Hot pies, fluorescent lights, bustling commuters. You step, for Shunt’s latest production, from the commuter world of London Bridge station into a long, very dark, very spooky tunnel. As you progress – your feet feeling for solid ground – the buzz of a bar is heard in the distance, then you’re in amidst the smoke and the laughter. But this is only the ante-room.

Explore, and you’ll find your way into the production of Amato Saltone. Hand over the keyring you were given at the entrance and you’ll find yourself with a business card with your name for the evening. This lets you into the party proper.

Disconcerting, you’re in the depths of a penthouse – very effectively created – and a swinger’s party. Circulating waiters record your preferences for obscure sex acts – don’t recognise some of them, and you won’t – and they’ll fetch the dictionary stored in the piano stool. (A nice touch.) On and around the piano is a very pregnant cabaret singer (and she’s rather a classy cabaret singer, if heavy-handed on the flirting with the audience bit). Happily, however, the threat of audience participation is never taken too far.

Then the storm starts and the lights go out. Windows slide back, and we’re voyeurs, looking into two attic rooms where assignations are underway; not open, swingers’ party assignations, but furtive, secretive contacts. Then the male participants, in a weird variation of a post-copulation ritual, go out on the roof for a smoke. Then two men in pig masks kill the women. READ MORE

* This is hardly news to anybody – certainly to women – but it is now official: 16 per cent of the UK’s biggest employers are paying women significantly lower wages than men’s.

“A study by the [Equal Opportunities] commission of 870 employers, all of whom have reviewed their pay structures to check if they are paying equally, found that 16% are unlawfully discriminating against their female workers by paying them less than men to do the same job.”

And it is a pretty fair bet – since these are firms at least aware enough to do the survey – that the general figures would be higher.

But there is some sane thought being given to genuine flexible working.

“The Institute for Public Policy Research – entitled The Citizen’s Stake – is calling for employers and employees to take a “whole career approach” to their working lives and dramatically rethink the way they think about time.”
The Citizen’s Stake approach involves viewing your working life as a number of “time units” that can be saved, borrowed and exchanged – much as our financial assets can. In this way, our working lives could be dramatically reshaped so that work-life balance becomes more of a reality.

Oddly enough the media — particularly among sub-editors — is something of a leader in this. I know lots of people who work four-day weeks, an agreement for two employees to job-share by working six-month about (one wanted to live in France for the other half of the year), all sorts of arrangements.

* A horrific tale of an arranged marriage that apparently ended with a woman abused and imprisoned. (I say apparently because the trial is ongoing.) The good news out of this is that it seems the police are taking reports such as this much more seriously than they did.

* Far be it from me to correct Germaine Greer, but hey, I will anyway. In today’s piece in the Guardian on the John Donne portrait that the National Portrait Gallery is trying to buy, she writes of London at the very end of the 16th century “there was no room for doubters or backsliders while London reeked of the flesh charred at Tyburn”. But under Elizabeth, and James, “heretics and Catholics” were no longer burnt. There were Catholics being executed, but they were hung, drawn and quartered for treason, not burnt.

* On the ground that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, I shouldn’t point to this, but the main Guardian headline at present says “US threat to Hamas over $400 aid”. I suspect there’s an “m” missing in there ….

* The British fascination with some murders – usually sexual ones; all of this provoked by Sir Ian Blair, who for once had something to say (about the media’s selective reporting of crime victims), but as usual managed to spectacularly put his foot in it in saying it.

London is a city of seven million people, with still largely Victorian infrastructure that is choked with very 20th-century traffic. So how could you ever make this great conglomeration a “sustainable” city? That was the question tackled tonight by a Young Greens-run seminar at City Hall. (A dreadfully unsustainable building, although for that the Greater London Authority can’t be blamed – complaints should be directed to Tony Blair.)

Jenny Jones, one of the two Greens on the 25-member Greater London Authority, began by attempting to define sustainability, saying it means “we don’t use today’s resources to compromise the next generation’s ability to have a good quality of life”. By next generation, she added, she meant the next generation all around the world.

