The “no junk mail” sticker on my door seems to be pretty effective, so I particularly noted the Burger King leaflet deliverer who this morning kindly provided me with FIVE of their thick leaflets. (Now in the recycling bin.)
I rang up the company’s “careline”, which was notably uninterested … their money; pity about the trees.
… to anyone who was trying, or planning, to fly today. Why the chaos? Well I won’t be believing much of what I read or hear for at least the next week – particularly if it is sourced to “security sources”. After the dust has settled there might be some hope of judging what the threat, if any, was.
Why the cynicism? Well remember the “sarin” plot, the “blow up Man U ” plot, the “tanks around Heathrow” scare, poor old Jean Charles Menendez, Forest Gate … I could go on.
And notice how much trouble the Blair government is in: on Iraq, on the Mideast (with growing calls to recall parliament), in Afghanistan.
That’s not to say that the whole thing is cynically made up – there undoubtedly is some basis there somewhere – but as the non-existent WMDs in Iraq showed, a wide variety of judgements can be applied to “intelligence”, and if the push from the top is all one way, the outcome is almost inevitable.
When it is funded by the ‘first sector’, i.e. government.
From today’s Guardian:
State funding for charities has outstripped donations from the general public, putting the independence of the voluntary sector at risk, according to a report from the Centre for Policy Studies.
While donations from the general public grew by just 7% in three years (up to 2004), government funding over the same period rose 38%. State funding now accounts for 38% of charities’ total annual income of £26.3bn, compared with 27% from donations, says the report.
The theory that NGOs can provided better, more flexible services than the government sector might, if they are small and funded by donations, he true. But when they start providing government services, funded by the government?
Got an old Pentium 2 desktop CPU that I want to do the right thing with – there’s lots of talk around about donating to Africa but there are obvious issues about the environmental cost of transport. Looking around I’ve found this listing of UK recyclers, and a useful site on how to wipe your hard drive.
Anyone had any good, or bad, experiences, or advice?
Can’t remember where I found this now, but since I’m about to start a new “career” as a school governor, I should point to the website of the eco-schools programme:
The Eco Schools programme can help schools to:
• improve the school environment
• reduce litter and waste
• reduce energy and water bills
• devise efficient ways of travelling to and from school
• promote healthy lifestyles
• encourage citizenship.
Over the whole period “between 12 and 19 per cent [of those whose letters survive] wrote all their own letters …. the number of women for who there is evidence of their actually writing letters rose from 50 per cent in the 1540s to some 79 per cent by the end of the 16th century … the proportion of women for whom no holograph letters survive fell from 28 per cent in the first decade of the period to an estimated 17 per cent by the years 1600 to 1609.” (p. 96)
From Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England, James Daybell, OUP 2006 (found today on the “new books” shelf at the London Library – which can be a really treasure.)
An nice example, Elizabeth Bourne, “wife of Anthony, the son of John Bourne, Mary I’s principal secretary of state”. Some 70 of her letters survive, written in holograph in several different hands. She also wrote original poetry and sometimes used the pseudonyms Frances Wesley and Anne Hayes, which she called her “secrete syphers”.
A search of the web and electronic academic database returned nothing on her – one more for the literary collection.
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