Voluntary sector organisations in the capital have expressed concerns about local peoples’ ability to secure jobs during and after the London 2012 Olympic Games

This article titled “Is the Olympics skills legacy on track?” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 5th May 2011 15.59 UTC I’ve been doing a bit of homework for a forthcoming Guardian podcast and found two things I’d like to share. First, the fun thing. That was from last September. The Games Makers programme is now at the selection phase, with successful applicants being measured up for different roles. But what will it contribute to the long term regeneration of East London which is, of course, the ultimate objective of the great Olympics adventure? How about the complementary London Ambassadors scheme and the Personal Best initiative, which was designed to prepare the long-term unemployed for securing some of the Games’s 70,000 volunteer roles and beyond that “encourage 20,000 people into work”? What about local peoples’ hopes of securing the new jobs in the pipeline at Stratford City? This brings me to the second thing. It’s less fun than Eddie Izzard but still deserves your attention. In February, the London Assembly’s economic development committee heard from guests who are closely involved with ensuring that East Londoners are equipped not only to take advantage of the employment and skills opportunities that the Games will provide, but also to use them to secure jobs and careers in the regeneration years to come. I’ve picked out a few quotes from the transcript of the meeting. First, a word of warning from Jonny Boux, the head of employment and training at the East London charity Community Links: [This] is a once in a lifetime opportunity for people in East London and I think there is a real danger that the focus, in terms of sustainability and longer term opportunity is lost…our experience tends to be, we are hearing a lot around the wonderful short-term opportunities…and the fact that people may find work for a month, but there are no guarantees beyond that.

Next up, Kerry Tweed, Director of Greater London Volunteering on the Personal Best scheme: The problem is that Personal Best is effectively finished now in London. I have not heard about any evaluation or any further work that might be possible to do with the around 4,000 people who have been through the programme to work with the training that they have been provided with to work with employers to see how that is transferable for them, to offer further support and training to move the participants closer towards work. The last stats that I had from Personal Best was that actually the biggest outcome for␣most people was they went on to further volunteering. Clearly, they need a bit more time to develop their skills, their confidence and their employability.

Committee chair Len Duvall asked about “barriers that may prevent long-term unemployed Londoners taking advantage of the Games Time opportunity.” Jonny Boux answered first: One of the main barriers is a lack of skills, particularly around some things you need for particular jobs, and also life skills is an important factor. One of the things that, particularly, our long-term unemployed people face is often a difficulty around reliability and low confidence. There is often a lack of motivation as well; it is what we call, broadly, life skills. Then, I guess, multiple barriers which can be anything from major housing issues to difficult family circumstances and financial pressures. Many people we support are heavily in debt.

Then, Lindsey Donoghue the Employment Manager of the Bromley-by-Bow Centre said: I would echo everything that Jonny said. Obviously some of the roles are quite short-term and that is an issue for some people in terms of them having been on benefits for quite a long time and feeling comfortable on those or perhaps feeling that coming off them might be a risk and feeling unwilling to do so for a short period of time. Also, doing roles like that they would need to arrange things like childcare; a lot of the people that we work with are parents. So, again, a short time role is difficult for them because they need to arrange childcare for that. Something that we have seen in our community is␣a␣sense of, “Well, it’s␣not really for me”. We have perhaps seen a limited number of people go into roles in the Olympics so far and because of that people sort of feel, “Well, maybe it is happening separately to me or it is not something that is necessarily part of our community”.

And here’s quite a striking speech by Roger Taylor, Director of the Olympic Host Boroughs Unit. If you asked anybody in the host boroughs what they felt about legacy, they would say that there is an ever-present danger that legacy becomes conflated exclusively with what happens during the Games and what happens on the comparatively limited, although very important, opportunities that will follow on on the Olympic Park. We feel it is terribly important to constantly remind somebody of what the bid promise was: the most enduring legacy of the Olympics will be the regeneration of an entire community for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there, and also to link that with the sheer scale of the opportunity that inner East London has within its grasp over the next 20 years. We are not just talking about the Olympic Park, we are not just talking about Westfield and Stratford City, although we think that is actually a pretty successful model largely down to people like Newham and Westfield themselves. We are also talking about the already-given planning approval effectively to double the size of Canary Wharf, and the very, very significant developments that we still expect to take place in the Royal docks and on the Woolwich and Greenwich waterfronts. Essentially, if anything I think the Mayor’s promise about 70,000 jobs is an understatement of what over the next 20 years is likely to be an opportunity in East London. The question then is whether or not we have got a sufficiently strong and clear vision to be able to ensure how that opportunity relates to the people in the communities in East London. I think that is where the really challenging questions lie.

