Power and sufficiency in the village

I'm in Birmingham Handsworth, and reading about Ano Korakiana via Thanassis' blog, which has 'temporarily' replaced the village website - undergoing maintenance. He mentions a power cut in the village. Thanassis points out, despite the inconvenience that follows the failure of modern technologies of power supply, older sources of light can make for neighbourliness. "Can I have a light - from your fire; from your candles?"

Όμως, όπως το νόμισμα έχει δύο πλευρές, έτσι και η διακοπή του ηλεκτρικού ρεύματος, μας δίνει την ευκαιρία να γυρίσουμε μερικές δεκαετίες πίσω, όταν το ηλεκτρικό δεν υπήρχε ή (όταν πρωτο-εμφανίστηκε) ήταν λιγοστές οι λάμπες στα σπίτια και στους δρόμους...Τότε βέβαια, η έλλειψη ηλεκτρισμού δημιουργούσε πρόσθετες δυσκολίες στην καθημερινότητα, ενώ σήμερα προσθέτει λίγες στιγμές ρομαντισμού, που τόσο λείπουν από την αυτοματοποιημένη εποχή μας…

Something similar happened when water was delivered, and foul water removed directly from individual houses. No more parish pump gossip (deeper ideas here about mother-tongue) - the glue of community, but few will regret the demise of midden heaps, though there's a rich new technology of sewage treatment as part of the sustainable treatment of 'grey' (washers, shower/bath) and 'black' water (toilets and kitchen sinks) that I saw as a guest visiting Mike Hill's and Lorna Pit's ecovillage in Melbourne the other day.

As it is the village - slightly ironically - but in line with current trends in Greece, being gradually attached to a main sewer by contractors to Faiakon Municipality, with foul water being treated at a sewage facility at the base of the village, finally abandoning old wells as soakaway cesspools which aren't happy with loo paper.

This is confusing, taking us forwards but also backwards. While it is beginning to become acceptable and practical to process and re-use waste water locally, Ano Korakiana, and many other places, are getting attached to the mains, even as places like Westwyck are detaching themselves.

There still are reasonably clear, if not potable, water wells in Ano Korakiana. Until twenty or so years ago, these were the main source of drinking and washing water. As more wells became soakaway cesspools the other wells in the village became unreliable. Even today some householders pump water from their wells to get the benefit of unmetered water for their gardens.

We have a cesspool, once a well, at 208 Democracy Street, at garden level below our veranda, by our composter. It works fine, but a main sewer pipe is slowly advancing up beneath Democracy Street. Work had reached the Community Clinic and band room by mid-2009.

I'm not sure yet how and when connections will be made to individual homes, nor how much this will add to our water bills, or indeed whether connection will be compulsory. One worry is that you can meter water coming into the home, but not water going out. There will simply be a fixed charge controlled by the sewage treatment agency. Once we are on a main sewer, and this would involve installing nearly 100 metres of pipe down to the main pipe on the lower road, will it mean that our soakaway cesspool can gradually revert, with similar soakaways, to a well from which we can extract gardening water?

Although alternative technologies are increasingly accessible, we've quite a long way to go before the village moves back to an older, but very different, form of self-sufficiency using modern technologies for harvesting solar energy, capturing and processing rainwater and tapping into wind power; one day even selling excess energy back to the rest of the island, even to the mainland, via a smart grid - things I learned more about at the Energy Futures Conference that John Martin organised in Bendigo in early November, the place I first met Mike Hill, chairing a session in which he participated.

** ** **

In London on Friday morning I enjoyed tutoring and animating half a day in Hounslow on Managing with Political Awareness - an event for nearly 60 officers, joined from mid-morning by some elected members and ending with a half hour Q & A session with CEO Mark Gilks and Cllr Peter Thompson, Leader, who agreed to do a video for me as soon as it can be arranged.

