A barb of winter

It shouldn't really be called winter, but it certainly feels like it. But then winter is one of those seasons like all others these days. One day hot, one day cold. Global warming - nay! Tis global chaos. Anyone who had spent lonely hours playing simearth in the good old days when computer games required an imagination will know that all extremes demand a period of chaotic self-equilibrium. This is it.


And it is only Autumn and not Winter before any of you hasten to correct me. The morning mists are taking a little longer to clear these days, but when the sun does appear it does so with a magnetism that draws one outside to find those songlines which Chatwin was so fond of.



Last Sunday drew me out to the trails above St Julien des Chazes. The sky was African, the trees from New England, the landscape Alpine and all was French. Bar the instant soup which was disgusting.



... and for any one who likes trains, where else could you find a line so fine? A far better site than the M 25 - technology and Nature can co-exist. But only if you make the effort.


All this walking about gives one time for reflection. So the pilot of the Enola Gay has died at the age of 92 - proof either that there is no divine justice, or that one shouldn't really blame the messenger. I emerged from a generation tormented and teased by the threat of nuclear war - Threads, Protect and Survive, MAD - We mutated our neurosis and passed it on to our children under the guise of global catastrophe the natural way. It may still be our fault but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Well, only if one realises that there is no tunnel, only our blinkered vision - that of a cart horse with its head stuffed in a nosebag of consumerism... Oh errr, I feel a rant coming on, better have a lie down.