Is there any debate about fracking?

Where is the debate or is it a case of just take the medicine, its good for you because we are telling you and here's a hundred quid to swallow it. 

This is what the Daily Telegraphy reported as to the government's case for gas shale tracking:

David Cameron set out the economic benefits including cheaper energy bills for millions, tens of thousands of jobs and windfalls for communities which are sitting on vast reserves of shale gas. He also pledged that fracking would not damage Britain’s countryside and would only result in a “very minor change to the landscape”.

'It’s been suggested in recent weeks that we want fracking to be confined to certain parts of Britain. This is wrong. I want all parts of our nation to share in the benefits: north or south, Conservative or Labour. We are all in this together'. 

Mr Cameron made clear that the potential benefits are too good to ignore. He said that fracking has “real potential to drive energy bills down”, adding: “It’s simple – gas and electric bills can go down when our home grown energy supply goes up.

There were also large rewards on offer to communities which find themselves sitting on vast reserves. He said: 'Companies have agreed to pay £100,000 to every community situated near an exploratory well – somewhere where they’re looking to see if shale gas exists. If shale gas is then extracted, one per cent of the revenue – perhaps as much as £10million - will go straight back to residents who live nearby'.

He said: 'We must make the case that fracking is safe. International evidence shows there is no evidence why fracking should cause contamination of water supplies or other environmental damage, if properly regulated'.

'If properly regulated'. Ah yes, its called Privatisation. Give pigs wings and they will fly. 

Here is the argument against fracking presented as facts quoted from http://www.dangersoffracking.com

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside.

Each gas well requires an average of 400 tanker trucks to carry water and supplies to and from the site

It takes 1-8 million gallons of water to complete each fracturing job

The water brought in is mixed with sand and chemicals to create fracking fluid. Approximately 40,000 gallons of chemicals are used per fracturing.

  

Up to 600 chemicals are used in fracking fluid, including known carcinogens and toxins such as…

The fracking fluid is then pressure injected into the ground through a drilled pipeline.

500,000 Active gas wells in the US X 8 million gallons of water per fracking

 X 18 times a well can be fracked

The mixture reaches the end of the well where the high pressure causes the nearby shale rock to crack, creating fissures where natural gas flows into the well.

During this process, methane gas and toxic chemicals leach out from the system and contaminate nearby groundwater.

Methane concentrations are 17x higher in drinking-water wells near fracturing sites than in normal wells

Contaminated well water is used for drinking water for nearby cities and towns.

There have been over 1,000 documented cases of water contamination next to areas of gas drilling as well as cases of sensory, respiratory, and neurological damage due to ingested contaminated water

The waste fluid is left in open air pits to evaporate, releasing harmful VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere, creating contaminated air, acid rain, and ground level ozone

In the end, hydraulic fracking produces approximately 300,000 barrels of natural gas a day, but at the price of numerous environmental, safety, and health hazards

There are numerous YouTube videos showing water on fire from drinking pipes in areas of Australia and other hazards in the USA. The sheer amount of water used and problems of storing and disposing of contaminated waste alone is alarming not to mention the demand for eater during a drought.

There is nothing so blind as greed. Effort should surely be increased to reduce our energy consumption and develop alternative technologies?

Well they warned us

        'The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years'.

         Well they warned us that we had a decade to make a U-turn and now the decade is up, but the problem today is every observation or 'fact' is immediately cancelled out by those who argue the opposite and despite the scientific age we live in, nobody seems to know, or we just don't like to face up to reality.

The day I met Maggie

      Margaret Thatcher died on 8 April 2013. I had the honour to meet her in her first term of office as British Prime Minister - I recall in 1980 a slightly stooping ordinary looking woman dressed in a light blue twin set scuttling into Kensington Town Hall carrying a handbag as the audience stood to greet her.

