The transition to renewables is not a threat to jobs in the North Sea, its the only lifeline that workers there have.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

My speech at the Rally for a Just Transition outside the Treasury last week

When people say “We have to make the transition to sustainable energy BUT we need to save jobs” we need to change one word in that sentence. “We have to make the transition to sustainable energy AND we need to save jobs”.

At the 2017 COP in Katowice – held in the middle of the Silesian coalfield, where the delegates said that they could smell the sulphur on the air – sensing a threat to their jobs, the local mineworkers branch of the Solidarnosc mineworkers union voted that climate change is not happening.

While that’s an understandable defensive reaction, it actually disarms these workers two times over.

  1. It makes it impossible for them to campaign to save their families and communities from the consequences of climate breakdown.
  2. It makes it impossible for them to defend their jobs, because that defence would be based on a fantasy.

That underlines the point that, whether we are a trade union seeking a future for our members – or a government seeking a sustainable future for society – we have to base our policies on reality.

Which brings us to the North Sea.

Oil and gas production in the North Sea is caught in a pincer that has nothing to do with government policy.

  1. The oil and gas fields are becoming exhausted – and even investment in new fields would make an insignificant difference to the speed of the decline in production, and therefore jobs.
  2. Oil demand has either peaked already, or will soon. That sets up a scenario in which the major oil companies are fighting like rats in a sack over the remaining profitable years. As oil demand declines, the only viable companies will be those able to extract oil from the easiest, therefore cheapest, places. That means OPEC, essentially. The Western oil majors will start to go to the wall in order of size and the extent to which their reserves are difficult/expensive to extract. The writing is on the wall for all of them, but BP and Shell will go down long before Exxon Mobil.

But these companies aren’t going down without a fight. They are pushing back hard against the shrinking of their markets, against taxes on their profits.

Part of this is the abandonment of transition plans from fossil fuels to renewables on the part of these comapnies because, in the short term, the former are more profitable. This dooms them and everyone working for them.

The bottom line is that the transition to renewables in the North Sea is not a threat to jobs in the North Sea, its the only lifeline that workers there have.

This is a video of the rally outside the Treasury.

📣 Please like & share the video to amplify our demands ahead of the budget!

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John Wesley’s Twinned Toilets, and other scenes from Central London

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On the Metropolitan Line on the way to the joint unions and climate movement rally for a just transition outside the Treasury building, a bloke gets on the tube wearing a blank expression and a black jacket with the legend “Find your own way” on the breast pocket. Its hard to tell if thats a personal philosophy, or advice.

Rising up through Westminster tube station, built at a time of intense de-industrialisation and therefore designed to look like the inside of a power station, a crocodile of kids on a school trip walk across on a higher level. They are wearing scarlet peaked hats, which are a bit MAGA, but, small as they are, they seem calmer, more mature than the people you get at Trump rallies. Odd moment at one of those recently. He complained that the teleprompter had cut out. You mean that stuff is scripted?

At the Portals of Power. Outside the Treasury building (author with Greener Jobs Alliance banner in evil looking black hat).

A lively rally outside the Treasury. A mix of Scottish trade unionists and other UNITE members, the Stop Rosebank campaign, Campaign Against Climate Change, Greener Jobs Alliance, Greenpeace and Scottish FOE. More women than men, including among the speakers. Lots of speeches and chants, people passing sometimes bemused, but a lot of honked car horns and fist pumps from drivers. A letter signed by 60 organisations calling for the government to fund a transition for North Sea Oil and Gas workers so their skills can be redeployed, handed in at the end. It would cost about a billion a year – small change given the totality of government spending and a sixth of what they are spending on maintenance on the Trident missiles they occasionally misfire into the Carribean on tests. Hopefully, when it was handed in by a delegation that included UNITE and Greenpeace representatives, someone from the Treasury was engaged in a discusion about it and was given some food for thought.

