Category: Uncategorized

I don’t wish to denigrate the efforts of the Swindon Real Nappy Network. (I’ll quite happily denigrate the Adver’s ability to get a web address right though: swindonrealnappynetwork.org.uk, as published in the Adver, won’t get you very far.) I’m old enough to have been in nappies before disposable nappies were commonplace, and my parents were sufficiently thrifty that once my sibling and I were beyond the nappy-wearing phase they cut them up and re-used them as face flannels. So I have nothing against their objectives. I’m just rather puzzled by the logic — if you can call it that — behind their support for the proposals from Swindon Borough Council and Wiltshire Wildlife Trust for a publicly funded nappy laundry service.

Disposable nappies are filled with a chemical gel that draws the moisture in to it. But it also draws all the good moisture away. At a time when parents are so keen on organic food for their children it seems madness to be putting chemicals so close to a very sensitive area.

Good moisture? Do they think there’s good water and evil water? And if they’re so concerned about the use of chemicals, does that mean that this laundry service will not use any chemicals? No detergents, no disinfectants, just nappies returned after a thorough rinse in pure water? I suspect not.

A company planning to build an incinerator a wood-burning energy generator at Park Grounds Farm near Wootton Bassett would like people to believe it is something better than an incinerator. According to Mr Overfield, the chief executive of Purepower Holdings, it’s much more high-tech than that.

This is certainly not an incinerator. An incinerator is basically a glorified bonfire, whereas this is a piece of advanced technology that can transform the wood brought to the site into enough energy to power 5,000 homes.

So in what way is this different from an incinerator. Again, according to Mr Overfield, it’s advanced!

This is advanced conversion technology, which basically sees the wood heated up to 1,000 degrees. The wood becomes a gas and we put that gas into an engine that uses that as a fuel to power generators.

Hmm…. Perhaps Mr Overfield should have a word with the people at SITA UK ltd who know a thing or two about incinerators, having plans of their own for ‘Energy-from-Waste’ facilities. Here’s the SITA description of their process.

Inside the furnace, a series of grate bars move the waste through the furnace where it is dried and burned at temperatures of around 1000 °C. Burning waste in the furnace creates 2 different materials:

• Hot flue gas – which is then used to create energy. This is known as renewable energy.
• Incinerator Bottom Ash – which can be used in construction.

That’s an incinerator producing gas at 1000 °C, unlike Purepower’s ‘Advanced Conversion Technology’, which is something-too-high-tech-to-be-called-an-incinerator creating gas at 1000 °C. If you’re not convinced that this is an incinerator, look at what the equipment supplier at Purepower’s other bonfire power plant project manufacture: furnaces.

incinerator noun a furnace for burning rubbish

I suspect that to Mr Overfield, something that looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, is not a duck but an advanced amphibious aeronautic organism.

I’ve been looking at the latest planning application for a Jurys Inn in Swindon. You’d have thought that, having revised their original planning application a couple of times, they would have tired of the habit, but no. So now they are back with a new application, very similar to the first, but with 20% less restaurant space and five fewer flats apartments.

Externally, there seems to be little difference between the two applications: it remains a ten storey slab of bricks and painted concrete. However, reading through the garbage that accompanies the application (and no, I’m not just talking about the refuse disposal strategy) I did notice that whoever drew some of the illustrations in the design statement has some problems with their balance. If this bit of developer-puffery is to be believed,

The scale of buildings rises towards the town centre

and they’ve drawn a pretty picture to show how their slab will fit in at the shorter end of this rising line…. It’s a tad unfortunate that they’ve only managed to produce this rising line by having it cut through the top storeys of the proposed hotel whilst passing several floors above the buildings closer to the centre. Anyone sober with a steady hand would have drawn a line that was level.

As an aside, I’m not quite sure what a ‘superior budget hotel’ is, nor what is ‘budget’ about paying £70 for a room, but that is what Jurys Inns claim to be. Just trying to bump up their search engine ratings in these economically troubled times, methinks.

As it will, no doubt, be subject to a considerable amount of spin, below is the text of the amendment (number 48) that Ms Snelgrove has had inserted into the Climate Change Bill.

Insert the following new Clause—

“Report on the civil estate

1. It is the duty of the Office of Government Commerce to lay before Parliament each year a report setting out the progress Her Majesty’s Government has made towards improving the efficiency and sustainability of its civil estate.
2. The report must include the progress made towards—
   1. reducing the size of the civil estate;
   2. improving the sustainability of the buildings that already form part of the civil estate; and
   3. ensuring that any new buildings procured for the civil estate are in the upper quartile of energy performance.
3. Where any new building procured for the civil estate is not in the upper quartile of energy performance, the report must state the reasons why this is the case.
4. A report under this section must be laid before Parliament not later than 1st June in the year in which it is to be so laid.”

