Pylon madness

It makes me rather cross to read that the National Grid is planning to spend £500 million on removing pylons from beauty spots, presumably as a result of arm-twisting by the government, keen to provide a sop to the eco-nuts at somebody else's expense. But it is all money being sucked out of our national life. We all have to pay for this particular madness, for madness is what it seems to me.

Electricity is a very important part of modern life, which would not exist without it. It is the wonder of the modern world. A wonder which allows action at a distance, which allows us to have power for our toasters which has been generated somewhere else. No more need for lots of smelly and dangerous fires on domestic premises. Much less need for inefficient and polluting coal consumption.

So why is it that we have the hates for seeing how this wonder is accomplished? Most of us that is. I rather like the sight of electricity pylons marching across the countryside. A fine bit of engineering - and it is nice to have engineering that one can see at work, as it were. So much engineering these days is too small or too complicated to be fully appreciated by us laity.

It is a cousin of the domestic disease whereby we do not like to be able to see how things in our kitchens work? That everything is covered up by expensive flush panels, flush panels which may be mechanically unsatisfactory in themselves and which may make maintenance of whatever it is that is hidden difficult. See reference 1 for a sample of previous musings on this topic. Search for oven door to find more.

Or thinking as I type, is it not a sop to the eco-nuts at all, rather a sop to all those folk living in the country on benefits - thinly disguised as farm subsidies - who are getting embarrassed about it and fancy £500 million worth of paid employment with the National Grid instead? A complement to the similar sum being poured into Faslane to bribe the natives there? The country being where most of the offending pylons are, never mind all those bog-standards living down the heavily pylonned Lea Valley. But on this story, don't the country folk just end up getting embarrassed by being the creatures of the eco-nuts instead? The very people who won't let them grow modern, genetically engineered crops and who bang on about badgers.

I await the wisdom of Corby the Crow on all this with interest.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/a-different-kind-of-truth.html.