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Tuesday 7 July 2015

Blog 144. Heathrow airport expansion – the sum of ALL madness...


Airport expansion at Heathrow says the government but with guarantees with regard to air and noise pollution!!! – aint that like giving a madman permission to shoot someone in the head as long as they promise not to cause brain damage?

I must be whistling in the wind again because according to the latest pro-Heathrow expansionist I heard on the radio this is inevitable because...
“We ALL want to fly more”

While I am at that age where I often find I want to scream at the radio – defenestrate it or boil it in acid - this catch-all laziness annoys me as much as any other over used phrase in the media. Who the hell was this guy and how dare he speak for me – presuming I am including in “ALL”. I do not want to fly more. I don’t want to fly much at all. I haven’t flown abroad in the last decade and a half and don’t feel I’ve missed much. Apart from, that is, being treated worse than factory cattle in an airport. I can see a certain madness in the whole situation. Having just bought a return train ticket for myself and my daughter to travel from Edinburgh to Warwickshire to visit family, I realise we could probably have flown to a sun soaked, beer drenched, tourist infested hell hole a continent away, for the same price.

Tax flights 2000% more and subsidise rail fares? That way the damage they do will be more realistically reflected in the cost. Or is that me being Don Quixote again. Except I am not ‘tilting at windmills’ these monsters are real and they are devouring the planet.
What I would like is to stop frying the planet. Maybe not EVERYONE feels this way but some people do – I do not presume to speak for EVERYONE. I’d like to hear fewer reports about species extinction but I’d never assume that ALL people feel this way.

I’ve blogged on and on about the weirdness of some folk living to excess while others starve (weird to me maybe not to ALL or EVERYONE). Equally, it occurs to me that people flitting cheaply round the globe at huge environmental cost in search of skin cancer while others worry about whether they can feed, clothe, keep their children safe through the night – is equally bonkers.

Surely at some point EVERYONE, ALL of us - most of us - some of us- one or two people (?) will realise that we can’t go on the way we are. (see the blog before last on Fracking)

Please – whoever you are – do not include me in your sweeping statements of craziness. I’ve no more need to get into a metal tube, breathing stale air, squashed into an uncomfortable seat with people escaping lives they don’t like to fry on a beach with other people who’ve come from where they’ve just come from - than I have to chew my own ears off.

I exclude myself from your idiocy so please – don’t ever use the term ALL again.


We need airport expansion like we need lilos in the desert.