Web ad or card box?

July 12th, 2011

The digital era is impacting on everything we know – shopping, travel, politics, news, social networking, film, music, house purchase, learning, books, advertising; and now the web is increasingly going mobile. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau 41% of the UK population have a smartphone. By 2020 it’s thought there will be 10 billion mobile devices worldwide.

This revolution is particularly affecting communications and the transmission of information, shaking up industries like newspapers, publishing, book selling and telecoms. But will all the old ways just wither away? We think not and here’s an example in advertising of what we mean.

We like people to stay at The Larches because it’s a great place with an intriguing garden and belvedere. We tell the world about the cottage and facilities through our website and via the agents. But now we have hit on a simple non-digital idea: a card box for passers-by at the front of the cottage. The photo opposite shows the box by the road with the belvedere in the background at the top of the fellside garden.

Anyone interested in staying here and liking the look of the place can simply take a card with the address, postcode and booking details. A blended solution, mixing the old with the new!

And what’s so special about the card box? Made of recycled wood, it has a 20 mms thick perspex block at the front, enabling the cards to be seen but crucially kept set back from a possible wet front. [The close up photo below shows the rain on the lid.]

The lid lifts up to enable you to get your hand in to take the card; and there is a 15 mms deep wooden block above the sloping roof, which sheds the rain away from the hinge and area where there might be leakage.

Screwed to the gate post, the back base is made from waste oak flooring, with glue channels at the rear to allow the rain to drain down behind. All very practical and environmentally sound! We will have to explore patenting it.

PS We’re not forgetting the digital world completely! Just type “Lakeland belvedere” into Google maps and you’ll get full directions, telephone etc for The Larches. And if you have stayed at the cottage, you can write a review.

You can click on twitter.com/thelarches to get our latest tweets.

We’re also looking at the use of QR (Quick Response) coding with these cards. QR barcodes are easily created and can provide information (URL, location, contact number etc), which can be read instantly by a smartphone.

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Big Society’s at Seldom Seen

June 27th, 2011

“There is no such thing as society”, Prime Minister Thatcher informed us back in a 1987 article for Woman’s Own. Now there’s been a change of tack in Tory thinking and everyone is trying to understand what Prime Minister Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ actually means.

Less regulation? More street parties? Less public services? More self help? No national forests? More competition in the NHS? Less weight watching? Smaller populations in prisons and psychiatric hospitals? There’s no end to the list.

When you come to think about it, well …. it’s just embarrassing! No wonder thirty learned professors, who are panel members of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, plan to resign because of their Chairman’s decision (Guardian, 19 June) to make the ‘Big Society’ a subject for serious research and grants.

The Government plans shortly to announce what the Big Society really means in its White Paper on Public Services Reform. I’ m not expecting any great revelations.

However we know the Coalition Government is introducing cuts to public services on an unprecedented scale at every level. These will affect all of us, however hard councils, voluntary bodies and others try to introduce efficiencies.

Back on the ground in Seldom Seen last week it all seemed suddenly clear. The arrival of the Big Society means I must now give up all hope of the water gully on the steep ravine road above The Larches ever being cleared by the Council. It was a prospect I’d quietly nursed since the November 2009 floods.

The Government’s answer to our local community’s problem is simple. If a job needs doing, do it yourself! Which is why in the photo below, I’m at the end of a hard day’s work with a scythe and hoe having cleared thick undergrowth, earth and a blocked pipe to keep rainwater from flooding down the road. Tough luck though if you are too old or infirm to do this or have kids to look after.

Does it matter? Well in winter’s freezing conditions the road outside The Larches is like a steep ice rink, which can easily land you with a broken arm or ankle. You need a hospital? Simple. Just get on your bike!

Posted in Environment, Local news, The Larches | No Comments »

‘Savage Grandeur’ exhibition

June 3rd, 2011

The road south from Keswick. Blencathra is in the distance. Painting by John Laporte.


