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Official May Day

Wednesday 7th May, a cool grey evening after a chilly, blustery day, outbreaks of blue and sunshine, threatening clouds. Official May Day, Government Mayday, was the fifth this year. We sowed our sunflowers and went walking in King Death's Garden, it was very green and pretty in there, wild excesses of birdsong, evidence of a mass outbreak of primroses just past, floods of Spanish Bluebells (ie, the paler blue, crinkly, more robust model, not the native kind) on the turn, and the trees in beautiful young foliage, particularly the great Field Maple in the valley, extraordinary tall cloud of peachy gold feathery leaves. A short circuit, as we had our cat Ginger with us, and the long circuit would have taken hours. She only really likes jumping on gravestones, or better still leaping from the top of one gravestone to the next, to our gasps of admiration.

And, as we can tell by the dour weather, it's Festival time again in Brighton. So far I have entirely missed the Children's Parade, attended the Gala Concert at Roedean College (where a work by a composer friend of mine was premiered). We had Land of Hope and Glory AND Rule, Brittannia! which seemed a little excessive. The massed parents sang along with great gusto. I sort of envied them, that they still could, while fearing for their sanity; & omitted to support a Slam Poet at Varndean college. Then there's Tis Pity She's A Whore at the Theatre Royal on Saturday, "classic theatre with a startlingly modern outlook", it says here. Hm. Very true. Not sure that's anything to be proud of . . . Emmy Lou Harris, Much Ado About Nothing in St Nicholas Gardens (despite King Lear being so dreadful and so freezing cold last year), I'm a sucker for shakespeare al fresco; and finally Marianne Wright and Gabriel Jones at St Michael and All Angels on 31st.

Justice Is Fled To Heaven And Comes No Nearer

I duly rode the bus to Horsham last week for the WSCC planning committee meeting (very nice park in Horsham, where I got caught in a fine cloudburst), and the success of Cuadrilla's application to resume acid-fracture drilling at Balcombe was duly announced. Approval predetermined, and without much pretence of pretending otherwise. It was a sorry show, the petulant arrogance of the chairwoman (I'll accept chairperson, if you insist, but chairman, when the chair is blatantly female, is ideology gone mad, in my opinion); the insulting little amendments to HGV traffic flow (traffic flow is the only issue the committee are allowed to touch, that and the angle of certain floodlights when the site is in action 24 hours); the bitter and shocked cries of "Shame" and "Unbelievable" from the public . . . Some heartbroken, deeply disillusioned and angry people are rather gaining ground in West Sussex, everywhere but with the oblivious County Council and their Party, and have of course vowed to fight on. And they will. Non Violent Direct Action, Lawyers! Elections! Whatever else comes to hand. My next date is the 24th June, when (at a so far undisclosed venue) WSCC will be "debating" the application for exploratory drilling at Wisborough Green, fiercely and unanimously opposed by all the locals, opposition supported by a mass of conclusive evidence, but I don't expect anything different there. Or at Fernhurst.There is no "planning", there are no regulations, those days are gone. It's a knife fight.

When cardinals think murder’s not amiss:
Great men may do their wills, we must obey,
But Heaven will judge them for’t, another day.


. . . Maybe

http://www.midsussextimes.co.uk/news/local/video-decision-to-allow-cuadrilla-application-an-announcement-of-war-say-balcombe-campaigners-1-6034890

Could it be time to lose the word fracking? I'm in two minds. Cuadrilla and Celtique Energie seem to feel there's a lot of mileage in repudiating this dirty word, "Cuadrilla vows never to frack" etc. Maybe the opposition should move on to Opposing Brutally Destructive, Planet-Destroying, Poisonous, Dangerous, Water Gobbling, Corruptly Financed, Extreme Energy Extraction. But it doesn't have the same ring.

Keynote picture is my garden in Maytime, very green, except there's more flowers than it looks like here. And the swifts are back in Sussex, first sighted on the 5th I think, so few so far, I've seen one pair and a singleton, tossing in the wind, over our valley; I have not heard them yet. Their numbers keep going down, of course, and they suffered dreadfully last year, but I'm hoping for at least two or three pairs more. And for fine weather.

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Bob Buhr on :

this might help: http://scholarsandrogues.com/2014/05/08/fracking-in-the-uk-dont-hold-your-breath/

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