Duck House Duck HouseTaken June 9, 2010 at 4:17 pm Canal Boat Isabella Kennet & Avon Canal Canal Boat Isabella Kennet & Avon CanalTaken June 10, 2010 at 2:24 pm Pumping Station Pumping StationTaken June 11, 2010 at 12:56 pm Hungerford Fete Hungerford FeteTaken June 12, 2010 at 1:00 pm Small Pond Lilly Small Pond LillyTaken June 18, 2010 at 3:53 pm via posterousThanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogtime capsule June 8th to June 22nd, 2010Related posts:Photo time capsule from May 8th to May 22nd 2010time capsule from May 25th to June 8th, 2010Canal Boat Holidays
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
time capsule June 8th to June 22nd, 2010
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/06/15/time-capsule-june-8th-to-june-22nd-2010
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June 15 2011, 5:01am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Seasonal water metering is seen as a con by consumers, study finds
Public anger grows over proposed seasonal water tariffs, as utility companies look for ways to save the UK’s supply
This article titled “Seasonal water metering is seen as a con by consumers, study finds” was written by Jamie Doward and Mario Ledwith, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.06 UTC The race to provide Britain with a sustainable water supply is already generating the first of what is likely to be a long list of controversies. As the UK basks in temperatures that put Athens in the shade and with rivers already running low, utility companies are under increasing pressure to preserve water. But the most comprehensive study of its kind suggests the leading option for ensuring the UK enjoys a sustainable water supply – metering – is hitting the poorest hardest and is viewed with suspicion by consumers who believe it is a ruse by utility companies to increase their profits. The study by Wessex Water, which supplies water to more than one million households in the west country, found the introduction of meters reduced customer demand by 17%, higher than previous estimates. The reduction was even greater if the meters were tied to a tariff system that saw the price of water rise in the summer, an increasingly popular option being considered by the utility companies, but one which has caused widespread anger among consumers. The Wessex study, the largest since metering was introduced 20 years ago, found 15% of customers saw their annual bills rise by more than £100 after flat-rate metered systems were installed. A quarter of the poorest customers saw their bills increase by more than £50. Phil Wickens, tariffs manager at Wessex Water, acknowledged his company had one of the highest water rates in the UK, but said that it was vital the industry introduced a new charging system if the UK was to have a sustainable supply. “We want a charging system that gives us the ability to meet future challenges in the long term,” Wickens said. “Climate change and population growth are going to place pressure on the need for increased investment. In order for us to secure that investment we really need all of our customers to be willing and able to pay their bills. There is a commercial incentive for raising these issues now.” Household water bills have increased by more than 50% in real terms since 1989, partly due to investment costs. But the financial burden on customers is becoming a key issue, with an increasing number refusing to pay their bills. Wessex estimates its underlying bad debt has doubled over the past decade, with the figure expected to rise further given economic conditions. It is estimated that the average customer now pays an extra £12 a year to cover unpaid water bills. Experts suggest establishing a fair charging system is vital if more schemes, such as the new £270m Thames Water desalination plant that filters salt from water in the Thames estuary, are to get the go-ahead. A failure to address water sustainability could have serious repercussions for the UK. The current spell of hot weather has already triggered warnings that farmers in some regions will have to limit their use of water. Several rivers in England and Wales are reportedly at “exceptionally low” levels, raising fears there will be a need for hosepipe bans. The Environment Agency said two months of unusually dry weather has left 11 rivers at extremely low levels of the kind seen only once every 20 years. The government is currently consulting on water sustainability, and environment minister Caroline Spelman is reportedly in favour of metering as a key part of its response. All new homes built since 1989 have had to be fitted with water meters, and an increasing number of people opt for them. Just under half of all UK customers now have a water meter, and it is predicted that all households will have one fitted in the future. But the shift to metering has prompted concern among charities. The Fairness on Tap (FoT) coalition – made up of 12 leading environmental organisations, including the WWF and the National Trust – is calling for a national switch to water metering. The coalition claims the current system of water charging is outdated, unfair and encourages wastage, with many households paying a flat “all you can use” charge, giving them no incentive to be water-efficient. However, the previous charging system, with water bills linked to the rateable values of homes, protected the poorest in society from excessively high bills. “The industry has been moving from a system based on rateable values that were set as part of local authority charging back in the late 80s,” Wickens said. “Lower income customers were paying less than higher income customers, but as we are gradually moving towards metered charging that social protection is winding out.” Creating a fairer charging system has seen some water companies experiment with higher charges in the summer. The option, being tested in more than 1,000 homes by Wessex, has resulted in a “step change” in consumer behaviour, says the company. Wickens said: “Higher income customers with bigger gardens end up paying a fairer chunk than lower income customers.” The new form of charging is likely to trigger animosity among households in the “squeezed middle”, who may fear they will be hit disproportionately. However, the Wessex study found almost all customers opposed to seasonal tariffs. “Customers are cynical about companies changing the way they are charged; they assume it’s about making money, like travel companies charging more on holidays, but in our case it isn’t,” Wickens said. “Even if we had a dry summer and generated more income, the regulator takes that money off us.”
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Related posts:‘Water poverty’ to rise in the UK as scarcity pushes up bills Superbug gene rife in Delhi water supply What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water
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April 26 2011, 11:01am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam
I don’t know what class will be protesting today – squeezed, strugglers. But will they resist the fiction that class no long matters? If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam.
This article titled “If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam” was written by Suzanne Moore, for The Guardian on Saturday 26th March 2011 09.00 UTC My cafetiere is pink. Shocking pink. I am shocked myself, as I reckon now I must be the most middle-class person ever to have lived. For this is one of the ways we now reckon class. According to pollsters. So disturbed was I that I checked its make. Boden? Aaaah! No, Bodum, and I need glasses. This is not product placement by the way, I am simply trying to place myself in class terms. If class is now deemed to be about what one consumes as opposed to being about what one produces, I might as well put it out there: my coffee maker. Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my penchant for vividly coloured kitchenware. Posher friends, or at least some people who claim to know about food, scoff at my cafetiere and say I should make coffee in those proper French metal things, and they are probably right and they shall inherit the land. I won’t inherit the land, nor, I imagine, will the classes who drink instant coffee. They probably don’t deserve to. I mean, have they no aspirations, these non-real-coffee-drinking low-lifes? They are probably the same type of people whose children don’t read 50 books a year, I bet. Really, there is no hope. Seven out of 10 people now define themselves as middle class, so we may just look up or down on the three who don’t. Presumably they just tick the box marked “non–dom” or “can’t be arsed”. Who is to know? But really there is more to it than cappuccinos. I am shocked at the bloodless coup that has been achieved here. As social mobility has faltered over the last 20 years, we have the majority of people “self-certifying” as middle class. Certified is the right word, if you ask me. Delusions of grandeur are one thing. Delusions of being middle class when you earn less than the average income, and are indeed struggling, may suggest the class war is not going that well. It’s really difficult maintaining a class war when everyone says that they are on the same side. And believe me, I try. I hate to argue with Lady Gaga (deeply middle class) but I wasn’t Born This Way. I was born another way and got on and got out somehow. My cohort is probably the last generation to achieve real social mobility. And if you now look at the studies, despite the myth constantly repeated, it’s not grammar schools that made the difference. To change one’s class position leaves one in a kind of no-man’s land, unable to share the nostalgia for the good old working classes, but always willing and able to rubbish one’s new milieu. Much about