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An open letter to our new prime minister

~ flissw ~ Leave a comment

Dear PM Sunak

Please read this article, and consider your choices. Instead of staying away from COP27 to focus on ‘domestic’ problems, you could take advantage of your current position to act on climate change, which is also domestic because it is planetary! Nowhere is exempt from the effects of climate change. Remember COVID? You took unprecedented steps then, supporting the furlough scheme. But the climate crisis is an even bigger threat than COVID. Now is the time for addressing it as an existential threat – stop throwing money at fossil fuels and start throwing it at renewables, insulating every home in the UK, training people to do that work, enabling people to get out of cars and onto public transport (which means improving public transport), restoring the ecosystem, greening the cities… You want growth? These are the things that need to grow, not the economic shibboleth of GDP.

You can go down in history as a leader who helped to turn the tide, or go down with history as it sails over the cliff of environmental collapse.

Yours urgently

A UK citizen

Ceremony – a fiction

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When they came to know that a leaving was imminent, they would start their preparations. An auspicious date would be chosen and invitations sent out to beloved friends and relations. The boatwrights would carve or build the canoe, according to the way of their people.

And a bonfire would be readied on the sands, built of driftwood and thatched with reeds to keep its heart dry until the time came.

The guests would arrive in the days before, walking or riding the old roads. And they would each sit for a while with the honoured elder, speaking or quiet, receiving gifts of memories and wisdom.

At the chosen time, on a day of calm and a night of stars, they would gather on the shore and light the sweet-scented fire. The honoured one would be seated in warmth and comfort, where they could see the horizon and the fire’s flames. And around them there would be singing and laughter and hands to hold. And tears.

And at last, they would bring the parting cup to be taken and drunk with clear eyes.

***

When the fire and the singing had fallen to glowing embers, they would lay the honoured departed in the canoe, and with charcoals from the fire’s hem they would mark their farewells on the hull, in words or images. And a scoop of hot coals would be taken from the last of the bonfire and placed in the well of the canoe, and the bearers would take up the slings lying ready beneath and carry the swaying vessel down, over the shining sand to the shallow fringe of the sea and beyond, until the water could uphold the load, and the canoe, finding a current, drew away from the shore.

Then, in a quiet dawn, the people would look on as the flames of the canoe shrank and merged with the sun’s flame on the sea, and the honoured one rejoined the world. Afterwards, returning to their homes, they carried with them the coals they had taken from the dying fire to write their messages, and placed them in the heart of their own hearths.

Colouring for Cumbria

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If you are into colouring books and would like to contribute to fund raising for people affected by the winter floods in Cumbria have a look at this:

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available at: http://www.amazon.com/Colouring-Cumbria-affected-Northern-England/dp/1532786875/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463165671&sr=1-1

or

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Colouring-Cumbria-affected-Northern-England/dp/1532786875?ie=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0

Aside ~ ~ flissw ~ Leave a comment

1 June

The bereaved house stands, neglected, at the end of a short terrace. Paint peeling around its windows, a bright green sea of uncut grass washes around its feet, waiting for the mower to be repaired. And the garden climbs up the walls and fences – roses, clematis, honeysuckle, on the brink of flowering.

Beside the back door, tumbled but convenient, three small piles of coal, logs and kindling.

Inside the neglect is more ingrained, the natural state in a house of two men (father and son – ‘we were two peas in a pod’) not much interested in housework and decoration.

Habitual hands have left their marks, on door frames and light switches, dark stains of countless touches. Many shelves line a room, crammed with dusty books, on art and magic, history and nature – a life-time’s library.

The disorder of illness overlies it all – the bed in the sitting room, a table dismantled in an upstairs room to make way for it, a small pile of plastic bags hold his clothes brought home from the hospital.

‘Here’s a picture of my father…and the dog we had…’ wiping the murky glass with tender fingers as he takes it off the mantelpiece, leaving its shadow in the dust.

But on the wall above the displaced bed there is a picture, a painting in a gilded frame, of a glorious sunlit afternoon – it shines like a jewel in this gloomy room, as fresh as if it were painted yesterday. (Though it is decades old – ‘He wouldn’t let me sell that one.’)

Two great trees stand in a green pasture which runs down to a hidden river. Beyond, the bluer green of farther woods rises to a low horizon.  A black and white cow, three quick dabs of paint, repeats itself, moving slowly from left to right across the picture plane. Leaf shadows ripple blue on the warm tree trunks and the trees’ crowns reach up into a tumbling airy height of sky.

Like a window into shining memory, it redeems the room.

 

Copyright © 2014 Fliss Watts

Earth Day

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Image

So it’s Earth Day today – one day to remind people about the planet we share.

Living where I do, it is hard to forget the climate change debate. There are reminders everywhere – wind turbines punctuate the horizon and colonise the sea. The local economy is driven by a nuclear power station some miles down the coast, while inland the fells and lakes show us a romantic image of a wilder, less peopled world, though they too wear a skin created by centuries and millennia of human action. Their bones read like a geology textbook of glaciation and its slow aftermath – U-shaped valleys, erratic boulders, benign flood plains awaiting the next deluge.

All this reminds us that on the almost inconceivably grand scale of geology, climate always changes, mountains rise and fall, ice advances and retreats, species evolve and are eclipsed.

But we cannot help but be attached to our little fraction of the great sweep of time, our infinitesimal point of differentiation on the curve, to worry about its gradient here and now. Can we affect it? Tweak the coefficients to slow things down and give ourselves and our earth-bound companions the time to adapt? Or are we like Canute, faced with an overwhelming tide? Have we already passed the tipping point?

The end of the beginning

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Yesterday I added as a (rather long) post and as a page (for posterity!) Beginnings and Endings, the last of the accumulated stories that were my reason for starting this blog. So there may be a bit of a lull now, while I figure out what to do next. On the other hand I may already be addicted to this. Anyway I thought I should say thanks to the little group who have ‘followed’ me.

To anyone who is reading this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the things I’ve put here so far. Before I started this blog I thought of it as just a way of putting stuff out there in the hope that it might be seen. But I have realised that blogging is not so much about publishing as about joining a conversation. The readers are all writers too (the magic of the internet), and, having cleared my backlog, I’m going to be more of a reader than a writer for a bit I expect. I’m looking forward to finding more gems out there. 🙂

Linocut: Reading

 

Copyright © 2014 Fliss Watts