On this small estate of fifty houses (north east UK) they all appear to be IC engine mad and in the thirty years I’ve been here the cars have doubled in quantity, motorbikes in profusion where once were none and the motor-home has appeared as a must have in the last thirty years… its rampant consumerism!

If were not spending we are not living!

Households now seem to buy ‘vanity vehicles’ that have no basis on practical need … after all one thinks to oneself what the heck else could one do with £30k, never mind the depreciation, fixed and running costs etc! We absolutely must have that soft top open tourer! What easy lives such people lead.

Climate change, impending methane and the need to remodel our lives (low carbon etc) seems not to have occurred to any of these people.

I come from a cautious household, my dad growing up in the 1930’s and once he died in ’76 after a life of hard manual work his wife my dreaded mother did a magic act with his hard earned money, she made it all disappear as in fact she did with herself, moving far far away; eventually hooking up with some clown called Mainprise from Scarborough and all went down the pan covering debt for this nasty waste of space on a doomed to failure taxi business. I met him once, he called to our house at no.67, a day late some bogus reason, my poor wifes cooking i insisted be served from the previous day, he was a shit, domineering, repulsive. Moral drawn, trust no-one, if necessary take your mother to Court, realise your inheritance is exactly that – YOURS – and realise truth can be stranger and possibly more cruel than fiction. Businesses are in operation to make and generate money, anything that does not is beyond laughable and will drag its owner down.

It is idiotic, brainless and offensive to the predicament we now face of having extracted the oil and gas from predominantly (say 70%) of that pet hobby horse of mine ie diatoms that people have so far not engaged with the changes we need to make. Strangely prescient how my fascination with these invisible to the naked eye foundations of the food chain have circled back to bite us on the whatever. Ocean generated DMS and associated weather systems and CO2 conversion equal to all the trees on land are the result of microscopic and near microscopic algae and plankton.

So what do I do … no mobile phone, no washer, no tv, no fridge … all is quiet and my life functions perfectly well, you even develop some muscle in wringing things dry!

okay, winge over!

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