Spring hopes

Woke up this morning to hear a cheerful dawn chorus, notably blackbirds, with robins and pigeons in the background. Our small garden isn't a great wildlife haven but it's nice to be reminded that spring has arrived. In fact we were at a young friend's wedding in Oxford on Saturday, bathed in sunshine on the banks of the Cherwell river. It is true that spring is not as advanced this year as sometime, but I gather that fruit-farmers regard it as good news and anticipate good crops - assuming the bees survive the neonicotinoids. Certainly it seems to be a good year

The bride's mother embracing Jane

for primroses and the daffodils and narcissi in our garden. 

Contra yesterday's Countryfile on BBC1. Usually it's Tom Heap who specialises in doom and gloom, and, if we've recorded it,  through whose Cassandra-like reports we tend to fast-forward. However, yesterday it was the normally sanguine farmer Adam Hanson who was bemoaning the weather. Fair enough, he looked like losing his field of over-wintering oil-seed rape, but it won't actually ruin him. He had the gall to describe it as "a disaster" (originally a cosmic event of the destruction of a star). For one thing in our climate nature has a way of compensating - think of last year's transition from drought to flood. For another, it won't actually render him destitute. And for a third, did he not watch the wonderful programme also by the BBC, The Toughest Place to be a Farmer, in which Devon dairy farmer, Richard Gibson, went to work with a Samburu farmer herding cattle in the desolate northern part of Kenya?

As the write-up said,  

BBC photo

"British farmers have suffered from low milk prices and squeezed margins but it is nothing compared to the struggles of Richard's host, village elder Lemerigichen. In recent years drought has decimated the herds in this region, forcing many Samburu off their land and into the poverty of local towns. Richard launches himself into an alien lifestyle - sleeping rough in the wilderness, drinking cow's blood and digging and digging to find water. The two men form a touching bond through the love of their animals and the basic drive to support their families, whilst Richard gains an insight into what it is like to tend a herd when surrounded by lions, leopards and hyenas." In producer, Hannah Griffiths' story of meeting Lemerigichen, she wrote, "he’d lost cattle to drought, his brother to tribal warfare and a child to illness. He’d fought bloody battles to protect his herd, gone for days without food and water in times of drought and suffered prejudice and abuse when he’d gingerly ventured 200 miles to the city to find paid work. Yet he never gave up."  

Don't mistake me. I do not belittle the reverses that farmers have suffered this year, least of all the tragic loss of livestock that many hill-farmers have sustained. The sight of mounds of sheep carcases waiting to be disposed of from the Welsh border farm was shocking and distressing, and must have been devastating for the farmer, Errol Morris, whom we saw dragging yet another two of his decimated flock across the snow. It must take real courage to pick oneself from yet another reverse inflicted by the weather or by disease, and like Lemerigichen and Errol, never to give up. It's the farmer's territory, fate and gift. I trust and believe that better is to come. I hope so.

Broadcast goodies

I don't spend the whole weekend glued to the tv or radio, I really don't. But this weekend I did pick up some good moments at various points. For example, my bedtime listening on Saturday was The Moral Maze when the discussion was the morality of monarchy - which seemed to be an attempt to examine the moral justification for the institution, things like service and representing nation. The form of the 50 minute discussion is four of the six regular interrogators subject four expert witnesses on either side of a debate to cross-examination. That evening I was surprised to find myself unpersuaded by the royalists and most impressed with avowed republican, Professor Stephen Haseler. He was pugnacious and entertaining, especially in his exchange with the Blairite Matthew Taylor: "Let me ask you a question, as a democrat and as a person who's been in the democratic process: do you you want a say in who your next head of state is, or do you not?" "I'm quite happy with the situation as it now is -" "You don't want a say?" "No, no - Let me answer your question and then move on very quickly. I'm quite happy with the situation in which the person who effectively is the leader of our country politically is the Prime Minister and is elected, and we have a constitutional monarch." Interestingly I heard one of the arguments used by Taylor in defence of the monarchy, that most people were happy with it, used the next night to justify the introduction of Islamic rule into the post-spring Tunisia. It's hardly a moral argument, more a political one. Anyway, it was quite fun to hear one of the inquisitors having their bubble punctured!

Then on Ski Sunday there was a really inspiring item on paralympic hopeful Peter Dunning. He'd been a paratrooper in Afghanistan who, days before coming home, was in a armoured vehicle which ran over an IED. The driver was killed; he lost both his legs. "I was literally knocking on the door (of death); but, thank God, no one was in!" His first reaction in coming to after a week in intensive care, with his family round him, was "I don't want to be here - if this is going to be my life. I don't want this to be my life." In rehabilitation he got the opportunity to try out skiing, monoskiing. He described the glorious feeling of freedom, gliding down the mountain.
"In hindsight, looking back over it all, what are your overriding feelings about it all?" asked skier, Graham Bell.

"People may think it's the most strangest thing that I'm saying, but I think that getting blown up is one of the best things that's happened to me. I'm such a different person than I was. Before I was a bit of a lads' lad; now I'm more focused, more determined, and everything, to achieve what I want to achieve, like getting to the Paralympics, and progressing on from there."

It is an extraordinary statement to make, and yet it's one that resonates with many people who have endured disasters. First reactions may well of despair, and yet I have no doubt that now Peter Dunning is blessing the doctors who saved his life rather than giving up on him, and the physios whose persistence got him walking and then skiing on his prosthetic limbs. The moral must be: don't assist people to give up, assist them to live.

