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Oxted: And Just One, Two more Things

The storm never got really strong here. It was sort of difficult to stay upright on the seafront, but the sea on a falling tide wasn't doing anything special yesterday, just churning. Today, drenching rain, and our outside drain is blocked again.

Oh, yes. One more, rather disconcerting, point from John Ashton:

• Hinkley Point delayed again, and the captain has jumped ship. It is vanishingly unlikely that any new Nuclear Power stations will be built in the foreseeable future.

• Biomass as our government interprets the term (ie massive power stations fed by imported wood-pellets) is unsustainable and impossible to scale-up.

• Carbon Capture Storage is a bust: not happening and not going to happen

The three pillars of David Cameron's COP21 deal (having ditched conventional renewables as politically insufferable) have fallen. It's now very probable that when the coal is dumped, the lights are going to go out. And a dead certainty (but this is my gloss btw) that the Green Party, the fracking movement and anyone else favouring the obvious and only workable solution (renewables) will be publicly shamed and blamed. See Jeremy Hunt's deft media campaign to wreck and then smear the NHS

And there's a video for you to watch, just to remind you, in all fairness, that David Cameron is not alone.



The COP21 You Didn't See


Reading

I just finished re-reading Flaubert's Trois Contes, in a French Paperback Classics edition with masses of academic notes. Fascinating. Did you know that Oscar Wilde wrote the play Salomé (that became the libretto for Rickard Strauss's opera Salomé), directly in french, specifically for Sarah Bernhardt in the role? I never knew that!

Now reading Delphine de Vigan's Rien ne s'Oppose a la Nuit, a Christmas present from Gabriel's Swiss girlfriend. Harrowing tale of a volatile, broken family past . . . Right up my street, and a whole lot easier reading than Flaubert's C19 fantastically exacting "simplicity" in those contes

And from my library books:

Sara Gran City of the Dead and The Bohemian Highway

I read the second of these two unusual whodunits first. The first one (City Of The Dead) is better, with a devastatingly effective venue in post-Katrina New Orleans I recommend them for the unusual post-punk setting, and the highly charged style but not to people sensitive to habitual drug use, notably cocaine. By the end of The Bohemian Highway I was saying to myself, if there's a third of these, which is strongly signalled, our "unique" raggedy hipster detective isn't going to have a nose left on her face.

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