No Fuel like an Old Fuel

Cough, hack, cough, etc.

Ecological Armaggedon is upon us, and it's all our own fault for using energy. Having spent the past several tens of thousands of years eating raw food and freezing to death in the winter, Mankind was given the gift of fire by Prometheus, much to Zeus' disgust.

For several thousand more years there were open fires and candles, and then fossil fuels were discovered and exploited. Coal, oil, gas. Enter the Industrial Revolution, releasing ancient carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in vast quantities, causing either a new Ice Age or Global Warming. Unless that's all due to sunspot activity and Anthrogenic Climate Change (or perhaps Bovogenic if cow farts are to blame) all turns out to be a politically-driven myth.

What are we to do? The petrochemical industry produces a lot of our electricity; our food (tractor fuel, fertiliser, pesticides); our drugs; our plastics; anything that needs energy to be made (so everything, then); and of course transportation.

The obvious political decision is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. In practical terms, this means discouraging private vehicle use. As banning cars would have a ruinous effect on the world even if it were possible, a first stage is to encourage motorists to buy and run more economical - and thus more ecological - vehicles. Tiny-engined cars such as Nanny Goat's Aygo sips petrol, and she is rewarded by Her Majesty's Exchequer with a vanishingly tiny annual Vehicle Excise Duty ('VED'; it hasn't been 'Road Tax' in decades). Meanwhile, gas-guzzling polar-bear-drowning bourgemobiles get hammered by the taxman when they're imported, sold, and annually taxed. Plus, of course, thirsty cars use more fuel and thus the owner gets to pay more fuel tax.

So far, so good. Loads of people cash in on these tax advantages. They get wads of cash under scrappage schemes, buy titchy cars, and pay less VED and less fuel tax. And the environment is saved: huzzah!

But with all these bribes to the motorists, the total tax revenue heading to the Chancellor of the Exchequer is reduced. "Oh dear, I hadn't thought of that," says the Exchequer. "What are we to do now?"

Simple, really. We will increase tax on everyone, so now everyone gets punished for complying with the government's wishes. Consider the huge U-turn in the UK when diesel, the erstwhile environmental saviour, is now the demonised Fuel From Hell.

And now the second part. A move to totally electric cars. Ignoring the not insignificant environmental impact of digging lithium out of the ground and turning it into batteries, where is all the additional electricity going to come from? There must be massive investment in power generation - without a corresponding increase in carbon emissions otherwise what would be the point? Renewables, yes, and nuclear fission. Fusion would be better, but we're not there yet.

Somebody is going to have to pay for all this additional infrastructure, and it won't just be the motorist. Electricity prices are the obvious target, so if the Goat charges both his cars and his bike overnight while the little old lady next door boils her kettle for a nice cup of tea while watching 'Strictly' on her gogglebox, we're both paying more for our power because of my desire for personal transport.

Is car (or motorbike, come to that) ownership going to go in the direction of "You may only have a car if you have off-street parking"? If not, expect extension leads in enormous numbers being strewn across the footways of cities. Also anticipate late-night revellers unplugging cars for a laugh to make people late for work.

The answer lies in part with electric public mass transportation. Discourage private car use by discouraging ownership. Who has a car in Manhattan? Or in central London? Or Tokyo? But the system must work well for almost everybody almost all of the time. Not everyone is a commuter into and out of the Central Business District. The Goat is reminded of nightmare trips to and from IKEA Budapest, and he's a reasonably strong and able-bodied pack beast...

Electric aircraft currently seem an unlikely proposition, though. However, wind-powered ships could actually work if some boffins put in sufficient R&D.

Or go back to some Arcadian agrarian society where all two billion of us live, work, and die within walking distance of our birthplace. We have been there and done that.

]}:-{>

These brambles are tasty

Lifted from Rentagoat
(yes, I know goats don't have top front teeth)

For no better reason than it just occurring to me that the long-running children's comedy show Rentaghost (BBC 1976-1984) is ripe for a pun, I made the connection with Conservation Grazing.

That is, using goats to remove invasive plant species rather than pumping chemicals over the plants and everything besides, attacking the plants with whirling blades of death, or killing everything in the vicinity with fire.

The thing is, a Company Song is missing. Until now. The song is sung by a choir of company employees. Well, the last line of the song.

Tune and original lyrics by Michael Staniforth, who also starred in Rentaghost.

If your garden is a shambles, just call Rent-A-Goat.

Are your ditches full of brambles? You need Rent-A-Goat.

We’ll eradicate your kudzu and remove invasive weeds;

It can be verified we don’t use herbicide, so just call Rent-A-Goat.

If your stately home’s a mess you should call Rent-A-Goat.

That poison ivy we’ll address because we’re Rent-A-Goat.

We are quiet while we’re working, and we don’t need gasoline.

We work without a fuss; you’ll barely notice us from Rent-A-Goat.

Have you tried a pesticide with side-effects you can’t abide?

Are you reliant upon high technology?

Perhaps you should take note that by contacting Rent-A-Goat

You can achieve it more environmentally.

There is a goatherd who will stay alert. That’s Rent-A-Goat

Who will ensure your orchids won’t be hurt. That’s Rent-A-Goat.

Now that your land is neat and tidy, recommend us to your friends.

We’ll conservation-graze and we work seven days at Rent-A-Goat.

“Baaaaaaah!”

]}:-{>

Rorty Zorst

During this year’s Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge, where I was marshalling all week, I got to thinking about motor vehicle noise. It’s obvious that racing cars and bikes produce a lot more noise than normal road vehicles.

Bikes on the Desert Challenge may not exceed 115dB(A) at 2 metres when inspected at the scrutineering just prior to the event. That’s very loud indeed, and it was just as well the test that was being carried out on each competitor just a few metres from where I was working only took a couple of seconds. It’s a lot louder than normal road vehicles, for which I suspect most of us are grateful.

Quoting numbers of decibels is actually pretty meaningless without specifying the distance from the source. The further away you are, the quieter the sound. By way of example, in the United States, the Federal limit from the EPA for motorcycle noise is 80dB(A) at 50 feet. Some high-school physics tells us that this is the same as 109dB(A) at 20 inches, or 98dB(A) at 2 metres. So when New Hampshire specifies a limit of 106dB(A) at 20 inches, this is actually fairly close to the EPA limit. The whole issue of distance is deliberately obfuscated by manufacturers of after-market horns: “138dB(A),” the blurb says, “at 100mm.” That’s 112dB(A) at 2 metres. It’s still a lot louder than the comedy horns fitted by most vehicle manufacturers, but less than the noise made by Marc Coma and his buddies on the ADDC.

Here’s the thing. There are plenty of people who believe that motorcycles alone are responsible for antisocial vehicle noise. If you live in JBR in Dubai, or the Pearl in Doha and you’re not deaf as a post, you’ll have been disturbed by the late-night antics of the Inadequate Silencer Owners Club. And some of these are indeed motorcycles. I wonder how many are performance cars? One solution, the one adopted by Sharjah Police in January this year, is to ban motorcycles from Sharjah’s main roads after 10pm. This, instead of ticketing the driver of every antisocially-loud vehicle.

Typical government reaction is to legislate for ever more stringent noise limits. Manufacturers comply with larger, heavier, more complicated, and more expensive exhaust systems. This in turn encourages an increased proportion of motorcyclists to switch to after-market systems. Reasons include saving weight and cost; another is to make the machine sound like a motorcycle and not a sewing machine. I contend that if the legal limits were set at a more easily achievable level, fewer bikers would replace their stock systems.

