Prayer for the Right Kind of Drought

This may be used for the occasions when it keeps raining, even though there is a drought.

Oh Lord

We have sinned grievously in thy sight, burning the unclean fire of the internal combustion engines. We have created Audi A4s, and Skoda Octavias. And we have bowed down on Sundays unto them and cleaned their hub caps. And we have gone a-motoring with our own inventions. Our CO2 riseth up to the heaven, and is a bad smell unto they nostrils. And although it's not much more CO2 than thou art used to, our emissions being unclean and yet relatively insignificant, still Al Gore, that great profit, has declared that we are guilty, and must tithe and tithe again until we are clean once more and the Earth's atmosphere is pure Oxygen.

And so thou has smitten us with drought. But being smarter than the average god, thou has smitten us with drought that falleth as cats and dogs: even as stair-rods. Yea for forty days the flood-gates of heaven have been opened, even as in the days of Noah.

In the past thou sent oft on our forefathers and foremothers just ordinary boring drought, and they cried unto heaven and thou heardest and relentedst (or else heardest and took no notice, and the country dried up even as the Negev and everybody died) but in these latter days of drought, the rain it raineth every day and lo we might even drown of drought.

So hear our cry, withdraw thy hand. And let it rain only at night, so the reservoirs may be as filled as the waters of the sea. And return our hose-pipes from exile, that we may once again wash our cars and clean the fascias, as in the days of our forefather.

Drought Warning

Typical. The Community Droughtometer has stopped working, so I can now no longer see how drought-y it is. I say stopped working, it's actually so far underwater that I can 't read it any more.

The Armadillo Song

(To the tune of... well yes, obviously)

When the day is dawning
On a dull and rainy morning
On the Ark with Noah
And the pythons and a forty-foot boa
And a pair of llamas
And a hungry goat
has eaten my pyjamas
Now I'm sleeping in my coat.

I've got to feed the armadillo
Clean the hippos' cage with Brillo
Now I'm feeling rather ill.  Oh,
it's the smell that gets to me.
Now I've fed the armadillo
I've got to give the budgie some Trill.  Oh,
I really hate that armadillo.
I wish I'd never gone to sea.

The Nationalisation of Salt

I note that Northamptonshire has been forced by the Government to cancel an order for 4,000 tonnes of road salt,  so the Government can send it somewhere that the need is greater.
Northants, a fine county in the East Midlands, has several major towns and a lot of rural roads.  The population is 650,000.  Being resolute folk, I am sure they will struggle around the place on ungritted roads, although the ditches around Northampton, Daventry and Kettering will no doubt gradually fill with cars as they skid off.
I wonder where could be more in need?  Counties that haven't bothered to order in grit, presumably.  Sadly the people of Northamptonshire will be unable to register a vote in those other counties to protest at the theft of their grit.
Meanwhile on the radio I heard a member of a local government association explaining that they hadn't ordered enough grit in because they hadn't been warned it was going to be cold.  Which begs two questions.  First of which is - didn't they know winter was coming?  And the second - which is like unto it - did the Met Office's Gaia-inspired prophecy of a mild winter, encouraged by the need to big up Global Warming at all times, con the local authorities of our land into thinking it would never freeze again?

In the mean time, good luck to the people of Corby, Wellingborough and Yelvertoft.  I am sure you will all be pleased, as you skid across your roads, to know that everyone's nicely gritted in Peckham and Tower Hamlets.

New Year Preparation

By "New Year", of course, I mean the secular one - not the Beaker one which took place on 21 December (or, according to certain stubborn people who believe what they read in papers, on Halloween).
I'm planning a combined Watch night Service and New Year's Eve Party on Thursday night.  This will consist of the Beaker Quire (as opposed to the Beaker Choir - we'll sort them out tomorrow) playing "Auld Lang's Syne" repeatedly from 8pm to midnight, by which time you'll all be thoroughly glad it's the new year.
Meanwhile Bible readings will include the bit from Ecclesiastes about nothing ever getting any better, and the bit from Galations about not celebrating special days.  While other spiritual writings will include the Norse sagas, ending with that cheerful bit where even the gods die.   Also we will hear inspirational readings from such optimistic poets as Ted Hughes, Thomas Hardy and our very own Drayton Parslow.
Drayton's special New Year Poem, "It's gonna be even more ghastly than this year" is now nearly finished.  He tells me it will be complete on the Big Night.  He also promises a complete performance of his street-poetry three-day epic "Stop hitting me and I'll go away".
For the hour before midnight I'll be preaching my special New Year sermon.  You may remember it from last year (or the year before).  Or more likely you won't.  In any case - the theme is "Next year will be just like this one.  Or maybe slightly worse.  Rejoice!"  This year I will be accompanying the sermon with a Powerpoint on "Environmental Breakdown, Global Warming and the Peak Oil Problem".  Watch out for those graphs - they're totally dispiriting!
Refreshments will include champagne, Belgian Trappist Beer and Wadworth 6X.  Or they will for me.  You'll all have to bring your own.
All in all, it should be an inspirational start to 2010.

