.and Englishmen go out in ….this certainly wasn’t …the midday sun.. After a night of continual rain we awoke to life in the clouds. A gap , then more rain . ; but wait do I spy a change , so I set off on my morning walk in our bit of tropical forest. I was all alone , for the whole way round there were no other walkers or riders. The locals clearly had more respect and understanding of their weather.
Rain drops dripped amongst the canopy ; was this more rain? No! just an after-storm serenade from a wet jungle. The birds had not been put off , so they joined in . I forgot about the effort of walking and enjoyed the range of greens brought to life after their morning wash. The only noise was that of AC units , although the cool after precipitation meant that they were just idling .
My mind wandered to considering the efficiency of various AC configurations. They can be power hungry beasts, thus whist cooling the inside , increase the ambient temperature. Evaporative are the most energy efficient, utilising , in layman’s terms , the cooling effect of water evaporation . ( explanation below) . Our unit in Australia was the epitome of efficiency having no moving parts . Water trickled over incoming air in a box on the roof , which was ducted to the various rooms ; the amount of air , and thus cooling , governed by cracking open a window . I was so impressed that I had a water line installed in the roof of our house in France . The draw back is having a surfeit of water , which we don’t now have , nor does Australia in a hot dry summer.
Lee Kwan Yew ( former PM Singapore ) profoundly uttered that if it wasn’t for AC , Singapore in its current form couldn’t have existed. He also added that the same could be said for the third Vietnam War . Ugh , what was he talking about , I knew about first and second, but third ? Having won the first two ( against the French then Americans ) , Vietnam set it’s sights on the rest of SE Asia ; there was no one there who could stop them ; or so they thought . It was China invading from the north to stop their neighbours, that diverted the Vietnamese and determined Asia’s future …for now .
It would seem that Europe hasn’t learn’t its own lessons. In 1683 it was the Pole’s that stopped the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna ; then (to everyone’s surprise ) in 1920 at the battle of Warsaw, stopped Lenin advancing westwards. It was the Americans , and their Atomic bomb, that stopped Stalin’s westward military advance . So here we are again , this time relying on the Ukrainians halting another expansive despot . Fortunately they had been preparing, and had more artillery pieces than the rest of Western Europe . That and American support has held the line ; for now. . Sanna Marin , the Finish PM , is spot on …“ We would be in trouble without the US “. I wonder when , or if , we will learn.
A bird of paradise pulled me back to enjoy the now! This tropical flower is prolific here. We even managed two blooms on our French plant . For the winter , ours is confined to the greenhouse. Unfortunately in the move a flower stem broke . However whilst resident in a vase on the breakfast table , it treated us a demonstration of nature’s beauty. Over the days the individual petals unfold from the flower’s ‘ beak ‘, the whole array rotating to accommodate each additional petal.
Our bit of Paradise
Evaporation :
‘ the enthalpy of vaporization, also known as the heat of vaporization or heat of evaporation, is the amount of energy that must be added to a liquid substance to transform a quantity of that substance into a gas. ‘.
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