DIARY
ALEXANDRA ARTLEY 0 n Saturday the arrival of 95 children from the Chernobyl area of the Soviet Union, to spend a fortnight's holiday with British guides and scouts, was another poignant reminder of the international nuclear industry's vast and continuing casualties of peace. Also this week, in a little publicised conference at the Universi- ty of Liverpool, those who know and love Sellafield met to form a new national lobby against THORP (the Thermal Oxide Re- processing Plant in Cumberland) which will begin to take in foreign nuclear washing on a quite unprecedented scale in 1992. How could any patriot in govern- ment have ever agreed to this? Apart from greatly increased radioactive discharges (aerial discharges alone are predicted to increase tenfold) another lovely coastal prospect in the Nineties will be Japanese warships in the Irish Sea escorting their newly extracted plutonium home. I would not trust the management of any nuclear establishment to shell peas (their task with this evil science is impossible). The so- called 'safety' men of the industry must be rather cross at the wonderful ads which recently appeared in the New York Times and Nucleonics Week headed: 'Journalists: are you prepared to cover the next nuclear accident?' Here (for $249) an NYT- produced video-cassette instructs hacks how to use a personal dosimeter and particle-filtering face-mask when covering the next 'minor' or `major' nuclear acci- dent. Rather hopelessly, the video ends up by saying, 'Don't go where you know you'll need it.' Those who dare not go should read instead Living in the Shadow: The Story of the People of Sellafield (Pan, £5.99), a new book by Jean McSorley which gives a simple and highly intelligent account of the way the nuclear industry has robbed several generations of Cumbrians of their health, land and peace of mind. It Is high time this ghastly place was shut down, cleaned up and alternative employ- ment found for the unfortunate people of this remote and beautiful English region. If nuclear waste, as we are always told, does no harm to the children of the poor, perhaps it is time to bury a bit in the playing-fields of Eton.
In common with thousands of otherwise fortunate Londoners trying to move house at the moment (our lives now revolve around the Mackintosh Architecture School in Glasgow) London's current property limbo has proved to be both trying and funny. George Orwell once described the English as a nation with sad knobbly faces, bad teeth and a love of flowers, and if one group of people has benefited from the property down-turn in
the South-East it is florists. Everyone in this neighbourhood with property to sell runs home with armfuls of fresh flowers, every time an estate agent rings, to create a suitably artless interior. The property ven- dor and the tart are probably unique in hearing the leitmotif of a complete stranger in their bedrooms, bathrooms, and airing- cupboards and then never seeing him again. In the course of a month or two 'there has been the barrister (already the owner of two other houses in smarter parts of town) who toyed for three weeks with the notion of buying another place to put up family and friends after evenings at Covent Garden and the Barbican; another barrister with a lunchtime mania for look- ing inside lofts; the blind man with a love of architecture whose fingers I traced over the mouldings on fireplaces and doors; and two young film-makers who wanted to make a video as they viewed the house perhaps just to clip into a bumpy inconse- quential film about buying a house. Then came the couple who decided on these very premises to part. No one wept more than I did. One surprising thing is the way people agonise for weeks on the telephone about what to do. It is not always a question of money but of simply raising the adrenalin to make a decision. My first proper flat (close to Euston) overlooked Cartwright Gardens where a Jean Rhys heroine stayed in a miserable brown hotel room in After Leaving Mr McKenzie. I walked round it in
30 seconds (it was very small) and simply said, 'I'll take it.' The same thing happened here and in Glasgow where we saw the new house for only 15 minutes in a typical Western Scottish deluge. Despite the leak- ing roof, tremendously flexible back wall, polystyrene ceiling tiles and plastic clay- mores, no time was lost in reaching an agreement. (We were not on speakers for 24 hours because I happened to remark that Greek Thompson's designs for domes- tic joinery are hideous.) It takes me three minutes to agree on somewhere to live but half an hour dithering over a bottle of scent or a bag of potatoes. But I think that is the proper way round.
Here at the Alexandra Smith Institute serious thought is going into the contents of the next Conservative Party Manifesto. As usual, our latest notion has been enthusiastically received by the Don't Look Now Group (otherwise known as `Mrs Thatcher's praetorian guard'). An election winner is quite simply the priva- tisation of the fire service. Like those moments in life when one is a cancer patient, bankrupt, homeless or mad, the first thing ordinary people think about when their roof is ablaze is — choice and an end to Soviet-inspired monopolies. These vicious class warriors with their yellow helmets, axes and 'breathing appar- atus' have for years been breaking down doors and snatching women and children for no reason other than that a house is on fire. Copies of Flaming Forward: The Case for the Privatisation of the Fire Service may be had from the Alexandra Smith Institute, Hayek-Against-the-Wall, London EC4.
For my generation a stunning political revelation was the news that Bernard Weatherill, the esteemed Speaker of the House of Commons, is a vegetarian. On Sunday, he was the only person to appear at the Young Indians' vegetarian picnic in Hyde Park wearing a grey suit and a blue tie. This merely proves how inaccurate were the Seventies' style-watchers' who too readily assumed that apparel proclaims the man. What goes on in the human heart and soul can be rarely known by physical appearances. In the next parliamentary session when Mr Weatherill's pleasing voice once again pleads, 'Order, order', three million almost-forty-somethings will be able only to think of a crisp green salad with a tarragon dressing, a Japanese stir- fry and a portion of brown, long-grain organic rice with a splash of terriyaki.
Auberon Waugh is visiting a health farm.
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