This will be the last post here, because I'm all set up now in my own hosting service.

I hope you'll come with me, and visit Camden Kiwi. All the old posts are there, though I haven't been able to bring the comments over.  There's an RSS feed as well, in case you're reading this that way.

Its still the same WordPress software, just set up for me, so I can modify it if I want to improve the site myself.

I'm looking forward to seeing you again soon!!

In a fit of enthusiasm, about this time last year, I signed up for a 5km run in aid of Trees For Cities, a London based charity which plants trees in cities. Much to my amazement, I managed to finish and didn't even come last. They gave me a nice goody bag, in a jute shopper, including a t-shirt, bottled water (not sure about that) and some tree seeds. I planted them immediately, they hatched a week or two later, quickly grew to about 3 cm high and then did absolutely nothing until the last couple of weeks, when they've suddenly put on another centimetre or so.

I think they'll grow to about 30-40m, given the chance, so I may have to bonsai them. I've no idea how quickly they'll grow here, but the ones on a plantation in NZ that I have as part of a long-term pension scheme are supposed to be ready for harvest at 25 years. They can stay in the yoghurt pot for a little bit longer.

I just found this - the Somerstown Project - including photos and stories from Somers Town in the 20s. I must go and have a look at the model.

Most of Somers Town was built in the 20s and 30s, and then some rebuilt in the 50s, though there are a few older buildings. There's some uncertainty about when my flats were built - the surveyor said 1910, but people here believe it was later. There is a photo of Johnson St (the old name for my street) but its showing a different block.

You've got some stuff to get rid of, it's not really good enough to sell, but you're a greenie so you're reluctant to just put it out with the rubbish.  One solution is to put it in the basement and hope the fairies will take it away.  This does not work, and has led to broken furniture which 'could be repaired', useful containers, ten years worth of the Philosophical Review and all the other unwanted paraphenalia of an affluent but environmentally friendly lifestyle clogging up space in guilt-ridden sheds and basements all over England.

A better solution is to put it up on Freecycle, if you've got the time and inclination, but if you're busy, lazy, or not too keen on total strangers turning up on your doorstep, there's a reasonably priced alternative in central / North London.

I've seen these trucks around a fair bit lately with one parked over the road the other day, and they look like a good idea.  Ecojunk pick up your junk, take it away and try to recycle it as much as possible.  They have a goal of a 50% recycling rate in their first year, and say they'll put their actual figures on their website, though there's nothing there yet.

They use LPG trucks as well, so lower emissions.   They're a new, green business and need your support.  Go on, you are never going to use all those yoghurt pots, you know.

London is a big, sprawling, crowded metropolis with a deceptive ability to provide green and almost wild spaces. A short ride on the number 168 bus takes me up to the South End, close to the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead. The Heath is so very different from Regents Park and the lovely but very orderly squares of Camden and Bloomsbury, with woodland areas that are left to grow almost as they will, dead trees providing habitats for small beasties and fungi, flowers growing wild. Its a place to be quiet, to walk and get lost, to pretend you're out of the city for a while.

After an hour, or a day, wandering across from South End, I arrive at Parliament Hill Fields where the 121 bus is waiting to take me back home again, after a stop for coffee at the Cafe Mozart.

I've spent the afternoon having a happy geeky time, setting up wordpress on my new hosting service.  It works well, and at some stage in the near future, this site will be moving. 

I'm doing this because I need a new host for my business website and blog, and may as well have them all together.  Although its a long time since I've worked in technical roles, I used to be a Unix / Oracle systems engineer, and there's still a bit of geek in me, so it was rather fun getting it set up, and having a good look at MySQL and some of the PHP scripts I'm planning to use.

One of the (very few) disadvantages of wordpress.com is that you can't put javascript into your blog.  That would let me do a few nifty wee things, such as participate properly in webrings, and show all the green bloggers links.  I'd also be able to get better stats and see who's visiting.

First, he signs a pro-vivisection petition.  A PM signing a petition of any sort seems a bit bizarre, but this one seems guaranteed to alienate many of his middle-class constituents.  Given a choice between using a life saving medicine that’s been tested on animals, and not, I doubt I’d take the noble route either, and the animal extremists  probably do their cause more harm than good.   Vivisection may be a necessary evil, but it is surely an evil.  It seems very odd to sign up to it.  As a small aside, I just had a look at the website, and can’t find a copy of the petition itself, without pressing the ’sign me up’ button.  You can apparently sign up anonymously.  Definitely democracy in action.

Next, he’s all for overriding the judiciary on the Human Rights Act.  It’s called the rule of law, Tony and while you may get to participate in making them, you are not above them.  A few Afghanis who hijacked a plane out of desperation and brought it here cause me a lot less fear than the notion that, having gone through the courts to get a ruling on a human rights matter, Tony and his mates could just turn around and veto that ruling. 

