A week in haiku

Something that got said in the pub last week, after writing class. Someone was reading Stephen Fry's book 'The Ode Less Travelled', and we were talking about the structure of poetry - iambic pentameter, sonnets, dum-di-dum-di-dum, and so on. Ben recommended writing haiku from time to time as a way of loosening up the poetry muscles (that sounds like a quote from Mr Fry, doesn't it?). So I said I'd try writing a haiku every day until our next class. Which I've done. With absolutely no reference to the complexities and beauty of the classical haiku tradition, here is my offering of seven very amateurish short Japanese poems. They were fun to write.

Thursday

All round a table,

sharing ideas and thoughts.

Will anything change?

Friday

Dad sleeps in his chair.

The sun shines through the window

and the music plays.

Saturday

Dig until the earth

gleams and my back aches. Stand tall.

Feel the sun shine down.

Sunday

Coffee. A window.

A notebook. The world goes by.

I look out and write.

Monday

Failure to mend a

flat tyre. Ego dented, hands

grubby. What a day.

Tuesday

I never lived to

work, but used to love it more.

Now I mark the time.

Wednesday

Steam rises through the

hole in the paper cup. My

coffee in my hands.

Two urban landscapes

This morning I looked out of the bedroom window, and there was a sparrowhawk hunting over the back greens of  the tenements. Three crows were mobbing it, following almost lazily as it crossed the gardens, then darting in sharply, almost touching, then wheeling away, a different crow attacking in its place, its beak and claws flailing. The hawk stalled and twisted, and dropped in the sky, and the crows banked and swept after it. Always chasing, never quite touching; an aggressive aerial ballet. A battle for food and survival, in miniature, right there in front of me.

Later I was through in Glasgow visiting Dad. Sometimes I'm fascinated by the Red Road flats and how impressive they can look in the right light.

Sun, snow and Sylvanians

I just spent a fabulous week skiing in France. I didn't start skiing (at least downhill skiing) until quite recently, put off partly by blank terror about sliding downhill out of control at breakneck speeds, and partly by its reputation as a posh person's sport, not having any particular desire to hang out with ex- (or current) private school kids and the London-Home Counties nouveau riche (or the vieux riche either, come to think of it). But I've learned to cope with both fears. A couple of amazing teachers have turned me into a half-way capable skier, good enough to get down most slopes without falling over (thankyou Domhnall and Ewan). And I've learned that despite my blatant and unwarranted prejudices, skiing is also for the cool people (thankyou to too many old and new friends to name!).

Like so many other lucky people before me, I've discovered I love skiing holidays. Mountains, snow, blue skies, sunshine (if you're really lucky!), fresh air, exercise, good food and drink, great company, fun and play, surrounded by happy people who're out to enjoy every minute of the day. The only possible thing to worry about is catching the last lift home, or falling off a tricky button tow.

This year we took some friends along for the ride. People did look at us a bit strangely when they appeared... We're working on a little documentary about their trip. Watch this space!

      

Policy, implementation and science. In that order.

I've just been to a conference all about flood risk management. Flooding's a big economic and social issue. The problem: lots of places flood, which destroys bridges, roads, crops, people's belongings. It's not nice, and it costs lots of money. It happens partly because we've built on floodplains and partly because we've speeded up the rate at which water flows through catchments, by straightening river channels, cutting down trees, draining fields, tarmacking the land, etc. And flooding will happen more often and in more places as changing climate means more rain falling in heavier rainstorms.

This is not my area of expertise, so I have an outsider's impressions. I might have got the wrong end of the stick. But I came away slightly cynically wondering about the right order of things when society needs to deal with a problem like flooding. This is how I saw it.

Traditionally we try to manage flooding by engineering - building levees and dams, and digging drains, and so on. There are various downsides to this, such as it being generally very expensive, and of course tending to cover the countryside in concrete. The new paradigm is Natural Flood Management (NFM for short. Bear with me). That's mimicking natural processes to try and slow down stormwater as it flows through the catchment, so that downstream towns aren't overwhelmed by all the water all at once. For example, by knocking down riverbank levees so that flood water can spread out slowly over the natural floodplain again, rather than flow straight down the river. Or by restoring meanders (remember GCSE Geography?) which were straightened decades ago, so that the river water has to travel further, which takes longer. Or by chucking lots of old tree branches and other woody debris into the river at various points, to form the kind of blockages which used to be there naturally, before we started clearing out river channels all the time.

This all sounds brilliant. As well as tackling flooding, it will make our rivers healthier and look nicer. So good, in fact, that it's already enshrined in law. New legislation says that NFM will now always be used in preference to traditional flood management techniques. Still sounds great, you say.

