The Anton Coaker column thread

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Spider in mushy bees

I think it’s time for some unlikely biology stuff. The idea was triggered when I found a spider in the previous night’s saucepan. Nothing too odd about this you might think, and indeed, we quite like the odd spider about –as long as our Agnes isn’t involved, because the shrieks would awaken the dead- to the extent that Alison and I harbour a monster of an arachnid in the bedroom window. It lives behind a picture frame, and must be the terror of such small invertebrates that visit…quite possibly mice and small birds as well by its size. I don’t know how long spiders live, but this one has been extant for a couple of years and more and we’re quite fond of it. But, back to the saucepan dweller. This particular pot had the leftovers of the previous nights’ mushy peas, and spidey had somehow turned herself bright green in an exact match. I’ve got to presume that’s what happened, because she’d have stood out like a sore thumb elsewhere. I did check it out, and yes, some species can do this, although seemingly over several days, which begs the question how she knew what Alison was planning for tea days in advance.

Onwards then, and moving up the orders. News slithered out a couple of months ago of an elderly python in a US zoo laying a clutch of eggs. This was generally a happy surprise for all concerned, being Mrs Python was a venerable 62 years old, but mostly as she hadn’t seen a male snake for some 15 years. It’s known snakes can practise parthenogenesis – making babies without a Daddy- but this was still a shock. It’s known to naturally occur in several invertebrate species, as well various fish- notably some sharks-, amphibians, and reptiles. Lady Komodo dragons, for instance, are known to be able to lay fertile eggs without the assistance of a gentleman Komodo. A few bird species can achieve it, parthenogenesis being found in domesticated turkeys, chickens and pigeons. The results however aren’t always viable, or are not put together quite right. Male turkeys bred by parthenogenesis are recorded as having smaller testes than normal – which I find hardly surprising to say the least.

In mammals, the phenomena has only ever been recorded where scientists have been, er, ‘interfering’ – and we’re straight into a wholly questionable field of ethics here. It has been induced in mice, although the abnormality rate is pretty high, which probably says enough for me. But as ever, there’s boffins who want to tinker further. In essence, you’re talking about cloning – and it is technically possible… Dolly the sheep was a clone. In her instance, it’s achieved by removing the nucleus from an egg, and replacing it with a snippet of tissue from the animal you want cloned. Typically a bit of skin tissue I understand. The resulting embryo can then be implanted in a surrogate mother for normal gestation.

Now whether this is a sensible thing to do or not remains to be seen. Dolly the sheep didn’t have a very long life, and looked pretty hobbly from videos I saw…but then, she was a sheep, living in a fairly artificial environs, so I can’t say I’m surprised. There are already businesses stepping forward who will clone your favourite pooch-overseas- at around £38,000 a pop. I love my hounds, but not that much! However the trade inevitably leads to speculation as to how much someone might pay to replicate a human they dearly missed? It isn’t hard to imagine a scenario where, as they used to say, ‘money will find it’. Hmmm. Curiouser and curiouser said Alice.



And so, to close, I’ll relate a wholesome tale about human surrogacy gone wrong. A nice American lady kindly entered into an arrangement with a childless Chinese couple, where she’d cook their IVF embryo in her tummy for cash. And initially all went well. Indeed, a scan soon revealed she was carrying twins…everyone was delighted, and she was promised an extra $5000 for the bonus baby. And when they were duly delivered –out the sunroof- and handed over to the doting parents all seemed well. Until that is, the Chinese got suspicious about the differing appearance of these supposed twins. A dna test soon revealed that the surrogate had somehow, after implantation, managed to shed an egg of her own- the body usually stops doing this once it finds itself up the duff- and that this egg had been fertilised in the more accustomed manner. Unsurprisingly, lawyers quickly became involved in a big way, and when the American lady eventually- and expensively- recovered ‘her’ baby, she apparently advises fellow would-be surrogates against the incubation trade.

There…it’s all in the Morning News!

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

RSPB Burn ban 14-111-20

You might have noticed a piece in the ‘Morning News the other day, reporting on calls for a ban on controlled burning of peatlands, which are currently managed for grouse shooting. With a list of seasonal livestock tasks in front of me, as the weather closes in, and grass growth slows, I was in too much of a hurry to focus on it much. I did clock it was fronted by the RSPB, along with an array of fellow conspirators we’ll refer to as the usual suspects. And sure enough, they’re claiming all kinds of benefits from such a ban, although I’ve found it hard to find the limits of their proposed ban. Whether it’s on all upland terrain, just active peat bogs, anywhere that grouse are found, or just wherever posh chaps in tweed are known to congregate through late August, I’m not sure. I rather suspect it’s everywhere, but especially where those nasty game shooting types are to be found. Because this noise is a …..forgive me…smokescreen for further agendas. Both some of the fellow conspirators, and within the RSPB, there is a fixation with rewilding bits of Britain. And while it’s difficult to convince the masses to rip up roads, housing estates, schools, and supermarket carparks to plant wild flowers and trees, it’s easy to point at those of us who still have some unconcerned countryside.

The claims for the benefits of undamaged peat bogs are one thing – and believe me when I tell you, there is a fetish amongst some of our urban brethren for peat bogs which I find unsettling. It’s now a matter of unquestioning faith that, if protected, they’ll save the world from the ravages of humanities greed and short-sighted behaviour. The statements about the level of carbon they’re storing are sometimes approximately accurate, although just allowing yourself to dwell on this, instead of focussing on where all the extra CO2 currently in the atmosphere comes from-IE burning fossil fuels- is rather missing the point. The peat is only a few thousand years old, and the amounts of carbon lost are such that we could conceivably recover them, whereas oil and coal have been laying in the ground for hundreds of millions of years, and their carbon, once released, is beyond our wildest hopes of re-capturing.

And while UK peatlands may or may not be being effectively managed to maintain their integrity, oil, gas and coal reserves are globally being constantly targeted… no, plundered is the word, for extraction and burning on a scale we can barely grasp. So go and read about the Athabasca tar sands, or the gas fields of the Yamal peninsula before you breathe such manure in my presence. Be under no illusion, this is an RSPB led red herring, because they hate grouse shooting, and the perceived persecution of raptors.

If you want to dig a bit deeper into the claims being made, it gets even more fun. There seems to be the assertion that ‘controlled burning’ is damaging to peatbogs. Now I’ve a certain amount of experience in this, and ‘controlled burning’ doesn’t happen by accident- the clue is in the name- and at times when us peasants burn on moorland, you can reasonably anticipate that the ground isn’t fried to a crisp. On the occasions I’ve attended uncontrolled accidental wildfires as a member of our commoners firefighting team, when they’ve gone out across the peat plateau above me, they generally skip right across the active bog ground. By its nature it’s saturated, with scant vegetation. The peat itself isn’t damaged, and the thin vegetation doesn’t create much heat as the fire passes in a couple of minutes. The threats voiced simply don’t happen.

By comparison, what happens to unmanaged moorland is worthy of consideration. If you don’t burn- or graze off- successive years growth, the fuel load increases. Dead vegetation builds up, waiting for a spark. On drier hill ground, I have seen what happens when wildfires get into the peat after a prolonged dry spell- and when the ground nesting birds have nested. And that’s when it burns for days, and things get ugly.

Irony of irony, one of the voices supporting the call for a ban on controlled burning is showboating Covid surfer, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. We’ll avoid the gags about his surname, and focus on what happened when nearby Saddleworth Moor caught fire a couple of years ago, in a huge uncontrollable wildfire. It was a perfect illustration of what happens when you don’t graze and/or rotationally burn moorland.

This call comes from an unholy alliance of ignorant hypocrites, class warriors and eco-fantasists. Ignore the lot of em.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Trumpty's last hurrah

So, the era of US President Donald Trump is closing, albeit messily, and with one last hurrah of boorish stupidity, topped with lashings of ‘spoilt child’ foot stamping. I’m not going to beat around the bush –aha!- I’ve seen Trumpty as a shameful reflection of modern US society. They have picked some twerps, but this one took the biscuit. It was very clear from before he was ever selected that he had huge character failings, and was woefully unfit for high office. Yet still they elected him.
And I think it’s the right time to reflect on what he then did. In an eerie forerunner of his reaction to the covid 19 pandemic, he immediately started rejecting scientific advice, sacking great tranches of public servants – the scientifically literate, alongside the diplomatic and rational. It’s been a characteristic of his tenure to ditch anyone that told him things he didn’t want to hear, whose advice he didn’t like, or who looked at him in a funny way. It was simultaneously funny to watch but terrible to contemplate. It was also clear he’d try to feather his own nest as well, as was so graciously made clear when his wife started lawsuits against various media outlets for saying nasty things about her. Her initial claims were seemingly for very large sums of money, based on the potential loss of commercial income she was expecting to make simply by being ‘First Lady’. To say it was puerile hardly does the idea justice. It was an admission of vulgarity on an epic scale. The claims were subsequently moderated back a step or two, but there it was…this Presidency was an opportunity to make money. Whether all of the subsequent ongoing allegations about the Trump camp’s money scabbing and general misbehaviour are true remains to be seen…but some will likely get to court yet.
His overseas policies- and I use the phrase advisedly- have led to ongoing trade problems with some major trading partners, including the EU and China. He’s fostered relations with administrations that it might be better to hold at arm’s length, not least Putin’s Russia. And my goodness, there was a perfect illustration of his crude self-delusion….to imagine himself a tenth as clever as Vlad.
And on the subject of Moscow, whether he admits to himself that overseas interference helped him to win his term in office I couldn’t say…but it was pretty clear to everyone outside the fishbowl.
At home, he badly mishandled yet more dodgy killings by the police, which were then whipped up as being acts of racism, warming the pot of civil unrest. A cooler head might’ve turned the wick down a bit, and calmed matters. But not Donnie, no, he was quickly ready to send in troops –presumably to shoot some more people. Pity the poor defence chief who had to say ‘Er, no Sir, you can’t do that’. I notice that fella got sacked last week, in another last minute little act of spitefulness.

