“Every Breath You Take – A Users Guide to the Atmosphere” by Mark Broomfield.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

If you haven’t heard about air quality over the last few months you’ve probably been
off-grid somewhere and your local air quality is probably quite good. However if you want to know more about the quality of what you’re breathing, what influences it and how poor air quality globally is responsible for over 7 million deaths a year, then this is the book for you.

It’s packed full of scientific information, and despite the slightly intimidating blurbs on the cover is easily readable. Mark Bloomfield writes well, his style and structure work well and he takes the reader on a journey by telling the story of air quality and more, from the atmosphere (and a little bit of interstellar travel) to the global, national, local and personal level. He looks at how this affects not only human health but areas such as nature conservation, acid rain, media coverage, environmental campaigns and issues at a local development level.

Whether you have a scientific background or not the book earns it’s “Popular Science” classification and by the time you’ve finished it you’ll have a much better understanding of what the issues, causes and potential solutions are. Bloomfield doesn’t shy away from giving his personal views but they are those based on knowledge from a career of experience in this field, and does so in a way that you can make your own conclusions from the evidence he presents.

Recommended for anyone who wants to know more about this topic, or has a general science interest.

“Every Breath You Take – A User’s Guide to the Atmosphere” by Mark Broomfield is published on 11th July 2019 by Duckworth Books.

About the Author: Mark Broomfield studied natural sciences at Cambridge University and has a PhD in atmospheric chemistry from York. He has specialised in air qualty since 1992, which also means dealing with health, odour and nature conservation. He has carried out research for the European Commission and the UK Government.

In 2017, he took a sabbatical to complete a 100 mile trek in the Himalaya, and write his first book – “Every Breath You Take“. He is married with three sons, and lives in Shrewsbury.

It’s getting close to the time of year when I have to pay the subscription fees for this site. Due to the changes that WordPress have made in the last year this is now significantly more expensive than it was a year ago, and for me I’m not sure that this represents good value for money anymore. The cost would be well over £100, which is spare cash that I simply don’t have at the moment, so I have reluctantly decided to cancel my subscription.

Cancelling my current subscription is the only way that I can downgrade my plan, and because the domain fee is now paid separately (another WordPress change), it hopefully means that I can downgrade to something cheaper or take my stall someplace else.

It also gives me an opportunity to look at other things. As you probably know I normally post once a week, and there are other ways to do this e.g. a newsletter, which could be done more cost effectively. Ultimately I haven’t made a final decision yet, but I had to cancel my plan before it auto-renewed in order to avoid having the pay the excessive fee.

I’ve tried a number of different options to passively monetise content here (adverts, affiliate links and others) in order to offset the costs of subscription charges and to be honest none of them provide anywhere near the income that would be needed to cover the cost (or even payout as the threshold is so high). Add to this I hate the sight of the adverts, they’re ugly and I have no control over what is advertised, and I’ll be glad when they’re gone.

This is my problem to fix, but I need to cut my cloth according to my means and have the control over “my” site.

It’s been a busy week for me, with family appointments and a few work related things. I had to take Wilson to the vets for a follow-up after last weeks sample collection as the results were inconclusive. It looks like that will rumble on for a bit.

Hagfish slime is super-slimy.

I received a new fountain pen, a TWSBI Go, which has a rather unique spring-loaded filling mechanism. I’m liking it so far.

I published a review for this book.

So yesterday I didn’t post, thus ending the unbroken run of posts started back before Christmas. I realise at about 2 am this morning that I’d missed yesterdays post, but I wasn’t surprised. I’ve struggled a couple of times to have something meaningful to write about, but have managed to find something anyway. Yesterday was one of those days, but I’d simply decided that if by the end of the day nothing came along then neither would a post. Nothing did.

Going forward I think I’ll be taking the same approach. I’ll still be posting but not necessarily everyday anymore. There will still be a Quick Links each Monday, but other days will perhaps be a little bit less predictable.

Some days are meant for catching up on all those things you’ve been putting off but don’t seem to achieve much. 