Then, he comes out guns blazing for nuclear power pre-empting the energy review.  That will be a good legacy, and ensure that Tony’s remembered for aeons to come.

And now, because a department managed by one of his cronies has proved utterly incompetent in applying the law we already have, he’s going to change the law. 

These look like the last days of a tired, stressed and finished man.  He’ll be gone by 17 June, for sure.

Here endeth the rant.

A friend asked for instructions on how to do this, so here they are. They’re detailed so that even the most untechnical blogger can do it. She’s using IE, rather than Firefox, and has only just started using a digital camera. She’s been having a lot of problem with WordPress’ upload facility and because she’s on the other side of the planet, on a dialup modem, I can’t figure out why. It could be that dialup modem?

I use Flickr for all my photos now, because its so easy and you don’t have to worry about resizing or anything. Now that Flickr’s been bought out by Yahoo, it’s not likely to disappear any time soon either.

To do this, you need to:

1. Get a Flickr account
2. Upload your photos
3. Put them into your blog

1. Get a Flickr account.
Go to www.flickr.com
Select ‘Sign up!’ from the menu at the top right.

That will take you to a Yahoo signon screen. If you don’t have a Yahoo id, select Sign up again.



Go through, fill out the form, and you will be able to use Flickr.

2. Upload your photos into Flickr.
Go back to www.flickr.com, and sign in with your new Yahoo id
Select ‘Upload Photos’ on the right hand side

Use the Browse buttons to select the photos you want to upload
If you want to give the group of photos a tag, enter one
Make sure the privacy settings are set to ‘Public’
Press Upload

Flickr will take a few minutes to upload your files. If you’re on broadband, a few seconds, if you’re on an old modem, quite a few minutes. There are tools for multiple file upload, which you can try later.

3. Now you’re ready to put the photos into your blog. There are a few ways to do this. One is to register your blog in Flickr, by selecting ‘You’ from the flickr menu, then Your account, then Your blogs. For the moment, we’ll do this the straight WordPress way. Also, its probably easier to do this using Firefox browser and Performancing, but because my friend is using IE, these instructions are for that.

Open two IE windows, and go to your flickr.com account in one, and your wordpress.com account in the other.

In the WordPress account, start a new post.

In Flickr, find the picture you want to display in your blog
In Flickr, right mouse click over the picture you want to display, and select properties. Then select the url for the picture (this will end in .jpg), and copy that (using ctrl-c, or right mouseclick again)

In WordPress, start typing your post. When you want to put a picture in, select the little ‘picture’ icon in the editing tool bar. This is the toolbar just below the post title. Don’t even think about the area you normally use to upload pictures.

In the window that appears (see picture above) paste the url for the picture that you copied before into the ‘Image URL’ filed, and select the Insert button. Your picture should now appear.

This will be a bit slow if you’re on dialup, and you might find it easier to type out all your words, and then put your photos in at the end (or go and get broadband!)

Good luck. If you run into serious trouble, email your photos to me and I’ll upload them (this is not a general offer - just for the person who asked for the instructions!!).

Anyone using this, please comment if you find any flaws in the instructions.

Another interesting local blog, from Suz Lamido over in Islington.  She’s a Lib Dem, interested in green issues, and well worth a read.

Techcrunch mentions a useful new service, which allows automatic backups of blogs.  The problem is that you’ve got to run a php script on your server, and I don’t think the nice people at WordPress are quite ready for that.

It is a worry, given that WordPress.com is a free, beta service and I’ve now got over 100 scintillating masterpieces sitting on their servers with no easy way of backing them up myself.  Over the last few weeks, I’ve taken to using Performancing, the Firefox plugin that lets you compose your post locally and then publish it to the blog of your choice, and I’m holding all my posts on that now. 

It would be nice to have a ‘download my blog’ or some sort of export feature, even if it was a manual one, that would allow me to easily copy down my blog and save it somewhere.  Alternatively, when and if WordPress.com starts offering new, chargeable services, this would be a good one.

The Booth Poverty Map was drawn up at the end of the 19th century, with typically Victorian attitudes towards describing groups of people which would not pass in todays PC world. 
The Londonist pointed out that its now online, and you can view it side by side with the modern map.  Its interesting to see how the roads have changed, and also perhaps to think about how the demographics may have changed as well. 
This is the old view of Somers Town but you can point the map to anywhere in London.  I suspect Johnson St (now Cranleigh St) is more mixed now than it was 100 years ago, but I doubt Phoenix St would be described as well to do.  Somers Town has changed a lot, particularly in the last 60 years since WWII bombings took at heavy toll on the area.

