Saturday 12 September 2009

Haytime

The haymeadow is finally cut! We've had the first three consecutive days of dry weather since June.

Unfortunately it's so late and so autumnal that it will all be silaged this year - c'est la vie!
G & I actually managed to make a hay fort last night. Excellent fun.

I remember a time, not so very long ago, when it didn't really rain very much in this country. As a postgrad student I shared a house with a French girl, Marion, who said that she was dreading coming to live here because of England's reputation for rain. She said how pleasantly surprised she'd been at how good the weather was. And it was! It was only the early nineties and I remember so well that, on the whole, most days it didn't rain, nor was it excessively, unpleasantly windy - and we had summers. And it isn't all in my head - just take a look here.
It's shocking to even begin to conceive that we are probably responsible for the changes. The human race is surely the single most catastrophic thing that ever happened to this planet. What a legacy, eh?

2 comments:

  1. And it's quite depressing that I read in the paper this week that about 30% of people are not convinced that climate change is happening, and the number is going up. I wonder where they live, and if ever they go outside! Whereas here it is so dry that I just wonder if all our new planting is going to make it! I'm glad you have managed to get your hay in, anyway.

    Pomona x

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  2. What saddens me most is that most people don't really care, regardless of what they believe. They're not willing to recognise that their actions have an effect on the planet.

    It frustrates me that everyone wants to blame governments and 'Big Business' for environmental problems and can't accept that we're all to blame as individuals.

    We all consume, with little regard to where things come from. We're spurred on by an obscene greed that makes us want more and more utter rubbish and our self-indulgence feeds these huge corporations to turn them into the monsters we all love to hate.

    As for governments, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. We can't let them use their power to curb our recklessness because we won't allow anything to get in the way of our civil liberties - our freedom to feed our greed -but we expect them to get us out of the mess we've all been complicit in creating.

    It's a pity that we've become so alienated from what really matters - this beautiful planet and the incredible diversity of species we're steadily destroying.

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