Simon Wren -Lewis on why Labour can be more ambitious in government than the general view that it cannot do much because of the Tory economic legacy.
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2024/03/detoxifying-government-debt-part-4.html
I am discovering how naive I was to imagine that retiring from full time employment would release lots of time to read books.
Progress is slow on my current book, reading it confined to bed before lights out.
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon attracted my interest in one of those ‘best books I’ve read this year’ pieces in the December edition of a magazine. Perhaps I am trying to make up for the complete lack of any human biology lessons in my school years, notwithstanding being a husband to Lorraine for over 40 years and father of our three children, for all of whose births I was definitely in the room.
The book has detailed fascinating information about the female body I just didn’t know before now, and aims to dismantle the still pervasive construct of the male body as the human norm of which the female is a variation.
Anyhow, why reading is limited even in the day of a retired person can be exemplified in yesterday’s schedule.
Finally this week we divested ourselves of our second car, leaving us with one battery electric vehicle, a Nissan Leaf. The old petrol-fuelled Peugeot Lorraine used for work before her retirement last year has been handed on to another family member, as a stop-gap whilst they work out what their next car is, following the recent demise of their old car.
Lorraine had exercised the discipline of waiting for this moment before making the switch to driving the Leaf to avoid potentially hazardously confused muscle memories if alternating between using a manual gear ICE vehicle and an automatic electric one. I had stopped driving the Peugeot already except for occasionally moving it to re-park, when I inevitably crunched the gears.
So yesterday was the first time Lorraine needed to drive the Nissan a significant distance across town, and beyond, to reach the garden charity where she does a voluntary morning’s work.
I was drafted in as passenger and advisor on the drive. It meant I got to take the car back home and use it for a food shopping expedition. We don’t use online food shopping apart from a weekly box of organic vegetables, as generally we like to see and handle what we are choosing to eat and drink.
Food shopping done, I returned to the garden charity across town with the car to collect Lorraine after her volunteering session . So two hours in a car and two hours shopping and unpacking shopping accounts for a whole morning pushing into the afternoon. Not much reading done!
After a slow lunch with fresh ingredients garnered from the above- mentioned shopping expedition the afternoon didn’t really stretch out in front of us. We had vowed to cut back one of our over- bearing fig trees, which the elderly previous occupant of the house had been unable to keep in check, before a potential garden landscaper arrived the next day to give a quotation for re- design work.
Despite having consulted several sources of advice about pruning fig trees in particular, which differed between themselves, we set about using general pruning principles to reduce the tree significantly. This is to prevent it encroaching on an area we want to plant up with vegetables. The tree, though the largest of four fig trees in the garden, had been the least fruiful last summer, probably because of the neglect. It was dusk before we cleared the cuttings from the lawn.
There was just time to have dinner using the remainder of a lamb joint we had on Sunday, before heading out to the local cinema. We had booked tickets to see Bob Marley: One Love. It was a nostalgic evening, a reminder of just how big was the impact of his music, reaching way beyond the usual reggae appreciating audience. We still have an early vinyl copy of Exodus in the house, one of those each of Lorraine and I had purchased separately in the 1970s before we met.
Flopped into bed around 10.45pm – 15 minutes for reading before my eyelids refused me.
I will be joining this pilgrimage
Date: 21st April 2023
Plan: The No Faith In Fossil Fuels Service will take place outside, in the grounds of St Johns Church Waterloo. We will be gathering from 11am, for the service to start at noon. After the service, we will walk together towards Parliament, via Shell headquarters, to join The Big One protest.
In this critical time for life on our planet, it’s vital that we unite to survive. So imagine this… Christians of different backgrounds and denominations coming together for a prayerful and prophetic service outside in the beautiful grounds of St Johns Church Waterloo.
You are welcome to arrive from 11am, and people will be gathering while music plays. The service itself will start at noon and will involve prayerfully reflecting on why this is a critical time for life on our planet. We will hear from young people whose future…
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On day 3 of his book of Advent reflections, Sleepers Wake: getting serious about climate change (SPCK 2022) Nicholas Holtam focuses on biodiversity. This is a timely topic as as the United Nations prepares for its 15th Conference of the Parties on biological diversity in December.
Holtam reminds us how dire the situation is. None of the 20 targets agreed for the UN Decade of Biodiversity 2011 20 have been fully met and only 6 partially achieved. Instead the destruction of ecosystems has continued and the pace of the loss of species has increased.
Whilst many countries including the UK have passed legislation to address environmental degradation nonetheless civil society must be alert to ensure that action matches intent.
I was struck by his note that churchyards collectively across the country in the UK are the size of a national park. In many communities local groups are being imaginative about the way they care for their churchyards and this is making a difference to biodiversity. By working together they educate both themselves and their communities.
