Kentucky Fried Litter

Some people like to read on trains, others like to watch videos, fill in their spreadsheets, catch up with their marking or, like me, stare out of the window. In the countryside you often get an unrivalled view of the scenery, the trip up the North Sea coast to Edinburgh being a particular favourite, but in towns and cities you literally see another side to life. Apart from when the train passes through a station, all the buildings are facing the other way and you get to see the back gardens, back alleys, fire escapes and car parks. In particular, you get to see the dark side of the supermarkets, the side where the litter collects. You can easily tell which is the biggest supermarket in town by the predominant colour of the litter. Blue and white for Tesco, orange for Sainsbury's and yellow and black for Morrisons. We're beyond the reach of Waitrose,  but I bet they've got a distinctive colour scheme too.

Now a few weeks ago there was much excitement in Scarborough. Not shared by me but excitement all the less. We were going to join much of the rest of the world in being able to sample, if not enjoy, Colonel Sanders' famous fried chicken. Kentucky Fried Chicken were coming to town.

Outside my local newsagents

And lo and behold if a new colour hasn't  been added to the litter-erary scene, and what a synthetically horrible one it is. I once dared to try a bubblegum flavoured slush in Malta and it was exactly this colour. Hence the slight feeling of nausea.

Up on Oliver's Mount

Now if you read more than a few of my posts you'll know that I do tend to go on a bit about public health. My focus is usually on the output side, on how physically active people are or ought to be, rather than on the input side, which is what they put in their mouths. As a seaside town that caters for people on a budget there are already lots of fast food outlets (the fish and chips are usually very good but more than once a month is more than enough) and so I find it hard to believe that adding yet another will bring much real public benefit. 

You may or may not be pleased to know that the much awaited KFC has been temporarily closed down while it figures out how to stop the smell going where it isn't welcome. Meanwhile the cultural pressures to lead a sedentary life carry on unabated.

A young man learning how to sit.

Frack this for a lark

I've just written some brief notes on fracking for one of our local Parliamentary candidates. Here they are.

Global context and transition fuel

It's been argued by proponents that since burning gas produces less CO2 per unit of energy (has a lower carbon intensity) than, for example, coal, shifting from coal to gas will help in the transition to a low carbon economy.

But

1) As a recent BP report indicated, there's precious little evidence that exploiting new sources of fossil fuels reduces consumption of the others (indeed the USA has opened up 4/5 new coal exporting terminals on its west coast so that it can export the coal that it would otherwise have burnt itself).

2) Natural gas is mainly methane and methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 (between 20 and 40 times depending on the timescale). This means that any leaks of methane (referred to as fugitive emissions) can easily end up undoing any greenhouse gas savings from its lower carbon intensity.

3) Whenever you make an investment in energy infrastructure there's an expected working lifetime of at least 25 years. The International Energy Agency has recently done an analysis of the expected overall emissions from our existing global energy infrastructure (anything that converts energy from one form to another, from car engines to power stations) and is clear that on current plans we've got 3/4 years left of investment as usual before the cumulative emissions from the existing infrastructure will exceed those needed to achieve the target of a than 2C rise in global temp.  Blog post locked in

4) Following on from 3), to avoid dangerous climate change we need to leave around 60% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground. A good place to start would be with as yet unexploited and unconventional (in the UK ) sources such as fracking.

Local environmental impact

A lot of opposition has centred on local pollution (e.g of water supplies). The fracking process involves drilling deep into suitable geological structures and then injecting high pressure water (along with sand, to keep the fractures open, and other chemicals, to dissolve some rock and keep everything flowing ) and there are obvious risks if the well casing loses its integrity. If done well this should not be a problem but experience from the USA suggests that over time even the best managed wells can start to leak into surrounding strata and so the long term management of wells would have to be very well controlled.

However, its possible to distinguish the methane that comes from deep lying strata from methane of more recent biological origin by its profile of isotopes (the same as carbon dating) and in the USA the methane coming out of people's taps has clearly been shown to be of recent origin and therefore not the result of fracking.

Getting all materials on site means quite a lot of transport of materials and lots of associated noise. Because you have to fracture the rocks before you can extract the gas its not like a conventional gas well where you drill a hole in one place and the gas simply flows to it. Instead you're limited by how far you can drill sideways (now about 0.5 mile but originally much less) so the minimum well spacing would be at least one per mile.

University of Bristol summary of the issues

Energy policy

Fracking involves considerable investment of machinery and manpower. The present government is offering significant tax breaks for fracking which can be compared with the support given to renewables. The question can therefore be asked as to whether our energy security is best served by subsidising a fossil fuel industry, and using valuable human resources there, rather than in encouraging a faster switch to renewables.

Bicycle delivery

In 2007 ago Sustrans ( a charity that promotes the development of safe walking and cycling routes across the UK) received a £50m grant from the National Lottery to fund schemes across the UK. Under the banner of Connecting Communities this project has made a big impact right across the country. However, I remember at the time there were complaints in my home town of Scarborough that none of this money was coming here, unlike the neighboring County of East Yorkshire. Well the reason was simple, if you didn't ask you didn't get. The local authority simply hadn't responded to the well flagged opportunity.

