The day before Tommorow (special deja vu blog)

So as the big day approaches, is everything ready? "Probably" is the only answer I can give. In the last blog  I welcomed back my old friend Rain, who is welcome to go now, any time he wants to... Taxi for Rain please.... or at least be elsewhere on Saturday. This uncertainty with the weather is part of what makes it hard to know how ready you are.

 Oh Mighty God of Rain- Will you be blessing us with your watery gifts tomorrow?
If the weather is nice and sunny (no offence Rain) I plan to have some of the event outside in front of the church and have the consultants inside, answering questions and generally consulting on multiple aspects of wood heating. Outside will be the Loch Tay Food Chain and Big Shed representatives and also the various products for sale including some amazing woven creels, baskets an platters from local weaver Georgia Crook who has a studio and work on sale at Tombreck. 

J

Just a few glimpses of Georgia's work reveal both her talent and the incredible beauty and texture of the natural materials she works with - no plastics here.  

As to the day being a success, if just one person visiting tomorrow fits a wood heating system as a result of the information they have learnt then the day will have been a success in my opinion. Once that person, (very happy at having such cheap and good heating) starts telling their neighbours, " I wish I'd done it years ago" and people can see that these systems actually work and are not difficult to use, then more people will fit them.As woodfuelled heating systems become increasingly common, so oil heating with its ever rising cost and pollution will seem, even more than now, a poor solution to the problem of heating.

R

Rowan poles from Coppice Experiment 2, available for sale on the big day. An ideal gift for the Rowan pole collectors we all know and love.
These systems are so common in areas just like the glen all over the Nordic Countries, Austria, Poland, Germany, Canada, U.S.A.... In Finland there are numerous examples of wood fuel supply chains, often community owned cooperatives in which people take control of their own local heat needs. Local timber heats local houses, haulage costs are very low, so the fuel is more economical to produce and thus cheaper for the end user. Employment in forestry is guaranteed into the future, which ensures good sustainable forestry practice and as these chains are often community owned, any profit goes back into the community, rather than into the pockets of distant oil barons whose increasingly desperate ransacking of the worlds stored carbon (or oil) is paid for by our need for heat.
I certainly know where I would like the profits from heating my house to go and it isn't to Shell, supplier of oil to Glenlyon and environmental vandals par excellence. If Ogoniland was in America, not Africa then one day we might have seen Shell getting hauled over the coals alongside BP. The behaviour of Shell in Ogoniland is truly shocking, and deliberately so which makes it much much worse.

  Ogoniland in Nigeria, undoubtedly a lot nicer before Shell came along.

S

Gas flaring is a major contributor to global warming, a waste of energy and a serious health hazard.