Bringing to mind words of Jesus about the liberating power of the truth, Holtam reiterates his call for people of Christian faith and others to face up to the truth of what we are doing to our environment because it’s only when we we know the truth so we are able to find the way forward.
I am on Day 2 of Nicholas Holtam’s daily reflections book for Advent Sleepers Wake: getting serious about climate change. Today’s piece is a quick overview of some of the main issues about getting to net zero with a particular focus on the current strategy of the UK government. As a short piece the reflection is necessarily a very top level skate over these issues. Nonetheless what struck me is Holtam’s encouragement to his readers both to be informed about the real complexity and contestable character of proposed responses and yet also to be determined to highlight the pressing need for urgent action to achieve net zero. Local communities of faith like churches have a greater role than possibly even they themselves possibly realise in raising awareness and engagement in their wider community.
Members of All Saints Church in Wokingham, where I am the Rector, as an Advent discipline are reading the book Sleepers Wake: getting serious about climate change by Nicholas Holtam, (SPCK, 2022). A bishop in the Church of England, Holtam was its lead bishop on the environment from 2014 until 2021. The book provides daily reflections, through the pre- Christmas season, on the climate emergency from a perspective of Christian faith.
Today’s refection focuses on how the Christian call to be awake always to the truth of what’s going on requires people of faith to make every effort to know and understand the true scale of the impact of current human activity on the climate, its consequences, and how urgently and comprehensively we need to respond.
I was struck in today’s piece by his clear-eyed statement that whilst on the one hand the IPCC process especially COP 26 is a major achievement of global cooperation to tackle the problem, yet also “it is nothing like enough”. This is a way of describing the COP process which perhaps both boosters of it and detractors of it might accept?
“Conservatives oppose change and want things to remain the same. On climate, however, inaction means that things will not remain the same but will radically change—for the worse. Thus conservative politicians should join with social democrats and greens in accelerating the necessary actions to repair the ecosystem.” writes Paul Sweeney in the latest edition of Social Europe.
Read the full article here https://socialeurope.eu/from-free-market-to-subsidised-capitalism
Visiting my mother in my native town of Pudsey, West Yorkshire today I took a moment to photograph my first school, Greenside Primary. I attended it from 1961 until 1966. In fact, it was also the school my mother attended when she moved with her parents to Pudsey from Leeds in 1939. It’s still a primary school today and one of my brother’s grandchildren attends it.
Among my most vivid memories of Greenside are the snowy days. We created immense (to us) icy slides the length of the gently sloping tarmac- coated playground. Playtime breaks were spent whizzing down these achieving feats of balance and speed, like a landlocked simulacrum of surfing.
There was a seasonality about our playground activities. Conkers in the autumn, slides and snowballing in winter, and at some point when the weather was warmer and the ground drier, marbles would be brought out.
In September 1966, for my final year of Junior school ( Year 6 today) the whole school decamped to a brand new school with its own playing field about half a mile away at Southroyd. This was just slightly closer to the house to which my family had moved earlier in 1966 than Greenside is. I don’t know what happened to the Greenside school building immediately after that move but it wasn’t long before it was operating again as a primary school as it continues today. No doubt the growth of the population in Pudsey in the mid- 1960s and 1970s required the additional school places.
Pudsey became one of the fastest growing towns in the West Yorkshire conurbation in the latter part of the 20th century. There were numbers of new homes built on brownfield sites previously occupied by industrial plants such as tanneries, woollen mills, and light engineering workshops. When I was a child it was nothing unusual walking around outside to be met by the greasy smells, incessant whirrings, and occasional bangs and blue flashes of local industry. It seemed there was a pub and a chapel at every significant street corner, and some in between too! The former I aspired to visit and frequently succeeded from the age of 16 upwards, the latter not so much. Whatever Primitive Methodists and Strict Baptists were I was content to remain in ignorance of them. I was unconflictedly Church of England! Decommissioned pubs and chapels were demolished and new housing built. At one site a former graveyard is covered over now by an innocuous cul-de- sac of modest detached homes; providing a complete visual erasure of its previous awe-inspiring appearance.
I saw my first redwings of the winter today. There was a small flock of them feeding on our lawn. Lorraine spotted them. What she thought were leaves in the distance suddenly started to hop around over the grass, pecking at the ground for worms.
The link to the RSPB site explains the annual journey of redwings to southern England in Autumn and Winter
I’ve discovered today the poem of this title by WH Auden. It was referred to in this week’s New Statesman in the article “Humanity, not hostility, will solve the migrant crisis” by Philip Collins. The poem’s context is the situation facing German Jews in Nazi Germany. It could have been written today in the context of the present crisis of hostility facing refugees.
The poem is online here
David Hodgson 