Monday 17 December 2012

A blog at last!

I've been told it's about time I post another blog. Okay, I admit it's been a time since the last one! To be honest I hate computers, I really loath the time spent on them - if I'm sat at a computer it's because something is stopping me from doing something more interesting. This is usually weather, darkness or pressure from an outside source such as the day job or HMRC.

I believe most of the stress in modern life is computer generated. They don't labour save, they create work - either because we now have to complete work on line, produce documents that previously were the domain of specialist printers or simply because some bureaucrat can now produce virtual paperwork faster than trees could have produced real paper in times gone.

Where does all this lead? There are millions of people living in identical houses, driving identical cars and slaving away at jobs they hate for bosses who should have been lobotomised years ago in order to protect the population. That's why I live in a house built around 1880, drive a van to work and a 33 year old car for fun. Mondeo man? Never!

Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.
No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged."
- from
"Wild Wool", John Muir 1875.

So whatever you pledge to do next year, just go outside - walk a mountain, paddle a river or lake, just go outside!