Monday, 4 February 2008

Lighter mornings

Imperceptible but oh so welcome the dawn is creeping backwards, here in Shropshire daffodils are out, snowdrops fading and new buds on the honeysuckle.

It is a wonderful world when you have time to stop and look, it's just a pain having to rush around trying to make a living. Or to listen to the news of countries tearing themselves apart, suicide bombers and economic collapse, and

The profligate spending of the rich and vacuous ‘celebrities’ . You can’t help thinking that there has to be reckoning for the human race all six billion and rising. Tom Lehrer wrote a song in sixties about the bomb when we would all go together and fry all 3 billion of us. In forty years the population of the world has doubled, if that’s exponential growth.

How long before nature/Gaia/the planet shrugs its shoulders and says enough of this disgusting two legged parasite that fouls and spoils this beautiful earth.

When I sailed across the oceans in the sixties there were whales, flying fish, sharks and turtles, when sailed across from The Canaries to the West Indies and New York to Falmouth in the nineties, there was plastic, polystyrene and other detritus and no sign of marine life.

The Mediterranean is a sewer the coral around beautiful islands is bleached white and dead Don Henly got it right when he sang, ‘Call somewhere paradise kiss it goodbye’.


Pandemic, or super volcano, climate change or maybe a rogue rock I figure there will an 'adjustment', and make no mistake about it, we are to blame

Stained Glass

The means of creating stained glass was

itself a kind of miracle needing the skills

of both alchemist and artist. The tool

for cutting the glass for example, had

to be cooled in ‘the urine of a three-year-old

goat fed only on ferns or, if that was really

unavailable, the urine of a small red-headed-boy’.

Here stand the complexities of the 16th century mind.

The Kings Glass – A Story of Tudor Power

and Secret Art by Caroline Hicks Chatto £18.99

Sustainability Blog: Recycling and Global Warming

Sustainability Blog: Recycling and Global Warming