Along with Caroline and my mother I went to see and hear an all time favorite author of mine at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester. As one event in the Essex Book Festival, Ian M Banks was there to do a reading from his latest non-M book, be interviewed, then take questions from the audience. I was surprised to see that he seemed quite nervous to begin with, but in retrospect I shouldn’t have been, since I doubt that the feeling ever goes away. Once he’d got into his stride, however, he was entertaining, amusing and came across as a likeable chap. One fly in the ointment was the assumption by the interviewer that since we were all there to see Mr Banks then we all had to be lefty liberals. Mr Banks claims to be a committed socialist who when given a chance always votes for the most left-wing candidate. I was stifling my cynicism since only a few minutes before he’d been telling us about the two Porsches and the Landrover Discovery he’d sold now he was going ‘green’. Mmm, right.
That aside it was still an enjoyable evening. At one point I was tempted to fire off a question at him after he said he hates and avoids research. I was going to ask if that avoidance of research extended to his book about whisky: Raw Spirit. I somewhat doubt that, since it certainly seems to be a passion with him. After he finished talking he sat at a table in the theatre lobby signing numerous books – the queue certainly looked satisfyingly long.
Deservedly so.
Tag: Environment
Warm January.
On Monday when I walked outside to get on my bike, it was like a spring morning. Today, despite the frost outside, the temperature is set to rise to 14 degrees Celsius, which is almost T-shirt weather. As well as snow drops blooming, other later flowers like daffodils are coming up. Farmers are happy with the prices for their crops rising by a third – mainly because of their use in biofuels – and with the fact that their animals have been able to graze throughout the winter because the grass hasn’t stopped growing. Whilst the enviro-we-all-need-to-be-poor-and-grow-cabbages-greenies march down the street with their The End is Nigh placards, everyone else turns down the central heating and enjoys the benefits.
Hair-shirt Environmentalists.
Charlie Stross has made a few pertinent observations about man-made global warming and the hair shirt environmental hysterics amongst us. His post is quite representative of what seems to be happening more and more across the Internet: people are getting sick of preachy environmentalists, they’re getting sick of the insanities of political correctness, they’re getting sick of the lies and spin of the lobby-ists and politicians. This attitude will take a while to reach snail-media like newspapers and television, and even longer to penetrate the thick skulls of the likes of Cameron and Blair, so don’t hold out too much hope of a swift return to sanity in public affairs.