Yes I know that’s the title of a Simon Pegg film – we
watched it the other evening, which is what prompted the plagiarism. Not his
best film, but it still contains some laugh-out-loud moments, like when Kirsten
Dunst kicks Pegg on the shin. It doesn’t sound much but I thought it hilarious.
Talking about hilarious, I’ve had one of those anything-but weeks when I couldn’t stop annoying people. The first was during a hang-over morning, when I did not want to wake up to a half-a-mug-a-coffee-long email from a complete stranger having a go at a local project I’m leading on. We are trialling a voluntary reduction in the village speed limit from 30 to 20mph before deciding whether to go for a legally enforced limit throughout the village, for part of the village, or leave well alone. He said things like: why stop at 20 and why not 5; traffic-calming was more effective; ‘Community Speedwatch’ was even better. I fired off a polite (honest, it was) riposte that included variations on a seen-that-done-that-got-the-T-shirt theme.
He wasn’t the chap that took the umph. That was one of my colleagues on the team who said he disagreed with the 54th sentence of my riposte, so I responded with just a, “Thanks, Steve.” He followed this up with a detailed, step-by-step, day-by-day account of what he said actually occurred, to which I again responded (third coffee in hand), “Thanks, Steve.”
I haven’t heard from him since.
The second person I prickled was a professor. I was enjoying a zoomed-lecture about improving the sustainability of food production and the inefficient, ecology-destroying, inequitable properties of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers. His solution to all these problems was to attach funghi to some root systems and bacteria to others. This is the briefest of summaries of course, because if I’d banged on about how difficult it is to break nitrogen’s triple covalent bond, you’d‘ve logged off.
Then I asked a question, which went something like, have you come across any unintended consequences and what can be done about them. Well! I should have known that the phrase “unintended consequences” is an environmentalist’s red rag to a technophile’s bull. He repeated – redder in face and louder in volume – that this fertilizer-use was unsustainable and something had to be done about it and we couldn’t shout unintended consequences to support the status quo.
Not what I was doing but never mind.
The third upset this week we saw coming. By “we” I mean the self-styled Awkward Squad or Usual Suspects, who have been fighting unsustainable airport expansion for years. This latest battle followed the well-trod path of communities being fed promises on noise, initial results suggesting these promises were false, follow-up data being consistent with this, additional data collection being requested, then demanded, then commanded, eventually proving our point. This normally leads to excuses and prevarication and more data collection and more conclusions, by which time it’s too late to do anything about it and there are another tens-of-thousands of aircraft polluting healthy lives (ok this year’s different because of Covid-19 but we expect a bounce-back).
So we wrote to the Independent Commission on Civil Aviation Noise (ICCAN) – whose remit includes improving relationships between the aviation industry and fed-up communities – and asked them to come out fighting on our behalf. We CC’d various bods, some to further our cause and support, some out of courtesy. One of those courteous CCs really wasn’t happy that we had not followed the agreed line of action (you know, the one that always ends up with tens-of-thousands of extra planes despite our best efforts); but then if he hadn’t slapped our wrists, someone else would have slapped his.
Then I emailed my old Cambridge college about Dr David Starkey’s racist outburst, but that requires a blog of its own.
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