working-class life is deathly dull and about anaesthetising oneself into numbing stupidity. The nobility of manual work was a necessary fiction. No man would live half their lives underground if they had another choice. No woman now happily gets up in the middle of the night and leaves her children to go and clean office floors. What has happened is that the main political parties cottoned on to the idea of aspiration being a vote-winner exactly at the same time when those aspirations could not be met for many in a globalised economy. Home-owning, self-reliance, a decent job for life, nice holidays, a taste for authenticity and real “experiences” came to define us. What we bought, rather than what we produced, became our core identity. As any fule kno, or OK, any old Marxist, this is not what social class actually means. This is reducing class to the trivia of etiquette and consumer power. The reality has been that as we produce fewer and fewer goods, our patterns of employment have become more haphazard and confused across the class spectrum. People on incredibly low wages are still required to look smart, present immaculate CVs and be respectful, even when on hideously short-term contracts. This may make them “feel” middle class. Alongside this, every politician has tried to wrap us up in some warm, fuzzy blanket of uniform classlessness. Last year Gordon Brown was promising that Labour would create “more middle-class jobs than ever”, and would also represent “the mainstream majority”. What on earth did this mean? Is it any more true than Osborne’s more obvious lie, “We’re all in this together”? The coercion of smooth, achievable middle classness was brought about under New Labour. Triangulation, remember, meant there need be no more class conflict or fights between workers and bosses. We were just floating in a perfectly harmonious world where things could only get better. The real working class remained problematic, and the workless morphed into what we now call the underclass. When Charles Murray started using that word in the mid-90s we reeled. The poor were not just people, he said, who didn’t have money, they were also morally impoverished. Now we use that word and others like it all the time: Chavs, “urban”, people from estates. Look at these people and their vulgar desire for instant gratification. Even instant coffee. Middle-class “values”, on the other hand, mean what? Some idea of restraint, of naturally knowing what’s good and being prepared to work for it. And, er, having a Ford Focus. If you don’t mind being defined by vote-hungry politicians or people who want to sell you stuff, then go for it! But I am sorry to say that when you are earning less than the average wage, even though your work may be sedentary rather than manual, don’t kid yourself, people. This is a massive scam, this horrible mutation of all into some homogenised vision of middle-classness. The old word for it was hegemony. Which, I can see, is as about as fashionable as class war. But when Gramsci described a culture in which the ruling class “persuades” the lower classes to accept its values, he could have had little idea of how parties of “the left” would also bring this about. But the rush for the centre ground means just that. The old collectivities of unions or the bonds of manual work have given way to individual fear and loathing in the workplace. Technology means outsourcing, and has been a liberation for some, but for others it means total loss of autonomy, and a working life that is under constant observation. The problem now is that mere aspiration, middle-class or not, is not enough. As if it ever was. The much-derided aspiration of the young – to become famous without necessarily having any talent – is no less nutty than many current political aspirations. We are to have growth without investment. Daft. We are all to stand tall and proud while we lop off the limbs of the public sector. Crazy. I don’t know what class of people will be protesting today. They may well be squeezed. Strugglers, downsizers. Or not from any of these marketing categories. They may simply be registering the fact that their individual interests are actually not those of the ruling class. Some may think they are middle class, and some indeed may be. Whether they resist the fiction that class no longer matters is surely much more significant than how they drink their coffee. For these new decaffeinated, tepid definitions of class are nothing like the real thing. And certainly not for the likes of us.
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March 26 2011, 8:48am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Will the 2012 Olympics be a sell out?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/24/will-the-2012-olympics-be-a-sell-out
Now the London 2012 Olympic Games tickets have been on sale for a week, the success of the event in London will be determined by the sports fans.