My own machine has a manufacturer’s plate stating “95dB(A) at 4400rpm.” It doesn’t specify a distance. When I bought an after-market silencer (yes, I too dislike the gigantic 28lb bazooka dangling off my bike), one feature that I liked was that the manufacturer was extremely candid about how noisy it was. 93dB(A) at 20 inches – the EPA test. This is an identical result to the OEM system, and less than what's on the manufacturer's plate and what's engraved on the original silencer. The “race” performance full system from the same exhaust system company produces 99dB(A) at 20 inches, which is significantly louder but still below the EPA limit.

For cars, the limit set by the European Union from 2012 is 71dB(A). I’ve been unable to find the distance, nor the speed, nor even the pavement surface. All these factors are significant. You experience around 80dB(A) from traffic when you stand on the kerb 5m from a busy road. I wonder, given this 71dB(A) limit, why a Mustang, or a Lamborghini, or a Ferrari all seem to be allowed, in standard manufacturer’s trim, to be significantly louder than pretty much any stock motorcycle? I guess most cars are very quiet compared with motorbikes, and most bikes are pretty quiet. Bikes are invisible anyway, so it’s generally assumed that all bikes: the ones that Mr Joseph Public notices, are loud.

EDITED 21 April. I've discovered a source for how motorcycle noise is measured in Europe. It's EEC Directive 78/1015/EEC. The test, essentially, is to accelerate the bike over a 20m distance in second or third gear between two microphones 15m apart. I found a research paper that compared the results of the European Union test with a static test. It's here. In short, the static test produced sound pressure levels that were up to 13dB(A) higher than the EU drive-by test, with almost all results falling within two standard deviations of the drive-by mean. A factory standard Honda Fireblade produced 83dB(A) in the drive-by test and 95dB(A) in the static. That's equivalent to 83dB(A) at 2m.

I’ve tabulated some sound pressure levels below, all sucked out of the intertubes and corrected to measurement at 2m, unless noted otherwise:-

Noise source              SPL at 2 metres

EU limit for cars         71dB(A) distance N/A

My bike at 5000rpm        81dB(A)

Inside A340 cattle class  85dB(A) distance N/A

Race exhaust for GTR      87dB(A)
Kerbside of busy road     88dB(A)

Inside London Tube train  94dB(A) distance N/A

EPA limit                 98dB(A)

Performance horn         112dB(A)

Diesel truck             114dB(A)

ADDC Moto                115dB(A)

The situation with dodgy after-market exhausts has improved over recent years. Manufacturers of many systems now dyno-develop them and get them certified as road legal. Beowulf in UK and Staintune in Australia, for example. The days of every chancer with a pipe bender and a supply of two-inch stainless steel tube are almost over.

Oh, and lest we forget, these are maximum noise levels. If you don’t ride around at maximum, wide-open throttle, your machine will be a lot quieter. Everyone, surely, owes it to common decency to keep the noise down when leaving at the crack of sparrowfart or getting home after a session of midnight oiling.

And then there are Harley-Davidsons. Mysteriously,these machines are “expected to be loud” and, with the exception of residents of JBR who have to be up for work at 6am, are tolerated by everyone including the vehicle inspectors at registration time, whereas riceburners have to sound like wristwatches…

Found on a HD forum:
Stock muffler 98dB(A)  (the EPA limit, measured at 2 metres)                          

Aftermarket 107dB(A)  Jeez…

]}:-{>

Farewell, sweet prints

Image: Wikipedia

Would you prefer to gas the car up, or throw it away and buy a new one? Seems obvious, doesn’t it? 

Apparently not to printer manufacturers, it doesn’t. I’ve just experienced the dubious delights of trying to replace the printer cartridges for my old Epson All-In-One printer/scanner. The only two shops that had ink cartridges for this model at all only had yellow. Clearly, nobody’s been printing pictures of sunflowers, and nobody knows where cyan and magenta may be found. I don’t propose to waste a day of my life trying every shop in Khalid bin Al Waleed Street to be repeatedly told that they’re Not Coming In Dubai^TM. I’ve already been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

It’s planned obsolescence. You buy a printer, and then later have to throw it away while it still functions perfectly because the ink cartridges are no longer available. Infuriatingly, they are available. Just not in all colours.

Further stupidity reigns when a new All-In-One printer costs only slightly more than a full set of ink cartridges would have, if they’d been available.

So it’s not the cost that is at issue; it’s the hypocrisy. We’re constantly bombarded with messages to Save The Planet, to recycle, and to wear homespun tofu. And yet if we’re to print documents, we need to consign a perfectly good plastic case, rollers, electric motors, circuit boards and all the other gubbins to landfill, as they are slowly digested over a thousand years.

There seems little point in recycling the device unless someone, somewhere, has access to print cartridges. And if he can find them, then why not I?

I now own a new, faster printer that doesn’t even need a piece of electric string between it and the computer. I also have yet more spare power and USB cables to add to my collection. The salesman was keen to point out that, because it's a new model, ink cartridges will be available for years to come. Me? I expect to be having this exact same rant in about 2018.

I now possess a spare printer. Perfect condition, FSH, light domestic use only, one careful owner, low mileage, ink cartridges rarer than rocking-horse shit.

]}:-{>

Tap dance

Today, 3rd March, was Arab Water Day or some such commemoration that wasn't publicised in advance. I was listening to the presenters and guests on Dubai Eye talking about how everybody in the UAE wastes 250 litres a day, and that the UAE consumes more water per capita than any other nation on the planet. In a former life I did water audit work. At the time, total domestic daily consumption in the UK was taken as 180 litres per person.

Most potable water comes from desalination, which is a huge consumer of energy, producing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Even with (the now environmentally friendly because it doesn't produce carbon) nuclear fission producing a quarter of the UAE's electricity by 2020-something, that's still a shitload of drowning polar bears.

The UAE has to reduce its water demand.  According to Dubai Eye, hundreds of dams and more desalination plants are to be constructed, and there are plans afoot to cap domestic consumption.

I have a few ideas relating to reducing consumption.

• Ensure that everybody pays for the water they use. The most sensitive part of the human body is the wallet.
• All new builds should include grey water recycling. This can be a nightmare to retro-fit into existing buildings and is only really practical if a building is being seriously renovated. The local version of serious renovation is usually to tear it down and start from scratch. So install a grey water tank, and then you can flush the loo and water the garden with minimally treated shower waste.
• Don't make it a criminal offence for watchmen to boost their meagre incomes by washing cars with bucket and sponge. And neither make it an offence to have a dirty car. An automatic car wash typically uses between 68 and 265 litres per cycle; whilst enthusiastic use of a hosepipe might use up to 450 litres, a bucket to wash a car plus another to rinse and leather will use probably 20 litres.
• Discourage houseboys and maids from using hosepipes to sweep sand from driveways. A broom is just as effective and costs nuppence.
• Try to get the Afghan ex-truck driver who masquerades as a gardener not to leave hoses running for an hour or more. I tried to reduce water consumption by fitting spray nozzles to my garden hoses. He simply removed them every morning, drowned the entire garden, and then refitted them when he left, in the apparent hope that I'd not notice. That was the guy that Beloved Wife fired when she caught him standing in a thunderstorm watering the cacti. His replacement has a similar attitude to water conservation: "I'm not paying for it so it's OK if I waste it."
• The biggies for domestic consumption are where hosepipes are involved. Modern toilet cisterns are presumably designed with Fitness For Purpose in mind, and many have an economy flush feature for where only liquids are involved, but putting a brick, a hippo, or some other device in the tank to reduce the volume of the flush may be false economy. Apart from the nasty prospect of having to flush again and again, insufficient water flowing in the foul sewers causes very real problems of blocked drains and all that this implies.
• In accordance with one of the guidelines of Abu Dhabi's Estidama manual, plant native species in public areas where possible. Plants from northern Europe may temporarily look pretty, but they drink a massive amount of water and still have to be replaced when they burn up under the Arabian sun. A lot of the public flowerbeds are watered with treated sewage effluent, which is a step in the right direction, and this re-use of grey water needs to be extended. I refer to my earlier comment.
• Growing local fruit and veg consumes enormous quantities of water. I'm not going to sit here and do the arithmetic, but the carbon footprint of watering local tomatoes could well be greater than that of air-freighting them from Spain.

