When I rest my skull on my pillow tonight I’m fairly certain that the organ inside it will have been significantly rewired. Whether physically or only metaphorically I’m not sure, but let’s just say that today was one of those days that really alter your brain. As I write, jammed neural trunk roads are being bypassed with brand new motorways. Mountains of cerebral detritus are being tunneled through by drilling machines powered by intuition. Stagnant lagoons of miasmic notions are being bridged by elegant spans of perspicacity.
Last year I wrote about geology and architecture in art, after visiting GoMA. Today I visited the two galleries of modern art in Edinburgh and found lots of stuff on those themes, and I … read on »
Archive for January, 2008…
Clean Energy 2: The Comeback of Nuclear Power in the UK
“Nuclear power? To most people, it’s witchcraft” (Chris Patten)
To describe nuclear power as clean might seem perverse, given that some of the waste produced is so dangerous that there is no containment material that won’t be destroyed by it, and that it remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
But last week the government finally said yes to the construction of up to ten nuclear power stations, at least some of which might be up-and-running by 2020. They’ve put off the decision for a long time. New Labour, motivated for so long by the desire to be liked, refused to face the impending energy crisis. Now that the closure of many of our existing nuclear power stations is fast approaching … read on »
Clean Energy 1: A Milestone in The Glendoe Hydro-electric Scheme
On January 7th the 200-metre-long tunnel boring machine called Eliza Jane broke through the side of a mountain in Scotland after sixteen months of grinding. The resulting five mile tunnel will take water from a reservoir up on the Monadhliath plateau down to Loch Ness, via an underground cavern housing a hydro-electric power station. It’s the biggest civil engineering project in Scotland, and the first major hydro scheme in Britain since the fifties I think. As such, it’s tremendously exciting: as I’ve mentioned before, hydro power sets me all a-trembling with fascination and a smidgin of dread. So indulge me.
The water head – the vertical distance from the turbine to the intake at the reservoir, is 600 metres, the highest … read on »
Across The Rumbling Bridge: A Walk at The Hermitage, Dunkeld
I drew this yesterday, from a photograph I took a couple of Sundays ago when we were walking Oscar, our new canine honorary nephew – but more of him later. The picture shows Ossian’s Hall, viewed from one side of the Rumbling Bridge, which spans the River Braan in a woodland estate called the Hermitage, near Dunkeld in Perthshire. Our friend Nicky, Oscar’s owner, was with us, and she had been before. But I’d never heard of it.
The building, a folly built for the Duke of Atholl in the eighteenth century, has a semicircular balcony – unseen in the drawing – which overlooks, and in fact overhangs, an awesome roaring tumult of water.
A great waterfall feeds a stubbornly narrow corridor … read on »
©2010 Alistair Robinson