It’s the coal station workers who make the planet worth saving
Not that long ago, for an article that never quite happened, I took a tour around Kingsnorth power station. This was just after environmental activists had staged a week-long ‘Climate Camp’ there. ‘Environmentalist?’ said my taxi-driver. ‘Journalist,’ I told him. He seemed surprised. Such is my debonair professional demeanour. He’d done quite well out of climate change activists, it turned out. It was seven miles from the train station to the power station, and cannabis and hand-woven teepees can really weigh you down. If no one was looking, or if it was raining, they’d often sneak a lift. A taxi-driver with an eco-friendly car, perhaps like the one in The Flintstones, could have made a fortune.
It wasn’t the most exciting tour, if I’m honest. ‘This is where we keep the coal,’ they said, next to a big pile of coal. ‘This is where we press the buttons.’ I wasn’t allowed to press the buttons. I asked. The turbine hall was like a space-age cathedral, with great shafts of light cutting down over curled, roaring machines. What sticks in the mind, though, is the quiet, old-fashioned dignity of everybody who worked there. And how frightened they were.
‘You can bring a photographer,’ the PR had told me, beforehand, ‘but you can’t take pictures of any of our staff.’ That was thanks to Climate Camp. With jeering crowds at the gates, and after a couple of break-ins, the station had eventually gone into lockdown. Under siege, the engineers had called their wives, laid out their sleeping bags in the canteen, and mildly continued with the solid, miraculous business of holding back the darkness. They were shaken, though. In the past, when people had asked them what they did, they had always felt proud. Not like heroes, exactly, because heroes have ego. What does daddy do? Daddy keeps the lights on. Daddy never realised he was a war criminal.
They were most upset by the protesters who had scaled the big chimney and written ‘Gordon’ down the side. Remember that? They’d planned to write ‘Gordon, bin it’, but they ran out of time and, from the photos, it looks like they ran out of chimney too. The engineers didn’t mind the decoration, and actually found the pun quite amusing. What appalled them, though, was the danger. ‘They could have died,’ they kept saying, about these people who hated them. Normally, power stations are incredibly safe places. Every system has a check, and every check has another check. Blithely abseiling down a chimney is like having a hog roast in a mosque. They felt defiled.
Prior to the lockdown, quite a few of the engineers had actually sneaked into the camp to have a look around. They’d heard about a wind-generator, and various whatnots run by solar panels, and being energy geeks they wanted to take a look. It was fascinating stuff, they said. Not exactly practical, but very ingenious. We could do something with that. There was no rancour here, no animosity at all. Just a sort of abashed alarm that they had set out on safe, respectable, even admirable careers, and somehow ended up as vivisectionists.
Coal is a disaster. I do see that. But these are the guys who are going to save the world. On the same day that a new Climate Camp sprung up in Blackheath last week, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers produced a report recommending algal bioreactors on buildings, and CO2-soaking artificial trees along the sides of motorways. You can bet those weren’t dreamed up by a stoner in a teepee.
I’ve got more time for environmental activists than all this might suggest. I interviewed a bunch of Plane Stupid campaigners last year, and I liked them all. They were eloquent and committed and clever, albeit a touch starey around the eyes. But still, I couldn’t look at pictures of the protest in Blackheath without thinking about the people they were protesting against. People who light the hospitals they were born in, and the houses they live in, and who ultimately, if we ever do manage to save the world, are going to be the ones doing all the work.
What happens to child prodigies? GCSE results last week, and you couldn’t move for them. Eight-year-olds with 12 A*s and suchlike. ‘Little Abdul cannot yet walk unaided, but already has top grades in Maths, Physics and Having No Friends.’ It always puts me in mind of that bit in that book, I think by Nick Hornby, about middle-class kids who aren’t allowed to eat sweets or watch television. Do they all become visionary poets and prize-winning artists? Of course not. They become middle-income middle-managers of middlingly successful businesses, like everybody else. Only, presumably, it bothers them more. It seems a cruel thing to do to a child.
Sure, some childhood prodigies are glorious successes. Mozart, Drew Barrymore, Bobby Fischer, Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson. There often seems to be something slightly brittle there, though. Something waiting to go badly awry. Like that strange antiques boy who became a lady. Remember him?
I’m bothered by the notion of something being more of an achievement just because it has been done at an early age. In my view, uncharitable as it might sound, it’s actually less impressive that Mike Perham sailed around the world aged 17 than it would be if he’d waited another ten or 20 years. A 37-year-old circumnavigates the globe singlehandedly, and the assumption is that he found his own boat, and sorted out the funding, and took the gamble of putting his life and career on hold. For a 17-year-old, it’s easy. Do I want to spend nine months sailing around the world? Yeah, whatever. Will it get me out of school? A 37-year-old investment banker with two kids gets an A*, I’m impressed. When an eight-year-old does, I sort of get the impression it wasn’t really his decision.
You know who was a child prodigy? Gordon Brown, that’s who. Well, pretty much. High school at ten, university at 16. He’s done pretty well for himself, granted, Prime Minister and all that — but might he not have done that anyway? Instead he had an entire childhood of not being normal. Vague feelings of specialness, probably, a bit like Harry Potter. The intellectual equal, at least, of all his peers, but being socially behind, and knowing it, and never being able to change that. You’d think that might leave a mark somehow.
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