Am I a saddo?

I suppose many people would think so, based simply on the fact that I 'blog'. But why does that make me a saddo? Couldn't the same be said for people who use sticks with knobs on the whack little white balls around the countryside? Or people who pour over their collections of pieces of paper printed colourfully on one side and covered with adhesive on the other? Perhaps what makes me more of a saddo in the eyes of some is the fact that I keep meticulous records of the cost of running my car. For example, I know the average fuel consumption since I bought the car until Monday last week (when I last filled the tank) was 43.63 miles per gallon. Granted, that figure is of little use or interest to anybody, but if I should happen to notice a fairly dramatic increase in fuel consumption it might indicate something going wrong or already gone wrong under the bonnet. So I think it as well to keep an eye on the figure.

Quite a few months back I suggested that if we all reduced our mileage by, say, five a week, we would make a significant contribution to saving the world. I have made a bit of an effort in that direction myself, but am surprised to see that my annual mileage has fallen by considerably more than that. Three or four years ago I was regularly covering between 15,000 and 16,000 miles a year, but I see that between September 2008 and September 2009 I drove only 12,800 - and that has dropped to just 10,700 during the last twelve months. How that has happened I have no idea. And maybe it has not made a significant reduction in the world's CO2 emissions. I console myself with the story of the man walking on a beach just as dawn broke. As he headed into the rising sun, keeping to the firm sand below the high water mark, he noticed somebody else walking towards him. That person kept bending down, picking something off the beach and tossing it into the waves.

When they got closer, our man could see that the other was picking up starfish.

'Why,' he asked, 'are you doing that?'

'If I don't,' the other replied, 'all these starfish will be burned to death by the sun as it climbs through the sky.'

'But there must be thousands if not millions of starfish on the beach. What difference can you hope to make?'

The other looked down at the starfish in his hand. 'It makes a difference to this one,' he said as he tossed it back into the sea.