I’m now fully experiencing the “Kentish Town crane”, a stiffness and soreness in the neck that comes from tilting your head back at an impossible angle while attempting to yell in a friendly manner to someone at least two floors up to convince them to vote for the Green Party.

“Kentish Town”, because that piece of the London Borough of Camden contains lots of Victorian terraced houses now split into flats, but with upper-floor flats that often don’t have intercoms. And inhabitants are understandably disinclined to run down two flights of stairs for some unknown stranger on their doorstep.

Hence the bellowing, and the stiff neck…

It is always easy to mock the Prince of Wales, but he does support some good stuff:

THE Prince of Wales plans to label his Duchy Originals range with details of the greenhouse gases emitted in making the products, which range from sausages to shampoos.
Under the scheme, to be announced by Prince Charles this week, every stage will be analysed to quantify how much climate-changing gas is released in producing each of the 200 items.
… A Clarence House official said the idea was to give consumers the most comprehensive green information available on any product in Britain. Prince Charles wants “people to know the cost of their food in greenhouse gas terms as well as in terms of pounds and pence”, she said.

Royalty does at least have its uses for political purposes – had some other small green producer made the announcement I doubt it would have got this sort of publicity.

I spent nearly four hours on a Green Party stall on Kentish Town Road this morning, and for the first time in this by-election campaign (before Thursday’s poll) the Tories also had a stall, which was an entertaining three-ring circus.

There was a mob of Young Tory males, looking terribly like, well, young Tories, and the assemblage of the stall – unfolding the table etc – nearly defeated the combined efforts of a dozen Tory brains. (It was suggested to me that perhaps they really should have brought their maids.)

Then there was the challenge of blowing up balloons. No quite sure how they managed it, but it seemed at least half ended up bursting, so there were regular fusillades echoing down the high street – you wouldn’t want to have been of a nervous disposition or you’d have been hitting the deck.

Politics can be so much fun…

Once upon a time, judges were the people who were old-fuddy duddies, holding society back, saying “would you want your wives and servants to read this?”

Now, however, everywhere you turn they seem to be champions of what the Green Party slogan labels as “real progress” – defending human rights, and in a dramatic case in Australia, the planet’s rights.

Nicola Pain handed down her decision on the Anvil Hill coalmine on Monday … found the NSW Government failed to consider the impact that burning coal from the project would have on global warming….
Two …principles were ignored by planning authorities when they accepted an environmental assessment of the Anvil Hill mine – an omission used by Justice Pain to declare that approval flawed.
They were the precautionary principle – that serious environmental threats should be mitigated even in the absence of full scientific certainty – and the intergenerational equity principle, which says the present generation should maintain or improve the environment for future users.

At the risk of sounding like one of those ladies in vaguely lab-style coats on television waving an impossibly white T-shirt around while raving about a particular brand of washing powder, I just have to say how spectacularly good Ecover (ecologically friendly) Lime-scale Remover is. (I won’t however point you to their website, because it is impossibly Flash-filled.)

I bought it thinking “this will never work but at least I’ll have tried to do the right thing”, but the first time I sprayed it over my difficult large bathroom sink, it came up just like new… whoops, I do sound like the lab coat. But anyway, ’tis true.

This seems a practical point to note the arrival of a new market trading, Unpacked, selling Ecover products, and things like grains and cereals, in bulk, “bring your own container”. Excellent idea, now in Spitalfields and Portobello, and rumour suggests soon to arrive in Marylebone.

Just like grandma used to do…