On this evidence, I’d say that there’s plenty of work still to be done if a really impressive skills and employment legacy is to be delivered for East London in particular. Something for the Mayor to get a good, firm grip on.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogIs the Olympics skills legacy on track?

Related posts:Iran claims London 2012 Olympics logo spells ‘Zion’ London’s 2012 Olympics must be a ‘regeneration games’ London 2012 Olympics countdown clock stops

This is a wonderful recipe combination of spicy chorizo sausage and meaty sustainable fish. The vinaigrette could be made with apple cider vinegar.

This article titled “Angela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe” was written by Angela Hartnett, for The Guardian on Wednesday 20th April 2011 16.30 UTC Pollack is a member of the cod family – a greeny-brown carnivore that can grow up to a metre long. It is common off the coast of Britain and Ireland, especially around wrecks, where it is popular with amateur anglers. It has traditionally been less of a hit with cooks, but with the push to eat more sustainable fish, pollack has emerged as a viable alternative to cod and haddock. Most supermarkets stock it, though you may find it labelled, French-style, as colin. Not only is it cheaper than cod; as far as I’m concerned it’s just as tasty. Like all flaky fish, pollack can break up during cooking; a quick solution is to salt it beforehand. Just cover the fish with rock salt and leave it to firm up for 30 minutes, before giving it a quick rinse and patting it dry. If you do this, remember not to salt the fish again before cooking. I love this combination of spicy sausage and meaty fish, but you can leave out the chorizo and finish the dish with extra vinaigrette. Ingredients (Serves 4) 4 100g portions of pollack fillet 12 large new potatoes, washed, with skin on 1tbsp diced black olives ½tbsp chopped basil 50ml vinaigrette 100g chorizo, chopped into lozenges 3tbsp olive oil Rock salt   Method Fill a pan with cold water, a little rock salt and the potatoes, and bring to the boil. Cook for about 15 minutes, until just done. Drain the potatoes well, crush with a fork, and mix while still warm with the vinaigrette and olives. This ensures that they take on the full flavour of the vinaigrette. Set aside. Season the pollack with salt (unless you have previously salted it to firm up the flesh). Heat the oil in a non-stick pan (medium heat) and add the pollack, skin side down. Give the pan a quick shake to prevent the fish from sticking. To cook it should take about two minutes each side, depending on the thickness of the fillets. The fish is ready when you can easily push the handle of a spoon through it. Remove the fillets from the pan and place them somewhere warm. Add the chorizo to the now-empty pan and lightly sauté until it starts to release its oil. To serve, dress the potatoes with the chopped basil. Place the fish on top and finish with the chorizo lozenges and the oil from the pan. Any extra potato can be served on the side.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogAngela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe

Related posts:Nain’s bara brith recipe The ultimate Cornish pasty recipe Angela Merkel orders safety checks on Germany’s nuclear power stations

Pundits who downplay the risks of  nuclear radiation are ignoring the casualties of the past such as Chernobyl. Fukushima‘s core meltdown may be worse due to the plutonium in the mixed oxide fuel rods.