And yet, ironically, it’s a sober reflection of the both the fallibility and soundness of the system. It firstly allows people to choose whoever they want –and I won’t be unkind and say ‘who they deserve’- but more importantly, allows them to deselect them again. And once voted out….they have to go, whether they like it or not.
I suppose this is also a moment to also reflect that it seems that it’s hard to stop massive personal wealth interfering with democracy. But then, we see that here as well.
Whether the recent elections were completely free and fair remains to be disproved, but nothing I’m hearing suggests that Donnie would’ve won, however he counts the votes. In keeping with past performance, the outgoing President is even making the changeover all the more newsworthy – I’ve said before…he really is a gift to the media, right down to a 3rd rate columnist in a far off regional foreign newspaper. The more he shouts at reporters, the better copy he makes – if only by making himself look foolish on a very large stage indeed.
I had to look it up, and it was in fact JFK who recycled Hemingway’s line ‘Courage is grace under pressure’. And indeed, while Kennedy himself had it, Donald clearly does not. God forbid, imagine something like the Cuban missile crisis under a Trump presidency!
At the other end of the scale of reference has to be 80’s UK punk rock combo the Toy Dolls, and their popular rendition of the tune ‘Nellie the Elephant’. You might well recall, from a pogo-ing youth, part of the chorus. Nellie packed her trunk, and trundled off to the jungle with a –all together now- Trumpety Trump, Trump
Trump Trump.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Culvert Finder

So, the ‘Blue Sky Thinking Club’ has finally exploded, with the going of Cummings. I’ve increasingly been concerned about how much sway he held, and where his inventive thought processes would take us next. Mind you, as clever as he might think he is, the only thing he’s really excelled at has been winning referenda/elections. And while that’s pretty important, it’s only the first step. Perhaps thinking you’re dead brainy isn’t necessarily the same as being so. Anyway, it was always inevitable he wouldn’t be a long term fixture, as Boris would surely have been ready to throw him under the metaphoric bus whenever he found it expedient. He’s got plenty of form for moving on. I’m surprised Cummings survived the infamous Loosie-Lockdown breaking incident.

The bigger question now is whether our illustrious leader is now going to do a ‘Spice Girls’, and think he, in turn, is as clever as his lately sacked ‘manager’. It didn’t exactly pan out for Geri and the girls. We’ll see.

And that still isn’t the real news. Depending on who you believe, it sounds as if Dom might’ve had to pack his cardboard box due to a difference of opinion with Boris’s official squeeze Carrie. Now an unkind soul might speculate that allowing your righthand ‘ideas man’ steer your governance is one thing. But permitting Carrie’s whispering in his ear to direct the Prime Minister is another thing altogether. And not a very good thing, come to that. She too appears to have form for that, and it sounds the alarm here.

Hey ho. The other story now is where Cummings will surface next. I reckon he’ll bob up somewhere unexpected one day. Watch him when he does.



Out of the Westminster gutter, and back to actual gutters, I’ve an idea for you. See, all along the lanes and by-ways I travel, there are endless culverts and drains suffering from a lack of maintenance. This will inevitably cause damage that will cost far more to fix than the savings made by laying off the parish lengthsmen. That is the modern way, save a few quid today, and let someone spend thousands righting your mistake tomorrow. Borrow today, and worry about paying it back later. I hate it, but there you go…I’m a dinosaur.

However, as a generation of old duffers hang up their tackety boots and long-handled shovels- both the Council employees, and the locals who’ve often given a hand unpaid, simply …’cuz it needs doin’ boy’- there’s something we ought to do, as a community – apart from thank them for their quiet patient service, obviously. We should get some techie minded yoof to set up a County wide interactive map of the road network, showing the culverts and drains. See, knowing the location of such things is invaluable when you come to clear them out, and find 2 foot of alluvial and leaf mould covering the whole verge. I’d always presumed there was an official map, showing such things, but now suspect it’s long lost, if it ever existed. And with every one of those old boys who shuffles off to the great celestial ‘bit of shelter for a quiet pinch of baccy in his pipe’, so the location of another set of buried drains is lost.

As I understand such things, it would be no great trick to set it up so a helpful youngster could help granfer look at the ‘big’ map of an evening, and identify where things should be marked. Little electro margin notes could refer to how to find the other end when it’s flooded, which field it always use to discharge into, who else to ask, where you can heap some spoil. Their help could be noted, naming them as community minded heroes.

I’ve said it before, but it turns my guts to see stuff like this neglected, and selfish blow-ins trying to stop that nasty dirty ditch water sullying their prized garden, which now extends down into the lower meadow they bought off that old farmer chap. A bit like the closing of public loos in town to save a few bob, keeping the road network clear is such a fundamental part of civilisation that I wonder how some people think the world turns. But as we’ve established, I’m a dinosaur.

Anyway, there’s a little task for some furloughed computer geek. We give it some snappy title – ‘Culvert finder’ perchance. It won’t cost anything much, and with a bit of publicity, it could be a good way to bring generations together, and show some respect to our seniors…men who can still feel the flex in a good bit of ash handle. A badge of honour, and we should recognise them and their knowledge.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Gyp

I’ve had to be parted with my oldest dog ‘Gyp’ this week, which was a wrench as he was 16, and has been a big character. We’ve kept a dam-line of collies here since I was a wain, my Dad having bought a little welsh bitch off a pal. She was one of the many ‘Fly’s I’ve known, and was as nice a sheepdog as you could wish. Her descendants have been the dogs I’ve lived and worked with all my days. They went through various guises of cross-breeding, and degrees of competence and sanity. Under my parent’s regime, some bearded collie crept in, so they were usually rough coated, and often brown. A home bred entire was kept once, which was hardly going to deepen the gene-pool, although, to be fair, the subsequent inbreeding turned up some of the hounds I’ve loved best. I then sent one or two of them off to visit neighbouring farmyards when the time came, and kept the dam line going. Repayments for stud fees have ranged from a favour to be returned, the pick of the litter – a time honoured measure- to hard coin of the realm, and/or a days shearing.

But there came a time when I happened to have kept a bitch who was a bit shy when it came to telling me when she might need to make such a trip out. She was a good dog, but before I knew it time had slipped past, and she was getting up there in years. I missed getting her to a dog twice, and scared I would lose the line, I decided to short circuit the system….and bought a dog in.

It’s the only time I’ve ever bought a collie, but he was a beaut. My selection criteria was to ask a friend at the local farm store if anyone had a card up in the window advertising such creatures. As it happened, her fella had just bred a litter from a useful bitch, and perhaps I should look at them?

So we duly loaded up the kids and trundled off to buy a pup. And after the soppy lovable pup stage, he soon grew into a bright bold young dog. He straightaway did the specific job required of him, and my old bitch was soon disappearing off to a burrow she’d dug in a bank in which to whelp. The bloodline was safe again, although misreading his instructions, new dog Gyp set to trying to impregnate every bitch in the parish. The vet soon dealt with that- Alison had to take him for that trip out… I couldn’t look him in the eye for such a journey. He was, however, my regular travelling companion, either in the back of the landrover, biting branches that came with reach, or in the cab of the tractor as I was feeding of a winters morn.

He matured into a big strong dog, working well, top-dog around the yard, and generally being everything I’d want of him. I’d only ever worked bitches before, and dogs are different. While a good bitch will sit outside the backdoor waiting for the boss to put his boots on and go to work, faithful to the last, a dog will have his own agenda, and is just as likely to want to be off doing his own thing. Gyps own thing was often hunting roe deer…I never saw him get one down, but by golly he gave it his best shot! He was a willing worker once you’d got him on the case though, albeit with an edge of belligerence I put down to his gender. In fact, I notice some of his female descendants have had the same bone-headedness.

He was as tough as a boot. I saw him run over twice without taking the least harm. One of them was the front wheel of a pick-up turning in the yard. As he bit its tyre, it ran right over his body, and he kept biting. On another occasion though, we didn’t see what had happened, but found him one morning with a small hole in the front of a paw. The vet extracted several chips of bone from the hole, and warned us the dog would be lame forever more. In fact, although it cost me a grand, Gyp recovered perfectly, and went on to work for several more years.

