Carl Bennett – Page 40 – Writer-insighter

A matter of prestige

Back in 2002 an old oil tanker sank off the coast of Spain. The scale of the environmental disaster was impressive, if you’re impressed by destruction. 63,000 tonnes of oil spilled into the sea. 230,000 birds were killed, or rather, those are the ones people know about. 1,137 beaches were polluted, some of them being totally unusable and some just having lumps of oil sticking to people’s nice shoes they only bought that morning on holiday.

After 11 years a Spanish court has decided it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Environmental group Greenpeace is predictably furious. I was working in maritime business research when it happened. It was everybody’s fault, but most of them never got anywhere near a court.

Captain Mangouras was 63 when he was in charge of the Prestige.. After it sank under him and he was helicoptered off he was arrested on the dock, handcuffed, taken to jail and bail was set at three million euros. AS he didn’t happen to have 3,000,000 euros he sat in jail for 893 days until the money could be found. Ship insurance companies were horrified, not just at the size of the bail (which was not covered by insurance anyway) In the same week but by the principle which seemed to be being set: consequences depend not on what you did, but how it is seen. After all, nobody died.

Back on the sinking ship a lot of people shared in the blame when the Prestige broke in half. The Port State Control inspectors who passed the ship safe to sail at its previous port. The Spanish Environment Minister who was on holiday at the time also should arguably have shared some of the blame, because there was a way of avoiding the environmental damage, at least on the scale it happened.

Ships don’t often suddenly break in half. When they do they usually go straight to the bottom in minutes, far too fast to get to safety in a lifeboat once the sheer size of the ship pulls itself apart. There are warnings. Lots of different people noticed the big splits in the deck. In this case the split was 15 metres long. which is why Captain Mangouras had requested permission to put into a Spanish port. Spain denied permission, as did Portugal.

One option was to sail up a river and ground the vessel to stop it going anywhere else. When it split the oil spill could be controlled by putting a boom across the river. Oil tankers could drive up hopefully close enough to pump the oil off the ship. As plans go it was making the best of a horrible job, but it wasn’t going to work out that way.

Mindful of the fact that local fisherman would lose their income for years wherever the Prestige broke up, when it was 15km off the coast Spanish authorities ordered it further out to sea, where 21,000,000 gallons of oil would spread hopefully somewhere else. Let’s think about that for a second.

An experienced seafarer who has done this for decades radios the nearest maritime authority to say help, my ship is about to sink. When it does it’s going to go down in a few minutes. Anyone onboard when that happens will be killed and the 20 million gallons of oil we’re carrying is going into the sea. Let me into a port or let me shove it as far up a beach as I can get it, then we have a plan to control the damage.

And the official response from a first world nation state is officially: take it somewhere else and they can deal with it.

Old history. So what? The Captain was in charge so the Captain is to blame. It was all his fault. That’s what responsibility is all about. It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t fit the facts. Some of the 27 members of the ship’s crew said the crack started after the ship hit something, possibly one of the hundreds of shipping containers floating about the world after they fall off ships each year before the door seals leak.

The Spanish maritime authority rejected this view and said the Prestige was in bad condition; it wasn’t sinking because of an accident, it was sinking because it was one of thousands of vessels out of date, not maintained, patched up with weld, registered somewhere they didn’t really mind what the vessel was like and passed safe to sail by variable inspection regimes based more on who was paying cash than what was and was not internationally acceptable, the reason why the International Maritime Organisation has White, Grey and Black lists of ship registries.

But given that, the ship owner wasn’t arrested. The owner of the oil wasn’t handcuffed. The inspectors in the embarkation port weren’t put in jail. Just the captain, the bus driver, who did everything he could to stop a bad thing getting worse.

Yesterday Captain Mangouras was cleared of blame for the oil spill and the events leading up to it. His career was over the day he was jailed. Yesterday he was sentenced to nine months in prison aged 73, for refusing to sail his ship out to sea, where it was towed before it sank.

If you’re looking for perspective try this. In February 2003 Adriano de Souza was music producer Phil Spector’s driver. When he saw Spector walk out of his house holding a gun, saying “I think I’ve killed someone,” he called the police who found the body of actress Lana Clarkson found shot dead in a chair. Bail was set at $1,000,000 and Spector stayed out of jail until his trial four years later.

