I'll be honest with you - I've not been paying much attention to the news these days because it has been getting on my Right Royal Wick. There is always something hideous going on which is always someone else's fault, and people are sniping at each other, verbally and physically, and according to this book I've just read, it's all the fault of Facebook and Google...
It's an interesting and, at times, thought-provoking read. I waded my way through the tech jargon and took on board the arguments. I sometimes felt the author was grinding a personal axe, but a lot of what he said was pertinent to how our society is changing. He has a proper full blown strop about Donald Trump towards the end, and I hope he feels better for getting THAT out of his system at least.
What has caught my half closed news eye, though, is the hoo-ha currently surrounding the Extinction Rebellion movement. This is because a) some of them feel it is a good thing to walk around dressed like this...
and think they'll be taken seriously and b) I've just purchased a clothes airer in order to cut back on using the tumble drier.
I used to have a clothes airer, but I think I must have given it away at some point, or it was a particularly flimsy specimen which died a natural death from being covered in blankets and used as a play tent. Happy memories of using my Mum's clothes horse (as they were then known) for the same purpose because we were too poor to have a proper tent. We also had to walk ten miles to school bare foot and coatless in six feet of snow every day between November and March, but that's another story. Anyway, the drier didn't come with us to Damson Cottage, so for the past three years I've been using a clothes line/ tumble drier combination. The clothes line is fine when the weather is good; there is nothing like the smell of laundry after it has been dried in the open air, is there? However, sometimes it rains and sometimes the lovely smell of the laundry can be tainted by the not so lovely smell of localised muck spreading. It has been at these times that a-tumbling I did go.
Being well aware of the cost of using a tumble drier and its environmental impact I decided to buy a clothes airer and leave laundry to dry off on that as much as possible. The laundry room itself contains the boiler so is generally warm and failing that the studio can store up a fair amount of heat during the day too. I can dry clothes naturally, I thought. Do my bit towards saving the planet without having to make an arse of myself my dressing in tatty red curtains and gluing myself to a road/ car/ railings/my local MP. It's a small consideration in the grand scheme but it is something I can do along with recycling, buying locally, eating veggie, driving the smallest car in the world etc etc you know...
Imagine how deflated I felt, then, how utterly small and useless and pointless seemed my clothes airer effort, when I had a brief watch of the recent athletics championships in Qatar and saw these...
...f**king air conditioning fans! 'Scuse my French, but really??? It is so hot in Qatar (oh, there's an irony) that the athletes can't do their do so they need air conditioning to keep them cool whilst they are throwing things, running in circles, and jumping, and not even jumping for a useful purpose like escaping a crocodile pit. I felt the same rage that I feel when I see motor racing, thousands of gallons of a finite fuel being burned up for what genuine and valid purpose exactly? And when I hear people, like Extinction Rebellion and their supporters, going on about air travel yet still flying because heaven forfend they sacrifice their holidays abroad in favour of a staycation.
What is the point? The world is such a complicated place to live in as it is and the more you delve into the whys and wherefores of what we should and should not be doing, it makes even less sense. Everyone has an argument, everyone has a cause. We are never, as sharing inhabitants of this one planet, going to pull in the same direction for the same benefits, and it is naivety itself to think that way. It's not the way of the human being, because we like to argue and to always be right. We just do.
This morning, I put washing on the line (lots of wind, no iffy niffy countryside smells, working from home so was able to dash out and save washing from the brief rain shower), and made some bread rolls, finished one side of my patchwork quilt and joined the Hare Preservation Trust.
Just trying to do my best in my own part of the world.
(Going for an anti-anger meditation now. Please feel free to join me.)
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