This article titled “Nuclear’s green cheerleaders forget Chernobyl at our peril” was written by John Vidal, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 19.00 UTC Every day there are more setbacks to solving the Japanese nuclear crisis and it’s pretty clear that the industry and governments are telling us little; have no idea how long it will take to control; or what the real risk of cumulative contamination may be. The authorities reassure us by saying there is no immediate danger and a few absolutist environmentalists obsessed with nuclear power because of the urgency to limit emissions repeat the industry mantra that only a few people died at Chernobyl – the worst nuclear accident in history. Those who disagree are smeared and put in the same camp as climate change deniers. I prefer the words of Alexey Yablokov, member of the Russian academy of sciences, and adviser to President Gorbachev at the time of Chernobyl: “When you hear ‘no immediate danger’ [from nuclear radiation] then you should run away as far and as fast as you can.” Five years ago I visited the still highly contaminated areas of Ukraine and the Belarus border where much of the radioactive plume from Chernobyl descended on 26 April 1986. I challenge chief scientist John Beddington and environmentalists like George Monbiot or any of the pundits now downplaying the risks of radiation to talk to the doctors, the scientists, the mothers, children and villagers who have been left with the consequences of a major nuclear accident. It was grim. We went from hospital to hospital and from one contaminated village to another. We found deformed and genetically mutated babies in the wards; pitifully sick children in the homes; adolescents with stunted growth and dwarf torsos; foetuses without thighs or fingers and villagers who told us every member of their family was sick. This was 20 years after the accident but we heard of many unusual clusters of people with rare bone cancers. One doctor, in tears, told us that one in three pregnancies in some places was malformed and that she was overwhelmed by people with immune and endocrine system disorders. Others said they still saw caesium and strontium in the breast milk of mothers living far from the areas thought to be most affected, and significant radiation still in the food chain. Villages testified that “the Chernobyl necklace” – thyroid cancer – was so common as to be unremarkable; many showed signs of accelerated ageing. The doctors and scientists who have dealt directly with the catastrophe said that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency’s “official” toll, through its Chernobyl Forum, of 50 dead and perhaps 4,000 eventual fatalities was insulting and grossly simplistic. The Ukrainian Scientific Centre for Radiation, which estimated that infant mortality increased 20 to 30% after the accident, said their data had not been accepted by the UN because it had not been published in a major scientific journal. Konstantin Tatuyan, one of the “liquidators” who had helped clean up the plant, told us that nearly all his colleagues had died or had cancers of one sort or another, but that no one had ever asked him for evidence. There was burning resentment at the way the UN, the industry and ill-informed pundits had played down the catastrophe. While there have been thousands of east European studies into the health effects of radiation from Chernobyl, only a very few have been accepted by the UN, and there have been just a handful of international studies trying to gauge an overall figure. They range from the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation study (57 direct deaths and 4,000 cancers expected) to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), who estimated that more than 10,000 people had been affected by thyroid cancer alone and a further 50,000 cases could be expected. Moving up the scale, a 2006 report for Green MEPs suggested up to 60,000 possible deaths; Greenpeace took the evidence of 52 scientists and estimated the deaths and illnesses to be 93,000 terminal cancers already and perhaps 140,000 more in time. Using other data, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences declared in 2006 that 212,000 people had died as a direct consequence of Chernobyl. At the end of 2006, Yablokov and two colleagues, factoring in the worldwide drop in births and increase in cancers seen after the accident, estimated in a study published in the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that 985,000 people had so far died and the environment had been devastated. Their findings were met with almost complete silence by the World Health Organisation and the industry. So who can we trust when the estimates swing so wildly? Should we believe the empirical evidence of the doctors; or governments and industrialists backed by their PR companies? So politicised has nuclear energy become, that you can now pick and choose your data, rubbish your opponents, and ignore anything you do not like. The fact is we may never know the truth about Chernobyl because the records are lost, thousands of people from 24 countries who cleaned up the site have dispersed across the vast former Soviet Union, and many people have died. Fukushima is not Chernobyl, but it is potentially worse. It is a multiple reactor catastrophe happening within 150 miles of a metropolis of 30 million people. If it happened at Sellafield, there would be panic in every major city in Britain. We still don’t know the final outcome but to hear experts claiming that nuclear radiation is not that serious, or that this accident proves the need for nuclear power, is nothing short of disgraceful.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogNuclear’s green cheerleaders forget Chernobyl at our peril

Related posts:Chernobyl 25 years on: a poisoned landscape Japan may have lost race to save nuclear reactor Q&A: Plutonium detected at Fukushima

Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. As iPad 2 launched, Charles Arthur looked at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology, and five users tell us about how the iPad is feeding into the way they work.

