#JulySquares

Bugs In My Borders And More About Climate Change

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It’s cool today after yesterday’s roasting, and thinking is easier. I’m still brooding on Boris Johnson’s climate change contentions (quote and article link in previous post) and it occurs to me that when an issue becomes polarized between sceptics and supporters, more energy goes into the argument than the resolution. In other words, nothing gets done and the conflict becomes an end in itself.

A poor end, I might add; the kind that happens in marriages, between nations, in neighbour feuds. And so when it comes to the climate-change sceptics, those cash-loaded, vested-interest, shadowy entities who fund political campaigns, and infiltrate their agendas across our mass media through advertising and sponsorship, then such wily bodies with share-holders to appease are sure to understand this very well. Distract. Confuse. Immobilize.

In some ways, then, whether rapid climate change is caused by humans or is the product of the planet’s own cycles, isn’t the point. The point is we need to act, because we’ve known for decades that environmental degradation affects the climate. If you cut down a forest, there will be less rainfall and more soil erosion. If you overgraze grassland you will create a desert. If you crop, mine or drill for natural resources and leave a wasteland of pollution you threaten the lives of the locals and their resulting survival tactics may only add to the problem.

Another fact: humans have been radically changing the natural environment for 10,000 years, ever since they took up cultivation and herding for a living. There is absolutely no doubt that these events happened. Environmental degradation creates and accelerates human poverty in a multiplier vortex of deprivation. Those of us who live in more privileged conditions may then be alarmed by the threat of arriving migrants, and this in turn starts colouring the complexion of a receiving nation’s politics – and not for the better for any of us.

But many of these things can be fixed. If we want to fix them. And since thinking globally is too big ‘a think’ for most of us, then there is much that can be done on local and regional levels. Here is a stunning example from China. Watch the video and be heartened and amazed. This is what it says about itself:

In 2005, the Chinese government, in cooperation with the World Bank, completed the world’s largest watershed restoration on the upper banks of the Yellow River. Woefully under-publicized, the $500 million enterprise transformed an area of 35,000 square kilometers on the Loess Plateau — roughly the area of Belgium — from dusty wasteland to a verdant agricultural center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QUSIJ80n50&t=1810s

The further good news is, the Loess Plateau model is now being used to tackle desertification in other parts of the world. So you see we CAN do it. Acting locally, regionally, nationally can go global.

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copyright 2019 Tish Farrell

 

July Squares #26

The Colours of ‘HOT’ ~ Bucolic Shropshire Version

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Today in the UK the heatwave continues, the Met Office predicting an all time July temperature high of 37’C. So things are not looking good on the climate change front. Yesterday Greenpeace volunteers wearing ‘Climate Emergency’ vests and sashes briefly blocked the Boris Johnson motorcade en route to Buckingham Palace where he was to meet the Queen.

Greenpeace say they handed the new PM a guide on how to tackle the climate crisis. But will he take action, they ask. It now transpires, as reported by  Peter Geoghegan at openDemocracy, that both he and Jeremy Hunt received campaign funding of £25,000 apiece from First Corporate Shipping Company, the trading name of Bristol Port whose influential owners, the report says, are climate change sceptics. (Hunt has declared the donation here).

But let Boris speak for himself as he pronounces on the 2015 Paris Climate Summit at the end of his account of a most exerting game of makeshift ping-pong at his office Christmas party:

It is fantastic news that the world has agreed to cut pollution and help people save money, but I am sure that those global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation.

 

Boris Johnson The Telegraph 20 December 2015

For further insight into the jolly japes chappie we now have as PM, you can read the whole thing HERE

July Squares #25

Out In The ‘Blue Remembered Hills’

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Into my heart on air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

From A. E. Housman’s  A Shropshire Lad  1896

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We are lucky enough to live on the edge of Wenlock Edge whose ridge-top road delivers us straight to the heart of Shropshire’s hill country. Caer Caradoc, Lawley, Ragleth, Long Mynd, Stiperstones are some of the most well known of our uplands, each striking in its own way and often featuring in old tales and mysterious legends. This is not surprising considering that humans have been walking these lands for at least the last 9,000 years when the ice sheets retreated.

The whole area is rich in prehistoric remains – burial cairns, standing stones, hill forts, Bronze Age field systems, trackways, drove roads and trade routes. This photo was taken from the northerly flanks of the Long Mynd, on the lane to Ratlinghope and Bridges, and looks over the Lawley to the long blue-green spine of Wenlock Edge.

July Squares #18

Crocosmic Blue

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A couple of years ago I dumped a big wodge of Crocosmia corms over the fence behind the old privies. The plants were too big for the garden and I’d lost patience with them leaning over and smothering everything else. But I didn’t quite have the heart to dispose of them altogether. And this year I’m glad I didn’t. The exiled Crocosmia are now as happy as Larry, not leaning over at all, but reaching up and up into the summer sky.