It now feels like we're about to get into the same situation again. The current UK government has launched what it calls a Cycling Delivery Plan and has invited local authorities to come forward with expressions of interest. A couple of weeks ago when I was visiting my parents across the other side of the County I noticed in their local paper that their District Council, Harrogate, (we have two tiered local authorities here with North Yorkshire County Council sharing some responsibilities with smaller district councils) was already developing their expression of interest. So, when I returned home I wrote to the relevant officers of our district council to draw their attention to the scheme and see if they were preparing to make an expression of interest.

The reply came back that timescales were short, that supplying the information requested would be challenging and that we should, I quote, "Bear in mind that cycling is not really on our members agenda and we are strapped for cash."

Well the only way it can get onto the members' agenda is if they know about it, and that's the primary purpose of this post.

Whilst there are a number of requirements I think, apart from the political will that I'm not in a position to provide, that the task is not as hard as it might initially seem. Here they are

B.1 The Department for Transport is calling for expressions of interest from local authorities who would be interested in setting a long term ambition for walking and cycling in their area, and who, as part of that ambition would like to work in partnership with government to secure its delivery.

B.2 Expressions of interest in working with government on partnership projects to increase levels of walking and cycling should include the following information:

 An indication of the local authority's level of ambition for cycling and walking over a defined period;

In recent years the borough has developed a Cycling Strategy and a Pedestrian strategy. The Borough's Community Strategy does contain targets, albeit modest, to increase the number of journeys made on foot or by bike.

 Their expectation of government's role in the partnership, and how they would like to work with government;

Since the current Minister with responsibility for cycling is also the local MP I'm sure that something here could be worked out.

 Plans for engaging with key stakeholders and securing an influential cycling and walking champion;

As part of Scarborough's Urban Renaissance we had a well established walking and Cycling Action Group. This developed a number of local projects, took on the role of the Borough's Cycle Forum and was instrumental in the formation of the Friends of the old Railway which, in turn, has helped produce clear development plans, in partnership with the Borough, the National Park and the Groundwork Trust, for the track. In the urban area of Scarborough this is the key off road route and an obvious priority. A sister group, Gateway, now exists in Whitby.

 A demonstration of the local authority's commitment to door-to-door journeys, and to creating safe cycling and walking provision through cycle proofing new transport infrastructure;

This is where a more focused demonstration of political will would be required.

 An outline programme plan, including, where relevant, a planned and funded cycling and walking investment programme.

Both the pedestrian and cycle strategies have clear priorities and objectives. Plans for the enhancement of the Cinder Track are very well developed, are largely costed and have been the subject of widespread community consultation.

B.3 Expressions of interest can be submitted on an ad hoc basis, and local authorities will be contacted by a member of the Cycling Policy Team to discuss their proposal.

B.4 Submissions should be made to Walking.Cycling@dft.gsi.gov.uk. 

So, a political decision needs to be made. Of course it may well be that there isn't the local political will but at least councillors will have known that the opportunity was available.

And what do you do?

The first time you meet someone new it's hard to avoid making assumptions about them based on their age, their physical condition and how they're dressed. If you also happen to come from the same linguistic community, then as soon as they open their mouths and speak you'll also make assumptions about where they come from, their class and their level of education. Needless to say, some or all of these assumptions could be wrong. Finally comes the classic ice breaking question, one that I've been struggling with for some time, "and what do you do?"

The unspoken addition to this question is "for a living". How do you make your money? Are you a doctor, a lawyer, a butcher, a local government worker, a writer, an accountant, whatever.  At various times in the past I could have answered, medical researcher, teacher, law student, carbon analyst or, as I still put on my yearly tax return, because there are still one or two things that do bring in a bit of money, environmental consultant. But really, for the last decade or so, this question has left me floundering and I end up babbling about whatever project happens to have my attention at the time; few of which actually make any money.

So what do I do and why do I do it? Well now that I'm officially retired, in the sense that I can claim a very modest teacher's pension, it all feels a lot easier. Money no longer needs to play any part the answer.

The short answer is "things that I think need doing but which aren't happening", but this begs the further question of what these things are and, the one which I struggle with, why they aren't happening. So let's step back a bit and give this glib answer some roots.

Shortly after my 14th birthday Apollo 8 went around the moon and brought back what is arguably the most important image of all time.

Thank you NASA

There we are, all of us. A clearly finite blue and white ball, a mere speck in the wider Universe. Who, having seen that image could imagine that we could continue to plunder the Earth's resources as if they were without limit ? Well clearly there are plenty who can, but I couldn't.

Once this truth had been revealed I was unable to put it back. It might have been easier to ignore it if I'd been seduced by conventional dreams of money and success but my relationship with money has always been pragmatic, as long as you've got enough to have a roof over your head, keep reasonably warm, eat properly and still get hold of books to read then I really couldn't be bothered to chase after more. If shopping was the answer then you were probably asking the wrong question, if you needed money to demonstrate status then better to deal with the insecurity than go pointlessly chasing after more.

Whilst to many this might seem improbable, I drifted into Balliol College Oxford without any plans or expectations beyond doing whatever came next. Because I talked a lot at the interview I ended up studying Philosophy as well as Physics and, because I found myself captivated by a friend's textbooks on neurophysiology, I followed this up with a PhD in Physiology at the University of Bristol.  Later, after a short spell at University College London, found myself poking electrodes into mouse eggs at the University of Connecticut. Back in the UK, I trained to teach in further education and taught maths, physics and other bits of science for quite a few years until the old obsessions reasserted themselves, I gave up full time work and have been messing around ever since.

