Browned Off

Gales massacred more local forests

Today saw the new year begin the way the last one finished with abrupt and violent gales of over 100mph. We were awakened by the house shaking and the trees in the garden were bending at right angles. Just the onset of another year of climate change weather and we have been without power all day yet again. Since the arrival of the new Scottish Government Transport Minister, Keith Brown, we have had more bad weather disasters than in the previous ten years combined. Any competent statistician would be able to prove that the correlation between this increased number of weather events and the minister is very high.

The daily utterings of the Scottish Government have a dated irrelevant quality about them.  Installed in the Civil Emergency Centre in Edinburgh they collect and disseminate information and tell you what has been happening on a macro scale. Fine for voyeurs of bad weather but not much use to people in communities who want to know is the school going to open? are the carers going to visit? is it worth putting out the wheelie bin? and when will we get the power or telephone/broadband connection back?  Fortunately, a transistor radio and local radio stations are far more useful as are the websites of the power companies and the councils. Life is a bottom-up process, not a top-down one but this does not fit easily with the power-crazed mindsets of central government mandarins or ministers.

By the time we heard the minister on the radio mid-morning, the wind had abated, trees were down, vehicles had overturned and electricity had long gone. He was peddling old news, not advanced warnings or useful information. In conditions such as these, it is communities that matter, they are neighbours and providers along with the local public services.  And if we want to watch or hear about what is going on across the country then there is a very fine institution called the BBC that does this better than anyone else. When you want to take your kid to school or discover if the local road is flooded or closed it is local information from the service provider that matters not more soundbites from Big Brother.

The return of power happened in the late evening after we returned from an evening meal in the nearest village with power. A gang of SSE engineers had been having a meal in the pub and they were able to tell us that they had now restored the power.  We returned home to watch the BBC Dickens season, it has served up some tasty television over recent days including Armando Iunucci's genuine and affectionate appreciation of Dickens as a radical campaigner for social justice.  Christmas Carols may now have given way to Hard Times but on yet another day lit by candles, it can appear that we are back to the times of Dickens. We are just as much in need of some social justice today as in the nineteenth century because avarice and the abuse of power are almost as devastating to people's lives as climate change.

Thankfully, Scotland has been closed for the second day of its new year public holidays whilst its citizens sober up so we have been spared the devastation that might have occurred had people been working and children at school. Let's hope that the minister takes a day off tomorrow so that the service providers can get on with sorting out the aftermath of the latest weather without having to waste time feeding the minister with generalised updates that he can broadcast to the nation.