Every LIDL Helps

I get an altogether constructive response from LIDL following my experience in the small hours of Wednesday evening last. In fairness there are good days and bad in haulage as elsewhere, and tho' the latter can be decidedly bad let's not complain as it gets us out of bed each day.

Three reflections though worth are worth contemplating.

Firstly the UK's economy has amongst the worst productivity in the developed world and whilst it's not all my fault, on a daily basis I can see why. We may never know if my two-dozen pallets of produce were binned, but what you should know is we do so to substantial volumes in the UK and not least when all the chillers and freezers in the supermarkets pack up as they do when temperatures exceed 35C. Actually it is turned into ethanol and included in your petrol, but if you think that's sustainable, wait until the Russians arrive.

Secondly I spent much of my life in an airline industry that introduced the concept of SMS or Safety Management Systems, taken up since at places like the National Health Service. It's about replacing a time-worn 'blame the pilot' view of accidents and incidents, with one that features contributory factors. It is still as often a not a case of 'blame the driver' when it comes to logistics, which rarely changes because most need to keep their jobs, whereas I'd be cracking open a bottle.

Thirdly it does not surprise me that a German company ~ albeit in the UK ~ should endeavour to do things in the right way. I'd fly with a one of the smartest people I knew (at the Bank of America) to Germany, where he was totally smitten by their professionalism when it came to fixing issues which needed it. I flew nuclear waste from Wick to Frankfurt and we'd be sent on our way by a guy in tweeds with a pipe, and met at the other end by motor-cycle outriders and an armoured car mounting a machine-gun.

The Heat is On

I write at a time when the June temperature record has been broken three days in succession in the UK, and the reasons are instructive and again something that you study in detail in the class-room ~ or less engagingly online nowadays as ever ~ in preparation for flying airliners.

In fact jetstreams like that in the pic were only discovered circa the 1940s, as either bomber-crews headed for Japan realised they went one way faster than the other or when commercial airliners crashed in the Andes when they figured it must be time to descend when they'd been fighting a headwind all along instead.

Either hemisphere best-viewed as an LP record, you can see that the outside moves faster than the inside and thus a descending column of air incorporates a spin from the surface of the Earth as it does so... clockwise in the northern hemisphere. At the same time descending air produces high pressure, and in doing so it warms and so is less likely to condense to produce either cloud or rain.

Broadly speaking the jets emerge because hot air from the Tropics expands to slide toward the poles, but is transformed into fast-moving rivers of air by a planet that rotates at around 1,000 m.p.h. at the equator. In turn these sinuous rivers produce eddies of rising or descending air, producing the high- and low-pressure systems we enjoy from one week to the next.

Turns out that climate-change, so called because it sounds less like something we caused than global-warming and in the hope it will go away, is affecting the Arctic most of all. Here it is warming at three times the going rate, with Europe at twice the going rate.

This alteration to the status quo at the northern pole apparently allows a jetstream to split as illustrated, which in turn allows for a high-pressure dome to inhabit the continent as shown. Hence temperatures of around 38C in England and 41C in a city once considered delightful to be in during Springtime, or Paris.

I studied (when I could be bothered) what might be called Earth Science nowadays but Geography and Geology back then, and one of the few things that told on me was how the plant loves a positive feedback loop. They often occur over stretches of time, but can be flipped into one or other long-lasting state by, for instance, human interaction or more obvious actors like volcanoes or asteroids.

An easy one to remember for those of us living in urban heat-islands (as the bulk of humanity does), is use of air-conditioning units. These (a) consume fossil fuels at a distance to increase warming on a broader scale and (b) dump hot air externally so as to increase it on a local scale. Which persuades more of us to use them... and so on and so forth until the roundabout spins too fast as it did at Blackpool's Funhouse and we all fall off.

Good pub quiz question though for you:

    Q.    Which nation has the highest per-capita energy-use?

    A.    Qatar.

And ladies, gentlemen and the undecided that is because you cannot really function there without moving between air-conditioned homes, shops and workplaces in air-conditioned cars. All of which uses more fossil fuel beside that used to provide water that would otherwise be largely absent.

It's a party, like humanity, that can only go on for so long. Someone I know asked an American ex-pat of the sort who provided the means of extraction from the 1930 on that has allowed for all of this... how it might end?

'Back to the sand from which it came' apparently.

But then we're nothing but dust anyway, are we?

Ed. And you have a good weekend too...

Mention in Vespatches

Celebrations in Rome this very day on the 80th anniversary of the introduction of Piaggio's Vespa scooter. Post-war the roads in Italy were not the best, and airplane manufacturers like Piaggio were largely forbidden from being so. And so they turned instead to manufacturing these, in a place where people were poorer than they had been but as fashion-conscious as ever... and reluctant to see oil or grease anywhere near trouser or skirt.

We'd a scrap 350cc Zundapp from Germany as kids that we tried and failed to get running, but aside from that in the UK in the way you were either Catholic or else Protestant you only ever rode motorbikes or scooters like the Vespa. The division was in fact cemented in the UK by gang-membership of either Mods (scooters) or Rockers (motorbikes), and reinforced by them regularly convening at seaside towns like Brighton in order to hospitalise each other. Rockers did this with chains, unfair in view of the fact scooter-riders didn't need one.

