Overboots

Now I've discovered another alternative to wellingtons. They're called Overboots and they're flexible rubber socks that you put over your shoes. When you aren't wearing them they are a lot less awkward to carry than wellingtons. And you can go to a party in your party shoes: just peel off the overboots when you get there!

My father used to have something similar called goloshes, but they were just shoes, so they didn't protect the legs and trousers; and they weren't flat pack like these ones.

These amazing useful things can be bought in Hawkshead shops, and are currently reduced to £1 a pair. How good is that?

Carbon offsetting again

I spent last weekend at the Joint Session (a major UK philosophical conference with about 250 delegates). It was hosted at a rather unpleasant campus which seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to the surface of the moon—or particularly the moon as it would look if covered in a maze of rectangular concrete buildings—, on the edge of Bristol, currently known as UWE, though in days gone by it was called Bristol Poly. It's not a place I am keen to see again in my lifetime. As a colleague pointed out, if they'd done the abbreviation properly the University of the West of England would be known as University of the WOE.

We weren't originally supposed to be at the University of WOE, but at the real University of Bristol, which might have been better aesthetically, and certainly would have landed us in a more desirable urban environment (as it was, the only things within walking distance were Hewlett Packard's works and, I gather, some examples of the edge of the city retail park with its B&Q and so on). But thanks to Bristol University and its building programme, the conference had been relocated at rather short notice.

But the point of this post is not the place we were in, but the process of getting there. This is what they said on the conference information:

Directions to the UWE Frenchay Campus are available at www.uwe.ac.uk/maps/frenchay_directions.shtml. Note that the nearest train station is Bristol Parkway rather than Bristol Temple Meads.

The Philosophy Department at the University of Bristol operates a carbon off-set scheme. Any delegates wishing to minimize the environmental impact of their conference travel are requested to contact Finn Spicer: finn.spicer@bristol.ac.uk

Now when unpacked as a guide to how to get to Bristol this seems to me to say the following:

We assume that you will typically be coming by car. You'll need directions for how to get there which can be found on the web site mentioned. Some people prefer to come by train, but we don't specially recommend that. Bristol Parkway is nearer than Bristol Temple Meads, but it's not really very near and not really very convenient. We don't see much difference in environmental impact between coming by car and coming by train, and since we now run a carbon offsetting scheme, there's really no need to use the train or to worry at all about the impact of driving, as long as you're prepared to pay a few pence for someone else to do the tiresome bit of being green on your behalf, so you might as well drive, use the free parking on campus and just send us a bit of money to salve your conscience (if you have any: we're proud that we do have a conscience as you can see).

Now it seems to me that what they should have said is the following:

Although there is free parking on campus, we strongly urge you to consider travelling by train rather than by car. Bristol Parkway, with high speed trains from London, Didcot and South Wales, is only a five minute bus ride from campus and there are plenty of taxis to be had. Train travel accounts for far fewer carbon emissions than road travel, and your train journey will assist the Bristol University Philosophy Department's attempt to become carbon neutral in all its activities. Contributions to the carbon offsetting scheme can be made by contacting ... but such contributions should not be regarded as a substitute for a low carbon lifestyle.

I hope one would say something like that even if train travel were quite a lot more difficult than it was in this case.

Hooray for wellington boots!

This week I bought a wonderful pair of wellies. They're pistachio green with pink trimmings and pink and blue spots. Just right for the summer.
I've decided to wear them all the time.
One huge advantage is that it makes it practical to ride my bike while wearing pale or white trousers, even on a bike with no chain guard, and even in wet conditions.
This is a major improvement to the quality of life. When I get a chance I will add a photo.

Air conditioning on trains

Does anyone else share my abhorrence for trains which have sealed windows and air conditioning?
There are two main problems in my experience.
One is that if the heating/air conditioning goes wrong there is nothing whatever anyone can do about it. One of the trains on the Norwich line had a faulty heating system in the winter which was blowing out extra cold air on some of the really cold days, so that you were chilled to the bone even sitting in an insulated ski-jacket.
Now we have the problem of "summer". The train companies seem to think that we want the train kept at exactly the same temperature whether it is winter or summer, and so (quite unnecessarily) they cool the train down on a nice warm day, so it's like getting into a fridge. What they don't seem to realise is that in the winter you get on in your thick socks and shoes, woolly sweater and long-sleeved shirt. Then you want the temperature set to the sort of level at which it's comfortable to read, without having to peel off all your warm clothes.
In the summer, by contrast, you arrive lightly clad, with sandals and short sleeves. On a warm day you probably don't even have a jumper or jacket with you. Three minutes into the journey on this refrigerated train you are perishing cold. You ask the "conductor" (meaning the guard) whether he can make it a bit warmer, but the answer of course is "no". There are no controls. The thing is just set at a certain temperature, presumably the same temperature winter and summer.
What a waste of energy! Most of the time we wouldn't need to be air conditioned: the outside air would be perfectly fine. And even if we do have air conditioning, it doesn't need to be working like a fridge to make us into blocks of ice. It could be set five degrees warmer, and we'd all be just fine. 21º in the winter and 25º in the summer would seem a sensible system to work on, to minimise energy and maximise comfort.
But best of all, let the human beings have control instead of the machines. Because, after all, we're the ones who have feelings...

What does it mean to be green?

At the moment it seems to mean getting cold and wet just about every day in June.

Silence

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be in a place in Wales which is at least five miles from any busy road, and between it and the nearest road is a mass of rolling hills. On Sunday morning at 7.30 I went out to hear what the world would be like without cars (there aren't many places in Britain where it is possible to listen to the natural world unpolluted).