But time catches all of us in the end, and he eventually grew to a doddery old gent, who tottered about the yard in a lengthy retirement. And these last few weeks, he’d become increasingly unsteady on his back legs, so I’ve closed the last page on a chapter of our lives here. Bless him.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Policy Announcement

I dare say some of you will be curious to know what that bearded twerp Coaker is thinking of George Eustice’s grand announcement about the post Brexit future of farming. And I suppose I should have been waiting for the detail with baited breath. But sadly, we already knew what the thrust of the plans would be, have already got used to the ideas therein, and guessed there wouldn’t be much meaningful detail yet. Are indeed, we’re already starting to enjoy the mistrust, division and animosity they’re actually going to generate.
We could start with the opening statements. In the first page of detail, an annotated footnote points out that the term ‘farmers’ refers to landowners, tenants, land managers, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. This was immediately ignored by the BBC, who, by lunchtime, could only wail about ‘tax payers money being paid towealthy landowners’…. ignoring the fact that it’s rather more complicated than this, that many of us are tenants, and that the whole system in fact supports hundreds of thousands of people who’re manifestly not wealthy landowners. This mindset is important, because whoeverit is that does Boris’ thinking nowadays is more likely to listen to the voter pulse in the street, that muddy peasants lurking in bucolic hedgerows.
The actual text then sets off by getting the biggest lie of all out of the way first off.
Line 1.1.2 says ‘What this means for farmers…..By 2028, our aim is that all farmers will be:…. running sustainable businesses that do not need to rely on public subsidy’.
Now this line doesn’t make clear whether Georgie is talking about financially sustainable, or environmentally. I rather suspect that the desire was to imply both… it’s such a good word to throw around, ‘sustainable’. Sadly, nothing in the subsequent –somewhat scant- detail gives any indication that we’re going to be encouraged to be doing either.
Remember the movers and shakers within the current govs inner circle are very much free-marketeers, who would recoil in terror at the idea of turning away cheap imports, irrespective of how and where they’re produced. To date, we’ve been insulated from the niceties of world trade by the EU, who in turn have been steered by French farmers who’ll quickly block the old autostrass with some burning tyres until their voices are heard. The UK is just coming out of that regime, making it clear that such barriers to free trade won’t be countenanced. Commercially, my output is going to be pitched against that from developing countries with effectively no environmental refrain, scant human rights, and living standards few voters would entertain here, or from developed countries that are still highly subsidised.
Likewise, actually farming environmentally sustainably is simply a blank space to George and those in Londinium. They’ve not the least idea how we’d achieve it, when, like the whole complex inter-connected society we’ve built, it all relies on cheap fossil fuels. Ironically, buried within the plans is the idea that I shouldn’t really be chasing my naughty scampering hill sheep around the moors. Now I do this on foot, with a dog and a stick….it’s the one single part of commercial UK farming that doesn’t burn any oil, or use plastic, and it’s going to be trodden on.
Given that my families background is immersed in the trade for centuries, and I’m part of a widespread settled steady community doing much the same….how do you think we feel about this?
Georges plans to plant a few trees to save the world is laughably naïve, and either a scary reflection of how stupid he might be, or worse, an indication that he’s knowingly selling a pup. I find this difficult, as I have nothing but respect for his highly regarded tribe down West.
As a sign of the gulf between public perception and reality, after the announcement the local TV news wheeled out a perfectly pleasant fellow, who is doing ‘nice’ things for the environment locally. But he’s light years away from actually converting acres of sunshine and rain into lorry loads of food for the tens of millions of city dwellers. People who need to be cheaply fed if they’re not to quickly start throwing cobblestones when supermarket shelves should run dry or the price shoots up.
The overall implication of the policy is that its farmers who’re ruining the environment, and who must fix it. It’s mis-direction on an epic scale, selling conscience-salving-hokum, and saying la la la really loudly with its fingers in its ears, in case someone speaks the truth. And that truth is that there’s far too many people in the country, with too high a level of expectation, to expect the environment to remain unspoiled. I’m sorry.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Cash Missing

You might’ve heard there’s calls for The Bank of England to investigate some missing ‘cash’. And sincethe absent £50 billion represents about three-quarters of all UK banknotes in circulation, you can see why. They know it’s out there somewhere, but aren’t altogether sure exactly where it’s hiding. And apparently, this has come as some kind of surprise!
Out of kindness, I’d better explain what’s going on. There’s several ingredients in the ‘missing £20s’ business. The most obvious is the combination of low interest rates and recent bank wobbles. Most folk can well remember the credit crunch panic in 2007, when it looked like we’d see banks going pop. We saw images on TV of what it looks like when they do, in countries not so far away, so when crowds started lining up outside Northern Rock, a seed of doubt was planted in our minds. Although the Chancellor of the moment hurriedly stepped in, the unthinkable could happen….. you could have your life savings gambled away by a careless bank, and lost. And when a bank is running on practically zero interest rates, meaning you’re only lending them your money for ‘safe storage’, their appeal wanes further.
There’s also their stupid charging system – I know banksneed to make a living, but look at what’s happened. In the steady drive to make everything digital, and close branches, banks now charge you to deposit cash. Think on that. They’re not only almost charging you to store money, but it costs you to pay it in as well. Even taking that jar full of coppers in to convert into something you can carry will cost a %. And they wonder why cash starts to drop out of the system.
Then there’s technophobia. Most of us wrinklies have heard about this yere ‘online fraud’ and keep being warned to stay on our guard. It hardly instils a desire to do banking online, does it? It gets more insidious when you start straying into the current fetish for ID confirmation and ever-growing money laundering rules. I regularly have to convince my bank that I’m not actuallyPablo Escobar. This is despite my having held the same bank account and maintained the same domestic residence for over half a century. When I started doing business of my own, I could walk into the foyer of the local branch and exchange pleasantries with staff who knew me by name. And if my dealings required it, I would be ushered through the heavy door into the manager’s office. He too knew me by name. Now? I have little idea who I am dealing with, where they are, or if they’re in fact Albanian scammers.
Taken as a whole, why on earth would I entrust any more business with them than I absolutely have to?
Then there’s the State’s part in this. It’s as old as taxation that the peasants will try to hide their valuables from the King’s tribute collectors. And as the modern banking system grew, where valuables became notional figures on a screen, so too tax collection evolved. Now, instead of a hired thug with a big stick, it’s largely a techie chasing figures on a screen. There’s an obvious opportunity for an illicit underbelly of undeclared money to be circulating. Personally, I don’t especially want to be involved with it, as once you’ve drunk your fill at the metaphoric boozer, what can you do with undeclared cash? You can’t safely pay the bills with it, or the techno thug will track you down. You can only whizz it away. I suppose you could use it further within the black economy, but frankly, that’s only ever going to escalate your problems.
So, given all of the above, it’s hardly surprising that this must be happening, or that since Baron Boris has a whopping great hole in the treasure chest to fill, that he’d be concerned when ever more paper money is disappearing.
The official line is that it might be involved in crime, when in reality, for fairly mundane reasons, most of it is simply stuffed in old socks, or nailed under floorboards. The figure per capita is about £740, which might surprise the committee of MPs doing the asking, but it doesn’t surprise me much.
Stand by for further pressure to curtail our use of folding money. Ironically, as seen the world over, that’ll simply push folk at holding something else instead….gold, or maybe US dollars. Money is, after all, only an easily transportable notional system of common valuation.Everyone knows what a loaf of bread is worth- to them at least-, but it’s hard to carry 740 loaves in your pocket.
There Rishi. That’ll be £500…in cash, thank you.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Animal Transport


You might’ve heard some guff the other day about banning livestock exports. And it may be that you dismissed it. After all, subjecting those poor animals to cramped uncomfortable journeys, packed into lorries, for slaughter in unknown countries, by swarthy thugs using barbaric methods….well, it’s quite horrible. It should be banned shouldn’t it?

Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as that, and you need to look at the DEFRA consultation and have your say. The document is mostly about animal transport, with live export bit being but part of it. And despite being dressed up as an exercise in extending the welfare of domestic animals, in effect, it’s a wholesale attack on our industry.

We’ll start with the live export. A small percentage of UK livestock is exported for fattening/slaughter overseas. It’s almost exclusively to near Continental Europe…the simple logistics forbid anything much else. These are countries with similar standards to our own, and until now, essentially the same rules on animal transport. Demonising the practise is a xenophobic idea, pretty much saying your neighbours are wicked thugs.

Of course, stamping your feet about it because you can’t abide the idea of slaughtering and eating fluffy animals, and you want it to stop…..that’s another matter altogether.

Remember, government’s plan is to permit further importation of cheap meat from countries outside the EU, whose animal welfare standards are, er, somewhat ‘different’ to our own. I’m not sure quite how Boris squares this with his current squeeze, animal rights campaigning vegan nut Carrie.

Back to the detail of the ‘consultation’. Vehicle design comes under attack, despite a lack of evidence that it’s needed. It’s arbitrarily deemed that the headroom for cattle needs to be increased. This means that double decked cattle wagons won’t fit under motorway bridges. Current wagons will have to be scrapped, and new ones purchased- bankrupting several good firms along the way. Ultimately, it can only mean one thing. The price of moving beasts at commercial scale will rise. And seeing as Tesco won’t pass this cost forward, they’ll simply scalp it off upstream. UK cattle will be worth a tenner less.