This article titled “How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives” was written by Charles Arthur and Killian Fox, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.05 UTC A friend recently went to a business meeting. He prepared by pulling his laptop out of his bag. All of the clients responded by taking their iPads out of their briefcases. These were not gadget freaks or latte-quaffing Hoxton-based web designers, as some imagine iPad users to be. They were a large group of senior civil servants and bankers, in a country well beyond Europe and the US. To them, the iPad wasn’t a status symbol; it was a device they had chosen to use because it enhanced their ability to do their job. A year on from its arrival, and with the faster, thinner, second-generation model released in the UK on 25 March , Apple’s iPad tablet computer still divides opinion. A large group of people insist it is an “overpriced toy” with limited functionality – no keyboard, doesn’t run Microsoft Office, can’t play Flash video, can’t expand its storage. But a growing number believe that, on the contrary, the iPad represents a new frontier in computing. And they simply don’t care what the first group thinks. They’re getting on with using their machines. We have lived with the PC paradigm for around 30 years now, since IBM introduced its first personal computers and pushed them into businesses in the early 80s. Until the launch of the iPad last year the only comparable change in the market had been the laptop, which led to the emergence of an army of travelling salespeople whose most urgent need was always to find a power point where they could charge their machine’s fading battery. The iPad seems to be different – a third stage of computing. Horace Dediu, a former analyst with the mobile phone company Nokia who now runs his own consultancy, Asymco, argues that “the definition of a new generation of computing is that the new products rely on new input and output methods, and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply”. That certainly sounds like the iPad. It shows that it is possible to have something that does all the computing functions you want with a big screen that also has long battery life and weighs almost nothing, certainly compared to a laptop. It is portable and durable, and the touch screen adds another dimension. Though it has the most prominent tablet in the market, Apple isn’t the only player (see its rivals assessed below). Dozens of companies are using Google’s free Android software to power tablets, and Google is helping them along with a custom version called “Honeycomb”, designed for iPad-sized Android tablets. An estimated 17 million tablets – from Apple and others – were sold in 2010, and that number is likely to keep growing. But is it really changing the way we work? We interviewed a range of people in different professions to see whether the iPad is all hype – or whether in future we will all keep taking the tablets. CA   Margaret Manning – businesswoman Margaret Manning first realised that her iPad was going to change how she worked when she was in hospital, recovering from a minor operation, about a month after buying it. “I realised I could comfortably do emails, download a book to read, watch a film, whatever,” she says. “There’s no other device that you can do that with. You certainly can’t read with a laptop in bed.” Manning, 50, is the founder and chief executive of Reading Room, a London-based web development agency employing 170 people. She takes the iPad with her to client meetings and presentations: “It’s got a wow factor,” she says. “I did a presentation that I ran off it, and all the people in the room went, ‘Ooh’,” she recalls, adding: “They were all bankers.” To Manning, the iPad’s chief virtue is its versatility. She can carry it in her bag to go to clients, check work emails in a coffee shop or train, and then take it to a bar later and kill some time playing a game. It’s become her laptop, TV screen, iPod and iPhone. “It’s adaptive to today’s digital age. You can create and consume content in a different way.” Key to that is the screen size. “The iPhone was a step towards this, but the format is vital. This allows businesses to start using it in a way they couldn’t with the iPhone.” She cites an app that Reading Room has developed for Grains Research Development Corporation in Australia which lets farmers examine crops for disease by comparing them, in the field, to pictures on the iPad. That could be done on a laptop – but it would be cumbersome compared to doing it on the handheld screen. She revels in the simplicity of the interface, and says battery life is key: “If it was shorter, that would change the relationship. If I had to travel with plugs and extra batteries that would change things. The iPhone’s battery life is too short – it hacks me off.” Are there any drawbacks? “There are two things that it doesn’t do well: the keyboard – if I travel with it, I have to take a lightweight keypad – and voice calls. You can use Skype [the free internet voice call service], but not everybody has Skype, and I can’t use it to call a client. ” CA Frasier Speirs – teacher “Nobody has lost a file for a year now,” says Fraser Speirs. “Which used to happen every week – someone coming along and saying they couldn’t find where they’d saved some work or other.” Speirs teaches computing studies at the private Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, and is also the IT co-ordinator there. Last year he went to his bosses with a radical plan: equip every one of the children in both the primary and secondary schools with an iPad. And not just for computing studies: for every lesson. Speirs wants them to replace textbooks, though he admits that is still some way off. But the iPads, with their simplified approach to filing (you can’t choose where to save a file), have made at least part of his life much simpler. The lack of a keyboard wasn’t an issue. “The problem with laptops in the classroom is the battery life, and the size and weight. When Apple said that it would last for 10 hours, and we realised it actually did, that was really important. And the size and weight matters too for younger children.” The primary pupils only use them in school; secondary pupils can take them home. And teachers have them too, which has changed their view of computing. Speirs thinks it is time to reconsider how and what we teach children in an internet-connected world. “Previously, we