House of the future? Isn't it time we COP-ped on)

There follows an excerpt from my book: Where Do You Live? Urban Dwellings and Open Spaces, available on Amazon Kindle (ISBN 978 0 955941931)
"In 1976 the BBC ran a television series called House Of The Future. Though many of the details have flown my memory, I can still remember the half-hour instalments of every Sunday noontide as a team of builders and engineers built a house with cavity walls, solar panels on the roof and water-saving devices inside and out. Curiously, there wasn’t anything futuristic about the building itself; no rooftop helipads or space rocket landing areas. The series creators deliberately avoided architectural clichés and refused to pander to images from science fiction. This was a generic house that any family, anywhere, could build and live in. No doubt the energy-saving devices were a response to the four-fold increase in oil prices in the mid-1970s and the idea of saving water followed in the wake of the drought of 1976, but it matters not. The idea that the house of the future would not be the energy-hungry beast we had all become acquainted with, was born. Three decades on, this idea has come to fruition, albeit somewhat belatedly. Everywhere; governments, private companies, public authorities and individuals have taken on board that all new houses must be built with water and energy-saving devices, as a matter of course. It is even possible to add these devices to older buildings."
I published the book a decade ago, so it is now four decades from the screening of House of the Future. And the lessons learned are all the more resonant today. Isn't it time that governments, big buisnesses and power brokers everywhere, copped on? I rest my case.

Here comes Halloween....Halloween....Halloween....

Whenever I watch Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas - and I LOVE that movie - I always feel a sense of disappointment as the movie ends when Jack Skellington - The Pumpkin King - restores order and Christmas to the world. But then, I am among the minority who loves Halloween so much more than that other, bile-inducing festival of indulgence that happens later in the year. Halloween is a reminder that we all have a skeleton underneath our skins. Its occurrence at the end of October, when the year is growing old, is no accident. We need this annual convulse in the same way that the Mardi Gras occurs just before those weeks of po-faced penitence they call Lent. We all come from darkness and one day, we will return to it, too. Kitting out in a scary costume is a harmless masquerade, one that puts us in touch with this inevitability and our other, darker fears. Dressing up as a werewolf or in a skeleton suit allows us to externalise and release our fears in a benign and collective way. We need our intervals of darkness as much as day needs night, and summer needs winter; places of eternal summer do exist - I think they call them deserts? So, next weekend, as you enjoy the candied eyeballs and the witches’ fingers, let the darkness enfold you as relentlessly as you enjoy the blossoms in spring and the beach in summer. Have a wonderful and frightening time!

Super Sizzling Syzygy.....

Certainly, I am rather backward but when I first stumbled over this word, it sounded like a newly-branded energy drink. Or the name of a Czechoslovakian perfume. Or a strange skin disorder. Or yet another cute cartoon character launching a range of themed merchandise. Or one of those obscure political slogans that you see emblazoned across t-shirts, which keep everyone guessing without reaching any conclusions.
Wrong again. But now that I know what it means, I just can’t stop composing….night and day…..sun and moon...little and large...joy and sorrow….light and dark….boy and girl…..Tom and Jerry…..by the way, does anyone know how to pronounce the word?

The Bake-Off is Back

What with scientific Jurgen and engineering Giuseppe contending for the Bake Off prize, we have so much to look forward to. In the forthcoming weeks, I anticipate an Eiffel Tower of trifle, a research project of fruit tarts and plum puddings, and on savoury week, a probe into the bacteria that grows on varieties of cheese. In the meantime, we have so much to look forward to, landscapes of lemon meringue, castles of cake and chocolate, and seas of sponge topped with shortbread sail boats and waffle whales. All this amid the tears of joy and sorrow, cries of triumph and wails of despair at confections collapsing – or simply failing to impress the duo of judges. But what I love most are the antics of Noel and of the inimitable Matt – I just love that man - aah! My mouth is watering already.

OMG! I was on THAT...?