Then there’s temperature. It’s now being suggested – and on past performance, DEFRA ‘consultations’ are policy that’s already been decided - moving sheep and cattle in temperatures below 5.C, or above 30.C, will be banned unless the wagon has ‘thermo-regulation system’. That’s right, air-con for livestock boxes. Now, I think we’d best step back from this for a moment to consider it. If I’m moving a bunch of ewes to their lowland winter keep- a completely normal hill farming routine as old as transhumance, which has been mechanised all of my life-, I won’t be able to load them in the stockbox when the weather is forecast to be colder than 5C. That’s a good chunk of the winter months on the hill. Instead, I’ll have to leave them waiting in the field, standing outdoors in….guess what? Temperatures lower than 5 degrees, in the wind and sleet too. Clearly it’s a nonsense.

The 30 degree business is a bit different, as a livestock wagon loaded with woolled sheep on a hot summers day needs careful thought and planning. And the norm is, when it’s murder hot, to load in the evening, and travel nights. Simples.

And we’re getting to the nub of it here. Whatever the regulations say, in the end, it’s the person in charge of those animals during transit who is responsible for their welfare, and to act accordingly. And, inevitably, an operator who allows the animals to suffer in transit inevitably goes out of business very quickly indeed.

Onwards. The real killer is journey times. The plan is to further limit journey times, and extend the ‘rest period’ between journeys- in the case of cattle to 7 days rest! Seeing as marketing sheep and cattle from outlying hill country often takes their overall journey over these limits, it will cripple the whole livestock market system. And I take that very seriously indeed.

Look. I’ve bought, sold and transported beasts the length of not just this country, but the continent. I’ve tended beasts moving from one end of Europe to the other, sometimes in blazing hot weather. And failure to deliver my charges to their destination fit and healthy would have been just that…failure. It’s pretty telling that the consultation also suggests banning livestock from going on a ship when there’s such and such wind forecast. In fact, it’s been the shipping industry standard for decades that one man who decides whether the sea is calm enough to transit livestock….the Captain. No-one else.

This is damaging unnecessary policy driven by ignorant emotive claptrap, and you need to make your voice heard right now

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Last of the year

It’s a long story, but we’ve unintendedly got a young Jack Russel in the house just now – making a pack of 4 of the blinking things. It’s a lean muscly little urchin, full of vim and vigour in that very satisfactory way theyhave, although it thankfully hasn’t yet discovered bunnies. It currently likes nothing more than to be around people, and I’m one of its favourites. And nothing pleases her better than finding me in the living room of an evening, resting peacefully on the sofa in front of the woodburner – perchance watching TV through my briefly closed eyelids. She hops up onto my lap, thencequickly onto the back of the sofa, from where she can slink onto my shoulder and lick my neck and ears with a laudable dedication. When she tires of this task, sheusually decrees I’m paying too much attention to the TV. What she thinks I should be watching is her…really close up. Instead of television, I have to endure terriervision as she plants herself on my chest, right inmy line of sight. It doesn’t last long, as her attention span is pretty short, and she’s soon bounding off to annoy someone else
Her grandmother is boss terrier in the short statured yappy little pack, and around the house is a languid soppiest thing. She’s mostly interested in tucking her nose somewhere warm, and getting 20 hours shut eye per day. She likes to sit on a lap, but only if someone picks up off the floor. She cannot possibly hop up herself, what with being the queen and all. It’s a mind game we play most mornings at cuppa time, where she might get as far as putting her front legs up on my knee, imploring with big begging eyes to be picked up. She assures me, in doggy words, that she’s very old now, and can’t jump up any more, and is so cold…please pick her up! If I callously refuse, she usually steps down, and slinks away to her basket to die quietly of neglect. I remain unmoved, knowing damn well that if a mouse/rabbit/mole should scuttle behind me along the window ledge, she’d leap over me and the chair in a single bound, teeth gnashing.
For outside, she’s a different dog, into everything, endlessly on the hunt for small critters to dismantle. Half-grown bunnies are the favourite, eaten outside the backdoor, endearingly crunching them up from the head back. She’s got more scars than ‘Switchblade Harry’ the enforcer for the local loan shark, evidently tangling occasionally with something with sharper teeth than a bunny.
Back in the house – and it’s been so raw up here this last week that the kitchen has a much increased attraction- we’ve been assaulting the north face of a half-eaten turkey, and are slowly making progress. Santa bought an obliging supply of tasty comestibles into the house including- for my much beloved little wife- a wheel barrow full of gorgeous ice cream from the fabulous Taw River Dairy. Like Roskilly’s down on the Lizard, it’s made from Jersey milk, and is firmly in another league. Domestic brownie points…..and I get to help her eat it. Double bubble!.
The lovely Alison has been struggling womanfully with a giant Christmas crossword over festive cuppa times, which reminds me of a tale that I reckon will stand aretelling. We had a highly intelligent young man helping around the place backalong. Over his sandwich, he’d borrow yesterday’s paper to attack the crossword. I’d let him get 20 minutes in, getting bogged down, before asking ‘Go on Matt, give me a tough one’. He’d dutifully read out the craggiest cryptic clue he couldn’t master, which I’d ponder for a few moments as I read my paper over a 2nd mug of tea. I’d wrinkle my brow before coming up with a suggestion that miraculously fitted exactly. Genius! Matt was highly impressed, and it was fully 3-4 days before he clocked that I was reading todays paper…..with the answers. Like the cut of a gemstone, brilliance can have many different facets.
Right, I’d best get on ‘foddering’ some cows, as our Irish cousins would say. I’ll kiss 2020 goodbye, and hope we don’t meet again, although I’m afraid it’s going to be an uphill struggle for a month or two. I’ve a simple mantra I give to friends who’re in dire times. That is that the sun will keep on rising in the morning. However dark it might seem, another day will dawn tomorrow. And I think we can scale it up today. The sun is going to keep on rising over the Eastern horizon, each day bringing us closer to a better spring. Chin up.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Veganuary

Veganuary? What is it with vegans, that so many become so fixated on their dietary choice that they’ve got to foist it on others, conjuring all kinds of bogus justification. I’d be a much happier man –and doubtless a richer one- if everyone was harangued into only eating food grown, say, within a 20 miles radius of where they were, or perchance grub that didn’t involve ploughing up the Amazon basin or being irrigated with water from ancient aquifers. I would be very happy to see folk living off the actual food they ate, rather than having to take an array supplements – when it turns out their ‘special’ diet leaves them unhealthily short of various minerals and trace elements. But it’s not for me to suggest this, so generally I don’t. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a bigoted self-righteous little twerp about such stuff. You judge for yourself.

As far as I’m concerned, you can eat whatever you like, and if you want to pretend that it’s better for you or the planet…go right ahead. Just keep it to yourself, and don’t slander what I do for a living with your stupid virtue signalling.

One of the most hackneyed assertions about the vegan fad is that it’s better for the planet. And I think we need to take this apart, as not only is it harming my industry, but perversely it’s damaging to the planet as well. This ‘received wisdom’ is so entrenched that it now includes advice being given to the Government’s own Climate Change Committee. Regrettably, their advisor seems to be a delusional strident vegan himself, who elsewhere makes some pretty absurd claims. Meanwhile, his fervour has persuaded the CCC that cow farming is the end of the world – literally. The chiefest crime is that cows burp methane, which is certainly true. And I understand that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Therefore, cows must be causing the greenhouse effect…surely? Unfortunately, it comes unravelled when you look at how long methane is in the atmosphere – just a few years- as part of a natural cycle. Or where the elements that this make methane -carbon and hydrogen in cows diet’s – come from….they were already in the natural cycle.

There’s scarcely any more methane in the air today because of cows than there was 10 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 1000 years ago. Blaming it is a disingenuous red herring, and shows a lack of basic chemistry knowledge….or perhaps some obsessed need to validate your prejudice.

Then there is CO2, which is indeed a greenhouse gas we need to consider. And it’s true that chopping down the forests, burning the trees, and raising cows on the land releases carbon into the atmosphere. But here’s the thing. Again, the carbon in the trees is part of a naturally occurring cycle, having been taken in by the growing trees a few decades ago. It may be that grassland doesn’t store as much carbon as forestland – although that’s up for discussion. But, and this is critical, they’re comparable and both part of natural systems. Compared to burning fossil fuel, which releases locked up hydro-carbon that’s hundreds of millions of years old…it’s not really a story at all.

It gets more awkward. Ne’er mind raising cows, mostly on grass. Ploughed soil, annually scratched about for growing crops, is less good at holding carbon, and poor practise can lead to it steadily losing ever more. And until the advent of electric tractors and combine harvesters, the diesel burnt to harvest your mung beans/soya/rice/lentils or whatever, is burning yet more fossil fuels. The bio-diversity of commercially growing crops is oft not far off a mono-cultured desert.

It’s frequently said the soya is being grown to feed cattle. And indeed, some of the crop is going into animal feed…..the bit humans don’t want. Think on that…. buying soya based products, you are doing the damage, while livestock eating the waste product is actually mitigating some of it. Blaming cows for the destruction of the Amazon is ill-informed hypocrisy on an epic scale.

Don’t take my word for it. Go and work out the building blocks of how food is made for yourself. You’ll find highly processed ‘meat/dairy substitutes’ are about as far from ‘good for the planet’ as you can get.

At the end of the day I have to assume a lot of the noise coming from the vegan lobby comes back to being squeamish about eating fluffy animals. But pretending that eating a soya burger might let some doe eyed calf live a happy life skipping in the meadow is just infantile fallacy. You’re destroying habitat elsewhere, while denying that calf any life at all.