Anthem for doomed youth

A doomed show for the 11th November, anyway. I left my box of essential CDs on the kitchen table when I drove in to the studio. My Kid Creole signature tune, the Rachmnainov for the not-very-sad story about the uselessness of utilities in East Anglia, the Gotan Project I was once addicted to and was going to play In Memoriam.

The show before over-ran so I had to cut across it and go straight into the telephone interview. Where the problems started. The deck said the ph9ne was recording. It wasn’t. The listeners were treated, if that’s the word, to me talking to nobody, as if I’d gone nuts.

Then a total sound-out, dead air, when I slide the wrong thing on the mixing deck. I think. I was panicking by now, trying to play something off Soundcloud that just wouldn’t play, the same way it wouldn’t when I played it at home after the show.

Read out Anthem for Doomed Youth, the Wilfrid Owen poem as it was Rememberance Day and kept calling it Memorial Day as if I was American. I hate doing that. Remembered the story about the American artillery battery that kept firing after 11 o’clock on 11th November 1918, so they could bravely say they fired the last shots of the war. Got stuck on the pronunciation of ‘orisons.’ I know why he had to use the word (to rhyme with ‘guns’) but it’s a word nobody ever uses now; all it does is distract from the poem.

Anthem for doomed middle-aged men

Nothing else could go wrong, right? Wrong. Phone call from the studio guest, fifteen minutes into the show. They’re too busy to come and publicise the thing they were doing that depends on people coming to it. Oh ok, I understand how that could work. Second time they’ve done that.

“I don’t want to be on the radio” is a really handy phrase. Not for me, but guests. I had a request for a song, Robbie Williams’s Feel. Nice song. Sad, but you can hear how he got rich. Snag was I know the person who requested it. I know she hates people knowing anything about her. Read the name out like a normal request? Decided not to in the end.

It’s a juggling act, this show. I was trying not to slip off the wire any more than I had.

I’m not listening

A long time ago I went to stay with an uncle. Like a lot of people on the up then, he had a vastly complicated stereo system that he liked to talk about more than he seemed to play it. When he did it was like nothing I’d ever heard. It wasn’t just the volume and the volume wasn’t just how loud it was. It was a fullness of sound I’d never heard before, certainly not out of the ten year old Bang & Olufsen my father mysteriously turned up with one night when it was brand new.

My uncle’s tastes in music matched his Zappata moustache, his recurve longbow mounted on the wall and his aptitude with explosives. It was what he did for a living, at a quarry. Knowing about grenades and fuses and it has to be said, his mouth, got him into trouble with the police at least once that I know about, but that’s a long and other story. Some readers will see some similarities already.

Best of Bread

He was into Bread. The band. Not The Band. They were totally different. Bread, you know Bread. They did that song, Baby I’m A Want You. You do know it. Come on. Dah da da da daaah da. Da di di di dah da, then the high bit. Everyone knows that one.

After my short holiday I went into town, as we called walking into Trowbridge in those days. There were two record shops then, both owned by the same company but in different locations as well as the stall in the market. They didn’t have the album cover I remembered in the racks so I had to order it. I really wanted this music. The snag was (and yes thank-you, I can hear the chorus of you just don’t LISTEN, do you? from here) I couldn’t quite remember the name of the band. It was that one that goes Dah dadada daaah da. You know the one.

Oh, that one. The guy behind the counter did know. He ordered it. It took a week in those days, but when I went in the next Saturday it was there. It was in a different cover, but there it was.

Cream's Disraeli Gears. It's not quite the same thing at all, is it? — Cream’s Disraeli Gears. It’s not quite the same thing at all, is it?

Until I got it home. I was 13. I’d never heard anything like Cream. It changed the way I thought about music. It certainly changed the way I thought about Bread. The Tales of Brave Ulysses wasn’t like anything we’d heard about in English, or Latin, come to that.

Sometimes, just sometimes, things get better when you don’t listen properly. But not often.

Caught by the river

Farleigh Castle, where the wild garlic grows.

I want to write about summer forever, that last perfect summer, the one in everyone’s head. When wearing shorts for the heat of the day and a hooded thick sweatshirt for the cool of the evening and driving your first car seemed so impossibly grown up while equally impossibly, I was doing it.

