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Sleeping Beauty
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Littlestone
Littlestone
5386 posts

Re: Sleeping Beauty
Jan 05, 2005, 20:54
Stood under the stars near Silbury on Sunday night - bright and clear, cold and still. If you lean back and look up at the sky the quiet spin of it all takes your breath away and puts you quietly in your place.

Then, on the M25 back to Essex on Monday, I passed a single spinning windmill (a new one) in the grounds of what looked like a school or community centre. I just managed to glimpse a large bank of solar panels in the same grounds as I whizzed by in my fossil-fuel powered car. Whoever owns the windmill and solar panels is seriously into energy self-sufficiency. Amazingly, on the car radio just then was a discussion about alternative energy sources. Then I got home, logged onto TMA, only to find the same debate firing away here - spooky.

Perhaps the sentiments posted on this thread are all correct. Perhaps it's just a question of what we 'need' versus what we 'want'. I remember propping up the bar at the Six Bells just outside Chelmsford one evening a few years back when a lady traveller came in for a coffee (she was on her way to Norfolk to visit her son and had stopped off for a coffee). We got chatting and before long we'd told each other our life stories (Christ!). But before leaving she said to me, " You have to understand, Littlestone, the difference between what we want and what we need - you can usually get by without the first but not very well without the last." It was a statement so simple and so elegantly put that it pulled me up short and made me forget why I was in the pub in the first palce.

What we 'need' is an energy source; what we 'want' is an energy source that isn't going to destroy that which is important to us. Perhaps, as so often in life, it's a question of what we need tempered by what we would like :-).
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