September 2009
→ Notice
(24th September 2009)
This blog will change somewhat from now on. I will be starting a new book so will be thinking about things other than sewage and shit. I will still think and write about sewage and shit, but not exclusively. Hence the trains and the whale. Expect much writing about ships.
→ Trains
(24th September 2009)
My brother has been building a model railway set forever. For as long as I can remember, there were always days andnights when I had to go out and yell upwards towards a draughty loft when food was on the table. It has moved when we have moved, from an outdoor garage in a big Victorian house to the loft above the outdoor toilet and ...
→ Whale
(24th September 2009)
I have stopped watching the news but I switched it on. Sometimes you can learn stuff. It was late in the broadcast so time for news that was not about bombs or fatigues. It was about a whale. A baby whale had beached on a beach in Scotland. Humans were trying to save it. They wrapped it in wet blankets, which seemed odd but is ...
(24th September 2009)
The New York Times mentions The Big Necessity in the latest Paperback Row, a list of paperbacks they like. This is very flattering, given that paperbacks don't get much media attention in the US (not like in the UK, where they are often re-reviewed). And also because they put me on the same page as Haruki Murakami and John Le Carré.
→ Matudzi
(24th September 2009)
I recently spent a week in Mozambique looking at the progress of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) projects there. It was impressive. And memorable: I won't forget an entire village recoiling with laughter when one of the esteemed visitors suddenly said "matudzi." Matudzi means "shit" in Sana, one of Mozambique's local languages. It is deliberately used because, in the words of Kamal Kar, the godfather ...
(20th September 2009)
I applaud engineers, so liked this piece in the Telegraph about Brunel, Stephenson and Locke. I also liked the reference to sanitation, though if you blinked you would miss it. But where, for the love of life-saving, life-prolonging sewers, is Bazalgette?
(20th September 2009)
I didn't know that some funiculars were operated by water. You fill the top one with water so that it's heavy and descends, and so that it pulls the bottom car up. Now I also know, thanks to a couple of readers who wrote to me recently, that in Fribourg, Switzerland, where two parts of town are separated by 375 feet of height, the ...