helen-louise's journal

When I am in Rochester with Grant, we go to Community Christian Church which is, in my words, a "hippy church". The first thing you see when you enter the building is a sign saying "Refugees Welcome", and they actually mean it. The minister is a gay man married to his husband, some of the lay people who help with the services are visibly queer, and it's genuinely welcoming. Even though I'm not a Christian, I still feel more at home there than in the UU church we went to once, where people came up to us afterwards and enquired as to whether the service was the strangest thing we'd ever been to. The idea that we might be Unitarians already didn't seem to occur to anyone. (There is a second UU church in Rochester, and I might try it sometime, but I don't feel any particular need to.)

Some people from the church work for a charity which helps children who may have been abused (TW: site talks about child abuse). When they come for assessment, they can choose a plush friend to help them through the process. Apparently they get through 4 to 6 plushies per day, which is a lot of new referrals. One of these people, Bob, died recently and in his honour, the church decided to collect Bears for Bivona because it was alliterative.

When we arrived and saw a giant box of bears (and other soft toys), I decided to go through the box and hug them all. So I did so after the service. When people asked what I was doing, I explained that you can't just buy a teddy bear from a shop, stick it in a collection box, and expect it to be able to help a hurt child. You have to give it some love first. And Rev Steven considered this and decided to put the teddy bears out in church the following week.


(click through for bigger version)

So the bears sat through the church service and were filled with the love of the congregation. They were pointed out during the "share with children" part of the service and each child went to hug one of them. Then the bears were blessed so that they could bring joy to their new owners. If you get the impression that this is not exactly a standard, mainstream sort of church - you'd be right!

Also the sermon featured Banksy art. (Did you realise that Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant?)

( More bear details. )

Had a fairly meh weekend due to my entire body crapping out on me on Saturday. I'd wanted to go to Birmingham BiFest but with my back, legs, right hip and left ankle all hurting, I wasn't going to manage 4 hours on trains. Even my gall bladder decided to get in on the action! I haven't had gallstone pain that bad in years. Instead I spent 15 hours asleep. Woo.

Yesterday was much more interesting. Richard & I went to see Ghost Forest in Trafalgar Square. It's an exhibition of tree stumps from rainforest trees in Ghana. Some of the trees had been felled sustainably (every tree in the rainforest there is numbered, and you can only take a certain quota of trees from a particular area in a 40 year period), others had fallen naturally. It was particularly useful to have the exhibition there because Nelson's Column is a similar height to the mature trees, so you had an immediate reference for the size of them when living. Also the plaque alongside each tree had a simple graphic comparing it to Nelson's Column (like when blue whales are compared to London buses, or in a video game info screen where you see size of monster compared to your character). Richard took lots of photos and I shall prod him until they go online.

Today the exhibition was being taken down, and sometime this week the trees are going to Copenhagen for the climate change summit. I don't know if there is a comparable building to be a size reference there.

I like the story about the Denya tree not wanting to leave the ground.

Argh. We decided it's time for some serious de-junking of the house, and in particular, the garden. Our back garden is a mess of dead decking, rubble, and one monstrous triffid. So Richard walked around the immediate couple of roads and made a note of all the phone numbers on skips, and I rang the companies to find out prices etc. I told all of them that the skip would have to go on the road in a parking space and asked whether they could get the necessary permit from the council for this. One of them couldn't, we'd have to apply to the council ourselves, so we didn't bother with them - the rest all had contracts. I made it very clear that the skip had to go in a residents' parking bay, how long would the permission take? and they all said one day. I was rather unconvinced about this "one day" because I was sure when we'd been looking at getting a skip a few years ago it'd been more like one week, but they all said the same thing so I believed them. (BIG MISTAKE!)

I ordered the skip on Wednesday just to make sure the council permission was in place, but there was no sign of the parking space being suspended last night. So I wrote a note to all the neighbours telling them a skip would be coming. The skip lorry came this morning at 6.55 am. Of course, there wasn't any space on the road, as it was too early for anyone to have taken their car to work. The driver waited around a bit but no cars moved, so he had to go back, and said it would be redelivered "later". Just to make this worse, I only fell asleep last night sometime after 5 am, because I had galloping raving insomnia. Argh.

So I've been drowsing on and off all day, jumping every time there's been a knock on the door or a lorry noise. And when a parking space became free, I put the tricycle in it with all the locks on and a note explaining it was there to reserve the space for a skip. (Chairs might have been better, but it's been drizzling all day and most of our chairs don't like getting wet.) Now the skip isn't going to come until tomorrow, but this is less worrying because we have the immediate next-door neighbour's car in the space and we can call her in the morning to move it. Nonetheless, I really didn't need a day of nowhere near enough sleep!

There are very rare occasions when I regret our environmental stance on car ownership. This would be one of those. A car of our own blocking the space would have made the whole thing so much easier. And for future reference, though I kinda hope that we'll never need a skip again - it really does take longer than one day to get parking bays suspended.

Today I spent several hours in various bookstores looking at chemistry textbooks and compiling a list of the ones I wanted to buy. The idea was for me to try to buy them second-hand, because that saves resources. However! in looking on amazon Marketplace and abebooks, it seems that the majority of the books I want will cost me as much or more to buy preowned than to buy new. A £10.99 new book typically becomes £7.50-£9 second-hand, but add the £2.75 shipping on and it's virtually the same. Bizarrely, some sellers price the books for more than they cost new even before the postage goes on. And, annoyingly, amazon Marketplace charges £2.75 per book, even when they can be posted together by the same seller.