The problem is, NFM as an implementation approach is still pretty new. No-one really knows yet how effective NFM techniques are, or which are the best ones to use for any particular river. What we do know is that any one individual NFM technique tends to be less effective than equivalent traditional methods. So you need to use lots in tandem. Which often takes up lots of land (often useful land, like farmland) and gets more expensive. So people have started to set up demonstration sites to test different NFM measures in real life catchments, to collect data, measure how much they reduce flooding in different kinds of catchments, find out the practical problems about putting them in and managing them, and work out how much it really costs. Very sensible - but this is after it's become law. And we're talking about trying to work out how effective these measures are at mitigating a 1 in 100 year flood event. How long do you think you'll have to monitor for to be confident in an answer for that?

So for the next few years at least, it looks like the cart will be before the horse. I can see that we needed policy and legislative measures to drive this - almost certainly - sensible approach forward. But maybe some more time and money could have been put into finding out more about the details  first - the science bit, building up the evidence. Right now, the people charged with tackling flooding are working - not blind, but blinkered. And I worry that all the research and trials that go on now will be rushed to fit in with legislative timescales, and won't be as good as they could be.

Right, apologies, that was a bit in depth. I blame the twenty three presentations I've listened to in the last two days. A person can lose perspective. So I'll sign off now. It's time to go skiing. :-D

Spring watch

I know I keep harping on about it, but it was noticeably spring-like in Edinburgh today. Sunny, no real bite to the air, the ice on the canal breaking up and melting, and the daffodils already coming out. Maybe it's just to remind us that Britain has the most confusing weather in Europe, what with heavy snow causing chaos in the south of England today. I expect we'll see a hurricane next week to blow all the daffodils away. Or a heatwave. Good thing I haven't yet got around to putting away my summer clothes for the season.

      

That happy feeling of recognition

A couple of weeks ago I posted about some photos I'd taken with my little plastic Lomo camera, and entered into the Guardian's camera club feature for January. I had a lot of fun taking the photos, and was kind of excited and chuffed about sharing them with the Guardian's camera club group - taking part in the group's assignments is something I've been meaning to do for ages, as a good excuse for getting out and taking new photos.

Then last Friday I was even more excited and happy when I saw that the Guardian camera club had chosen my January photos as one of the sets it reviewed on their website! OK, now is the time to admit that, because this was a exercise in using film, hardly anyone else had bothered to dig out their old 35mm cameras, and so there were hardly any other entries....quite possibly only about the 5 of us whose photos were reviewed...and I doubt more than a handful of other camera club entrants have taken a look at my photos on the website. But that didn't take the shine off my pleasure. It feels pretty good that other people like my pictures too, and to have had them noticed in a national paper!

And just because I'm still basking in that warm glow, here's another one of the photos.

Name days and old customs

Spring is nearly upon us. No, hang on, don't disappear in disgust! I know this is turning out to be the coldest week of the winter so far. And this isn't more about vegetable seeds and the start of the growing year, although I'm suddenly struck by how perfectly appropriate my last post was.

In the old Celtic calendar, 1 February was Imbolc, the first day of spring. It was one of the four biggest celebrations of the year, one of the quarter-days marking the start of each season - the other three being Bealtaine (1 May, the beginning of summer), Lughnasa (1 August, the start of the harvest and feast of the sun god) and Samhain (1 November, the onset of winter). Of course, our folk calendar still remembers May Day (Edinburgh even has its own official Beltane festival) and All Saints or All Hallows Day, although it's the day before, Halloween, that gets all the attention. But the more agriculturally-focused Imbolc and Lughnasa have long faded into insignificance in our urban society.

Imbolc literally meant something akin to 'stomach' in Irish, the reference apparently being to pregnant ewes, celebrating the onset of their lactation before the lambs start to be born in a couple of weeks time. In a farming society, it was the literal celebration of rebirth and new life after the dead, dark months of winter. It was also the feast day of one of the most important goddesses in the Celtic pantheon, my namesake Brighid - daughter of the sun god and with a particular remit for fire, light, poetry, healing and fertility. Later on when Christianity came to Ireland and the church absorbed the most popular pagan gods, the character of St Brigid took on many of the characteristics of her divine forerunner. Irish hagiography has her the most famous woman in the early Celtic church, founding and leading communities of nuns; custodian of an eternal fire; protector of harvests and the milk yields of cattle and sheep; and patron saint of studies and learning. Apparently there are similar St Brigids (of various spellings) all over formerly Celtic parts of Europe. It's fascinating to see glimpses of how folk beliefs endure over thousands of years, even when religions change, and even in our long industrialised continent.

Anyway, so I've been celebrating my name day as usual by basking in the reflected glory of my divine namesake and enjoying the early signs of spring (light when I opened the shutters at 8am! Snowdrops peeking out everywhere!). And wondering anew how I can better live up to the reputation that goes before me. Maybe I'll try my hand at a poem at writing class tonight...