I read this morning a full page article in the Guardian about the way the Australians look after the boat people, that is to say to shipping them off to not very comfortable islands some way away from the mainland. It seems that they are not in the least embarrassed about this. And while it is all rather unpleasant, I am not sure what else they can do. They have a heavily populated archipelago to the northwest - 250 million or so of them (see 1st January), a lot of them poor, not to say backward - with, inevitably, very porous borders. Lots of people, both from there and further afield, are going to gamble on getting themselves smuggled across the water in search of the streets thought to be paid with gold, and the Australians have to push back somehow: it is all very well for us to be sanctimonious about it, but we don't have the problem.
But I do wonder how many of the poor sods involved realise that they will have to do thirty years hard labour at the jobs that the people already in Australia don't want any more, after which their children might wind up as fully fledged citizens? Or, alternatively, turn their hands to crime or illegality of one sort or another. All a bit rough on their children, but I am not sure what can realistically be done about that either.
Then off on the morning ramble, to find a neighbouring chimney being taken down. The point of interest being that rather than using a club hammer and cold chisel, the chap was used a Kango (see http://www.milwaukeetool.com/. I think that this is the right place but it looks as if Kangos are now on the reserve list) or something like that to loosen the bricks, one or two at a time while I would have thought that it would be a lot harder work to hold a Kango up to brickwork like that than to wield a hammer. Rather like those chaps who use noisy blowers to move autumn leaves around in circumstances in which a broom would be quieter, quicker and generally more ecological. And if one was worried about bricks falling down inside the chimney, it would be easy enough to block the flue in some suitable, temporary way.
From where I moved on to a conceit from our last visit to Hampton Court. Let us suppose that when a molecule of water is inside a significant body of water for a significant time, its quark configuration is used to store the geographical position, depth, latitude and longitude. All something to do with the moon and the stars - an astrologer would know how it is done. Then, after the water has evaporated from its home water, floated around the world a bit, fallen as rain somewhere in the Thames valley, it finally makes it to Hampton Court Bridge. Where we have erected an MRI scanner or some such which can read the quark configuration of the water below and produce an image of the water coloured according to the place of origin of the water. A swirl of Arctic Ocean here, a dab of Malacca Straits there. One might get an interesting read out. Or would it all be terribly mixed up and one would be reduced to imaging quite small variations in the make up of the water. How might one find out? Could the weather people include such a scheme in their models?
A variation would be to colour the image according to where the rain fell instead of from where the rain came from. At least that would be entirely practical, albeit in a crude way, by adding chemical markers to all the springs which give rise to the Thames.
PS: I was told by a regular at TB some years ago that paved with gold was all a mistake. The gold in question was not the metallic sort, rather the colour of the sort of sandstone used for London pavements at one time.
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