The river that caught me was at Farleigh Hungerford, a place where the wild garlic grew, a place with a tiny Post Office but no people there any more to use it. I went in once, just to see. I didn’t want anything. Except I did. I wanted to see the lost places, the empty rooms. Things still happened there, near the castle. The Village Pump Folk Festival, the motorcycle races. But always the castle, on top of the hill, overlooking the river. There was a Roman flashlock in the bend of the river. Oliver Cromwell took the roof off it. There was a cottage at the bottom of the hill made from the stones of the castle and an old couple who lived there. One day they took up a floorboard and found a gun, hundreds of years old, secreted away there for nobody knew how many lifetimes. The old woman turned deaf one day when she thought her son was drowned in the river, caught by the weed. Once long ago I had a picnic there one night, with my mate Phil and my girlfriend, and Emma, this girl who was sort-of Phil’s girlfriend, a bit, and someone I was sort-of hoping might be my girlfriend. It was cold that night, that Easter. Cold and we were young and not used to being in an old castle at night, even one open to the night.

But when I remember that place it’s always summer. The same as it was one morning just before the sun was up when I cycled past so early, so early in my life.

A lesson in humility

I went to a music thing the other week. Or I tried to, anyway. It was in Aldeburgh, except around here Aldeburgh and Snape Maltings are interchangeable terms. For some things. You never know which. The Aldeburgh Food Festival is at Snape, for example. So is the Aldeburgh Music Festival. Bits of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival are, and bits of it aren’t.

But I was fairly sure that this music thing was actually at Snape. It sounded as if it should be. I rang the ticket office.

The girl who answered the phone had never heard of it.

It was the right number. I thought maybe the phone had been misdirected or something, so I phoned it again. Same thing. Same girl answers. Has never heard of the music thing. Is not the ticket hotline. Has no clue what I am talking about.

I rang off and rang the number again. An older woman’s voice answered. Yes of course. It’s on tonight. Come on down.

So I went down to Snape. Nothing doing. Went into the Plough & Sail. No music things on at Snape tonight. So I got back in the car and drove down to Aldeburgh. It’s about five miles. Maybe a little more. The thing was, there was nobody on the street at all. Just two teenage girls. It’s been quite some time since I accosted teenage girls on the High Street.

They’d never heard of the music thing. Maybe I should try in Prezzo. They might know. That’s a sort of happening place. They didn’t need to say ‘for old farts like you.’

On the fifth attempt I found someone who actually spoke English. No, I’m not making that up. This music place, is it a bed & breakfast? Only if my luck improves, but it wasn’t going to that night.

Maybe it was in Snape. It’s not. Can’t help you.

It was one of those nights you know the only thing you can do is go home. So I did.

Next day I went out to a lunch thing I sometimes go to on Saturdays, a club on the beach. I got talking with a glass of wine, as you do. I had this really, no seriously it was, really funny story about what happened to me last night, yes, just up the road.

You see I kept calling this number and I knew it was the right number but this girl, this girl kept saying she didn’t know what I was talking about. I could see the woman I was talking to getting a bit tight lipped, but I couldn’t see why.

Anyway, third time lucky, this older woman who did know what she was talking about answered the phone the third time. Phew, eh? Still. Young girls! Tchoh!

“That,” the older woman’s voice said, out of the mouth of the woman I was talking to, “was my daughter.”

I wish this stuff didn’t happen to me. But it does, sometimes. I really need to work on that not happening. It upsets people, people I don’t mean to upset.

Pedalling on

I’ve cycled all my life. I grew up in the countryside and if you wanted to go anywhere you were expected to make your own way, back then. You walked, you got a bus or you cycled. Only rarely your parents would get a car out and take you, so for example, if you wanted to go to Tellisford to pretend to be fishing, five or six of you aged eleven or twelve would tie fishing rods to your bikes and cycle along the main A361. That was, admittedly, the rubbish bit, sharing the road with huge trucks full or processed meat and pork pies from Bowyers.

When I was fourteen I cycled 40 miles over the Mendips to go and stay with my uncle one Easter. I practised the route for a few weekends, seeing the dawn come up for the first time in my life near Farleigh Castle, on the lanes and unbeleivable main roads Ben drove in Not Your Heart Away. A few miles further on, about six in that summer morning, I turned a corner just before Kilmsersdon hill and found a warren of rabbits hopping about the road. None of them had heard me; there was no other traffic around.

I’d had rubbish bikes before that, single speed steel framed things that were like that not because it was a hipster statement but because the3-speed Sturmey Archer hub gear had seized solid years before. And steel-framed because all frames were, hand-brazed in Nottingham just the way they were in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Craftsmanship for some people. Mind-numbing drudgery for more.

