Busy Day

Alun Life 1 Comment

There’s still some dis­pute about how the world star­ted. Sci­ent­ists have observed galax­ies fly­ing apart from each other across the uni­verse. From this they have deduced that in the past the galax­ies must have all been much closer together. In fact go back far enough in time, they say, and you’ll find the uni­verse must have been a single point from which all time and space came from.

Some people have uncovered other truths. They tell the story of Ymir, the first of the frost giants who fought against the gods and was slain. From this body the gods cre­ated the world. From his skull they made the sky and from his bones they made the moun­tains. From his eye­brows they made a bar­rier between Midgard, the world of man and Jotun­heim, the world of giants. This is why you rarely see a frost giant in the supermarket.

Sci­ent­ists had been reluct­ant to accept the death of Ymir as a reas­on­able explan­a­tion for the cre­ation of the world. “Where’s the evid­ence?” they asked. Then the cre­ation­ists smiled for they knew they had won. “Not only can we show you the sky and moun­tains,” they said. “We can even prove that Ymir had piles.” And they poin­ted to Derby.

I had hoped to write up some­thing about pas­sage graves today. N.S. Gill has poin­ted out there’s a live web­cam feed of the sol­stice from New­grange tomor­row 8:30 to 9:30 GMT. I thought it would fit nicely with that. How­ever I have some essays I’d like to fin­ish mark­ing before Christ­mas. Today is going to be par­tic­u­larly busy as I also have the police round after someone tried to burgle some sheds.

It’s not just the burg­lary that annoys me, it’s also the stu­pid­ity. This guy left foot­prints after jump­ing into the potato patch while climb­ing the fence from next door. It’s a bit point­less when he could have used the unlocked gate that we have so I can get round next door without hav­ing to leap fences. This gate is just a few pan­els down from the potato patch.

Still, he’s not as stu­pid as the burg­lar who vis­ited a couple of Christ­mases ago who split open some sacks I was keep­ing out­side and rum­maged through to see what I was hid­ing. I know, if I wanted them secure I should have kept them inside the house. But there’s some­thing about sacks of manure that makes me want to leave them outside.

I know some places go for civic pride through great monu­ments and events. In Derby we tend to build a com­munity through some­thing more akin to a blitz spirit. There are plenty of people who are warm, friendly and help­ful. Some are even are as hon­est as the day is long. That’s a nuis­ance at this time of year.

Noth­ing has been lost except time.

Loot by Sharon Waxman

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lootcover

In short, the best archae­o­pol­it­ics book I’ve read since Edward Fox’s Sac­red Geo­graphy. I was kindly sent a review copy by the pub­lish­ers and I have a feel­ing that they were hop­ing for a bit more than that, so I’ll add a bit more.

It’s sub­titled “The Battle over the Stolen Treas­ures of the Ancient World” The ancient world here is pretty much Greece, Rome and Egypt, which means she doesn’t have a lot to say about the strip­ping of sites in Africa, the Amer­icas or Asia. To some extent that’s a bit of a shame, but by focus­sing tightly on a few examples Wax­man is able to go into the details of how the mar­ket for illi­cit antiquit­ies works. You have to keep a close eye on what’s hap­pen­ing as I get the impres­sion that one of the inspir­a­tions for the antiquit­ies trade was the three-card trick. The book is four parts. She opens by look­ing at Egypt and the atti­tude of the Louvre.
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Do you need a note from a criminal to prove an artefact is stolen?

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kanefernefer
Looks nice, but are looks enough?

This is the death mask of Ka Nefer Nefer. I can tell you she was con­nec­ted with Rameses II in some way, but not a lot else. It hard to find inform­a­tion about her lie on the web because her death mask is the big story as far as Ka Nefer Nefer goes. Or rather it’s the travels her mask has been on and the dogged determ­in­a­tion of the Saint Louis Art Museum to drag its own name through the mud.

The mask was found in 1952 in Saqqara by the Egyp­tian archae­olo­gist Mohammed Zakaria Goneim, as part of the exacava­tions of the pyr­amid of Sekhemkhet. After this events are dis­puted. In 1998 it was dis­covered again when the Saint Louis Museum of Art pur­chased it. They got it from Phoenix Ancient Art, who say it came from an anonym­ous Swiss col­lec­tion before them. The Saint Louis Art Museum is fur­ther claim­ing that a Bel­gian dealer had it back 1952. This would appear to be an object that’s been shuffled around deal­ers, like yesterday’s amphorae. If you read yesterday’s entry you’ll also remem­ber I said there was going to be a test. Here it is.

