Stern stuff

I've always liked spring evenings. Of course technically it isn't quite spring yet, not until the 21st. But it's a light early evening as I walk across the fields to the University, and it's about 6 degrees warmer than it has been. That is, it is about 6 degrees, and everything's no longer frozen. Birds are singing. Trees and grass smell of, well, trees and grass.

It was actually a bit of a gamble. I only heard about this evening's event yesterday, and hadn't realised until today that I'd be able to make it. Free tickets were available by phone or email. I emailed, and got no reply. Towards the end of the working day (4:30) I phoned too, but everybody in the Economics Department must have finished work early.

And can you blame them? Lord Stern (of Stern Review fame) had been invited to give a talk on his experiences at the infamous COP15 (that's Copenhagen climate talks to you and me). The fact that Lunchista had no ticket (free or otherwise) made me the official gatecrashing delegation, but I don't take up much room and I usually behave myself. In fact no-one was checking for tickets, and a handful of us late arrivals were quietly ushered in just as the Vice-Chancellor was finishing his introductory speech. Perfect.

The lighting (this "dramatic lighting from above" lark seems to be becoming fashionable) made Lord Stern's features look slightly Indian. I found myself wondering whether he, like Lunchista, had a slim Indian strand in his family tree, possibly dating back to some aristocratic liaison in those enlightened times before the Victorians started frowning on that sort of thing.

He lovingly described the characters, atmosphere, mistakes and successes of the Copenhagen talks, in particular how, because every decision had to be made unanimously, it reminded him of Student politics. Thinking back to when I was a student, many of our campus wannabe politicians were students of Economics, so that must have resonnated for practically everybody in the room. Somehow campus politics just didn't appeal as much to us Physicists, which perhaps explains a lot.

One of Copenhagen's successes, which I must admit had passed me by at the time, was the REDD anti-deforestation programme, by which countries with more trees than money can be bribed to keep their trees. The biggest failure, on the other hand, appeared to have been the idea of writing a "provisional" agreement in advance (with a view to saving time) which, naturally, offended every representative who wasn't directly involved in it. Oh well, you live and learn.

There followed lots of talk about future growth while reducing Carbon emissions. I wondered whether he'd ever had a chat with Prof Tim Jackson. There was even time for questions at the end: I would dearly have loved to ask about this but I felt I'd already pushed my luck a bit!

Put a spell on you

Quite a few "traditions", especially those involving people a lot younger than Lunchista, make their way from West to East across the Atlantic. You know, like Rock'n'Roll, Trick-or-Treat, and, erm, Spelling Bees. I'd never given any of this much thought until Lunchista fils came home from school one day proudly brandishing a letter which explained that he was on their school team for the Times Spelling Bee. Apparently they'd been doing practice rounds in class and he had turned out to be rather good at it.

Isn't life strange? Because Lunchista's spelling is absolutely appealing, and marvellous other half hails from a land where spelling simply isn't an issue. In fact if you think about it, most non-English speakers do: whatever their countries' other tribulations, they don't have the effects of 1066 and the Great Vowel Shift to deal with. Thank you Polyglot Vegetarian for an example of one such alphabet.

Parents were warmly invited, in fact encouraged, to come along and cheer on. The regional heats were being held forty miles away on a Monday afternoon. Lucky Lunchista, not having to be at work on a Monday! (by this time of year in my old job I'd usually used up my meagre allowance of annual leave, even including the extra days I "bought" instead of having a pension).

The venue was one of those Multiplex cinemas. The teams, rather melodramatically lit from above, lined up at their desks with the silver screen behind them, while the parents sat in the darkness. Rules were run through, in quite some detail because this was apparently only the second ever national Spelling Bee held in the UK. I was relieved to hear it would all be refereed using a British (as opposed to transatlantic) dictionary.

About a quarter of the players, at a guess, were bilingual, including two of our team of four. Interestingly, they did just as well as everybody else, demonstrating as they did so that bilingualism is good for the brain. Except perhaps when culture got in the way: one lass who had come swathed from head to foot in black kept getting given words like "cognac" and "bodice". I was beginning to wonder if it was a put-up job.

Lunchista fils' team won! Strangely, neither he nor I could remember any of the words he'd had to spell. Even more strangely, that's supposed to be a sign of real concentration, of being "at one" with the game.

School's out!

This good old-fashioned, unreconstructed, take-no-prisoners winter is still with us, much to the delight of all at Chateau Lunchista. The smaller Lunchistas returned to school on Monday (4th) and were looking forward to finding as many ways as posible of getting round that boring, litigation-culture-inspired rule that forbids the throwing of snowballs in the playground. Towards the end of the morning I settled down to start scribbling, and not long afterwards the 'phone rang. It was Lunchista fille, informing us that school had given up for the day because the heating wasn't working, and she'd gone home with a friend, presumably for a pleasant afternoon building snowmen, chatting and drawing cartoons.

A few minutes later Lunchista fils piled in and announced with obvious glee "Peak Oil has reached our school!" Apparently the tank was empty, the next delivery of the vital substance being either badly procrastinated or stuck in the snow somewhere. During Science, they'd had to light the Bunsen burners to keep warm. No oil delivery was due until the day after tomorrow, he said, so could we go sledging tomorrow?..

And so an exciting afternoon was spent by the lads in the street investigating the structural properties of snow necessary for building the largest snowman, the ballistics of snowballs, and the coefficient of friction of ice (and how to minimise it). They also confirmed the finding that a body loses 25 (yes, twenty-five) times more heat through wet clothes than dry ones. The following day we took the sledge to a particularly good ice-run down by the river, and built a snowman striker (complete with football) to take a shot at the goal on the playing field in which someone had thoughtfully constructed a snow-goalie.

Today we'd been advised to listen to the local radio to find out whether or not the school would be open. I haven't listened to the radio for years, though we do at least still have a working radio in the house. I'd forgotten how bad commercial radio could be: the guy kept saying "...and school closures, coming up shortly..." then there'd be adverts, sporting fixture lists, trailers for interviews coming later with celebs I've only just heard of, traffic news (protracted by the huge number of road and airport closures because of the snow), followed by a piece of music I'd always profoundly disliked but which, having been shot at me first thing in the morning, remained embedded in my head for hours.

Finally we gave up and looked on the school's web-page. School was up and running. So off went the small Lunchistas, in their wellies in something like six inches of snow.

Now that I can sit and think, the obvious question that occurs is: what on earth is an urban school doing messing about with oil, when gas is available, cheaper and (for those who care about such things) emits less in the way of greenhouse gases? It's also more reliable: one thing I discovered from my foray into radio news this morning was that if Transco fail to deliver, those households left gas-less are entitled to £300 a day compensation.

And it wasn't a one-off: the smaller Lunchistas' previous school also suffered an empty oil-tank one New Year, with a use of oil over the holidays that bordered on the suspicious. Nothing was ever proven, though: no-one at the school had the slightest idea how much energy the place really used. I wonder if there's a posse who go round schools with a lock-picker and a length of hose while everybody else is busy stuffing the turkey? If so, I wonder why I've never heard a case of these people being caught?