I realise I got too excited too quickly about the transition movement perhaps being the solution for Dawlish. I now do not think it is (so the Transition Town Dawlish page has moved), and I am going to spend some time thinking through how and why this place – which is not a town, some say – is in crisis. 10/5/08

I tried posting the following to a local campaign group guestbook, and as usual with this particular website failed – although I don’t have any problem with guestbooks, message forms etc. on other sites.

‘A new supermarket will kill the town!’ provoked the reply: ‘There is no town! Dawlish is not a town.’

What is it then?

1. A daytrip destination. Dawlish businesses serving visitors (including we visitors who happen to live here) will thrive despite / because of the new supermarket.

2. An expanding suburb of Exeter, part of the great suburb / garden city of England (Note: what was MAFF is now DEFRA, and farmers are part-time park keepers.), supplied via supermarkets of all shapes and sizes, supplied by trucks, boats and planes, supplied by agribusiness mining the planet. NB Dawlish has a Tescos already, in the Strand. This supply chain machine is probably unstoppable short of a complete collapse.

Lovely morning though!

I wanted to use that cunning thing about the Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ meaning ‘danger’ plus ‘opportunity’, so I did a search on that and the first hit is a web site that says this is wrong! ‘Danger + Opportunity ≠ Crisis (http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html) Lovely! I like that. In the case of Dawlish, the town – if it is a town – just is in crisis, in imminent danger of losing its useful food and other household supplies shops, so that everyone who lives here is driven to shop at supermarkets, whether they want to or not – and many want to and won’t be bothered even if the remaining shops do continue to disappear, one by one, pop!, pop! like in some real life Pacman game.

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