Sunday 3 August 2014

Commonwealth Games, A Reminder To Humanity

The harvest is in full swing right across the whole of The Cotswolds.  I watch from a distance within the woodland the Badgers, as they in turn watch the combines rip through the fields of gold.  The cereal fields that have given cover to nature’s bounty of new life are now laid bare once again after the passing of these gigantic, noisy machines. 
Always fascinating to me how nature’s timing of the harvest coincides quite beautifully with the growth and strength of all those beings that took protection by it.  The Leverettes are now as big as their parents and can run as fast as the quickest of their relatives.  The Roe Deer fawns and the Fallow Deer fawns, the Muntjacs are now big enough and strong enough to easily outrun their predators, but always so pleasing to see them take cover in the woodlands as the combines relentlessly churn through the cereal fields acre upon acre.
The excitement of seeing these monstrous machines excites me as much now as when I was a child.  The busyness, the toing and froing of the tractors pulling the trailers full of grain.  The augers as they swing out from the side of the combines in a robotic, precise manner.  Not seeming to spill a grain as they load the moving trailers. 
The tolerances of todays’ technology never ceases to amaze and the whole theatrical experience when observed almost resembles Thunderbirds on speed. 
The Badgers are still doing exceptionally well.  The Coopers still delight in their part of the Badgers protection programme. 
Liz Truss, our Environmental Secretary, has announced that she doesn’t intend to roll out a gassing programme in any forthcoming Badger cull proposals, saying that she favours shooting.  A small step in the right direction I feel.  Although, any movement in the slaying of Badgers is a step backwards in our whole eco system.  Especially after hearing the news this week of a BTB outbreak in Cumbria that can be directly linked to cattle movements as my blog stated on Sunday June 9th 2013 titled, “George Would Have Told Them to Keep Dodging the Lead.”
As the commemorations go on across the length and breadth of the land on the anniversary of the start of the 1914 1918 war, the Great War supposedly to end all wars, the excitement of the Commonwealth Games really brings home to me just how great the Great War was.  Nearly half the globe in conflict leaving a world in its wake consigning the mis-treatment of women and the underclass workforce in the annals of history.  Never before has the human race seen such vast change in such a minute window of time. 
A 50th birthday party and 20 years wedding anniversary brought a very satisfying afternoon’s hospitality.  A chance to see people from the same village and to catch up on bits and pieces of gossip and to generally be enlightened by other people’s lives.  So diverse, so different to the conversations to be had in the villages forty years previous. 
Changes are constant, progress is forever in evolution, but I feel the real progress and change in evolution is always in the eye of the beholder, because so often the benefits to a minority are at extreme discord with the majority. 
The fundamental issues that were surely learnt from the 1914 1918 war and were shortly mirrored in the 1940 1945 war tells us that peace and harmony can only emulate from humanity and equality, two ingredients that are so conspicuous by their absence in the Middle East today. 

Please watch my amusing short film of my Badgers who epitomise equality and humanity.


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