Mine was lime-green metal flake, back when you ordered the colour you wanted and waited weeks while they made it in Nottingham.

But this trip, that trip was on a beautiful lime-green Carlton Continental, the kind of bike we’d now call a light tourer or an Audax, but then we just called it a racing bike, because it had drop handlebars wrapped with white cork tape and 14 gears. Yes! Fourteen!! Could there actually BE that many??? That was my first real bike, £40 I paid for out of my paper round. That was a serious amount of money back then.

Yesterday two more people were killed when they were crushed under a bigger vehicle that didn’t see them. Instantly, lots of people are going to say that’s why children shouldn’t be allowed out on bikes and why every cyclist should be made to wear a helmet.

Horrible though it must be to be hit by a lorry the figures say otherwise. The statistical illiteracy that seems to be fashionable doesn’t help. A BBC report clamoured alarm when bicycle accidents increased by 3%. But bicycle journeys had increased by 4%; bicycling per mile had actually got safer.

In 2000 , 2.3 million new bicycles were sold in the UK. In 2011 that had gone up to over 3.5 million. Over four out of ten adults in the UK have access to a bicycle, even if they don’t own their own. Three quarters of a million people cycle to work regularly. Three million people cycle at least three times a week. (All figures from CTC).

In my cycling life I’ve been hit by a car mirror and separately a Lambretta. In rural Suffolk a car driver deliberately try to ride me into the ditch after I politely thanked him for driving towards me at 50 mph and missing me by less than six inches. He bravely stopped, turned around and showed his small son some definitive good parenting role-model work by driving at me. I got into the middle of the lane. I couldn’t do anything about it if he actually chose to drive into me; I could make sure he couldn’t pretend it was an accident. At the first junction he pulled over and demanded I come and talk to him. He got the fingerand I rode off. I didn’t have to use my D-Lock.

The D-Lock. So many practical applications on a bicycle.

In London in the 1980s anyone riding expected about one close call a week on a bike. We found the flat of a hand banged on a car boot was the best retaliation. Some people recommended a Jiffy lemon filled with battery acid but I was always worried it would leak in my pocket. The flat of the hand on the boot worked for me. Inside it sounded as if their car had exploded. When they stopped and got out screaming there was nothing for them to see.

Whatever petty vandalism you do on a bicycle the ending is the same: in a collision with another vehicle on a bicycle you are going to come off worst. If you go up the inside of a bus or lorry at the lights you’d better make sure they see you in case they turn left. If it was a bus with a door at the front I made sure I got eye contact with the driver, so he knew I was there. With a truck you haven’t got a hope.

I used to hitch-hike when I was a student. If you’ve ever been in a truck cab you’ll know there’s a patch at the bottom of the passenger door you can’t get the mirrors to show. If you’re on a bike and you’re in that blind spot then you are in mortal danger. That isn’t being dramatic. If those wheels roll over you that’s it.

How would you know the driver can’t see you? Well, can you see the driver? It’s as good a test as any. Even if you can, you still don’t know if he can see you.

So dress up like a Christmas tree. Put extra lights on your bike. Wear a hi-viz vest. Wear a helmet if you really think a bit of plastic is going to stop 30-tonnes of lorry going over you from doing anything lasting. But whatever you do, don’t go up the inside of anything at the lights. They can’t see you. And odds are you won’t be there for long for anyone to see.

Live groupies

I’ve just finished the first live music broadcast on the Lifeboat Party today when I had Jack Pescod and Hannah Vogt in to play. She played the violin, so that was no problem apart from pronouncing her name properly. Vocked, apparently. German. Don’t mention the war. I did, but I think I got away with it.

He said he was bringing a piano in. How we roared! Until he turned up with an electric piano in a case, with a stand and a collection of tangled leads but not one that would feed directly into the mixing desk, so we had to mic it up which picked up the noise of his hands on the keyboard and blah. But the music was sublime. I thought so anyway. Hope the listeners did.

The duo – is that the right word? It doesn’t sound right, although they do – are performing at Butley Priory, home to Frances Shelley who was on the show recently. I’m doing some lyrics for her. Did I mention that? Didn’t I? Oh sorry. I’m doing some lyrics for her, for her third CD. The one of hers I played today was from her second album, the beautiful All I Want from the album Wilderness Rhapsodies.

