Well hello there. It’s been some time – over three months since I did a “proper” post. I know there was all that climate change stuff, eight weeks of it, but that’s not real blogging, is it? Not the flow of natter and triviality that our reader expects and enjoys.

There’s a reason for that, of course. You may have seen and heard on the news that Cornwall was cut off from the rest of the world by the storms that lashed the south of England in February. The solitary railway line was destroyed at Dawlish in Devon which brought panic and isolation. We have been subsisting entirely on pasties and cider, and we were running out of those – so we’re glad the railway has been repaired now and we’re reconnected and I can blog again.

Hang on, do I hear you say? If you could write about climate change, why not the usual stuff? Ah, you’ve got me there. Actually, Cornwall wan’t that cut off. We drove up and down to Oxford a few times without trouble. Diana even took the train up once, gaining first-hand experience of the highly organised and efficient bus replacement service between Plymouth and Tiverton. Cornwall wasn’t really cut off at all. Not that you’d guess that from the national news bulletins…

A more convincing excuse might be that I’ve been busy. My involvement with WREN (Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network) has expanded from writing an occasional blog to being co-opted onto the board as communications director. So there have been communications strategy planning sessions, taking over the Twitter feed, writing press releases, reviewing and updating bits of the WREN website and attending board meetings. What do I, an accountant, know about communications? A smidgeon more than the rest of the board, is what, and time to do it in while they are busy doing other more technical stuff. Shell change management courses and project experience finally pay off!

We (WREN) had a meeting with Friends of the Earth last week. Andy Atkins (executive director) and three others came to see what community energy is all about in the Southwest, since a new FOE campaign will address just this, with an emphasis on solar panels for schools. We have just such a school in Wadebridge, which WREN helped with the panels. So we spoke for a while, explaining why we think community ownership of renewable energy generation is actually key for the future of renewables, and then went to see the school and have photos taken. Andy wrote a piece for the Guardian about it: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/apr/15/save-money-bills-renewable-energy-climate-change-government-help  

Since then, Twitter has been slightly excited, with @WRENuk getting mentions and retweets.

Diana and I have also been invited onto the board of the Wadebridge Creative Hub, an organisation facilitating the arts in Wadebridge. The other members come from music and dance and painting and events, but we fly the flag for the written word (though Diana is also involved with music – something pretty much impossible for me). There’s actually a large overlap with the WREN and Spot the Dog communities (see posting of November 28th, 2013), which is kind of how we found out about it. The writing skills, not to mention my stint working on the Shell control framework a few years ago, have come in handy in drafting governance and policy documents for the Hub.

One of the Hub members arranged a one-off showing in the local cinema, the Regal, of an old silent movie, Sunrise, with live musical accompaniment by a band called Wurlitza. It was actually rather good with quite modern songs being applied aptly to the old film.

Back in March we got wind of a “petrified forest” appearing on the beach at Daymer Bay, the sand that normally buried it having been washed away. Diana and I had to see that. We went at low tide and walked along the edge of the sea, but could see nothing unusual. Then, as we turned back to the car park, we saw people gathered around a dark, rocky shelf protruding above the sand. We went over and walked on it, becoming very excited by a tree stump about a foot high. This was our petrified forest. Not as many trees as we we’d expected, but there nonetheless. Then we touched the rock shelf and it felt spongy. The petrified forest was actually flattened vegetation, compressed over many centuries, but not precisely “petrified”. The sad thing thing was that, exposed now to the sea, it was crumbling and being washed away. We’ll probably go and have a look again, but not over Easter – too many cars trying to get up and down the very narrow road to Daymer at the same time.

I’ve also joined the Wadebridge Rotary Club, an organisation as different from WREN and the Creative Hub as it could be whilst still in the same town. I was formally accepted and inducted last Thursday (10th April) and on Sunday I was on the gate at the Royal Cornwall Showground collecting entrance money for a charitable money raising event to do with Cornwall’s coast and marine pastimes.

Finally, the bowls club opened for the season last Saturday (12th April). Local MP Dan Rogerson came to open new facilities at the club and stayed for a sandwich. Wadebridge mayor Tony Rush bowled the first bowl of the season. This year I have entered several competitions and the first one, a singles, started on Monday (14th). I won the first round against Frank, who joined the club about the same time as me last year. In the second round, I was up against a more experienced player, Tom, and lost 21-16, after staging a magnificent but ultimately futile comeback from 20-8 down. “You made him work for it,” his wife said to me afterwards.