The Little Green Portfolio is down this week, having had a rather bumpy ride since I last blogged on it. 

Novera Energy is holding up well, with plans for a new windfarm at Lissett Airfield in Yorshire currently undergoing public consultation.  Local reaction is reported to be mixed, and there is clearly a risk that planning permission will be turned down.  However, that’s the way it is with wind energy, and Novera seem to be doing as good a job as any of getting public opinion on side.

Renewable Energy Holdings continues to do very little, sliding back to 45p.  There seems to be some sort of barrier to it falling below that, though next week may prove me wrong.  Peter Temple, in III this week, commented that the lack of news is not unusual for small companies.  The company has some positive cashflow, some interesting potential and, like Mr Temple, I’m holding on.

Some profit taking in Straight Plc, including the sale of a 1.77% stake by founder Jonathan Straight, saw this company come down off the precipitous high of 300p to 270p.  That looked dramatic, but considering it still leaves me with a 31% improvement since I bought on the low at the beginning of March, that’s good performance.  I had put in a limit order at 300p, in the hope of taking the profits and using them to round up some money that’s going into a very low-risk fund for overall portfolio balancing purposes, and it briefly touched that, but not for long enough. 

Letsrecycle.com is carrying a story that TEG Environmental has secured planning permission to build a new composting plant in Somerset.  The plant will be used to treat organic waste from a poultry farm, requiring high-temperature composting to make sure that the potentially toxic material is harmless.  This is a good example of reducing waste in a manufacturing process, as the resulting compost will be used for fertiliser, though it would also be interesting to know more about the partner company, Halberton Poultry Ltd, who are not listed and don’t seem to have a website.  This will be TEGs 6th composting site, and I’m surprised it doesn’t seem to have helped the price yet.

nb. Change % in value of my holding since purchase

And hows this for rather strange? Found in the oddly interesting popbitch.

Cos I like stuffonmycat.com

Over the last few weeks, a lot of my blogging has been about the way I'm investing my pension fund, and particularly about the Little Green Portfolio, which is the part of my fund (about half) devoted to small, green, aim-listed shares. It's a risky investment, but so far has done well, and it appeals to my green ideals. It also gives me the chance to have a look at some extremely interesting small companies who are combining technological knowhow, green ideas with, I hope, business acumen.

I currently own shares in four companies, and will add to that as I have more money available, with the aim of getting up to 10 companies over the next year or so. I'm also keeping an eye on another 15 or so that I may consider buying.

The difficulty with this type of investment is the real lack of information about many of these companies. There are occasional updates in Investors Chronicle, and of course market updates. I'm setting up news alerts on them all, and may try to attend AGMs or other events run by the companies.

These are the companies I've got on the watchlist at the moment. Over the coming weeks, I'll be posting my analyses of them. If you're interested in this type of investment, I'd really appreciate a comment or email.

Tomorrow, this blog is five months old. Today, for the first time, it had over 100 reads, not including the 20 or so taking RSS feeds. It feels like this blog is well and truly underway.

I’ve met a few interesting people through blogging, and you can see their blogs on the bar to the right, but I’m very aware that the majority of readers never comment and so I’ve no idea who you are.

Please, if you’ve a minute or two, would you mind taking a quick survey to tell me a little bit more about who you are, why you read Camden Lady and what interests you? I’ll leave the survey open for a few days, and see what results come through. If there’s anything I can do to improve the blog, I’ll certainly try.

You can find the survey here

TEG Environmental's new director is an engineer, chemist and 'chartered environmentalist'. This company, part of my Little Green Portfolio, manufactures a composting system which turns organic waste into fertiliser on an industrial scale. The share price has been fairly stable since I bought them and, like all the other shares in the portfolio, it is likely to be a long term investment.

Doug Benjafield joins the board with considerable experience in the waste management industry, including positions as Development Director for Cleanway in the UK and Chairman of Lakeside Energy from Waste, as well as Chairman of the NGO, London Waste Action.

Cleanaway is an extremely large multinational waste management company which, among many contracts, provides street cleaning services to Tower Hamlets, and owns landfill gas to energy plants.
Lakeside Energy from Waste Ltd is a subsidiary of large, privately owned waste management and quarry operating company Grundon which was formed to commission and operate a highly controversial incinerator producing energy from waste at Colnbrook near Slough.
London Waste Action is a partnership between local government and the business organisation London First.

Its good to see a combination of scientific and business background, and bodes well for TEG. Of the six directors, there are now three financiers and three engineer / scientists, which seems a good mix.

