Category Archives: Blog on The Landscape

Blog on The Landscape, Outdoors, Psychology, Society

The Psycho Path Test

…or how to restrain yourself after being nearly barged into the path of a speeding van.

Street

Image by skeeze from Pixabay

There are “Rages” for everything these days so I feel justified in adding another here – Pavement Rage. It’s not new but I’ll elaborate anyway. Some months ago I suffered yet another example of pedestrian selfishness. There is a road in the town centre which has pavements either side of a single traffic lane, the pavements used to be about one person wide but have been widened to accommodate two people side-by-side, which is fine until you get a couple walking along and you’re walking towards them and when you meet neither of them wants to move either in front of or behind their partner and you end up getting forced to step into the road, hopefully avoiding any traffic. You can’t even stand still as you’ll just get barged aside without so much as an excuse me. I don’t mind if the people are unable to step aside easily, such as the elderly or disabled but for two able-bodied people to refuse to give way to another person is just ignorant and it makes you want to scream sometimes. Hence the pavement rage.

Some other choice examples…

I was walking along a wide pavement when a family group was walking towards me, not one of them moved aside and I ended up stood in a flower bed as they sauntered past. Then a chap in Lycra leaving a shop gets on his bike on the pavement, starts pedalling and swerves right across in front of me, nearly knocking me over – without even the slightest acknowledgement or apology, he hadn’t looked before setting off so was probably oblivious to my presence anyway. Another evening while walking home in the dark I saw a light on the path ahead of me, hovering silently, moving rhythmically side to side, was it an alien presence? No, it was a woman on a bike, I stepped into a driveway to let her go past, nearly twisting my ankle and falling over in the process, and she rode past without so much as a “thank you”.

On a Saturday morning, walking along a wide pavement carrying two heavy bags of shopping I was approaching a woman with a pushchair and two kids, one on either side of her, taking up the whole width of the path, seeing that she had no intention of getting either of her kids to move out of the way I considerately stepped off the pavement and stood in front of a parked car – she then strode past again without so much as a thank you; because obviously she was entitled to take up the whole path and I was obliged to move out of her way so therefore she had no need to be grateful, how selfish I am.

The worst was when I was walking along the same narrow road mentioned above, eating a bag of chips and a couple were approaching from the other direction, they looked well-off from the way they were dressed and as they reached me the man, who was on my side of the pavement, nearest the buildings, had no intention of moving out of the way, having that typical modern arrogance and sense of expectation that other people should get out of his way, because he’s important. To avoid losing my dinner I had to swerve closer to the building and nearly fell against the window of a pancake shop. I immediately turned and shouted after them “well don’t mind me” but they ignored me, the look on the face of the woman who was sat just inside the same window told me she couldn’t believe the other man’s behaviour either.

These are all examples of how much of our society has become so self-obsessed, so arrogant and aggressive, that people have the expectation that other people should stop for them, or stand aside for them, that they’re sense of self-importance is so strong that they feel that they can just do whatever they want to and sod anyone else. Has it really become wrong to be considerate and polite?  I hope not.

[The title was of course inspired by that of Jon Ronson’s excellent and fascinating book, The Psychopath Test]

Advertisement
Standard
Blog on The Landscape, Outdoors, Society, Transport

The Cycle Path Test

 

Cycle Path

Image by Pam Patterson from Pixabay

Near where I live runs a path along the former trackbed of the closed railway line from Newark to Nottingham. There are many old lines like this across the country – I’ve also walked on the path at Threlkeld in the Lake District and part of the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire. They are wonderful places to visit to experience the outdoors – mostly surfaced, level and easy to walk on for everyone, many like ours here are designated cycle paths as part of the Sustrans network that since the seventies has made at least something good from the Beeching annihilation of the railway network of the sixties.

I am quite happy to use cycle paths whether they’re in the countryside or in the town, though it seems many people don’t seem to agree with cyclists using them. I have seen on so many occasions cars parked on cycle lanes and on the railway path I encounter people walking dogs or otherwise exercising who rather than returning my friendly “morning” and smile just scowl at me, I know what they’re thinking – I’m one of these annoying cyclists who rides on their footpath and integral dog toilet.

Even the ones who don’t think the place belongs solely to them seem oblivious to the fact that there might just be the odd bike rider around at some point.

One day I saw a man who had walked down one of the entrance ramps to the path, he hesitated at the edge of the path with his back to me and then just as I reached where he was he took two steps to his right, without looking behind him, straight into my way – I swerved round him while shouting “whoa”… and only narrowly missed ending up amongst the nettles.

