Snow. I know. Riddickerluss, but snow is here turning the Ben into a light, red at sunrise and bridal just now. That white is a white we can never replicate on material, nor in paint. I remember art school, madly trying to find a pure white, the one Nature produces without a single dither. Ach!. it’s an ‘almost’ at best. Clouds for we painters were always the ultimate challenge. I digress. This Ben is millions of years old, thrust up in the ice age or some such thrusting era, when lands split and digressed and pushed up from oceans and upset a whole load of sailing boats, dinosaurs, marauders and those who set out to ‘discover’ lands which, just fyi, had been lands for a very long time pre ‘discovery’, those who lived there already being just fine with their living thing. Looking at the Ben thinks me of such. When I see and watch a creation way older than me, holding stories and histories within its stones, its edges, its falls and its brave organic life clinging to ledges and finding sunspots, adapting and allowing and still thriving, I marvel. We eejits can learn a thing or two from such a claim to life, instead of whinging about the lack of ryvita (me) or wood (me) on the island.

If nature, sorry Nature, can find ways to adapt to change, big ass change, then so can we. But there’s a difference. Nature has always challenged her followers, her children, her ground, her stones, her seas. We, on the other hand, grow comfortable too easily. A fine street, good housing, adequate pavements, parking, drainage, etcetera has turned us into lumps. I remember in my middle class youth, hearing that this generation, mine, needed to know hardship. I turned away from such nonsense, laughing, well fed, safe, in good housing, secure. Now I see the truth in what they said. We have no idea how to deal with hardship, never taught, not through the years of expectation and abundance. But now we do need to pare our tools, to sharpen our wits because it is coming. We need to teach our children that nothing is a given, to learn them inner strength to deal with what is out there now, how to meet life physically and mentally strong. I wish my own parents had taught me how life can be in the ‘out there’ but they never thought it would change, the ‘out there’. I was completely unprepared, me in my white socks and with church on Sundays and everything warm and safe. I learned the hard way. My kids too, the next generation. And they have kids.

It isn’t the end of the world, no, not at all, but I know that those who learn how to accept the beginnings of climate change and its effects now, will be the kids who can find their way whilst others fanny about wishing it wasn’t happening at all. They, the former, will be the ones who notice everything good such as snow on the Ben in April, hear the sound of life in lambs, watch the green of grass and refuse to cut it, allowing wildflowers to rise for insect food and pollination, who will share their wood when there is a lack, who will learn to bake bread, grow herbs and veg, who will be wise in the ways of that which Nature has been telling us for years.