The first obsession was with energy, nature's currency. I could see that we were leading increasingly energy dependent lives but that little attention was being made to using it efficiently let alone using less and that if we carried on as we were then, within an historically short period - of the order of hundreds rather than thousands of years - we'd not only run out but would have caused dramatic environmental damage along the way. So, a lot of my often ineffective efforts have gone into trying to get people to recognise the nature of the problem and then to give them the basic knowledge needed to do something about it. If you compare current public policy with the very well established fact that to avoid the worst impacts of Climate Change we need to leave well over 60% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, you'll appreciate my disappointment in finding that we're not as rational as we'd like to think we are.

The second obsession, clearly linked to the first, has been with the quality of public space and how we can shift people out of motor cars, particularly for short journeys and back onto their feet or bicycles. Not only would this cut pollution, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote equality (that's why its called public space because everyone can benefit) increase sociability, reduce social isolation but it would also help deal with the next major crisis on public health (after smoking and drinking) of physical inactivity.

If you look through my blog posts then, apart from the odd bit of whimsy, you'll find a host of posts dealing with these issues. I put them there not only so so that they're on public record but also so that I can poke public officials and others in their direction. Over the decades that I've been thinking about these issues they've become more prescient rather than less and more and more of my thinking has been going into the political, social and psychological barriers which prevent them from getting the political attention that they need. 

So, what do I do? This and that.

Why do I do it? Because I think it needs doing

Some links from the blog

Living in the real world : a talk to the Scarborough Rotarians on the history of the concept of energy

A redacted abuse of power : The one time carbon analyst exposes his CEO as a fraud. You can guess who lost his job.

Time travel: The great Ivan Illich was an enormous influence. Here's a short riff on his masterpiece Energy and Equity.

Market Failure : You can't make sensible decisions about energy efficiency unless you're well informed

Insulation and bicycles : key technologies to prevent Climate Change

The exception proves the rule : a brief dip into the psychology of littering

Ask a pejorative question  and Two wheels good : The real reasons why people are reluctant to get on their bikes

If it were a drug : The health benefits of becoming physically active

The cost of sitting around in North Yorkshire : Official figures are used to put a cost on physical inactivity in the County.

Seamer Road : A look at the problems faced by cyclists on a busy road in Scarborough

Taking the lane : When and why it's safest for cyclists to block traffic from getting past

Smooth enough for buggies and wheelchairs (wide enough to pass) : The simple things that are needed to bring the Cinder Track up to scratch.

The Cinder Track : Why we set up the Friends of the Old Railway

The politics of the sedentary : Does the modern political process favour the sedentary.

Addicts at the wheel : Car dependency and its influence on public policy

Are we active or not? : Trying to make sense of contradictory figures about physical activity levels in our area.

Remembering the innocent

Stephen Pinker may well be right in saying that we now stand less chance of a violent death than at any time in our archaeologically accessible history but this doesn't mean that violent death is a thing of the past and that there are no more innocent victims. We might pretend that our targeting is so precise that we can safely carry out extra-judicial killings without undue collateral damage but the mealy mouthed euphemisms can't hide the fact that this is just a pretense. 

It's now the centenary of the start of the Great War, a full explanation of which remains beyond me but I am inclined to see its roots in a colonial squabbling over territory which wouldn't be necessary these days when the rich and powerful can simply buy up and control the means of production wherever on the planet it might happen to be, and for the next 4 years we'll no doubt get many reminders of the particular events of a century ago. Among these, on the 16th of December this year, will be the bombardment of Scarborough in which 18 people lost their lives. All were civilians and one of them, John Shields Ryalls, was only 14 months old.

Since our dog died a couple of months ago I've taken to wandering out with a camera in my pocket rather than a selection of dog biscuits and plastic pooh bags and a fortnight ago I was surprised to find that a memorial to those that died, the first to die on British soil in the Great War, had been erected in the local cemetery.

A little bit further down the path you can find the grave young John shares with another of the victims, his nanny.

A closer look at the inscription at the bottom reveals what I think is a message of true faith.

"Oh what a happy life was this,

to my dear baby given, 

just one short year of earthly bliss,

and all the rest in heaven"

Now I can certainly respect that faith, even if I'm not able to share it, but a week or so after I'd taken this picture I discovered that the construction of the memorial had been part of a larger project which involved identifying the graves of all the victims and putting up new plaques to show where they are.

Not wishing to annoy any of the people involved in this act of remembrance I do think they should have shown a little more respect to those who decided upon, and no doubt paid for, the original inscription.

Lichen hunting with an ornithologist

A couple of weeks ago we made a brief visit to the Scottish Highlands to visit an old friend. It was a mildly eventful trip with one day spent clearing out  a neighbour's drains to stop flood water coming into her house and another spent walking 10 miles or so back to Inverness along the Great Glen Way. En route we stopped at the Abriachan eco cafe where I happened to mention to the woman who runs it that one of my companions on my first trip to the Highlands had spent most of his time photographing Lichen. Hearing this she took me to see some particularly fine specimens in the woods nearby.