taught technology just for business needs – Excel, PowerPoint. But now technology is there to assist learning. What do we teach, when you can look up facts in two seconds flat? The answer I think is much more about challenge-based learning, where you give the pupils a high-level goal, and have the teacher support them in achieving it.” But what happens when those children leave school and encounter laptops and even desktops in businesses? Speirs isn’t worried for them. Children starting at Cedars now will graduate in 2024, he points out – and any company still using desktops by then will be hopelessly behind the curve. CA   Richard Bowman – physicist Will the iPad soon become a fixture in science labs alongside Bunsen burners, microscopes and graduated cylinders? Richard Bowman, a 24-year-old physicist doing his PhD at the University of Glasgow, reckons so. His field is optics, and in partnership with colleagues at the University of Bristol he recently developed an app that allows users to manipulate microscopic objects simply by touching the iPad’s screen. Before iTweezers, Bowman employed a desktop computer and a mouse to control optical tweezers, an instrument that traps and moves microscopic particles using laser beams. Now, he does it all on his iPad. “It’s quite a natural interface,” he says. “It’s like you’re touching the actual particle and pushing it around. We can also move particles up and down with the pinch gesture, which is hard to do with a mouse.” It may be some time before iTweezers appears on the market – “there are loads of intellectual property issues” – but Bowman has already had interest from scientists in various fields, including chemists at Glasgow University who are using it in experiments with crystals. In the meantime, he’s developing a more commercially viable iPad app called LabVIEW with his colleagues in Bristol: “It puts virtual dials and sliders on the screen to let you control your experiments in the lab”. One serious limitation of the iPad, according to Bowman, is that “Apple are quite restrictive in what they’ll allow to run on it. You have to register as an Apple developer and use their tools to do things.” But, he adds, “I think the iPad is definitely here to stay – its capabilities are increasing all the time – and multi-touch interfaces definitely are the future. If you can control several things at once, it means you can interact with your experiment better, it can happen faster, and you can do things that you couldn’t do before.” KF   David Kassan – painter When David Kassan bought an iPad last spring, his intention was to use it simply as a portfolio to show to prospective clients in the art world. Kassan, 34, is a Brooklyn-based artist who paints “really realistic lifesize figures” using oils on wood panel, and the iPad, he says, is “like a perfect art portfolio. You can adjust the colours, it’s a cool thing to hold, and it’s easier to update than a printout. That’s the reason I got it.” But on a trip to Europe last summer, Kassan started messing around with the ultra-basic Brushes app on his iPad. “I sketched people in subways and airports, and did studies of paintings in museums. I started using it as a completely portable, full-colour sketchbook. It meant I didn’t have to bring watercolours or an easel with me. I could just slide it out of my bag and start using it.” Now he finds himself painting much more when out and about. “I’m an observer of everything – that’s my job – and the iPad is a great tool to see things around me and be able to record them so that my eye gets keener. Also, if I’m in a museum I can do a study of the colour of a painting, not just the drawing and compositional aspects, which is all I’d really get to understand with pencil and paper.” Kassan believes that the device has improved his “real painting”, but does this mean that the paintings he does on the iPad will never qualify as “real”? Actually, he says, “I’m working on a piece right now, a lifesize head that I’m trying to do exactly like my real paintings.” Using a more advanced app called Artrage and a Nomad touch-screen paintbrush, he hopes “to make it as realistic as possible, print it up and sign it. I thought I might put it in my next solo show in October to see what it’ll sell for.” KF   Richie Hawtin – musician/ DJ Early last year, the DJ and producer Richie Hawtin was putting together a live show to mark 20 years of Plastikman, the most prominent of his many musical alter egos. Due to its scope, the show posed a considerable challenge to the British-born techno megastar. “When you do an electronic performance, traditionally you have a mixing board with all these knobs and faders to create the sound,” he explains. “For this show, each song called for a whole different set of knobs and faders.” What Hawtin needed, in order to control all those diverse environments at once, was a touch-screen device. The iPad came out in April. Within two months, Hawtin and his team had integrated it into the Plastikman performances. Six months later, they formed a company, Liine [www.liine.net], to turn the apps they’d developed into commercial products. One of these apps, Griid, “allows you to navigate a musical environment that would be hundreds of screens deep if you were trying to look at it on a normal laptop. With your hand movements you can zoom from left to right, find the instrument and the melody that you want, and start, stop or modify it with a quick touch.” Another app, Kapture, “allows you to take snapshots of different states of your performance. If something amazing comes together, you can capture that moment just by touching the screen, and return to it later. Then you can then morph all these moments of the show together.” Both apps interface with the popular Ableton Live sequencing software and can be used in the studio as well as onstage. Harnessing touch-screen technology, Hawtin says, is like “following a dark path with a torch and stumbling upon new techniques. The show has evolved into something that we didn’t even realise was possible.” Being able to use both hands on a screen, rather than being tethered to a mouse and keyboard, “transfers a bit more of your spirit into the technology you’re using”. Ever the restless techno-pioneer, Hawtin is now looking forward to future devices “that can sense not only left or right movements but how much pressure you’re applying to the screen. That, as far as musicians like me are concerned, will be the next huge development.” KF

