Gwyneth's personal blog

Wednesday 2nd October, grey skies, clammy air. Rain in the night, but it didn't change anything. Spider season in the garden has come and gone since I last added anything to this blog, and far too much of the time between has been spent reading the documents supporting Energie Celtique's application to drill for oil and/or gas, at a site between Wisborough Green and Kirdford, Chichester district, West Sussex, deep in that "intimate and secluded" landscape, (I'm quoting from the ES) that still retains (miraculously! ed) its mediaeval character. There's 1000 pages of the stuff. The ancient headland church at Wisborough Green is the haunted location I chose for my "Tom and Em" story The Flame Is Roses The Smoke Is Briars. The Sussex Wildlife Trust has a reserve adjoining the site, frequented by all sorts of bats, including the rare species our present regime mysteriously insists that it protects to the point of reverent worship (cf great crested newts: they're obsessed with great crested newts, they love to catch them and carry them around in jars, like rapacious small children of fifty years ago). SWT wasn't consulted, of course. They're asking all their members to object, and of course many of us will, but the process is a mean joke. If we so much as hint at the term "fracking", our objections will be tossed. If we say, exploration? Well, what are they exploring for, if they don't mean to exploit?, our objections will be tossed. If we say, we know what outcome is planned. We've read the letter to the shareholders, and it's all about tasty unconventional energy reserves, do you think we don't know what unconventional means?... Do you think we don't know how many wells they'll need? our objections will be tossed.

Sometimes I wonder, what could be the Invasion of Poland, the game changer, in the preamble to this war against the worst threat our civilisation has ever faced? And I can't think. I just can't think.

Dust in the air suspended, marks the place where a story ended

Not many people realise this, but that dust, the eutrophic nitrogen in all the heavy goods vehicle emissions just duing the 3 years of this "exploration" license, will be enough to destroy a lot of the "value" of these choice "landscape receptors": and I mean permanently.

& that's only one of the threads I'm involved in. I'm drowning in hopeless activism here. I really must get a grip on this.

Watching (over)

& so, goodbye Breaking Bad. On Friday night we took a break, and another on Saturday: then realised we weren't going to make it without a huge effort, and it was worth it. 3 episodes on Sunday, and a race to the finish on Monday, late. There's times when I've grown impatient, and many times I've grumbled that the two female characters had very little to do except wander vaguely about being witless (I'm not counting the Wicked Witch of the East with her iconic red soles; or that zero-hours contracted baby), but even Marie was a huge improvement on the usual sopranos and madmen collusive and enabling pneumatic dolls. The melodrama of the last stretch was peerless. Pantomime elements in the mopping up of secondaries fine with me. I like a fictioneer who isn't afraid of pantomime. Happy ending for the monster of evil, reunited with his true love, also okay with me. It was neat.

Reading

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice; for Vector. Very interesting! All I'm going to say about that for the moment.

Hoping for

A change in the weather.

Keynote picture is my gentian sino ornata, that I bought to cheer myself up. This plant will have to live in a pot when it moves to the garden, as it hates chalk, yes, I know that. Couldn't help myself. Bright blue October sky...Memo, must visit Sheffield Park this month.