Welcome to my Sunday. 

[Today’s post is a bit of a political rant – please feel free to skip it if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you].

In 2015 the Tory Party manifesto contained a promise not to raise income tax, national insurance contributions or value added tax (VAT). At the time I can remember saying to my then colleagues that it was a stupid promise, (effectively blocking the three main ways a government can raise money at significant levels) and that I doubted that they would be able to keep that promise.

On Wednesday they broke that manifesto promise and raised NI contributions for the self employed. [Full Disclosure: I am self employed and therefore this will effect me directly]. Now there has been significant claim and counterclaim that they haven’t broken a manifesto pledge because it wasn’t what the legislation said; but I’m sorry – liar, liar, pants on fire. A manifesto pledge is made before an election, the legislation is enacted afterwards (assuming that you get in government). So actually the promise was broken when the legislation was laid and not last Wednesday then, wasn’t it, the manifesto pledge did not distinguish between employees and the self-employed, whatever your subsequent claim it is you manifesto pledge that you have broken.

As the proposal further unravelled we’ve now seen the Prime Minister back pedal and say that this won’t be legislated on until the autumn and not now (probably because there are sufficient Tory backbenchers who would vote against it, and the government would loose the vote), presumably in a hope that it will be forgotten about by then, and it can be sneaked through.

Regardless of all of this, I actually think that NI should be raised – across the board. We have a Tory government and once again we see that Education, Public Services, especially adult social care, and the NHS are completely f***ed (remember when we were last in this situation? Well it was a Tory government then too).

Austerity (or budget cuts) have been the mantra of the Tories since 2010 – the first five years they had their Lib Dem glove puppets to hide behind (bad news send out a junior Lib Dem minister), who got their reward in 2015, and lost nearly all their parliamentary seats. Coupled with buying off (one-off grants to) local authorities not to raise Council Tax (until now when the horse has finally bolted and now a 5% rise means a lot less than a year on year rise of 1% over the past five years would have) and in some cases buying off local authorities in order to prevent them embarrassing the government (Surrey County Council), this Country’s finances and public services are firmly in the toilet.

So actually put 1% on NI across the board or if you want to “even things up” 1% on employees and 2% on the self-employed, I really don’t care about your manifesto pledge (you’ve always been a bunch of liars, so you don’t change your spots overnight anyway), which was a stupid promise in the first place – just try being honest. You’re in government and need to sort out the mess that you’ve created. Austerity (cuts) do not work, and they never have, so now that the chickens are coming home to roost, how about having an honest conversation with the country and asking them what they actually want, and not what you think is important and while you’re at it what about some of those other stupid promises? Do we need HS2 (to save 20 to 30 minutes travel time) or could we spend that money better some place else? Do we need two (or three) new nuclear power stations, when there are better renewable alternatives, and spend the difference some place else.

FFS – have an honest conversation with the Country and stop pretending that we don’t have an opinion or a view, and only what you think counts.

I’m not surprised at what Wikileaks has revealed [NY Times Article Link], I don’t think I’d ever assumed that any item of technology was completely safe. On the basis that the moment anyone claims to have made something secure, someone else will be looking at ways around that. Virtual cat and mouse if you will.

Also glad to see that George Smiley is making a return to print 😉 [LINK]

Today we scattered my Grandma’s ashes, it would have been her 95th birthday. 

When I was sorting through some of my Dad’s old paperwork, I found a folder in his filing cabinet with my name on it. Inside were a lot of my old school and college reports. I hadn’t realised that he’d kept them (although possibly given his filing system he may not have realised that they were still there).

I pulled a few out at random and it reminds me pretty much of how I felt about school and college. Latterly I didn’t really enjoy school very much, although college was much more interesting to me (probably because I was specialising in the subjects that were of most interest to me). My teachers seemed to think I was good in class but not very good at exams (which is pretty much how I remembered it).

I’m not sure whether or not I’ll keep them, for now they’re back in the filing cabinet.