Matilda’s Planet
My youngest offspring Matilda and I decided on a Saturday tour of some of London’s great features. We would start with the Natural History Museum. She had grown up in a country environment. This trip was to prove to be a damascene moment. Stuck in a queue at the Euston taxi rank she tasted the air of pollution. There followed a long day of debate including dinosaurs, buses, the air over London from the famous “Eye” and a strange rickshaw ride back to Euston.
The following day, in the presence of my distinguished in-laws our 8-year-old persuaded me it was my duty to try to save the planet. “We don’t want the planet to be yucky, do we Daddy?”. The task ahead seemed, and stills seems, daunting. The road was far from clear, the path chosen was to seek ideas to reduce the energy consumption based on fossil fuels. To achieve it I invited inventors to show me their ideas. Many were good but many also impractical.
Of those chosen I would invest in development, manufacturing and the marketing. I became, in the words of one broadsheet journalist “The Jolly Green Dragon”. Possibly as a quip on my Welsh and Irish origins, but who knows?! Like all journeys there have been ups and downs, good and not so good investments. We have pride in our first turbine that we call ‘Matilda’s Pegasus’ which sits atop the Vauxhall Tower, generating power whichever way the wind blows!
Our real passion is in securing a better future for those in society who have homes which are far from energy efficient, homes that are cold, damp and unhealthy. Homes that test the finances of the poorest in society. Homes that are in themselves sick! Matilda’s Blanket was to be our answer and to that end we are building a host of fabrication units around the UK in the belief, backed by thousands of examples, that using this globally unique system we can make a 50% saving on the heating bills of the common housing stock of the UK, making it efficient and healthy. Our ‘think national, act local’ plan is beginning to work – servicing the needs of many and giving local, much needed, employment.
This is an ongoing story with new units and indeed new products coming onto the roster. However, you need nerves of steel, the constitution of an ox and our consistency of purpose. To help make this work you need to attract to the cause good people, who share the vision and have skills you don’t have. The other important ingredient is to gather to the cause key decision makers, those who see the value in what you are doing and can commit to some consistency of support. It’s a growing band of brothers and sisters from Scotland to London from there to Wales and Ireland all seeing the merit and morality of better homes, healthier homes all using less energy.