You are offered an Egyp­tian death mask from a site which was claimed to be the most import­ant dis­cov­ery since the tomb of Tutankhamen. The sellers claim it left Egypt in 1952 as ‘part­age’ the prac­tice where a host nation will give for­eign excav­a­tion teams some of the arte­facts it finds. Do you:
A) Say “Hang on, Goneim was Egyp­tian, how did part­age hap­pen? It would have been held in an Egyp­tian museum. I’d bet­ter con­tact the Supreme Coun­cil of Antiquit­ies in Egypt to check the story.
or
B) Say “Owned by an anonym­ous Swiss bloke? That’s good enough for me. After all if the seller’s hon­est then he wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”

If you scored mostly ‘A’s: Con­grat­u­la­tions! You would not be not look­ing like a prize buf­foon. The claim of part­age looks ludicrous as these couple of para­graphs from the River­front Times make clear.

“That runs counter to everything I would expect,” says Robert Rit­ner, a pro­fessor at the Ori­ental Insti­tute, an Egypto­logy research cen­ter at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. “If it left Egypt that early, it prob­ably left improp­erly. Any excav­ator for the Egyp­tian gov­ern­ment is under oblig­a­tion to provide that mater­ial back to Egypt — even in the ‘50s. It isn’t his per­sonal loot that he can then take out himself.”

“It never hap­pens,” seconds Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia art-history pro­fessor Mal­colm Bell, who is also vice pres­id­ent for pro­fes­sional respons­ib­il­it­ies at the Archae­olo­gical Insti­tute of Amer­ica. “It sounds like the sort of thing you could say if you didn’t really know the cir­cum­stances and you were try­ing either explain or invent. But it’s not the sort of thing that happens.”

In his own writ­ing Goneim also indic­ates that it was Egyp­tian prop­erty. Goneim thanked the Egyp­tian gov­ern­ment for allow­ing him to use pho­tos of the mask in one of his books. You don’t tend to thank someone else for giv­ing per­mis­sion to use pho­to­graphs of your own prop­erty. There’s also the addi­tional prob­lem that the mask was recor­ded as being in the Saqqara ware­house in 1952 and 1959, but not in 1965.

If you scored mostly ‘B’s: Con­grat­u­la­tions! You’re gull­ible enough to work in the Saint Louis Museum of Art pur­chas­ing antiquit­ies. This is no mean acheive­ment. The Saint Louis Art Museum say they checked to make sure the Swiss owner was a real per­son. So did the River­front Times, and they found she was a woman who had no idea about the mask. But she had ren­ted prop­erty to two Lebanese men, Ali and Hicham Aboutaam, who turned out to be Phoenix Ancient Art. Since selling the mask to Saint Louis, the Aboutaam broth­ers have been con­victed of smug­gling illi­cit antiquit­ies. The Aboutaams are so dodgy even the Met has con­cerns about them. Assum­ing the Saint Louis Art Museum isn’t inten­tion­ally abet­ting illegal activ­it­ies (and I’d like to make clear to the museum and their law­yers I am def­in­itely not accus­ing them of this), then the logical con­clu­sion is that who­ever approved the deal was com­pletely incompetent.

The defence of the Saint Louis Museum of Art is that their pur­chase was legal, there­fore they should keep the mask. I don’t know enough about Amer­ican law to say whether or not someone keeps own­er­ship if they unknow­ingly receive stolen goods. Even if they do, this is con­fus­ing legal with moral. It is for instance legal to have unpro­tec­ted sex with the Saint Louis Blues while your wife has gone to the shops, but I don’t know any­one who would encour­age that kind of beha­viour. The museum’s own­er­ship of the mask is based on a shock­ing lack of curi­os­ity about the ori­gin of the piece. As for the claim that the mask leg­ally left Egypt via Goneim, the claim is legal in this sense; it only works because the dead can’t sue for libel. Goneim was not a cipher.

After find­ing the pyr­amid Goneim wrote a book and toured the USA. Sadly he gained enemies and on his return to Egypt life took a tra­gic turn. He was accused of smug­gling out a ves­sel found by Quibell and Lauer found in the Djoser com­plex. There was no evid­ence but he was repeatedly inter­rog­ated by the police and slandered. Lauer under­took to clear Goneim’s name and even­tu­ally found the ves­sel in a stor­e­room in Saqarra. By the time he found it, it was too late. Over­whelmed by the shame of a crime he didn’t com­mit, Goneim drowned him­self in the Nile in 1957. The records show Goneim didn’t take the mask for his own either. In view of his death I think the Saint Louis Art Museum’s claim is par­tic­u­larly repugnant.