Man-made Global Warming

You see, some like to call it "Anthropogenic" Global Warming.  But if you're going to have just one word in Greek, have all three or none, I say.
I prefer "Man-made".  Makes it quite clear who's to blame.

Climate Change

There's been a lot of mud-slinging lately and I'd like it to come to an end.  Especially as, this being the Husborne Crawley community, a lot of it was real mud and I'm fed up having to get Burton to do so much laundry.

There has been a certain amount of suggestion recently that some people have been... let us say, presenting data in such a way as to suggest that global warming is more proven than it actually is.  Our own Climate Change Laboratory, in the shed at the bottom of the herb garden, has not escaped some of the fallout from these accusations.  Specifically, we predicted that there would be a beach just along the Ridgmont bypass, that we would be growing pineapples in the Orchard, and that the Gulf Stream would stop, resulting in temperatures falling to below -40F.  In retrospect, I can see that some of these predictions might have been overly pessimistic, and possibly even contradictory.

Now I have had the chance to check the data, I do agree that our predictions that Husborne Crawley would be by the seaside within 10 years were overly dramatic.  Husborne Crawley is a good 100m above sea level.  It's going to take more of a sea level rise than is currently predicted before we end up sun-bathing on Ridgmont Beach.  So on balance, while we are still deeply concerned about the threat of global warming, we're going to abandon the project to put the Great House on stilts.  The claim that I substituted millimetres for yards at a certain critical point in my  calculations is almost certainly unprovable, since I deleted all the emails.  And burnt the hard disk.

In unrelated news, I'm pleased to announce a huge profit in my speculations in long-term futures in sun-tan lotion, flip flops and grow-your-own pineapple kits.  It's been a funny market, and I notice that the price of all three has dropped sharply in the Husborne Exchange over the last day or two, so I'm glad I sold up on Wednesday.  I think I'll be steering clear of these commodities for the near future.

Global Warming Action Day

Despite the evidence of thriving populations of polar bears, and it being ten years since the warmest year globally recorded, we remain ever-vigilant to the dangers of global warming.  After all, it was the original Beaker People that invented global warming. Faced with the danger of a new ice age, they burnt down all the forests to keep the temperature up.  Thus proving that it is possible to work with Mother Gaia in a constructive, but forest-burning, kind of way.

I think we can show our commitment through the following initatives that we carried out over the last six months:

• We've been heating the Great House by burning old tyes in the wood burning stove. OK we've had to buy a new stove after the old one filled up with toxic rubber compounds, but you've got to make sacrifices.
  
• We've been recycling all the empty aluminium cases from our tea lights into a giant statue of Al Gore, instead of burying them in the orchard like we used to.
  
• We buried all the pumpkin pulp after the Parade of Pumpkins, at a depth of half a mile. The JCB we used may have emitted some carbon dioxide - but we offset this by only drinking non-fizzy beer.
  
• To avoid pilgrims bringing their 4x4s into Husborne Crawley, we've been setting an example by getting them to park at Cranfield Aerodrome and then bringing them in by helicopter.
  
• Realising that the windows in the Great House were wood-framed, we ripped them out, burnt the frames, and replaced them with U-PVC.  So much warmer, and they'll last forever.  The Planning Committee didn't like it, but we've blackmailed them.
• We've stopped Burton from eating any more lentils.
  
• Since we heard that mature woodlands are actually a net creator of carbon dioxiode, we've burnt down the spinney.
  
• We're really keen on recycling bottles. Especially the milk bottles we get delivered each morning. Every day, without fail, we drive them over to Leighton Buzzard to put them in the bottle bank.
  
• We've kidnapped a couple of pandas from the Safari Park.  Strictly speaking this doesn't reduce global warming or increase biodiversity, but they're just so cute.

www.blogactionday.org

Jolly Hockey Sticks

In these environmentally-friendly days it behoves us all to consider the impact of our actions. So Young Keith's suggestion that we just dump all the smashed pumpkin flesh we are currently extracting from the Moot House, would have been totally reckless. And since he suggested throwing it in the brook, we could have ended up being charged with polluting a watersource.
On the other hand, if we just leave it to rot it will end up discharging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and assisting climate change. I'd hate to think that somewhere in Greenland there's a glacier with our name on it.
So we have decided to embark on a process of carbon sequestration. For two reasons, really - first because we just like the word "sequestration", and secondly because it was a very traditionally Beaker People thing, burying things in ritual holes. We've taken advice on this and we reckon, given the porous nature of the Greensand on which the Community lives, we need a hole about a mile deep which we can then cap off with a hundred yard depth of clay. Should keep the carbon down.
Hnaef will be handing out spades, and Burton will be banging the drum to encourage everyone to keep digging in time. Keep at it - remember this is for the good of the planet!

Anyone needs me, I'll be in the conservatory.