Peter Rhodes on the shoplifting epidemic, a too-smart phone and planting a multi-million pound Acorn
Great oaks from little acorns grow. Quite what will grow from the Acorn Project, supported this week by Rishi Sunak's announcement of millions of pounds of UK Government cash, is anyone's guess.
Officially, Acorn is a “carbon capture” scheme to lead Britain towards the sunlit uplands of zero-carbon. Unofficially, in the words of Friends of the Earth Scotland, it's a pipe dream.
For us non-experts, the Acorn Project sounds bold and yet baffling, too. It seems to involve rounding up loads of naughty carbon dioxide emissions, pumping them out to the North Sea and then sealing them in the vast, convenient and empty chambers beneath the sea bed, left behind by the extraction of natural gas and oil. Some pipe, some dream.
To recap, the Acorn Project is a combination of cutting-edge technology, public money and boundless promises. Why do I keep thinking of HS2?
After a few days wrestling with my new cordless-phone network, (the one with a 63-page user manual) I admitted defeat, took it back to the shop and got a refund. No matter what I did with it, I couldn't escape the fundamental fault (and one that Alexander Graham Bell cured150 years ago), namely that when you picked up the handset, the phone kept ringing. Like so much digital kit, it's too clever for its own good.
It is infuriating and heart-breaking to see Britain's epidemic of shoplifting being played out on countless CCTV cameras, with thieves smashing their way into stores and grabbing whatever they want. I sympathise with all those young, low-paid store staff confronting hardened crooks while our glorious constabularies look the other way.
One store manager, Richard Inglis, claimed this week that the cops told him they wouldn't get involved unless he provided them with clear video images and the full names of the offenders. Ye gods and little fishes.
I thoroughly enjoyed former doctor Adam Kay's new book, Undoctored, especially when he rages at the gross inequalities on this planet. He asks bitterly how history will judge individuals who possessed enough money to transform every healthcare system in the world, “yet instead they built yachts bigger than hospitals and f****d about in the sky, playing space t***s.”
Whoever can he mean?
