Reflections

Part 1: Climate Change, Southern Water and The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley.

It is August. Grass everywhere is the colour of sand.

Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby sits disconsolately in just-waist-deep water, in a nearly empty river bed. She looks, to quote Pepys at an execution, “as cheerful as any (wo)man could do in that condition.”

Unable to even look at her reflection in the pond, or the dried cracked depression which once was a pond, Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid reflects, but only internally, on the year, with its drought, its deaths, its usual invasion of her habitat by sewage and litter. The Human Race had never cared, but now it was doing its not-caring on a scale they had never seen.

The Water Babies depicts a fantasy water-land of clean, though savage, innocence, teeming with creatures and life. Already under threat from industry when published in 1863 with the great waterways full of pollution already, we now see rivers and streams culverted as if an inconvenience, drying out or full of algal invasion, mismanaged by the people and companies who are paid large amounts to do the opposite.

The water-fairies pondered what revenge was to be taken on those who caused the ejection of foulness into the waters as soon as they thought nobody was looking, but found they were only moralistic Victorian personifications after all.

Part 2: Truss & Floods & Writing

It is October. It rains and rains and rains. Liz Truss has come and gone.

“I write with acid – there mustn’t be one single word out of place or one word that could be taken out.” (Katherine Mansfield) : - A writing ambition for 2023 which will behave like a drunken man wandering into the Ladies, but must come under control.