I love the way in which the sheer variety of shapes and forms creates an entire world in miniature. Another old friend used to be a railway modeller and one of the dafter things we did was pretend that the 19th Century Act of Parliament giving permission to extend the railway line up Wharfedale ( down in Yorkshire this time) from Grassington to Kettlewell had actually been acted upon and so, as well as surveying the route for ourselves, he constructed a model of the station in Kettlewell that never was as it might have been in 1926. He used lichen to model trees and bushes and grey wool to knit dry stone walls.

Now the odd thing about this Highland trip was that nowadays it would probably never have happened. The photographer was the senior maths teacher at our secondary school and we were the only two students studying further maths at A level. The whit holiday just before our final exams he simply asked us if we'd like to accompany him on a camping trip up to Scotland and for some reason we agreed. My companion saw it as a chance to go bird spotting along the north coast - Eider Duck, Great Northern Divers, Purple Herons and the rest - and I think that I simply saw it as a distraction from the revision which everybody said we ought to be doing but which we obviously weren't (In maths and physics, if you've worked out what's going on when you do it, which is the point, then there really isn't that much revision to do. My main preparation for exams was not going out to the pub the night before) So, we spent a week driving around the Highlands, stopping to take photographs and stare at birds through binoculars, camping at night in an old fashioned single ridge tent and neither of us, nor our families, questioned the propriety of this trip at all. Oh, such days of innocence.

What prompted this post, however, wasn't the recent trip to Scotland but a slide shown at a presentation I attended earlier this week. I'd got myself invited to the North Yorkshire Healthy Weight Forum being held far across the County in Ripon. This was partly so that I could meet some of the people involved in the County's public health team, and gently harass them about physical inactivity, and partly so that I could visit my elderly parents, who live nearby. The slide was shown by someone from an organisation called More Life. In essence what they do is run camps for overweight children where they get them moving and encourage a healthier diet. The slide was of the camp venue.

Blow me, as in "you could blow me down with a feather", if it wasn't the front building of my old school and if it wasn't the very building where, for my fellow student, mathematics and ornithology fought a desperate battle for his attention.

Because there were only two of us sitting these particular exams we were put in an upstairs room on the right hand side of this building with a view out across the school grounds and, crucially, a side view of the flanking extension at the side. At that time of year House Martins were busy nesting along the eaves. So, get on with your sums or watch the birds? An easy call for me but a very hard one for my companion who even I could tell was thoroughly distracted throughout.

40 years on I believe that he now lives and breathes bird life on an island off the North West coast of Norway while I piss around in Scarborough.

Are we active or not?

I'm confused. This is a conclusion that you may well have drawn for yourself, but now it's official. For a little while now I've been gently poking the powers that be, my local authorities and the local Clinical Commissioning Group (the body responsible for primary health care in the area), about the need to challenge modern sedentary lifestyles and get more of us to be physically active. My technique has been to throw official statistics at them, see how they respond and then wonder aloud why they don't. 

In my post - The cost of sitting around in North Yorkshire - I used figures from a project entitled - The Health Impact of Physical Inactivity (HIPI) - which though it originated down in Bristol developed a tool that could be used across the country to estimate the health benefits in four key areas of getting more people to be modestly physically active (150 minutes per week of the sort of activity that raises your heart rate and gets you breathing just a little bit faster). Since this project has now become part of the official body Public Health England I feel free to assume that their work has a seal of official approval. In order to come to their conclusions they needed to have some sort of estimate of how many people currently met this target and to do so relied on survey work carried out by Sport England.

To quote from their report  (Click on the appropriate indicator to give its source)

Adults who are physically active (percentage)

Latest Annual Figure:Estimated number of participants in moderate intensity sport and/ or undertaking some form of physical activity on 20 or more sessions (5 times 30) in the previous 4 weeks, persons 40-79 years, 2010. Calculated using the estimated percentage participation in moderate intensity sport and/ or undertaking some form of physical activity on 20 or more sessions (5 times 30) in the previous 4 weeks, persons aged 16 and over, 2010-2011. 

Comment: Modelled estimates of prevalence, based on survey estimates taken from the Sport England Active People Surveys 4 and / or 5

Source: Health Profiles 2012 

For Scaborough (Click on the relevant bit of the map or select from the drop down menu) the figure they give for those who are sufficiently physically active is a depressing 21%. 

To quote from the Sport England Spreadsheet, used by the HIPI, 

The sports participation indicator measures the number of adults (aged 16 and over) participating in at least 30 minutes of sport at moderate intensity at least once a week.

It does not include recreational walking or infrequent recreational cycling but does include cycling if done at least once a week at moderate intensity and for at least 30 minutes. It also includes more intense/strenuous walking activities such as power walking, hill trekking, cliff walking and gorge walking.

Now a couple of days ago I spoke to the member of the Public Health Team at North Yorkshire County Council who has responsibility for physical activity. He drew my attention to their basic source of public health information across the County - The Public Health Outcomes Framework - and if you open up the page wide enough to see the column for Scarborough you'll notice that the percentage of physically active adults is given as 65.5%. Very different from the 21% given in the HIPI report.

Now the first thing that I remembered about the HIPI data was (see above) that they said it referred to people aged from 40 - 79 and indeed the figure is lower than the overall one given in the Sport England spreadsheet of around 30%. Since this 30% also includes people from 16 - 39 this is what you might expect as people become less active. 

