Hello again world.
I haven’t actually abandoned this blog, nor has it lain fallow for want of content. There is loads going on in the wider world of waste, and, indeed, plenty happening in my little corner of it, I just haven’t had time to write about it.
This is entirely down to my own dreadful time management, of course. I’ve become adept at ’snoozing’ my Outlook reminders for just long enough for them to lose their urgency. One reminder has been nudging me gently at 24 hour intervals since June*
When I started working for the Civil Service, way back at the turn of the Millennium, I was frequently told to put non-urgent work in the pending file: “we can do that in the Summer when it’s quiet.” See, during the rest of the year, we spend a lot of time on the work that parliament creates – answering MPs questions, briefing Ministers for parliamentary questions and select committees, writing legislation to deadlines so that it can be debated at the right time and so on and so forth. Then parliament goes into recess for the summer, and the Civil Service enters its mythical ‘quiet time’.
I say ‘mythical’ because I’ve never actually experienced it. Ministers still need briefings for visits, the public still write to us and to their MPs and we still provide those MPs with information, we still need to talk to our stakeholders, there are projects to manage and, of course, there’s all that non-urgent stuff that we put off until summer-when-its-quiet.
Not that I’m complaining; it’s not like the rest of the world gets to bunk off for 3 months in the summer either, and since I’ve been in Waste I haven’t actually heard anyone utter the words ’summer when it’s quiet’. Perhaps those Civil Servants who remembered, or imagined, some halcyon days when the machineries of government ground to a halt along with the nation’s teenagers** have all retired? Or maybe my colleagues, knowing that I’m an Olympic level snoozer, refrain from mentioning that they are organised enough to be able to take 2 weeks off without feeling slightly guilty?
I did, as it happens, take a fortnight off in August, and assuaged my guilt somewhat by spending an afternoon visiting the local County Council to talk about the review of Schedule 2. On the other hand, all the people who said ‘Oh aren’t you dedicated!’ because I took a few hours out of my holiday have just made me feel even more guilty.
Anyway, one of the things that I haven’t been putting off is the Schedule 2 review. That’s been put off for me, and I’ll make that the subject of another post because I appear to have spent this one putting off talking about it.
*An application form to become an OGC Gateway reviewer, as it happens. Something that is personally interesting, career-enhancing, useful to other people in Government and mostly unrelated with my day job. Hence the heroic snoozing.
**This might be slightly unfair. I have two teenagers, and only one of them has been getting out of bed mid-afternoon all summer.
29 September 2009, 12:13 pm
welcome back
So what are you views on the new WFD, or the floated idea of waste stream specific landfill bans?
And when will we see something on schedule 2?
29 September 2009, 5:30 pm
The Stage One consultation on the WFD is sitting on my desk right now. I may actually get the chance to read it sometime this week! Landfill bans sound like a great idea, but “it’s a great idea” does not a blog post make – I need to find out a bit more about the practicalities, and what’s going on in other countries that already have bans.
Schedule 2 is going to be the subject of my very next post – I was hoping to post some news today, but sadly my steering group meeting was cancelled. Soon. Very soon. I promise.