Just to prove that I am blogging from the real Scotland, and not like Neil Armstrong from a Hollywood studio (OK, I know men went to the moon), a couple of Very Scottish Photos.
One of an abandoned, ruined but thoroughly Wromantic 18th century barracks built by the English in their initially vain (and perhaps once again so) efforts to subdue the Scots.
And the other, cycleway markings in the Middle of Highland Nowhere giving priority to non-existent motorised traffic into a farm track. In Holland, France and Germany, as I found last year, bikes have priority, pretty much always.
But as towards bikes, so towards the environment, our priorities are so very far out of alignment with anything that willl make a difference.
On which, at the risk of over-blogging (a warning from my very techie-literate son Alastair), I would like briefly to put on record what feels a conclusive, liberating awareness this evening that the Game is indeed Over.
Mary-Jayne has sent me a link to a blog and website of colleagues in the US who have drawn much condemnation and pain from making a film, which it seems names the catastrophe that’s coming, in the understanding that we’re already beyond the tipping point.
I was reminded reading their blog of a new builder friend who came round to our Cirencester home the other day to quote for some loft insulation, and with whom we ended having an inspiring, honest and totally no-holds-barred conversation about how there’s not really much point any more, as nothing can stop the catastrophe that’s coming.
He emailed me afterwards saying he’d wept on his way home, with relief and also sadness at meeting someone who was, with him, prepared to face what now awaits us.
I realise, epecially after my father’s death this week and his one individual inability – determination not – to confront and accept what was happening to him, that humankind just can’t do this.
And doesn’t want to, yet anyway – despite actually KNOWING quite deeply (as I’ve found on the this bike trip, talking with dozens of very ordinary, everyday students and B&B owners and shopkeepers) that it’s really bad.
I suspect that many ordinary folk, as they go about their ordinary lives, are in fact now, possibly even a touch desperately, looking for real leadership from those courageous enough to name what is happening and map out what this will mean for us
Only then can we truly make choices about how to respond. The rest is denial and collusion.