There was an item last night on BBC's Countryfile programme on rural road safety, or rather lack of item, presented by John Craven (about 10 minutes in). It was filmed in Lincolnshire which has had significant success in reducing fatalities on its roads. In the course of his report, there was on remarkable interview with the mother of an 18-year-old, John Van Spyk, who'd been on his motor-bike and killed when a young driver did a rash overtake of a slower moving vehicle meeting the bike head on.

In due course the young driver was taken to court charged with causing his death, "but Emma, John's mother, felt he had suffered enough. 'When the driver appeared in court, you did what many people would think was a remarkable thing. You wrote a letter to the judge asking him not to send this young man to prison.'
'Yes. I couldn't see that on top of everything he had been through being in jail away from his family and support network was going to help him. He was obviously very, very contrite, and he kept on saying, "I just didn't see him, I didn't see him."'
'And he didn't go to jail, did he?'
'No. No, he didn't. I believe he had a driving ban and community service.'"

I couldn't help admiring Emma and thinking how wise she was (and incidentally the judge for listening to her), and contrasting her spirit with the thirst for retribution so often broadcast, the "I'll never forgive him" which simply leaves the bereaved embittered. And I wished that parliamentarians and magistrates had an ounce of her wisdom and common-sense in the response to last summer's "rioters". I gather just for being present, not actively involved, you can expect a two-year jail sentence - which is plain daft, doing exactly what Emma sought to avoid for her son's killer, being away from his family and support network.

There was another moment of broadcasting gold in the same programme (about 30 minutes in) when "very lapsed Catholic" presenter, James Wong, visited the Benedictine Quarr Abbey in the Isle of Wight for a day. It was a short piece, but had a hugely resonant minute when he walks down to the shore looking over the Solent with Father Luke. As the sea washes the shingle at their feet, the monk talks quietly about the significance of the spot to him. He preferred it when mist shrouded the mainland and there was more of a feeling of being on an island. The sea for him was a picture of eternity, and pieces of land had over time been washed away from where they were standing just as parts of our lives are absorbed into eternity. Then he turns to James Wong. "Do you know the poem Crossing the Bar by Tennyson?" Wong confesses he didn't. But I did. In fact I'd sung it in a setting by Hubert Parry when I was at school. A bar is a sand or shingle bank, for example outside Cowes, protecting the harbour. Tennyson had a house in the Isle of Wight. In Tennyson's poem, he uses it as a metaphor for life and dying (coming into the harbour). Father Luke quoted the last two lines, but here's the whole poem:
Sunset and evening star,
  And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
  When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
    Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
    Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
    When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
    The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
    When I have crost the bar.

Weekend doings

What's the link?

Here we are again, out the other side of 'the sermon'. My audience nearly had to do without any visual aids, as another disaster befell my poor old laptop in the form of a sprinkling of elderflower cordial, resulting in the blanking of my screen before I'd put the powerpoint on my memory stick. However with a torch shining on the screen the transfer was eventually achieved. Phew! People seemed encouraged at the end. I talked about the deep link between Sunday worship and weekday life.

Before I rush on, however, I must go back to Saturday afternoon when we had the first MNDA meeting of the New Year at the Pear Tree Holiday Inn. What a good time! Sat next to my friendly 'herb farmer', David. First off we had a debrief on last year's International Symposium on MND/ALS (in Orlando) from the amazing Rachel Marsden, our local MND nurse coordinator, and heard about things like supra-glottal swallowing, compassion fatigue in carers and state-of-the-art green (environmentally) houses for independent living. After the break, his friend Dr Martin Turner gave us a presentation about Patrick Joyce, the incomparable optimist, who's an artist with MND. His aim is to paint 100 portraits of people who inspire him before he dies. Lovely young father, with an impish sense of humour and a gutsy determination. We were told that he's presenting an exhibition of his paintings in Oxford's beautiful Natural Science Museum in April. Made me feel a bit inadequate, if I'm honest.

http://www.mndoxfordshire.org/

The best thing about the meetings, as I've said before, is meeting folk. This time it was a new family, of whom their mum, Lorraine, was diagnosed with MND last year. Her son, Matt, and four friends are running the Reading Half Marathon in aid of MND care and research on 20th March. Here's the team. They can be sponsored on http://www.justgiving.com/TeamDiddy. 


Today's main decision was whether to replace my faithful friend, the laptop. Well, actually I made the decision last night and had second thoughts today. But now, "Alea iacta est," as Julius Caesar said, as he crossed the Rubicon. The die is cast. Norman tells me I've overused it - and he's probably right. I reckon a few more books are called for to merit the investment. So less waffle and more application.

I suppose that means less sport-watching. What a good thing we don't have Sky! Though Murray being walloped by Djokovic was on the BBC - I was spared that by my preaching engagement - phew! Big problem - the rugger starts again on Friday. Well, I suppose I am allowed weekends, aren't I?                      
Oh, I almost forgot, by way of light relief, a visit to my gentle dentist this morning, who painlessly patched up my carious teeth. A special needs dentist, she's worth her weight in gold. And talking of different special needs, I hope you didn't miss Countryfile on Sunday when Adam the farmer went to visit Pennyhooks Farm. It's a farm which works with young people, giving them life skills and education, and where Rachel does some of her work. If you didn't you can see it 14 minutes into this:  Countryfile including 'care farms'. I think it's impressive.

http://www.pennyhooks.com/