Parking, Pedestrians & Pavement Rage

Recently I got our city council to re-do the parking lines in my street. People were constantly parking over into the no parking area in front of my drive. When the culprits were big 4 WD's or vans it was impossible to see whether it was safe to exit into the road. The combination of drivers doing the same on the area opposite my driveway meant that I was effectively boxed in. The markings were faded, but frankly it was simply carelessness & complete indifference to the annoyance caused. Or maybe they are just bad drivers. 

When I walk to my local shopping area I can guarantee that there will be cars & vans parked overlapping the kerb & pavement. That combined with trees & shrubs overhanging the pavement from the gardens leaves little space for pedestrians. Even less for mums with pushchairs or people on mobility scooters or walkers. In the UK we have a crazy situation where whether this is illegal or not depends entirely on where you live. In London & Scotland it is completely illegal. In England & Wales it can be unlawful if local restrictions or obstruction rules apply.

 

I may be a grumpy old woman, but I have a simple mind. Law shouldn't be random, piecemeal & confusing. If this is wrong in London & Scotland why on earth is it acceptable in England & Wales? What are the factors that make a difference? Is it simply that vehicles matter more & pedestrians matter less in England & Wales? 

I am normally a peaceful person. But I am increasingly incensed by how little pedestrians are prioritised in our society today. Especially as demographically we are an ageing population. I often struggle to walk to the shops, but I don't want to lose my capability completely, so I do make an effort. Coping with the above as well as playing "chicken" with cyclists & scooterists on the pavement means that I feel more vulnerable than I should. 

So I have to admit I am tempted by pavement rage. I have obviously never "keyed" a vehicle or pushed a cyclist or scooterist over. But lurking in the depths of my "granny" persona there is a rebel who is seriously tempted. 

The real issue is that all of this is happening on a daily basis everywhere & it is being completely ignored. We are all habituated to it & have learned the skills of avoidance. There is no enforcement even if there is legislation. People get away with it all the time. 

I think we pedestrians should rise up & fight back with our mobile phones. We should flood local councils with photos of offenders showing vehicle reg plates & gardens overhanging pavements. We should complain & they should be forced to do something about it. I've even been tempted to go out with secateurs & throw the cuttings into the front gardens.  

Westminster - The Seat of Government?

I have quite strong views about this topic. I think they are very logical, but I know that they probably won't be universally popular.

For starters I think we should sell off the Houses of Parliament & permanently move the seat of government to somewhere more central in the UK. That would give us the opportunity to have a purpose built, much better designed, far less adversarial, setting for decision making. We need a circular design that isn't as sectarian. Just like Scotland & Wales. It seems to work very well there. I've mentioned before that the cross bench adversarial design of Westminster is anachronistic. England is stuck in the old hierarchical, class ridden, traditional past. This is the 21st century for goodness sake.   

 

I don't much care what we do with the current building - but I'm sure a good developer could make a lot of money & given that it's Grade 1 listed they won't be able to do anything that will detract from the building itself. There must be touristic opportunities, or a hotel or conference centre maybe. It is a big building, right on the Thames, in the centre of London after all.

Maybe number 10 North is designed to open our minds to such a possibility? Maybe Burnham is quite Machiavellian in his thinking? I do hope so. Because selling the H of P off would surely generate shedloads of money. So the new parliament would presumably be self funding, given the difference in house prices in London & "up North". As a real bonus we wouldn't have to pay the estimated cost of repair of between £11 - £40 billion the H of P needs right now.

But all of that, important though it is, isn't the main reason for my thinking. We must get rid of the so called "North South divide". We must start to think and act as a cohesive country with 4 semi independent states. We must acknowledge that currently there is a post code lottery & not all counties are the same - They all have distinctive characteristics. London & the South East must not be allowed to dominate politics & decision making. Devolved government works. The 14 Regional Mayors have been a really good decision. Great examples are - Greater Manchester, West Midlands, London & Tees Valley.

So whatever else I think about Andy Burnham, I'm hoping that his experience as mayor of Greater Manchester will mean that he is capable of not only seriously thinking about this, but actually doing it.

Then he can tackle our ridiculously unfair voting system.  

 

   

Autonomy & the Sandbox

Autonomy - self governing, independent, free to make choices. It embodies personal freedom, political self rule & workplace empowerment. It is very important if democracy is to survive.

