Frack off!

I usually do my best to miss the Budget, but details will filter through. Like hearing George Osborne has endorsed the process of fracking to such a degree that oil companies will receive preferential tax breaks and even be able to by-pass the usual planning process- all to smooth their path to despoiling the Earth for maximum profit.

Yet out there, tucked away in a drawer marked "Not enough easy money in these oddball ideas" are schemes that could provide gigawatts of sustainable power, if only the oil companies and the government had enough foresight to realise that this headlong rush to exploit the Earth's dwindling oil resources is, in the longer term, complete folly. There's real money in exploiting wind, solar and wave power. At the moment though, this government, with its ultra short term view, just can't, or won't, see it.

LONDON DISPATCH

One way of avoiding one's blood pressure experiencing a nasty hike while watching the budget is to chase around London in the freezing cold (you know that hateful thing: "3 degrees, feels like minus 2") and see a few things you haven't caught yet despite your dozens of visits to the capital.

 Tuesday afternoon found us taking in the Kurt Schwitters exhibition at the Tate Britain. The show was called "Schwitters in Britain", which was in itself an education for me, because I didn't even know there was such a connection. He established his reputation in the Dada and Surrealist movements through strangely inhabited rooms he called his Merz Baus, but in the late 30s the Nazis took against him and declared  his work "degenerate". He fled to Scotland, but was picked up and spent the War years interned on the Isle of Man as an "enemy alien"  Here he produced some of his most imaginative and innovative work. The founder of the concept of the "installation" and "found art" he worked with what he could find in his camp, sparing swirls of paint, a bit of chicken wire, bus tickets, receipts, advertising fliers- all was grist to his uniquely inspired mill.

That night we saw Strindberg's "Miss Julie" transferred from a chilly Scandinavia to a parched, modern-day South Africa. Powerful and harrowing stuff from a terrific South African cast.

Wednesday morning saw us wandering round the quixotically strange "Leighton House" in Chelsea, where the 19th century nobleman and pres of the RA decorated his huge town house in the style of a Damascene villa, with genuine tiling, rugs and ceramics which produce a strange and beguiling atmosphere. I fancy, however, it would have looked even better under the dazzling blue skies of Syria than the lowering, almost menacing cloud cover of a London winter.

Finally, we visited the Temple Church in Fleet Street, lovingly restored after being bombed flat by the Luftwaffe in 1941. Almost next door we took a peek at the Middle Temple Hall. Closed to the public the sign said, but the infinitely relaxed security guy was happy to admit pretty much anyone who asked, so we were able to marvel at the extraordinary timber roof- more impressive than the roof of Westminster Hall. The same night the nearby church was destroyed, another large bomb fell just outside the Great Hall , but it survived largely intact.
Then the ever helpful guard told us we could even have had lunch there and rubbed shoulders with all the QCs and Old Bailey judges, but we couldn't fit it in on the day. He passed us a card with numbers for us to ring ahead to be sure of a place. We're gonna do it...