A pretty big ask then.

Darren Johnson, the other GLA Green, said a survey they had instigated found that 90 per cent of Londoners thought renewable energy in homes was a great idea; 20 per cent would consider going ahead if a scheme was presented to them; the problem was to make it happen.
– if it went ahead there would be at least 250,000 customers.

The first scheme presented — and in many ways the “biggest” idea of the evening — came from Jim Footner of Greenpeace, who spoke about decentralised energy networks. Under the current centralised system, with big plants in one place producing lots of power that was then transported to consumers, two-thirds of energy — largely in the form of heat — was thrown away. “For every 100 units put in to the system, two-thirds is lost in heat and you; lose another 3-5 per cent in transmission losses; you only use one-fifth of the energy that you could be using.

“At the moment the Barking 1000MW station dumps all that excess heat into Thames; it seems crazy not to be using it.”

The decentralised model instead turned consumers into generators, and if heat was being generated in this way it could be used locally, Mr Footner said. This would also be ideal for the use of small-scale renewable sources such as wind, solar etcetera.

This was not mere theory, he added. “Woking [a Surrey town] decided to decentralise 10 or 15 years ago. It spent money to save cash, not for environmental reasons, but in doing so cut CO2 emmissions by 77 per cent.”

Could this be scaled up for London? The answer was a definitive “Yes”. “The designer of the Woking scheme has been employed by the mayor to work on London.

And beyond that, it was possible to employ it to deal with the threat of massive emissions from China. “WADE, the world alliance for decentralised energy, has calculated that its emissions could be cut 56 per cent their predicted level in 25years, which would also save $400bn over 25 years.”

Back in London, he said, the approach would bring renewal energy from the margin to the mainstream. “And, if it is your energy – you’ve made it – it is much more appealing to save it.”

In response to an audience question about how to make this happen, he said that barriers in the current regulatory system discouraged small-scale producers; they had to be able to claim for the energy they produced. Furthermore, the remit of Ofgen (the main regulator) was to keep prices down at all costs. That had to be changed to a more balanced view.

Next up, Steve Shaw, the campaign co-ordinator for the Local Works Campaign, looked at the question of “sustainable London” in its broadest sense, saying that the chief problem for Britain was that “communities are unsustainable. We talk about ghost town Britain; the decline in things that make communities sustainable: post offices, banks, independent shops. And there is a severe deficit of local democratic activity.

“We have a very centralised system – not just in energy but in political power – in that big Gothic building just down the river. It creates top-down, one-size-fits-all policies.”

His organisation has produced a draft Sustainable Communities BIll, backed by 237 MPS, that provides for more bottom-up decisions, particularly on issues such as local waste recycling, reducing traffic, reducing social exclusion and local job provision. And if a local participation exercise is carried out and comes to a decision, under the BIll the central government would have to back it, including with funds.

Louise Hazan then brought the issue down to an organisational level, speaking about People and Planet’s campaign for green universities.

In the London league table the London School of Economics (LSE) was top (might be a message there), and Royal Holloway scored well well; UCL was at the bottom.

“Royal Holloway is selling itself as green uni – something students are increasingly looking for.” But generally, Ms Hazan added, “universities are not yet significantly contributing to the solution, and they should be.”

Richard Bourn, the London campaigner for Transport 2000, said a lot of what needed to be done was “pure commonsense. The Mayor has done some good things in transport, but it has become clear that are still some crucially important things that aren’t happening.”

Among the positives were congestion charging, bus service improvements, some progress on providing for walking and cycling; there had been a significant increase in cycling partly due to reduced congestion.

“But, the mayor’s philosophy is as long as you don’t travel by car it is OK to travel – we have misgivings even about public transport travel. We don’t see the alternative to boundless car travel is to put same amount of travel on to public transport.”

