Welcome to my latest blog post…
I am a member of the Taw Torridge Estuary Forum, which met last Monday evening. Louise Wainwright, chair of Avon River Champions in South Devon, was our special guest. She gave a rousing speech about the abject state of our waterways and our dysfunctional regulations but proposed a solution I am keen to help put into practice: Inter-parish water quality groups.
The idea is that parish councils in the same catchment could join together to carry out high-level water testing of their waterways: testing kits costing £250 a go can detect whether pollution is from sewage or agriculture and if from the latter whether bovine or ruminant etc. The idea is for parishes to work with farmers to remedy any problems detected, helping them find and apply for grants available from DEFRA for natural solutions such as reed-beds.
I’m pursuing this. In my vote of thanks on behalf of the Forum I declared Louise as trenchant a water champion as Feargal Sharkey.
We have suffered a Broadband outage – apart from a few random hours of connection – since 16 December. We have spent countless hours on the phone or texting with BT and had four visits from engineers. Many promises have been made about the service being restored but none have been kept beyond a few random hours.
We have spent a lot of money keeping up with emails etc via data roaming on our phones. I’ve often had to go into Barnstaple for wifi to catch up with council emails. On Friday last we had a 4G system installed by James from Croyde Aerials. Bliss! We said goodbye to BT and reminded them of the need for recompense. Alas, BT employees – however willing individually – have no idea what other members of the organisation are doing or have done.
French farce or Absurdist drama or both? If much of the rest of British industry is run on these lines we should be very worried.
The Museum of Barnstaple and North Devon opened its latest exhibition of documentary photography on Saturday: Festivals, Fairs and Carnivals. I was glad to see photographs by friends like Karolina and by Nick Withers, as well as spotting various other friends in the photographs. It is an open-submission show but supplemented by a fine selection of James Ravilious prints from the museum’s collection.
I gave a talk on Carnivals etc in the history of photography on Saturday afternoon. There were 23 in the audience and, as someone once said, ‘in North Devon anything over 20 is a mass movement’. My talk featured all manner of Carnival objects from the V&A collection plus outstanding Carnival photos by, among others, Josef Koudelka, Susan Meiselas and Markéta Luskačová.
RIP Michael Longley, one of the most-cherished poets of our time. I once talked to him and his wife Edna at a contemporary poetry conference in Cambridge. Some of his poems suggested to me that he was probably keen on the work of my old friend Ian Hamilton Finlay – he and Edna were, indeed, both fans. I treasure Michael’s remark that ‘If I knew where poems come from I’d go there’.
Thanks for reading. Please keep an eye open for my next blog.
Mark