     Anyone handing out an award to 100 people might be pushed to say anything original and immediate to each and it is unlikely they would compare notes afterwards which would be interesting. As I stood on the stage waiting for my cue I was briefed that I had 18 seconds to converse with her. I walked on to the announcement  'Jeremy Broun visited furniture designers, manufacturers and retailers in Sweden, Finland and Italy'. As she handed over the medal and I shook her hand she softly whispered 'well done, I hope you taught them a thing or two'. I was too mesmerised by the occasion to say anything more than 'thank you' but on exiting down the stairs I immediately thought why didn't I say 'on the contrary, ma'am, I was there to learn from them '. I had bought a pea green flared felt suit for the occasion, far too tight around the shoulders and crutch to comfortably wear much again so I mothballed it my 'Maggie Thatcher suit'.

I was 33 years old and making innovative handmade furniture in a tiny cramped underground workshop without natural light. My ideas were too forward looking for the hidebound British market so indeed it was a huge shot in the arm for me to win the Churchill scholarship that took me away from 'Little England' and discover my ideas were shared abroad but also that I would soak up much of Scandinavian and Italian culture in my chosen field. 

   However, now some 33 years on I have observed how the spin on history changes and Maggie became a hate figure to younger generations whose parents she encouraged to pursue individual plight. But the dominant opinion today is largely second hand opinion and I suspect the hate has another agenda. People forget how much Margaret Thatcher not just led but echoed a change in attitude in Britain. She was a person  of her time and greed was already in the air. She held the view that encouraging individual enterprise and reward would benefit society but in so doing may have ironically destroyed a sense of community. But she, like others was contradictory. I'm not a politically educated or inspired person but am bound to hold views about welfare, education and commerce, a complex and conflicting mix in itself.  Yes she was not entirely right (longterm) in my opinion to sell off Council houses (reducing the safety net for genuinely needy) and clearly wrong over the Poll Tax and I do remember events that happened at the time. She was surely right to stand up to the unions who were crippling this country and engaged in blatant class war. There is no universal right that anyone born into an occupation in a particular community can continue that for ever. Migration and change is the story of civilisation and as an individual I have personally had to adapt and adjust to suddenly and unfairly losing valued jobs in the area I trained. Also I have a 'Facebook culture' thrust on me to conform to whether I like it or not and the destruction of letter writing, the art of communication, arguably ruined by emails! These things destroy sense of community also. Arguably miners communities could have been protected but at what cost to the economy? The strikes were self-interested causing chaos and misery for millions of ordinary Britons.   
      Margaret Thatcher was above all a world player with unique influence on a par of Churchill (who fought for freedom we abuse). She got dialogue with Gorbachov and charmed Reagan, cementing ties with the USA and helping break down the Iron Curtain. We seldom question the impact of American culture on our own culture today? She also (astoundingly) clawed back an EEC rebate that still remains largely intact today.

     Margaret Thatcher was arrogant and had audacity, clearly attributes of a strong leader! Inevitably power corrupts and she did became too extreme and I guess history will paint a divided view but then Britain today since Thatcher has become more divided, more greedy with political opposition betraying its roots and it is easy to pin the blame on just one person. One thing I learned on that day I met the Prime Minister was never to judge a woman with a handbag, appearances are deceptive! Margaret Thatcher RIP. 

Love thy 'Nay'bour

       Strongly influenced by a Christian upbringing and believing in 'God' until I was about 45 years old, I consider I had a good start in life in that respect. Such a childlike belief warded off cynicism until a much later age. 

       Sadly my older sister Jill's fundamentalist belief in Jesus Christ the saviour caused a rift between us in latter years when she frequently used the words 'devil, sin and demons' whenever we spoke on the phone. I could never accept the notion we are all born dirty sinners before we even breath the first breath of life.  It was, however, on her death bed that she held my hand and said with her familiar loving smile 'I'll be waiting for you'.  It would indeed be an arrogant atheist not to consider the possibility that there is the 'other side' - heaven, spiritual unity, eternal union and peace, or whatever. I have no greater intellectual capacity to argue for or against a God and am always stuck at the point of how human suffering can be allowed by a so-called loving God, so in turn I refer back to the only thing I know - the human condition - the use of human language passed down through the ages to explain or bring some kind of order to our lives. I refer to the Holy Bible in which the Ten Commandments seem to be a pretty basic human code of conduct irrespective of the existence of God. 'Love thy neighbour' is a fundamental commandment and strategy for co-existence. And so too is 'Do unto others....'

