This has been a crazy week, and I am wilting like a pale Edwardian lady on a chaise longue, so for today's blog I am handing you over to my friend Terence Blacker in the Indy, and his thoughts on why we must cherish and protect our great British countryside.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/terence-blacker/terence-blacker-we-must-fight-them-in-the-fields-1807569.html
What I especially like about this article is that it reminds me that it is not just the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty that must be guarded, but the ordinary fields and woods and streams. Once the hedgerows are gone, they are gone. And also, as an old bucolic lady myself, I would quite like it if people stopped regarding country people as a bunch of marauding fox-murdering nimbying braying chinless inbred heathery toffs. Although I must say I am very glad to read in the magazines that tweed is back.
For your visual amusement, there follow some snapshots of the countryside. These are not the famous bits that the tourist brochures show, but just places that I know and love and walk the dogs in, from north to south, and they are as precious to me as diamonds.
And my final, exhausted, whimsical thought, while we are on the subject: if you ever get a chance, plant a tree. Plant many trees, if you can. They will grow for hundreds of years after you have gone, and give keen pleasure to people who will never know your name, but will bless you anyway, and they might just save the poor old planet after all.
Now I am going to have a little rest.