There’s a fascinating exhibition at the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere, which is well worth visiting before it closes on June 21st. “Savage Grandeur and Noblest Thoughts: Discovering the Lake District 1750-1820″ has a collection of over 100 paintings, engravings, books, maps and other material from the period when the Lake District was first being discovered as an area of grand romantic scenery.

This was a time of revolution in Europe. Travelling at home was more attractive than journeying through unknown lands on the continent. It’s a feeling we can understand now, as people hesitate to visit countries like Egypt and Syria while the ‘Arab Spring’ is bringing change and turmoil to much of North Africa and the Middle East.

All of the exhibits are from the Wordsworth Trust’s own material. They may for that reason have a bias towards the interests of the donors of material, rather than providing a balanced picture of how the Lake District was represented at the time, but this is a small objection.

The material is particularly strong for the northern lakes and has some marvellous paintings of Borrowdale, Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite.

Skiddaw, Blencathra and Keswick are well represented as well as Grasmere and the Langdales. The influence of Thomas West’s Guide to the Lakes, published in 1778 is also evident in the choice of several of the subjects depicted.

An excellent catalogue for the exhibition (189 pages) with illustrations of all the material and an index is available at a reduced price of £15. It’s worth getting even if you can’t make the exhibition itself.

Posted in Culture, Environment, Local news | No Comments »

Recycle now please – URGENT

May 30th, 2011

Thanks to the writing on a recyclable cardboard soup carton, I learnt last week that there’s a great DEFRA website (www.recyclenow.com), with lots of information about recycling. 

This includes a searchable database. You can type in your postcode and find out more about local practice and the policies of your local authority for the recycling of different kinds of materials. This is useful because these are changing as new techniques of sorting enable more to be collected and saved.

Allerdale local authority had managed in 2009 to achieve a recycling rate of 45%, but last year the figure dropped to 44%. When I asked Stephanie Fleming, Allerdale’s recycling officer about this, she replied “the weather’s got to take the blame here”. 

With so much flooding in November, the Council was overwhelmed with the sheer task of getting areas cleared and houses habitable. Water was covering huge areas and recycling for a while had had to take second place. Hard to argue about that!

But there is a bigger question here we need to ask. The EU has set a 50% target by 2020 for household recycling for the UK as a whole, but both Scotland and Wales have set their own higher targets of 70% for 2025. With no targets set for English authorities does this mean, say Friends of the Earth that we’ll shelter under the skirts of the Scots and the Welsh and lag behind? 

We know this Government is averse to the ‘nanny state’, but let’s see a bit more forceful direction on this front! Surely we need this if we’re going to create a green economy, which Ministers tell us they want.

Two other good Government websites on green issues are worth looking at. A more technical waste data flow site, (http://www.wastedataflow.org/) provides additional information about waste management across the country.  You need to register to get access to the data.

The second is for the Department of Energy and Climate Control  (http://www. decc.gov.uk/). This includes information about the Government’s Green Deal programme, with more details due out soon.

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Posted in Environment, Local news, Recycling, Technology | No Comments »

Rainbows fell on Seldom Seen

May 12th, 2011

Remember those lines from King Lear: ”You have seen sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears were like a better way …” ?

Without referring to it specifically, Shakespeare knew well the power of the rainbow to stir the imagination, but it was only studied in detail as a problem in optics by Rene Descartes in 1637 – just 21 years after Shakespeare died.

Despite its power to excite and delight, I wasn’t ready last Sunday for the evening rainbow that came bursting through like a tiger over the Derwent Valley. It had been a dull day mostly and I was in the house reading. Suddenly I sensed a brightness outside and looked up to see a slice of the rainbow through the window (See photo opposite).

I rushed for the camera and raced the westering sun up the garden steps to the Belvedere, hoping it would stay. It waxed and dulled over 20 minutes or so with a secondary arc above, producing this marvellous cameo below. The rooftops and gardens of Seldom Seen were enclosed in a luminous glow, while outside this charmed hemisphere all seemed grey and dull. Yes, what a delight!

Posted in Belvederes, Local news, Seasons, The Larches | 2 Comments »

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