The South West Energy Centre on Long Road Paignton
My stuff in this week's Herald Express.
SOMETIMES I do find myself scratching my head and wondering whether I have missed something or perhaps, like a Philip Pullman story, I have simply cut a slit in the fabric of time and dropped neatly into another world. Philip Pullman is the author of the Dark Materials trilogy the first book of which (Northern Lights) was made in to a curious film starring Nicole Kidman called the Golden Compass. Read the book and give the film a miss.
It may well also be that we have all dropped into the wise monkey world where we see no evil, hear no evil and say no evil, or in this case simply not wanting to see a truth, hear something we don't want to or not speak out when we should. More worryingly perhaps we may have adopted what Margaret Heffernan refers to as wilful blindness. Wilful blindness is a worry because, despite the fact you can probably see the truth, you simply don't want to acknowledge it and carry on as though nothing has changed. That tends to be a more comfortable option in our increasingly restless world.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
This is the English Riviera and has always been a major tourist destination. We spend hundreds of thousands of pounds promoting tourism. Despite a run of several years of lacklustre weather we have been blessed recently with a few sunny days. Back in the dark winter days the local council announced cuts to beach services and as a consequence deckchairs, sunbeds and beach attendants had hours reduced. One local hotelier a few weeks ago was jumping up and down in red faced anger as he looked across a packed seafront without the usual infrastructure. It's a little like having Santa's Grotto at Christmas and telling Father Christmas he's not needed at the moment.
With such an obvious contradiction you would have thought that the announcement of closure of services outside the school holidays would have had folk doing cartwheels down the promenade but it didn't.
Having said that, my hotelier friend did do a very good impression of an Olympic high jumper as he bounced up and down pointing angrily at the seafront!
The other day I had to nip into Torquay to collect something. It was midmorning on a Saturday and the town was curiously quiet despite wall-to-wall sunshine. My short stop cost me £1.30. Again, we are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds promoting town centres and then bang parking meters all over the place to extract cash from short-term visitors. The parking meters have become a 'cash cow' for councils but I rather suspect that a law of diminishing returns will result.
Again for me the whole parking meter fiasco is another obvious contradiction and while most of us can see that we simply plough on. For those of you that sympathetically read my words, you will know that I worry constantly about the cohesiveness of our local community in these increasingly complicated times. We all need to keep an eye on what is happening around us and that doesn't mean attacking every change! We can also act in a very positive way is supporting the things that need a helping hand.
Seek out the community projects but remember to speak out when things are not for the greater good. It is much better to head silliness off before it becomes an unwelcome reality. Now here is some good news. I am sure you have received the cheerful call centre messages which make you wish you hadn't picked up the phone. You may have pointlessly requested that cold calls should not be made to your home number.
One tedious message doing the rounds just now is the friendly voice tells you you probably qualify for the Green Deal and other energy saving money off deals. It just so happens they have a lovely agent not far from your house and an assessment visit is free. Sadly by the end of the visit you can be hundreds of pounds out of pocket for information which was available locally for a fraction of the cost or freely available in the public domain.
So now here is some good news for those of you who like me have been hammered by that intrusive call centre onslaught. The new South West Energy Centre is about to open on Long Road Paignton. The SWEC will offer free, impartial, no-nonsense expert advice on how to cut your business energy bills.
I love this SWEC quotation 'community engagement is a big part of the South West Energy Centre. Everyone wants to save energy and working together as a community can be a great way to reduce everyone's fuel bills and energy use, but it's not always easy to know how best to go about it. Although there are plenty of options — solar power, wind generation, insulation, energy saving devices and the like — it's difficult to find an organisation which supports saving energy as a community in the South West. Coming together to work for the common energy efficiency goal can produce very strong feelings of community cohesion. With good planning, an energy efficiency project can also be an important vehicle for social inclusion too'. The first community open day is on Saturday, August 31. This is a really good thing for South Devon given the need to think green and popping along to the open day sounds like a plan to me.
Keep the smile.
