New House of Windsor

Prince Charles is soon to buy a small estate in Wales, I gather. Good news for the Welsh, though property prices will rise and generate flight among the locals. Apparently he hopes to use the place for holiday lets - and of course there is only one web-site to be on: Special Escapes. We will get onto the case, not least because the Prince is bound to convert the estate to organic. He is genuinely committed to the organic movement and has been willing to put his head above the parapet time and time again. Some of the media still take occasional swipes at him for it, but his support is now generally seen to be profoundly wise, given the concern about global warming.

White Plastic Chairs - love 'em or LOVE 'EM??

Vile, uniform, mass-produced blots on the landscape of every country on earth - the white plastic chair. They drive all before them - the wicker, cast-iron, wooden, leather and fabric. Artisans yield to the invasion, furniture makers despair, craftsmen crumble. It is relentless, this uniformed rape of the chair business. Whither the hammocks, the deep leather retreats, the hand-carved heirlooms and well-crafted-but-rotting beasts brought annually out of retirement from the potting shed? Now it is plastic, white plastic, every one of the millions of them designed to fit together in smug unison. They lurk by every lakeside, on every lawn, in every sea-side cafe - from Uzbekistan to Uruguay. They are the triumph of the globalised market. They are perfection.

Feedback Frenzy

Interesting article yesterday in The Sunday Times, pointing out the vulnerability of travel web sites to 'interference' from people with a vested interest. You can make a hotel's rating soar on, say, Trip Advisor by posting false rave reviews, and vice versa. Hotel and restaurant owners are not unknown to post their own glowing reviews.

Wikipedia has had the same bad press, though there still seems to be a blanket acceptance that if enough people use a website somehow the truth will get through unscathed. I doubt that the Times article will make a scrap of difference. The most savvy among you will continue to use the corruptible Trip Advisor - won't you?!

It all goes to remind us that information on the web is corruptible, and that we are infinitely gullible. If the future lies in the web - then where is there room for old-fashioned integrity? Dare we hope that where it survives - even on the web - it will carry a special value? When (and if) we open up our own site to readers' reviews we will, nevertheless, be crossing our fingers and biting our cheeks. But our own reviews will be the ones that really count - still.

I don't care what the weather man said

An interview with Radio Solent this morning got off to the usual local-radio jolly start. I had a bit of light banter with the weather man who confessed to preferring hotels to B&Bs because 'you know what you are getting'. Was he winding me up? Anyway, I rose to the occasion - sure that the world would be more interesting if we didn't know what we were getting all the time. May the weather man never be surprised, never have a nourishing encounter with strangers and never learn something new from a chance encounter. At least the weather won't surprise him (on second thoughts, it probably will).

Stern Warning

Panic in all the media this week after the Stern Review report here about the economic catastrophe facing us if we don't get our act together on climate change very soon. I was elated at first to hear that the message had finally got through to our dear leaders, albeit unbearably late. Then another thought took over: why does it take an economist to crack the nut after years of effort by others? Is it because the one thing that can move us is a threat to our purses? We can know that whole species - thousands of them - are under threat; that the Gulf Stream may stop working; that methane on a terrifying scale is escaping from the now-warming Siberian permafrost; that glaciers are in retreat and that ....and so on. We do nothing. Then an economist tells us that we may lose money on a vast scale - and we get it.

Having apparently got it - what now? Don't hold your breath, because there are two gigantic obstacles to change: one is the economic system that has us in its grip, the other is the political system. Both have failed, in spite of every inducement and years of warnings, to provide solutions to this crisis. There is little reason to imagine that they can deliver now. New institutions are needed, new 'paradigms' (help - I once swore I would never use that word). What can they be?

I don't know, though I wonder if the switch from traditional government in London to the mayoral system is not one possible model. And as for the economic system - the current one is palpably bonkers, needing continuing growth and consumption of resources to function. China is a grand example of the idiocy of it all - though only a repetition of what has happened elsewhere. We burn the rigging and masts on our ship to keep warm.