Love

Actually, something akin to love - kindness perhaps - was lurking in all sorts of unexpected places today.

There's a 'Community Farm' not too far away and I went up there today on a quest for their freshly grown veg, and to hear their fate. It's located in a beautiful spot, high on a hill right next to one of the poorest estates in the area and, in theory, is a community project. In practice, although it was started by people from the estate it's never been well supported by the locals. On the contrary, over the last few months they have really struggled with funding, have had to let all the animals go and the allotments were trashed by local youths. Today they were clearing all the beds and putting them to bed for the winter. They've found solutions to some of their debt burden and are hoping to regroup in the Spring as a purely horticultural project. I feel for the good-hearted folks who try to keep it going.

Walking through the estate afterwards I came across this puzzling sculpture and stopped to blip it. In the course of doing so I learned that a local guy has the job of picking up litter, which he loves. Just walks out of his house, starts filling his bin bag, goes home for a cuppa, back out to pick up after the school-kids at lunchtime, home for lunch, then out again. He LOVES it, says it's spoiled him for a proper job. The more rubbish he collects the more he earns, the council come and count the bags.

More importantly, I learned this by eavesdropping on a conversation between him and a brain-damaged guy, where they were joshing each other about having degrees in 'talking shite.' Actually it sounded more like love to me, or kindness, or community.