This article titled “Will the 2012 Olympics be a sell out?” was written by Owen Gibson, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 11.21 UTC It is an extraordinary ticketing process in more ways than one. Ten days into the application process for 6.6m of the 8.8m tickets to the biggest sporting event ever to hit these shores and it remains hard to precisely calibrate the level of enthusiasm for being there. The keenest have constructed elaborate spreadsheets and affixed colour coded Post-it notes to their already dog eared Guardian guides as they try and spread their bets between events they are desperate to see and their chances of getting the hottest tickets (opening and closing ceremonies, velodrome, evening athletics sessions among them). For others, next August still feels like a long way away – particularly if there are more pressing financial concerns. My barber reckons he’ll leave it until closer to the time and see what’s left, our childminder has become so used to picking up tickets at the last minute from eBay or Viagogo that she too can’t see the point in shelling out more than a year before the Games. For some football fans, there’s the annual debate about whether to renew their season ticket to be had first, for others a discussion about whether to forego the family holiday in favour of the Games. The fact that Locog has promised a ticket resale system has perhaps encouraged those inclined to wait it out. Locog has successfully communicated the “marathon not a sprint” message to avoid a rush on the first day that applications opened – but could be a victim of its own success if people translate that as a signal not to hurry at all. Expect the reminders about this being the best chance to secure tickets for the events you really want to see to increase in frequency as the closing date on April 26 approaches. For the media too, there seems to be uncertainty about how to judge success. The usual media narrative around the sale of tickets for big events (Glastonbury, Take That, Champions League final) runs like this: huge hype around the onsale date, followed by a mad rush, creaking technology and a spate of stories about tickets being sold for exhorbitant sums and online scams. Because this process is so different, we have instead already seen the first stories hinting that sales have been “steady” rather than spectacular. In truth, it is hard to criticise Locog for doing exactly what they said they would do – give people time to find their way through a complex process. During this period of stasis, Locog – which can monitor what registered users are doing – believes many people are still calculating their options and trying different combinations of tickets in their online shopping baskets before hitting the buy button. Such is the scale of the task – 645 sessions across 26 sports at five main price points – that it was never going to be simple. Locog deserves huge credit for thinking long and hard about how to balance the need to raise the £2bn required to stage the Games with its promise to make it as accessible as possible. The eye watering prices for the most expensive (including that £2012 opening ceremony ticket) were justified on the basis that it was better for that money to flow to Locog, where it could subsidise cheaper price points, than touts who would mark them up anyway. But even given the number of £20 tickets (2.5m), the pay your age scheme, the concessions for over 60s and the free tickets for some school kids there is no getting away from the fact that the sums involved soon add up – particularly if you are buying for a whole family, and particularly if you are coming from outside London. There are already some grumbles about the high prices of the packages being sold through Thomas Cook and for all the entreaties from Locog and the Mayor to the hotel industry, staying in London during the Games was never going to be cheap. Which? has also raised concerns about the fact that money could come out of ticket buyers accounts on May 10 but it could be as late as June 24 before they are told which tickets they have. For most, it is likely to be a big outlay in one go. And while some have alighted upon the solution of applying for a Visa card with an interest free period to spread the cost, it is something of a surprise that Locog have not put in a place a more formal scheme to pay in installments. While reluctant to go into detail about levels of demand for individual sports and sessions, organisers say they are pleased with the level of steady engagement and that the spikes of demand are largely where you would expect them to be. Sports that are less familiar, but on the Olympic Park, are unlikely to prove too difficult to shift as people look for a relatively cost effective way of grabbing a slice of the atmosphere. More problematic could be the events at the cavernous Excel. And there must be a nagging fear that the there is a band of mid range tickets – those around £300 that are not the prized blue riband ones that people will want at all costs, nor the relatively cheap ones that will give you a slice of the experience – that will prove most difficult to shift. Somewhat ironically, given the extent to which it dominates media coverage and conversation in this country, football is likely to give organisers the biggest headache. With more than a million tickets to sell to a population who perhaps see the Olympics as an antidote to football’s dominance for the rest of the sporting calendar, just a few weeks after Euro 2012, it is a big ask. Bear in mind too that the Olympics (under 23 with a handful of over age players) is not the pinnacle of achievement as it is for most other sports, while the political issues surrounding the British team appear endlessly intractable. And while 2012 represents a huge opportunity for women’s football in this country if organisers can fill the Ricoh Stadium in Coventry or St James’ Park to see, say the Japanese women’s team take on the Swedes on a night when Team GB is going for gold elsewhere the Locog marketing and ticketing gurus will deserve every one of the plaudits that will flow their way. Locog chief executive Paul Deighton has set a high bar by promising to marry an electric atmosphere with full stands in all venues, while selling out all tickets. It is something that has never been achieved in recent Games. He has the British love of sport and major events of any kind on his side. But our natural cynicism and tendency to wait until the last minute might yet leave him with some nervous moments.