July Squares #17

What A Good Yarn! Knitting Bombs in Bishops Castle

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Well you can’t help but think it, can you: would that all bombing were so beautifully harmless and smile-inducing. In my last post I mentioned our ‘guerrilla garden’, but here we have a spot of guerrilla knitting found in and around our favourite small Shropshire town of Bishop’s Castle. The great knitting outbreak apparently began here a few years ago to coincide with the town’s arts festival, but I noticed some more recent additions on our last visit. It’s inspiring me to get my knitting needles out again for a little more creative procrastination, though yarn bombing Wenlock might be a step too far. Maybe the allotment…?!*&

Knitted peas and carrots anyone?

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Crocheted cupcakes at Poppies Tearoom?

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Much indulging of the imagination at the bookshop:

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And then some subtle, ‘environmentally sensitive’ yarning:

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Last but not least, in the entrance of the Town Hall you may also see a knitted version whose accompanying notice says it was created by Nigel. It’s there to serve a particular good cause, inviting donations for the care and renovation of this lovely building that sits so finely at the top of the town:

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July Squares #16

Just Now ~ The Blue Over Wenlock Edge

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I noticed last night that the wheat in Townsend Meadow is on the turn – the silver-grey ears taking on the faintest sheen of gold. Out in the guerrilla garden there is also much gold on the go. The chamomile daisies are over a metre tall, and the giant mullein are being truly gigantic. Soon the helianthus will be blooming and it will be full-on yellow, here on the edge of Wenlock Edge.

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July Squares #11

Atelier nani Iro Meets Indian Woodblock~ A Case Of Sewing Not Writing

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I started making my own clothes in my teens: it was the era of Pop Art and Mary Quant shifts. I made a bee-line for cheap remnants of furnishing fabrics with big prints and turned out some surprising garments. Much much later, when were living in Kenya and Zambia, I was inspired by the bright local fabrics and started sewing again. Graham still has some striking longish shorts – an all-over mango tree design – orange print on navy – the lovely glazed cotton bought in Lusaka back in ‘93 and initially used as curtains in our little house on Sable Road.

Back in England again, I did not sew so much, though I remember making a big winter coat which features in one of my earlier blog headers. Thereafter the sewing urge mostly faded away. It was easier to buy stuff.

And then recently I discovered nani IRO. Not only was it love at first sight, but the advent of a whole new sewing adventure: the hitherto unencountered territory of Japanese design. This was the book that started it:

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For those like me i.e. not-in-the-know, Nani IRO is the brand name for the fabrics created from designs by Japanese artist Naomi Ito. And Atelier nani IRO is the design studio that produces the sewing patterns. In the past they have catered only for petite Japanese sizes. But this current collection now includes sizes up to UK 14/US 12.

The book is beautiful – every page of it. But being captivated by the images and fabrics is one thing. I soon realised the challenge of using it to make an actual garment was probably bordering on the impossible. The patterns that come with the book comprise two fat folded wads of stiff white paper. They are inscribed with multiple pattern pieces that overlay one another, and at all angles. Furthermore, the instructions are in Japanese, although on the whole the book’s accompanying diagrams are more or less clear to anyone used to tackling European dress patterns.

So: this is what a small part of the pattern sheet looks like. Think exploded Venn diagram meets Heathrow air traffic control flight paths:

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Each garment does however have a letter code in English and the sizes are indicated S, ML, L+, 2L. After this, you are pretty much on your own.

Once you know the letter of your chosen project, you must then study the designated layout in the book to fix in visual brain the shapes of all the pattern pieces you’ll need. Then you have to search for those shapes within this bonkers mega-puzzle, and having located them, trace them off to the appropriate size on dressmaking tracing paper.

By this point, on my hands and knees amid clouds of tissue paper strewn across the bedroom floor, I realise I am pursuing, and with dogged intent, an extreme form of writer’s procrastination. I have actually chosen to unravel this devilish design of cross-purposes rather than sort out the pressing narrative plotting problems of the novel.

Found you out! I cry. This is not really about making a big blue frock out of a stash of Indian block print cotton that you just happened to have handy. This is about NOT WRITING.

But  then of course when it comes to prevarication, writers have all the excuses. I tell myself it’s good at my age to go in for new forms of mental and manual exercise, even if the initial processes are killing on the knees. Besides, there is also the great satisfaction of making and completing a project. And while I can see that my new blue Indo-Japanese gown is hardly the sort of thing I can wear at the allotment, it does have potential as a personal seaside ‘changing room’. I can even look fairly gracious when needing to treat with the postman before I’m quite up in the morning.

And then I’m actually rather in love with the thing itself. Scenes from Kurosawa epics (Seven Samurai, Ran, Yohimbo) come flitting through my mind. Perhaps a little of the master’s creative impulses might just rub off on me (though hopefully not adding confusing Japanese influences to a yarn set in the East African bush. Or there again…) So I may just hang the finished work on the wall. Perhaps it will tell me I’ve used up all present excuses to not write. Perhaps it will say: stop play-acting out in the field with the other half and get back to the keyboard!

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July Squares #7