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The Blankney Journal is now in its eighth day and I am most grateful to everyone who visits the site. Hey, it would be nice to know who you are! If you visit the site and enjoy it please click the 'follow this blog' link in the left hand margin (just below the picture of me). It only reveals your name no other information. Even if you never came back again it would be nice to know you visited. Finally, the long term aim is to make the blog as interactive as possible. If you wish to make a suggestion or comment about anything in the Blankney Journal, good or bad, I will be more than happy to publish your views, always providing of course they are neither abusive nor offensive. Please e-mail me at the following address garlant@btinternet.com . I would love to hear from you.

Recycling Doubts

For a long time now I have questioned, in my own mind, whether recycling can be cost effective. I was very interested therefore in a recent article that suggested incineration was probably a better way forward. Over the past few months I have read of several instances where recycled materials from Britain have ended up in landfill sites as far away as India and China. Now with the demise of the pound it is no longer viable to sent this material abroad. It has been estimated that 100,000 tonnes of recycled waste is being stored in warehouses on industrial estates. The waste paper market has collapsed and councils are now paying to store this waste to avoid incurring landfill taxes. In 2006 the government funded a study called Balances and Energy Impacts of the Management of UK Waste. As a result City engineers concluded that incinerating paper and other types of waste could provide the nation with one sixth of its electricity. A staggering thought. The net cost in energy terms of moving and recycling paper waste means we could cut carbon emissions by switching from recycling to incineration. It further concluded that a well run incinerator at high temperatures emits less dioxins than a typical bonfire. Obviously, this argument does not take into account preservation of the earths resources, saving trees for example, but it does make you question the overall merit of recycling paper waste.

19 Red - No Not Roulette - Football

I find this quite astonishing! A Spanish referee issued 19 red cards in the same match. The game involved Spanish rivals Recrativo Linense and Saladillo Algesiras in the regional first division of the southern province of Cadiz. With Linense leading 1-0 a fight broke out between two players ,which quickly turned into a brawl, followed by a pitch invasion. The referee abandoned the game and fled the pitch. In his post match report he wrote that he had sent off 19 players. Mind you, I watch Match of The Day every Saturday night and if I was a referee I would probably issue 19 red cards in every game. The amount of obstruction, holding, pushing, shirt tugging, elbowing and leaning-on and bad tackling that goes on is disgraceful and that's just from one corner kick.The problem as I see it is, that the money involved in the game today is so great that it has raised the game to a new level of competitiveness. Therefore, these blatant fouls have become an accepted part of the game. Referees today have no option but to turn a blind eye otherwise they would be continually stopping play and the game would not flow. This would ruin the game from the spectators point of view but, ironically, they have helped to create this cash driven sport by allowing themselves to be ripped off by exorbitant admission prices.

Wedgewood's Cup Runneth Over

How sad to see that Wedgewood's have gone into administration. Like Woolworths, Wedgewood was an icon of a past British age. It represented everything good about British manufacturing, craftsmanship, quality and design. It was in the eighteenth century that Josiah Wedgewood founded his empire in Burslem, Staffordshire. Later he was to build a new town Estruria, near Stoke-On-Trent. It was here that the finer wedgewood was made whilst Burslem produced the everyday ware items. He used great artists to create and design his pieces. At a time when the middle classes were becoming more prosperous Josiah Wedgewood gave them beautiful and desirable creations. The Wedgewood name became synonymous with beauty, quality and elegance. Alas, we now live in an age where those attributes are becoming increasingly less important.