It is indeed your choice.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Conspiracy Theorists

One thing the covid pandemic has evidently boosted is the fondly treasured fantasies of the paranoid conspiracy nutjobs. I maintain a discreet watch on various of them- for my own amusement as much as an academic interest. And it’s fascinating. From the origins of the virus, through to alleged suppression/exaggeration of news of it, and how masks are going to spread it even worse, to that holy motherlode of dastardly evils…a vaccine being hurriedly rolled out and forced on an unsuspecting population. And as you surely know, any vaccine is the work of that secretive ethereal entity…’Big Pharma’. Then there’s the lockdown, and how that’s the beginning of the end of freedom of movement. Big brother is watching you, and will probably be injecting one of Bill Gates* microchips in with the vaccine, so they can track you forever more. I’m not altogether sure what ole Bill will want to learn from the movements of an unemployed facially pierced conceptual arts graduate, whose daily routine and spending power is hardly going to excite advertising sponsors.

Not only is the pandemic news itself a heady mix of ingredients for them to knit into a sinister web of self-delusion, the fact that they have to mostly sit indoors with only their devices for company helps feed the psychic monster.

*Funnily enough, I happen to know a boffin who has done some work for Bill Gates, trying to find ways to help the world’s poor and hungry. I regret to inform – knowing rather a lot about the subject being investigated- that his focus is…er…soft. Like other tech billionaires, along with various movie and pop stars, and ranks of vacuous celebrities, he’s earnestly sure he knows everything, simply because he’s made a lot of money in a particular field. But he is, apparently, at least quite earnest and really wants to help.



Like the Covid conspiracy theorists -and more worryingly- Trump supporters in the US are falling foul en masse to similar hysterical hooey. Blithely ignoring the evident reality that the man himself lies quite openly, and more or less continuously, and that he recently openly encouraged a mob to go and invade the seat of US Government, many of his followers are convinced there’s a socialist conspiracy out to get him. Many were using some obscure social media platform, which was apparently allowing increasingly unsettling material to be posted. When it was then effectively shut down by its tech peers, users cried foul. Several US Trumpites I keep loosely in touch with – the word ‘friend’ is somewhat stretched on the social media- were soon bleating that this was the end of free speech. ‘Look’ they cried, ‘the President is being censured!’ This ignored the fact Donald was still quite at liberty to walk out of the Whitehouse door, and say whatever he chose direct to the worlds TV….and whatever he said would be beamed right round the world, live, unedited. Well, I say unedited…at least until networks bored of his droning on, and satisfied he’d cut through the branch he was sitting on, would allow the cameras gaze to move on.

However, the phenomenon has arrived. Whole groups of people will share delusional garbage on-line, believe it, and keep adding to its momentum until it becomes self-perpetuating.

I seldom engage with these people. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a digital shouting match, but rather because they might then block me….and spoil my viewing pleasure. One of the things that I ache to ask them is how the massed ranks of the conspirators are managing to keep a lid on ‘it’….whatever it might be. In the case of the covid pandemic, this would appear to incriminate pretty much the entire medical profession. That’s quite a trick. We’re all being duped by …well…the list is pretty extensive, and somewhat contrary. Big tech is in the frame, which is funny if you think how the conspiracy theories spread. The makers of Roundup weed killer are a perennial favourite…pretty much wanting to boil your babies. Based in the anti-GMO movement, the hatred of Roundup has created a vast catalogue of made up science, dodgy websites, and now litigation. It is now a commercial activity in its own right.

Apparently, those of us who don’t see the light, foolishly accepting the lies of the dark forces controlling everything are the ‘credulous’. I always enjoy the irony of that.

In seriousness, much as it all amuses me, it’s a new reality. And these people all have a vote. I believe we’re experiencing the results of those who do understand the effects of social media on the world, and who are –ironically- exploiting it for the own aims.

It must be true; I read it on Elvis’ Facebook page.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Quorn

To get where we’re going today, I’m going to stitch together elements from the last two weeks articles…..the fallacy of the environmental benefits of veganism, and internet fuelled beliefs that don’t stand much analysis. And these 2 topics come together in an unholy bit of nonsense, where a corporate giant can advertise their highly industrialised fungus based ‘meat substitute’ as being better for the environment than my beef or lamb. And riding high on that gossamer wave of ‘It must be true, I saw it on YouTwitFace’, the myth becomes ‘fact’.

Quorn is the product, and you have probably seen the ads, endorsed by ‘celebrities’. In fact it’s a product of monster corporate interests- the petro-chemical industry helped fund its inception, undoubtedly to sell more of their product. It’s registered as a trademark, and ‘grown’ in carefully guarded processes. The basic stuff is produced using this fungus- or mould- fed on glucose and ‘fixed nitrogen’. No-one is prepared to talk about how much of either is used, or the source of these ingredients. But it’s a pretty fair bet that neither appear out of thin air by magic. Well, to be fair, the nitrogen is probably being ‘made’ out of thin air, using the Haber-Bosch process, and prestigious quantities of natural gas. It is most certainly not ‘good’ for the environment…at least, unless you’re planning for your grandchildren to evolve webbed feet, and gills.

There are multiple layers of processing, and finding the ingredients of a ready meal on the supermarket shelf isn’t simple, as the Quorn element is often simply referred to as such – or as ‘mycoprotein’-, and the extensive fiddling that’s gone into it is airbrushed out.

In fact a multitude of processes and ingredients go to make the stuff marketable. As well as hard to fathom chemical additive substances, sometimes they’re using egg yolk, pea fibre, milk proteins, and palm oil – to mention but a few. Obviously, some variations can’t therefore be called vegan. Those, I suspect, involve even further complications and processing…but I’m sure it’s all good for you. And as for palm oil going into this stuff? Well, you can say that, in a very real sense, your Quorn ready meal ‘may contain traces of ground up dead orangutan’. Saying that something like that is greener than my beef, which is primarily raised on untilled unfertilised rough pasture is about as big a lie as you can tell. But somehow, it’s legally unchallenged – oh how I wish I had an industry body who would pursue such hurtful dishonesty…all the way to court. Or better yet, a DEFRA Minister who would stand up.

You can be sure…manufacturers don’t care about the environment…they care about money.

But in this internet informed world, the idea becomes the perceived reality. So many people see what they want to, it becomes accepted. It doesn’t matter that they can walk out onto Dartmoor and see what my cows are made of – in essence, rainfall, fresh air and the occasional bit of sunshine, utilising the medium of a beautiful bio-diverse landscape. But they can’t go into the quorn factories, and see all the industrial processing and resource consumption that feeds into them. I’m happy to discuss what fossil fuel inputs I use, and indeed, could get by without them if push came to shove. Whereas the intensely processed ‘meat substitute’ business are a bit coy about this…preferring to stick to generalisations. They cannot exist without complex bought in ‘inputs’…because that’s what they are made of.

Moving on, but connected in every way, we need to revisit the Climate Change Committee, or more specifically, one of their technical advisors. One of the contributors to the CCC’s ‘Behaviour change, public engagement, and Net Zero’ report, is called Dr Joseph Poore. He researches agriculture and the environment at Oxford, and appears to be a vegan evangelist. With almost no effort, you can find video of him online, earnestly explaining to an adoring wide eyed eco-woke child that being vegan is much better for the environment. He tells her- quote- ‘Feeding grass to cows is equivalent to burning coal’. Let that statement sink in for a moment. Cows eat grass made with carbon sequestered from the air ‘yesterday’, while burning coal releases carbon hitherto locked away for hundreds of millions of years. There’s plenty more…go and check it out yourself. Poore, for whatever reason, is so fixated on his vegan quest that he’ll lie….whopping great big hurtful lies. And then fill the internet with his nonsense, so gullible keyboard warriors can replicate and spread it, turning it into ‘fact’.

And he advises government?

Wake up, Minister George Eustace. Look at what you’re endorsing by your silence. Where’s your integrity man?