Aims for the seminar

to improve understanding of the skills and values involved in political-management working relations in Hounslow,

to increase understanding of how political and managerial roles are changing, and how this applies in Hounslow

to enrich your vocabulary of political concepts and offer models of competence and integrity in political settings,

to assist resolve dilemmas that arise when giving professional support to politically led agendas,

Programme

Brief introduction - overview of the morning (& a short icebreaker)

Political-management: negotiating the overlap

Member-officer conversations

Defining political awareness: reading/carrying

Work on critical incidents: facilitated by guest councillors (Cllr Barbara Reid, Cllr John Todd) and tutor

Summary and feedback: Q & A with Cllr Peter Thompson and CEO Mark Gilks

Networking lunch

* * * * Had a planning meeting in Staffordshire for one of three planned seminars on scrutiny. Lucy Stratford has edited a film made with the Leader of the Council, Philip Atkins, and the most senior Scrutiny Chairman, Alan White, which I've sorted into four separate thumbnails - making the film rather more accessible than leaving it on a DVD. Why? Because a DVD runs off the disk not the faster computer hard disk and is not as controllable via the keyboard as an MPG or MOV file - where you can project a picture onto a white wall or large screen and pick and choose between extracts.

For my travels - to London and Stafford - I'm back to relying on my Brompton, avoiding having to pay to take a full size bicycle on the train to London and using the tube to get to and from Hounslow and, back in Birmingham last night, not having to wait by a chilly wet bus stop, cycling home from New Street in 15 minutes after a swift visit to the German Market.

* * * I'm keeping an eye on TeacherDude's citizen journalism and Malcolm Brabant's reporting as we arrive at the anniversary of last year's troubles in Athens and other Greek cities. See also Monday 7 December events in Athens as reported from Australia.

** ** **

Long ago Cheshire County Council, with whom we were running an in-house course on Political Skills for Managers commissioned a mug for each participant. My friend Nina Dawes knew a potter in Walsall who made us about 20. I have one with the Cheshire CC logo and Inlogov on it and the four animals signifying 'wise, clever, innocent and inept' from Kim's and my paper. They might be quite a souvenir one day. My own mug is priceless of course.

Energy Futures Conference at Bendigo

"Er, Annie, can you just check that this spider on my washroom mirror is one of the safe ones?"

"No problem. That's a Huntsman. They can get a lot bigger than that."

* * *

Today ended the two and a third day Energy Futures Conference in Bendigo. What a treasury of knowledge about the state of the world, evidence of the scale and depth of the problem we face as a species and upon which many of us have turned their backs in denial, and what a range of technical and social carbon-free solutions promising some mitigation of the impact of climate change. Finally I hear over and over again that what was once an asset - coal and oil - are now liabilities. John and Cameron Fraser from Sustainability Victoria chat to Dave Lennon on ABC Victoria. They refer towards the end to Oz PM Kevin Rudd's recent speech introduced by Micheal Wesley, Exec Director of the right-wing think-tank, The Lowy Institute, in Sydney in the 31 day run-up to Copenhagen 2009 on the challenges facing Australia and the world and different ways some are gambling with the future. (An optimistic prognosis for COP-15 from Alex Steffen at World Changing - one of my favoured on-line mags)

Visiting a new solar farm outside Bendigo

* * *

From England I get the delightful news that Amy's not only passed the WM Police fitness test, which she failed by a second a few months back, but that she was 20 seconds inside the 3'45" time limit, beating all the others taking the test with her and passing with four others, out of the 9 women who took the test with her - the same for women as for men. I skyped to congratulate her the other evening and chatted to Lin. Skype's great but doesn't make up for the vast distance between us - especially as between work days I'm basking in the sun, dipping in the pool, cycling and walking in shirt sleeves beneath a blue spring sky.

* * *

"Here's a bigger one, Simon, on the sitting room curtain."

Such a race...

Between travels to run workshops we return to John and Annie's home in Bendigo, a spacious low house four kilometres from the town centre. I've my own comfortable private space from which to join in a communal drawing room and kitchen where we talk, work and eat. Wifi works well there and in my room. In my bathroom there's a sandtimer reminding me not to waste water. The garden burgeons on greywater. A pool where the water doesn't get replaced over the winter, in which a clever self cleaning gadget roams at random, and solar heating warms the water, provides sweet relaxation. A few days ago John had to dispatch two Brown Snakes, (snakes protected in Oz unless a risk near homes) as we were eating outside fed from a BBQ under a large covered veranda. I wake early to the songs of bright plumaged birds darting through surrounding trees and fragrant jasmine.

