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A very small adventure
Sep. 17th, 2011 08:44 pmIt began, as adventures tend to nowadays, in the financial pages. National Grid offering a peculiarly-constituted bond: what for? What are they building? A mighty HVDC line from north-east Wales to Hunterston: but what's at Hunterston? A nuclear power station … a well-run nuclear power station … a nuclear power station with an open day on Saturday … an open day consistent across the British Energy fleet.
A quick call to the Press Office. Sizewell shut. Hinckley Point hard to get to, and shut. A glimmer of hope: Dungeness B. Discussions of railway routing; confusion over the three Ashfords briskly resolved, the new line from St Pancras to Kent eulogised, tickets procured.
An early rise, a hasty ride, an almond croissant; to Ashford International with a bicycle, twenty miles of Kent to cover and two and a half hours to do it in. Rain, short-lived but drenching. Impermeable not so. Romsey Marshes, their lack of charm. Lydd pie shop. The shingle flats, filled with the glaucous sea-kale.
Coffee and fine biscuits. An adequate pace procuring some time to enjoy them. Disaster: no plant tours available. An exceedingly safe presentation focussing on safety to the exclusion of the engineering magnificence that I was there for. EDF's pernicious habit of using 'terawatt' to mean 'terawatt-hour' on the false grounds that the different orders of magnitude make confusion impossible. The control room. Imprecation from local security that I not post my close-up pictures of the controls on the Internet. Yr correspondent's belief that obliging Her Majesty's enemies to decipher at great lengths the principles of operation of a kind of nuclear power station abandoned as uneconomic thirty years ago more to be considered a coup of the counter-espionage kind; yr correspondent nonetheless compliant. A promise that in 2012 it should be permitted to stand on top of the reactor vessel.
The sea-wall from Lydd-on-sea to Dymchurch, considered as an exceedingly fine impromptu velodrome; the sadness of lifting one's bicycle over an obstacle with one's thumb on the reset-trip-counter button. A frankly excessive hill in Sandgate. Sunset over south Kent from the train. The entirely useless stopping-train from King's Cross, discovered in time to catch a better one. Home via a purveyor of fine soups. Fine soup, and a warm bath. The adventure thus concluded.
A quick call to the Press Office. Sizewell shut. Hinckley Point hard to get to, and shut. A glimmer of hope: Dungeness B. Discussions of railway routing; confusion over the three Ashfords briskly resolved, the new line from St Pancras to Kent eulogised, tickets procured.
An early rise, a hasty ride, an almond croissant; to Ashford International with a bicycle, twenty miles of Kent to cover and two and a half hours to do it in. Rain, short-lived but drenching. Impermeable not so. Romsey Marshes, their lack of charm. Lydd pie shop. The shingle flats, filled with the glaucous sea-kale.
Coffee and fine biscuits. An adequate pace procuring some time to enjoy them. Disaster: no plant tours available. An exceedingly safe presentation focussing on safety to the exclusion of the engineering magnificence that I was there for. EDF's pernicious habit of using 'terawatt' to mean 'terawatt-hour' on the false grounds that the different orders of magnitude make confusion impossible. The control room. Imprecation from local security that I not post my close-up pictures of the controls on the Internet. Yr correspondent's belief that obliging Her Majesty's enemies to decipher at great lengths the principles of operation of a kind of nuclear power station abandoned as uneconomic thirty years ago more to be considered a coup of the counter-espionage kind; yr correspondent nonetheless compliant. A promise that in 2012 it should be permitted to stand on top of the reactor vessel.
The sea-wall from Lydd-on-sea to Dymchurch, considered as an exceedingly fine impromptu velodrome; the sadness of lifting one's bicycle over an obstacle with one's thumb on the reset-trip-counter button. A frankly excessive hill in Sandgate. Sunset over south Kent from the train. The entirely useless stopping-train from King's Cross, discovered in time to catch a better one. Home via a purveyor of fine soups. Fine soup, and a warm bath. The adventure thus concluded.
