On Friday, England suffered its worst smog attack of the year. Is it an attack? A situation?? A state of affairs??? Whatever, shit in the air and lots of it. Most of the country reached a whopping score of 9. Ok, that’s out of 10. Obviously. If it was out of 217 we wouldn’t even be having the conversation, would we?

And the summer always precipitates such conditions. Low or high pressure, possibly medium, coupled with isobars and thermo-things plus all that rubbish blown over from France and here we are in our little verdant isle encased in a cloud of pollution.

Fortunately, London, like most big cities, has so much fucking pollution normally that we hardly noticed. If you happen to be some poor sod from Lincolnshire who’s lungs are unaccustomed to the output of 50,000 diesel engines a day spewing out their filth, Friday was a bad day. For us here in the capital; same old same old. Though they kept warning people not to exercise outdoors and if short of breath… what? stop breathing?? Its a problem.

And its a good one to ‘debate’ (ain’ they all??). So yesterday, as Mel and I returned from our trip to the countryside (Mill Hill, London NW7 actually but it looks like the countryside, all green and with animals all over the place, and trees’n’stuff) that’s just what they were doing; discussing air quality on the radio. In my car. Which has a monster engine, shit-loads of cylinders and produces more carbon that a coal mine. Bit ironic, really. I’d have a car that emits even more carbon but they tend to be very very expensive.

So some guy, can’t remember his name, so we’ll call him TOSSER, for convenience, phoned in to suggest that everyone should be driving battery cars. Fair point. Oh, and that the government should give grants to allow every driver in the country to swap his turbo-diesel lung-clogger for a worthless piece of battery-powered shit. We’ll ignore the fact that batteries need charging, with electricity, which is currently produced by burning oil, and that these cars generally have a range of about 6 miles after which the ‘back-up’ 6-litre V12 cuts in otherwise you’d never make it home. And we’ll just think of the financial logistics of giving every motorist in the country a few grand to go buy a noddy car with a big(ish) battery.

Ok, I’ve worked all that out and it comes to much too much to even consider. We’d have to shut down 93 hospitals to pay for it.

So those that are really bothered about it really should, they owe it to their consciences, to swap over to battery power. And that in itself, even if its just 5% of drivers, will create an improvement. Will reduce emissions by about 5%. Should that figure be 75% of motorists, then the emissions will be reduced by that amount. Ish. Fine. Democratic. Then you can leave the rest of us alone.

Until they stop all air travel and stop cows from farting (the single largest source of worldwide methane output, for real) then leave me alone. I’ll go buy a mask.

Happy relatively clean-aired Monday

A xxxx