Saint Louis’ insist­ence on hold­ing the mask raises quite a few unpleas­ant ques­tions. Does the slander of an inno­cent man mat­ter? Is it accept­able to gain arte­facts by any means, so long as you make sure you’re ignor­ant of exactly what those means are? Is it enough that an arte­fact is pretty? They don’t seem that bothered about answer­ing any.

Links:
I found this story via the Inter­na­tional Her­ald and Tribune, how­ever the best write-up is in the River­front Times from earlier this year. Even older is this 2006 art­icle from Al-Ahram

From blogs, there’s pieces by Paul Bar­ford this year and Derek Fin­cham from last year. I think they’re both more polite about the museum than me, which might be more pro­duct­ive. It’s just the read­ing round the sub­ject made the Saint Louis Art Museum appear more and more slimy to the extent that you won­der if they have a limit. Exactly how bad would the proven­ance of an arte­fact be before they refused to touch it? Would you actu­ally need to have a note from a crim­inal to prove an arte­fact was stolen?

I’ll try and write up a review of Sharon Waxman’s Loot for tomorrow.

Spanish police seize looted amphorae (pay attention, there will be a test)

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From Typ­ic­allySpan­ish comes the news that two men have been arres­ted in con­nec­tion with some 1st cen­tury amphorae which may have come from the Bou Fer­rer wreck off the Costa del Sol.

Seized Amphorae
The looted amphorae. Photo Guardia Civil.

If you’re like me you might have a vague idea you’ve heard of Bou Fer­rer, but can’t remem­ber where. That’s because it’s not been widely repor­ted in the English-speaking world. Span­ish web­log Ter­rae Anti­quae had the details back in Novem­ber 2006. The Bou Fer­rer, named after a diver who worked on the wreck is poten­tially hugely excit­ing. It’s big, 30 metres long, car­ry­ing 400 tonnes of freight. It’s also extremely well pre­served. It’s embed­ded in the seabed which means the tim­bers have sur­vived in excel­lent con­di­tion. So far forty amphorae con­tain­ing garum, a sauce made from rot­ting fish guts, have been recovered. There’s about 1200 amphorae on the wreck.

Informacion.es says the amphorae were recovered after they heard a man had a col­lec­tion of amphorae from vari­ous eras includ­ing some from the Bou Fer­rer. After hear­ing this they chased round vari­ous antiquit­ies deal­ers. The typ­ical plan is to shuffle round the arte­facts until they get con­vin­cingly lost. Then you turn up with them at an auc­tion house call­ing them “Prop­erty of a European col­lector”. Trad­ing arte­facts found after 1970 is a prob­lem due to UNESCO con­ven­tions tar­get­ting the trade in illi­cit antiquit­ies, but simply say­ing they’re part of an old col­lec­tion is good enough for a lot of deal­ers. They may well check on the Art Loss Register, but given that the amphorae have been recently lif­ted from the seabed they won’t appear on that. This is why it was imper­at­ive that the Guardia Civil hit when they did because if they’d tried fol­low­ing them through the twisty-turny deal­ing that make up the antiquit­ies mar­ket there’s a good chance they’d lose them.

To be hon­est I have trouble see­ing them as art. They’re pretty ugly look­ing and I can’t ima­gine they’ll look that much more sexy when they get cleaned up. So why are they import­ant? Well, they’re clearly of Dressel type mumble mumble. I don’t know much about amphorae shapes, but there are plenty of people who do. They’re cat­egor­ised by their pro­file, known as their Dressel type after Hein­rich Dressel who cat­egor­ised vari­ous shapes of amphora and then worked out which shapes were pop­u­lar when. A large num­ber of amphorae gives you a large sample size and gives you a good chance of put­ting a date on the shipwreck.

It’s also import­ant that the wreck is excav­ated prop­erly because there’s a lot of other inform­a­tion there which loot­ers wouldn’t be inter­ested in. For instance ships com­monly car­ried things like roof tile as bal­last. Or did they? Recent work by Phil Mills sug­gests that a simple tile=ballast approach is naïve and that actu­ally people were ship­ping tile because it had value, rather than just because it made the ship more stable at sea. If that’s the case the bal­last in this ship might be inter­est­ing. It lies on the route from south­ern Spain to Rome. Was it just garum that the Romans wanted? What else is in the wreck? If it’s not valu­able then there’s a good chance it’ll be lost if loot­ers turn over the ship. The seizure is great news.

