GrumbleSmiles

There is a desperate shortage of houses in this country and has been for many years. Repeated Governments have promised to build more in every political manifesto, but they never reach their targets. The current Government target is to build 300,000 new houses a year,but this year they have barely achieved 200,000.

The consequence of the shortage is ever-rising house prices —-there has been a 78% rise on average from £167,000 to £ 290,000 since 2010. This has also resulted in a push of people into rented housing, or living longer with parents, or sadly for some —- homelessness. This situation is further exacerbated by high levels of immigration and the creation of new households through marriage breakdowns.

If you have already got a house, nobody wants a new house built next door, so NIMBYISM flourishes. Meanwhile, well meaning environmental policies endlessly delay construction, while planning regulations require evaluation of the danger to wild life and plant habitats of using greenfield sites.

So housing policy and new house delivery over the last two decades have been an abject failure. We are on a carousel of housing promises that never arrive. There have been 15 Housing Ministers since 2010 !

The only ones to benefit are the frogs and newts still in their greenfields.

COP28 has just finished in Dubai. Why COP? Why 28? And why Dubai?

It’s the United Nations global conference on climate change, so it must be critical to the future of the planet. 14,000 people have flown in from all over the world, many on their private jets.

COP stands for “conference of the parties”, whatever that means in a country that frowns on alcohol, but maybe they set aside their prohibitions for a week or two🤡

Why 28? I guess they must have had 27 of these binges before. How else do you put the world to rights?

Why Dubai? Well Saudi Arabia is the Worlds biggest oil producer, so if they were to agree to turn off all their oil wells we would be at Nett Zero over night ! But don’t hold your breath.

So what has all this to do with potholes ????????

It’s the other side of Britain’s climate change strategy. Anticipating that weaning ourselves off our dependence on fossil fuels will be very difficult, the Government has been surreptitiously introducing other tactics to reduce our use oil.

By not repairing potholes it discourages excessive car use. Congestion charges also help a lot, so do cycle lanes which add to congestion on the roads. Not resolving rail strikes also saves fuel. Gradually the Government is gumming up the UK transport system, which all encourages more “working from home”.

There is also the big promotion of electric vehicles. Except they cost a fortune and don’t travel far without stopping. Horses and carts will be coming back soon.

So if COP28 doesn’t save the planet, maybe the UK will still be OK.

Although all over Britain the lights will be going out🤡

It’s a time of constant change. Quite probably it always has been. It is only with a lifetime of perspective that you can always appreciate the degree of upheaval. Or is it just a failure to adapt ?

So is the pace of change any more dramatic in my 70 decades? Certainly it feels that way in that there seem to be fewer unchangeable anchor points like family, community, religion and trust in institutions.

TV was perhaps the first big change, starting with only two channels in black and white, for just a few hours a day; it has now morphed into hundreds of channels every hour of the day and night. Although 70 years on it seems likely to go the same way as the ‘wireless’ for the next generation.

For the generation before me there were things beyond my imagination :- the aftermath of World war 1; the depression and unemployment years of the 1930’s and then another World War. Not to mention the technological advancement of electricity and the proliferation of motor vehicles. These were big changes that my mother and father had to come to terms with in their lives, but they seldom looked back and talked about them.

The moon landing was the most memorable event of those early TV days, although that one off adventure had little impact on my day to day life.

More mundane things had lasting effect in the UK, when we changed to metric measures. Or sort of changed — we still have “miles” and temperatures seem better in Fahrenheit . £sd went out of the window and in came new coins that heralded a jump in inflation. In my teens I used to serve a pint of beer in a pub for one and six. Now it costs me over a fiver ! Next we are about to do without change altogether and just use plastic.

There are many more changes I could grumble about, but without question, the most significant one is the advent of the internet. Discombobulating certainly, but an opportunity for great adventure too. It now pervades just about everything, for good and ill.

Like the moon landing, who knows where it will lead ?