This isn’t everything that has been going on, but I have to save something for later.

I have started a course on Climate Change with the University of Exeter. I thought, since I am now more involved with renewable energy through WREN, I had better be up to speed with the science of climate change. And since it is a free course, run online and open to masses of people worldwide, it is termed a Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. So now you know.

I’ve set up a new series of pages blogging my experience with the course, so as not to confuse my intermittent personal ramblings with course-related stuff (to use a technical term). Click on “Climate Change” in the menu bar, or hover over it to view a drop-down list of postings, if you really want to see.

Spot the Dog: this is neither an invocation to locate a canine illicitly transgressing on Polzeath beach after Easter, nor an invitation to drip paint over a mutt, nor even a recitation of the title of a favourite children’s picture book. And certainly not a review of poor-performing investment funds…

It is rather a Wadebridge band featuring Stephen on guitar, Lizzy-Jane on double-bass and Adrian on keyboards. Or perhaps it is a twice a month gathering of the aforesaid trio together with assorted and various other local musicians and poets in the Picture and Coffee House on Molesworth Street, Wadebridge. This establishment will sell you a picture or a coffee at the drop of a hat, and more importantly a beer with even less reticence. You can pick up a Doom Bar or a Cornish Pilsner (best lager in the world, apparently; I haven’t tried them all, but this one was pretty good)

We went down a couple of weeks ago, Diana and I, to see what it was all about. It was pretty full, but we found seats with some people we knew, right by the door and, it seemed, even closer to the draught when the door was opened. People played music, and told stories, and read poems, some original and some by famous poets. Diana read one she had brought along (we did have an inkling of what to expect).

We went again yesterday. The place was emptier and we could sit out of the draught, but further away, as it turned out, from other people we knew. Spot the Dog was playing as we arrived and a few others joined in. We drank a beer or two – let me be more precise, I drank a beer or two while Diana had a hot chocolate – and listened. The music paused, the musicians needing a break and to recharge their batteries glasses, and Lizzy-Jane asked if anyone wanted to read something. We waved a hand vaguely and Diana stood to read a poem she had written at the Indian Kings poets group. There was merited applause and someone asked if it was her own. Yes, she asserted, and there was more applause. Well, it was a good poem.

I then stood to read a poem I had written some four or five years earlier at Woking Writers Circle with a metre and rhythm borrowed from the ancient Norse (oh, all right then, lifted from Hiawatha). It also received applause. There were other readings of favourite poets including Dylan Thomas. A couple of people came over to chat. The music resumed. Later on, Lizzy-Jane asked if we had been given enough time, whether there was anything else we wanted to read. I assured her it was okay. One poem a fortnight is hard to keep up with; more than one would exhaust the backlog much too quickly

The highlight of the evening came accidentally part way through. A guy had a long instrument in a bag, which he slowly extracted, being careful not to impale the ceiling with it. It proved to be a didgeridoo (though he probably knew that all along).

Proof. There really was a didgeridoo.

He began to play and a few others joined in, improvising (I am fairly sure). At the end of the piece he seemed totally breathless, but was prevailed upon to play again. Even more people joined in, making a sound not aboriginal Australian, and not Indian and not South American, though there were hints of all of them. Well, why listen to me trying to explain it when there is this recording of the last minute and half (which was when I realised I could record it on my iPhone – I’m quick that way, hem hem).

We’ll be going again.

We have a new pet. It’s not a replacement pet, we’ve never had a pet before, unless you count the pet rocks when the children were little. It’s a totally new pet.

What, you might ask, are we doing with a pet after so many years where our pet hate was just that? Especially a pet that was quite expensive to buy. The answer lies in its characteristics. Its demands are minimal, though occasionally it asks to be picked up, and it feeds itself, in the right circumstances. It doesn’t shed hairs all over the place, quite the contrary, though it does require grooming every so often to remove tangles. It’s fearful of stairs, so you’ll never find it unexpectedly in the bedroom. It bimbles unpredictably around the room, sometimes bumping into things, but always very gently. It makes little burbles of delight when it achieves something. It’s downright entertaining to watch.

“What is it, then,” you might pose as a follow up question, “this paragon of pets? It doesn’t sound like any cat or dog I’ve ever heard of, nor tortoise or guinea pig, or fish.”