I love the little piano line. It reminds me of Listen With Mother, not exactly but to me there’s an element of some half-forgotten children’s story, from the times when little boys wore shorts and knee length socks at this time of year.

The show finished at one pm. At five past we had a phone call at the studio. Is the Carl Bennett show still on? Have I missed it?

Don’t know who it was. But whoever, you can hear still hear it on the Listen Again thing. I hope you like it, whoever you are.

Mobile

A little bleary this morning after a nearly five hour phone call with my oldest friend of all. We met when I was 16. We went to school together. We lost touch for about five years, a long time back, just moving around, then we got back in contact. There is a good thing about an unlimited talk contract on a mobile. There is something much better about having a friend you can tell everything, who can hold you as well as scold you. Who is always, always there.

This has been a difficult year on so many different levels. But I have been blessed this year, discovering things about myself. Some were things I didn’t want to learn. And one of the most important things I had not learned is that friends are there and when you ask them to, most people will help if they can.

I learned you have to be strong enough to ask for help too. Which is a sad and interesting dynamic in itself, because often when you really need help you aren’t strong enough to ask for it or to accept it when it’s there. So as Paul Simon put it, we talked about the old times and we drank ourselves some beers. Or now we’re who we are and the age we are, we drank a bottle of wine together, 220 miles apart. We weren’t crazy though, then or now. Just happy to be talking to each other in a place where time didn’t happen, where even if it did, this huge thing, that wasn’t going to change or go away, ever.

My friend’s job is sensitive. The things she deals with every day are horrible and they happen to lots of people, far more than people like to admit. She’s not a spy or a secret agent or anything like that but in her job using Facebook would be instant career suicide. So she won’t see this. Her children will. And they know how it is anyway.

Thank-you, my most brilliant friend, in a year which has sparkled with brilliant friends, not just you, but the Brilliant Three as well who this dark summer have kept me mostly upright, who have picked me up, who have been on their own different penances and pilgrimages, who sometimes I was able to help a bit, too. Thank-you, my friends. Thank-you so much.

Put out the light

It’s 27th October. As Bruce Springsteen used to sing, it’s Saturday night, you’re all alone and feeling blue. Well hopefully you’re not, but I am.

The clocks go back tonight. It’s now officially UT, GMT, Universal Time, Greenwich Mean Time. Not British Summer Time, as it’s been since 31st March. It’s officially Not Summer any more.

I don’t like this part of the year, the days getting shorter. Everything seems worse in the dark. I keep telling myself all I have to do is get through to the 21st December, not even two months and then the evenings will get lighter again, really quickly and long, long before the 31st March and official Summer time again everything will be ok. Well, the evenings will be lighter anyway. It helps.

I even don’t like July and August, for the same reason. It’s past the peak, past the longest day and however deliriously summery and drowsy and hot and torpid the evenings, you know that slowly but surely the year like the wasp-eaten fruit is past its best and it’s all downhill to Beltane.

I know. It’s being so cheerful what keeps me going. I got one of those SAD lamps, for Seasonally Acquired Disasters or whatever they’re called, and that helps a bit. Nothing helps so much as getting outside, which means getting up early and getting out for a walk before things start for the day. I haven’t got a dog. I can understand getting one, even if only to make you get up and out and smell the clouds before the day really starts. It’s been a long journey, this summer.

Put out the light, and then put out the light:

If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me:–but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.

But it will be relumed, if that’s actually a thing. The days will get longer again. Just eight weeks of this to get through. I can do it. We all can.

And the clocks will go back again. Next year it’s 20th March. There’s even a special government website about it, to tell you, so you don’t have to listen to The Archers, the normal way of learning what’s going on. All I need to do is get through this next bit. Like all of life. It’ll be ok.

Put your lights on

In a story absolutely nothing to do with Carlos Santana’s song, which as a sign of aging I still think is quite new even though it came out in 1999, according to the BBC the Energy Secretary Ed Davey has defended the building of a new nuclear power station at Hinckley Point as “a very good deal for Britain.” In twenty years of providing research-based consultancy I’ve come to detest facts being used to spin a story that they contradict, not least because when the person doing it is found out the first thing he does is blame the people who provided them. I’ve seen whole company boards of directors literally screaming across a table at each other when that happens. It doesn’t generally go in the book of best management practice. But then, incidents like that are supposed to magically unhappen in most management books I’ve ever read.