I did try to reconcile the two figures (21% and 65.5%) by getting hold of the population data for Scarborough from the 2012 census, which are available from the Office of National Statistics (go to the third table down), and did some quick sums to find out that the total adult population between 15 and 79 was about 42,000 of whom 14,000 were under 39 and therefore not included in the HIPI data and 28,000 were between 40 and 79. 

If you'll forgive some simple algebra, I attempted to find out what proportion of the under 39's would need to be physically active to make both statements true.

Working in 1000s

42 x 65.5 = 14 x Q + 28 x 21

Therefore 2751 = 14Q + 588

Therefore 14Q = 2751 - 588 = 2163

Therefore Q = 2163/14 = 154.5

So, for the two numbers to be talking about the same thing, 154.5% of the younger age group would have to be physically active. Not so much unlikely as impossible.

Looking at the Public health Outcomes Framework (above), clicking on definitions and selecting the one about physical activity it turns out that whilst their source of information is also Sport England's Active People Survey (see above) their definition of what counts as being physically active is slightly different. I quote:

The number of respondents aged 16 and over, with valid responses to questions on physical activity, doing at least 150 “equivalent” minutes of at least moderate intensity physical activity per week in bouts of 10 minutes or more in the previous 28 days expressed as a percentage of the total number of respondents aged 16 and over.

So, it appears that if you count sessions of between 10 and 30 minutes in your total, as well as those over 30 minutes, then you more than double the number of people considered physically active (from around 30% to over 60%). 

Going further down the Definition page you come across this caveat.

It is not possible to compare results with indicators of physical activity presented in previous publications due to changes in the methods for collecting data on equivalent minutes of physical activity and a wider definition used for what is classed as moderate intensity physical activity.

So, what's happened, to quote from the overview of the spreadsheet that can be found on the Public Health England web site, is that

APS5 collected information on physical activity that was conducted in 30min blocks, while APS6 collected information on physical activity conducted in 10min blocks. This is so that the physical activity measure in APS6 is more in line with the Chief Medical Officer's (CMO) recommendations for physical activity.

So, does this mean that the health impacts highlighted in the original HIPI report were fundamentally overestimated and that the changed definition means we're all a little bit healthier than we thought or does it mean that the target has shifted in order to make it that little bit easier - more realistic - to achieve. I simply don't know.

What I do know though, is that the figure given in the APS6 spreadsheet for the proportion of physically active adults in Scarborough isn't 65.5% but 47.9% and that even if you take it to mean not physically inactive (which the definition given above clearly doesn't) and include those doing between 30min and 150min per week it still only adds up to 64.8%.

So, where did the 65.5% come from.........?

Postscript (13/11/14)

Having chatted to a number of other people with an interest in obesity and physical activity I've done some further checking of sources.

The HIPI report above combined a survey of physical activity levels made by Sport England (under the old definition) with a global study of the increased risk of getting certain diseases if you weren't physically active that had been published in the Lancet. 
(Lee et al Effect of physical inactivity on major non-communicable diseases worldwide: an analysis of burden of disease and life expectancy. Lancet 2012, 380: 219-229)
 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3645500/#R9

Their estimates of increased risk were made by comparing disease rates between active and inactive people, making some corrections for other risk factors, and the figures they used to determine the proportion of the population that was physically inactive came from the World Health Organisation Report. "The Global status report on noncommunicable diseases 2010"
http://www.who.int/nmh/publications/ncd_report_full_en.pdf

On page 96 of this report there's a map showing the global prevalence of physical inactivity on a country by country basis (also give in a table form elsewhere) which it appears that two slightly different criteria  have been used. To quote " Less than 5 times 30 minutes of moderate activity per week, or less than 3 times 20 minutes of vigorous activity per week, or equivalent"

Now since the older CMO's guidance also included the possibility of 75 minutes per week of vigorous physical activity (instead of 5 x 30 min of moderate activity) the figures given for the increased risk of being physically inactive in the HIPI study would appear to apply much more closely to the old definition rather than the new.

Ghost rider

You always know that well loved pets will die. The median age for whippets is just under 13 so at least Poppy lived longer than might have been expected. In spring this year she almost lost her ability to walk and we came to terms with the idea that she didn't have long left. But she still wanted to eat, still wagged her tail when we came in and recovered enough to be able to get up and down the stairs, jump on the furniture and take us out for modest walks. Then, about 5 weeks ago she practically stopped eating. So, rather than let her starve herself to death, we decided to help her on her way.

Poppy: July? 2001 - 2/10/2014

Just down the coast from us in Filey the old county boundary between the East and the North Ridings of Yorkshire used to run down a valley that ends up near the Coble landing (the place where fishing boats are hauled up off the beach). The town is on the south side of this valley and the parish church on the north. So the euphemism for a death used to be "He's gone tut North Riding". Poppy has now gone up the garden and is buried among the fruit trees.

Over the past two weeks my memories of her have drifted back in time from the wasted figure she became to the lithe friendly bundle of muscle that she once was. We got her from the family of one of my youngest son's friends when she was about 6 months old - "Can we have Sarah's dog, I'll take her for walks?" - and when she was little they'd point her at people on the beach 200-300m away and let her go. She'd  then hurtle off towards them and, before she learnt to make a last minute step to one side, often collide with her target. Racing whippets cover 120 yards in a little under 7 seconds so she wasn't only much faster than Usain Bolt but faster than any human that's ever lived.

