horsemouth floats free from the wreck (nothing beside remains)

horsemouth typed this while listening to the wave debb show .it's a bit of a late start by horsemouth because he was watching lots of footage of a somewhat pop-eyed dude explain about insulation, condensation and heat-loss from houses - thanks dude that was really helpful. 

today horsemouth visited TESCOs with his mum to do the first part of the christmas shop. he hopes he was helpful. it was knee deep in geriatrics (and the horsemouth who is telling you this is nearly 60). there were some howling kids attempting to wander off and get separated from their parents (but strangely few). 

a guardian newspaper article has reminded him of an earlier part of his life when he volunteered for an anti-nuclear group. 

their main aim (in truth) was to get sellafield (aka. windscale) shut down and to get it to cease operations as the world's nuclear laundry and dustbin.

they failed, but, some 30-40 years later, it has finally been shut down and the site been handed over to the nuclear decommissioning authority. 

in normal operation uranium in a reactor makes plutonium - and that plutonium can be extracted by a process called reprocessing and then either used in bombs or in further reactor fuel. now its use in bombs horsemouth does not approve of and frankly its use in reactor fuel horsemouth does not approve of either. the process creates vastly more nuclear waste than the spent reactor fuel you started with and now we face decades (possibly centuries) of clean up work at sellafield/ windscale/ whatever it is called in a hundred years time or a thousand years time to come. 

best not to do it at all opined horsemouth at the time.he quoted 'ozymandias'at the MPs - it did no good. (they thought it was a hymn of praise to wise king ozymandias.  he lost that argument).).

at some point horsemouth decided the whole effort was futile and returned to fill-time unemployment and drinking (his first love). he was fundamentally not suited to the work of campaigning and the whole operation was so precarious it didn't bear looking at. it survived not because  anyone cared but because horsemouth was effectively doing the donkey work for free. 

the work suited horsemouth because it alibied his music (a similarly largely fruitless endeavour but one about which he feels better). 

a while later his then flatmate denise ishaque recommended he get an actual job (and the rest is history).

for 25 years horsemouth worked integrating deaf students into the hearing higher education system and for 25 years sellafield worked as the world's nuclear laundry, strangely multiplying nuclear waste and contaminating still further (at a minimum) the land it is on and the irish sea.

and now it is all over - (nothing but the clean up).

'nothing beside remains. round the decay

of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

the lone and level sands stretch far away.'

once again horsemouth floats free from the wreck.  

-----

'in this third, and, for the present, last volume of autobiography, I have followed the previous system of alternating letters from the past with my present day impressions, so that the result may be, I hope, the composite one of memory and refection; present and past; plaited in together as they are in actual life: for it is usually a chord and not a note that we remember.' 

- forward to 'the coast of incense: autobiography 1933-39' by freya stark.