Bees in the base of an old gum tree - at least 240 years old? Before Cooke came to Botany Bay?

Our days, beginning around 6.00am seem longer, with lots getting done before breakfast. You sense here, perhaps more than in Europe, our human race with climate change - to adapt and mitigate. Fewer hours wasted on scepticism, more on urgent invention.

A few miles out of Melbourne airport after our flight from Brisbane, John parked to take a call for a live broadcast, with ABC reporter Kathy Bedford, about Energy Futures, the national conference he's promoted and which, with a rich variety of sponsors, will run in Bendigo from mid-Sunday through to Tuesday pm. I'll be chairing one session in the Capital Theatre, Bendigo, on Tuesday afternoon on Distributed Energy; speakers are Dr David Jones, BIO 21 Group, Melbourne Energy Institute. University of Melbourne talking about New Generation Printable Solar Cells - Low Cost and High Volume, then Dr Maria Retnanestri and Professor Hugh Outhred, University of NSW, Energy sustainability for rural communities in Indonesia, local renewable energy resources, implications for Australia and finally, Mike Hill, Chair, Victorian Local Sustainability Advisory Committee The role of local governments in sustainable and distributed energy. Instead of thinking of food-miles my attention is drawn to the challenge of reducing energy miles and the creation of local energy sources as opposed to the piping or wiring of gas, oil or electricity over vast distances. The drought of the past decade and the continuing water crisis in Australia, despite some welcome rain in recent months, has wonderfully concentrated people's energies in pursuit of sustainability - and like the clever rats we are, human creativity burgeons in pursuit of fixes for the fix we face. A plethora of bright people will assemble for an event conceived by John Martin and to be opened by the Premier of Victoria, a state only slightly smaller in area than the whole UK.

* * *

This morning I borrowed one of John's bicycles and pedalled the O'Keefe Trail into Bendigo to meet up with him and friends at a coffee shop in town. They'd started earlier and probably covered a good 20 kilometres to my four and a half, but I was delighted to have this well tamed bush to myself for a couple of miles cycling through corridors of mellifluous bird song amid eucalyptus woods.

In Australia more people seem to take cycling - fast long distance road cycling - really seriously. Off and on road cycle lanes proliferate here and the cycles I see are thoroughbreds, their riders in Lycra pedalling in cadence, putting me in the 'calico and basket' category as one woman observed - gently - in a Bendigo coffee shop this morning. It didn't detract one iota from the sheer pleasure of being able to cycle through this new landscape, though I've a yen to try to search out, perhaps on eBay, a racing cycle that might suit me. John says he'll tutor me on suitable frame dimensions.

* * * Between relaxing we've been reviewing political-management conversations on film, selecting further clips from the Marion City Council conversation for coming seminars in Launceston, Sidney and Melbourne. We've also kicked off a new blog - Constructing Trust - on Wordpress; to be a joint activity dedicated to the political-management theme. Annie's in Melbourne filming until tomorrow. For supper this evening John barbecued us lean kangaroo steaks with lightly fried potatoes and onion plus salad and a nice Shiraz.

I spoke to Lin by Skype this morning to discuss our Easter dates in Corfu; chatted to Mum in Scotland - all for free, as well as arranging teaching in December and January. I'm still bewildered at how our current communication technologies take awe from global distance - the vastness of Australia alone as well as the eleven thousand miles between me and England. It's part good, part slightly dismaying, but I rejoice at the opportunities afforded to collaborate with John.

* * *

My favoured book at the moment is the first Martin Beck procedural, Roseanna. I've read it before but it's good enough for a reread, especially as I've forgotten the end.

* * *

Just got the great news from GreenBirmingham of a small terrace house at 103 Tindal St, Balsall Heath B12 92U - well inside the city - being on show as a zerocarbon house - possibly the first inner city old house converted and lived in that will meet the sustainability code, meant to apply to new homes in the UK by 2016. Such a race ...