Several moons ago on this very site, I posted my account of the Vampire "jaw-dropping, heart-stopping, head-spinning, sense-dimming" experience at Chessington World of Adventures, one that rendered me a quivering wreck for years afterwards. Ever the glutton for punishment, I have just graduated from the child-oriented Chessington to the adolescent version, Thorpe Park. Well, I am quivering again. In a nutshell, Thorpe Park has more OMG! moments than an Indiana Jones movie. My experiences included the Tidal Wave “one of Europe’s tallest water rides” and The Swarm (see left) “reaches a top speed of 59 km an hour” and beginning to end is the “same length as 175 Great White sharks” - seriously, did anyone ever measure a Great White shark? I endured a roasting on the Nemesis Inferno which “has a section with a zero-g roll where riders become weightless” - no wonder I felt light-headed when back upon beloved terra firma. And they were not the scariest rides! I could have gotten on (but did not) The Colossus which “pulls 4.2 g’s of G-force on its riders”. Or The Saw which “has a vertical drop, plummeting you at an angle of 100 degrees down a 100ft drop”. And The Stealth is “the tallest ride at Thorpe Park, at a staggering 62.5 m tall”. Guh! Guh! Guh! Seriously though, why do we love being scared? Personally, I put it all down to Edmund Burke and his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published 1757, in which the good philosopher tells us, in so many words, why we, er, love being scared. I quote: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible object, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is feeling.” In summary, you only feel truly alive when you come close to losing it all. And in the tame West, we need our theme parks and petrifying roller coasters. With the holidays coming to a close, I return willingly to the slower, gentler death of everyday life.
(Thorpe Parke, Chertsey Road, Surrey, is open daily. All quotations taken from its publicity material.)

Let's twist again

Friend, I have never been a sportie. School games left me in a corner of a tarmac court, quivering least that terrifying phenomenon,
THE BALL, should fly in my direction. But right now, I am quivering with outrage at the conduct of the European Handball Federation over the dress code of a group of young Norwegian sports’ women. The EHF have fined the team, it seems, for wearing SHORTS on the beach handball arena, instead of bikini bottoms. I ask you: why have the members of the EHF gotten their underwear in a twist? Whatever the answer is: they get to wear their underwear as underwear, while the sports’ women are expected to wear their underwear as outer wear. Just imagine the furore if male footballers were expected to go on the pitch with their private members covered only in cod-pieces? Surely all that matters is that the handball team wear clothing that is uniform, comfortable and non-hampering, while playing? Right now, I stand in the sand with these feisty young women – so long as they don’t send THE BALL in my direction.

A Traveller in Time

During the 1970's, the BBC presented us with A Traveller In Time, a serialised drama to fit their afternoon children’s drama slot. With a name like that and the era it was broadcast in – that of Star Trek, Blake’s Seven, Dr Who – I expected to witness a hokum futuristic set peopled by humans in helmets and boiler suits, and other motifs of a now defunct space age, entertaining a lost denizen of the twentieth century. But, lo, what a surprise! A Traveller In Time, written by Alison Uttley, is the story of a teenage girl who lives in a relative’s country house while recovering from an illness. In and about the old farmhouse, she encounters people dressed in sixteenth-century clothing and soon realises she is drifting between a bygone time and the present day. The ‘historical’ people intrigue her and slowly, she pieces the puzzle together. She, the heroine, becomes the sometime companion of a group of people conspiring to free Mary Queen of Scots, imprisoned in a nearby castle. The story was beautifully filmed, the two eras enchantingly interwoven, the heroine sensitive to whichever century she happened to be in. She goes on helping the conspirators, being careful not to reveal what she knows about the eventual fate of the Queen of Scots. The drama became the highlight of my week, and I felt real loss when it was over. Alison Uttley was unusual in that she was born in 1884, and became the second woman to graduate from Manchester University, with a degree in physics. Uttley was intrigued by the idea of time travel, as many physicists still are. The novel was the result of this interest, combined with her fertile imagination and skill as a lyrical writer. Later in life, Uttley was to write stories for illustrated children’s books, creating characters like Little Grey Rabbit and Sam Pig. Happily she was with us until 1976, long enough to witness the triumph of the Apollo missions in space. What she would say to our slow progress in conquering the solar system, if she were here today, we can only imagine.