Category: environmental
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Taking to the streets
For the first year in a long time I’m not involved in this year’s Civil Act of Remembrance, and it’s given me a moment to consider some of the wider implications of the event less connected with the thing itself. I’m not ill, but Janet was covid positive for fifteen days solid and only went…
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Under the Oak
Under the oak we met, and played. When Sun was hot, in shade we stayed. It cooled the breeze, and branches swayed. It served us well, and all unpaid… But now today I look, dismayed. This gorgeous tree has been betrayed. Who felt they could, this oak, degrade; Who’s moral code has been mislaid? Now…
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Here we go again
Things don’t happen in polite sequence; one thing following gently after another. And so it is again today as we nervously await the news from Buck House. Is London Bridge fallen? But alongside that is the news that our continuity Prime Minister is about to overturn the hard won ban on fracking in Britain, and…
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Free Public Transport
What if it was all free at the point of use? All of it. How bad would that be? Establishing the overall cost of public transport (not the profits, the actual basic costs) ought not to be impossible. That’s how much we need to find in some form of taxation. Easier; make it regionally free…
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It (still) isn’t easy being green
A lot of my time at the moment is occupied by an impending planning application in my village. It’s for a new railway station, and there is a large part of me that goes, yes! Public transport, accessible in the village, has got to be ‘a good thing’, right? Buses come and buses go, and…
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Travelling Light (Lisbon 1)
It’s been a while. Two years of Covid-19 has caused not only lockdown but a fairly ingrained aversion to crowds. More perhaps than for most, with Janet’s kidney transplant placing her pretty much at the top of the “extremely medically vulnerable” list. So, after vaccine number four and her consultant telling her she was currently…
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Feeling Railroaded
The village of Charfield has long had a main railway line running through the middle of it. It’s famous, if at all, for the railway disaster of October 1928 where a passenger train crsahed into a goods train underneath the main Wotton Road railway bridge, killing sixteen people and leaving a mangled carnage beneath it.…
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A little rant on “pagan tealights”
Ok, so I guess pagans… we are connected to the natural world in a spiritual sense and find inspiration and communion within the enspirited landscape? It follows really that we don’t litter, we reuse and recycle and all the rest, we honour life and probably in a semi-animist sense we recognise not all that lives…
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Greenwashing
I attended a focus group meeting this evening where the point of discussion was the Climate Crisis. Attended by people across the voluntary sector as well as local government, it was hosted by the local county council. It was a lively and useful meeting. The council representative made a comment during the discussions that went…