It was impressive. There was an incredible racket going on. No human noises or engine noises were audible (though a low hum was present, perhaps from inside my head?).

There was a lot of birdsong, including identifiably blackbirds, wood pigeons and various other noisy participants. A cock was crowing loudly, from what I think must be the village, probably at least a mile away. Sheep were calling to their lambs and the lambs were replying, or vice versa. Wind was rustling the leaves of the trees.

However, despite all that incessant noise, it was a kind of silence. Lovely.

Homogenised milk

All that stuff about milk and calcium in the earlier posts was really leading up to a discussion of homogenised milk.

The reason for wondering about that was a letter in the Spring issue (229) of the Soil Association magazine called Living Earth. Sally and Keith Hall from Carmarthenshire had written to say "We became concerned about homogenisation after reading an article in Living Earth 219 and have since avoided homogenised milk. This has proved difficult, as suppliers do not state on their bottles that their milk is homogenised..."

This struck a chord with me because I too understood that homogenised milk had been shown to be bad for the health, because the process of homogenisation involves breaking the fat down into very small particles, which then pass directly through the gut into the blood stream and are to blame for filling the arteries with fatty deposits (whereas the cream from normal whole milk that has not been homogenised does not seep through the gut).

But besides the fat getting into the bloodstream instead of being digested properly and absorbed as nutrients the body can use, there's another problem with homogenised milk. Here's an explanation of what happens from a New Zealand website :

According to Dr Oster, with Dr Donald Ross of Fairfield University and Dr John Zikakis of the University of Delaware, homogenising allows the enzyme xanthine oxidase (XO) to pass intact into the blood stream. There it attacks the plasmologen tissue of the artery walls and parts of the heart muscle. This causes lesions that the body tries to heal by laying down a protective layer of cholesterol. The end result is scar tissue and calcified plaques with a build-up of cholesterol and other fatty deposits. We call these arteriosclerosis and atherosclerosis. According to these experts, dietary cholesterol is not the main cause of heart attacks; it is homogenised milk.

The problem is that the enzyme is one which is designed to break down various kinds of food product, particularly prurines found in meat. If it gets into the blood stream it starts breaking down the artery walls as if they were meat in the stomach. Here's what they say:

Xanthine oxidase has a very specific function in our bodies. It breaks down purine compounds into uric acid, which is a waste product. The liver of several animals, including humans, contains Xanthine oxidase specifically for this purpose.

However, as Dr Oster said, "When foreign XO, such as that from cow's milk, enters the bloodstream it causes havoc by attacking specific targets within the artery walls." The "specific target" which Dr Oster refers to, as mentioned earlier, is the plasmologen tissue making up the artery cell walls. Plasmologen is vital as it holds together the cell membranes within the artery walls. Any damage from foreign Xanthine oxidase causes lesions to the artery walls. The body, in its efforts to protect and repair them, immediately responds by "patching" the damage with calcified plaque. In the later stages of arteriosclerosis and atherosclerosis, arteries lose their elasticity as additional calcium is deposited. Calcification of the arteries can contribute to high blood pressure which is actually not a disease by itself, merely a symptom. It has been found in some samples that plasmologen was missing in artery wall lesions and plaques. The mystery was solved when researchers found XO in the plaques. The two substances cannot co-exist.

So it seems that they've got fairly good evidence that deaths from heart disease and damaged arteries goes up exactly in line with whether the milk we drink is homogenised. So why are we getting so much homogenised milk now? Because (a) the supermarkets prefer it because it has a longer shelf life, and (b) people seem to like it because they've become used to not seeing the cream on the top of the bottle. But what you don't see may be worse than what you do see. In fact, there seems to be good reason to think there's absolutely nothing wrong with a good bit of natural raw milk with the cream on, but once it's been interfered with it is deadly.

What are they doing allowing the organic suppliers to use homogenisation, then? This is what the Soil Association said in reply to the letter from Sally and Keith Hall:

"Concern about homogenisation began in the 1970s with the theory that the process forced fat globules through the stomach lining into the bloodstream where they released xanthine oxidase (XO) thought to be linked to heart disease. However, new studies have found that XO appears at high levels in colostrum (the antibody-rich first milk produced immediately before and after giving birth) and is actually part of its immune boosting armoury. Whilst homogenisation is not believed to be harmful..."

Now this is a non-sequitur. In fact, the Editor of Living Earth seems to concede that homogenisation results in fat passing undigested into the blood stream, and also to the presence of XO in the bloodstream as a direct effect of homogenised milk.

BUT, says she, that's okay because for a day or two when we are newborn babies nature produces a very wonderful stuff called Colostrum for us, and that has this XO stuff in it, whereby we get our mothers' antibodies.

Hooray for XO, we are supposed to say?

But this is completely bizarre surely. Because we are not drinking colostrum, we are drinking cows milk. And we are not getting healthy from it, we are getting ill. And the reason we are getting ill is because the fat is leaking onto our artieries.

So just because for two days after birth we thrive on something that feeds XO into the bloodstream, it does not follow that this is good for us at age 2 or 12 or 22 or 32 or 62. Especially if, as we know, the rates of death from heart disease in Finland (where they drink homogenised milk) are three times as high as in Sweden where they drink unspoilt milk.

So here's another reason to have the milk delivered by the milkman, because thankfully, the milkman still brings the proper stuff with the cream at the top (not if it's semi-skimmed of course because to get semi-skimmed they have to remove the cream and then put it back in artificially). But the normal silver top bottles still come all creamy on top, so you have to upend them before you open them, and sometimes even scoop it out with a spoon before the milk will pour at all.

There are some interesting myths about fat and heart disease dispelled here.