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Kicked on the knee

I’m crook. See I’ve been doing a bit of pre-movement TB testing – for to ‘export’ a few Riggit and White Galloways to Scotland, which is the hill farming equivalent of selling oil back to the Saudis. One animal was a beast I really didn’t want to be parted from, and subsequently had a fairly stiff price…but she went too. She was out of a cow I kept into old age, as she reliably bred and raised very solid chunky calves. In 17-18 years, she never gave me a negative cause to notice her presence, and they are the ones you want! The sire was the infamous red Riggit ‘Firethorn’, who left his characterful stamp across the whole herd – and due to an abiding interest in my neighbours cows…their herds as well. However, money talks and I named my price, and she’s gone north up onto an Ayrshire hill. I notice she raised a very striking heifer calf backalong, which is quite a personality and will certainly be staying here.
Anyway, it was while testing these cows that I thought to PD – pregnancy diagnose- a few South Devon heifers. They’d run with the Angus bull, who we’d lately noticed wasn’t doing what he should’ve. And sure enough, 2 out of 8 are empty, suggesting I’ll also have about 10 empty Galloways after him as well. Harrumph. However, it was the dopey South Devon heifers which feature in my tale, and one of them tired of my waving a stick at her- they were being especially wooden on the day, and just stood ignoring my requests to move along the chute in an orderly fashion. She responded by kicking me square on the knee, from about as far away as she could still make connect. And by gum it hurt- and hurts yet. It damn near knocked me to the ground at the time, and for several days I was dragging my leg around the farm behind me, in a singularly undignified fashion.
After 2 weeks, it’s sore, but bearable, and has been a sharp reminder of how near the edge my profession takes me. At any moment – and if you’re going to handle cattle, it really can happen at any time- I could be invalided out of my work. I could invest in clever handling systems that separate me from the beasts ever further, but from what I’ve seen, if you go through life thinking like that you simply end up with beasts less used to people, and more dangerous than ever. I wouldn’t want to live like that. I go in amongst my cattle, scratch their hairy rumps, and endeavour to keep them as quiet as may be. I have to accept equally the steamy slobbering hay flavoured kisses, and the risks. For me, there’s no other way. It’s how I grew up, and might well be the way I eventually check out.
Risk is a funny thing. Poor old Boris is coming under all kinds of flak for managing the risks Covid 19 has placed us under, despite it being clear that whole tranches of the community are less bothered than his advisors would like. It’s further muddied when, for all the talk, he then hops on his bike and pedals several miles from his residence for a bit of healthy exercise. Given his residence is in the middle of what would’ve been a hotbed of infection at the moment, you’ve got to wonder how he keeps a straight face. But hey ho. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do better.
Personally, I’m reluctant to admit it but I’m pretty ambivalent. We’re un-naturally over populated, and looking through farmer goggles, nature disapproves of continuous overstocking just as much as she abhors a vacuum. By suppressing the infection rate within our community, we’ve only achieved 2 things. It’s allowed ‘essential’ workers to keep going – during several previous historic pandemics, there were often too many people incapacitated through illness to even bury the dead. And it has given us breathing space to create a vaccine, which might very well end the crisis. Of course we don’t know how the virus will evolve. I’m guessing it will keep changing, leading to good employment prospects for virologists and such boffins for years to come.
But it’s no good pretending this has been the ‘big one’. It hasn’t. By simple comparison, Spanish flu in 1918-20 would’ve knocked down well over 2 million Brits given our current population…and most of them would’ve been young adults. Perhaps modern medicine would’ve saved more, and prevalence of TB in people then was a complication. Mind, we also move around a bit more nowadays…..
So, don’t shout at Boris….it’s somewhat above his pay grade, or anyone else’s come to that. I’m sorry

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Hinkley Point C

I couldn’t help pricking my ears up last week, at news regarding Hinkley Point C power station. As well as the completion date being set back, the projected costs have now risen to £23 billion- although, as we all know, these figures only ever creep up. Happily, this is supposedly going to be shouldered by its funders, although I wouldn’t wager on that.

As things are, French owned EDF, and a Chinese partner, are fronting the money, expecting a 7% yield over 35 years from completion. Simple maths suggests these figures are now out of the window, and I’ve little doubt there’s some difficult ongoing discussions. But, however you cook the ingredients, here are some hard figures to grasp. EDF admit that it’ll need 3 million tonnes of concrete and 230,000 tonnes of steel. The upfront carbon footprint of the project is stratospheric.

It’ll eventually generate 7% of the UK’s predicted electricity requirements, although that figure was conjured before the government statements above pushing electric cars. 7% of UK households would be circa 1.8 million, so the budget is about £12,800 per household. This is only the build cost, not the running cost, or maintaining the supply network. Nor, most pointedly, the costs of dealing with the unsavoury leftovers, to which we’ll return.

I’m a simple man, and use simple measurements to compare things with. You and I could go out and buy a diesel generator today, and produce electricity for about £1 per household per day, all in. No economy of scale, generator running 24/7, and with a bit of tweaking, it’d run on vegetable oil. I’m not advocating this, but would use the example to illustrate that idiots like us could do no worse……….which begs some pretty fundamental questions.

The briefest bit of oogling suggests that the tedious Musk bloke would supply solar panels and battery banks for every household for less than the coast of Hinkley C. And much as I detest him, I’ve got to wonder what is wrong in the head with those who’ve taken these decisions. Perhaps they’ve been bribed.

Just on the immediate cost analysis, it’s evident lunacy. But if you want to see it clearer, let’s look forward a few years. The leftovers from smashing bits of uranium and such together, until their atoms go ping, are quite extravagantly dangerous. They will kill you if you sit on them to eat your sandwiches, snuggle up near them for a snooze, or just stroll too close. Contrary to popular misconception, this nightmare stuff doesn’t really glow in the dark, although it might be better if it did, because it remains extremely hazardous for 10’s of thousands of years. Admittedly, some of the waste is quite handy for making nuclear bombs, which explains our original 1950’s atomic fixation. And you and I are still paying for the very first plant that sparked up. Our great grandchildren will be too.

EDF’s payback should take 35 years, and the plant might reasonably be expected to run for some time after that. By then, there will be an awful lot of this waste kicking about. Some is safe enough to simply landfill …some manifestly isn’t. The industry trick has been to ‘mothball’ the old plants for as long as possible, putting off the expense. Figures I was looking at backalong suggested we were commissioning new nuclear power stations a lot faster than we were dealing with the old ones, simply deferring the pain for later.

And you don’t have to be a very rounded character to know that putting things off for a later date isn’t the best way to run a railroad.



Another little issue with building this poison chalice for our descendants is that it’s been sited less than 50’ above mean sea level. And sea levels are currently rising by something around a foot a century, meaning the site will be breached well before it stops being hideously dangerous. The whole lot will eventually have to be moved, like some darkly malicious Stonehenge. And that simple bit of maths is somewhat disingenuous, as the graph showing sea level rise is shooting skywards these last few decades. It’s a shot in the dark, but clearly the numbers are tightening, and it’s hard to conclude that Hinkley won’t be breached well before ‘official’ projections. And that isn’t allowing for any kind of unpredictable geological changes or incidents. The Japanese thought their nuclear plants were safe right up until a tsunami flooded one, which kinda focussed their minds. Notably the Germans took that as the cue to stop playing this shockingly dangerous game.

The whole project is the utmost folly, and a truly wicked thing to do to our descendants. This mind-set has to stop.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Time

I was watching that Ben Fogle TV show the other day. We quite enjoy gentle Ben and his experiences with people who end up living in the wilds – it’s apparent that the story is what’s in the people’s heads as much as the wild places they go and live in. And we note it’s pretty much central to Ben’s formula that they’ve left a more recognisable urban life…he’s seldom much interested in the gnarly natives who’ve lived all their lives beyond the reach of street lights. Funnily enough, I’d find such stories the more interesting, finding the commonality in humankind, which then shines a light on why most of us apparently want to live in cities. Those who’ve left tell a different tale, which begs different questions.

Anyhoo, this time, Ben was meeting some Irishman, who had moved to a shack in the country, grew his own veggies, eschewed money, and no longer wore a watch

Time didn’t matter to him anymore, or somesuch. He clearly had issues in his life- as many of the subjects do-, and could’ve kept a shrink occupied for quite a while, unravelling all the things going on twixt his ears, prompting his move to the sticks. I clocked the fact he’d formerly been a vegan for years, and rather suspect that must’ve addled his noggin somewhat – there does seem to be quite a correlation with that fixated mindset. However, it was the time element that got me thinking. This fella no longer kept much heed of time – although the rose tinted spectacles rather slipped when we learnt that he occasionally helped out the farmer down the road, and Ben asked how he went to help at the right time…..hmm. Anyway, we’re led to believe that this gentle chap was living a blissful life, not being a slave to modern trappings, and bumbling along with none of the manic pace many of us recognise.

So, why do we rush at life? Certainly I do. I’ve got no issue with the question at all. We’re hard wired to propagate our genes, and provision of support for our families is fundamental to the survival of these genes. Bingo, there it is, can I go now? Oh, you want further explanation? OK. Half of us – the better looking half- are absolutely tied to time in regard to this drive – and on the show Ben soon discovers that his Irishman has firstly had the snip, and secondly, lately acquired a lovely young Irish bird. And there can’t be many viewers who didn’t detect a potential for a problem right there, for whether there’s a clock in the house or not….time counts in such matters. Even if we’re not really meant to talk about it, being so personal, or potentially uncomfortable for some.

As for the other half of humanity, I’ll try and see it through my own drives. As a younger man, I didn’t know why I was driven, merely that I wanted to get on. I soon learned that smelling the metaphoric roses along the way made the journey all the more enjoyable. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions how this manifested itself. As time went on, I’d falteringly made steps forward, both in the outward journey and the inner. Milestones went past, but the drive remained. I had a clutch of small people dependant on my efforts, which made going at life all the simpler. I have to provide for them, to give them the best leg-up I can. Learning that’s it’s more than just fiscal or material is part of the journey, and whether I’ve acquitted myself on either count is still up for debate. But I couldn’t have sat around and let it flow past me, or had no care for such matters, any more than I could’ve jumped over the moon.

As they’ve started finding their way as adults – where my obligation to them is the same, but they obviously each have their own central role to play now- I’ve found that I’m still driven. I still have to fight, as a dear departed pal used to say- the old enemy….time. I still want to have a catalogue of stuff to look back on, when I can’t kick it any more. And the smaller number of calendar pages available to me only focus’s my attention. I’d like to say it’s made me work smarter, or possibly have more empathy for those who don’t share the same simple drives…but I’m not sure either would be really true.