     The shock that consumers have been duped into eating horse meat when they were told it was beef leads us to automatically blame others - first the Romanians who have a lot of horses and then the French and in no time at all the finger is pointed closer to home in a Yorkshire abbatoir. Of course Government ministers, the Food Standards Agency, Jimmy Saville and the ex-chief of the Royal Bank of Scotland are to blame, but what about the people working at the abbortoires, their wives and daughters, the van drivers.... did they not know or were they not party to a degree of the scam? Do they, do we not care what we do to others?  

      The word 'morality' has been firmly deleted from any public/media dialogue for decades and what is going on in the horse meat issue is the tip of the iceberg in a culture that has consciously allowed image (what is on the label) to override content, substance or truth. Switch on any television soap and the script is to swindle, cheat, outdo and make a fast buck out others. This is the daily sermon that replaced the church service many years ago! the staple diet. You could call it a fundamental lack of love for fellow human being and the drug is ....money, lotza money! Sad.

        And while the Government pushes out of work people to take up any job as a second option and become cheap labour for multi million pound employers, the Government find themselves in an illegal position, but has anyone asked the university graduate who won her case, who promised you a job with that meaningless degree in the first place? I recall being suspicious of the term 'gap year' as a ploy by universities to get bums on seats before youngsters left schools and travelled the world for fear they might not come back. 
     Someone told me many years ago that people don't like to face the truth. So there's no problem then, it doesn't matter if its horse or donkey meat as long as its fast and cheap! 

  

  

The tail wagging the dog

      Recently in the news it was reported that doctors are being advised to be careful in prescribing Benzodiazepine tranquillisers. 'Diazepam' and 'Lorazepam'  

come from this family of drugs.  I didn't get as far as reading who is advising them but all I know is my dear late sister Veronica Jill was addicted to a prescription drug called 'Ativan'  over a twenty five year period and one readily prescribed to me for a few years. She tried in her own way to raise public awareness by appearing on a daytime television programme that highlighted this  toxic family of drugs and their dangers were known decades ago.

      Anyone suffering severe depression will likely have associated anxiety, a terrible 'no hiding place' affliction and this kind of treatment is basically a sledge hammer to the senses with longterm effects on the nervous system and arguably now an impact on Dementia, I nearly forgot to say. During a hospital stay - my closest encounter of hell on this earth (my state of mind, not the hospital), I was given hefty does of 'Diazepam' and probably one of the greatest acts of will and determination in my life was to throw them down the lavatory pan and face my demons in full consciousness when I was discharged. I was even offered money on the street for my prescribed drugs.  

      To this day I refuse to take medication and this  includes alcohol in large doses. When things get really bad it is a glass of cider or red wine as there is no doubt drugs affect the mind. But I would be ignorant to wrong say drugs are wrong for managing all mental conditions and I suspect as with everything else rthere is a payoff called side effect. The term 'side effect' has a similar ring to 'clean' energy when talking nuclear. In an ideal world we would need no doctors but at least we should have the trust that their judgment is sound. 

     I lost my mother Jean in childbirth due to medical neglect. She shouldn't have died. She died bleeding of an internal hemorrhage and there was no care present. It was a tragedy that should not have happened. In my youth my father mistakingly overdosed on insulin as he was diabetic and in his coma was pumped full of more insulin by a freshman doctor in hospital. 

      As a young man trying to deal with the socially tabooed condition of depression I had a rare doctor who happened to be elderly and a Christian. He would book me in for his last surgery of the day so he could give me a little extra time and the biggest therapy was having someone genuinely caring to listen to me. Financial worries were part of the depression and he knew I was a furniture maker struggling to make a living with no outlets for my avant grade designs. He suggested an empty shop window I might approach a local businessman about and I took on that shopwindow at a rent of £3 a week on the busy A4 road. I called my shopwindow 'The Bath Carpenter' and my unusual furniture got a wide audience due to traffic jams right by it. Thanks to my doctor. That was in 1977 but the doctor of today in the society of today paints a very different picture. Heaven only knows what will happen when doctors have control of the purse strings. 

