Friday 14 December 2012

Fracking: A warning from Rutland

A year ago Lord Bonkers wrote this in his Diary.


There has been a lot of nonsense written in recent weeks about ‘fracking’ – that is, drilling into hard shale rocks and then setting off small explosions to crack them and release the gas inside – which I have been practising here in Rutland. One local newspaper (not my own High Leicestershire Radical, I hasten to add) printed its report under the headline “IT’S FRACKING HELL SAY VILLAGERS”; I thought that was in particularly poor taste. Let me make it clear: Rutland has always been subject to earthquakes, as anyone who has studied its history will know. To connect them with my fracking is simply...

I am sorry, Meadowcroft came in just then, complaining that he had narrowly missed being hit on the head by a stone that had fallen from the battlements as he was digging in the kitchen garden. I pointed out that there is bound to be some settlement in old houses like mine and suggested that he got on with his work. He left mumbling something about Trotsky.

There has been, as I was pointing out, a lot of nonsense talked in recent weeks. In particular, the Revd Hughes’s refusal to mount the pulpit of St Asquith’s until he had been given a hard hat seemed to be particularly unfortunate. And did he have to take as his text Zechariah, xi, 2 “Howl, fir tree, for the mighty cedar is fallen”? It set a bad example to the choirboys...

I say, could anyone dig a chap out of all this rubble?

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