Where there’s a will
Phew! Have I been busy recently - and with the new PM set to announce his new bunch of camp followers on Wednesday and Thursday - I can see little let up.
We were all disappointed in the office when the demolition of the tumble-down building in Dean Farrer street didn’t happen - we were all waiting with baited breath and primed cameras - building must be stronger than the surveyors first thought.
Here are a few bikes that got in the way of two storeys of building
And all this in the neighbourhood where the Persuaders’ Lord Brett Sinclair had his London flat….
One sharp eyed member on the AMOC forum spotted this car for sale ad
http://www.classicdriver.com/uk/find/4100_results.asp?lCarID=1752126
The car is parked in Queen Annes Gate, just the other side of my office outside the building used on TV for Brett’s pad.
Going North
My trip to Finland was hard work. Three days of meetings with government and industry. The Finns do like their Powerpoint presentations, loads of stats, loads of graphs - half the time I had no idea what they were talking about! There was a great deal to learn - Finland is certainly well ahead in environmental technology and implementing environmental directives. Not sure I’m too comfrtable with them building another nuclear powerstation though.  But as they said “Better on our soil and in our control than on Russian soil.”
Their Minister of Environment Paula Lehtomaki was very charming - but I was quite amazed that given their geographical position they are putting all their effort into climate change mitigation and ignoring adaptation… When all that ice melts Finland is in for a dunking.
As well as all the heavy debate we also got to see some really cool stuff. There was a fellow who had developed a heat generating plant for small communities using forest waste as fuel - he would have dearly liked to generate power as well but the cost of new plant was prohibitive. We heard all about Neste Oils clean fuel technology and their second and third generation biofuels… Why can’t we do things like that in the UK? We went round a HUGE paper mill - full of lovely big machines, and we visited a washing machine company.
Washing machines…? Yes. For Jumbo jet engines. How brilliant is that. Finnsonic make sodding great machines for ‘a british manufacturer’ to dunk their plane motors in…
And lastly - my all time favourite. We got to play with a logging machine. The Finns have a very far sighted approach to logging their forests - they are their most important asset. This little machine trundles through the woods picking out individual trees and leaving most standing. It cuts, strims and chops the tree into logs while measuring and weighing them. the data is then sent by satelite to the office so that all timber can be tracked and traced from source to final usage.
Yes, yes., but what about CARS…?
- I managed to sort my travel arrangments to arrive in time to go to the Classic car show in Turku before all my meetings - and boy did I go in style
….but that’s a story for another day. I have a couple of neat video clips to load first.ÂÂ
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