      

My Aunt Wilhemina Barns-Graham

      My aunt Wilhelmina or 'Willie' to family and friends was a celebrated British painter and member of the St Ives School who's centenary was 2012. She died in 2004. Few people had heard of her outside the inner art sanctum (certainly in my youth when I mentioned her to artist friends) and although her CV included major galleries around the world, she received public recognition (The CBE) much later on in her twilight years. 

     Willie was the sister of my mother Jean who died having me. We were virtually the only practising creatives in the wide family apart from my late half-sister Barbara.  In her work I recognised the importance of technique and how learning the rules gives one true freedom to break away. Her early water colours were a fantastic expression of mastery of technique and indeed technique was instrumental in much of her abstract work such as using paper hole stiffeners as a collage in a particular phase in her work. 

      I am no art critic, although she once asked me my opinion about some of her last paintings and then she said 'you sound just like like the Sunday Times art critic who was down here last week'. The fact is anyone could see she was a fantastic artistic brimming with creative energy right up until shortly before her death and if any work of art truly evokes feeling then finding language to describe it is not rocket science. Perhaps equally importantly she was one of a small group of prominent women, such as Mary Goldring, who spoke on Radio Four about various topics. I recall her as a great story teller, just like my late sister Veronica Jill. 

    The point of this short comment here, is one of the apparent lottery of life and how, in misspelling her name in a letter of congratulation may possibly have cost me an inheritance to be an innovative furniture maker operating from a 'stately' home, instead of a tiny cramped basement workshop without natural light in an artisan terraced property!  Life is certainly a mystery in the cards that are dealt out:

  Willie amongst fellow painters in St Ives (circa 1947)

'Penniless artists' mentioned in the video is a generalised term based on the assumption that many artists lack the financial means to sustain their art and therefore a trust set up to help talented young people by way of offering scholarships is an entirely worthy cause.

Dymentia is wonderful

      Last night I attended a Royal Society of Arts regional 'networking' meeting, my first ever and a rather daunting experience. The first thing I noticed at reception was a bold advertising card 'Do you know anybody who would like to be a Fellow?' It reminded me of Pyramid selling and Party Plan in the 70's!  I was then interrupted, while I was chatting with a local architect I had not met before, to talk to a stranger by the (presumably Scandinavian) young facilitator (no, we don't do that in the south of England!) and then ushered into neatly formed discussion groups. I felt like a sixth former being controlled to speak freely. Of course it had to be this way. Sitting beside me was a young guy with trendy soft leather retro winkle picker shoes (looked pink to me but I'm colour blind) busy 'networking' on his mk3 iPad jumping up and down taking pictures and recording the experience, yet not once did he make eye contact with me sitting next to him! This is called social networking.

      Two young speakers emerged and I had to choose which discussion group I joined. The first group was headed by a pretty young and self-confident woman who immediately announced 'Dementia is wonderful, depression is wonderful' campaigning for a local support group, and the other, a young guy who had a plan for kids in schools which included knowing how to set up a bank account and preparing for dinner parties. I presumed he was talking about teenagers but he may have been referring to primary school kids! I couldn't help wondering that parents lost the art of having dinner parties decades ago and that the notion of a dinner party in a secondary school in Glasgow was plain funny. As to bank accounts for the young we are still reeling from the education Industry tricking young kids into borrowing vast sums after their 'gap year' to pursue high status and high earning careers through our universities all on a plastic card!  I stupidly joined the education group because that is my passion and of course got embroiled in fanciful ideas-overload making me wonder is it the process or the end result (sorry - 'outcome' is the jargon) that counts in all of this here at the RSA? 