Hey ho. Better call that shrink who’s deliberating over Ben’s Irishman. There’s a far richer seam to be tapped with that balding twerp on Dartmoor, if only he’d stop long enough to lie on the couch!

Better get on, daylights wasting.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Frosty Sawmilling

Well, I haven’t welcomed the return of the rain and Westerly gales, which are inevitably such a feature of my life farming on Dartmoor, but boy! Were we ever fed up with the freeze. Despite it only having been a few degrees into negative figures, the relentless East wind never seemed give for a minute. The livestock don’t mind a bit of cold weather as a rule, and as long as they’ve got grub, they loaf about unconcerned. But they like a drink with their fodder, and there lies one of our problems. H2O in a solid state doesn’t run along pipes and through ball valves very easily, and after a few days of the penetrating wind, we were having to free up troughs daily everywhere. Even inside sheds full of dozens of steamy burping cudding bullocks, where keeping the temperature down is usually the problem. I suppose I should be grateful a lot of our stock runs out on the rough, with access to running streams and the like. They at least could find a drink. One trough, supplying a large isolated group with no stream to go to, and where a problem would suddenly escalate, was a persistent worry. So one of the lads carefully cut a twig to the right length, and wedged it across the valve chamber, just holding the float down enough that the water kept dribbling.

Around the sawmill, the freeze brought other problems. Frozen dirt and grit was seemingly superglued to every piece of round timber, which doesn’t exactly help cutting edges, and stacks of planks likewise stuck together amorphous lumps. And however carefully you creep along in the telehandler, a green oak beam with an icy surface might as well be rolling on well-greased ball bearings the way it wants to slide left or right off the forks. Poor sawyer Barrie charges the bandsaw lubricant line with antifreeze each evening when he shuts down, and the 5 gallon barrel of lube comes indoors overnight. But last Tuesday, it caught him out when he stopped for a cuppa, and was solid before he fired up again. This caused all manner of problems which took some time to sort. Then, the next day, we discovered there must’ve been a bit of emulsified oil in the bottom of the oil tank on the timber crane, borne of condensation over time…which of course had frozen too. There wasn’t much to be done about that – it wouldn’t drain out, and without a closed up heated workshop the machine, it was staying frozen until there was a thaw.

With the world and his uncle all wanting some sawn timber for various projects, I’ve had to put more time in the mill than usual, which revealed yet more woe. The East wind was blasting straight into the open side of the building, across Barrie’s saw and onto mine. As well as making the bed of the mill very cold to handle, it kept bringing with it gusts of sawdust specially to lodge in my eyes….which isn’t much fun at all. I was soon resorting to wearing eye protection, which I don’t like doing unless there’s serious hazard- you really want clarity of vision working such equipment, and fogging up safety specs don’t exactly help.

And speaking of my own comfort, as well as numb fingers, and repeated chillblanes itching away, I’ve made a discovery. I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m no longer prepared to live in a dwelling where most of the single glazed rattly metal framed windows face East. It might be very pleasant of a midsummer morning, letting the solar rays warm the kitchen and my mood. But when a freezing Easterly is driving straight in for a week solid, making the whole house persistently cold, it takes a special state of mind to just put up with it. And my dear little wife and I no longer have that state of mind. Each evening, we’d retreat to the living room, where heavy curtains, and a roaring woodburner being continually fed chunks of well-seasoned oak made for the one warm room. But at some point, one of us would have to venture out to the kitchen to make a cuppa….and be reminded how blinking cold the house was. I don’t mind going outdoors and facing what each day brings me –that goes with the territory- but I’ve decided that we need some respite, at least, when we come back indoors. Now, I’m sure I stacked away some nice clear joinery grade stock backalong, perfect for making windows. Hmm, I’d better find a joiner, and go and dig it out before next winter.



Onwards then.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Advertising on the interweb

Advertising on the interweb is a funny old thing isn’t it. There are apparently computer algorithms working away furiously working out what I might buy andwhere to snare me, or possibly just how to scam me. They’re pretty sure I might like various ointments and unction’s to fix whatever ailments their computer thinks I might have acquired in my advanced level of decrepitude. While, conversely there’s invitations to be introduced to luscious lonely beauties ‘in my area’. This perplexes, as I’m pretty sure I’d have noticed these enthusiastic hotties, knowing pretty much everyone living within a 5 mile radius. Oh, and apparently there’s young Ukrainian birds unnumbered who want to make acquaintance, should I only click on the link. And, as if in anticipation, plenty of ads implying I’ll be needing some little blue pills to adequately acquit myself with these ethereal creatures.
It’s fascinating stuff, and amuses me no end….but not, I might add, enough to click on any of it. Generally, I can see how my age and gender might make the whirring little software somewhere deduce it knows what I like. And after my beloved Alison went searching backalong for some long lacy gloves – for a panto costume, I should explain- I suppose we can guess why adverts for certain other lacy garments spontaneously appeared heavily for a while.
However, one ad had me stumped this week. Clicking on a site for to play a merry tune as I was writing something, an ad jumped out trying hard to flog some floral scented girly beauty product range. And the unlikely tune being used as a vehicle to sell me these products? A sleazy greasy Mexican-American rock band called ‘Tito and Tarantula’, and their killer hit ‘Angry Cockroaches’. Try as I might, I can’t see how these products are ever going to feature on the shopping list of many Tito fans.But then, to be fair…I haven’t made millions selling on-line advertising, so what do I know?
As it goes, I am expecting my first big payback for online traffic generation. See I’ve lately steered some folks I know toward their online fame and fortune. It occurred that, should this extended local tribe take to filming their day to day exploits, and put them up on some youtube channel…. they’re going to make it big. The name of this channel- still in hushed secret development- might well be ‘Radio-Godsworthy’, or something very much like it. And if you recognise to whom this title might be attached, you’ll know exactly what I mean….it’ll be a hit.
And here’s another curious thing. Buried deep within a thousand year old Icelandic text, I stumbled backalong on a lengthy description of some farming characters and their doings. And it’s impossible not to notice they bear an unsettlingly close resemblance to the abovementioned folk. I don’t know if anyone else is both a scholar of such texts, and familiar with Dartmoor’s natives, but the similarities really are striking. Give or take swapping quad bikes and aluminium crooks for a halberds and tolting ponies, you could drop characters from either tale seamlessly into the other. It’s uncanny.
My little wife and I have in fact just been considering how hill farming’s day to day stuff looks from the outside, after watching an episode of TVs ‘This Farming Life’. This show follows the fortunes of several livestock farmers in Scotland and oopNorth. In amongst the endless shows about fake ‘celebrities’, and their puerile interests, it’s a gem. These are real people doing real stuff, with scant regard for glossing over the bumps in the road. Some are as haphazard as your scribe, while others are better organised, but it’s lovely to see into honest lives away from all the prevailing tinselly trash.
And speaking of things rural, here’s something which might’ve passed you by. You’ll recall just around Christmas I recorded that the change in the birdsong on the winter solstice, which I’ve long observed is timed to the very day, was running 2 weeks early. It came early in December, when avian tunes changed to their New Year songsheet. I’ve no idea why this should be so, but there’s more now. All over the country, cuckoos have turned up…over a month early. East Anglian farmers are reporting hearing them, as are several in the Welsh Marches and Midlands. I mentioned this to Alison, and she admitted to thinking she’d heard a cuckoo a week or more ago, but dismissed it as ridiculous.
Anyway, they’re surely about. Whether this means they know their prey species are nesting early, or that they’ll have to sit about waiting now, remains to be seen. Curiouser and curiouser said Alice.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Plant a Tree

