There’s hope for us yet

Had a nice warm’n’cozy moment of pure optimism whilst catching up with some TV recordings over lunch t’other day.

hyacinthLunch was particularly satisfying in and of itself. It was my first tasting of the beetroot I’d grown and preserved this year and I found it went particularly well with some good cheese, some of my best homemade bread, a dollop of my green tomato chutney and a cup of Fortnum’s finest.

I realise I degenerated into listing for a while there, but my point was that the only bit of lunch that I hadn’t grown and / or made was the cheese, and that’s only because I found out how cheese is set. yuk.

It’s a bit Good Life, but my biggest motivation towards gardening is going from a tiny seed to my dinner with the application of nothing more than time. (bloody engineers) It’s certainly easy to see where the sterotypical ploughman’s lunch came from, despite it’s relatively recent history.

To cap this moment of personal satisfication, I found myself watching a segment of television about the recent history of public parks, with a case study of one man’s effort with a park in Bristol.

I won’t repeat all the details here, but to hear about Constantine Blake transforming St. Agnes park from a no-go area to a sterotypical park was very, well, nice. I don’t think that many people in this decade would imagine you’d actually have a park keeper living in a Lodge in their park, let alone making such a difference for their immediate area.

Combining those two very different impressions of satisfaction lead me to think

“Y’know, I think there’s hope for us yet”.