Also, there is the question of packaging. If I take my existing shopping bags to, say, Foyles, and buy a load of books, then I am not using any extra packaging. If I send Richard to buy them, then we're not using any more resources at all, because he can walk from his workplace to the bookshop, so there's not even the issue of transport. Whereas, if I buy the books preowned, each book will come in its own jiffy bag that I'll then end up storing along with the 100 or so other jiffy bags that are in this house waiting until they can be reused, which I can't throw away because of the environmental guilt and can't recycle because this country is not that efficient yet. They'll also have a packing slip and/or invoice which can't be recycled because it contains my name and address information, and while I often do rip off that part to go in the shredder while recycling the rest of the page, this takes Effort and spoons. Most likely, they'll pile up until I have energy to deal with it.

Of course, the sensible answer would be for me to go to a bookshop to buy the books second-hand, but there aren't physical bookshops that sell chemistry textbooks. You're stuck with physical bookshops that sell new or online bookshops that sell used. Occasionally, universities have a second-hand textbook fair, but they tend to be limited to students of that particular institution, and wouldn't be advertised externally. Similarly, another idea would be for me to borrow the books from a library - but public libraries don't carry university-level science textbooks because there just isn't the demand for them, and I don't have access to a university library. I could get access, but that would be to go there and study from the books there, rather than a borrower's pass - those are pretty much impossible to come by for outsiders. And I don't like to sit in libraries and breathe their dust and photocopier fumes and deal with chairs that aren't designed for my back when I could take a book home to read.

Considering that we're talking about small paperbacks of around 100 pages each, and considering that these books have already been printed and are sitting in the bookshop waiting for someone to buy them, I'm inclined to think that buying them directly with my existing bags might actually be the most environmental of the options available. But it doesn't seem very satisfactory.

It is officially the week with the crappest air quality in the UK. This is something that I, of all people, know only too well. In 2003 I wrote a master's thesis on the statistics of air quality, in which I analysed the hourly air quality reports from seven sites in the DEFRA air quality automated monitoring network over as many years as data was available. I looked at PM10 and ozone from all seven sites, and PM2.5 from the two sites where it was available. PM10 is primary pollution produced directly from combustion, specifically particles smaller than 10 micrometres; and ground-level ozone is secondary pollution, produced by photochemical reactions on primary pollutants in sunlight.

Today is Guy Fawkes' night, which commemorates the Gunpowder Plot. Depending on how you look at it, we are celebrating either the salvation of the British monarch from being blown up, or the plotters' valiant attempt to destroy the Houses of Parliament. I suspect which depends on your personal opinion of the monarchy and our British Parliamentary system. We celebrate by lighting bonfires and exploding fireworks. The celebrations generally last from the Saturday before Guy Fawkes' to the Saturday after - and this year, Diwali falls within this time, causing even more fireworks to be set off.

The thing about fireworks, and especially bonfires, is that neither of them are particularly good for air quality. Great quantities of PM10 and sulphur dioxide are produced by bonfires, as well as other noxious pollutants depending on what people choose to burn. (Plastics and rubber should never be burned on a bonfire.) The average urban level of PM10 goes up from 50 micrograms per metre cubed to well over 100, and may spike as high as 600. 100 micrograms per metre cubed is the warning level for asthmatics and other sufferers of respiratory diseases, greatly increasing the risk of asthma attack and hospitalisation. This increase lasts all week, and the weather becomes terrible as a result. PM10 are cloud condensation nuclei, which cause water vapour in the air to form as droplets. As a result, we get lots of mist and fog at ground level, and a lot more rain. Sulphur dioxide has an albedo effect that leads to cooling, and the temperature drops along with all the fog. It is unlikely that we'll see much sun all week.

I hate this week. I have to be careful about opening windows or going outside. I have to take far more asthma and allergy meds than usual just to function. The cooler temperatures and damp weather play havoc with my joints, and the lack of sunlight makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. The fireworks look pretty, but hardly compensate for all the rest of it.

Every time I visit North America, I get reminded how impractical European ideas about slowing down global warming are. We think the North Americans should just stop using their cars to drive everywhere, and forget how spread out North American cities are. Because they are not short of space, things there are far, far more spread out than at home. For example, the strip mall - a collection of five or six shops in a single-storey, flat building with a huge amount of parking at the front - that simply does not exist in Europe, as we don't have the room. I made rmjwell fall over laughing when I admitted at alt.polycon 11 that I'd thought a strip mall was a place you went to see strippers.

What really brought this home to me was going to the drive-in with futabachan & Amanda. This North American custom does not exist in the UK, or in any part of Europe I've visited. Of course we have cinemas, but never outdoor ones, except occasionally during summer music festivals. It was cool to be there, but weird - it seemed very wasteful to have each individual car blasting its own sound system rather than the cinema using a single one. And drivers were advised to switch on their cars occasionally to prevent their batteries running out. Because electricity generated by non-hybrid cars' petrol engines is so energy-efficient...

Anyway, the movie, Ratatouille, was cool. And seeing it in Canada means that I can go home & see it with Richard, and thus fulfill my desire to see a Pixar film twice within a few weeks. (I always come out & want to see the film again). Nonetheless, it was a surreal experience for me.