In the basement of Central Hall Westminster, the enormous HQ of the Methodist Church, they have a cafe that is a bit hidden away, named after John Wesley, founder of the Church, which a little group of us from the Greener Jobs Alliance repaired after the rally for a bit of caffeine fuelled repair and bounce ideas off each other. Its a light and airy cafe. A bit of a discovery. Good coffee. One of my comrades in Green arms was very complimentary about their bacon rolls. Its a little odd because Wesley himself was not especially fond of coffee. In his Primitive Physick, his rather austere guide to diet and exercise he notes that “Coffee and tea are extremely hurtful to persons who have weak nerves.” However, while he was not especially fond of coffee, he definitely didn’t like tea, blaming it for “Symptoms of a Paralytick Disorder” in himself and, watching people on the street, concluded that there was a lot of that about. He gave it up altogether in 1746, arguing with a friend that “You have need to abhor it as deadly Poison, and to renounce it from this very Hour.” Now they sell mugs with his face on it, but without the quote.

Although, equally oddly, he didn’t note that coffee and tea can be exteremely hurtful to persons who have weak bladders, one of the best things about the place is that they have twinned their toilets with facilities their church has built all over Africa. Every urinal has a little photo above it of a thatched shack in Zambia, or the DRC explaining where it is. They are all unique. The urinals are all the same. None of them is by Duchamp. The shacks are like the Ventilated Improved Pit toilets at Vanghani school in Limpopo, South Africa that I visited in 2005. A gigantic pit with a long drop from a basic toilet seat. The idea being that whatever goes down will be absorbed and the hole will never fill. Works very well. No need for flushing. The pictures felt like humanity and hope.

On the corner outside Westminster Hall, a bloke in his sixties is standing with a home made contraption with a message about the overuse of plastics that looks like a full size crucifix for plastic bottles, which hang from the cross bar like shot game birds. Its so large that its hard to miss. I go over and offer some encouragement and find out that he is doing it off his own bat, not attached to any campaign, just personally motivated to get a worthwhile message out there. Beats sitting at home watching Homes under the hammer I guess. I suggest it might be an idea to have a map showing nearby water fountains and he says that there aren’t any nearby, and those that do exist are often hidden away in odd corners, perhaps so they don’t get worn out by anyone using them.

Opposite him, a big blue banner and EU flag with the slogan “We’re still here because Brexit is still crap”. I think this might have been the bloke who played “Things can only get better” as an accompanyment to Rishi Sunak’s ill judged General Election announcement; one of the things contributing to Sunak’s increasingly frustrated demeanor as he talked on through the wind, talked on through the rain, and walked back into Downing Street very much alone. Perhaps “Singing in the rain” might have been better.

By the statues in Parliament Square, a tour guide rattles through his spiel to a group of teenagers with 1,000 yard stares. General Smuts is turning green behind them.

On my way back down the tube, a family of French tourists walks up the steps towards the exit. As they get half way up, the two toddlers with them, who look like illustrations by Shirley Hughes, look up and out and catch an eyefull of Big Ben at a sharp angle, framed by the humdrum surroundings of the exit and backlit by a bright blue sky, all tall, gothic, gold and glittering in the sunlight, and their eyes widen and jaws drop – “OOOOH! Wah!”

Love a bit of awe and wonder.

The Unbearable Racist Chutzpah of the Observer: Two Letters arising from today’s edition

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The Massacre of Children in Gaza is not a Libel

Howard Jacobson’s article (Tales of infanticide have stoked hatred of Jews for centuries. They still echo today Observer 6/10/24) is evidence of an inability to reconcile support for Israel with a belief in himself as a moral person who would “never dream” of doing what the IDF is actually doing.

The deaths of children in Gaza is not a malevolent racist fiction, like the blood libel he refers to, but a horrific reality that is going on and on and on. When the names of all the people killed in Gaza that it has been possible to identify were published, the first fourteen pages were children under one year old. He knows this. Which is why it is so unbearable to see it night after night on the news; as he says “what you cannot bear to see done”.