    I engaged in discussion with my sub-group and another very pretty young woman with a nose piercing that glinted under the cold fluorescent lights in this church cafe, muttered something about kids being inspired to use their imagination in schools. No we can't do that, it would lead to anarchy in society, but of course I agreed with her but teachers themselves are terrified of using their imagination, they are so locked into a controlled system! I tried to get a word in saying we need to get back to kids using their hands and minds and making things, but half the problem is in the outdated use of language such as the word 'craft' in society.

    And then the whistle was blown and the two group leaders stood up and revealed something I would never have imagined in all my years on this planet - the young pretty girl announced that the two groups had much common ground and would link together as educating the young and changing attitudes would lead to society changing its attitude over dementia and death. Hang on this is the RSA which is about 'fresh' thinking. Haven't we heard this before and isn't it the age old argument about whether it is the place for school to innovate or reflect what is going on in adult society and thus prepare young adults for it? Of course a bit of both goes on and school is one of the few playgrounds there is. Most teachers don't know what we are preparing young people for because who knows what jobs will be needed in the next decade alone?

     One thing I learned was how the world has changed with all the social media frenzy and we were all encouraged to Twitter away. I would rather have flittered my eyelids at a pretty young woman sitting at the same table but we have lost that art and of course by my repeated use of the word 'young' here means clearly I am not part of the the club that has 'fresh' ideas! Well okay, my ideas are old but are yet to be taken up!

       I was rather offended by the highly articulate facilitator saying that it is fruitless to be a lone soldier taking on projects, but when you have tried getting funding and collaboration for something you are passionate about for longer than he is old and land up funding it and doing it yourself I feel is a simple case of putting your money where your mouth is. As to depression being a wonderful thing I wondered if the pretty young lady had experienced two bouts of utterly indescribable hell in a hospital psychiatric wing and living with it on a daily basis and as to dymentia being wonderful, well, my dear half-sister Barbara suffered rapid premature dementia and died of a brain tumour not long ago. But obviously her heart is in the right place and I can see the logic of trying to make your enemy your friend. But will the research she called for be directed in creating technological gadgets that aid those suffering dementia or used to get to its causes?

       The harrowing experience of someone like myself, essentially someone quite shy, and not a great 'people manipulator' who works primarily alone and gets concrete results on my own, was that the RSA's invitation to me to become a Fellow was a flattering gesture that in reality relies on my subscription to fund much younger people's (and less experienced) voices being exercised and that unless you conform to this relatively new language of social networking, you have nothing to offer, quite apart from age unless you have the title 'professor' before your name! 

       I would have liked the opportunity to say not long ago I was invited by my local technical college to teach a group of 16 to 19 year olds who failed everything in their schooling with no bits of paper to flash around and some were in trouble with the Police, to build an acoustic guitar. I had to teach kids with criminal records for violence to stop brandishing chisels at my face and re-direct their focus. They learned more about numeracy, literacy and discipline in that short experience making something that interest them than all the King's horses and when I met one or two of them in the street years later, they simply stopped and thanked me. I was invited to continue with this project but maintaining simple respect and discipline (that manipulating tools and materials alone demands) was so exhausting I could not go through it all over again. And why should I when discipline is a thing others should teach as a collective effort and first and foremost from their parents.      

Intelligent Design

       The little Smart car that is my workhorse is fantastic in many respects - it is small enough for me to park in my overcrowded street where other cars can't fit into the space, it takes daily battle scars of people pulling in on the narrow hill, letting their foot of the foot break or plainly misjudging their car's clearance and banging into the wings of it and I have a box trailer for occasional heavy loads. And it is economic.
        I can live with the BMW drivers who insist on coming right up to my rear on the open road as I know I can easily blow them away on my motorcycle, but what I find is mind-numbing is a discovery that has temporarily left my intelligently designed little Smart car a piece of useless plastic metal and rubber parked on the road, awaiting a cost effective solution.

