Passata

I assumed, without thinking too much about it, that I was going to be making masses of passata this year. It seems appropriate that the Italian word passata means 'passed, finished, over'.

That's a resonant word just at the moment: honesty, the rule of law, democracy, our habitat...

On which subject I wrote recently to my MP:

I've been concerned about the damage human beings are doing to the environment since I was at school 50 years ago, and I have tried to do my small bit to look after our shared home, but I never imagined it could become as dangerous and frightening as it is now.

The searing heat and the torrential rain that the UK has seen recently; the collapse of our wheat harvest; the news that Greenland's ice sheet, already causing sea levels to rise, has melted to a point of no return; the fires, droughts and hurricanes in the US... All signs of our global interdependence and the catastrophic route we are on, yet no-one seems to be taking real action.

I'll probably be dead by the time northern Europeans need to become climate refugees and find there is nowhere left to go, but my children might not. Please, please, please can you do your best to persuade the UK decision-makers to take a lead on this by backing the The Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill? I know that the real decision makers are the wealthy whose goal in life is to get incomprehensibly wealthier, but even they can't eat money.

I don't know whether I believe we can do it, or even whether humanity is worth saving, but this Bill commits the UK to making and enacting a serious plan. It:
• gets us to acknowledge our entire carbon footprint, rather than perpetuating the myth that everything is somehow different across our borders and someone else's fault
• sets in place action now, rather than waiting for some imaginary technology to arise like a god and save us later
• focuses on the rest of nature as well as the climate - everything is interconnected as, it seems, Covid-19 is showing us
• gives a voice to ordinary people through a Citizens’ Assembly with real teeth.

For your children and mine?

Thank you.

I got a supportive reply today.

And I have to record one of the best newspaper headlines ever in today's i: Britannia Waives the Rules. I wish I could think like that.