As for my bit, the car gets washed once a month down at the EPPCO, the bike generally gets a weekly once-over with a duster and some furniture polish if it's been out. We shower rather than bath. I even turn the tap off while I'm brushing my teeth. Beloved Wife wanted a dishwasher, and I refused until she showed me a model that used less water than washing the pots in the sink. Our extravagance is the garden, and that would use a lot less water if I could convince the gardener (q.v.) that aloe vera and agave really don't need to be drowned every morning. In the winter we seldom get a DEWA bill beyond the green (lowest consumption and therefore cheapest rate) zone of less than 6000 gallons a month. That's still 450 litres a day per person, and is on the whole shameful. Over the past couple of months our consumption has been half that, but it always goes through the roof in the summer.

]}:-{>

Bill Stickers is guilty

Unfortunately, it seems that Dubai is one place where the Goat's particular incarnation of Mr William Stickers is not going to be prosecuted.

Not a day goes past without unsolicited crap being hung on the gate of the Crumbling Villa. The cast alimininium curlicues all over the outside of the gate seem to encourage the practice. The Goat isn't particularly interested in the new pizza joint, nursery school, hair salon or dental clinic; he has little use for a borehole in the garden (which is apparently illegal anyway), and always gets his cooking gas from the same outfit. So it's futile hanging the garbage on the garage.

One thing is certain. The Goat always removes the paperwork and stacks it unread on the footway for collection. If that constitutes littering, then address the cause and not the effect. If you prevent everyone from plastering the Crumbling Villa with junk, the Goat won't dump it in the street. Simples.

Just lately, things have got worse. Cars parked outside get additional copies of the same handbills stuffed in the door handles and under the windscreen wipers. These blow off eventually, but the Goat will certainly not read them, nor avail himself of the product or service advertised. The purveyors of cooking gas and of satellite TV rather unfortunately have self-adhesive stickers that get plastered by the elusive Mr Stickers all over the Goat's electricity meter cabinet. They get removed and dumped.

The Goat made the mistake of leaving the gate open the other day. He found yet more junk, left all over his parked motorbike and even shoved under the BACK door of the Crumbling Villa.

He's tried complaining. The Municipality seems to do nothing, and calling the number advertised on the junk results in somewhere between: "The manager isn't available, and will return your call" (which he doesn't, of course), to "Neanderthal grunt."

On the rare occasions when the Goat catches Bill Stickers in flagrante lectaro, on the footway on his motorbike, and asks him to refrain from littering, the relief is extremely short-lived. About ten minutes. Then it's back to paper and plastic waste being stuck to the wall, attached to the car, shoved in the gate, hurled over the wall into the front yard, and even hand-delivered under the Crumbling Villa's door.

]}:-{>

"The trees are strong, my lord. Their roots go deep."

I thought biofuels were supposed to be carbon neutral. Not according to this recent report commissioned by Friends of the Earth. It seems that bio-ethanol and bio-diesel are going to produce more carbon dioxide than the fossil fuels that they’re supposed to replace.

In fossil fuels, CO₂ that was photosynthesised into organic matter thousands of millions of years ago is released into the Earth’s atmosphere. Strictly speaking, ‘back into’, but because the planet’s atmosphere has changed since the Carboniferous age, let’s assume that burning fossil fuels creates new CO₂ that causes a greenhouse effect, melts the polar ice caps, and generally annoys Ursus maritimus.

Now, what we were previously sold was the idea that biofuels were carbon neutral. You plant a field of, say, sunflowers. They grow, photosysnthesise, and turn sunlight into sunflower seeds. Processing those sunflower seeds, peanuts, oil-seed rape, sugar cane, or whatever, produces a liquid fuel that you burn in your internal combustion engine to produce energy, releasing the CO₂ back into the atmosphere. That’s the important bit: ‘back’. If the cultivation and manufacturing processes also use a biofuel energy source, there is zero increase in atmospheric CO₂ levels.

But this is wrong, according to Friends of the Earth. The report says that over the next 20 years, converting European land (presumably moors, forests and other non-agricultural land) will produce around a billion tonnes of CO₂ as a one-off: equivalent to ‘up to’ an additional 6% of total European Union transport emissions in 2007.

Where is all this extra CO₂ going to come from? Destroying the trees? ‘Land-use change’ appears to assume that the trees are all torn down and burned in a vast bonfire.

Therefore we should leave the trees alone, right? What would happen if those trees were not replaced by fields of biofuel crops (that are basically carbon neutral)?

The trees would eventually die and rot away, releasing all their CO₂ back into the atmosphere, that's what.

If we cut down the trees and made furniture, what would become of that furniture when it’s old and broken? Landfill? Firewood?

It doesn’t matter if we leave those trees untouched, burn them, or turn them into tables or boats, all the CO₂ absorbed by the trees is ultimately headed back into the atmosphere. Pretending that trees absorb CO₂ for all time is self-deluding to the point of being disingenuous tosh.

What does the FoE report suggest we do? Lobby to reduce the amount of biofuel in our petrol. Amend biofuel policies and prioritise energy efficiency and renewable electricity. What it doesn’t say is where all this renewable electricity is going to come from without, presumably, turning vast areas of natural wetlands into tidal power stations, putting enormous windmills on every hilltop, or mining the planet for cadmium, indium, gallium, palladium, selenium, silicon and tellurium to make photovoltaic panels. At least silicon is almost literally as common as muck.

Meanwhile, what we really need to do is throw away our gas-guzzling cars and aircraft. Go back to horse-drawn transport. But wait: doesn’t a horse consume biofuel feedstock and turn it into energy and carbon dioxide?

Perhaps Friends of the Earth and their ilk would advocate that we go back to a simpler age when the human population of the planet was a lot smaller. But that’s too politically incorrect to suggest, isn’t it?

Link to FoE website

Link to the report

]}:-{>

T'weekend is comin' an' it's time for a bath

Last weekend was exhausting.

Dubai St George’s Society Ball was postponed from its traditional 23rd April, presumably to avoid clashing with the Royal Wedding, and to ensure that the Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines would be able to come. On the run up to the event, the Goat was chasing around for jobs, passports, visas and so forth, and with less than one week to go, it at last became apparent that You Shall Go To The Ball!

Beloved Wife’s Aunt in Abu Dhabi has a colleague who wanted to attend the Ball with his wife, but the couple didn’t wish to leave their son Kay home alone. A plot hatched that entailed the Aunt and teenager being dropped off at the Crumbling Villa on Friday morning, shopping, errands and entertaining Kay all afternoon, and then Beloved Wife and Goat heading off for a riotous evening including Roast Beef of Old England, unlimited special beverages, a military band, patriotic singing and then dancing the night away to the Royal Marines’ Dance Band. Another task was to find enough gear in the Crumbling Villa’s emporium of dive kit, tools and bicycles for four snorkellers. That was part of Saturday’s plan.

Kay, who is thirteen, spent Friday afternoon ably demonstrating how Beloved Wife’s latest toy, an X-Box Kinect, should be used. Naturally, he has set the bar so high that certain middle-aged owners of said X-Box are going to have to reset the unit or else become unbelievably fit. No prizes for guessing which is more likely.