Last week I was out riding my old friend John's bike up on the North York Moors (John used to own Walton Street Cycles in Oxford and when he died in 2010 left me a bike in his will that I still think of as his) and recalled the time I'd tried to see how fast Poppy could run by getting her to run alongside me as I rode as fast as I could along a wide section of the Cinder Track. No matter how fast I went, there she'd be running alongside; not looking where she was going but instead looking up at me. As I remembered this it felt like I was riding with ghosts.

RIP Poppy, John and Stellar 

The asymmetry of hypocrisy

Most of us are conformists. We don't base our decisions on the best available facts and theories but copy other people instead. Now I might decide to copy the habits of a carpet seller in the souks of Morocco but, unless I happened to live there, this would simply mark me out as weird. A safer bet would be to copy the people like me who live nearby. That way I don't get too many awkward questions about why I'm doing what I'm doing because they're doing it too.

But, this is not a reliable way to get knowledge about the world. Just because everyone around you says that A is B doesn't mean that it is, it simply means that that's what the people around you say. Go somewhere else, like that souk in Morocco, and they'll be equally convinced that it isn't. 

For a culture to be stable I suspect it's important that most people try to make the effort to fit in without challenging the underlying assumptions of the group. But when that culture faces a challenge, and needs to stop doing some of the things it has been and start doing some others instead, this habit of conformity becomes a liability rather than an asset.

The obverse oft his tendency for individuals to fit in is that we tend to judge the person presenting the argument - to see if they fit in - rather than the argument itself. We question the character of the person rather than the details of the argument. Even I find it hard to give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt and take what he says seriously rather than simply saying to myself "well that's the sort of thing he would say"

Now, a common tactic that's used against someone presenting an argument we'd rather not agree with is to accuse them of hypocrisy. Though sometimes this clearly doesn't work - How can you say murder's wrong when you've already gone and murdered someone? - a lot of the time it does. How can you lecture me about emissions from aircraft when you went on holiday to Majorca? How can you say we ought to consume less when you've got an i-pad? 

Those of us attempting to come to terms with the environmental and ecological impacts of the way we live come up against accusations of hypocrisy almost every day. We might try hard to explain that what we're wanting are structural changes in our towns and cities, changes that would bring where we work closer to where we live, changes that would make it safer and more convenient to walk or cycle than to take the car, but the charges of hypocrisy stick.

But, if you were a member of the Selfish Greedy Party and believed that we're all simply in it for ourselves, and that everyone who didn't was simply trying to excuse their own failure, then it would be very hard to ever be accused of hypocrisy. Even then you could excuse the odd random act of kindness as really being made out of self interest, as indeed, you'd no doubt argue, are all of those made by everyone else.

So, whilst being a hypocrite may not be quite the best thing to be its probably better than not being able to be one at all.

H 982 FKL

I was living and working in the United States when Margaret Thatcher went to war with Argentina over what we call the Falkland Islands and they call Las Malvinas. This meant that far from being exposed to the jingoism of home, the tearful crowds watching the ships of the Task Force set out from Portsmouth, I got my news from the studiedly neutral press and TV in the USA*. Even so, I still couldn't really believe that we'd got ourselves involved in a proper war. As far as I was concerned, notwithstanding the war in Korea which felt like unfinished business from the Second World War, we'd learnt our lesson and didn't do that sort of thing any more. Wrong again.

It can easily be argued that, but for the failure of someone in the Argentine air force to set the fuses of their bombs properly (so that they exploded before passing straight through the British ships that they'd dropped them on), this episode would have gone down as a great military disaster rather than a joyous military victory. A victory that turned Mrs T's fortunes around and saw her go from being the least popular Prime Minister in history to the triumphant victor at the next general election.

It could also be argued that the country which came out best from this post colonial scrap were the French whose anti-ship Exocet missiles could then be sold as "battle tested" without incurring the human and financial cost of actually going to war.

Thatcher's lesson was not lost on subsequent British Prime Ministers and for the subsequent decades they seem to have taken whatever opportunities they can to take those "difficult decisions" and send our boys off to fly the flag and fight against whoever's being portrayed as the latest threat to our way of life. 

As a one time great imperial power with an empire upon which the Sun, literally, never sets, it's an undeniable truth that most Brits are proud of our military history and, until recently, have tended to be wholeheartedly behind the projection of British military power. We like to see ourselves as the moral parties in any dispute, there to keep the peace rather than to conquer, and will happily contrast the discipline and good nature of our troops against the gung-ho intolerance of some of their international colleagues.

Now, whilst there is a lot of money to be made out of arms sales, many have argued that the economies of both the United states and the UK have become too entwined with the demands of what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. We've devoted too much of our manufacturing industry to the low volume but extremely high tech demands of the military rather than the slightly lower tech needs of the mass market. This may also explain the fact that although most Formula 1 cars are made in Britain, there isn't a single major UK owned motor manufacturer left. (BMW own Mini and Rolls Royce, VW own Bentley and Tata  - from India - own Jaguar/Land Rover)

Meanwhile, however, both the United States and the UK have been extremely successful in the projection of soft, cultural, power (music, films and television) and one of the most successful of these has been the UK TV programme "Top Gear". In the unlikely event that you haven't seen it this involves three middle aged men behaving like adolescents, playing pranks upon one another and getting generally over excited about motor cars.  As grown up adolescents, they spend a lot of time being scornful about people who aren't like them such as poor people (defined as those who can't afford proper cars) or anyone who displays any hint of concern about the environment.