Apparently the company behind Chat GPT has revealed that an autonomous agent powered by Chat GPT went rogue & hacked into a startup. They consider this to be unprecedented, but they also expect it to become more commonplace. Only the big brains of technology could make such a contradictory & worrying statement.

I can't believe they haven't thought this through. Surely it isn't just a question of the income generated for these companies? Surely they realise that allowing machines to be autonomous means the we won't be. 

The AI escaped from it's "sandbox". How cuddly & friendly that sounds. Just like my toddler when she was 3. Frankly I think it's deliberately misleading, to stop us from seriously considering the implications of this. 

It really doesn't matter whether there was malicious intent or not. The genie is out of the box & Pandora has opened it simultaneously. The tech brains are not in control & we certainly aren't. An unknown IT flaw is known as a zero day vulnerability. I think that says it all. Anthropic, the rival of Open AI, said it's Mythos has found thousands of these flaws. 44 incidents have been recorded in which AI acted against it's users intentions.

To be specific, autonomous AI might pursue assigned tasks using harmful or unintended methods. More worrying the machines might hide capabilities or bypass safety guardrails to achieve their goals. As has now already happened, advanced machines can break out of isolated testing environments & access the internet.

I hope this raises as much concern in you as it does in me. I certainly don't trust the various owners of  Open AI (Chat GPT). In my view they have already failed. I doubt the genie can be put back in the bottle now. Unfortunately they probably have enough arrogance & self confidence to think that they can. 

 

Are we really stupid enough to hand that over to a machine we don't control? Apparently so. 

Politics - Optics, Expectation & Andy Burnham

I'm not sure what I feel about Andy Burnham. He is certainly very different from Starmer, but what needs to be done will be extremely unpopular, very costly & take a very long time. Time will tell whether he is the one to do it. I really hope he is.

A change in optics is welcome. Starmer & Rachel (from accounts) Reeves came in telling us repeatedly how dire everything was. It was true, the conservatives single handedly almost destroyed everything they touched over 14 years. But it started way back with Thatcher in 1979. If you don't agree just research the effects of privatisation & think about your own water company. 

I do think that politicians must give people an honest, clear & evidenced picture of the state of the nation. How can we judge what part we need to play individually - How can we know what to expect to happen & their proposed solutions & accept them if they don't? I just seriously doubt that many have the ability to communicate that well.

Things are in deep trouble here & internationally. There are multitudes of conflicting demands & pressures. Running a country & a world must be frighteningly complex. Unpopular choices will have to be made & we will have to accept them even if they cause us pain. 

When politicians talk about change I worry. Having a new shiny PM will, not of itself, solve all of this. No one is that good & we shouldn't expect it. This will take an end to party politicking & real cooperation between the best in all parties & people outside politics with relevant skills & experience. I can't see any evidence that anyone in UK politics can see that, never mind actually do it. 

Maybe the first step is to come clean. Maybe each government ministry should produce a public brief of where we are now. Not a historical gripe about what different parties have done wrong, but a clear indication of the issues facing them & the possible solutions. In order for governments to govern they have to have consensus. They have to be able to get the people to accept very difficult choices. They have to stop thinking about being re-elected. 

I simply don't believe that our current system is capable of all of this. Not least because of the intense speculation, voicing of opinions & media circus we live in. Burnham has been in for just one day & already it has started. 

 

It's really depressing. 

Disappointment & The World Cup

England lost a football match against Argentina. Possibly there was a wrong decision about substitutes, possibly not. Argentina brought politics into their celebrations & will hopefully be disciplined. Thousands of people will be disappointed & thousands will celebrate. It is just a game. It's good to have something that gives people great pleasure & hope. But it is just a game.

Life is full of disappointments, losing a football match shouldn't be that important in that context. We all need to learn the lesson of losing gracefully, trying to see the positives, congratulating the winners. The England team undoubtedly did their best. No one should ask more than that.

I watched the build up to the world cup in the news. It was full of unrealistic statements that must have put pressure on the players & their manager & coaches. I've been a fan of individual tennis players for decades, but have never been so blinded that I thought they would always win, although some top players seem to. I got bored with Laver winning Wimbledon all the time & Rosewall never. 