Last Sunday I approached a group of four women taking up the whole width of the path, I rang my bell a number of times until one of them looked round and said “oh, sorry we didn’t see you there” or hear me, presumably. Then, as I passed between them she said “you’ll have to negotiate them now” – the ‘them’ in question being six big dogs, running free on the path ahead, without leads and quite a way away. As they tend to do the women called their respective pets’ names and I then suddenly had a group of dogs running in my direction and one heading straight for me, I had to stop completely, expecting it to actually collide with me. “You’d never think this was a CYCLE PATH” I muttered, audibly, as I set off again.

Ruined my Strava time on that segment too.

Further along at regular intervals were a number of small tied-up blue bags left on either side of the path, no doubt waiting for the dog-mess fairy to pick up later, as someone else will always clear things up won’t they… But that’s a whole other blog post right there.

[I’m all for recycling, hence the title’s unmistakable similarity to today’s other, related, post]

 

Standard
Blog on The Landscape, Politics, Psychology, Society, Tech

Waste to Watts

Teesside Waste to Energy Power Station at Have...

Teesside Waste to Energy Power Station at Haverton Hill near Billingham. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the UK there have been regular plans to build waste incinerators which have always failed because locals near where they were planned always made the same arguments “what if they burn something hazardous”  “the smell will be unbearable” and so on.  Often it seems to be just a case of “not in my back yard” a phrase that afflicts so many development plans in our country.  Though in the past many incinerators in this country haven’t had the best record for cleanliness.

Such plants were generally only for waste disposal but in northern mainland Europe they think differently about their waste.

As Gizmodo reports Norway’s capital, Oslo, has a waste problem – they don’t have enough.  Half of the city’s population is powered and warmed by rubbish.  In the area there are 400 waste-to-energy plants converting household waste, industrial scrap and even medical waste into power.  Northern Europe produces about 150 millions tonnes of burnable waste to feed plants that were built to take 700 million tonnes and now they’re looking to import waste from other countries – the UK for example exports about 1,000 tonnes annually.

The plants operate in a similar way to fossil fuel power stations: burning fuel to heat water into steam to drive turbines and they’re between 14 to 28 percent electrically efficient but they also use the waste gasses to heat water and then condense the fumes to produce biogas used in metro busses.  What remains is ash and some remaining gas, contaminants and toxins tend to be destroyed in the process.

The system clearly works yet were still cramming more and more waste into landfills.  Our local councils’ recycling schemes help with reducing the level of dumped waste but actually using the waste as a resource instead of something to be buried, out of sight, out of mind until the area is eventually redeveloped into a combined recreation area/ticking time bomb of methane-fuelled fury would be even better.  There are waste-to-energy plants in this country, such as the one pictured above, but really we need to get behind this concept on a wider scale.

But again we come up against the nimbys who want power plants to be out of sight, out of mind too, preferably large, fossil fuelled, pollution spewing and far, far away, in someone else’s back yard.  The thing is that many smaller plants, although costly in setup, could eventually reap benefits for us all – cheaper electricity, cheaper heating and less trash heaps.

We’re demanding more and more power but we’re not willing to pay the price financially or in terms of our urban landscape.  Designers can make even the most industrial of buildings look attractive so the argument against the plants comes back to the idea that “they’re burning dirty waste near my home” – but as the Oslo example shows that argument is becoming, well, rubbish.

Standard
Blog on The Landscape, Tech

Blog on the Landscape – 21st Century Windmills

English: Modern wind energy plant in rural sce...

English: Modern wind energy plant in rural scenery. Français : Une éolienne moderne dans un paysage rural. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In front of me is a window with  a view of a slice of countryside beyond the river.  At the right side of that slice, at the edge of a low hill appeared, last week, a white mast and eventually the three, apparently delicate feather-like blades of a compact wind turbine.

It’s one of three that have been put up locally this year and all are individual turbines, not wind-farms, and all appear to have the purpose of supplying farms with power in a modern analogue of the many windmills that farms had centuries ago to grind their corn and often power machinery.

I’m certain that there will be people around here who will have written angry letters to the council complaining about them being blots on the landscape and I wonder whether similar arguments happened when farmers started building windmills (despite their admitedly lower altitude).

While I admit that the larger wind-farms are not attractive and there are certain landscapes in this country that would be ruined by even a single blade sticking up into the view smaller individual turbines like the one I can see now are not ugly in my opinion and their gracefully turning blades can add a certain modernist beauty to relatively featureless landscapes, a blending of the old and the new to remind us that we do live in the 21st century and times move on as they did when the revolutionary new wind powered milling wheels ground their first corn.

Standard