HYDRAULIC EXPERIMENTS

A Happy Theo and Sand Castle Building Bucket

You know it is autumn, don’t you, when you come out of your front door, or through a garden gate, and blunder straight into a spider’s web.  It only seems to happen at this time of the year and both spiders and webs seem different to those you find at other times.  The webs are finer and only catch the light when it reflects obliquely off their gossamer threads  They look like proper spider’s webs too - as though designed in some Disney studio - and the spiders are brown and camouflaged, not black.

Our grandson Theo, now past two and a half, has a mortal fear not of spiders but of their webs and spots little threads here there and everywhere that have to be removed before he will venture anywhere near.  This can make progress around the garden - or even parts of the home - rather slow.

What he does like are the adventures of Shaun the Sheep, one of Aardman’s comic creations for children.  In one episode Shaun is dancing an Irish jig on top of a washing machine for a reason that need not detain us here. Theo is fascinated and has been attempting to emulate Shaun on top of the ottoman.  To encourage him I showed him a video clip of Riverdance.  Michael Flatley would be a revelation, I thought, and so much more agile than me.   Alas not so.  Young Theo prefers the plasticine sheep while I have become, unlikely as it may seem, a teacher of Irish dancing.  It must be my grandmother’s genes.

The Indian summer has been so beautiful that when I took Theo to the beach yesterday the atmosphere was quite Mediterranean.  The same dry wind, warm light, and featherdown softness to the air, not however set against the parched pines, sand dunes and purple hills of the south of France, but against a peculiarly British backdrop of grassy hills in a new flush of greenery and the magnificent autumn colours of oak and ash leaves.

The sun hangs low now, even in the afternoon, which makes it seem as though this were the evening and we would be shortly returning for a later supper rather than a five o’clock tea.  All most confusing.  Not that it bothered Theo who engaged himself in numerous hydraulic experiments around sandcastles and the power of the incoming tide. Unfortunately, they are lost to posterity for I left my camera at home.

Watching the waves crashing on the rocks and the tide racing up the channel I cannot help wondering why the powers that be stick turbines in the thin air on the tops of our moorlands, where from time to time they stand idle and becalmed and even when the wind is blowing don’t generate much electricity anyway.   Why not put the turbines in the sea? Obviously not the same turbines, but the tide in this channel is heavy and fierce and above all predictable. A few marine turbines could generate more renewable energy than all the white stalked monsters that disfigure our landscape. And, would do so invisibly, too.

The hot weather also means that we haven’t yet had a chance to experiment properly with the new heating system, kindly installed by British Gas recently.  In addition to the central heating we have an open fire in the sitting room which we have never used much because the room promptly fills with smoke.

When we were in Gascony last week my sister told me of the various stratagems she had employed to stop her big open kitchen fire from smoking.  The answer, it seemed, was to eschew grates and large logs and instead to build the fire directly on the floor. Our fireplace is a minnow compared to her great whale of a beast but the idea seemed worth trying and two friends invited for dinner provided a reasonable excuse to despatch the grate and light a fire directly against the fireback.  And yes, it worked.

The papers are full of the collapsing euro and how lucky we are not to have joined the single currency, but I am not sure if this isn’t a question of beams and motes.  Buying euros for our trip I couldn’t help noticing that the external value of sterling has declined by over 20 per cent since the euro’s launch, while our level of inflation is running at twice that of countries like France and Germany.  Personally I’d rather we were in the euro than out of it - it would make Gascony a lot cheaper for one thing -  but the indignity is that whereas once we would have been welcomed with open arms, now we should need a very long period indeed to get ourselves back to that position.  This doesn’t seem like making the right decision (to stay out) to me.