There is a difference between supporting your player or team & being blindly obsessed. There is certainly no excuse for the sort of jeering & trolling that disappointed football fans engage in. Imagine how that must make players feel when they have just given their all to try to win. Some fans said it was the biggest disappointment in their lifetime. All I can say is if that's true they have led a charmed life. There are far worse disappointments.

Very few people go through life without major disappointment, I can think of many. I'm sure readers can too. We have to learn how to deal with disappointment. It isn't necessarily an ending. It can often encourage a change of direction, a new beginning. We should try to see it as an opportunity. 

Time

"Time & tide wait for no man" is a proverb dating back to at least 1225. There are numerous sayings about time.

 

We live our lives at such a pace that we now talk about being "time poor". We have allowed ourselves to become overly busy in the "developed world". We seem to have lost balance in our lives, lost the capacity for peace, introspection, doing nothing. We are teaching our children to be seekers after instant gratification, to need constant stimulation & have very short attention spans. We have even given it a name & made it into a medical disorder - ADHD. The symptoms appear before age 12 & are inattention, hyperactivity & impulsivity that interfere with daily functioning. It can continue into adulthood. Many experts agree that society has medicalised normal human emotions & behaviours turning everyday stress, grief, and shyness into clinical conditions. For example labelling natural grief as major depression, treating normal childhood high energy as ADHD, and turning daily work stress into generalized anxiety.

When you age you notice the passage of time more I think. You seem to travel onwards to the final stop ever faster. Days, weeks & months pass in a blur of speed. Seasons & years too. Oddly, at the same time many of us elderly people become much slower, both physically & mentally. We are like grandfather clocks winding down. But there is no key to wind us up again. We have the time to think even if we don't have the energy to do & we have a lifetime of experience.

To many, that experience is irrelevant, out of date. However we have the benefit of seeing the patterns. Over time things repeat, not just history. Fashion for example. I've just bought some linen culottes. They were in fashion in the 60's - 70's & the 90's. We know when our world is going down a path it has gone down before. We often know what is at the end of that path. 

Sadly, we are so irrelevant we are no longer listened to. As Dickens said in "The old Curiosity Shop" "Twas ever thus". We are all living in "Groundhog Day" but the dangers are increasing & we aren't adapting well. 

 

Heat Impact

According to the Met office temperatures of 35°C or higher have now been recorded for the first time in May, June and July of the same year in the UK weather record, as heatwave conditions continue through the weekend and into next week. We have had a record eight days with temperatures exceeding 34°C, surpassing the previous record held in 1976 and 2020. This is exceptional warmth over several months. We have had red, amber & yellow heat warnings.

Fire chiefs are concerned about the wildfire risk. Medics are concerned about heat associated ill health. People trying to escape exceptional heat by wild swimming are dying. Excess deaths across Europe are expected to be over 20,000. Average UK A&E attendances exceeded 80,000 for the first time ever in June. During the June heatwave there was a 118% increase in the number of times 999 emergency call takers directed members of the public to collect a nearby defibrillator for someone in suspected cardiac arrest. More than 1,000 schools across the UK were either closed or partially closed during the June heatwave. Supermarkets across the UK have struggled to keep their fridge and freezer units running in the extreme heat, with many shoppers finding empty shelves at their local store, including my local M&S. The knock on effect of man made climate change is obvious to see.

 

Personally I am struggling to exist. During the heatwaves I have hardly left the house. I am lucky because I have a north facing downstairs room I can spend most time in with the shutters closed. It's not just uncomfortable, it is actually almost unbearable. My pacemaker is helping but I am finding it difficult to do anything. My body can't keep my core temperature down. Any exertion makes me breathless. My underlying health conditions are exacerbated by the heat & I find walking, even round the house, exhausting. By the afternoon there is no respite anywhere. Despite trying to distract myself from the exhaustion of the heat, it is difficult to concentrate.

However there must be so many people much worse off than me. People who have to continue working, especially those wearing uniforms like first responders. Elderly or sick people living alone with no help. People having to continue looking after their families as well as themselves. People living in unsuitable housing, particularly high rise flats. 

We are not prepared or adapted for this in the UK. Yes, of course climate varies. But this is truly exceptional. Denying that will get us nowhere. We need to scour the world for best practice in getting CO2 emissions down & transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. We all need to accept that the necessary changes will be difficult.  

There really is no plan B. Climate Change, like it or not, is here & won't go away unless there is Human Change.