I don’t know whether nuclear power is better or worse than windmills or tidal barrages or lots of people on stationary bicycles converted into dynamos. But the number of flat contradictions in the story makes me think someone isn’t so much being what the last Tory government chose to call being economical with the actuality, as flat lying.

“A good deal for Britain” now means giving an eye-watering amount of money to EDF, the French company which will be building and operating the power station, along with a Chinese company. In both France and China these companies are effectively nationalised, so now a good deal for Britain directly means that UK tax payers’ money is given directly to foreign governments and this is officially Good. This isn’t me being a bit political, as Ben Elton used to say. There isn’t another way of looking at this. The money couldn’t, for example, be given to the British government’s power companies because they were sold off cheap (just like the Royal Mail, whose shares have jumped 50% in the first week since the launch).

The government estimates that energy bills will be £77 lower by 2030, but Mr Davey could not guarantee this because of the “uncertainties”.

In other words, Mr Davey, who as a Cabinet Minister is one of the most senior members of ‘the government’ has said that what was said isn’t necessarily true.

Greenpeace pointed out helpfully that the official story is that power prices are going to be locked for 35 years. But as David Cameron, the Prime Minister said last week, he couldn’t stop power prices rising this winter. There is no magical thing that makes this winter (the one where prices cannot be controlled) different from the one half a lifetime away where apparently they can.

Even normally shy and retiring Ed Milliband had to comment on the fact that his Right Honourable Friend said he couldn’t do anything at all about consumer prices now, but could definitely fix the price the government was going to pay for power in 35 years.

Mr Davey plans to submit the application for state aid clearance to the EC.

Let’s look at that for a second. You might think the dead hand of the European Union shouldn’t get involved with the workings of a sovereign government. You might also wonder why the UK government is in the business of giving state aid to foreign companies, especially when they are owned by foreign governments. Clearly it’s not enough that we exported the production of the stuff that fills pound shops to China; now we have to give state aid to their government as well.

Angela Knight, chief executive of trade body Energy UK, said

“We’ve got 10 years in which to insulate our homes better. We’ve got 10 years to take the steps that some other countries have taken – especially those in colder countries – to make sure that we can keep warm but use less.”

Some other countries have a private rented housing market, where energy inefficient homes are harder to find occupants for. Some other countries actually build houses, modern, energy efficient, insulated houses, rather than allowing ‘the market’ to dictate that fewer new homes were built last year than in any year in the previous ninety. That’s right. in 1924 more homes were built than in 2012. The market doesn’t want new homes. If there were new homes then the rubbishy inefficient heat-leaking old ones we have wouldn’t sell for as much. Who on earth wants that?

Still, what do I know? Someone who probably knows a little bit more about stuff than me is Dr Paul Dorfman, from the Energy Institute at University College London, who said “what it equates to actually is a subsidy and the coalition said they would never subsidise nuclear”.

He added: “It is essentially a subsidy of between what we calculate to be £800m to £1bn a year that the UK taxpayer and energy consumer will be putting into the deep pockets of Chinese and French corporations, which are essentially their governments.”

Where do you even start with this?

So just to sum up, officially we don’t have any money and we can’t interfere in the market because not only is the market always right (except if it looks like the Royal Mail was deliberately and fraudulently undervalued, robbing the taxpayer, in which case it’s just a fluke and hardly worth mentioning) but interfering with the market means your Mum fancied Stalin. At exactly the same time we have £800 million a year to give to the French and Chinese governments in state aid so transparent that we have to ask the EC really nicely if it’s ok that we give it to them. Oh and the teeny little lie about never subsidising nuclear power, obviously.

Appropriately enough, way back in the 1980s there was a TV series called Edge of Darkness (not to be confused with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a searing insight into the 1970s power cuts and the Three Day Week, or Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness On The Edge of Town, a song protesting intermittent rural New Jersey power supplies), the hero’s daughter got herself shot protesting about nuclear energy, setting her father off on a quest to find out who was lying about what. Along the way he met a CIA man who saw the light, spitting out ‘Nuclear energy – they threw truth out the window the day they invented that stuff.’

Something to do with copyright and You Tube which I don’t pretend to understand is stopping me being able to bring you Put Your Lights On with sound. So I’ll just type the words and you can hum them.

There’s a monster living under my bed
Whispering in my ear
There’s an angel with a hand on my head
She says I got nothing to fear

We all shine like stars, then we fade away.

I used to believe that grown-ups mostly told the truth and tried to help. Then I grew up too.