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March 24 2011, 1:28pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
London 2012 Olympics countdown clock stops
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/15/london-2012-olympics-countdown-clock-stops
I was in Trafalgar Square yesterday, but that was before the unveiling ceremony of the countdown clock for the London 2012 Olympic Games. It all looked like and advertisement for Omega, buts as it turns out, not a very good one perhaps.
2012 Olympics countdown clock Trafalgar square London
This article titled “London 2012 Olympics countdown clock stops” was written by Owen Gibson, sports news correspondent, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 15th March 2011 15.24 UTC It was launched in a blaze of sparklers by Lord Coe, London Mayor Boris Johnson and potential London 2012 gold medallist Jessica Ennis. But on the day Olympic tickets went on sale, organisers suffered a major embarrassment as their official countdown clock stopped. The timepiece, which has become a traditional fixture for Olympic host cities and is made by sponsor Omega, stalled reading 500 days, seven hours and 56 seconds to go until the opening ceremony. The 6.5m-high structure, which is in a prominent position in Trafalgar Square, was launched on Monday night at an event hosted by Clare Balding. It was unveiled by four Olympic gold medallists from Team GB – rowers Pete Reed and Andy Hodge and sailors Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson. “The launch of the Omega countdown clock is an important milestone for any Olympic Games and is something of a tradition within the Olympic movement,” said Locog chairman Lord Coe before the launch. “It will be a daily and hourly reminder to everyone who visits Trafalgar Square that the countdown to the start of London 2012 has well and truly begun and that the greatest show on earth is soon coming to our country.” Omega says it is not immediately apparent what has caused the problem. In a case of life imitating art the BBC on Monday night launched a Thick of It style mockumentary, Twenty Twelve, which featured a PR farrago around a countdown clock. A spokeswoman for Omega said: “‘We are obviously very disappointed that the clock has suffered this technical issue. The Omega London 2012 countdown clock was developed by our experts and fully tested ahead of the launch in Trafalgar Square. “We are currently looking into why this happened and expect to have the clock functioning as normal as soon as possible.”
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March 15 2011, 10:39am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/20/apples-slice-makes-the-ipad-a-bad-deal-for-newspapers
Well you’d think they’d be glad of 70% of something rather than 100% of nothing? This article titled “Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers” was written by Peter Preston, for The Observer on Sunday 20th February 2011 00.05 UTC It’s a straightforward transaction. You produce your newspaper priced at £1. Distributing and selling it – via wholesalers and retailers – takes maybe 33p of that. There’s only 67p a time left to pay for the newsprint and ink you need, plus staff wages, heat, light and the usual stuff. And there’s one added burden. Unless readers are signed up to buy their copies by subscription, you don’t know who they are. You can’t sell holidays or books to them. You can’t market lists of true believers. Conventional news-vending is fatally blind. Now see a digital nirvana on the horizon. Here’s Apple selling 40m iPads this year. Put your paper on an app at an iTunes store and you can hope, gradually, to leave all the problems of print behind. Except that, as of last week, Apple has imposed a new regime for selling from its tuneful store: it wants 30% of everything. Worse, it will only allow subscribers to sign on for marketing purposes – and most, inevitably, won’t. Compared with print, then, distributing and selling your iPad version of a £1 paper will cost only 3p or so less a copy – and you still won’t know the names of those who are buying and reading you. Only Apple will be able to pluck fruit from that particular tree. Good dead, bad deal? Lousy deal on first sight. Whereupon Google promptly launched its own One Pass pricing system for publishers – taking only 10p in the pound and leaving papers and magazines in control of readership lists. A pretty effective response, you’d think: a riposte to make Apple crumble. There’s certainly bargaining leverage here – but