More politicking

Another day of news watching today, with attention on the Labour party executive and the conduct of the leadership challenge against Jeremy Corbyn. Had he been excluded in any way from the process, the act would have done the Labour party to death. Interesting too, the speculation about who will be recruited by Teresa May to form a cabinet, an to discover both May and Germany's Angela Merkel are clergy daughters. It counts for more in Merkel's case, when you consider her father served the church in communist East Germany, an uncompromisingly costly and difficult place to maintain any kind of Christian witness. I wonder what sort of CofE parishes May's father served in? I imagine the Church Times will give us a profile before too long.

This afternoon, again being cooler and cloudy, gave me an opportunity to walk again along the Costa Norte path, and this time go all the way to the riu Senia, through the richly bio-diverse Sol de riu conservation area. That's the furthest I've walked since I've been here, 8-9km, and I was just starting to drag my feet with tiredness on the final stretch from the Spar mini-market, struggling to get back in time for the Archers on-line. However, the internet is so erratic here, that I had to resort to accessing the SkyTV box radio channel, which always works, thankfully, although you can't quite wander around, doing the washing and cooking the way you can if you're streaming from a broadcast on a mobile device.

Later I watched an interesting, as well as amusing early episode of 'New Tricks', on the Drama Channel, which I'd not seen before, all about the diamond trade and an unsolved crime. Well crafted with superb character acting. No wonder the series has been so popular for so long.

     

Design and divide

Today has been cloudy and pleasantly cooler, so this afternoon I walked further up the footpath running along the Costa Norte clifftop, observing more places where sea defences have been strengthened, and beach access improved. In places, there are level paved sections, alongside the footpath, giving wheelchair access to the clifftop area. Providing the same access to beaches is more difficult however, with a 7-8 metre cliff to be negotiated. Only occasionally, where the beach is at the mouth of a barranco is this practicable. As many residents and visitors are older people, it's in everybody's interests to make it safer and easier to get down to the water's edge, so I imagine the improvements are likely to continue, if slowly, long term. 

I got to the end of the urbanización Deveses where the shuttle bus turns around just as it was about to pull out, so I rode back to urbanización Saldonar, for pleasure. The fare is still 60 cents, and the bus is rarely crowded. It must be running at a loss, yet it's a vital service for those who have had to give up driving. The coastal residential area, north and south of the town, is designed on the assumption that the vast majority are car users, as indeed are the multitudes who travel from inland cities to holiday homes on the coast. They will go to the main commercial centres for shopping and as a result there are very few shops of any kind along 3-4km of coast road.

There was an interesting Ted Talk video I came across today, from a Syrian architect, Marwa Al Sabouni, practicing in Homs. She observes that for centuries, Syrian society succeeded in being religiously and culturally mixed without falling into the chaos of conflict and social disorder. The traditional oriental design of buildings and public spaces in towns and villages, evolved in a way that physically obliged people to live and work together with their differences in close proximity, and mutual reliance. It was hard to avoid each other in that kind of social environment.

It's only been in the past half century when modern architectural layouts of high rise estates and shopping malls, imported from the West, became predominant, that ancient conviviality has been disrupted. Now the rich and poor, powerful and powerless no longer have to live cheek by jowl and notice each other personally. A framework of separation and isolation of people into social groups, in the name of more efficient modern living, makes an environment that ferments alienation and conflict, along with its claimed improvements in housing standards and social amenities. This is a substantial critique of the influential school of thought represented by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. There's hardly a town or city in the world that isn't affected. This warning voice from the ruins of the ancient city of Homs is one that makes us see our built environment from quite a different perspective.

Sea defences and the EU

I sent Kath and Anto a text message to congratulate them on their 24th wedding anniversary. This happened around the time when the job in Geneva first presented itself to me, and when Clare's mother died. It seems like only yesterday, and so much more has happened to the whole family in the years since then.

I'm rising early, trying to deal with routine emails and uploading photos to the internet, but progress is hindered by slow low capacity broadband. This takes the edge off using a Chromebook, usually so smooth and slick at doing everything. Here I seem to do a lot of waiting, get time outs and app crashes. There's been no real improvement since I was here in 2012. The big difference now is the dominance of Cloud storage and web apps, and this sort of internet service isn't fit to meet the demands of today's users. Web user interfaces are are attractive, except when screen refresh slows to a crawl because of the connection. These days, having several connected devices in UK is normal. Here they tick over, but work effectively only one at a time.

I started wondering how people cope, as hypermarkets here have phones, tables and PCs to sell. They get bought and used, but what's happened here is ruled by the widespread rapid uptake of 3G and 4G phone services. Many people no longer bother with having a landline, and the quality of mobile internet is good. My Blackberry behaves here much as it does at home, away from home wi-fi. Here, when connected to wi-fi preferentially, it's not as good. I suspect that in some regions, the old landline telephone and broadband service infrastructure is not being modernised. It may not even be profitable to do so if, mobile infrastructure is new and better.

This morning, I drove to Lidl's to do some grocery shopping and stock up for the week, did some washing, then went out a walk along the coast path of the urbanizacion Saldonar, where the church house is situated. Eighteen months ago, I was aware coastal erosion that was taking place and took photos of some of the damage. It seems to have got even worse just after I left, as sections of the path battered by stormy seas, collapsed. Since then, work has been done on new coastal defences and walkways, funded by the EU, half a million Euros worth of work on the hardest hit places over a kilometre of local shore-line. It's good to see this kind of economic solidarity in action. Britain needs it too, and will suffer as a result of brexit.

After supper, I went for another walk up the barranco forming the boundary with the neighbouring urbanizacion Boverals on the town side. Beyond the houses is a wooded part of the ravine, from which some interesting sounds of birdsong were rising as the sun began to set, but nothing I could identify, which is most intriguing.