But, lets be clear, “Jews” are not committing the genocide in Gaza. The Israeli state is. A growing number of Jewish people around the world oppose it, organise against it march against it. Howard Jacobson does not, chooses to identify himself with the state that is doing it, and that sets up the psychic stress between what that state is doing and how he sees himself. If Howard cannot bear to see this, he should oppose it.

Editorial

A year ago, in response to your first editorial about October 7th, I wrote you the following letter.

Since the turn of the century the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, why does your editorial find calls for violent vengeance from Israel “understandable”, but consider that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”? 

Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy.

Your editorial this year, describing the “unfathomable hatred” of Palestinians, and the questions that Israelis ask “reasonably enough”, begs the same question.

Pitch Imperfect – a bid for the Conservative Leadership

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Watching the “beauty parade” of the final four Tory leadership candidates standing at their conference this week was an exercise in mental masochism best summed up in the phrase “appalled, but compelled to look”. This is, after all, the Party that voted for the very strange Liz Truss the last time they had a chance, and has barely changed or reflected on the experience.

First up was Tom Tugendhat. He came across to me as a man who is sufficiently sensitive and intelligent to be clinically depressed by the things that he believes in. And oddly two dimensional, like one of those cardboard cut outs they used to have in cinemas pointing you to your seat in the lower stalls or, in the case of the Conservative Party, the upper dress circle. the victim of a definite charisma by pass operation. War hero as dweeb.

Then James Cleverly, who went down better than the others because he actually had a sense of humour. Jokes by numbers from the other candidates fell into dead air where they had expected – or longed for – laughs. But, just as he was coming across as a relatable human being, he would say something mind numbingly dim. Given the audience, that also went down very well indeed.

Then Robert Jenrick. A man who gave one of his children the middle name “Thatcher”. Cruel and unusual punishment for an innocent child. I wonder if he’d have painted over the murals in her bedroom if he thought it would garner him a vote or two. But, even as a cartoon villian, there is something fake about Jenrick. Trying much too hard without the capacity to make it. Auditioning to act a big role but without the authenticity to live it. If Tugendhat is a cardboard replica of himself, Jenrick is an AI generated hollogram, or possibly hollow gram.

And rounding off a grim morning, Kemi Badenoch. Like Suella Braverman, Badenoch ingratiates herself into a party of xenophobes by being even more xenophobic than they are. In Braverman’s case, trying to contain the resulting psychic contradictions makes her a walking nervous wreck. Badenoch, by contrast, keeps things crushed under an icy control that allows her to blot out the fact that, for the racists she is trying to appeal to, “stop them coming” is just the first step to “send them back” – and the “them” would include her.

Having heard all four pitches, there is a standard script that barely varies, that goes something like this, but with a few of the unspoken parts added.

My friends (checks back for dagger).

You should vote for me because I have a personal backstory that involves self sacrificing, hard working parents who enabled me to slip up the greasy pole of achievement in a way that most people won’t, and that’s their fault for not being their best self.

I will never apologise for our record of achievement in office, that has just led us to being turfed out on our ear with the lowest number of MPs since 1832; so the first thing I want to say is sorry…but it wasn’t our fault.

Everything we did in the last 14 years was constrained by the Left establishment in the civil service and next time we shouldn’t be so restrained and perhaps should lock some of them up.

But look at the positives. We got Brexit done! And hasn’t that been a success?

We’ve been saying we want to get immigration down for 14 years and now we mean it. I will set a cap/legal limit, regardless of the damage that will do. If we start running out of construction workers, fruit pickers, care workers or nurses, thats the price we pay for not having quite as many foreign sounding people on the bus. Always remember. Queuing, and grumbling in queues, is a Fundamental British Value, and we intend to give people the chance to be in many, many more of them, going forward.

And we will pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, because we are Fundamentally British and don’t see people born elsewhere as completely human. After all, we are the Party of the family, except when it comes to the brightest and the best from the rest of the world, who we will generously allow to migrate in to work for us, but not allow to bring their family with them.

