An Englishman's Castle

The true cost of the London 2012 Games for the UK taxpayer comes in at over £12 billion, £2.7 bn more than the 9.3bn budget, a Sky investigation has revealed......

The additional money calculated by Sky does not include extra counter terrorism funding of £1.131bn being allocated to the police despite a ministerial statement saying "much of this capacity will be devoted to the Olympics in 2012". Nor does it include the £4.4bn budgets of the security and intelligence services.

It also doesn't take into account the opportunity cost of having the majority of the UK police force working on the Games instead of fighting crime elsewhere. On peak days 12,000 police officers will be policing the Games.

In addition Sky's total misses out the £6.5bn spent on transport upgrades which have been brought forward due to the Olympic Games and could have been cancelled as part of the Conservative government's spending cuts if it wasn't for the Olympics.

If we had counted these figures, the Olympic spend would have totalled well over £24 billion, more than double the current Olympic budget and ten times the original calculation....

In some regions, acidity rose faster in the last two centuries than it did in the previous 21,000 years, a study has shown.

Measuring changes in ocean acidity is difficult because it varies naturally between seasons, years and regions.

Animal and insect species in Europe are losing the fight to keep up with rapid changes in climate in a new phenomenon dubbed "climatic debt", according to an international study.
The findings saw birds lag behind their normal climate zones, on average by 212 kilometres and butterflies by 135km.

Some birds, such as the black and white pied flycatcher, are unable to adapt to the encroaching warmth and are not naturally moving north to cooler areas, according to experts writing in the journal Nature.

. So far all the meat "made" has been nearly colourless, tasteless and lacking texture. Scientists may have to add fat and even lab-grown blood and colourants.

the UK government envisages 400 km sq of offshore seaweed farms in its long-term energy planning.

The new microbe research, published today in the leading journal Science, represents a "critical" technological breakthrough, but the challenge of making the approach commercially viable remains.

In the wild, animal numbers naturally fluctuate. The marsh fritillary butterfly, for example, can virtually vanish from some of its colonies in certain years, only to be present two or three years later in numbers that are overwhelming (this is caused by cycles of parasite infestation, and something similar happens with red grouse).

Generally, though, animal numbers have evolved to be in balance, both with their food supply and with other species. Predators cannot eat all the prey, as they themselves would die out. So when an event comes along which disturbs this balance, it's worth examining. One such is the steep decline of one of our best-loved mammals, the hedgehog.

In the past 20 years or so, hedgehogs have disappeared from much of Britain. This has not really registered yet in the public consciousness, but it is an astounding phenomenon. There were an estimated 30 million hedgehogs in Britain in the 1950s, but by the 1990s this was thought to be down to about 1.5 million, and recently the rate of decline has grown even steeper....

....my own impression – not worth a row of beans, scientifically, of course – is that the link is obvious and direct, and I take this from my experience of my local patch, as birders would say, which happens to be the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew ...

RECENT images of wind turbine towers being blown over or catching fire during the storms may have alarmed advocates of wind energy. Scotland has ambitious climate change targets, but we should look beyond wind and waves for answers.

The Games have been corrupted by government money, lack of talent and little public interest in the events

Much is written about the hubris of world sporting bodies such as the International Olympic Committee, with its pompous officials taking over the streets, hotels and even advertising hoardings of London. But the real story is the moral bankruptcy of the tournament itself.

Olympic participation has become little more than a government vanity project. Not just for the hosts, with their bribes and their billion-pound structures. But for all the big competing nations, with their costly pursuit of meaningless medals.....

money, voluntarily given, reflects society’s judgment of the merit of sport. Games like football, tennis, cricket and rugby are wealthy because they are popular.

In the Olympic Games, this dynamic is turned on its head. The reward for success is medals, and governments have come to the conclusion that Olympic medals bestow national prestige. The irony is that the easiest way to obtain medals is to target sports that are uncompetitive, either because they have little popular following (and so few participants), or are difficult and expensive to organise conventionally. Another way of putting it is that Olympic reward goes to sports that have little value in the estimation of the public.

Shamefully, Britain is particularly guilty of this tendency....

Britain has simply targeted Olympic events which attract little interest in an effort to boost its medal tally.

The Olympic Games are becoming increasingly dominated by such sports. There are ten different sailing events, in various types of boat, and you can win cycling medals on a BMX, on a mountain bike, in a velodrome or on the road. Some of these sports are beyond the reach of most of people in Britain, let alone the developing world.
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For the sports that people ascribe real value to – football, boxing, golf, rugby, tennis, basketball – Olympic success is held to be unimportant. So with the exception of a handful of athletic events which demonstrate pure physical prowess, the rest of Olympic competition is corrupt in sporting terms because it reflects neither talent nor public enthusiasm.

A town football club faces eviction from its ground under an eccentric clause which stated the lease would expire 21 years after death of King Edward VII's last grandchild.

... the wealthy local woman who bequeathed the ground to the club in 1922 included a condition which said the land should pass back to the town 21 years after the death of King Edward's last grandchild, who became King Olav V of Norway.
The deadline, which passed yesterday, has proven controversial and the debate over the club’s future is far from settled.

The Queen....might also have said that it would be quite hard for her jubilee celebrations not to be "overshadowed" by a party that was meant to cost £3bn, and was now costing £9bn, and looked set to cost even more. And that she understood that the bid to host the Olympics was made at a time when the financial climate looked quite different, but that £9bn seemed like quite a lot of money to spend when there didn't seem to be much of it around.

She might have added that the extra £30m that David Cameron had recently promised for the opening ceremony was also quite a lot, and so was the extra £39m he had promised to "boost tourism", which she'd understood that the Olympics were meant to do on their own. And that while she too liked the idea that the Olympics would, as Cameron suggested, "lift Britain out of recession", the evidence showed that they wouldn't. That the Olympics had, for example, damaged tourism in Australia, and in China, and that whatever they'd done to the Greek economy, it didn't seem to have been all that good.

She might have said that she wasn't that much of an expert on public transport, and that it was no skin off her nose because she never had to sit in traffic jams anyway, but that the plans for getting an awful lot of people from one part of the city to another, which included special lanes for VIPs, which might well piss quite a lot of people off, seemed to be largely based on keeping fingers crossed. And that that double-decker bus we'd had at the opening ceremony in Beijing, with that girl from that TV talent show, didn't suggest that opening ceremonies were things we always did all that well.