Freelance Afloat

A post on the importance of giving time and appreciation to elderly people: “Twice this week, I have watched an elderly individual, fade into the busy life in which we all live. One man just needed Panadol for his wife but the shop assistant simply said it’s in ‘6’. But he struggled to navigate the supermarket and as I watched him go in the wrong direction, I left all my groceries and took him where he needed to go. Today, I watched an elderly man struggle in the heat, who had obviously had a fall with a huge scrape and blood on his leg. He walked past people in the cafe, while he slowly made his way to his car. Not one person stopped. Or looked. Or acknowledged him. I took him to his car and checked he was ok. He told me he had a fall and wasn’t sure how the air con worked in his car so he just didn’t use it. I sat with him, until his air con kicked in and heard him talk about the old frail body that he is in, that fails him now, every single day. When you see an elderly person walking down the street, searching in the supermarket or struggling to their car, take a minute out of your busy schedule and ask them if they need a hand. Think about your grandparents and your parents and how pissed off you would be if someone didn’t stop to help them. But more, think of them as you. Once upon a time they were you. They were busy, they had work, they had children, they were able... Today, they are just in an older body that is not going as fast as it used to and this busy life is confusing. They deserve our utmost respect and consideration. One day it will be you, it will be us. I wish more people gave a shit about them and acknowledged them for their admirable existence and geez I hope someday, not that far away, someone does it for me.” Credit: Adele Barbaro

Protecting the heritage and the future of the British countryside is a hill I will die on. Not because I hate cities. I have spent 20 years of my 52 years on this planet living in cities. Not because I want the countryside frozen in a postcard. But because this beautiful green and pleasant land is the one thing Britain still has that money cannot easily fake and policy cannot easily replace. I come from a farming background. I see farming and the countryside for its true value. It is the hedgerow that has been laid for three hundred years. The country lane that still follows a Saxon boundary. The church tower rising over a field of hay. The dry-stone wall that someone stacked by hand decades ago and that still holds firm. The dawn chorus. The smell of wet earth after rain. The harvests that reap what has been sowed. The community spirit of the village pub. The footpath that belongs to everyone and to no one. This is not scenery. It is the country’s memory and heritage made visible. Blake called it a green and pleasant land. He was not writing a travel brochure. He was naming the thing we were supposed to keep while the mills rose. We kept enough of it that people still know what he meant. That is the inheritance. You do not get another one. Because once the farmland is gone, it’s gone forever. Never to return. We lose our green and pleasant land our own peril. A country can survive ugly architecture. It can survive bad fashion, bad governments, even bad decades. It cannot survive the slow conversion of its living rural landscape into a corporate development opportunity, a solar panel farm, a data centre or an energy industrial estate. We need homes. We need power. We need food. Those are not optional. What is optional is the government habit of treating the countryside as leftover space: the place you put the housing target; the place you put the solar farm on a real farm that feeds the nation when a warehouse roof or car park would show more common sense. The place called a “development” when governments have already decided the field is in the way and that somehow, food supply from farmland isn’t deemed to be a “development”. Once a village is ringed by a data centre, it is not a village. Once the best land is under glass and steel, it is not a farm. Once the view that made a place itself is gone, no planning approval can bring it back. Farmers are not extras in this picture. They are the reason the green and pleasant land of Britain still exists. A countryside without people who work it becomes either a theme park or a ruin. If we make it impossible to pass on a farm, impossible to grow food at a living return and easy to rent the same acres to a developer or an energy company, we should stop pretending we are “protecting nature.” We are just changing the land owner to a corporate asset stripper. This is my hill because the alternative is a Britain that still has a flag, a language and a history, but no longer has the thing those things were supposed to belong to. A nation that cannot recognise its own ground, soil, crops and trees has already started to forget who it is. I am not asking for nostalgia. I am asking for continuity. Build homes. Generate power. Feed people. But do it without flattening the last ordinary miracle we have: a small, crowded island that is still, in places, beautiful enough to break your heart. These places often live in the countryside. They should be protected. Working farmland is not in the way of the future. It is the reason the future is worth having.