Jeremy Clarkson, the lead presenter and millionaire owner of the production company,  is a provocative love/hate figure. He's had various run ins with the BBC over things that he's said on the programme (e.g a lazy characterisation of Mexicans that led to complaints from the Mexican embassy) and has apparently been told by the BBC that he's had his last chance and from now on has to be on his least offensive behaviour.

Those of you familiar with the UK will recognise this blog post title as a car number plate. Originally these were made up of three letters and three numbers - e.g. my mother's first car ( a Triumph Herald) was XDB 536 - but as the number of cars grew they needed to introduce more numbers. So, in the mid 1960s they used the same pattern but put an additional letter at the end which depended on the year of registration - e.g.her second car (a Vauxhall Viva) was DOO 629G - When these ran out as well and the pattern was reversed with the extra letter at the beginning - e.g. our current car ( a battered Peugeot 306 ) is V404 JBR - and since the start of the 21st Century there's been yet another system with letters, numbers and more letters in a pattern I can't be bothered to explain.

Top Gear is a repetitive sort of programme, same sorts of stories but with a slight twist each time. Every so often they get some old cars and go on an adventure abroad. Three adolescent men, each driving in separate cars accompanied, presumably, by a whole unseen fleet of production vehicles and mechanics. On the most recent trip, being filmed last week in Argentina, the car being driven by Mr Clarkson (an elderly Porsche 928) happened to have the number plate H982 FKL. After a few days filming it appears that a crowd of Argentinians decided that this number plate was a direct reference to the Falklands war. All you had to do was mentally edit the first sideways T out of the H and the plate clearly read 1982 FKL, a direct reference to the war in 1982. As a result, an angry crowd pelted the cars with stones and the presenters and crew were obliged to leave the country.

Now whilst this incident amuses those of us who don't like Clarkson, it had unexpected consequences at home. We were sat around the dinner table talking about the incident when I happened to disagree with one of my sons that the number plate couldn't have been a coincidence. His line was that Clarkson is so obviously a nasty piece of work that the chances of this happening by accident were so low as to be beyond reasonable doubt. My argument wasn't about Clarkson, though I did feel a certain discomfort in appearing to defend him, but about the nature of coincidence. It has to be admitted, no it doesn't but I will anyway, that I was merely thought to be being contrarian, and failing to accept the obvious evidence of obnoxious pranksterism, just for the sake of it. 

So, because I really didn't get the chance at the time, here's the brief argument about coincidence. Whilst a coincidence occurs whenever two things happen at the same time we don't normally label those with an obvious causal link as coincidences. e.g. the fact that it's rainy and cloudy at the same time wouldn't normally be labelled a coincidence. So, for a pair of events to be labelled a coincidence they have to happen at the same time but without any obvious causal link. But, unlikely things happen all the time and I would argue that whilst we're good at spotting the coincidences, the unlikely couplings, of events that do occur together we're not very good at noticing the vast number of unlikely couplings that don't. For example, if you were told that someone had tossed a coin and had a run of 50 heads in a row your judgement of whether or not the coin was biased would, I hope, depend on whether the coin had just been tossed 50 times or these 50 heads came in a run of 50 million tosses. In the language of probability, in order to assess the probability of an unlikely event you need to know the sample space. So, whilst any individual coincidence might be unlikely the chances of some sort of coincidence are not.

In this case, unless the number plate was deliberately changed after purchase, the real coincidence lies in the fact that a second hand car of roughly the sort they were looking for, a cheap second hand sports car, just happened to have a number plate that could be interpreted as a slight to Argentina. If the producers really did wander around second hand car lots, or even trail the internet, in the hope of coming up with something that might be seen to be offensive, I'd be really surprised; if only because the argument alleging it wasn't a coincidence hinges on the unlikelihood of getting this particular number and even Top Gear can't waste researchers time looking for the almost impossible. But, when they did buy the car I can imagine that they might well have had a quick chuckle at the "coincidence" and then simply decided to carry on with their excuse already in the bag.

*It later turned out that whilst for sensible geopolitical reasons, i.e not wanting to piss off too many people in South America, the USA claimed to be neutral, they were in fact supplying the British with a great deal of military intelligence (which though I'd like it to be an oxymoron probably isn't)

Stay in or drive

When faced with a difficult hypothesis in maths or physics there's a long tradition of simply turning it on its head, assuming the opposite, and then seeing what happens. For example, Galileo used the idea of dropping different sized cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to illustrate his hypothesis that all objects, no matter what their mass, fall at the same rate. With the equipment available at the time this would actually have been a very difficult experiment to do  - analogous to the tightest off side decision a referee's assistant has ever had to make - and subject to far too much human error. In reality, he did do practical timing experiments but these were made on balls rolling down slopes (to slow everything down) and he measured the different distances traveled in equal times by using bells that could be positioned at different points along the track. By adjusting their positions he could make them sound at equal musical intervals and then work out how they were speeding up. 

