Its about time I blogged again.
So much has happened I won't even try to weave this into the previous one.
In few days the hut I'm sitting in will be declared legal, or not. I'm pretty dispassionate about it, mostly. I have put in for ' retention of a temporary work shelter, ancillary to the restoration of biodiversity at Allttabor' or words like that. 'Ancillary' is one of those key Planning coinages, part of their special code. Planners are an increasingly detached priesthood, who really only want to engage thus.
I have tried to give the 'structure' a neutral title in the word 'shelter'.God forbid it should have any whiff of 'habitation'. And that it is in the 'open countryside' sets lights flashing.
We are of our Age, unconsciously adopting its values and sensibilities and neuroses as our defaults.
Suburbia is Unreal. An intrinsic lie, a designed fantasy.
It was founded on nostalgia for lost pastoral origins, and as refuge from our often crowded and dirty and ugly workplaces.
A conscious displacement.
We have mile after mile of pocket rural 'dormitory' for nuclear families. Clusters of houses and gardens were built, tailored to house an aspiring middle class . A culture intrinsically selfish and isolated and aspiration.
From this place, no wonder we learn a view of the world based on confused guilt and whimsy. On occasional escape and dreams of retirement.
Most driveways harbour boats, camper vans & caravans. The substance of dreams of adventures into wilder places.
I came across reprints of the first Ordnance Survey maps recently. They are a treasure, showing a landscape that is pre-industrial, pre-suburban sprawl, pre-oil, and pre-forestry. So much has changed and so fast in two hundred years. I feel a great healing in gazing at them, and realising how fast transformation can be. We can mend things as well as break them. Nature always treats our disturbances as an opportunity , so we should too.
This blog has gone epic mode,
That is, it's gone on too long.
I'm going to coil it in.
Tie up the threads.
Since I started this, the decision has been made. I will wait for a brown envelope to john spikes in the postbox. I am ready to meet it either way...
I think
