Wednesday 27th January 2021
Theme: Environment
Kath read an alarming piece, from an informed
perspective: Is Water Too Cheap a
Commodity? Without water there would be no life. Severn Trent supplies 75m
litres of water every hour. Over 3 billion litres of water is lost to leakage
daily, but some of this is caused by leaking pipes belonging to customers, on
their premises. 72% of people wrongly believe we have enough water to meet our
needs however population growth etc means England faces a water shortage within
20 years.
Adam read a poem called The Ecosia Search Engine. Ecosia.org.
After every 45 searches on the site, a new tree is planted through sponsorship.
Jennie read a work in progress called This Promised Land. It is the young who understand there is a better way.
Marie read about The Ozone Hole from sources
in Wikipedia and National Geographic.
Martin told us of the talk he listened to by Tim Peake about the
training of astronauts before going up to space and the ISS. Several photos
were shown and one was of the ozone layer around the earth that looked just
liked a thin blue line.
Kath told us that the Science and Industry Museum are doing climate talks online. The first is by Dr Hannah Fry & Dr Jane Goodall tomorrow night at 18.30 to 19.45.but Tim Peake will be speaking at one of the future talks
Liz gave us an entertaining but also rather melancholy
piece called Environmental Saturdays about when she lived in Lagos. She upset the
local refuse collector by thinking she was saving him work by taking
non—recyclable (she thought) rubbish to the tip. He was upset as he relied on
sorting through rubbish for his income. For a while during Liz’s stay in Lagos,
the last Saturday of each month was decreed an Environmental Sanitation Day and
everyone was to stay at home for three hours and clean their compounds and neighbourhoods. In
the 90s single use plastic became so cheap and water was sold in plastic bags and later on bottles which created a major litter problem. In 2016 the courts ruled that confining people to their homes for three hours was an
infringement of liberty so it was stopped. Lagos is predicted to be one of the
largest cities in the world in the near future with an enormous waste problem to deal with.
Adam read a poem called The Earth. One extract
was about turning arable land into a dusty graveyard.
Jennie read Can We Save Our Planet? The poem
mentioned oceans teeming with plastics and numerous other pollutants.
Kath read an enlightening piece about Food Forests, the first of
which in the world was in Much Wenlock.
Liz and Marie didn’t read their email properly, and both did the exercise for tonight in advance. The exercise was: Start your own story using this opening:
"In the waning hours of a presidency, Donald huddled in the Oval Office with his last remaining friend and pondered his final decisions. At that moment he felt as though he'd botched every decision in the previous four years, and he was not overly confident that he could, somehow, so late in the game, get things right."
(adapted from the opening lines of 'The Broker' by John Grisham as I thought it was relevant to current events 😉).
Liz had Trump’s last friend to be Winston Churchill’s bust in the
Oval Office, and Marie said it was Herbert, Trump’s goldfish, which he inadvertently
killed.
Jennie wrote about Trump going scuba-diving. Trump was
missing all the attention and thought he had some followers when he went
scuba-diving however they said they hoped he would drown.
Martin wrote about Trump’s imaginary friend Harvey, a 6’ tall
white rabbit, which he took to fast food restaurants. In the last couple of
minutes Trump was told about armed missiles detected coming from Russia.
Adam wrote about a cat called Trump, with parallels
to Donald Trump.
Kath wrote about a labradoodle called Winston and Trump’s
delusions about his ‘greatness.’ Then he was shot in the head.
Martin read an extract from his novel, a thriller
called Katama Bay which sounds intriguing. Descriptions so effective that
it seems as if we are there.
The next meeting is on TUESDAY 23rd
February at 7.30 pm. Liz will be the chair.
Theme for the Homework is 'Love' - this could be:
• Love in the romantic
sense, so a love story or poem for St Valentine's Day
• Origins and history of
Valentine’s Day - who is this mysterious saint and where did these traditions
come from?
• Emotional Love in the
wider sense - family, friends etc. Perhaps what we miss because of yet another
lockdown?
• Love in the sense of
being passionate about something. Is there a hobby that gives you a great sense
of fulfilment (maybe one we don't know about)?
• Love in the sense of what you would love to do, have always dreamed of doing if resources (time, energy, money) were unlimited.
Marie Sever
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