…and as I said there’ll be a test. Find out which museum fails it tomorrow.

Should we pass on the PAS?

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Treas­ure hunter. Photo (cc) Elsie esq.

I’m slightly late to be com­ment­ing on Derek Fincham’s paper, in the Inter­na­tional Journal of Cul­tural Prop­erty, A Coördin­ated Legal and Policy Approach to Undis­covered Antiquit­ies: Adapt­ing the Cul­tural Her­it­age Policy of Eng­land and Wales to Other Nations of Ori­gin. There’s a few reas­ons for that, but the major one is that I’ve been read­ing round what other people have been say­ing about the paper. A large part of the paper dis­cusses the Port­able Antiquit­ies Scheme, and my own per­spect­ive on that seems to be from a dif­fer­ent view­point to a lot of other peoples.

Excavations at a Gallo-Roman Villa
The site at Goeblange-Miecher.

By and large my archae­olo­gical train­ing has been on com­munity pro­jects. My first dig was on a com­munity pro­ject excav­at­ing a Gallo-Roman villa, organ­ised by a soci­ety based in the local vil­lage in Nospelt. In the UK I was in the local vil­lage archae­ology group and did a bit of excav­a­tion and geo­phys­ics and a lot of field­walk­ing. All the pro­jects I’ve worked on have been poorly fun­ded, even by archae­olo­gical stand­ards, or more often not fun­ded at all. My exper­i­ence then with archae­ology out­side of aca­demia is of know­ledgable, enthu­si­astic people with rel­at­ively little access to expert­ise, equip­ment and information.

The great attrac­tion of the PAS from my point of view is the out­reach aspect. All sorts of little bits of inform­a­tion are being gathered by ama­teurs and rather than being cent­rally hoarded they’re being made avail­able to any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion. It’s not that there’s been a lack of will in any of the museum ser­vices I’ve seen when it comes to pub­lic engage­ment, but there hasn’t really been the insti­tu­tional frame­work to help it hap­pen. The PAS is built around enga­ging with the pub­lic and it’s in the bones of the sys­tem. For example below is some data uploaded to Swivel. To be hon­est I can­not see myself using that par­tic­u­lar data­set, but that’s not the point. I’m used to being told there are strict lim­it­a­tions on what I can do with pho­tos from museums. Here someone is act­ively encour­aging the pub­lic to take away data and do some­thing inter­est­ing with it.

Finds and Records vs. Number of Treasure cases in England and Wales Number of Treasure Cases vs. Number of Treasure cases in England and Wales Number of Treasure Cases

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Why context matters

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Find­ing buri­als is not always easy. Bod­ies decay over time, and their vis­ib­il­ity can vary for a num­ber of reas­ons. One reason in par­tic­u­lar is the wealth of the deceased. If you’re rich you can afford a very lav­ish and very vis­ible burial. As a res­ult our under­stand­ing of the past can be skewed in favour of the social élites. That’s one reason why archae­olo­gists get so excited about large cemeter­ies. News is com­ing out of Italy of one such cemetery near Fiumicino air­port. What has been found is a nec­ro­polis with around three hun­dred skel­et­ons. What makes these spe­cial is that they’re the skel­et­ons of the poor.

There’s vari­ous reas­ons why the Italian archae­olo­gists think they were poor. The grave goods aren’t as plen­ti­ful as you get from the richer sites. In the tombs there are ceramic tank­ards, oil lamps and what remains of ancient shoes. There’s also around sev­enty coins, mainly of Tra­jan and Faustina, used to pay the fer­ry­man Charon. The coins date the tombs to the early second cen­tury BC. The loc­a­tion may not have been as pres­ti­gi­ous, this was down towards the ports of Rome, which played a vital role in con­nect­ing Rome with its empire. In Trajan’s period, Portus, a new port was being built to ser­vice Rome’s boom­ing eco­nomy. Most tellingly, like the other poor people of the ancient world, their poverty is writ­ten into their bones. The cor­rel­a­tion between poverty and deform­ity was recog­nised in the ancient world. Mark Steel has a nice line on it:

Aris­totle wrote over 2,000 years ago, “It is nature’s inten­tion to dis­tin­guish even the bod­ies of free­men and slaves. The lat­ter are endowed with strength to suit their employ­ment while the upright car­riage of the former renders them unfit for servile work.”