The Ball was huge fun, with the added bonus of the Goat actually winning a spot prize. Turning the voucher into the actual prize will entail a trip behind the Red Door in Ras Al Khaimah.

So we got home at 2am, dirty stop-outs that we were, and were up again at 6am to go snorkelling.

Any excuse for the Goat to get the bike out and head off to the mountain roads and the east coast.

Kay had allegedly never snorkelled before. Fortuitously, the Goat is a snorkel instructor, and because Kay took to snorkelling like a duck to water, the pool session took about ten minutes and then everybody headed for the sea.

There were the usual tropical fish, large shoals of juvenile barracuda, but no reef sharks or turtles, and the water was a bit murky. It was very smooth though, and there was no current, so the underwater Goat with snorkel and flippers set off with Kay around the seaward side of Snoopy Island. Aargh! Oil slick!! As soon as he realised, the Goat dived below the surface and made a U-turn into clearer water, dragging Kay along. Generally a lucky escape, although the Goat needed to find some olive oil and Fairy Liquid to get the noisome sticky bituminous mess out of his hair. Due thanks to the beach-bar staff at Sandy Beach for being helpful with detergents.

After lunch, the whole party had time to flop in the pool before heading back to Dubai to drop off Aunt and Kay for their trip back to Abu Dhabi. The Goat got back on the bike, and headed south through Fujairah to Kalba. He’d not been in that area for a year or so, and was amazed by the amount of recent construction in Fujairah. It was better to refuel at Al Ghayl before hitting the mountains. The Goat once ran out of petrol on the Sharjah-Kalba road; an embarrassing exercise he doesn’t intend to repeat. A very therapeutic ride on the bendy Kalba to Sharjah road, included entertainment provided by persons unknown piloting black-windowed sports cars. They vanished beyond the horizon upon hitting the monotonous straight bit at Shawka (N 25°04.9' E056°01.6').

Meeting back at the Crumbling Villa, the Goat had changed out of his sweaty biking gear. Everyone piled into the Goatmobile to drop off Aunt and Kay for their trip back to Abu Dhabi, and retrieve Beloved Wife’s car from the Grand Hyatt’s valet parking.

]}:-{>

We've got the power

I'm ever so glad I no longer live in Sharjah. The daily commute to Abu Dhabi is bad enough from the Crumbling Villa. It would be intolerable if I had to do the Sharjah schlepp to Dubai too. In fact, I only ever lived in Sharjah at all because that's where I worked. And as Beloved Wife absolutely refused to live in Grumpy Goat Towers, I moved out a couple of years ago.

The past few years have seen increasing strains put on Sharjah's electricity system. The increase in numbers of residences and businesses has outstripped the electricity and water authority's (SEWA's) ability and/or inclination to provide more 'lectric or sufficient electric string to deliver it.

Result: rolling power cuts. An hour or two once in a blue moon might, in extremis, be tolerable. This is what happened with tedious regularity when I first moved into a flat in Abu Shaghara district, and I lived in perpetual fear of being trapped all night in the lift.

But now we have reports of huge power cuts lasting hours and hours. Frozen foods are ruined; people are trapped in lifts; traffic lights don't work. And when it's pushing 40C at night and close to 50C in the heat of the day, the lack of air conditioning is not trivial.

Massive numbers of the affected population live in apartment blocks. Unlike traditional houses, and exactly like modern, traditional-looking houses, the residences are not designed to function without air conditioning. With neither aircon nor insulation there's no way to pump out the heat that pours in through the walls.

What solutions are on offer?

• Sleeping in your air-conditioned car is possible.
  
  
• A paraffin stove in your high-rise might be the only way to get cooked food.
  
  
• It might be possible to run a portable air conditioner off a petrol-powered generator.

But these solutions are fraught with their own set of problems:-

• Carbon monoxide poisoning.
  
  
• Food poisoning from putrid defrosted and inadequately cooked food.
  
  
• Apartment blocks burning to the ground.

All these problems and more, available to Sharjah residents as a result of SEWA's inability or unwillingness to provide the services for which they charge.

]}:-{>

Pearls of wisdom

I generally listen to what passes for Talk Radio on my 90-minute daily commute. Dubai Eye (103.8MHz) does that Business Breakfast thing from 6am until I drop out of range at about 6:45 and have to switch to Radio 2 (106MHz) as I approach the capital. The journey home is marginally better because the BBC World Service (87.9MHz) is in English until 6pm.

On Wednesday I was tuned to Dubai Eye after 6pm, having put in ten of my contracted eight hours (less half an hour for lunch) and I was commuting home. Fortunately, the amount of foopball news was minimal; instead, there was an interesting half hour feature on ‘green buildings’.

Sorry, but as I was driving I wasn’t in any position to take notes, so no names, no firms, no phone numbers.

The presenter had a whine that, following years and years of living apartments, he’d moved into a villa. The air conditioning upstairs was apparently poor, and Mr Maintenance advised him that this was because of the sun. Apparently, sunlight heats the roof which, in turn, radiates heat into the building. Imagine that, eh? Strong sunlight in the Gulf. Who’d have thought it? The solution offered was to run the air conditioning at full throttle for three days until the ceiling and wall slabs had been cooled.

Here we have the problem. Buildings constructed “six months ago” are to the same standards that were considered appropriate for the region in about 1975. A typical build comprises a reinforced concrete frame on a concrete pad foundation, a single skin of hollow concrete blocks make the outside walls, and reinforced concrete slabs compose the upper floors and the roof. If it isn’t flat, the roof slab gets tiles nailed to the concrete. The walls, at least those bits that aren’t windows or doors, are rendered outside with cementicious stucco, and inside it’s plaster.

Where is the insulation? An air gap of about four inches really doesn’t have much insulating effect, particularly when it’s bridged by the block construction, the mortar and whatever the brickies dropped down the gap during construction.

But it’s cheap. And this is why energy inefficient buildings continue to be constructed. This is despite, as the radio article pointed out, “around Dh3000 spent on insulation” yielding a “Dh15000 saving” in terms of smaller air conditioning units running for fewer hours, to say nothing of not having to leave them on for three days. And at four kilowatts per unit, that’s a shedload of electricity.

Most real estate in the Gulf is owned by citizens: nationals. Those who pay little or nothing for their electricity have no real incentive not to run the air conditioning on maximum at all times. Heat pours into the building, and gets pumped out again essentially for nuppence. There’s a perceived financial advantage in throwing up a bespoke villa as cheaply as possible, and someone buying a developer’s house doesn't really have to worry about electricity bills either. You won’t realise your Dh12000 saving if your running cost is zero.

What about the other 85% of the population? Those who don’t get free electricity? These residents either rent or buy cheaply-built concrete boxes. Either way, the incentive is to build at minimum cost because the consequences of no insulation are borne by the tenant or in the latter case, the ‘freeholder’.

There's little incentive for a tenant to undertake substantial environmental building improvements. Even if the landlord allowed it and it were practically feasible, in a year or two you might have to walk away from expensive solar panels - or even compact fluorescent light bulbs, so the long-term benefits wouldn’t happen to the environmentalist or his wallet. And why, incidentally, do the so-called ‘long-life’ CF lightbulbs purchased at additional expense invariably fail within a few months? So much for the alleged ten-year life...

But there is good environmental news on the horizon. In Abu Dhabi there are moves towards more environmentally sustainable buildings. Estidama, which is Arabic for ‘sustainability’, promotes a so-called “Pearl Rating” that includes insulation requirements and a whole lot more besides. Proximity to public transport, non-toxic building materials, grey water recycling, bicycle parking, painting the exterior white, solar panels for free domestic hot water, and even advice on planting native plants outside that don’t drink vast quantities of water. One suggestion is even to use ceiling fans (anyone remember those?) instead of air conditioning in the spring and autumn.

