them to the children. The images of blurred buttocks were met with derisory laughter, not shock and outrage. They were more perplexed that I had chosen to go and watch it …

Why anyone would be concerned about such an event I am not sure. Why should we protect our children from nudity? There are so many other things we should be protecting them from — drunk people in the street, dog poo on the pavement and the overpowering stench of celebrity culture in the media … That, in my mind, is much more damaging than seeing a few saggy buttocks on bikes.

Indeed so!

food+drink

Get Ready … Pour your Gin …

This is an early warning for all my alcohol-soaked friends …

Saturday 15 June is World Gin Day, a celebration of all things gin, and a chance to mix up your favourite G&T or cocktail and find out more about our favourite juniper-laced beverage.

World Gin Day is still small but in the days leading up to 15th there are events around the UK (maybe elsewhere too?).

Check it out over at http://worldginday.com/ — where else?

Full disclosure: The Adnams Copper House gin shown on the right is the most delicious I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of imbibing.

environment, food+drink

World Environment Day

It is World Environment Day on Wednesday 5 June.

Every year since 1972 the UN has hosted World Environment Day to encouraging people to treat the environment more kindly and realise that it’s everyone’s responsibility to make the change … because it’s not just us that our actions on the world affects — it will have an impact on all our future generations too.

Although World Environment Day activities happen year round they culminate on 5 June every year, with the aim of enabling everyone to realize not only their responsibility, but also their power to become agents for change in support of sustainable and equitable development. It is also a day for people from all walks of life to come together to ensure a cleaner, greener and brighter outlook for themselves and future generations.


This year’s theme is Think.Eat.Save — an anti-food waste and food loss campaign that encourages people to reduce their “foodprint”. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted; the equivalent of food production in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. While this is happening around 15% of the world’s population is under-fed or staving.

That is an enormous imbalance in lifestyles and which also has serious effects on the environment. So the Think.Eat.Save theme is intended to encourage you to become more aware of the environmental impact of the food choices you make and empower you to make informed decisions.


As I’ve said before, in my view there also needs to be root and branch reform of our whole environmental practice as well as of agriculture (for instance see here and here) — but that’s really a whole other debate.

As always there is a whole raft more information on the World Environment Day website at , including a list of activities by country.

photography, pleasures

Weekly Photograph

This week’s photo should appeal to some of my more geeky friends. It was taken at New Romney station on the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. The RH&DR is a 15 inch gauge light railway running along the Kent coast. The 13½ mile line runs from the Cinque Port of Hythe via Dymchurch, St Mary’s Bay and New Romney all the way south to Dungeness, close to Dungeness nuclear power station and Dungeness lighthouse. Constructed during the 1920s the RH&DR was the dream of millionaire racing drivers Captain JEP Howey and Count Louis Zborowski. It now provides a valuable service to the otherwise relatively isolated communities, especially south of New Romney, as well as being a tourist attraction.

In the photo we see a gleaming 4-6-2 Pacific, No. 8, Hurricane, receiving loving attention from her driver while simmering between duties at New Romney station, the line’s HQ.

Click the image for larger views on Flickr
Hurricane
Hurricane
New Romney, Kent; August 2010

There’s lots more information on the RH&DR on their website, www.rhdr.org.uk, and on Wikipedia. If you’re in that bit of the UK it is well worth a visit for a really fun ride and some great photo opportunities.

words

Word: Cockshut

Cockshut or Cock-shut

Evening twilight.

Probably deriving from the time when poultry go to rest and are shut up for the night although it is also suggested to derive from cockshoot, the time when woodcock ‘shoot’ or fly. In consequence of the latter it has been recorded as used to mean a net to catch woodcock, although this seems to be unusual and isn’t recorded by the OED.


The first use recorded by the OED is 1594 in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

beliefs, current affairs, ramblings

In which I worry about Bishops …

… or more precisely, retired Archbishops.

The BBC reported a few days ago that according to Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, allowing Gay marriage “paves way for polygamy”.

In an article for the think tank Civitas, Lord Carey … argues that the government is effectively seeking to change the definition of marriage to “a long-term commitment between two people of any sex, in which gender and procreation are irrelevant”.

He says he does not want to be “alarmist”, but that could logically be extended to “say, two sisters bringing up children together” or “multiple relationships, such as two women and one man”.

Let’s just leaving aside the fact that this is an absolute load of old baloney — the relationships his Lordship cites have been happening since time immortal, so where’s the problem? But I do worry what school Lord Carey went to when he can clearly think that two women plus one man is two people. Do divines have different arithmetic rules to the rest of us? Or has he actually lost his marbles?

Fortunately others of Lord Carey’s colleagues are more sane:

[T]he Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Rev Nicholas Holtham suggested in a letter to the Telegraph that it was time to “rethink” attitudes about same-sex marriage, as Christians had done with slavery and apartheid. “No one now supports either slavery or apartheid. The Biblical texts have not changed; our interpretation has.”

And in a brilliant response to Lord Carey …

Stonewall chief executive Ben Summerskill said: “This is regrettably hyperbolic shroud waving”.

You just have to love someone who can talk about “hyperbolic shroud waving”!

environment, science

National Microchip Month

June is National Microchip Month. No, not computers, but pets.

It’s so easy to lose track of a pet. But getting your pet microchipped is quick and pain-free; it takes your vet about 1 minute to insert the chip under the animal’s skin (usually at the back of the neck) do and you 5 minutes to send in the registration. The actual chip is about the size of a grain of rice and contains a passive RFID tag.

And from then on your pet is quickly identifiable by any vet or animal shelter. I know. We had a stray cat turn up with us a couple of summers ago. We fed her and took her to the vet for a check-up. It took the vet 30 seconds to scan the microchip and then about 5 minutes to find the owner’s details on the national register. The vet contacted the owner and there was one happy owner reunited with his cat who he thought had gone for ever.

There’s more on microchipping at www.rspca.org.uk/allaboutanimals/pets/general/microchipping and Wikpedia.