So Ancient Greece was full of mas­ters burst­ing to spend the day labour­ing but just not up to it with that upright carriage.

The Greeks in par­tic­u­lar noticed that the aris­tro­cracy were on the whole much bet­ter look­ing than the callous-handed labour­ers they employed and recog­nised cause and effect, just not in the right order.

The buri­als are mainly men. Anthro­po­lo­gist Paola Catalano estim­ates the ratio of men to women is around 3:1. Sex­ing skel­et­ons is not always easy, but the pre­ser­va­tion of bones in the sandy soil is a help. Addi­tion­ally they’re also mainly adults, with many more adult buri­als than adoles­cent or juven­ile buri­als. The skel­et­ons are deformed due to the stress of work. They have stress frac­tures and crushed ver­teb­rae, her­nias and ten­don inflam­ma­tion. Don’t ask me how you spot the last two on a skel­eton — I have no idea. The evid­ence is that these are the people who built Rome and made it what it was. The value of the site is that it is a one of the largest cemeter­ies excav­ated, and the grave goods can tell use what life was like for the aver­age Roman, not only from what they have but also from what they lack.

At least that should be the case. Many ver­sions of the news story over­look a detail men­tioned in the Italian press.

Il Mes­sag­gero reports that the site was found fol­low­ing an invest­ig­a­tion by the Guardia di Fin­anza, one of Italy’s many police forces, at Fiumicino. The police were involved in track­ing down two tombaroli, grave rob­bers. A raid on thei homes revealed more evid­ence of pil­la­ging and they are now chas­ing down a third indi­vidual who they think was involved. The mater­ial, if it had got to mar­ket, would have said little about Roman life. In an auc­tion house they would have just been reduced to trinkets. No-one would know where they had came from or what they meant. As it is we will not know what was des­troyed in ran­sack­ing the tombs. One of the most poignant finds would cer­tainly have been trashed by the tombaroli if they had worked it over. To the right is a neck­lace found in a child’s tomb. The indi­vidual pieces wouldn’t make any sense at all and would be value­less, except in con­text with each other.

And that’s why con­text matters.

More Read­ing:
Il Mes­sag­gero
ANSA (Eng­lish)
IGN

Illicit Antiquities linked to Islamic terrorists — Who’da thunk it?

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It shouldn’t be news. I men­tioned the pos­sib­il­ity in 2005, and again late last year. When you buy unproven­anced antiquit­ies you don’t know who you’re buy­ing them from.

Now the Ash­land Daily Tid­ings reports on the work by Mat­thew Bog­danos, which he says shows that the con­nec­tion between the trade in illi­cit antiquit­ies and Islamic insur­gents is undeni­able. Yes, you read that right. It turns out some mem­bers of Al-Qaeda are prone to crim­inal activity.

Des­pite that fair-play to Ant­o­nia Kim­bell at the Art Loss Register who said that she’s seen no evid­ence of a dir­ect link. The way the Art Loss Register works is they check a data­base of illi­cit arte­facts. Obvi­ously that means that someone needs to have registered an arte­fact as illi­cit, but that’s not a prob­lem so long as Al-Qaeda remem­ber to fill out the paperwork.

I went to look at David Gill’s blog to fact check the work­ings of the Art Loss Register because Kimbell’s com­ments seemed unfeas­ib­ily mor­onic. I can’t believe someone that cred­u­lous would be able to hold down a job at the Art Loss Register if it worked the way I described it. But it does, and David Gill is also blog­ging this story.

There’s a lot of things I’d like to see hap­pen with the Iraqi occu­pa­tion. One is that I’d like to see UK and US gov­ern­ments sup­port our sol­diers by mak­ing it harder for ‘art col­lect­ors’ to fund the enemy. If you’d like to read more about how you can fund the killing of Brit­ish and Amer­ican sol­diers and pick up a nice antiquity into the bar­gain then you can read Loot­ing Mat­ters, Illi­cit Cul­tural Prop­erty and Safe Corner.

Mixed news from New Zealand

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The medals includ­ing a double Vic­toria cross which were stolen from a New Zea­l­and museum late last year have been returned thanks to a $300 000 dol­lar reward. It’s nice they’re back, but the cost is too high.

Waiouru Museum dir­ector Ray Sey­mour said he hoped the thieves “don’t get one god­damn cent” of the reward.

