A Dutch naturalist compares the new Tesla Roadster with heat pumps, rural solar panels and a cormorant who flies for free
Tuesday, 20 October 2026. Narrowboat, River Lea. Drizzle, wood stove going, 6.40pm.
A Cormorant Has Achieved What Tesla Spent Nine Years On
There is a cormorant who sits on the old pump house below the lock, holding his wings out to dry like a tired vampire hanging up laundry. Today I watched him take off from the water. He ran across the surface, slapped it with his feet, lifted, banked over the reservoir and landed again ninety metres away. No thrusters. No compressed air tank. No reservation deposit.
The same evening I read that Elon Musk unveiled a flying Tesla Roadster nine years after it was first promised, which can drive upside down, hop over a row of other cars on ten compressed air thrusters, and reach sixty miles an hour in about a second. Production is expected in 2028. Customers have paid fifty thousand dollars to reserve a car that does not yet have a price.
I showed the cormorant. Well, I held the phone up towards him. He did not look. He has seen flight before. He has been doing it since the Cretaceous. He does not pay a deposit and he does not wait until 2028. He simply does it every morning before breakfast, and then he eats the breakfast, which is a fish, which he catches himself.
Compressed Air Is Still Somebody’s Electricity
The more serious point, which I wrote on the cardboard back of a muesli box, is that compressed air has to be compressed by something, and that something usually plugs into a wall. I have nothing against invention. My people perfected the windmill, and for centuries we used it to pump water and grind grain and, I suspect, to make the neighbours jealous. But a windmill did a useful thing every day. A car that hops a traffic jam for a few seconds is a firework with a finance plan.
The Daily Mash, which I read when I want to laugh in English, described the new car as a reliable way to identify the worst drivers in a traffic jam, and I can confirm there is a man on the Lea Bridge Road in a white Model Y who already behaves as if his car can fly. When it finally can, the ducks will need to be told.
A Report That Rescued The Humble Heat Pump
Then Grist cheered me up with a new report busting another myth about heat pumps. I love heat pumps the way some British men love a particular football club. They are quiet. They do not fly. They do not hop over anything. They sit outside your house humming, moving warmth from one place to another, like a very patient Dutch aunt who always knows where the spare blankets are.
Nobody has ever unveiled a heat pump at a rocket test site in Texas. Nobody has ever made a heat pump drive upside down. That is precisely why I trust them. The most useful technologies in the world are boring. The bicycle is boring. The dyke is boring. The heat pump is boring. The mangrove is extremely boring, unless you are a baby fish, in which case it is your entire childhood.
On My Boat We Have A Wood Stove And Guilt
I should confess that my boat is heated by a small wood stove, which I feed with offcuts from a carpenter in Clapton who gives them to me in exchange for my opinion on his sourdough. My opinion is always that it needs more salt. He keeps asking. I keep getting wood. It is not a perfect system, but it is a closed loop, and it involves bread, which is more than most energy policies can say.
Someone Has Switched Off The Sun For Farmers
The less cheerful item tonight was another Grist piece reporting that Trump effectively killed a popular solar energy programme for rural America. I have only been to rural America once, to visit a cousin who married a dairy farmer in Wisconsin. Their barn roof was enormous and pointed at the sun like a big red face waiting for good news.
My cousin’s husband, a gentle man named Dale who said almost nothing for nine days and then gave a twenty-minute speech about silage, would have liked panels on that roof. The cows would not have noticed. Cows are the least political animals on Earth, apart from the heron, who is extremely political but only about fish.
The Pattern Of The Week
So in one week: a car that flies briefly on compressed air is a triumph of human genius, while a quiet panel on a barn roof is something to cancel. A prince needs three cars for three moods. A heat pump is still treated as a suspicious foreign object, like garlic in a Dutch kitchen in 1965. And the cormorant goes on flying for free, every morning, without a press conference.
I put the muesli box notes in the stove at eight o’clock. They burned nicely. The cormorant was asleep on the pump house. The rain stopped. I made cocoa and sat on the roof under a towel and watched the lights of the reservoir pumping station blink. The pumping station, I would like to point out, was built in the Victorian era, has never once flown, and has supplied water to London for over a century. That, to me, is the real Roadster.