I have downloaded the PDF blurb about villas. Whilst it’s not worth trying to retro-fit insulation in the Crumbling Villa, there may be some useful pearls (ba-doom, tsch!) of wisdom applicable for the Cyprus retirement palace.

]}:-{>

Hephaestus

Ήφαιστος, the Greek god of fire, volcanoes and technology, is having fun at an awful lot of people's expense. Trying to get back to the Lands of the Sand is proving to be an exercise in frustration. Why? Well, apart from UK airports being closed, airlines aren't answering their phones. Too busy with their inflatable dartboards, perhaps. More likely busily selling seats to new passengers instead of putting existing customers whose flights were cancelled on them.

Of course I realise the problem, and also how even once the ash cloud eventually disperses there will be thousands of aircraft in the wrong place and getting back to normal will take weeks or months.

I've been examining other options. How about travel to a less-affected airport, such as Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, Athens or Istanbul? An InterRail international train ticket would set me back the order of £500, and this assumes that I'd be able to get a seat on a train anyway.

So I checked Hertz car rental. Seemingly, there are numerous foreign-registered cars in various locations in the UK that resulted from one-way car hire. The website says to Ring this number and...etc, etc... So I did, and got a recorded message to the effect that no-one can be arsed to answer the phone. Checking with Hertz's main number, I learned that a one-way hire to Rome would set me back £1200 - that's over AED6000 - in addition to the normal hire charges, ferry or Channel Tunnel fares, fuel and hotels. And this is to do Hertz a favour by returning one of their vehicles to its country of origin. In keeping with Hertz's apparent policy of extracting micturation, I was charged over £50 per day for the additional two days I had the Group 1 billy-basic car, and yes I did inform them in advance. The vehicle is now back at Gatwick where it can gather dust and ash.

So I've concluded that the only realistic option is to wait it out in Blighty. Checking the Met Office map, if everything went even more pear-shaped I'd be in a foreign country where I don't speak the language (Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey) and stuck at an airport just as the ash cloud parked itself directly overhead. See how close the cloud currently is to Istanbul and Rome.

I can't even work remotely. None of my employer's UK offices are anywhere nearby, and I object to adding to my frustration by living in a hotel in order to work. Not that I'd be able to function without my computer, books and files. It will come as no surprise to learn that I did not take my office computer with me on holiday. Consequently even working from 'home' fails to be an option.

Looks like I'll simply have to have a holiday, punctuated by frequent reference to the news websites and - joy and delight - listening to Qatar Airways' telephone tree.

Edited 23 April to add:

The skies were reopened to traffic on Wednesday 21st April, and I eventually got through to Qatar Airways to book on to Thursday's flight. Amazingly, there were scores of empty seats on the aircraft. I'm relieved to be back.

And I even have five days of annual leave remaining.

]}:-{>

Goat versus the Volcano

Stuck in the UK for the foreseeable future, here goes with something to let my regular readers know that I haven't actually dropped off the planet.

Since the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano erupted last Wednesday, all flights in and out of UK airspace have ceased, and my return to the Lands of the Sand scheduled for Saturday has been delayed. I do not for one moment blame the airlines for this, nor the UK's Air Traffic Controllers; I was previously aware of the experience on board BA009 back in June 1982, when Captain Eric Moody ended up piloting a Boeing 747 glider.

It's a bit of a shame that when I tried to talk to my airline, Qatar Airways proved impossible to contact. This can only be the airline's fault: there isn't even a recorded message to say that there are no flights until Monday. Passengers, including members of the frequent non-flyers' club, get no info at all at any time of the day or night. I suspect that the phones have simply been left off the hook. None of the London numbers were answered, which is exactly what used to happen a few years ago when Qatar Airways required passengers to reconfirm 72 hours prior to flying. The international phone number gleaned off the airline's website went straight through to hold music. This is not useful when ringing Muscat from England, and is even less useful as a source of flight information.

Oh, and a website that says that there is no information, and for further information to log on to the website is right up there with inflatable dartboards and chocolate teapots.

I eventually managed to talk to someone in Doha, who told me that there were no QA flights out of Gatwick until Monday 19 April. I reconfirmed my seat for Monday, and put in a request that if there were any further cancellations or rescheduling, that I be contacted by phone or email.

You gotta laugh, haven't you?

Then to extend the car rental. The national help desk phone number's robot woman took all my details and then cut me off. Twice. Finally I got through on a different phone number to a nice Irish woman who dealt with extending the rental. She congratulated me for having a Hertz car on hire before amending the details.

So now I wait. Truth be told, there are worse places to wait for my flight than the Gnomads' house. The marble floor of Gatwick Airport's north terminal springs to mind. Truly a Pollyanna moment.

Another Pollyanna moment was amusingly provided by the BBC in a tragic case of non-joined-up thinking. I was watching the magic idiot-box chez Nanny Goat and learned that the total lack of air travel in the UK has apparently resulted in reduced CO₂ emissions of some 100,000 tonnes per day. So not flying is good for the environment. So what is pushing all that volcanic ash into the earth's atmosphere then? Polar bears' farts?

It is such a shame that this whole volcano thing is eating into my annual leave. Come September when I'm going nuts after a summer in Dubai, I'll not have enough leave remaining to go abroad, and this is not good.

Edited Sunday 18th April to add:

Qatar Airways' flight out of Gatwick tomorrow morning was cancelled. I rang the ticketing help line, only to be advised by a machine that all the UK employees are enjoying their weekend. The office in Doha advised that the next available seat is on the totally unacceptable Saturday 1st May. How...helpful.

]}:-{>

Blue is the new green

Picture of Neytiri nicked from Wikipedia

Blog post title nicked from Jax.

I loved Avatar. The story held me captivated for the complete duration of the film, and for a couple of hours I completely forgot that it was almost all special effects. Apart from the creatures, the indigenous Na’vi and the Hallelujah Mountains, I appreciated the high-tech VTOL aircraft and head-up 3D displays.

On the subject of 3D, I did see the film in 3D. It was well worth it. Fortunately the third dimension was used to immerse the viewer in the world of Pandora, rather than to provide a succession of hostile beasts leering into the auditorium.

Among the said hostile beasts were a kind of hammerheaded rhinoceros, a ‘panther from hell’, a ‘six-legged alien Clydesdale’, and the Great Leonopteryx: the top of the airborne food chain and a brightly-coloured, four-winged, dragon-like beast. And the giant Christmas tree worms will be eerily familiar to anyone who’s dived on a coral reef, as will the bioluminescence.

It would appear from this Daily Telegraph article that the film is overly realistic. It’s not only the Na’vi who are feeling blue by the time the credits roll. It Isn’t Real, people! It’s Pretend! It’s Been Made Up! Are these the same people, I wonder, who spend their spare time investigating the backs of apple-wood wardrobes, or asserting that there is no spoon?

Anyway, unless you hate and detest Sci-Fi or fantasy, I’d certainly recommend seeing the film; if possible the 3D version, and maybe even the IMAX.

I came out of the cinema awed, but with what the Germans call an Ohrwurm: an earworm: that tune in your head that is impossible to shift. Failing humming the entirety of Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme (which is normally an effective remedy) I have written down my earworm. Caution: Here may be spoilers.


Locals are hostile. You’re
Dodging arrows while you’re
Mining unobtainium.
Displace all the natives;
Helping them is racist:
‘White Messiah’ just ain’t done.

