Me and gardening don’t get on.
I’ve tried several times, as I’ve moved to different houses throughout my life. But all I’ve had any success with growing is grass and weeds. And I have to admit, much as I admire other’s wonderful creations, I find the whole process of digging and weeding and clipping and composting wholly boring.
I’m assured, for instance, that mowing the lawn is a good thing – all that fresh air and gentle exercise and lovely smell of cut grass.
Well not for me it’s not. For me mowing the lawn is sweaty, and time wasting when I could be doing something better. And – when I look back afterwards and see the stuff is already growing again – a blooming nuisance.
So I’m pleased to see our scientific friends have come up with what seems to them a startling discovery. The average garden, they inform us, contains far more by way of bio-diversity than a field sown with a crop.
Or, putting it in language the rest of us use, there are more bugs and birds, more flowers and bushes, more growery and rottery.
I wonder how much public money that bit of research cost.
It confirms my point however. If gardens are better than fields, then untidy gardens,gardens with weeds and dead flowerheads and rotting branches and ignored heaps of mouldering cuttings, are better still.
An argument I’ve been putting to the man from the council for years.
Beware the rise of CCTV
When Hitler gained control of Germany he did not, I suggest, set out to make the lives of his fellow countrymen as miserable as possible.
What he did was declare his intention of creating a new Germany, one where every honest citizen could lead a fully productive and happy life ‘And your job,’ he told Himmler, ‘is to root out all the criminal elements that seek to prevent the smooth working of society.’
Thus was born the Gestapo,a gang of self-regulating jobsworths who knew their duty was to keep a close eye on everyone and everything; to root out, first, the known criminals,then the suspects, then those who looked as if, given the right circumstances, they might commit a crime against individuals or state.
A gang who, because of their ever increasing efficiency, record keeping and indisputable statistics, could finally prove wrong any person, group of people or organisation they felt the need to.
In Hitler’s Germany, as in countless other states of its kind, it was not the evil which spawned the system – it was the system that spawned the evil.
That is why I’m scared of cctv.
Image: Kevin Dooley under CC BY 2.0