I have to agree with him and the Prime Min­is­ter, Helen Clark, pre­sum­ably does too. She’s quoted as say­ing: “You didn’t want to set up expect­a­tions for the future that if someone stole some­thing and then gave it back they would be paid for it.” What hap­pens when they’re stolen again? Does the reward now mean that all Kiwi her­it­age is a tar­get to the enter­pris­ing criminal?

The ransom pay­ment could also have major con­sequences for museums in the UK. The bulk of the money came from Lord Ash­croft, Deputy Treas­urer of the Con­ser­vat­ive Party. I couldn’t say if the Con­ser­vat­ive party will make it offi­cial policy to buy off crim­in­als when they get into power.

Vandalism of an African archaeological site

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Vandalised Rock Shelter
Van­dal­ism, Lajuad. Photo (cc) West­ern Sahara Pro­ject.

Via the Mega­lithic Portal comes news of van­dal­ism of rock art. The cul­prits are sol­diers, but in a twist they’re not Amer­ican. From the graf­fitti scrawled over the walls of the shel­ter they’re Rus­sian, Croa­tian, Kenyan and Egyp­tian. Along with name and rank the per­pet­rat­ors also left tags say­ing which base they were oper­at­ing from.

I’m slightly frus­trated I can’t tell you why these rock shel­ters are import­ant. That’s because I know so little about this region. After read­ing the field reports for 2006 I can tell you that some of the art depicts anim­als that prob­ably haven’t been in the area for 5000 years, so this is pre­his­toric mater­ial. The arte­facts and art­work of these people are all we have. In my defence Nick Brooks, who found this graf­fitti, says that this really is an under­ex­plored area of the world. The finds from here could tell us about how the cli­mate changed and how people adap­ted to life in their new environment.

Sadly Nick Brooks also reports this isn’t the first time the UN Peace­keep­ers have dam­aged archae­olo­gical sites in the area. Nor is it a prob­lem with the sol­diers. Some of the graf­fitti quite clearly states the rank of the officers includ­ing a Major and a Cap­tain. The dis­cip­line seems to be rot­ten a long way up the chain of com­mand. Islamic states in Africa tend to see them­selves in rela­tion to the expan­sion of Islam and so can see pre-Islamic remains as remains of an other. Given the polit­ics of the West­ern Sahara that would sug­gest that the actions of the UN Peace­keep­ers are com­ing awfully close to endors­ing the Moroc­can government’s claims over those of the Pol­isaro Front.

You can read more at Nick Brooks’s blog Sand and Dust. There’s also a web page for the West­ern Sahara Pro­ject, more pho­tos of the dam­age done and news stor­ies at the BBC and the Times.

It’s also a pro­ject you can take part in. If you want to help sur­vey sites which are unknown the West you can volun­teer.

Are Sainsbury’s mis-selling energy?

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I was stopped in the bread aisle today by a nice lady who wanted me to switch my energy sup­ply to Sainsbury’s. It’s a com­mon thing in the UK and the energy com­pan­ies are col­lect­ively known for the eth­ical stand­ards they employ when selling their energy plans. It’s not a sur­prise so many of them spon­sor weather bul­let­ins — “Today’s weather is brought to you in asso­ci­ation with Happy Energy, because we’re a shower of bastards.”

What’s inter­est­ing is the sales pitch that you get as you try and find a loaf. My energy sup­plier was recom­men­ded by Green­peace. Gen­er­ally that’s enough to per­suade sales people from wast­ing my time. It’s grow­ing less effect­ive. I demurred say­ing that I didn’t want to sign any­thing because I was con­cerned that there was going to be a push for nuc­lear power and I’m not con­vinced it’s a good thing. Sainsbury’s, she assured me, had noth­ing to do with nuc­lear power. Sainsbury’s even sold a Green Energy plan.

Sainsbury’s don’t actu­ally have their own power sta­tions, they re-sell and right now they’re reselling for EDF. What was the news when I got home? French energy giant EDF has already said it plans to build four nuc­lear plants in the UK by 2017, without sub­sidies, fol­low­ing the government’s announce­ment. BBC News.

Nuc­lear power itself is not neces­sar­ily a deal killer for me, but being misled about it is. I’m also doubt­ful about the green nature of Sainsbury’s power. I’m sure they want to invest in renew­able resources, but what is a renew­able resource? Ask Lord Sains­bury. Lady O’Cathain offered me the oppor­tun­ity of … agree­ing that nuc­lear is a renew­able source of energy — it clearly is so. The Times.

So was the nice lady mis-selling Sainsbury’s energy, or do they have a con­tract with EDF that the elec­trons they sell are driven by non-nuclear power?

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