While much had been done in Inner London, the biggest problems were in the outer boroughs, which held at least two-thirds of the population. “Well over half of journeys there are made by car; 87 per cent of journeys made as car drivers end in outer London; only 14 per cent by rail, bus and bike combined.

“The traffic is continuing to grow and the target is merely for a reduction in the RATE of growth. Pressure on the road network is gong to continue to grow; roads are running out of capacity.”

The other main negative was the Thames Gateway scheme, the “largest urban regeneration area in Europe” with 120,000 new homes planned by 2020, and more after. The planned Thames Gateway bridge would draw an extra 17 million additional car trips into east London; with a 60 per cent increase in traffic on the north circular. Suburban rail and light rail needed to be developed, instead of relying on cars.

Also needed were a whole range of soft measures – a 20mph speed limit, cycling and walking networks, travel plans for organisations, and car clubs.

The final speaker, a sustainability consultant and BedZed resident, directed his first comment to city planners: “Cycle routes have to start somewhere sensible and go to where people want to go.”

He stressed that the timebomb for the South-East and East of England was water. “We don’t have enough of it. If the Welsh and Scots weren’t nice to us we wouldn’t have any at all. We use something like twice annual rainfall. Most of that is wasted.”

Spent a couple of hours leafletting for the Greens this afternoon and learnt several things:

* Many people must never come home drunk, because if they did their front steps would surely kill them.

* A row of houses with raised ground floors – eight or ten steps up – don’t look like that big a deal, until you start climbing them one by one.

* Many people have astonishingly small letterboxes, and flaps with bulldog-strength springs, so it is a miracle posties don’t lose their fingers in them.

* I did see a real example of a flat from hell – an astonishingly filthy kitchen – no window glass at all (all of the other windows in the flat were boarded up). I did put a leaflet through the door, but have to admit to fleeing when someone approached it…

What was this all for? A talk by Paul Ingram, a defence analyst, former Green Party councillor and co-leader of Oxford City Council, speaking on “The Need for Green Politics Today” on Sunday, 29 January 4.30-5.30pm at Holly Lodge Community Centre, 30 Makepeace Avenue N6 6HL. Just in case you happen to be in the area …

In Our Time this morning is on the subject of 17th-century print. I’ve been half-listening, in between the morning chores, but I do plan to get back to it, since it is downloadable as an MP3 file, at least for a week, or you can listen on the website.

Time to work out how to load MP3s on to my phone …

A piece in the Guardian today suggesting young women are angry about the apparent disappearance of “political feminism”. Great!

I am sitting on a platform at the ICA with Naomi Wolf, and a young woman speaks up from the audience. “Where has our women’s movement gone?” she asks. I am struck by her impatience and the anger that is voiced by other young women in the room. I hear them speak about feeling under attack by our Nuts-and-Loaded culture, which suggests to young women that their only chance of fulfilment and empowerment is through pandering to the so-called ironic fantasies of chortling men.

It is partly a mea culpa by the author, Natasha Walter, although it does make me want to point out the difficulty of getting anything overtly, or even covertly, “feminst” in the mainstream meda – I know because I was there, and I tried. And nearly all of the decisionmakers are males; the few exceptions are woman who have often had to, or felt they had to, be more male than the blokes to get to their positions. Mention the word “feminist” in a news meeting and you’ll get either rolled eyes and comments about “bra-burning”, or, in more politically correct areas, people clearly thinking similarly.

But then a story proving that youth can sort things out for themselves – a New Jersey schoolboy has won the right to wear skirts to school.

At first, Michael Coviello only wanted to bend the uniform code at Hasbrouck Heights High School by donning shorts, which he had started wearing because of a knee injury.
But he was told that district policy prohibited shorts in winter.
He sought a meeting with Joseph Luongo, the school superintendent, and argued that it was unfair that girls were allowed to expose their legs and he was not. The superintendent suggested that if he felt that way, he should dress like a girl. Michael, 17, a drummer in the school band and a member of the golf team, called his bluff and went shopping.

Well indeed; why shouldn’t boys wear skirts?