And shouldn’t they be grateful to live among such Fundamentally British tolerant people?

Because no country has given the world as much as we have, from industrialisation to the internet (I won’t mention all the cultural things because thats just Hippy dippy Left wing nonsense) so, let’s face it conference, they owe us. Perish the thought that we took anything for ourselves at the time.

So, we should be proud of our History. All of it; especially the parts we should be ashamed of. The slave traders, whose statues proudly adorn our public spaces, owners of dark satanic mills, plantation owners, rack renters, leaders of punitive expeditions and arms dealers made this country – and our Party – what it is today. We stand on their monstrous shoulders and should be proud to do so.

But now, we live in a more dangerous world, so we will make it safer by increasing UK arms spending to 3% of GDP. After all, this country only ever acts militarily in self defence. I learned this myself on active service in Iraq and Afghanistan and, indeed, Luton.

And we will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel, as it bombs its neighbours into the stone age, because if you can’t stand by an ally when it is commiting a genocide, what kind of fair weather friend are you?

And we have been such a friend to Ukraine that when there was a chance to secure a peace settlement within two months of the war starting, we made sure they didn’t sign up. I now pledge them £3 billion a year in continued military aid – a boost for our Fundamentally British arms industry – for as long as they can keep press ganging their men to fight.

I am not a climate denier, but I am a Net Zero sceptic. So, the problem is real, but we have no plans to deal with it. We made a mistake to set targets without plans, so the solution isn’t to develop a plan, but to abandon the targets. That’ll sort it. Hopefully none of you were flooded out this week or, if you were, you were here and didn’t notice.

And we cannot be content with the managed decline of our economy. Let us shift the burden from the broadest to the narrowest shoulders; as a reward for all that hard work that makes those of in this hall so smugly well off.

Because we believe that you, and hard working families, should keep more of your money, and less of it should go to people who don’t work hard, like train drivers and teachers and doctors.

Relieving the tax burden on the wealthy has nothing to do with our corporate paymasters, and everything to do with encouraging people to build businesses around their kitchen tables (with or without an Allen key from ikea). Because nothing enables small business success more than liberation from paying for burdensome regulations like too much maternity pay, or being held back by health and safety gone mad. Risking two, three many Grenfells in the future is part of the brave new world of uncertainty that we should embrace with enthusiasm, as it sorts out the sheep of enterprise from the goats of failure.

Winners gonna win. Losers gonna lose.

So, let us beat the drum for capitalism, which is taking the number of food banks and people sleeping rough to ever greater heights.

God save the King….And God help us all…

Starmer through the looking glass

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The hypocrisies and biases of a political stance are often revealed starkly by keeping the grammar of a statement intact but reversing its terms. The result puts whats being said, and, crucially, what isn’t, into a sharp relief.

This is very clear in Keir Starmer’s statement on the Iranian retaliation for succesive Israeli assassinations and terror attacks and their latest assault on Lebanon.

For ease of understanding I have kept in the original word in brackets.

“I utterly condemn this attempt by the Israeli (Iranian) regime to harm innocent Palestinians (Israelis), to escalate this incredibly dangerous situation, and push the region ever closer to the brink”

“It cannot be tolerated. We stand with Lebanon (Israel), and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression. Israel (Iran) must stop these attacks”.

Israel (Iran) “has menaced the Middle East for far too long, chaos and destruction brought not just to Palestine (Israel), but to the people they live amongst in Lebanon and beyond.”

“We stand with the people of Palestine (Israel) and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression,” adding that Britain supports “the Palestinian People’s (Israel’s) reasonable demand for the security of its people.”

Idiocies of the Week

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Its Conservative Party Conference week, so we are spoiled for choice.

Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going to back any of the 4 candidates for Party leader. The sighs of relief from the candidates could be heard from coast to coast.

