Happy New January

January 2nd, 2008

Views: 745

Posted by ChrisG at 9:50 am

Having two children = proof that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Or in other words, 1 child + 1 child ≠ 2c, where c = general household complexity. More like cⁿ, where n is an as yet undetermined integer.

The new Rochenquito has now been blessed with the name Oscar, which together with his elder brother’s name makes a particularly auspicious pairing (even despite the latest addition to Eastenders’ grim tableau of shrieking misery).

In other news: a major victory for CAPRI in Gloucestershire who launched an impressively mounted and comprehensive campaign against National Grid’s plans to build a huge industrial plant on an unspoilt rural location (not, as the BBC website’s caption writers put it in classic Day Today fashion, ‘in a field‘) as part of the South Wales gas pipeline. The Government has now ruled that the Forest of Dean planning authority’s original ruling in favour of the protestors was correct, and that National Grid had not followed proper procedure in selecting the site and consulting local residents.

This represents a vindication of democratic resistance to the confluence of corporate interest and the Government’s energy security agenda, and also a serious defeat for the Grid, whose premature claims about the pipeline’s completion have now been exposed. They now face a challenge in Brussels to the safety and environmental risk assessment procedures used in the planning and construction of the pipeline.