Compact, turbo charged 50+mpg Smart Fortwo

    Last week after heavy rainfall (that drowned at least one car driver, so I shouldn't complain) as I switched the ignition on, the left flasher came on and stuck on. It later revealed that the engine management system, a tiny 'black box' crammed full of circuitry that controls absolutely everything on the car is sited under the dashboard and right underneath the windscreen that apparently is prone to leaking. So, having owned over a dozen minis in my youth and remembering that the distributor cap was always prone to damp but one could easily seal it with a plasticising spray or wrap it in insulating tape, I was dumbfounded to discover this little expensive and crucial black box called a 'SAM' (app £500) was not even protected against water ingress, quite apart from the inherent design fault of the leaking windscreen right above it! The official verdict is water in the SAM - replacement. 
     It takes no Einstein to ask why such an intelligently designed car would fail so totally and what makes matters worse is that once the little black box is removed it can't be repaired, a new one is not currently available from Mercedes and even if a new one is replaced it will incur further expense in re-coding to suit my car which means driving the car to Mercedes - Hang on . . . 
    To add injury to insult, once the engine management system (called a SAM) is removed the car is stuck in gear which means it cannot be freewheeled out of the way if it has to be moved.
     Now, this is what is called 'Intelligent' design - a car knowingly designed and based on decades of motor engineering experience by a world leader that has such a basic design flaw and I am referring now specifically to the fact the car can't be moved once the black box control system is removed!. Nobody cares because the 'intelligent' thing is that when things go wrong you can't fix them as in the 'old days' but you bin them and pay a fortune for a replacement and labour charges plus VAT. You are basically f....d.  
    Okay, the devil is always in the detail today so we understand that the Smart car was engineered by Mercedes and was a collaboration with Swatch (the watch people) who I gather designed the body, so we have a cop-out clause that Mercedes didn't actually design the whole car but they put their name to it and if you want it serviced you receive constant reminder calls from Mercedes to book it in and they will tell you everything else that needs doing as well while you sit in the posh waiting room drinking free freshly ground coffee.

    I do think the Smart car is a fantastic car, not least the plastic body panels that flex when others hit you before they break, unlike a metal car that crumples. But this problem of engine management computers is not just peculiar to Smart but runs all across the motor industry today. I heard of someone with a Nissan Micro where they had to go all the way to source the replacement part in Japan - final bill for water getting into it - £2000. 

I do like the Smart car for urban use and I have considered an electric version but the technology is still in its infancy. Renault have brought out a dinky little electric car called the Twizy and I'm really tempted for my cramped city use but you have to lease the batteries at around £50 per month and each 50 mile charge will cost £1 at today's electricity prices. So your running costs are not that much cheaper. It doesn't bother me that the Twizzy isn't really a car but a four wheel scooter as it is a tool I am looking for to do a job not a label! 

 Renault Twizy - funky little urban electric car

Audi is bringing out an electric car, I think in 2013 which looks interesting but not very good for British urban traffic calming road humps!

Audi electric concept car

In the meantime I am continuing to work on my Raffo Belva sports car re-build project, with the help of a local garage. I'm putting a 2 litre Vauxhall diesel engine into a plastic bodied car of half the donor vehicle's weight and as aerodynamic as a straight plank of wood being placed along the front bonnet and windscreen. It will run on vegetable oil. No leaks here or complex computerised car management system other than basic engine management ECU. All the other electric's will be carefully and individually wired by me and sited right where I can access every single fuse and relay in the cockpit.

Raffo Belva no 7 being re-designed and re-built by Jeremy Broun

If I applied the design strategy car designers/manufacturers wilfully employ to my furniture designs I would be a millionaire in 'after car' costs. I might even use their sales slogans. One manufacturer's website caption is 'if you are vague about ethics you know where to focus your attention...' or words to that effect. 

The fixer - part 2

     I removed an earlier entry called 'The Fixer' about Jimmy Saville

    It was obviously written before the shocking revelations and like countless other people I immediately condemned him. I still do if what is alleged about him is proven to be true.

