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Off To See The Witches

Friday, just after one. Wind and rain outside my window. Good! I was getting sick of that dry barren cold weather, it had such a mean-spirited feel. Off to see the witches tonight, for my birthday treat, only about nine years after Amy Rowan (Rowan-Buckley now) recommended Wicked so highly. My first Modern Musical! I don't usually move so fast in embracing new trends, it's the effect of having walked past the Apollo at Victoria so often, going up and down to London. (Gabriel thought I should prefer Woman on the Verge, but that was too much of a leap into the unknown).

My Fracking Round Up

A lot's been stirring the pot since I last wrote about fracking. The New York State ban. The bumpy progress of the Infrastructure Bill. which became law yesterday. The oil price collapse, the troubles in the North Sea. Wales and Scotland both voting for a moratorium on the dirty business. But what exactly did we end up with, after all the excitement about a proposed entire UK moratorium (never going to happen!); the infamous change in the trespass laws, with Kramer's nasty addition; the pressure put on Labour by the major unions, not to support the moratorium; the apparent "reprieve at the foot of the gallows" for our National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Sites of Special Scientific Interest?

Not a lot of joy I'm afraid. The protection for Protected Sites clawed back, in a horrible amendment that says fracking wells can crowd around the gates of any National Park, AONB, SSSI (imagine that effect on the beauty and tranquillity, eh?) and horizontal drilling can just ignore the whole idea of protection . . .

Why is this still happening? The extractable reserves in the UK, where they exist, are, at the most optimistic estimate, piddling in terms of our future energy needs, and everybody in the business knows it. You really want to understand why Mr Francis Egan, Mr Greg Davies and their cronies are still going to be allowed to make a vile mess of our countryside, when everything in the world says no, and the current price of oil makes their alleged, potential, distant product look absolutely lunatic? Wilful ignorance accounts for a lot, of course. The house is on fire and we know it, but we won't get out of bed until the flames are licking our pillows. But there are other factors. Study this diagram, which puts together some facts that should be better known:

http://www.frackfreesussex.co.uk/corruption-vested-interest

But there's the cheap oil factor, which may not last, but it might last long enough. And there's the tide of climate change action, creeping up. Wait and see.

Watching and not-watching

I like Wolf Hall. I tried the book and gave it up, it was just too much like reading A Place Of Greater Safety (about Danton, and I liked it), all over again. Same type historical man-mountain main character, same tone, same prose, same everything. But it's like Harry Potter, much better on screen. Thomas More's very good, waspish, cranky, monster of integrity. Cardinal Wolsley and Cromwell maybe a wee bit too cuddly? Haven't seen any heads roll yet, but it's got to start soon.

Broadchurch is just ridiculous tat.

Birdman I liked better than any other Inarritu movie I've seen, but that is not saying much (as I walked into the cinema I suddenly remembered having vowed never again, after finding Babel very irritating, but it wasn't that bad). Another of those luvvie movies. Give the guy an Oscar, he really gets us! Give him five Oscars!

Ex Machina I think I won't pay good money for.

Reading

Just come to the end of a trail I started following at Christmas; instigated by H is for Hawk (which turned out, oddly, to be mainly an extended, in depth review of T.H White's The Goshawk. It went from The Goshawk, to The Midnight Folk and The Box Of Delights (John Masefield, very old favourites of mine, clear precursors of T.H.White's The Sword In The Stone, and also, in the case of The Box of Delights, starring the great Ramon Llul (aka Cole Hawlings;then doubled back to The Heart Of Midlothian; where you will find the precursors of the witches and that excellent character the Rat, in the first and best of the Masefield stories (The Midnight Folk). The Sword In The Stone, to my surprise, stood up well in this august company. A fine lineage!

More on these later.

I'm now going to read The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, which Gabriel bought for me yesterday. Always meant to, never got further than the cookbook, which I have never yet used in anger, but it's interesting; esp. the Picasso Fish Dish, and other insights.

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