Elephants in the room

Nobody mention the pachyderm. It's there, it's eyeballing you and thinking about standing on your foot, but if nobody mentions it, it doesn't exist. Even when it does. Right?

Electric (un)necessities

I saw the Tescos recycling centre again today. And started on my usual rant about it. Which is really quite unproductive. So instead of ranting to Hwsgo, I'm going to start a list of things that are so mindlessly wasteful that they can't possibly justify their place in a civilised green economy.

1. Automatic recycling machines. What? The? F? Which genius thought: "I'd like to encourage people to recycle things so they can make the planet last a bit longer. I know: we'll replace all those boring (and over-used) metal recycling containers with something that takes ages to load, uses lots of electricity, and has a huge ground footprint". This. Is. Not. Green. At best, it's pseudo-green to encourage people to recycle things because it gives them points, and to put a bloody great big electric into the carpark presumably because it looks nattier than the original set of mismatched metal containers. So consider. The big box takes lots of types of recycled materials (bottles, cans... erm... anything else?) but only has two slots in it, into which you can post just one thing at a time. The original bins had 6 holes each, through which you could post bottles, cans etc as quickly as your heart desired (and your hands could manage). Clustered with this were boxes for foil, shoes, books, clothes, and all the other things that most people don't know that they can recycle unless they're looking at them. This system has been working in carparks all over the country for an awfully long time now. So why mess with it? Why replace it with something that actively consumes time, patience and electricity? Why? And before anyone says things about wind turbines and solar panels: I've looked. These don't appear to be fitted to the machine at my local supermarket. And if they were, I'd much rather they were powering something a little more useful and a little less hypocritical.
2. Automatic towel dispensers. A serious pet hate. When we don't even notice that we're using electricity to do what we used to do with one tug on a (manual) paper towel dispenser, then we've seriously lost our way about energy use. And then there's the automatic tap. What in Gods' name (deliberate apostrophe: choose your own deity, including none) is wrong with turning a tap on for yourself? Okay, so it probably means less maintenance on the washer front, but at what cost to the environment? And then there's this, the electric kitchen towel dispenser (and its friend, the electric-powered bin lid). Which is wrong in so many ways that I don't even know where to start.
3. Electric toilet seat covers. Actually, I've noticed that the favourite places for this sort of electro-madness are airports and service stations. Maybe it's just a subtle form of acknowledgement: y'know, we exist because you're using up too much energy, so we say sod it to political correctness and thinking green, we're just going to party like we're on biofuels. Man.
4. I can now make an exception for electric carving knives however. When my dominant hand stopped working for a while recently, I discovered just how difficult it is to carve bread with just one hand. In fact, it's impossible: I was reduced to making marmite sandwiches by putting the bread under one arm and tearing lumps off it with the other hand, then pasting marmite onto the results. It's not pretty, and said electric carving knife would have made all the difference. And probably led to another dodgy accident, but lets not go there.

Okay, QVC generation: it's over to you now. Prove to me that I'm wrong about this...

Death and self

I think I watch too many brutal detective series. Mostly to play with the puzzle, to see if I can work it out before the protagonists do (which is of course always easier when all you see are the necessary clues with a little light obfuscation). And it doesn't usually go much deeper than that (except of course watching mortuary scenes during dinner, which can always be a little offputting). But tonight I was watching Cold Case whilst doing something else, and looked up to see that moment between life and death, that change from a moving sentient thing into a body. And thought again about how contradictory my beliefs on life and death seem to be, even to myself.

The other thing I thought about was something I saw on holiday recently. I'd taken a boat to the top of the Bosphorus, to look out over the Black Sea; a futile effort in itself since the day was so misty that I could see a few large boats and just enough water to sense that the Sea was indeed very very big. And as I walked up the hill to the local castle for a second time in the hope that the mist had cleared a little, someone ran over a cat with their car. I didn't see them run over the cat, but it was a single road with no sidestreets, and the car had been going fast and just narrowly missed me on the lane less than a minute earlier. And I rounded the corner to see the cat in the road, smashed but fighting, with the car gone and people walking past it, seeing but not pausing. It was probably only 100 yards, but it seemed to take an age to walk, to stand by the cat to see if there was anything I could do, and all the time the cat fought, struggled to get its paws on the ground, fought to get itself up, presumably up and out away from the danger. And then it was still. Stiff then relaxed, tenaciously alive to body, bleeding out to blood flowing down the hill. I've seen that moment before, watched my father break the neck of a wild creature that was too injured to survive. But this time I felt helpless. Angry at the driver, at the people who didn't stop, but aware too of the culture difference between us that made them accept death and ignore just a cat.

On my things to do pile is a letter from the woman who cradled my husband by the road as he died. It's been there a while (there have been other things going on, mainly at work, but they did take over precedence late last year). She's a friend of a friend, and he only connected the two people by accident. I believed in the continuation of spirit when it happened; that part of a person continues for a while after their death. But the cat was such a live-to-dead thing, a there then gone moment. And if I can be shocked by a cat. If.