Jarheads gonna hate ya
When you link with nature,
Ten feet tall and painted blue.
Wanna fight and and frag ’em
Airborne on a dragon?
There is something you must do:

Join the Na’vi!
You will need an avatar
’cos the Na’vi
Live on planet Pandora.
But you’re human
And you can’t get thah from hyah.
They’re the Na’vi.
They’re the Na’vi.

In the Na’vi
You can breathe the atmosphere,
And the Na’vi
’gainst warmongers show no fear.
’cos the Na’vi
Hold the ecosystem dear.
That’s the Na’vi.
That’s the Na’vi.

]}:-{>

Litter

One of the wonderful things about living in the Lands of the Sand is that it’s possible to go and picnic or camp in the desert pretty much wherever and whenever you like. The seriously equipped 4x4 fraternity might go so far off the beaten track that they’re almost off the edge of the map where “there be monsters!” Others can and do simply pull off the edge of the road and have their picnic and campfire right next to the motorway.

I’ve never really understood the allure of sitting on a sand dune about ten metres off the slow lane of the Barracuda Expressway and having a picnic with traffic roaring past. Surely, people, you could find a quiet road and sit ten metres away from that?

But the thing that gets right up my nose is the monstrous mound of miasmic mess that invariably seems to get left behind. I was appalled recently to drive past a group of picnickers in the desert one day, and then to see the unspeakable quantity of garbage that they’d left behind when I drove past a day later. As a desert camper, I am fully aware of how much effort it takes to stick litter in a plastic bag, take that bag back to civilisation, and dump it in a roadside wheelie bin on the way home. That’s in, please, not next to. There really is no excuse for leaving paper and plastic plates, cutlery, tins, bottles, broken tents and crash-damaged kites in the desert where they were dropped. Laziness (with a possible hint of stupidity and a soupçon of arrogance) are reasons; they’re not excuses, and certainly not justification.

I guess there’s an ingrained “someone else will tidy it up” philosophy. This works fine in town where legions of Men In Orange fight the constant battle against fag packets, drink cans and plastic bags that have, for one reason or another, failed to find their way into dustbins. But this doesn’t work in the desert. Bizarrely, some picnickers bag up the rubbish and then leave it behind. Why? Do they expect the binmen to scour the open desert on the off-chance that they’ll find a black bag to collect? Or will some animal find it, open it and then choke to death on a polythene bag?

And then we have periodic “Desert Clean-Up” campaigns in which groups of concerned people show up with the laudable intention of denuding an area of beach or dunes of all rubbish. And thus “someone else will tidy it up” becomes true, which confirms that it’s OK to leave trash lying around.

If a Clean-Up produces a truckful of trash, the event is hailed as a huge success. It isn’t. The fact that the trash was lying around proves the message that “littering is unacceptable” is not getting through. A huge success is when, at the end of the day, the volunteer litter-pickers all come up empty-handed.

I’m not holding my breath.

]}:-{>

Jack in the greenwash

How much of an environmental footprint does a mobile phone leave? It’s huge, apparently. Apart from the packaging and the manual that weighs in at a pound or so, the handset is made of a miscellany of plastics, there’s a liquid-crystal screen, various bits of rare and precious metals, and a rechargeable battery.

Sony-Eriksson reckon that they can apply a 15% greenwash by using recycled plastics, reducing the packaging, and supplying the C901 phone manual electronically, in the handset itself. So if you can’t figure out how to install the battery or switch it on you’re gonna be royally shafted. I had a giggle at the idea of saving the Earth’s finite resources by using a 30 milliwatt charger instead of 100mW, and then, as is not mentioned, sitting around under the air conditioning for an additional hour at three kilowatts or more waiting for the battery to charge.

Lithium-ion batteries don’t last for ever. I’ve just discovered a fading battery which results in a super short standby time and my Nokia reporting a full battery when it obviously isn’t. So it’s time to replace the battery or buy a new phone. Surely extending the effective life of an otherwise serviceable handset by a couple of years is environmentally preferable to lashing out for a whole new one? By not changing the entire phone I also neatly avoid yet another new mains charger and replacing the car charger.

How much for an appropriate Nokia battery? In “Not Coming In” Dubai it’d be an astonishing and ridiculous Dh145. £25. Twenty-five quid. As the shop assistant pointed out, for only a little more cash I might as well buy a complete new handset. And charger. And manual. And carrying case. It’s the electronic version of flogging the car ‘cos the ashtrays are full, the only obvious beneficiary being the phonemonger.

In any case, the point is moot because nobody I asked had a BL-5B. They do exist on the interwebs though. They’re offered at between £5 and £15, plus whatever shipping charges are deemed appropriate. The problem here is that the on-line suppliers I contacted couldn’t ship beyond the impenetrable English Channel (Fog in Channel: Universe cut off) and were similarly incapable of accepting a credit card payment when the registered address isn’t in the United Kingdom. Only non-expatriate Brits ever use credit cards, obviously. www.4mobiles.co.uk promised to contact me with details for taking my order by email but they didn’t. So I’ll not be buying an iPhone or BlackBerry or N98 from them, will I?

I have now found a solution to the original battery problem at £6.95 that involves Nanny Goat, Eid Al Adha and Boeing. She’s coming anyway, so the carbon footprint incurred by schlepping a phone battery doesn’t count.

In related greenwash news, I have just learned that it is impossible for my UK-based credit card company to switch to paperless statements. The company needs a UK-based mobile phone number to SMS so that I’m reminded to check the balance and cough up the moolah. International numbers ‘aren’t acceptable’, and alerting me by email is ‘impossible’. So I shall have to continue receiving the dead tree version every month, air-freighted to my PO Box at enormous environmental expense.

]}:-{>

Herbology expert

Beloved Wife and I spent Eid in Cyprus. We had commissioned a government-approved surveyor to mark out our plot boundaries in accordance with the official Land Registry records. Having met the surveyor on site, noted the lengths of rebar that he had banged into the ground at the corners, and paid the money, we are now in possession of an accurate survey. We have precise co-ordinates of the corners, a contour plan and the whole thing in AutoCAD as well as on paper. This ought to be enough to get an architect started on the planning permission for the Dream Home. But that won’t start in earnest until Beloved Wife and I agree the basic size, shape and orientation of the building.

Unlike defining a plot in town, where measuring off existing buildings and walls easily defines a plot, up in the boonies the surveyor had to measure half of Cyprus in order to ensure that our particular corner or a foreign field was precisely defined. And that, we were told, is why he wanted such a thick wad of banknotes. I was of course shrewd enough to get in writing beforehand that the price quoted was fully inclusive of all taxes, disbursements and those niggling extras that have an unfortunate habit of bunking up the bottom line so that it resembles the GNP of a small country.

The good news is that the plot is unexpectedly larger than we originally anticipated. The original advert said it was around 3300 sq.m; I’d measured the area using existing hedges as seen on Google Earth and discovered a disappointing 2740 sq.m. The survey reveals the actual plot fully includes one of the hedges and extends further south than expected, yielding 3578 sq.m, or 0.884 acres in old money.

I took hundreds of photographs of the land, the views, the existing herbaceous borders and the survey markers.

And this, dear reader, is where you come in: identifying the plants. Essentially, we’d like to retain as much of the mature planting as possible, but if it’s diseased or toxic to goats, it’ll have to go. Hopefully the greenery that remains will be pretty to look at, provide useful windbreaks, and might even produce edible fruit or something that gives a glossy coat.


No.1 and No.2
The first one is easy. It’s probably a carob tree Ceratonia siliqua and might even bear usable fruit. I could get hold of some wild honey and do a John the Baptist impersonation. The second plant appears to be some sort of parasite hanging off the carob. Its fruit is small black berries. No hints in any of our Mediterranean Plants and Gardens books or, so far, from the Interwebs.



