It's my birthday

A collection of climate stories mostly

Normally, I plough on doggedly with Duolingo, my French language learning app of choice, driven as much by an urge to score more points than other players in my league, rather than a need to parlez-vous with the increased time now in France.

It was somewhat disconcerting today, in the middle of a section entitled family, when a young French boy said,  mon grand-père a soixante ans aujourd’hui. Aside from the pedestrian nature of the sentence, my grandfather is 60 years old today, I was reminded by petit Pierre, that I’m in fertile grandfather territory. 

It was my birthday this week. Gone are those super excited school days when I wished I could somehow make the 10th July arrive just a little bit quicker. 

There are still presents. Surprises are always welcome. Thank you Mrs H. But it’s only fair to offer suggestions to those with less time or inclination to think. Buying for grandfathers, even those in waiting, is never easy. 

Clackers, banned because of head injuries to children

Despite all my childhood excitement, presents were often underwhelming. It wasn’t because my parents were thoughtless or didn’t care. It’s because I, like many, had whims, lots of them, desperately important needs which needed fulfilling until they didn’t anymore. 

One year I got clunkers, an all year round version of conkers, not be confused with Clackers, which had already been banned. 

I loved the whole conker season - gathering them from trees, pickling in vinegar (didn’t work) to finally putting the best contenders on string for playground battles. 

Now I could play whenever I liked with my friends, knocking coloured pieces out of my artificial conker until none remained. My clunker chipped irreparably in St. Saviours playground on 10th July. I think a refund was eventually offered after some debate between the shopkeeper and my Dad. I can’t remember what replaced them, if anything, that year?

The Philips radio with earpiece another year, was a brilliant present. Mike Danby had been bringing his into school for the Radio One, top 40, lunchtime countdown. Once I’d got mine, I realised pop music, Radio One and other popular stations weren’t all that interesting, at least not to me.

Photo by Soviet Artefacts on Unsplash

The world seemed an unstable, dangerous place when I was born in July 1961.

The Cold War was raging between the USA and USSR. 

Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, announced his decision to resume nuclear testing with a 100 megaton hydrogen bomb. It ended a moratorium which had been observed since 1958. On a visit to East Germany (GDR), Khrushchev also agreed to let their leader Walter Ulbricht, start the construction of the Berlin Wall.

President Kennedy’s address to the nation on US television was as close to a national emergency proclamation as it could be. The implication being, if the Soviet Union attempted to take control of West Berlin, a nuclear war was imminent. Cut off from the rest of West Germany after the end of the Second World War, it was now an island surrounded by the communist, Russian puppet state of East Germany.

Back in Russia, Khrushchev announced his twenty-year program for reform. The 47,000 words were printed on 9 of the 10 available pages in Pravda, the daily newspaper. 

By 1970, the workday would be reduced to six hours. By 1980, workers would also enjoy free housing and public utilities. Public transport would be free as would meals at school and work. None of these benefits were ever delivered.

More significant, as history proved was when Lech Walesa, 17, began working at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. In 1980, he would lead a strike there and help form the Solidarność (Solidarity) trade union. It became a pivotal moment in the downfall of the USSR and their communist expansionist regime.

July 1961 would have been a very good month to stay at home. There were four airplane crashes and one hijacking when an Eastern Airlines flight 202 en route to Tampa from Miami was forced to fly to Cuba. 

Yet despite all this global tension, history continued to be made. Gus Grissom became the second American astronaut to go into space. He reached an altitude of 118 miles then descended in his capsule by parachute 16 minutes later. His hatch opened early. Grissom escaped but the $5m spacecraft sank to the bottom of the Pacific.

In 1949 the ENIAC computer took 70 hours to calculate the value of pi to 2,037 decimal places. By comparison in July 61, an IBM 7090 calculated the value to 100,000 digits in 8 hours 43 minutes. There were no silicon chips yet to speed up the process.

The IBM Selectric typewriter was new on the market. You could buy one for $395. The typeball, a sphere with the characters on it, replaced the individual typebars. It moved along the paper while the carriage stood still becoming the most popular typewriter in the world. 

Technical developments have implications. What happened to that workforce of secretaries in the typing pool, now emancipated by word processors quickly followed by personal computers? Even men in suits had to get with the programme.

Despite such a scary outlook in 1961, there were solutions to all of the issues, even if the more thorny political ones took decades. 

What is scary about today is most of the world, governments included, don’t even recognise that there is a global problem. Those that do, feign affordability and practicality, as real reasons to do little or nothing, masking their real concerns which are not environmental. 

Remaining popular and powerful are far more important. With the help of the electorate and vested interests from oil, gas and any other sector which thinks its days might be numbered by climate change, governments, dictators, who ever is in charge, continue to ignore the inconvenient truth.

We don’t care, at least not enough. Much as I’d like to blame this current rotten government for the lack of progress in reaching the UK’s net zero goals, they’re only reflecting what most voters are thinking. 

The Stop Oil protestors have in recent months been manhandled by members of the public, furious that their working day has been badly disrupted. With mortgages to pay, the cost of living sky high, the last thing they want to think about is a deadly future which they will never be around to witness.

At some point, governments will have to deal brutally with the culprits of capitalism, profits at all cost and damn the environmental impact. It’s our responsibility in a democratic society to make sure that this happens. Cancelling oil and others, has to become the popular acceptable sign of a balanced economy, which behaves responsibly on behalf of its citizens and is a good neighbour to the rest of the world.

Looking on the bright side, this should be an opportunity for the world to unite, putting self interest to one side for the sake of everyone’s future. 

Happy birthday to me.