THOUGHTS ON THE BREAK....

Current mood: NOTHING A MACHINE GUN WOULDN’T SORT OUT...
Category: NOTHING A MACHINE GUN WOULDN’T SORT OUT... Life

Blimey....

It's difficult to raise yourself back to reality after a short holiday.

If you go away for a month or even 2 weeks, and you're returning to something you love doing, you have that energy and desire to get back on with things ASAP!!!

But when it's only been 5 days (and 1 of those has been on the bleeding buses) it's difficult to do much other than consider why you didn't take a longer break and to lust after the simplicity of what you've had and where you've been....

C'est la vie...


So, I haven't done that kind of a wilderness trip for sometime and I haven't walked in Scotland since I wandered around the country for 2 months aged 18.

Then, already burnt out from too much protesting and minor clashes with the law, I was searching for proper virgin wilderness - the kind of areas where you not only don't see anyone at all, but also no evidence of humans existing in the landscape at any point.

I learnt then, that it's very hard to get that in the UK.

Sure there are spots where humans and their influence is very hard to OBVIOUSLY notice, but even in places where you see as few as 4 people in 4 days, the human impact on the landscape is there.


As a part of this 2 month wilderness trip in 1993, I worked in Abernethy Forest doing environmental work.

Abernethy Forrest is a 31 square mile former shooting estate in The Cairngorms.

Bought by The RSPB in the early 90's and closed to the public ever since, the wardens there have been working on removing the regimented tree plantations, culling the deer, replanting the right kind of trees and returning the area to it's former wild state...

Cutting trees and killing deer??? Not very environmental you might think - but the opposite is the case.

Yes boss, I took pleasure in cutting down the Sitka Spruce and stalking deer (uncontrolled and encouraged (for rich people to shoot) deer are over grazing the natural forest of the Highlands out of existance).

It's dirty work, but someone has to do it - not all environmentalism is pretty..


The thing was, no-one much gave a shit about this kind of thing in 1993, but nowadays they claim to...

Yes boss, come 2008 and every man and their Thom Yorke claims to know what will save the planet and maybe that's a good thing

But the thing that always amuses me about todays environmentalists (celebrity ones in particular) is their ability to see one side of something and not the other.

Yes boss, if you take a 'celebrity green' to The Highlands they'll go on about natural and untouched beauty of the mountains

They don't have the feeling, historical context or intelligence to realise that what they're looking at is little more than a disaster recovery zone.

Yes boss, much of the Highlands is in exactly the same state as ex-rainforrests in Brazil about which we hear so much. ..

As in Brazil, the Scottich landscape has been completely ravaged by systematic deforrestation, undertaken by humans and their domestic animals over centuries. The bleak and barren hills used to be almost completely covered with wild forrests of Caledonian Pine, Hazel and Silver Birch and now they're barren and bleak - a disaster area and tourist attraction..

And this is the trouble with many amateur band wagon environmentalists. They believe in the idea of beginings and ends, biofuels and catalytic converters, marketing and hype, whereby THEY CAN MAKE THEIR POINT!!! and cleanse their conscience - but in nature there's no such thing as a beginning and an end, so much as one long old flow of various good and bad...


Well, these days, I might not be an environmentalist per se, but I still like to have my opinions, and I spent a lot of the discussion time in Scotland this last week trying to ascertain what in.the hell could and should be done about these police state like conditions under which we now live here in The UK.

Now, I know I'll sound like a nut or conspiracy person talking this way, but I'm afraid I can't see it any other way.

It's not just the police who now seem to be sticking their nose into every minor crime and failing with proper ones, but also the armies of High Vis Jacketeers have come to dominate day to day human affairs..

Yes boss, to go anywhere and do anything nowadays, you have to go through phalanxes of these folk who politely want to search your bag and your person, and then tell you what you should and shouldn't be doing in public, in the park, and on the bus....

Of course these people haven't come from nowhere, The High Vis Army is replacing the community spirit that naturally polices, but this softer way of controlling things was ripped out of British communities by careless harridans like Margaret Thatcher, and in 2008 we're all either policemen or criminals and EVERYTHING MUST BE CONTROLLED!!!!


And whilst errant kids and financially poorer people having a drink in the park, or on the tube or a fag in the pub have become THE ENEMY!!! of all civilization and good and reasonable behvaiour, the cretinous cunts, who with their unbriddled greed, money and power lust, have lead us to this position, quaff their charity champagne in the prescence of war criminal I Am Tory Plan B and Sir Bob G...

Credit crunch - what credit crunch?

Charity dinner raises £25m in just one night

An astonishing charity dinner last night, at which Tony Blair was the guest speaker and Stevie Wonder gave his first major performance in London for nearly a decade, raised more than £25 million for the world's poorest children.

With dinner costing between £1,000 and £10,000 a head and a charity auction which saw a Damien Hirst painting alone go for close to £1 million, Mr Blair was moved to declare: 'I thought I was the only person who got a lot richer this year.'

More than 1,100 guests attended the annual Ark charity dinner at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, which ended early today.

Arpad Busson, the multi-millionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist who is founder and chairman of the charity, had scaled down the target for this year's annual dinner to just £15 million and was delighted it far exceeded expectations.

In seven charity dinners since 2002, Ark has raised nearly £100 million.

Mr Busson, 45, who was accompanied last night by his partner the actress Uma Thurman, 38, said: 'I am thrilled by the overwhelming generosity of our guests, particularly given the more difficult financial and economic environment.

'These donations will transform the lives of tens of thousands of children in India, South Africa, eastern Europe and the UK.'

Mr Blair, who was there with his wife Cherie, said: 'This evening demonstrates both the power and the value of philanthropy.'

Mr Blair was flanked at his table by Jemima Khan, who wore a grey satin dress, and Trudie Styler, wife of rock star Sting.

The man behind the dinner, Mr Busson, is a French multimillionaire financier who has lived in the UK for the past 10 years and counts some of world's glitziest and richest people among his best friends.

"We are keepers of the world's wealth," he told guests before the dinner began. "It's our responsibility to come together and give to our common humanity.