Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.

Langston Hughes

merry meet

well it is decided chilly here in our little valley today, swampy is just firing up the rayburn and i think tonight will be the first night of an open fire.
yesterday was a day of doing very little and today it was back to my studies, just a few hours...i find anymore and my brain gets a bit foggy and i cannot take in any information. still a few hours five days a week is okay by me.

driving over to get my flu jab on saturday and over to bridport last week we passed lots of little bodies at the edge of the roads...it always makes me upset to see them laying there. twice on a lane we have stopped and swampy has moved a deer and then a badger out of the middle of the road and laid them in the grass...the second time holding up traffic to do so. we couldnt just leave them to get hit again and again.
i think the trouble i have is becoming too emotionally involved in everything...i worry about animals, i worry about trees, i worry if i see woodland for sale if someone is going to dig it all up and put houses there, i worry about city folk buying up houses for holiday homes and putting up house prices and locals not being bale to afford to buy. the trouble is i find it very difficult to turn off my 'worry' button!

actually that reminds me of something swampy and i were re-visiting in a discussion the other day when we went past the place up Bulbarrow where there was at one point a travellers camp.
we get a free local magazine here called the Blackmore Vale and it was last year that there was an exchange of letters; started by someone complaining about the travellers they had seen parked up for some considerable time at one of the 'non' places between villages.
a reply the following week was written by someone who knew these 'travellers'...they were actually local people who had been pushed out of the area by high house prices, but still wanting to work in the area of their birth, had chosen to live in converted vans, while working locally and of course contributing to the local economy. the originator of this discussion did not reply the following week.
i am sure that the camp up Bulbarrow was a similar group of people because there was never anyone there during the day, so they were obviously out at work.
i know in some areas of devon and cornwall houses are sold with particular covenants which only enables people with strong local family connections to the area to buy them. what a good idea. the trouble here is you get into the whole 'freedom' issue...freedom to live where you want. but it seems to me in this world only those with considerable money has this choice and the concept of 'freedom' is relative to what the authorities consider to be freedom.

i find it hard to understand how society has come to the point where the minority can dictate to the majority on so many different things and yet it is just accepted and therefore continues.
still i should be glad to live where i am able to express these views without ending up in a prison cell.
however that is not to say that this is not being monitored somewhere by someone...