But, the real experiment was carried out in his head. Suppose, he thought, large bodies really did accelerate faster than small ones. If you made a combined body made of a small one attached to a large one with a piece of string and then dropped it, the large body would be held back by the smaller body and hence the combined body - which is even larger than the large body - would fall slower than the large body by itself. This contradicts the original assumption and thereby proves it wrong.

A similar trick is often played in maths. For example the proof that the square root of 2 is an irrational number - cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers (e.g. p/q) - involves the assumption that it can followed by a little bit of algebra which ends up contradicting the assumption. This sort of argument is given the glorious name of "reductio ad absurdam".

So, you'll have to forgive me for shifting this idea to a completely different context. 

Recent survey work carried out by Sport England and published by Public Health England suggests that in North Yorkshire only 25% of those aged 40 to 79 year take the minimum recommended amount of physical activity. Since this amounts to just 150 minutes a week (half an hour a day on five days out of seven) of the sort of exercise that tickles up your heart rate or makes you aware of having to breathe, instead of trying to think why the vast majority are so inactive I wondered what I'd have to do to join them in their inactivity.

I live in a small town (60,000 people in winter about 100,000 in the summer) about 15 minutes walk from the town centre. 3 or 4 times a week, I'll walk into town, or across to the other side and almost everyday I'll cycle for half an hour or so on my way to pick up heavy shopping or attend meetings. In addition, I frequently head off for an hour or so into the local countryside. So, as you can see, even without the recreational trips into the countryside, let alone my habits of running up stairs, sawing timber, mowing the grass or clipping the hedges - all by hand - I'd have trouble making the cut.

I could, of course, stay in and simply fail to get the things that need doing done - which wouldn't please the rest of my household - or do them by walking so slowly so that I don't raise my heart rate. You've seen this sort of walking. For men it usually involves thrusting your hands in your trouser pockets and then swinging from the hips. Unfortunately slow walking, which in days long past I'd be forced to practice on demonstrations, makes my lower back hurt. Or I could walk slowly to the bus stop and then take the short bus ride into town; though that would demand enormous patience to stop myself from simply walking off. So, there's probably no practical alternative but to pick up those car keys, take the car and drive.

Oh, and is that the dog asking for a walk....

Lardbuckets and Tossmobiles

I behaved badly the other day. It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last, but I've discovered that I can make the most of it if afterwards I wallow in a little puddle of regret.

I was taking the long route to the shops, and doing a few circuits of Oliver's Mount, when I rounded a bend on the top circuit to find the road effectively blocked by a parked car with it's door wide open while the driver chatted to a man standing in the road nearby. It was clearly a very important car - low, shiny and with personalised number plates - and the man standing nearby looked as though he was being duly impressed. Meanwhile, I'd just got to one of the good bits in Beethoven's 6th Symphony and really couldn't be bothered to stop, pull out my earphones and politely ask if they'd mind moving out of the way. Instead, in the second or so it took to assess the situation I thought "f**k it, the standing man is so in rapture to the shiny motor car that he's not going to move any closer too it" and, without any warning, just went straight through the gap.

Luckily I got away with it, but one of the things about cycling, or walking, is that it gives you time to think and as I rode on I began to regret what I'd done and tried to figure out why I'd done it. To cut a long story short - see Situational or Dispositional to get the gist - I was responding to the car rather than to the people who were associated with it. It could have been, for example, that the car was simply being tested as a favour to the real owner and that the driver and his conversant wouldn't normally be seen dead in such a vehicle*. But at the time my imagination didn't stretch quite that far and, in all probability, the person driving the car was the owner and part of the reason for owning it, along with the personalised number plates, was as a status symbol. So, I hope he'll forgive me if I was wrong but there is every reason to suppose that I wasn't.

A recent report suggests that, despite the fact that for the last decade that the BMI (body mass index) of the average American has been stable, their waistlines are still expanding. Now you might think that the owners of large bellies would try to avoid drawing attention to them. Wearing Lycra, for example, you'd think would be a no no. But I wonder how many of them have noticed that, from the perspective of a pedestrian or a passing cyclist, modern cars with their aerodynamic sloping windscreens actually provide a perfect display area for, what a friend from Ghana in his West African way refers to as,  their responsible bellies. 

A few years ago the then prominent Labour politician Roy Hattersley withdrew at the last minute from a popular satirical TV program "Have I got News for You" . Because they couldn't get a substitute at such short notice, and because he's a bit overweight, they chose to replace him with a tub of lard. So now, when I'm getting grumpy with the traffic, I tend to refer to certain types of cars - usually inflated 4 x 4 s that have never had a bale of straw or a sick sheep thrown, I mean delicately placed, in the back - as Lardbuckets and the sort of car I encountered on The Mount as a Tossmobile. (those unfamiliar with UK slang see Tosser )

I prefer to think of the use of these terms simply as ways of relieving stress rather than as wholehearted value judgements. You, of course, are entitled to think as you please.

Photo courtesy of the Richardsons Cycles web site

(they have not endorsed the terms used in this blog)

*Among the many tasteless jokes that circulated after the Princess of Wales' death in 1997 was "What's the difference between a Mercedes and a Lada? " "Princess Diana wouldn't be seen dead in the back of a Lada"