Unnatural spoilt beauty

They've been making hay up our way.
Last night they cut the grass, and today they were collecting it. It's a busy old, noisy, machine-driven business. It leaves great masses of short green nothingness. Once you've walked through a few freshly cut fields you can get a bit bored.

There's a tendency in North Devon to overplay the unspoilt natural beauty card.
We have an Area of OUTSTANDING Natural Beauty status - which is great and lovely and it is beautiful. Mostly it really is very beautiful.
But it's not unspoilt and mostly it is not natural.

There are a lot of big green fields.
Really not as great as it sounds.

When you stand in a big green field; a really big green field, you notice the absence of tress, of birds, of diversity, of unspoilt natural beauty. There's nowhere for the natural world to exist. It really is manmade. Sometimes I think cities have more spaces for nature.
From the air, from the distance, as a view from your house green fields are pretty, but close up they are a little worrying.

Unspoilt, natural Devon would have been covered with trees, with woodland; there would have been no roads, no pylons, no cows, no plastic hay bales, no big concrete-block-built white washed houses.

When we whinge about new stuff we should think about whether we are whinging because we are worried about something truly damaging or whether it is just the shock of the new and a new view.

I don't mind new views. What I don't like is the absence of diversity. I think big swathes of sameness are dangerous.

Apparently we don't want wind turbines here because we are too special and precious. Sometimes the attitude is enough to make me want to leave and go and live in Brighton. But I believe you have to stay and fight from within when you believe in something - and not run away.


Today was much better than yesterday. Richard worked all day; Gemma, Joel and Tess were occupied by their education systems (In Tess's case that meant a day on the beach), and I wrote myself a massive and varied To Do list. I got through most of my list, which included good stuff - such as yoga and walking the dog and playing the flute, and the less fun stuff - such as cleaning off the grouting on all the tiles in the bathroom and washing down the bath and basin and floor and ... you get the picture....