No.3
That this is an oak of some sort is obvious from the acorns. But which one? There are holly oaks Quercus ilex around, but this one dares to be different. The leaves aren’t wobbly-edged as per the ‘traditional’ oak leaf, so which species is it?


No.4
The fruit smells of apple, so I suspect a crab-apple of some sort. But is that indeed the case, and is the fruit edible?


No.5
It seems that this one finished flowering a little while back and has perhaps gone to seed. Is it some kind of wild rose? There aren’t a load of thorns on the stems.


No.6
I think this may be Cistus ladanifer. But I'd appreciate the opinion of someone who knows more about plants than I. Most of the population, then.


No.7
I suspect this one is pistachio Pistacia lentiscus. The small berries are red and green. I guess they’re turning from red to black as they mature. Are these what eventually produce pistachio nuts?


No.8
Absolutely no clue at all with this plant.


No.9
Nor this one.


I found this page of the University of Reading's website of some use. Again, those who know and understand plants might get better use out of the page.

]}:-{>

Organic hand-knitted tofu

“Actually,” I said to the freelance journalist, “I rather like being able to afford to drive a gas-guzzling, ozone-depleting, polar-bear-drowning four-wheel drive.”

“Would you like me to quote you on that?” he asked.

Yet to my own embarrassment I find myself drifting inexorably towards a ecology-minded existence. Not deliberately, you understand.

Agreed, the Goatmobile is a gas-guzzler. It actually burns rather less than the ol’ Disco by about 50%. Seventeen miles per gallon is a lot less unimpressive than twelve. Since buying the motorbike, my personal monthly petrol consumption has dropped from some 90 gallons to around 60 gallons. I make that a monthly saving of about 200kg CO₂ not pumped into the troposphere. Of course, I could have gone to work by bicycle, but that would have required several tins of ozone-depleting deodorant, there being nowhere to shower and change into the mild-mannered Clark Kent upon arrival at the office.

Just for the interest of any chemist who might accidentally have stumbled upon this blog, and to prove to myself that all that O-level Chemistry hasn’t been entirely forgotten…

Petrol is typically a mixture of C₅H₁₂ to C₁₂H₂₆

Atomic weights: H=1, O=8, C=12

Lightest fraction: C₅H₁₂ + 8O₂ = 5CO₂ + 6H₂O

5x12 + 12x1 + 8x16 = 5x(12+16) + 6x(2+8) = 200
72 + 128 = 140 + 60

72g petrol produces 140g CO₂

Heaviest fraction: 2C₁₂H₂₆ + 37O₂ = 24CO₂+ 26H₂O
2x(12x12+26x1) + 37x16 = 24x(12+16) + 26x(2+8) = 932
340 + 592 = 672 + 260

340g petrol produces 672g CO₂

On average, 1kg petrol yields a maximum of around 1.97kg CO₂. This is a maximum, assuming complete combustion. If any petrol is unburned, the amount of CO₂ is going to be less, and there will be increased quantities of other crap such as carbon monoxide and various nitrogen oxides. All of this other crap reduces the amount of oxygen available to make carbon dioxide.

Incidentally, the figures provide a simple way of converting fuel consumption to grammes of CO₂/km:

15 x l/100km = g/km CO₂
Or, in old money 4150/mpg = g/km CO₂

The Goat is bemused to learn that according to UK government figures, the Goatmobile produces 305g/km CO₂, which equates to 13.6mpg. Yet those same government figures state typical fuel consumption as 16mpg in the (worst case) urban cycle. The ‘extra-urban’ and ‘combined’ cycles produce 27.7mpg and 22.2mpg respectively. Yeah, yeah ‘your mileage may vary’. But why does the CO₂ figure exceed the worst fuel consumption by around 18%? If the 16mpg urban were adopted, CO₂ emissions = 260g/km. Perhaps this inflation of the CO₂ figure is a vain attempt to get a prospective purchaser on to a guilt trip so that he’ll buy an electric moped instead. Incidentally, practical long-term testing by Muggins since 2004 shows an overall average of 237g/km CO₂; a total of nearly 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Take that, Ursus maritimus!

Then there’s the house in Cyprus. Accusations that the Goat is turning into a tofu-knitting, lentil-wearing bunny hugger, whilst not exactly unfounded, are circumstantial at best. The interest in solar energy is borne out of solar water heaters being more-or-less mandatory and the nearest existing power pole being about $30,000 away. Whilst photovoltaic cells are unlikely to pay for themselves if ‘proper’ electricity is available on the premises, being self-sufficient in power makes us immune to dodgy supplies, brownouts and inflated bills. You can buy a lot of PV panels with $30,000. Similarly with water. The nearest well is a good $10,000 away and the plot is lower than the well’s ground level elevation, so a borehole may be the answer. Cyprus’ water supply problems make it realistic for the government to subsidise private boreholes because this reduces demand on the piped network. There may even be a grant to get mains electricity to the plot in order to power the water pump. I wonder if there are EU grants available for installing a grey-water recycling system?

I’m advised that decent thick walls with plenty of insulation will keep the heat indoors during the winter and outside all summer, thereby making air conditioning unnecessary. The house will nevertheless be ducted for aircon in case this advice isn’t entirely accurate. Furthermore, someone is going to have to do the sums to see how many PV cells, batteries and inverters we’ll need.

Having contrived to produce a carbon footprint about the size of a pogo stick’s, the Goat has all the justification necessary for owning a big 4x4 pickup. Huzzah! The Goat also idly wonders how much land and effort would be required to grow his own bio-diesel to power said 4x4 pickup and the backup electricity generator…?

]}:-{>

The Goat is landed

The Goat’s silence on the blogosphere of late has been caused by a week’s vacation in Cyprus. What, Cyprus again? Well yes, actually. Beloved Wife and I visited in August and then again in October. This time was to experience winter and, with any luck, to select an appropriate plot of land for our dream home.

Following the dubious delights of the fleapit hotels that I picked last time and the time before, I suggested that Beloved Wife might like to try her hand at on-line hotels. We have therefore ended up in a ‘four-star’ establishment on the west coast. Breakfast is both vast and excellent, apart from the fried zucchini that look exactly like mushrooms until they’re no longer under monochrome heating lamps. It’s a huge improvement over two bread rolls and a limp piece of Spam. Actually, the hotel would still have been prohibitively expensive, were it not for a 40% discount for booking seven low-season nights. The indoor pool, sauna and steam room are also marvellous. I haven’t dared to try the torture chamber fitness machines. Winter is very much low season. The “Tomb of the Kings” Road has turned into the “Tomb” of the King’s Road.

I took Beloved Wife for a Teppenyaki meal for her birthday. Apart from the food being filling, fresh and fabulous, we had the full cutlery-juggling show from our chef. We also nearly lost eyebrows to the flames. Apart from that evening, we’ve mostly eaten at the local chippy. I like steak and kidney pie, and Beloved Wife likes pork chops by the square foot.

We’ve also been shopping for stuff that’s either Not Coming In Dubai or else is ridiculously overpriced. Lace tablecloths and motorcycle gear, since you ask. More on the latter in a later post.

Several land agents have given us guided tours around the island to view miscellaneous pieces of real estate for sale. A curious thing is that almost all of those parcels of land that we were shown were around 25% to 30% higher in price than our stated budget. I wonder which particular part of: “This is the maximum that we can afford” is so difficult to understand? Ah, the allure of 25% to 30% extra commission. Of course. There seems to be a general failure to realise that 25% to 30% of buggerall isn’t very much.

