Those who have little else to do but follow my jottings in a sister publication to this – Construction National – will have come across a number of alternatives being proposed to the HS2 as probably more economic in the conventional sense: not to mention more environmentally friendly. The despoiling of large tracts of countryside to allow trains to shoot down to London from the North West and Midlands (and probably ONLY in that direction) at 250mph is beloved of those who wish to knock an hour or so off the journey. That appears to be speed for its own sake.

The left-of-centre think tank New Economics Foundation is proposing the alternative of developing the cities and towns in the North and Midlands as economic entities by transforming the internal transport infrastructure rather than pointing the entire country even more towards London. The proponents of the re-opening of the trans-Pennine tunnel to enable a direct line across the country from Liverpool to Hull make much the same point.

These past couple of weeks I have been exercised by the issue of energy once more. It has been the time when the issue of fracking moved south.

An esteemed former colleague of mine sent me the well-travelled story of God and the Northerners – where God was explaining that in creating the Earth He put balance everywhere. Heat is balanced by the freezing cold; poverty with riches; conflict with harmony. And then there was the North of England, where He put the wisest, kindest, most talented people. And the balance? You guessed it – the "tossers" He put down South to govern us.

As if to bear out that epigram, Lord Howell – George Osborne’s father-in-law – wedged his foot even further in his mouth by claiming not to know east from west. His idea of an apology was to infer that he really meant North West when he said North East. That’s all right then, isn’t it?

The upset to the weather continues to be a major topic of conversation. After returning to the UK in the middle of an – albeit shortlived – heatwave a couple of weeks ago, I had the spectacular sight today of a lightning strike in the valley just a few hundred metres from where I am sitting. The storm is also dumping a few millimetres of rain onto the garden that has only just dried out.

That was shortly before I logged onto Twitter to see what’s going on and was informed of a “yellow warning” for rain in London and the South East. Nice to know the Met Office is on the ball.

And my Christmas cactus – that I rescued from certain death at a local supermarket five-and-a-half years ago – has decided to flower!

Discerning readers will have noticed a prolonged pause between the last post and this one. I have been sojourning on the Ionian island of Corfu, where a pleasant 38⁰ has been the norm while Britain has been sweltering in the high 20s and low 30s. Although the most northerly and westerly of all the Greek islands, Corfu does still have the common problem of water being a precious commodity. It also finds renewable energy a ready source. What was puzzling, though, is how the solar-heated water contrived to be hotter in the evening than during the day.

The fruit crop this year suffered from an early heatwave in April, while we were clearing snow, which meant the blossom came before there were sufficient bees around to pollinate it. A second crop is very late so will probably never come to anything. It’s another side to the freakish weather that some people still don’t acknowledge as climate change.

I have come home to find my shorts and sandals are still in demand and the spring trickling from the hillside onto my lawn via a land drain has finally dried up. Ironically, it means the wetland plants I scrounged from a neighbour with a similar problem to soak up the resulting ‘water feature’ now need watering!

The billboard for my local newspaper has been shouting the news that the council is planning to save £1m next year by – among other things – closing down local recycling points. That follows just a year on from an act of vandalism by the county council when it closed the so-called ‘neighbourhood recycling centre’ (or tip, as it used to be called) in my town. It was an issue the victorious Labour candidate in my county council ward fought his campaign on. Now the newly-elected Labour borough council is to take the axe to more recycling facilities.

Still, at least Ed Davey has taken up the cudgels against climate change sceptics. After all, he is the Energy and Climate change Secretary. 

At the launch of the Met Office’s new Climate Service UK, he said: “Some sections of the press are giving out uncritical campaigning platforms to individuals and lobby groups who reject outright the fact that climate change is the result of human activity.

“This is not the serious science of challenging, checking, and probing; this is destructive and loudly clamouring scepticism born of vested interest, nimbyism, public-seeking controversialism, or sheer blinkered, dogmatic, political bloody-mindedness.”

This week the House of Commons is debating amendments to the Government’s Energy Bill before it shunts off to the House of Lords to continue its tortuous route to the statute book. The debate was opened by the chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, Tim Yeo.

Mr Yeo, together with a colleague on the committee, proposed an amendment to commit to the decarbonisation of electricity generation by 2030, rather than leave it to the whim of the Energy Secretary in 2016.

The logic behind the amendment, to quote Mr Yeo’s constituency website, was that: “Delaying this decision for three years leaves investors wondering whether the UK is really serious about decarbonising its electricity sector. Concerns have been heightened by the publication of the Gas Generation Strategy that includes a scenario which envisages the revising upwards of the Fourth Carbon Budget and construction of up to 37GW of new gas-fired power stations.”

While the issue of food miles illustrates the ridiculous over-production of carbon emissions in the way we distribute food in the world, the issue of food waste is a scandal that is too little regarded.

Every now and then an article crops up on the mainstream media pointing out the amount of food – particularly bread – that is thrown away by the average British household. In January even the Daily Mail was shocked by a report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers that around half the food produced in the world never gets eaten.

The report, Global Food – Waste Not Want Not, said: “Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. Yet due to poor practices in harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, it is estimated that 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach. Furthermore, this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilisers and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs which simply end up as waste. This level of wastage is a tragedy that cannot continue if we are to succeed in the challenge of sustainably meeting our future food demands.”

The issue of sick building syndrome cropped up in conversation last week. In the late 1980s and 1990s the idea that symptoms of ill health could be associated with presence in a building – often a workplace – was common. The term itself seems to have dropped out of use but it is less clear why.

The issue was raised by a fellow participant in a seminar at Greenbuild Expo in Manchester. The general topic concerned the idea that green building was more than just an end in itself. The built environment affects us in all our doings and beings, so to speak. Thus, greener workplaces have been seen to improve productivity and lower absenteeism, while research at the University of Exeter has indicated that greener open spaces in cities lead to feelings of wellbeing among the inhabitants.

There is a caveat. The online newsletter Science Omega quotes the leader of the research, Dr Matthew White of the university’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health as saying: “We cannot tell from those studies whether green space improves mental health or if people with better mental health – perhaps because they are richer or have more stable personalities – tend to move to greener areas.”