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Beware If You Are Ever There...

Beware If You Are Ever There...

August 05, 2022

*Best to read these Friday updates on the web*

Finally, we'd finished our last minute beer, biscuit and macaroon shopping at the Cite Europe shopping centre at Calais. We hopped back into our full Qashqai, which whiffed of our gastronomic Paris McDonald's rubbish bag, buried beneath the teen's things.

There was still time to catch Le Shuttle home.

But it wasn't the passport queues that delayed us, it was navigating our way out of this shopping area that did it. The signposting was confusing- a spaghetti of roads, roundabouts, and twisted sign posts that even Google Maps couldn't help with (how on earth did we ever manage without it?).

So beware, if you ever find yourself there.

We found a bin for the rubbish, and I settled in to read Ian's late takeover on the next train. Perfectly not on time.

🗞️News From You

Rescued young swifts

◆Sarah Davies: Quiet Skies — randomdialogues.medium.com

You may have noticed the skies are now very quiet as numbers of Swifts have halved. Many of the non-breeding Swifts had started their epic 14,000 mile migration back to Africa. Mostly just the breeding parents left, attending their chicks.

BUT the hot weather is causing havoc.

Around this time the parents stop feeding their growing chicks, so they are both lighter and hungry, which helps them to leave the nest and take to the skies.

The insects they've been fed on are their only source of moisture...but in the hot weather, they are getting dehydrated.

Too many are falling to the ground rather than flying.

They spend their life on the wing, so if they fall, they are in real trouble and need specialist help.

If you find a fallen swift, contact a Swift Rehab Specialist.

👉 Find out more about Swifts and what to do if you find one

◆Annelize Kidd: Extra Virginity — www.pdfdrive.com

Surprisingly murky....The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

◆I’ve been meeting with the same group of men for 36 years — www.theguardian.com

When I saw a flyer for a ‘men’s group’ in a shop window, I was a young, buttoned-up and newly single father. More than three decades on, the conversations are still changing my life

Here’s what they’ve taught me

Thanks for the spot, Mike

◆Philip Parker: "The Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson — sites.google.com

You don’t need me to mention the record-breaking heatwave we suffered last month. The day before it peaked, as some of our national papers told Britons to enjoy the sun and not listen to the ‘snowflake’ agitators about a climate crisis, I took from my bookshelf The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. The landmark book exposed the impact of profligate use of pesticides and other chemicals in agriculture in the 1940s and ‘50s. It’s decades since I read it. It was published exactly 60 years ago, and I was curious as to whether such an old book, written well before the term ‘climate change’ was coined, remained relevant.

The book is special to me. I grew up with it on my parent’s bookshelf. Reading it and watching David Attenborough’s pioneering docs like Life on Earth, instilled in me a passion for nature.

‘Silent Spring’ is a brilliant title, much mimicked. It stems from American birdwatchers who reported a steady decline in species in the 1950s. Carson was a respected US biologist and nature writer who investigated the reasons for the loss. With a rare gift for conveying science to a lay audience, she summarised a huge amount of research and statistics and funnelled this into a coherent argument - and a call to action to oppose the scorched earth policy of pesticide use.

At the time of her writing, nature was very much considered an ‘it’ – something to be mastered and used, whether in maximising food output, or as a dump for industrial waste. Carson pioneered a more Earth-centric literature, questioning the duality of ‘us’ distinct from nature.

Two years after its publication she died from cancer. She had to suffer vilification and attacks from vested interests like the pesticide manufacturers while ill, and she countered this with clarity and courage. She left a book that serves as a template for clear and great writing, and arguably was the genesis of the modern environmental movement, kickstarting public debate in earnest.

Reading it again, I found that something stands out more than ever. There’s a subtext that says: you won’t save something you don’t love. Her love for the natural world sings out from the ink on every page. Given the overheated month we had, does her 60-year-old writing remain relevant? The excerpt below answers.

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less travelled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”

From Silent Spring, 1962 Thank you Philip

🎵Jason's Music Choice This Week

“The sound of someone you love who’s going away and it doesn’t matter" The Penguin Cafe

You need to listen to it all the way to the end.⤵️

🎨From The Artist Living In The Shadows

Christmas is just around the corner....who doesn't need one of these pet portraits

⚡️Creative Nudge

"Something Old Something New" 1874 by Monir Shahroudy ⤵️

🧙‍♂️Mike's Musings

My (Mike's) basic model is that:

[1] we ALL in our childhood create negative/limiting beliefs which rationalise what we are experiencing. eg "nobody will ever believe me".

[2] as we wander through life we create super-effective coping mechanisms which OVER-compensate eg "I have become a super communicator, everybody understands me".

[3] however we still have the original belief hard-wired - and until we confront and learn to manage IRL that belief we will continue to be hindered in the use of our super-power since it is STILL true that "nobody will ever believe me".

This relates to ego as far as I am concerned since its ego that projects out the image of the excellent communicator AND its the ego that ensures that things don't get (from ego's viewpoint) out of control and (god forbid!) believing in oneself by goading/reminding/nudging using the fear of the original experience to ensure subservience to the ego.