Subject headings

Too busy for anything much this past half week, but I have a slip of paper here with things written on it that I had intended to write about. So, in brief:

1/700th of a second: The period by which the actions of a Newsnight reporter who has lived the green life for a year have postponed the onset of global warming. The bloody fool gave away his Saab 9-5 estate and allowed himself to be photographed in a biodegradable coffin with worms crawling all over his face. There was a discussion on Tuesday's show about it during which David Miliband reminded the other guests that aviation emissions were five per cent of the total and there were other things worth getting hot under the collar about. Some American geek, appearing by satellite, thought it would be better if western societies worked to reduce the cost of cutting emissions to the point where it would be realistic and attractive for the developing world to do so. He could be on to something. We do all need to do a bit though, even if in just a small way, such as turning lights off and buying less fruit and veg imported from places like Peru. Also, if Tesco can sell Peruvian asparagus for £1.90 a bunch after it has been flown all that way, I dread to think what the growers are getting.

Slow glass: I read about this in The Economist some time ago, so assume it must be true. Slow glass is the name for materials - I think they are all theoretical - through which light passes at a velocity rather slower than 186,000 miles per second. What I want to know is this: if you could fit a window in your house with some 10-year slow glass, would you be able to see, for example, how your street looked 10 years ago, or how your garden grew? You'd have to hang around for a long while, of course, but wouldn't it be cool?

Coin sorting machines that take a 7.9pc cut: While not exactly mean with money, I am careful and throw my small change into a jar or a tin when I get home. I found a month or so ago that I had raked together £330, but there was a problem. My local HSBC (are you reading this in Hong Kong?) does not operate a counter service, the staff being employed to loiter and offer various investment vehicles while customers flounder at the ATMs. There is a Barclays nearby but I don't have an account there. The nearest useful HSBC is in Greenwich. One day, I noticed that a coin sorting machine had appeared in the local supermarket but that it levied a nearly 8pc charge for shaking shrapnel. Absolute usury. Did I: a) get my friend to pay the money into her Barclays account and then transfer it; b) lug it all to Greenwich, having first sorted it into little plastic bags (also applies to choice a)) ; c) kiss goodbye to £26.07 while the machine sorted it out and printed a voucher to be redeemed for new tenners and twenties; d) inquire about where to get a cash sorting machine charging marginally less and where I could install it for all the other gulls, dupes, losers and misers out there. I opted for a) but wish I had done d) also.

Old git: To Lymm truck stop yesterday morning from where best to fortify myself for a day with the kids. I arrived just after a coach party and was delayed as one of their number fussed in the breakfast queue, getting the girl behind the counter to pick over the bacon in the tray until she found some that was just to his taste. The same performance ensued with the other components of his meal. He then got to the checkout and started to argue about the cost and wanted a receipt and then to speak to the manager. He was about 80 with white hair all greased down and old man's ears, like taxi doors left open. A simpering smile - "terribly sorry to be a nuisance" - and a cardy, shirt, tie, suit trousers and brogues. It was all I could do not to shout out or, worse, go back to the car and get my "special" tyre bar, the extending one that develops enough torque to undo any wheel nut, and, taking a long run-up with it held in both hands, knock his false teeth round the wrong way and break his specs. Couldn't think of any other way of stopping him. And he pushed in when I was getting my eating irons and ketchup. Bastard.

Quarry Bank Mill: The kids have been pestering to see this for a while. I thought it was a flour mill (lived too long in East Anglia) but it is a cotton mill on several floors with a huge breastshot waterwheel and loads of other machines that still work. The Manc and I were chatting about it, larkingly, a few nights ago, along the lines of:
Apprentice: "Please, master, please, don't make me go crawlin' under't spinning mule again, master."
Overseer: "Don't be such a baby, lad...you've still got two fingers left."
The reality is somewhat more sobering. Contemporary accounts, written in a humane manner and with amazing word economy, record accidents which saw children losing their hands or older workers having their arms wrenched off at the shoulder. In the latter case, there was nothing to be done but take the shocked and convulsing victim by cart to hospital in Manchester - I am amazed he survived the journey - where a lingering death was his fate. History can be heartbreaking. The mill apprentices were come-by-chances or workhouse brats, indentured for 10 years from the age of nine to clean machines and mend threads. They lived in dorms in a house in the mill grounds and worked 12- or 13-hour days, six days a week, for board and lodge. They were up at 5.30am and to the mill for 6am. Breakfast - a dollop of porridge served straight into the right hand - was at 8; lunch - more of the same with the addition of root vegetables - some time after noon. The monotony was dented - it would be wrong to say broken - by way of walking to Wilmslow and back twice on Sundays for church services. One young lad lost a finger and was sewn up by Dr Holland, physician to the mill and a relative of Mrs Gaskell. He recovered but then absconded, taking a fortnight to walk the 200 miles to Hackney for a cuddle from his mother, who was still in the workhouse. Having made this journey, the lad was happy to go back, thinking himself well fed and looked after in every other regard, especially since the apprentices weren't beaten and stood a five-times greater chance of reaching adulthood than folk in the mills in Manchester. It all seems incredible, the times they lived in 200 years ago and the times we live in now. Maybe not so different.

LS Lowry film loop: I am drawn back, many times a year, to the Lowry in Salford to watch the same 20-minute film about the artist. He talks about himself and his motivation, though without giving much away: it can be guessed at - a big and clumsy boy with few friends who was devoted to his mother but could never please her; chaste but sexually curious; searching for himself by painting crowds of lonely individuals; looking for something in seascapes; sensuous landscape curves with an obelisk on a hill. Soon after Lowry's death in 1976, a photographer from the Guardian arrived at his house to see canvases being placed in the back of a security van. He asked the men doing the removing to stop so he could photograph the house and went from room to room. The gaps and marks on the walls where pictures had been gave the photographs an air starkness. The place was dingy - an Edwardian time-capsule with hardly a nod to modernity, except for a radiogram on which Lowry listened to Housewives' Choice in the morning and the Third Programme or recordings of Bellini in the evening. He had destroyed lots of paintings, views of women as sexual tormenters, and in his bedroom were the ladies he loved best - marvellous heads by Rosetti, 14 frames maybe, and one positioned so it could also be seen in the mirror on the dresser.

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I feel pretty sure that there will be a letter in the post this week from the West Midlands Police or the Wednesbury Safety Camera Partnership (if such a thing exists), or some other spasticated branch of officialdom. Suspect I got zapped with a radar gun on the M6 while leaving flaming tyre-tracks. Not happy about it, but no one to blame blah-de-blah-de-blah.