Have you ever had one of those days?
I had a strange one while on holiday on a very hot Mediterranean island .... On the first day I put on my favourite holiday sandals of many seasons .... They were German and practically indestructible, or so I thought. I walked to the main strip, when suddenly I felt my heel dragging. I looked down expecting that I had snagged something, only to find to my surprise that the heel had simply crumbled away and was hanging by a thread.
Realising that the game was afoot so to speak, I ripped off the offending heel and limped on. Two minutes later the same sensation on the other foot, and yep, you guessed it, the other heel had done the same thing. That by the way is German efficiency for you, the heels degrade at the same speed. None of that one shoe fine, one worn, for the Germans.
Now in dire straits, with both feet on bare concrete I turned in to the nearest tourist store and purchased some plastic replacements for the princely sum of 8 Euro's and 30 Cents. 'A week', that's all I hoped for..... But no, just one measly hour later, the right sandal just fell apart. I was now in bare feet again on baking side walks. I staggered back to the store of purchase, but with no suitable replacements, I took my refund and hot footed it (literally) down the strip, this ordeal included crossing a metal bridge barefooted ..... twice (boy was that an experience!), until I found another store with alternative sandals.
All in all a morning that both I and my footsore feet won't forget in a hurry.
I had a strange one while on holiday on a very hot Mediterranean island .... On the first day I put on my favourite holiday sandals of many seasons .... They were German and practically indestructible, or so I thought. I walked to the main strip, when suddenly I felt my heel dragging. I looked down expecting that I had snagged something, only to find to my surprise that the heel had simply crumbled away and was hanging by a thread.
Realising that the game was afoot so to speak, I ripped off the offending heel and limped on. Two minutes later the same sensation on the other foot, and yep, you guessed it, the other heel had done the same thing. That by the way is German efficiency for you, the heels degrade at the same speed. None of that one shoe fine, one worn, for the Germans.
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| Hot Footing It Across Town Had A Meaning For Me .... Footsore And Free Of Fancy |
Now in dire straits, with both feet on bare concrete I turned in to the nearest tourist store and purchased some plastic replacements for the princely sum of 8 Euro's and 30 Cents. 'A week', that's all I hoped for..... But no, just one measly hour later, the right sandal just fell apart. I was now in bare feet again on baking side walks. I staggered back to the store of purchase, but with no suitable replacements, I took my refund and hot footed it (literally) down the strip, this ordeal included crossing a metal bridge barefooted ..... twice (boy was that an experience!), until I found another store with alternative sandals.
All in all a morning that both I and my footsore feet won't forget in a hurry.
Hot pavements are a reminder of how much energy we let slip between our fingers whilst burning millions of years' of stored sunlight every day in the form of fossil fuels. The Sun delivers over a kilowatt of energy per M² which is most believable if you've ever gone bare-foot in a Mediterranean hotspot, as above.
ReplyDeleteThe mean global average of sunpower being a kilowatt of energy per M² is sadly not that over the UK. All the houses around the Med have some sort of solar boilers for hot water, but have to supplement this in the Winter season with electric grid water heating. Maybe they could do more in that part of the world (which raises the question about Southern economies failures again).
DeleteBut in the populated and Industrial North, the Sun could only play some limited part of our power needs, and only in conjunction with other green schemes (tidal, geo-thermal, wind etc) ... however, lets be honest, we should have been building new nuclear plants as the mainstay of our next generation of electric generation. Its our failure to do this in the mid 1990's that has opened up the idea of 'Fracking' in the UK. So what seemed like a victory for the anti nuclear groups in getting Blair and Co to put off vital infrastructure decisions back then .... has resulted in something possibly far worse now.
The fact is that the UK particularly, and Europe generally is facing an energy shortfall which has to be met quickly, or we will all risk huddling in the dark.
Maybe we should hotfoot back to the coal face? Just joking of course - we have to face up to global warming.
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