   However, I will use this space just to say that horrendous though the evidence seems to be stacking up (I write this in october 2012) the question I cannot help but ask, apart from the obvious one of why nobody did anything about his alleged exploits over four decades (what!!!), is why is it that he achieved so much in helping so many people when so many others failed?  Put another way, what kind of person does it take to get things to happen other than a Jimmy Saville because he was apparently 'unique'! 

      There is something in this that also reflects on society and society is made up of individuals like you and me.  I happen to know someone who's life was probably saved by Jimmy Saville over twenty years ago in his arranging an 'ambulance' service from Italy back to the UK. The person may have suffered dire consequences but for the initiative of Mr Saville where timing was crucial.
      There must be other examples of how people's lives had been changed in more than trivial ways? This is nothing to do with Jimmy Saville the alleged sex fiend but Jimmy Saville 'The Fixer' as he was known for decades. Are any of the journalist vultures asking any of the people's who's lives were fixed in a positive way what they feel right now? Difficult and awkward probably for them not to speak of the burden of shame now resting on his family, but our focus is to crucify. It is slightly alarming that we do this before evidence has actually been firmly established.

   Is it not possible to say yes these are terrible crimes but yes he also did good and raised millions of pounds? In the 21st Century are we not capable of dual thought?

There is also a sinister thread of hypocrisy running through the almost medaeival lynch mentality fevering the nation right now when domestic violence is at an all time high and we still have bankers who have ruined the lives of many.  

   My little understanding of Christianity (that is supposed to be our core religion in Britain) is that good can come from evil. To my simple mind I could imagine a conflict of God and the Devil fighting over the same will and agreeing to compromise and this evil and good can go alongside each other. The same energy of nuclear fission provides light and warmth and also kills. There is no light without shadow, no black without white, but plenty of shades of grey. 

The JKB Window Hook Roof Platform

         The JKB Window Hook roof platform is a custom built device for hooking onto a dormer window and resting on the roof tiles in order to undertake repairs/maintenance. It saves hundreds of pounds in scaffolding costs and can be stored away in two separate parts after use. Made from stout 18mm exterior grade plywood and sandwiched at the hook in three thicknesses of material, it is screwed and glued together and lacquered with two coats of matt polyurethane varnish and one top coat of yacht varnish. Job done!

The JKB Window Hook platform. Copyright Jeremy Broun 2012

      It took longer to design the concept than build it and its hook profile and general angled geometry is made to measure for my particular roof. I had already constructed a roof ladder (see my You Tube WOODOMAIN channel) from a couple of bundles of batten so this is also a very low cost solution for servicing my roof and dormer window. Both sections of the platform are 48" long, conveniently coming out of an eight by four sheet and it makes lifting into position and storage easier. 
     

Looking down on the platform from the dormer window flat roof

        There is an extra hitch point where the two holes are to anchor the end of the platform to the dormer roof upright. I used rope but envisage constructing a metal strap that simply hooks into place. The two sections are fixed together in situ with stout stainless steel screws with the larger hole as a viewing hole to locate the screw. Each section is light enough to manoeuvre through the dormer window opening and fix into place on the roof and the hooks amply clear the window sill and flashing if repairs are needed there, which in my case they did. 

The platform is made in two sections for ease of mobility and storage

       If you are a woodworker/housebuilder who would like to use my idea all I ask for is an acknowledgment or better still buy my Routing DVDs (from WOODOMAIN.com) as a thank you for my ideas. It would cost me too much to patent many of my ideas but I believe in the universal law of what goes around comes around. My device may be featured in a future issue of 'British Woodworking' magazine as an example of resourceful woodworking. I intend doing my own roof repairs for as long as I am active. If you use the idea and make a similar window hook platform I cannot accept any responsibility for its safety, not least because build quality is important. If you are 25 stone heavy obviously the way I have built mine would not be strong enough. Safety always comes first and it is imperative to use an anchored safety harness when working on a roof.