I leave you, for the moment, to judge for yourselves whether it matches Ms Snelgrove’s current rhetoric or earlier intent.

Anne is therefore intending to table an amendment with the provisions of her Bill at the Report Stage of the Climate Change Bill. The amendment will require all newly procured central Government buildings to have an energy efficiency rating of A or B in accordance with the energy rating system used for Energy Performance Certificates.

With the economy in trouble and signs that the local economy could suffer soon, you’d think that how the government spends billions of our money as it attempts to prop-up the economy would be worthy of serious debate. The government’s representative in South Swindon, Ms Snelgrove, thinks otherwise and can contribute no more than petty point-scoring to the debate in parliament.

Ms Snelgrove

Is it bad judgement to oppose Government action to protect small savers’ money in banks and building societies, or just another example of social justice from the perspective of the Bullingdon club?

Mr Speaker

Order. The honourable Lady really should cut that behaviour out.

Ms Snelgrove often berates Swindon Borough Council for not talking to her first before bidding for money from central government. With the infantile approach to politics that she displays, it’s amazing that anyone would waste their time talking to her at all.

Car manufacturers parking-up vast numbers of new vehicles is nothing new. In previous economic downturns, many disused airfields have been filled with unsold cars. So, natually, the Adver’s reporting of Honda’s planning application to store cars at Wroughton Airfield, is a piece of calm writing about current economic problems over-the-top sensationalism.

HONDA is planning to dump nearly 7,000 cars in an area of outstanding natural beauty.

The cars will be guarded round the clock and wrapped in plastic: doesn’t seem much like dumping to me. Yes the airfield is within the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), but it hardly fits that description itself. Filling the runways with 6,600 cars will only be noticeable to those flying overhead. (The runways aren’t visible from Barbury Castle, though the hangars are.) Fifteen car transporter round-trips each day will be more apparent (about one every 24 minutes), but it’s not as though they’ll be travelling along quiet country lanes.

And in one of those bizarre outcomes that only planning regulations can produce, the portacabin where a security guard will sit is to be painted white or grey ‘to reduce visibility within the AONB’. Clearly, on a runway filled with cars — also to be covered in grey plastic — and surrounded by old hangars, the colour of one small portacabin is vital to keep the place pretty.

Once again, one story has outshone all others in Swindon this week: Swindon Borough Council’s decision to withdraw from the Wiltshire and Swindon Safety Camera Partnership. In amongst all the political ya-boo politics, it’s been noticeable that both Mr Wills and Ms Snelgrove have moderated the tone of their views, though only a little.

As it became that the council was not going to back down, that there was more to this than just political grandstanding, in addition to stating their opposition, they added something else. That it was up to the council to show that its new plans for road safety would be more effective than staying in the camera partnership. Which is what the discussion should have been about all along. And with Swindon having just three fixed speed cameras for its contribution of over £300,000, will that really be so difficult to achieve?

It’s four months since I last posted any photographs of Swindon’s Front Garden slowly disappearing under the bricks and concrete of Wichelstowe, though I have made an extensive photographic trip around South Leaze for future reference. This weekend, whilst on my way to make some purchases from those helpful people at Old Town Hardware, I took a photograph of the low-cost housing blocks of East Wichel being built where Westlecott Farm once was. The style and housing density remind me of the dense Victorian terraces that once made up the St Ann’s area of Nottingham… which were demolished over thirty years ago as slums.

I suppose that as they’ve got rid of all their weekend presenters, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Brunel FM’s weekend output has been rather below par. For much of yesterday morning it was playing their emergency recording — which kicks in after about twenty seconds of silence — between the hourly news bulletins. The recording is a little dated: Haddaway can’t have had so much airplay for a long time!

At some point towards the end of the morning presumably someone corrected it, and a more up-to-date set of tracks was programmed, with adverts too Even then it wasn’t right, with the emergency recording kicking in at ten-to each hour. There was worse to come. Today has been nothing but the emergency recording, which lasts a little over an hour, on permanent loop. No news bulletins and no adverts either, which can’t be helping the station’s financial problems. Just to rub in the problem, the jingles are highlighting a programming policy from several years ago.

Brunel FM. Home of the no replay weekday…. We never play a song more than once during your workday.

They’ve certainly made up for that this weekend.

With the economy in crisis and an economic and diplomatic feud with Iceland brewing, you’d think Mr Brown would be busy with the important affairs of government…. Nope, he’s been breezing through Swindon on his way to open a literature festival. Admittedly, he was in Swindon to talk about economics, but it’s hardly an efficient use of the PM’s time.