don’t get carried away. Some papers, like the Mail, have signed up for possible One Pass use already. But nobody will be able to put together comprehensive, overall figures for advertisers citing a single incontrovertible system while the iPad keeps user dominance over competitors such as Google’s Android system, with its different apps. It’s Godzilla versus King Kong in cyberspace. The sum of all fears – Apple moving from a 30% to 50% cut, for instance – is stark. But rather less terrifying versions don’t exactly bring much cheer, either. You need to produce print papers, website and smartphone versions, an iPad app and an Android app. All work, cost and cash. You need to market your paper in an online environment where hundreds of news sources are struggling for a foothold: more big bucks. And what have you got when you add up the figures at the end of a long, sweaty day? Not profits restored by the wonders of hi-tech. Just another puddle of red ink.
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February 20 2011, 9:31am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Theatre Breaks by Coach
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/10/26/theatre-breaks-by-coach
I tend to bang on about rail travel as preferable to driving, but theatre breaks by coach offer a different kind of experience altogether. People over a certain age may well have bad memories of coach journeys back in the bad old days when there were no onboard facilities, long uncomfortable journeys around bendy trunk roads with groups of badly behaved people and children. I know I do. But modern coaches have air conditioning, plush comfortable seating, traffic news by radio and sat nav, personal entertainment and are a fast and relaxing way to travel hundreds of miles from city centre to city centre. When you arrive in London on a theatre break by coach, you are not left to yourself to find the hotel and the theatre because you are part of a coach party who are all going to the same show and you usually get picked up outside the theatre by the coach which then drives you all directly to the hotel after the show. That can make the whole stopover a lot more manageable for some people. Theatre Breaks by Coach - Theatre Breaks Magazine Another thing I’m really excited about being able to offer now that we have Coach Theatre Breaks available through the Magazine Readers Offers is the opportunity to book a theatre break for one. Yes, there is a single room supplement to cover the extra hotel costs, but it’s a lot better than being confronted with a booking form that asks you to select the number of tickets required starting at two! And if you go on a coach trip to London’s West End as a single person then you have the perfect choice as to whether you want to keep yourself to yourself or socialise a bit with other people who are coming from the same town as yourself and will be around at the hotel and on the coach journey home again after having seen the same show.
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October 26 2010, 5:55am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Canal Boat Holidays
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/06/27/canal-boat-holidays
Previous Canal Boat Holidays I’ve been going on canal boat holidays since a child, but none in the last few years and it has been long overdue to do something about that. The first trip I went on was a little Thames cruiser boat with my parents, before the locks were all manned. Then I went on a narrow boat with a youth club and years later took my own children on narrowboats and Norfolk broads cruisers. Ideally, I would like to spend spend summer months continuous cruising around the inland waterways of England and Wales. That’s part of the Location Independent Living idea but there are several steps which need to be taken first, and one of them was to take a gentle introduction to the joys of boating by way of a short canal boat holiday on the Kennet & Avon canal in rural Wiltshire, perfect for weekend breaks, on board the hotel boat Isabella Canal Boat Holiday Weekend Pictures
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- boat
- holiday
- cruise
- Location Independent
- weekend breaks
- England
- canal
- avon
- kennet
- holidays
- boats
- tunnel
- weekend
June 27 2010, 2:11am | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Canal boat holidays - Kennet and Avon canal - Bruce Tunnel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUXBwjPT4gc&feature=youtube_gdata
June 15 2010, 4:26am | Comments »
1