Kemi Badenoch – and has no one noticed that her name is an anagram of Bad Enoch (its even in the right order) – said that she was shocked that so many recent immigrants to this country “hate Israel”. Given that Israel has spent the last year killing over 41,000 people and bombing Gaza to rubble, accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, been indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Court and, to return its 60,000 internal refugees to their northern border, has just killed another 1,000 people in Lebanon invaded the country and displaced a million people there, what’s not to love?

Her team in the leadership campaign released an odd pamphlet arguing that 21st century politics is different from 20th century politics because – although everything can best be understood in the form of a triangle – in the old days the triangle was divided horizontally and the bottom of society supported the Left while the Right defended the top, today the triangle is divided vertically; to indicate that both Left and Right have support from top to bottom, but without any acknowledgement that the right still defends the interests of the people at the top, while it is the role of the Left to fight for the bottom.

Confused? You will be. Just to make things even clearer, in their diagram the Left is on the Right and the Right is on the Left. This might indicate that the Tory Right approach the world in an inverted way, but it also might simply be a Freudian slip, implying that somewhere deep in their heart of hearts they know that the Left is, ultimately, right.

Another way of looking at it is that they don’t know which way is up. Bottoms up chaps!

Another gem from Badenoch is that her way of dealing with the problem that highly educated people tend to lean Left is to have fewer highly educated people. All those “pointless university degrees” that make people think have got to go.

Meanwhile, Miriam Cates, speaking on Politics Live, unravelled the full insanity of the Right’s line on immigration. On the one hand the country can’t afford to have all these people coming in, but at the same time it needs people coming in to fill job vacancies because, in Cates’ view “we’re not having enough babies”. So, the country isn’t full up after all. Breed damn you! Breed!

Jo Coburn, the anchor of Politics Live, noted that the Tories were obsessively discussing immigration while most of the electorate are concerned about energy bills and the cost of living, the NHS and the state of public services; without reflecting that Politics Live itself obsessively discusses the issue “we can’t talk about” almost every time it comes on. Anyone would think there was an agenda somewhere to push this under everyone’s noses at every opportunity, carpet bombing us with BS.

Robert Jenrick – a small, cheap embodiment of petty minded mean spiritedness, best known for his order as immigration minister to paint over a mural in a child refugee centre to make it less welcoming – dropped an honest bollock when he said that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is that it meant that UK Special Services were having to shoot terrorists rather than arrest them because the EHRC would order them released. While this is an absurd claim in itself, its notable that none of the people who criticised Jenrick for this statement denied that UK Special Forces do indeed breach the Geneva Convention in this way. There are a number of cases from Afghanistan that the SAS kept locked away for years to maintain the fiction that they didn’t happen. But its now well known that they did. But to everyone from his rivals for the Tory leadership to “a Labour source”, its just terribly bad taste, and awfully insulting to our brave boys to say that they have done what they have done.

Jenrick also criticised the police for dealing with peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to genocide and a ceasefire in Gaza more gently than rioters who were trying to burn refugees alive in hostels, threw bricks at the police, attacked people in the streets and trashed their neighbour’s houses. Quite inexplicable.

And two from last week.

A delegate at the Reform Conference, interviewed on Politics Joe, opined that the rivers are polluted, not because of the water companies failing to invest – “I think they are being scapegoated” – or too much toxic runoff from farmers overfertilising their fields – its because all those immigrants are coming over here and overwhelming our overloaded sewage system with all their poos. Talk about S*$t.

And David Lammy at the UN last week saying “I know Imperialism when I see it”. A question for David. When you go to work as the British Foreign Secretary at the Foreign Office, and you walk past that statue of Robert Clive, and stride along corridors resplendently decorated with paintings of Britannia and all the rest of it (which you can see here), perhaps through the “Durbar Court”, and you look at all that, what exactly do you see?

Hostages and casualties – a matter of proportion.

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Travelling on the bus up Golders Green Road, the hoardings just opposite Grodzinski’s bakery (now modernised but smaller than it was) are covered with A3 posters of the Israeli hostages. 97 of them are still alive. If you were to stick pictures like this of them up alongside the road in a single line they would stretch for approximately 100 metres. About the length of three semi detached houses side by side.