So, Camden has gone from Labour to 'No Overall Control', which looks set to be a Lib Dem / Tory alliance. The only light in a rather miserable result is the election of two Greens up in Highgate.

When I put my most recent post on the election up, it invited a rather long diatribe from Daniel of Daniel's Counter and he goes on to reiterate his points in his own blog. I didn't have time to comment last week, but now, here goes.

First of all - he repeatedly stated that I 'wasted my vote'. That is like saying I wasted my money because I bought something I like, and he doesn't. That's tough, it's my vote, and I'll use it as I wish, thank you. As Labour still holds this ward, I think I acheived my aims. Now, lets look at some of his other points.

The war - I completely agree that its a complete waste of money and, more importantly, lives. And I am absolutely sure the only other likely party of government, the Tories, would have done exactly the same thing. The Greens and Respect are the only seriously anti-war parties, so if that really is the issue, then no doubt, Daniel would have voted for one of them.

He states that Camden has one of the highest council taxes in the UK. I checked Upmystreet.com to see that Camden's council tax is slightly more than the English average. Average council tax in Camden, per household is £1282.67. In Kensington its a little less at £1221.96. In Islington even lower at £1118.70. So that does look valid, and £160 is a lot to a family on benefit. However, I wonder how well that really stacks up. That per household measure is hard to judge - what if there are more small houses in Islington, or the overall value of Camden homes is higher and pushes households into higher bands. Yes, the Council Tax system is unfair, particularly on people with larger homes and smaller incomes. That's nationwide, and a Tory innovation.

Camdens schools are not underperforming. They seem to be better than neighbouring Islington, and the national average, for measures like 'KS2 to 15 Value Added' and for GCSE results.

Camden parking policies are 'in diaccord' with many local residents, and in accord with many others. The policy of zero-tolerance to infringement of resident parking zones is excellent. The 20mph around Somers Town works well, and frankly anyone who drives much more quickly here is an arrogant idiot.  

Pretty well everywhere, health services see to be underfunded and poorly managed. I can't see any way that Camden council has any control over the Camden PCT. It's website lists Camden Council as a 'partner', along with other organisations such as the BMA. There is no Camden Council representation on the PCT board. It looks like the hospital NHS trusts are similar.

I've fortunately had no experience of Camden's Social Services, and am fairly unlikely to, so can't comment on them. However, my experience of Council Officers generally, as a leaseholder, chair of the Cranleigh House Tenants and Residents Association, and citizen, has been very good. The patch manager in this area has been excellent - sorting out problems with the building, helping us to get funding for minor projects, sorting out a bit of a problem with the pub over the road.

Local authorities deal with the minutiae of day to day lives, and there will always be areas people are unhappy about.  It's also difficult to understand how well a council is doing compared to others, because one only lives in one borough.  Certainly, the Audit Commission thought Camden was doing well last time they took a look.  They didn't think so well of neighbouring, Lib Dem held Islington which has, interestingly enough, had quite a swing to Labour this time.

My vote wasn't wasted, though I'm concerned about the future for Camden with no single party in control.  It looks like we've kicked out a good council to get at Tony Blair.  I only hope it was worth it.

I stood outside Waterstones in Picadilly as a giant 40ft pachyderm came up towards the Circus. Accompanied by a delighted throng, it slowly walked, waving its trunk and ears. Occasionally, it slowed down, lifted its trunk and sprayed the audience with water. Mesmerised, we followed it down around Picadilly to Trafalgar Square.

There, the Elephant met the Little Girl, a 15ft puppet.

The whole event is a staging of the Jules Verne short story 'The Sultan's Elephant' about a Sultan who sets off with his entourage in a mechancial elephant to find a time-travelling Little Girl who has been disturbing the Sultan's dreams. Central London is the stage.

It is fantastic, in every sense of the word, a surreal sight on London's grey streets. The Elephant is a marvel of detail and the nineteenth century scientifictional imagination. Built of wood, every part is articulated, and even the face is expressive. The Sultan's harem sit on top, preening themselves, and the Sultan himself walks around carrying a moving wooden fish. Puppeteers and drivers sit on legs and to the side, steering the beast, wearing bright red military jackets.

It's still in town tomorrow, so if you read this today, try and get in to see it. Details, and a link to the Jules Verne story, are at www.thesultanselephant.com

You can click on any of the photos to see larger versions in Flickr

As I came home tonight, the road was blocked off by a security guard, apparently to 'keep things secure, for the election'. There's a polling booth at the end of the street.

I'm not quite sure what they are expecting, but it seems to have caused a lot of trouble judging by the shouting and traffic jam that's been going on since I got back at 10pm just as the voting finished. It's the first warm, sticky night of the year, so I hope noone gets too upset by it all.