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Passion for design

        Probably the most successful British chair of the 20th Century is the polypropylene  stacking chair by Robin Day for Hille International. The tooling costs were around £60,000 and it retailed at under £5. I was always inspired as a designer maker by the giants of mass produced innovation and found myself an increasingly reluctant member of an exclusive social club - British Designer Makers from the 1970's onwards.  I did work on the shop floor of a furniture factory as a trainee designer in 1973 but found the British mass production furniture industry depressing in the 1970's.

Stacking chair by Robin Day for Hille (1966)

      However, another icon of late 20th Century furniture design recently caught my eye in a local 'junk' shop which was a must have for me - four 'Supporto' chairs by Fred Scott, also for Hille International. I only want one for my quirky office but I am having to buy all four and hope to pass the others on. This is the classic original ergonomically designed modern office chair but most in my heritage city would be ignorant of its existence.

                             

'Supporto' chair by Fred Scott for Hille (1979)

      It is not the first time I have picked up a scoop locally. A couple of decades ago. I picked up a classic Harry Bertoia chair from my local market for £5 and use that in my home. Who is Harry Bertoia you ask? We know who Simon Colwell is or that playboy Harry who poses naked on the front of our respected tabloid newspapers. Oh yes, his cousin (uncle) David called on me a few years ago asking me to make some of his to furniture and emboss his Royal stamp on my craftsmanship.

                                 

Harry Bertoia chair (1957)

         But back to the plot - my passion for furniture design is re-kindled when I see a classic modern chair and my home is just too full of chairs so I am having to build a separate sealed storage area for my micro museum! The very first chair I made was actually a copy of 'The Chair' by Hans Wegner and I delighted in spokeshaving the arms which are highly sculptural. I made it out of teak when I was 17 and it was one of my major pieces when I was at Shoreditch College, so I must have made that chair in 1966 and all it needs today is a fresh smearing of Danish oil. The cane seat is still immaculate despite occasional use over the years. At a recent lecture by the furniture designer John Makepeace he referred to using silver wire as being 'more substantial' than cane for the seating of a chair, but his chair is younger than my copy of Hans Vegner's chair, but has noticeable cracks on its ebony joints! Am I allowed to challenge 'The Father of British Furniture Design'?! Is furniture lacking critical debate?

'The chair' by Hans Vegner (1949)

I think it is important to know our history. I visited the Cheltenham Celebration of Craftsmanship exhibition last week and apart from feeling somewhat let down by the chairs on show (the public chair competition), noticed a table by a maker that was an exact copy of a table by a designer maker friend of mine - John Coleman in the 1980's. I actually could not bring myself to mention this to the exhibitor so here I am referring to it on my blog. But surely in this age of 'graduate masters degree' furniture maker they have studied their history, especially the recent history of designer makers? In my Furniture Today DVDs the history is detailed with hundreds of images of furniture design and many colleges stock my DVDs. 

Veneered Table by John Coleman 

'Maker Designers Today' exhibition at Camden Arts Centre 1984

         I am certainly not accusing this maker of blatant copying as the design possesses a certain structural rationale that could be conceived by more than one mind. But in a previous exhibition there was a submission for not just a direct copy of a classic design but the design itself, a stool was used and the top just re-veneered in burn walnut which stuck out like a sore thumb! I alerted the exhibition curator but goodness me I am not a member of the design Police but just dumbfounded at - ignorance? 

Laminated birch stool by Alvar Aalto (1933)

          The wonderful thing about furniture design history is that it may be far from popular culture but it has a lasting and satisfying dimension to it and something to pass on. On my 90th birthday I intend holding a retrospective exhibition of my furniture designs and also show my chair collection which one day will be handed down.

  Cantilever chair in elm by Jeremy Broun (1984)

 inspired by Marcel Breuer's 'Chair with no legs' (1927)

          The designer Ron Arad once said to me 'a chair should have a very good reason for being'*. I would agree with that. It would be arrogant to claim total originality as we all know ideas come from somewhere and I think at least if one is inspired by one design to create another, the source should at least be acknowledged as a respect for that designer. But what does that silly old-fashioned term 'respect ' mean today? 

* 'The Chair' video 1990 (now on DVD) by Jeremy Broun