And you’d be right. It’s not like any of those things, seeing as how they are essentially organic. This is an inorganic pet – a robot. I’ll come clean, which is just what the pet is supposed to do. It’s an iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner.

When you set Roombie (as I imaginatively call it) going, it’s very hard to avoid the impression that it is alive as it wanders underneath the sideboard, bumps into the walls and trundles across the carpet. It finds its way into small spaces but then has to bump around until it finds its way out again, with all the strategic awareness of a bee battering against a window pane. The most efficient way to use it is to clear the floor of small things and leave only the sofas and armchairs and other large furniture. The most entertaining is to leave everything where it is, in fact to construct a sort of maze, and see how it gets on.

I expect the novelty will wear off, but even then we’ll have cleaner floors.

The Royal Cornwall Show happens at the Royal Cornwall Showground on the edge of Wadebridge for three days at the beginning of June each year, and the royal attending this year was Princess Anne, who came on Thursday (6th). Being of the non-monarchist tendency, and having studied the weather forecasts, we decided to go on Friday. Judging by the traffic, we chose the least crowded day as well.

We can see the main road from our back windows and on Thursday morning the traffic was stationary at times and on Saturday it was moving slowly all morning, whereas on Friday it kept moving. Of course, the traffic on Saturday could have been worsened by misguided tourists not realising that the Royal Cornwall Show makes the A39 a road to avoid.

We walked up the hill to the showground at about ten o’clock, paid our £16.50 (each) admission fees at the east entrance and strolled into the throng. There were indeed lots of people there (over 118,000 for the three days, I later found out), but there were also lots of food kiosks, stands, stalls, tents, loos, displays, ice cream vans, arenas and entertainments to accommodate them all.

We walked round the flower show tent with professional displays and stalls, and flower arranging and schools competitions. We went through the Wadebridge Chamber of Commerce area (all stalls taken by local tradesmen, including our kitchen installer). We stopped off at the stand selling efficient electric heaters, for whom we were the ideal customers, having an old house and no wish to knock it about to run central heating pipes through. The heaters could even be controlled by an iPhone app. Terrific idea, but the heaters themselves were boxy and ugly, so we’ll try to find someone who has pretty ones.

We marvelled at the combine harvester titled at an angle, or perhaps that was just me. I was sure it was propped up on blocks to look more dramatic, but no – it had hydraulics to tilt itself, presumably to go over sloping ground more safely and efficiently. There was machinery I didn’t recognise (despite coming from a farming family) and tractors much larger than I used to drive. We passed the hospitality tent for farmers only and the Cornwall Young Farmers tent. There was a tent from Newquay Zoo. Our daughter Tris had asked whether there would be elephants and giraffes among the animals at the show, so this was the place to look. They had millipedes and tortoises and then: –

Right at the end was a lake. Well, they call it a lake. My mum has a bigger lake than that.

We came back via the animals. A large tent held sheep, which we didn’t look at, but we did go through the smaller tent with fleeces, shorn in competition the day before, and had a look at what makes a winner – not that I was much the wiser. A wire fence enclosed pig pens filled with pigs: old spot, landrace, large white, tamworth, saddleback – serious pigs for serious pork and bacon production.

We stopped off for lunch, a bacon roll and a roast pork baguette, with never a thought that we had looked upon our food’s cousins a few minutes earlier. (I was going so say ‘on the hoof’, but pigs have trotters and anyway they were lying down out of the sun.) I had a pint of cider – solely to make up for the lack of apple sauce with the roast pork, you understand – and we sat on the grass to eat. We had just about finished when a tanker lorry drew up opposite. There was nothing on the tanker to say what it was, just the company name and the slogan ‘50 years Service and Partnership’. When the driver connected a wide pipe to the loo block, I discerned the words ‘waste management’ (small, like that), which is a polite way of saying ‘pumping poo’. We finished our drinks and left.

We wandered by various motor car stands, looking closely at the Jaguars and BMWs we had no intention of buying. (Diana on the £80k Jaguar F-type, 0-60 in 4.5 seconds: “Where would we fit the surf boards?” Good question.) Diana found a robot lawn mower demonstrating its abilities by trundling around an area of grass the size of a snooker table. Tempting, but we have three small lawns with steps between, so a trundling robot isn’t much use. A robot vacuum cleaner for indoors, though? Very tempting.

We walked through the Radio Cornwall tent and the Cornish crafts tent and by this time we were back near the east entrance, so we headed for home and a cup of tea.