Beavers and Bees

Wild ones, in Britain, hooray! http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/first-wild-beavers-spotted-in-england-for-800-years-could-be-trapped-and-put-in-zoo-by-government-9574751.html Now of course, Defra wants to put them in cages, and some angling society is upset because they feel they have a 'right' to shoot them. Seriously. Our first wild beavers in 800 years.

Today, the government will be chewing over whether to overturn the EU's ruling in Britain and allow Syngenta pesticides to be used... I have emailed the PM to try to persuade him about the damage this could do to our already failing bee populations. One truly alarming thing I read yesterday is that urban bees are doing better than rural ones because they are less likely to come across deadly pesticides. It's so weird to think of the Green and Pleasant Land becoming a dead canvas. Just as the UN tries to give a clear focus on the connection between healthy environment and healthy humanity,(http://www.un.org/sg/statements/index.asp?nid=7821) it seems Britain is still focusing on economy at the cost of ecology in a very 19th century kind of way. It isn't all about the government either. We, the people, don't want to know.

As I write this, I'm staring out of the french windows at all the gold and green - the latter added to by rampant and very happy parrots squawking in the trees. A very young fox just bimbled out into the garden, eyes blinking at the sunshine. It jumped about four feet on noticing me and one of the cats staring at it, and ran off, terrified, down the back lane. Another one, full grown I think, followed it less than a minute ago.

Life can be really pretty. I don't know why we have to mess it up.

Predator Safari

It's been an interesting time for shouting at the bad guys. Today's twitter king is the AskThicke hashtag, a gift that keeps on giving. It was supposed to be a Q+A publicity thing, giving fans direct access to the singer most famous for the very questionable hit song 'Blurred Lines.' The result has been a troll avalanche, as spectacular as the unfortunate Susan Boyle publicity hashtage #Susanalbumparty. It's been caustic to the point of joyful brutality, and I am trying not to enjoy it. 9 times out of 10 Twitter makes me want to run off to another planet. Today was the 10th time. Some have pointed out that RT wasn't alone in the production of that song, the mintingly popular Pharrel was involved too. But the latter's PR machine has a bit more savvy than to paint a target on their man and set him loose in a shooting gallery. Clearly, Thicke doesn't have those kind of friends. From the tweetfest, it seems he may not have any kind of friends.

Not so funny, the Rolf Harris thing. Like many others, I grew up with Rolf puffing and painting on the TV set in the background. He was never a favourite of mine, but he was part of the landscape. I recall long ago being given a warning about him. I can't recall who told me that they were disappointed on meeting him, because all he did was creep around the girls in an unpleasant way. 'Nasty,' was the word used. I was young enough not to understand quite what I was being told, but as I never intended to meet him, and never did, it was moot.

Marion Zimmer Bradley was the real shock. Turns out her husband was a known paedophile shielded by her...and according to her daughter, she was much more monstrous than he was. I read a poem by her daughter on the matter, and it has an awful ring of sincerity to it. I am upset enough not to provide a link* to that, or to the deposition* regarding her husband, which records MZB twisting and prevaricating pretty obviously. It is very hard to avoid the revulsion, and having read some of the material, I am not going to try. The poem makes me want to smash her face with rocks. I'm afraid I believe it.

I never read The Mists of Avalonall the way through; it was a bit too mopeymoon for me. But it was a good idea to have, this sense of Arthur's world from the point of the women. I liked the whole vibe around it rather than the story itself, a world of tattooed priestesses and Loreena McKennit warblings. But that was the interpretation of other imaginations and feelings. She drew, others coloured in. Do those who found their own profound expression in MoA feel complicit in her inner poison? Do they feel that they enabled her? One friend said that
he didn't feel the need to throw away her books or hate her prose anymore than he would stop using an autoban if he learned that Hitler had built it. And I understand that. Others say they feel sick that she ever benefited from their fandom, their belief and their money, and they are just chucking her books in the bin. I understand that too. Popular and Gifted and Good are not interchangeable. But in a time when we get so much of our moral compass delivered through entertainment, it's a hard thing to accept. Maybe we always want to like a person when we like what they create.

*Both are easy to find on the web.