Air-quality

If you're choosing a tourist destination, one of the factors you should consider is air-quality.  For example, if you suffer from Asthma you should avoid Bangkok - and indeed, much of Asia - or take a large number of inhalers with you.  Pollution in these places is notoriously high and even the permanent resident have problems.

Fortunately, St Helena has a very good tale to tell on Air-quality.  We have some of the cleanest air in the world.  Exactly how clean, and why this is so, is discussed here: http://sainthelenaisland.info/air.htm and you should give it a look before you choose your next holiday.  In our case it's our scenery that makes you breathless, not our air!

Advice for life – lessons from The Standard

Since I moved to Jamestown five years ago we have been treated to weekly advice on how to live.  I present below what I have learned.

(Please forgive me if the words below are not exactly accurate. I heard them through earplugs, with my head beneath the duvet, in a room with all the doors and windows tightly shut and the thick curtains drawn, so some slight inaccuracy is possible.)

·       You can’t turn back from the crossroads of life
If I ever locate them I’ll check, just to be sure

·       Sometimes you’ve got to fight to be a man
quite a surprise, that one. I’ve managed OK for the last 40+ years.

·         It’s hard when you’re just seven to know matters of the heart
It doesn’t get any easier when you’re 37 either, I can assure you

·         Apparently I will never walk alone
which is good to hear

·         Some people like to be beside the seaside
I do too

·         Don’t mess with anybody’s Toot Toot
If I knew what one was I’d be certain not to mess with it

·         I now know how to break a cowgirl’s heart
Should I ever need to the information will be useful, no doubt

·         Caroline is sweet
Nice to know, just in case....

·         Someone with a high, quavering voice will always love me
Caroline, perhaps?

·         You can cross the Mersey on a ferry
surely the tunnel is quicker?

·         It’s a long way to Tipperary
About 5,000 miles as the crow flies. Further via Johannesburg, London Heathrow, Dublin, etc..

·         Saturday night is an OK time to fight
To be a man, presumably

·         Money is funny
but, apparently, only in a rich man’s world

·         I know about Fulsome Prison
I’m pretty sure I don’t want to visit, but if I did I might apparently find Jesus sitting on the floor

·         It’s five o’clock somewhere
but only if you use Solar time. If you use timezones it usually isn’t.

·         Sorry seems to be the hardest word
I find antidisestablishmentarianism harder

·         I should not cry for Argentina
I don’t intend to.

·         Apparently I should be dancing
But probably best not – with my walking difficulties I’m sure I’d fall over

·         Lucille picked a fine time to leave
I’ll just have to feed the four hungry children and tend to the crops all by myself

·         I know about the Ring of Fire
Extra-bite fishcakes will do that to you.

·         I can push a pineapple and shake the tree
though I can’t figure out why I would want to

·         I should stand by my man
which is curious, because I don’t actually have a man to stand next to.

Today is Saturday, so I may learn more tonight......

Poor Design

Our home experienced an Internet outage over the weekend. The technical explanation is that the “Port” had locked.  In English, the system at SURE decided that something had gone wrong with our connection to their systems so the Port (a sort of entry gateway into their systems) shut down to protect itself and the systems behind it.  Not, you might argue, an unreasonable action, but this is where it gets interesting.

It did that at around 1am on Saturday.  We did not realise we had been disconnected until 2pm on Saturday, when we tried to use the Internet.  Call technical support and get it fixed?  Well that would be nice, but SURE does not provide any technical support at weekends.  Indeed, after the “Customer Care” centre closes at 12:00 on a Saturday it seems there is no way to speak to anybody at SURE about anything at all until 8am on Monday (or Tuesday, if Monday is a Public Holiday).  I tried every number in the ‘phone book to, attempting to speak to a human being, but apart from the ‘Faults’ line - which connected me with someone in the Falklands who had trouble speaking English and, when she understood my problem, could not help me – I could not even report the fault until Monday.  So the Internet was out all weekend until a technician arrived at work on Monday, when it took a few seconds to fix.

It seems to me that this is an incredibly unhelpful design.  I agree, it is reasonable that a Port should, if it detects a problem, shut down the connection.  But if there is not going to be anyone available to manually re-set it, surely it should have been designed to automatically re-set itself after, say, 10 minutes, and only if the problem is still occurring after 3 resets should it require a manual reset.

Or SURE could have a technician on call 24/7, as does every other Internet Service Provider on the planet, who could divert him/herself from Minecraft for the few seconds it would take to reset my port.

In the majority of the world the Internet is seen as an essential resource.  You would no more expect to be without Internet all weekend than you would expect to be without electricity or water.  Even Connect St Helena has an out-of-hours fault line.

