GOOD MORNING

15 02 16

I woke at 0500 feeling all awake and ready to go. Weird. The view from the wheelhouse was striking. There was bright starlight, maybe a little moonlight too; five geese paddling quietly downstream on the high ebbing tide; black grey and silver blending in a strange, almost surrealistic, waterscape. It would have been a great, though unbelieved, painting.

Common sense won out and I went back to bed.

I next woke at 0730. Through the large skylight I could see a few seagulls circling above. Then smudges appeared on the skylight. Gullshit, I thought. But no, it was snow! Coming down in large flakes. Sadly, not for long. Last night it had been freezing by 2100 and I was slipping about as I walked up the ramp to feed the meter last night. I like snow if it is well behaved. Today it has given me an excuse for another breakfast fry up. I had one yesterday and usually limit them to two a week. But rules are made to be broken – aren’t they?

Delighted to hear on the Today Programme Sir John Chivers chastising the Bank of England for watering down his recommendations on banking reserves. Fractional reserve banking is a very dangerous and unstable practice, like asking the economy to walk the high wire whilst ever loading weight on only one side of the balancing pole. Like Ponsi schemes, it can only last so long before the act fails. So boom and bust thrives. Poor Gordon Brown – another cunning plan bites the dust.

The current international banking and finance system is on its knees yet no one seems to have an alternative. All the effort is focused on modifying the current system to achieve greater acceptability and stability. But this is building on sand.  

As an aging git deeply concerned with our destruction of the environment in pursuit of consumerism and wishing to hand on to my grandchildren a better world, I should like to see a new banking and finance system that accounted for environmental costs, rather than, as the current feeble economists do, leaving nature as an inconvenient externality. Are we not part nature? Surely we people are not a mere externality!

Consuming

Having knocked consumerism, today I have bought equipment for both the air heater system and my new bike. Life is complicated!

 

 

 

Bike bits, especially the saddle. The standard saddles aren't built for real people.

It’s brother Nick’s birthday tomorrow. Mustn’t forget to text some rude good wishes. He is coming up for retirement too.