We managed to whittle down three visits’ worth of sites from over twenty to merely two. All of the others were rejected on the grounds of horrible or non-existent access tracks, the plot being flat but on a 45-degree slope, the ground being ghastly clay, the asking price being prohibitively above our budget, the plot being 30 miles up a bendy road into the sticks, and in some cases all of the above. Mind you, the roads to and from Salamiou are a scratcher’s paradise...

Of the remaining two sites, one turned out to be half the advertised size. The agent’s subterfuge was easily exposed by a Goat wielding a scale rule. We put in a low bid of around 70% of the asking price for the other one. With a global recession in progress and the Pound Sterling competing with Zimbabwe for worthlessness, our offer was accepted.

Having secured the land - inshallah - and instructed a lawyer, it’s time to save furiously in order to stick a highly insulated, solar powered, recycled grey-water, organic-tofu-knitting house on it.

]}:-{>

All Greek to me

Beloved Wife and I are now back from a week in the birthplace of Aphrodite. After a pleasant and uneventful Gulf Air trip to Cyprus via Bahrain, we picked up the rental car and headed off down the motorway from Larnaca towards Limassol. We both tried to get used to bilingual road signs in Greek capitals. A very popular destination is ΕΞΟΔΟΣ. By a staggering series of fortunate guesses, plus having checked the location on Google Earth and selected the correct εξοδος, I drove pretty much straight to the hotel, We checked in before showering and heading into town in search of pork and beer.

The two-star hotel was fully booked, so it was futile to complain about the air conditioning in our room. Unfortunately all the A/C's efforts were going into making itself sound like a small, unsilenced motorcycle instead of having any meaningful cooling effect. We also had to ask that the mattress be changed, as the original had all the support and texture of a marshmallow. Still, the hotel did have a reasonable swimming pool. It was not permitted to cut through the dining room to the pool, so everyone had to parade out of the hotel front door and down the street in their Speedos and thongs if they wanted to go swimming.

Aphrodite's birthplace, at least according to local legend

It rapidly became apparent that, apart from us and a Bangladeshi waiter, the entire staff and guests of the hotel were Russian. Yet I'd booked the hotel on line, using a UK-based website. No matter; there was somewhere to sleep, somewhere to have our disappointingly Spartan breakfasts, and even somewhere in the shade to park the car.

Ah yes, the car. Ian The Dog had tipped me off that especially up in the mountains we might encounter unmade tracks. I upgraded the rental car to a small 4x4 in an attempt to get more ground clearance and to minimise the likelihood of chassis damage. The Daihatsu Terios was apparently powered by a sewing machine engine. Perusing the manual, I was forced to conclude that it must have been the 1300cc version. The relative powerhouse of ponies, the 1500cc 100BHP version, was clearly not in evidence. It was of course relatively easy to wind the vehicle up to the maximum legal 100kph speed limit on the motorway, but the poor thing had enormous trouble with anything resembling a hill. Commonplace gradients of 8% to 12% and an asthmatic Shetland pony under the bonnet do not match well with an automatic gearbox either. This minuscule car was however easy to park, and its equally minuscule engine returned around thirty miles per Imperial gallon. This was just as well, given the rather frightening €1.12 per litre (Dh29 per gallon).

It appears that Cypriot petrol stations have a 24-hour system for automated dispensing of fuel. You select the pump, insert cash or credit card, and then pump gas. After filling up, you go back to the money machine and re-insert your credit card. The computer recognises the card as the one that just paid for petrol to, say, Pump No.2 and spits out a paper receipt. All instructions, including the ones to get the machine to display instructions in English, are in Greek. Rather alarmingly there is at no point any requirement to enter a PIN. This is probably just as well as I couldn't remember my VISA card PIN, but it does mean that nefarious types could potentially gas up with anyone's card.

We both rather like Cyprus. After many consecutive months in the Land of the Sand, it was refreshing to see that, despite no rain for 14 months, there was still some greenery around. We were repeatedly told that it was usually a lot greener than this, and also sorry about the appalling heat and humidity. Frankly, after August in Dubai, 30°C was surprisingly refreshing. Up in the hills, above about 500m the temperature was a couple of degrees cooler. On the coast it was even possible to sit outside (in the shade) without impersonating the Wicked Witch of the West. So of course Beloved Wife and I both accidentally overdid it at the hotel pool one day. Whoops.

English is widely spoken in Cyprus, although bilingual signs become scarcer the further one ventures into the boondocks. There is definitely a need to read Greek, and some ability to speak it would also be good. At this point it's worth quite emphatically pointing out that the indigenous Greek Cypriots are not Greek, even if that's the language they speak.

The village of Laneia

On our travels around the said boondocks we looked at various plots of land and even some houses for sale. There are developments all over the island, but Beloved Wife is allergic to living on a postage stamp in a housing estate. We found some massive plots of cheap agricultural land on which it would be possible to put a single house on typically 6% of the total plot area. But these were invariably miles and miles up mountain switchbacks and several kilometres from the nearest power and water supplies and civilisation. Certainly not the same as living on a housing estate.

The tower of Omodhos monastery

Given that we ultimately want an ecologically sensitive house, the concrete-and-blockwork-with-not-a-scrap-of-insulation buildings generally on offer in Cyprus, and indeed Dubai, do not interest us. The Crumbling Villa costs a fortune to keep cool during the summer. The A/Cs pump the heat out and more radiates in through the walls. It's like pumping the bilges of a sieve.

Most Cyprus homes seem to have solar panels for water heating, but it's becoming possible to get electrical power from the sun. We're advised that it's even possible to flog unused electricity back to the power authority. And grey-water recycling - using shower waste to flush the loo - is also becoming such a popular water saver that the Cyprus government offers grants to build it into houses. These systems are difficult to retro-fit into existing buildings, meaning that we're starting to look at a self-build house with lots of insulation too. By the way, this is sooo much not yoghurt-knitting bunny-hugging, and sooo much keeping the household bills to an absolute minimum without having to live in a shoe box in t'middle o't'road.

Some of the older property that we visited dates back many centuries. I've never seen proper, authentic ancient classical ruins before. Beloved Wife used to live in Naples so has seen Pompeii and Rome, and has also visited Athens. So she was mildly surprised at my enthusiasm for a very small archaeological site near Limassol.

The remains of a Byzantine church at Kourion

Amphitheatre at Kourion. Bring your own cushion

The House of Theseus. He of the Minotaur, the labyrinth and the ball of wool

I must admit that the ruins and mosaics on display at Pafos and at Kourion were much better. The mosaics even gave me an opportunity to demonstrate my somewhat haphazard ability to transliterate ancient Greek text. For all the sites, we left our visits to the late afternoon in order to avoid the seething mass of οι πολλοι. And with the sun lower in the sky, shadows make photographs more interesting, and the temperature's a bit lower too.

The journey back was mostly without incident. Mostly? Well, on the Bahrain to Dubai sector the aircraft got clearance to take off, the pilot went balls to the wall and there was an immediate horrendous series of mechanical clangs from somewhere beneath the wings. We stopped, turned off the main runway and sat in the dark while presumably someone got out and looked at the undercarriage or leaned out of the door with a mirror on a stick. Our Captain declared that all was well and the Airbus still possessed the requisite number of wings, wheels and engines, so we trundled around to the end of the runway and had another go. Same mechanical clanging, but this time we got into the air. Obviously, we also landed safely in Dubai. Perhaps the noise was someone's luggage rolling around in the hold.

It snows up here on Mount Olympus, although not in August

As for return visits, we've been advised that February is the coldest month, so a visit then will reveal Cyprus' other temperature extreme. I spotted a ski resort 1900 metres up in the Troodos mountains, so it presumably gets seriously chilly. I wonder if I can get the leave?

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