What if I had been a business user, with an online presence connecting me 24/7 to my customers around the world?  What might they have concluded if I just disappeared off the Internet for two days?  What if I’d been a student trying to cram for an exam first thing on Monday?  What if I needed to upload something to meet a deadline with severe financial penalties?  What if I’d had a poorly pet and wanted to check the Internet to see if it was worth dragging the vet away from their Sunday?  What about my weekly Sunday Skype call to my aging relative overseas? What if I’m the Governor and I want to liaise with London about a fleet of Chinese ships massing in James Bay prior to an invasion?

The Internet is no longer an optional extra.

If Governor Rushbrook is serious about improving our economy by promoting the growth of businesses he could do worse than demand our Government-monopoly Internet Service Provider actually provides an Internet Service suited to 2019, not one that would have been barely adequate in 1999.

British Nationalists please note ....

10 uncomfortable facts for the British Nationalists so strongly in favour of separating from Europe:

1: Our aristocrats are descended from the Norman invaders (French) and our Monarchy is German.

2: Leading British businesses like Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Tesco were started by European Jews fleeing persecution.

3: The Bank of England was set up on the model of the Bank of Holland, and its first governor was Sir John Houblon, a Dutchman.

4: The Church of England is based on the ideas of Martin Luther (German) and John Calvin (French).

5: Our patron saint, Saint George, was actually a Turkish knight who never came to England.

6: The quintessentially English Sunday Roast is a Roman invention.

7: Suits from Savile Row, the epitome of English luxury, are based on tailoring introduced in the 16th century by the Dutch Walloons and refined by the French Huguenots.

8: English, our language, derived from German and Latin.

9: Our names for days-of-the-week are all derived from Norwegian/Danish gods (e.g. Thursday = Thor's Day)

10: Leading popular foods have European origins, including Pizza and Spaghetti (Italian), and chickens were introduced by the Romans.

Britain has been integrated with Europe for as long as Britain as we know it has existed.  The idea that Britain can stand alone flies in the face of what we learn from history. As Winston Churchill once said: “Those who fail to learn from history are apt to repeat its mistakes”.

Fur coat but no knickers

It’s a Northern England expression to refer to someone or something that is splendid on the surface but sadly lacking underneath.

It came to mind when, as is normal with a new Governor arriving soon, the Government workers started painting the front walls of The Castle and the Courthouse.  No doubt they’ve also filled in all the potholes in the road from Jamestown up to his residence at Plantation House (but not an inch further), spruced up the Governor’s Office and cleaned and tidied everything else he will see in his first day on the island.

Meanwhile a short way away there are people living in Government Landlord Housing which is in such a poor state of repair it should be condemned not inhabited, but they live there because they have no choice.  For years there has been no money in the budget for repairs.

Many of these same people have no electricity because they can’t afford the bills and struggle each week to feed the family, but for years there has been no money for improved welfare spending.

Disabled people are trapped in their homes because for years there has been no money to pay for accessibility improvements.

But the police can afford to equip themselves with a Tazer per officer, just in case they find themselves in a situation where they might need to use it (we have three times as many police per capita than England & Wales, but only half the number of crimes, and very, very few of these violent).

Whatever our new Governor may think of the fur coat, I wonder how long it will take him to discover that there are no knickers (because for years there hasn’t been enough money .....)  Maybe when he leaves in three years time his successor will arrive to a better balanced society.  He should make this his priority.

St Helena goes back to the 1990s.

This morning SURE’s UK service provider disconnected our island’s connection to the Internet at 05:45h for “an hour”. The connection was not actually restored until just after 10am.

In those four hours the island had no Internet, or anything that depended on it.  No external email; no Skype; no ‘distance learning’ (a problem both at PAS and the Community College); no social networking such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever; no Wikipedia; no Google.  For all of that time we were living back in the 1990s (though then we all would have had fax machines – does anyone still use these in 2019?)

This disconnection demonstrates how vulnerable St Helena is to breakdowns in our tenuous connection to the outside world.  Physically we only get one flight a week and one ship a month, but in recent years we have been able mostly to get around that with an, admittedly slow, but at least operable real-time link.  We found out this morning how dependent we are on that link.  It was not nice!

Imagine what would happen if a big rock fell off the hillside are bent that great big satellite dish up at the Briars into a heap of twisted scrap metal?  How would we all cope for the many months it would take to replace it?  It doesn’t bear thinking about, but I hope that is something our Disaster Planning people HAVE considered, and I hope they’ve come up with a workable solution too.

Otherwise we’d better start breeding long-range carrier pigeons......

Exports from St Helena

It occurred to me this morning that, contrary to what we are always told, St Helena does have exports. I don't mean small quantities of fish and tiny quantities of coffee, I mean something much larger and more valuable.

Skilled workers.

There are Saints working on every continent (even the Antarctic, if he still goes there). They are skilled willing workers who make a positive contribution to the societies in which they reside.

If you are one of St Helena's exports, be proud!