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogHow the iPad revolution has transformed working lives

Related posts:Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2 iPad 2 queues start 33 hours early as demand expected to beat supply

The Cooperative movement was born out a mixture of radical socialism and paternalist philanthropy during a period of upheavals and change. It was a group called The Rochdale Pioneers who established the first successful co-operative in 1844, starting a revolution which is still going strong.In theory the cooperative movement provides an alternative to capitalism by changing the relationship between the workers and the owners of business. In a workers coop the business is owned by the workers collectively, although it still has to operate in a capitalist marketplace. Not all coops are workers coops though. The coop retail service was a form which claimed to share the ownership of the enterprise with the customers rather than just the workers. Customers were paid a dividend, terminology deliberately derived from shareholders dividends, which was paid out periodically according the amount spent in the coop supermarket. This system degenerated into a stamps scheme, which ended up almost like green shield stamps and is mirrored today by the loyalty card schemes operated by distinctly non cooperative retail giants Sainsbury and Tesco. There is much more to the Cooperative movement than the visible shops trying to compete on our high streets and retail parks though. Today in the UK, as well as The Co-operative Group with its six million members and 5,000 outlets across its family of businesses including food, financial services, travel, pharmacy and funerals, there are thousands of other co-operators who share the same heritage. The cooperative model is often the best way for rural communities to organise services such as broadband into areas where the big telecoms companies can’t be bothered to deliver. Alternative energy is another good example:

The UK’s first community owned wind farm, Baywind Energy Co-operative was established in 1996. The project has always favoured local investors, that way the economic benefits of the wind farm are kept within the community it serves. In 1998 Baywind secured a loan from The Co-operative Bank to purchase two turbines for their Harlock Hill site. It has also received several grants from The Co-operative Enterprise Hub to develop new, co-operatively owned wind farms across the UK. Baywind now typically generates around 10,000MWh of electricity each year – enough to power around 30,000 homes. And along with educational visits throughout the year, it funds environmental books for local schools. There’s even a Coop Facebook page now,which you can ‘Like’ to get updates. The Co-operative Join the revolution Get involved Sponsored Post

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogThe Cooperative movement was born out a mixture of radical socialism and paternalist philanthropy

Related posts:Movement on the bridge UK Farm infected with foot-and-mouth Wild birds not to blame

Sitting up late chatting with an old friend last week I saw a gigantic locust-like insect climbing up the kitchen wall. It was bright shiny green, about 10cm long and heading for the breakfast cereals. We decided it belonged outdoors so I put one hand over it and cupped it with the other and walked towards the door with the giant green cricket safely trapped. Then it bit me, so I dropped it with the shock. I wasn’t expecting a harmless cricket to bite, although this was like no cricket I’d ever seen before. Gigantic, enormous and brightly coloured it looked like a tropical specimen or else some new form of hybrid mutant vampire cricket. We escorted it to the outdoor world eventually but it did try to get back in again once or twice. To help with identification, here’s a picture of the giant green cricket before it bit me.

The location is near St Agnes, Cornwall, UK

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogGiant Vampire Cricket Bites Man

No related posts.

Andyrob

green jumper blue shed at St Monans

Green Eggs, but no Ham I still haven’t found out what these green eggs are, carefully laid out on a yellow iris leaf, like snooker balls in a frame.

If you look close up on the original picture at maximum size I think it’s possible to make out a circle of little hooks on each egg, like velcro presumably to help them stick to the leaf.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog Green Eggs

Related posts:Yellow Boat

Andyrob