As of April this year, Israel was holding 3,660 Palestinian prisoners in adminstrative detention, that’s to say without trial. Hostages by any other name. Rarely mentioned on the news. No imperative to release them. Effectively invisible. No pictures of them up on hoardings anywhere. But if you were to stick them up in a single line of A3 posters, it would stretch for about 1,220 metres. On a street of semis that would not stop at number 6, as it would with the Israelis, but at number 73.

If you were to stick up posters of the Israeli victims of the Oct 7th attack on the same street it would not get so far. About 400 metres, just to number 24. You could walk it in a couple of minutes. Doing the same for the 41,534 Palestinians killed so far in Gaza since, and you’d need a road more than ten kilometres long. Walking at an average 3mph it would take you more than two hours to get to the end.

Carer’s tales

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There are rhythms to the deployment of carers. Some arrive according to a rigid timetable set by tablets. If a certain medication has to be taken at regular intervals, with no more than a 10 or 15 minute variation, the carer has to turn up at those times.

This tends to mean that the carer who arrives is more often than not the same one. They have their regulars and a regular schedule so they can get from one client to the next on a predictable timetable. They are, of course, not paid for travel time and the pressure to get from one job to another can lead to road accidents. One we know was trying to save a second or two and crocked her car gliding into the one in front, damaging it enough for it to be out of action for a week. She was unable to get work until it was fixed because they are all dependent on cars to get from one job to the next. She now drives very carefully because the pressure isn’t worth it.

Because they travel by car, they come from quite a range of places, from Forest Gate in the West to Canvey Island in the East. One had moved from a flat off Tottenham Court Road in the heart of London down to Purfleet – because the housing is more affordable – and taken the job for the excitement; explaining that “Nothing ever happens in Purfleet”.

Pay for each visit is presumed to match the half hour or 15 minute slot that the company is paid for. This does not always match reality. If a client has a medical emergency it can take longer, so there has to be a scramble to fill the slots that are down the line. If all goes well, the routines of getting a client onto the commode, sorting all that out, getting them washed, dressed and chatted to can be done more quickly. In the case of housebound people with no family support, the last job is the only social contact and conversation they will get all day and is a crucial part of the job.

One that came to ours a few days ago said that she has a core of bedbound people who are her regulars. Somehow she has got into the habit of singing to them, and taking requests. Some of the old ladies like the Ronettes, and bands like that, but she has one old gentleman who is into heavy rock and usually wants something by Metallica – which is truly above and beyond.

Some carers are chatty, some quietly get on with things and converse functionally. Most are pretty upbeat. Most of them are women. Many are black. Most of the white ones have tattoos. There is a high turnover. A core of veterans keep things going while newcomers either adapt or, finding it too much, leave.

Some of them wear fans around their necks because, even during a heatwave, some of the clients have their heating on, and cranked up high.

None of them are in a union.

I complement one on her pair of colouful converses and she says that she loves them, has 14 pairs, but is now boycotting them because of Nike’s sponsorship and partnership deals with Israel.

Several have said they like coming to us because we are friendly and take an interest. Many of the clients have dementia, so can be terrified and aggressive. Some are racist and don’t hold back about it even though they are being looked after – possibly because they are being looked after and resent it. This is sometimes the case with relatives too.

If the family is covering meds and, to a lesser extent, food, the schedule for visits can swing quite wildly, with the getting up arrival ranging from slightly before 7am one day to well after 9am the next. During the Summer holidays schedules get stretched because carers with children have them on their hands, but as Winter approaches they also get harder to fill because its getting dark, dank and miserable and, people get ill.

Some of the overnight crews, who are always in twos and arrive in the wee small hours to give bedbound people a turn, or deal with pads, can be loud – car door slams, a conversation that would be loud for the middle of the day erupts up and down the path to the back door, a scrabble for the door lock, the door goes crunch and the loud conversation imposes itself on the living room downstairs for a while, before the whole thing repeats itself in reverse on the way out. Others arrive with the stealth of Ninjas, but greater consideration. Some of them close the side and front gates on the way out. Some let them swing in the breeze.

