Written before 'Brexit'... by Mari Howard

Snail... a beautiful shell...

Today (May 2022) I walked into the garden to survey the plants, and remove any visible slugs or snails. These go, with a bit of human help, over the back wall into the sports ground beyond: where they happily play cricket, rugby, or football, according to the season. A fantasy of course: in reality they land in the wild grassy bit, to continue their quiet, slimy lives chewing on dandelions or being caught and eaten by various birds and creatures who live there…

Coming to write a blog, hunting inspiration, I discovered in my ‘blog ideas’ folder, this, labelled Written before ‘Brexit’: here, it’s updated... but first...

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So, writing in 2012...

A couple of weeks back, I posted on Facebook photos of a walk we took at the weekend. It was a showy-off piece about the beauty of the natural world — here is a lovely place, and I live so near it. Something we don’t often think about — our thankfulness for home.

Inevitably, most of us live where the work is. We try to scrape together the necessary to do so. Over the past few years, some people have begun to pay phenomenal sums to live in this city, a place where we’ve lived for years and years, because the specific work is there. Now, the local estate agents send leaflets or postcards around the neighbourhood, announcing how much they could sell our houses for. Why not, they suggest, sell your house to people who are desperate to access the amenities you have here? They’ll pay a phenomenal sum for that, far more than you and I know your house is worth: they’ll be paying for the area, the easy access to the countryside, the address. 

Well, humans come in many diverse forms – evidently some may embrace the offer, and swap their home for cash. It seems that with enough temptation, a marketing manager can change contented people into lusting people. My temptation, however, is to resent, indeed condemn, that behaviour.

But is my personal temptation simply different: am I — in order to kick myself off that first moral high ground argument — resorting to another kind of moral high ground when I think about having gratitude that we happen to live here, among mature trees, beside a running river, birds, butterflies, and other wildlife and flowers in season? To be consciously thankful to live in peaceful surroundings, to’ve launched children into the adult world healthy and qualified to earn their living. Not like our parents who had their young adult years marred by the necessity of fighting a war. 

‘We won this for ourselves, we deserve it. We are the fittest who survive.’ Really? And is that okay? Maybe we are simply and randomly, for a little while, blessed... 

Arrogant? But possibly true. As Hegel said, ‘everyone is I’ – though why, after all, am I me, in this very nice corner of Britain today? After all, ‘I’ could easily mean: a Syrian grandmother, weeping over her sons (business ruined by war, house destroyed), and her sons’ wives and daughters (raped) and their sons (shot full of shrapnel or crushed as their house fell about their ears). But I’m not. Nor am I a mother with a starving baby, four other children, and a fistula, living in a muddy refugee camp with no hope of health care. Or a Bangladeshi farmer whose lands are flooded. Or (added in 2022) a health care worker wondering whether to heat or to eat.

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...and back to the present, May 2022...

Reading the above (in May 2022) reminds me how far things have changed. Between then and now, most of us western, reasonably well-off human beings have sleep-walked into far deeper problems, affecting and functioning throughout the planet. The signs were there –scientists were predicting the arrival of global epidemics, and of catastrophic climate change. Acts of terrorism alerted minority groups into a state of defensive, agitated fear. Did governments or voters listen?  Tribalism began to divide populations into extreme positions on politics, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism (as a separate issue), and colonial pasts.  The subjects, rather than being considered in reasoned debate, became ‘weaponised’, while identity-awareness became a fight with all who were not our own tribe, and refugees were re-labelled ‘migrants’, as if they had made a choice, rather than fled war or oppression, though war in Ukraine seems to have re-instated some of them…

Talk about the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations reminds me of the enormous optimism her Coronation created (a second Elizabethan age, the media called it, implying a golden time of promise – power and majesty, a new Shakespeare... whatever did they imagine?) Be careful what you wish for: now, here on this island, we’re ‘sovereign’. Or, we’re lonely, unsupported, and counting the food banks — Nature, which is lovely, fascinating, and life-giving is also cruel: we are part of that. I write family-based stories to try to convey, in microcosm, another way to live alongside one another. I also throw the snails out of my garden, because I prefer flowers without holes in them, and I didn’t buy plants to serve salad to small, land-based molluscs...