I’ve been thinking on all the guff about how planting trees is going to save the world. It is the accepted wisdom now. The nuts and bolts of the theory are pretty simplistic…trees are largely made of carbon, most of which the take from the air as they grow..inthe form of carbon dioxide. When they’ve done their thing, you’re left with a bigger tree, and some obligingly leftover oxygen. It’s a no brainer isn’t it?
Well, no it’s not. See, in almost every case, in a century or two, none of that carbon is going to remain locked up. Unless very careful intervention is taken, your tree will be dead and rotted away, or possibly burnt. ‘Amenity’ plantings, ‘left for nature’ are the worst. Even if your tree is a commercial conifer, the chances are that the quik-fix junko housing estate it helped throw up will be torn down again in mere decades. The carbon taken up by trees is part of a fairly short loop. A natural cycle, from which it is quite difficult to escape. You could, of course, plant an oak tree, then when you and I are both about 150, get me along with my sawmill, and cut it into an oak beam to flog into some prestige building project. That would lock up some of the carbon for maybe another century or two.
But don’t imagine for a moment that the trees in a forest continue to gather and hold more carbon forever. They do not…it’s a fantasy. As I am fed up explaining, you can go to all kinds of ancient and/or virgin forest, and find a few hundred tonnes of timber above ground, and some more carbon in the root systems, and some more in all the soil biota. But there is a ceiling. If it’s a rocky site, the boulders will still poke through.
Regrettably, the carbon we’re trying to ‘recapture’ was formerly lying in a coal seam, or an oil field, for hundreds of millions of years. And we’re releasing more of it every single day- in quite staggeringly large quantities.
So why are so many people jumping on the tree planting band wagon? It isseemingly a subtle cocktail of guilt, wishful thinking, childish fantasy and gullibility. People know we’re trashing the planet, and planting a tree is such a tangible thing you can do isn’t it? If you plant lots, you could, like that gormless actress Emma Thompson, fly across the Atlantic to attend –seemingly with a straight face- an Extinction Rebellion protest.
Like all such ‘carbon capture’ scams, Emma’s’ claims conceal a lie. A great big whopping facile lie. And while you can lie to yourself, I’m afraid you’re not going to lie to me.
So the great idea is built on straw. There is also another reason many of us aren’t very enamoured of the blind faith in planting new woodlands. In the UK, once you’ve treed up a piece of farmland, the State is going to be very reluctant to ever let you clear the trees and put the land back to conventional farming again. It’s a one way street, and a major impediment to persuading us that we might view trees as another crop. Those doing most of the lowland planting now are rich blowins, charities and quangos. I’m exempting the old estates who do understand longterm woodland management, and regard caring for the land at a level the rest of us barely grasp- and without whom I wouldn’t have much oak to cut. I’m also setting aside upland commercial softwood plantations, which have created a huge new industry in the UK. But, as a rule, when us peasants see some urban downsizer planting up good farmland- on the lovely little place they’ve bought down in the westcountry-, warmly wittering about bio-diversity and carbon capture…..you should realise that what we perceive is ‘another idiot’.
And this comes to you from a farmer who’s planted trees on bare farmland all his adult life.
There is almost no rational plan. No calling to account the fallacies and fantasies, and inane celebrity or ministerial statements. Where the Forestry Commission should be leading from the front foot with the hard facts and a positive direction of travel, a yawning chasm …well, yawns. There’s lots of talk with all the warm fuzzy buzz words, but it leaves most of us connected with the actual timber growing and processing industry cold. At the sharpest commercial end, several cute operators are aligning to financially milk the gullible sentiments, and the cash cow they’re raising.
But it ain’t gonna put the carbon cat back in the bag, you can be damn sure of that.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Sarah Everard

Dare I venture into the morass that has erupted after the murder of that poor woman Sarah Everard, near Clapham Common? It is not the murder itself that has raised all the questions, as abhorrent as such things inevitably are, nor the fact that the suspect is a serving policeman. I say ‘is’, because I take it until such a time as he’s convicted, he remains ‘innocent’. Where it has all got a bit difficult is firstly, the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the ‘vigil’ last weekend, and separately, the discussion about how to protect girls and women from the unwanted male attention.
In the case of the former, it was obvious from the moment it became known a serving copper was the chief suspect that a wagon load of ‘anti-establishment’ types would be piling in. Given that far lefty students were already rumbling on the subject before Saturday’s vigil, you’d hardly have to be the world’s shrewdest bookmaker to give pretty low odds against there being some kind of scene. And once the vigil had been denied whatever licence it is you need to hold such an event…the writing was on the wall.
Likely no-one really knows what happened, or who shoved who first. And once the shoving starts, who knows whose shins have been kicked? But it was desperately inept to have allowed such an obviously potential confrontation to have flared off like that. I think, in Dame Cressida Dick’s place, I’d have given everyone on the force the night off, except half a dozen female Bobbies – apparently they’re not called WPCsanymore, because they’re just ‘police officers’ now. Or at least until they manhandle a member of the public, when their gender suddenly matters again. I like to think I would’ve also had the foresight to instruct officers to keep their hands in their pockets, and ignore breaches in the covid rules for the duration.
But then, I’m not Cressida Dick, nor am I Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police service…. And given Cressida’s lapse in judgement last Saturday, I don’t know that she will be for much longer either. When the PM says he has ‘full confidence’, the bookmaker in me would be shortening the odds again. Perhaps the problem was a combination of the Met’s sensitivity about the murder suspect being ‘one of their own’, coupled with what must be a never ending battle to try and maintain some kind of public respect in the face of deliberate lawlessness.
To touch briefly on the fact that the main suspect is a cop himself, I know it’s counterintuitive, but I don’t think it makes any difference to the crime whatsoever.I’m concerned that public and media interest in the case could make a trial more difficult, but that ship has sailed now.
As for the general discussion about women’s right to walk the streets unmolested – and perhaps we oughtn’t to be using that specific term, but you know what I mean.It’s more or less impossible for me, or any bloke, to understand what it’s like for a woman who feels intimidated thus, when they’re out and about. I’m not even sure I have the right to comment, so forgive me if I get it wrong.
I am unclear whether anyone could change what drives some men’s actions. Outside of a safe developed society, nature does regrettably little to disadvantage men who don’t try a kind word, a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates as an introduction. It’s the nature of biology that evolution doesn’t necessarily stop them in their tracks,as deplorable as that may be. So the potential for some men to act in varying degrees of unpleasantness is inevitably there, however we wish it wasn’t.
Societal change is all well and good – as my daughters eloquently lecture me on the topic. And small incremental changes must all help women as a whole, although how you get to some muppet suggesting- seemingly with a straight face- a 6pm curfew for all men isn’t clear. But, as I hate to point out, it seems unlikely potential murdering rapists would be too worried about breaking a few curfew rules.
In fact, on the subject of such monsters, I’m not at all sure you can fix the kind of illness that leads to someone killing a girl in such situations. I’d happily start with the boiling alive of conclusively convicted perpetrators, but don’t suppose that’d deter the next one.
If you want to move the discussion in the right direction, perhaps teaching young men how intimidating they can be for some girls should be part of the human biologycurricula. Because, as I’m astounded to discover, it apparently isn’t.

 

[Anton Coaker Blog]

Selling off Nat West

I note the Gov is planning to sell off a chunk of their share of the Nat West Bank. You’ll recall, this was acquired as some kind of emergency bailout, after the credit crunch in 2007-2008. Several –most- banks had been gambling on ridiculously complex markets, whilst lending insane amounts of money to the most fickle of requests. Whole tranches of the banking sector were an over-extended fragile web of stupidity. And as casualties started to look likely, the Treasury stepped in to scoop up various outfits which were close to toppling.
I was storing my meagre holiday fund with a bank that was barely paying me anything to borrow these savings, but using them to leverage what were evidently absurd risks –presumably paying themselves whopping great bonus’s for their cleverness. It was then partly bought out by….well, me the taxpayer. Worse, I’d then have to pay extra tax to pay myself back. To help do this, the clever chaps round at the Treasury printed a whole lot of funny money, and lent it to yet more people who probably weren’t fit to borrow it. This inevitably devalued what I had to start with.
I hope you’re following this, because I got lost about then….but I was pretty sure I’d been done over.
You might have your own views on all of this. Possibly, like me, you might observewith despair the global infatuation with living on borrowed money, which had risen once more to stupidly dangerous levels before the Covid pandemic came along. It mystifies me….there’s apparently no prudence whatsoever. The world and his dog seem to think you can climb a rope ladder that you’re holding up at the same time. And now, we’re left with debts beyond any kind of reason, both personal and national, and a complete reliance on interest rates remaining on the floor – possibly below it.
Meanwhile, as someone points out to me, it rather appears that there’s massive inflation in several sectors, which is somehow remaining hidden from the headline figures. This is hardly surprising, as the aforementioned ‘quantative easing’ those scamps at the Treasury so love –remember they’re mostly former bankers themselves- can only push things one way. It’s hard to say whether Brexit, or Covid, or goodness knows what is to blame, but I’ve seen 20% jumps in the price of several commodities I’m involved in. Mostly these jumps are in honest solid goods, rather than the ethereal morning dew so beloved of the City. So on general principals, I approve of this latest turn of events.
I can’t say whether these jumps will be sustained, should some kind of normality ever return, and how it will change the board game. I’m pretty sure the establishment will do anything- absolutely anything- to avoid any kind of crash. The stakes are too high again, and the carnage is barely imaginable. Meanwhile, those of us who’ve played it safe are left in the bizarre position of rather fancying such a crash. See, I want some kind of reward for having been such a stabilising influence on the otherwise fickle morons, and I sure ain’t been getting much reward of late.
Meanwhile, on more important matters out in the mud and the rain, my immediate thoughts are rather more focussed on the changing seasons. My South Devon cows begin to ‘bag up’, and get all swollen and wobbly behind, with great round bellies swinging as they meander over to meet me mornings. For spring calving is upon us at any moment, with all the joys, stresses, toil and reward it brings.
One group have insisted that they’d rather be loafing across the valley by the main road. The barest of green bites there must be sweeter than the bales I’m offering, as they’re going hungry to enjoy it rather than scoff to their hearts content at the feeders. We pulled them all back close to the yard this week, and shut them on some inbye to keep an eye on them. Driving their swaying orange bodies back through the colour matched bracken litter, amid the boulders and the budding gorse, they stopped to drink as they forded the Dart. And it was as satisfactory a way to spend a timelesshour as ever.
The ewes aren’t far behind, round as barrels with a new crop of lambs due in 2-3 weeks, so I’ll be fetching them back from keep, and off the hill, to be close by in the next week or so. The Galloway cows are a month off yet, but altering now, and mustering for their respective launch onto the high ground.
These are the things I really value. Money is just paper in the end.