Ed. Goes some way to explaining why Honda's 50cc step-through became the most-produced motorised two-wheeler ever, accepted by each side as a work in progress.

198 Longwave

Another good friend passes away in the form of long-wave broadcast of BBC Radio 4 output, now restricted to frequency-modulated transmission on medium wave; else a Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB); else and altogether more common nowadays, over the internet.

What we do with all technology is to mistake the convenient for the good, however, although that only becomes apparent after the fact.

At the outset of an off-and-on working career in London I shared a flat in a recently gentrified part of Forest Hill in Southeast London. An elderly man occupied the roof-space, which would have been intended for servants when the house was built. I did occasionally visit Mr Newcombe, or 'nuke' as my fellow-flatmates called him, without ever visiting themselves.

As a consequence I inherited a half-bottle of Campari, the sort you bring back from a holiday where it was consumed on the beach but which doesn't quite work on your return back home. And a radio, of the sort with a knob on top to turn it on and after adjust the volume and another to move a linear pointer along the frequency scale in order to tune it to whichever frequency. Between these were a display along which that pointer moved, and buttons for pre-selections besides setting the frequency at whichever broad range of wavelength was required.

I left all of this set to Radio 4, for the singular reason that it could be turned on and the news listened to at six or seven o'clock prior to work or the weekend's activities.

Now this can be done by picking up a phone and if necessary winding things back to the start. But there's no discipline in that, and for centuries Western civilisation ran on a bed-rock of monastic discipline where everything was done to the clock and the routines of work in the fields and workshops were as often as not dictated by church bells.

And it's how we think easier is invariably better, and thus have to invent things like gym classes and parkruns and charity hikes in order to compensate for a life on the sofa watching David Attenborough get out of bed in the morning instead.

The ends of the radio as was done in the 1960s or 1970s were finished in hardwood panels, one of which had come loose and pivoted around the renting fixture at the top end... which only added to the attraction. Life is not perfect, people not perfect, and thus it is that we crave cars and phones that at least appear so.

Radio 4 was known originally as the Home Service, and provided news to the more serious-minded types whilst the Radio 2 had been called the Light and aimed at the plebeian end of the populace who preferred more musical fare. Popular music was only broadcast officially from 1967 on in the UK, with the introduction of Radio 1 to accompany the re-framing of prior output as Radios 2 and 4, with Radio 3 added for classical music that nobody listened to.

All of the underlying science would be analysed in much greater detail when training for a commercial pilot's licence, and I can summarise it here. The military where I learned to fly were granted UHF radios, literally above and beyond the civilian realm of VHF and its medium waves. Navigation beacons like VOR or the VHF Omnirange still in use shared this space, to the extent illegal FM stations might overstep their territory so that listening in to their 'ident' you'd hear a musical playlist instead.

Over at the long-wave range of VHF meantimes, this was used and I think still is by the rapidly disappearing means of navigation called a Non-Directional Beacon, used nowadays if at all solely as a last-resort aid to confirm you're on the right approach course prior to landing. It was based on the fact that a ring-shaped aerial provided the strongest signal when facing toward transmitter, and these hoops can be seen on any number of vintage ships and aircraft.

It also meant that such navigation receivers could be tuned to long-wave broadcast stations like Atlantic on 252 kHz, which relieved the boredom of longer stretches of the North Sea during night-flights hauling freight.

In later years co-pilots would bring a phone and set their playlist to run during the pre-flight preparations on the flight-deck, and having been trained in the military and brought up with the strictures of long-wave radio broadcasts, I'd say 'Please don't do that' and in the end they'd appreciate me saying so, not least for being in one piece.

Later it was more a case of suggesting that with the take-off roll in view it was as good a time as any to stop messaging your mates; although nowadays looking at YouTube I realise that the flight-crew's number one priority is less your safety and more the highest possible number of views. Which, making money being theirs, the airlines are entirely happy with.

Suzuki MC

Forthcoming, and nobody does it better, Suzuki's 4-wheel drive mini-camper. I'd like to sell up, bid the UK farewell and drive off into the sunset. Except it'll never happen, the sun setting in the West and beyond us only sea.

David Hockney Post, Mortem.

Died recently and what I found most inspiring the fact he'd just two people attend his funeral ~ partner and nephew in his case ~ which I like the idea of for my own.

My favourite tale concerning was the time Billy Connolly and mother, born and bred in Glasgow, visited him and from the patio admired a San Fernando valley sprawled out below under the sort of sky that appeared in his paintings.

Mother's only observation: 'A drying day like this and not a washing-line in sight?'

Faulty Towers (Ref #13374406) Update

Did in fact get back to me a fortnight ago with promise of a refund (thanks Gemma) and free tickets (thanks Stevie), and whilst these are as yet unforthcoming we live in hope... and have promised a blog post with a positive spin greater than Nemesis.

Happy days tho' because chancellor Rachel Reeves has taken time out from kissing prospective PM Andy Burnham's ass to scrap sales tax on kids' meals and theme parks in summer.

It'll benefit VCs in the US bankrolling the rollers more than it may our dear children, but does divert us from the daily shit-show of politics in the UK.

And of course we're still enjoying the ride here on Britain's Best-Loved Blog*.

* Unsuitable for those under four feet in height except Nicola Sturgeon.