… that was my thought this evening as I stumbled down yet another set of wet and slippery basement steps in Kentish Town towards an unlit front door. Presumably the residents know that the third step is twice the height of the rest, and that the edge of the fifth is crumbling away, but a humble canvasser seeking to help them in exercising their democratic rights doesn’t.

Canvassing after 4pm is no fun at all at this time of year – well except when you get a poster put up before your eyes, beautifully lit up by the streetlights. Had a couple of those this evening, which helped make it all feel worthwhile.

And to everyone I got out of the bath … sorry!

As bushfires rage in many parts of south-eastern Australia – there are some, small signs, that the nation is starting to wake up to the reality of its climate: well, it has only taken a couple of centuries.

When I was a kid the – rather artificial – rivalry between its two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, was often played out over climate – Melbourne was wet, grey, dismal, we Sydneysiders said, although it was admitted that the state of Victoria in which it is set was greener than NSW – more like “Home” as the early settlers put it.

Yet now, Melbourne too is drying up: the dams supplying its water are at 42% of capacity.

There’s nothing new about this; it’s clear the old insults were just stereotypes, for:

“Water restrictions have been enforced in Melbourne 15 times in the past 67 years and, most recently, Victorians have been battling drought and its consequences for eight consecutive years.”

Yet don’t feel too sorry for those Melbournians: “At a time when the United Nations Development Program is urging governments to guarantee each person at least 20 litres of clean water a day … the average Melbourne household uses 685 litres each day.”

… astonishingly to be found in the Financial Times magazine.

As you’d expect, it is rather good on explaining the fundamentally different foundations of Green economics:

If George W. Bush didn’t exist, the Green party would have had to invent him. The saboteur of Kyoto is the embodiment of what the Green Economics Institute calls homo economicus – “a western, white, middle-class man, [whose] standard model in economics has left out most of the experiences of most people in the world”. By contrast, the Greens emphasise that the Greek root of economics, “oikia”, means “home”, leading them to accentuate the “care, reciprocity, direct production and maintenance of human beings” as opposed to “competitive production and exchange in markets”.

And who can resist quoting this sentence, on climate change? Not me.

The other thing the Greens have going for them is that they are, in essence, right.

This seems a good place to point out the absolute last and final call for green bloggers: if you are one and you think Jim on The Daily (Maybe) might not know about you, pop over to leave your URL. It is your last chance to go down in history – well at least on the first-ever listing of the top 100 green bloggers.

Shellfish caught in Scottish waters are to be shipped to Thailand to be shelled, then the meat shipped back to the UK, where it will be labelled “product of Scotland”. That means 120 jobs in Scotland go, and a good amount of fuel will be burnt by ships for the purpose of this piece of insanity.

The label “beyond parody” really doesn’t go far enough here.

I’ve no time for a serious and thoughtful post this evening, having spent most of the past few hours wrestling with Zonealarm. Why is it that anti-virus etc programmes always start out working well, then gradually get worse and worse?

I was going to uninstall and replace it, but it provide impossible to remove the programme without wrecking the machine – great way to keep people with you. So know I’ve bought the upgrade – and that won’t install. Grrrrrrrr!!!

Don’t get into Zonealarm is my advice.

Anyway, since I have no energy to do more than grumble, I’ll send you over to The Coffee House, for a not-too-serious quiz on climate change: what’s the best thing to do to tackle climate change. Nuking the US is offered as an option – undoubtedly effective, but no, I resisted the temptation to vote for it…

UPDATE: Link to quiz now added – sorry about that. I wasn’t in a good way last night!