Aromatherapy in Thurrock, and other bits and bobs.

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Overheard in Boots.

“If she says she caught thrush from sitting on a toilet seat, she’s doing it all wrong.”

Walking down to town I am passed on the other side of the road by an elderly Irish bloke I chat to sometimes, absolutely bombing along in his mobility vehicle. He hurtles off up the sharp incline of Cromwell Road, leaving me limping behind eating his electric dust.

The trees on Cromwell Road now look almost primeval, with huge boles you couldn’t put your arms round anymore. Oak. Lime. Massive crowns hissing in the wind. At the brow of the hill there used to be a Horse Chestnut, magnificently flowered in May and the source of many a childhood conker. Now gone, diseased and rusted and eventually chainsawed, leaving a sawdust and a naked stump; and the road looking like a smile with an extracted front tooth.

Further down the hill a bloke built like a silverback gorrilla – arms like hams, big belly, a neck with one of Rusell Kane’s “Essex triple ripple” rolls of muscle – is drilling and hammering insulation panels on the outside of a house as though he is attacking it. Despite the power in his body, he carries an air of nervous truculence about him.

The street name plate by the car park outside the Tae Kwando Centre at the foot of the hill, pointing to a pair of houses evidenty constructed as an afterthought to fill in a bit of spare space overlooking the Titan pit, is a rhyming couplet. “Quarry View – Nos 1 – 2”. As mind worms go, this is the road sign equivalent of “baby shark”.

As I pass the war memorial opposite the old police station (now posh flats and renamed “The Old Courthouse”; which has a slightly Western feel about it to me) workers from the council are planting out dense blue banks of lavendar in the flower beds on either side. The waft of aromatherapy is almost overwhelming even from the other side of the road.

The vista approaching Wallace Road across “The Field”. More homely state than stately home.

In the playing field opposite the house, now glorified as “Hathaway Park”, a strikingly tall woman stands alone on the bank of grass, bright green in the sunlight, looking up towards the redbrick facades of Wallace Road – a proletarian version of the entrance to Blenheim Palace – wearing a chador from head to foot in the same celestial blue as renaissance painters used for the Virgin Mary – so a sort of Muslim Blue Nun. he is alone in a sea of green, and looks as though she has been beamed down from the heavens. It looks like a still from a film. The staginess of everyday life.

Things my Grandmother used to say.

On the News. “Not to worry, it won’t happen here”. On the “nothing ever happens in Grays” principle.

On illness. “What’s moveable’s curable”. Which, I suppose means that if you’re not dead, you can be fixed.

On the elasticity of the perception of time. “It don’t half get late early, don’t it?”

Fear and Loathing on Kilburn High Road.

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Chatting to some stall holders at the Brent Green Day at the Kiln Theatre about how the vibe inside it, quiet, prosperous, with a clientelle that is evidently well to do – drifting over from various manifestations of Hampstead perhaps – is such a striking contrast to the hard bitten, impoverished, tough dramas of everyday life on the streets outside. The Kiln puts on a lot of challenging drama, addressing some of those issues, but rarely engaging with the people they affect, in a sort of performative bubble, it seems to me.

Outside Tescos a woman sits on her knees begging. A bearded, slightly wild eyed, man marches past and snarls “Why don’t you get up off your arse and get a job? How about that?” He marches on feeling better about himself no doubt. The woman just stares.

Further up, outside a pawnbrokers, a ragged looking bloke with wild looking hair and some missing teeth sits astride a Lime bike waiting for something and mutters at me as I walk past. I ask him what he said and he repeats “Do you buy gold?” I am wearing a preoccupied expression, a crumpled shirt, with at least one curry stain, and carrying an overfull rusksack and Morrisons plastic bag. I’m not my idea of a gold dealer. Deep cover perhaps? Or perhaps a different sort of “gold”?