We went looking for bluebells again yesterday. It was a good walk. Parts of the path through the woods have been resurfaced, or at any rate scattered with fresh gravel, so it’s less muddy. But he bluebells are a bit slow to get going this year. Maybe it’s a result of the cold weather earlier in the year. Or maybe I’m just misremembering. But if they don’t get a move on they’ll be overtaken by the dreaded Indonesian balsam, a plant which is lovely in moderation but which tends to take over wherever it grows.
I recognise the seed leaves and when I started to notice them this year I was stopping and pulling them up. I am not alone in this. As the plants get bigger you see great mounds of it where people have had a mass pull-up session. Years ago Granddaughter Number One’s primary school class was taken out on a nature walk specifically to uproot Indonesian balsam! It is a hopeless endeavour though. There is no way you can uproot all of them. Weedkiller would kill off everything else as well and we want the bees to survive! I determinedly pull up any I find sprouting up in the garden. Not even the small forest sycamore seedlings prevents them from growing. And then I look over the wall into the sort of gully between our garden and the industrial estate’s old mill buildings and discover it’s full of the stuff. I suppose we’ll have to live with it.
Having reached the end of the Italian series ‘La legge di Lidia Poët’, we were having difficulty finding something else equally ,interesting to watch. We thought we might re-watch one of the many films we have on DVD and hunting through them came across the DVD set of a series called ‘The Corner’, which we neither of us recognised or knew we possessed. It’s likely our son lent it to us long ago. So we watched the first episode last night. It’s a sort of precursor or maybe a trial run by David Simon who made ‘Homicide - Life on the Streets’ and ‘The Wire’. T
his first episode has flashbacks to the childhood of the main character, showing how that district of Baltimore changed in the lifetime of one generation. From being a bright, clean and cheerful area where people went about their business or sat outside and chatted and children played out and politely greeted neighbours as they went along the street, it became dishevelled and run down, with older people reluctant to go out and children, ‘hoppers’ as they call them, scuttling around running errands for the drug pushers and swearing like troopers. Police don’t so much patrol as invade the area, lining the young men they sweep up, hands raised above their head, against the wall while they search them for drugs. Not the most cheerful of watching!
Here’s a link to an article about drugs in San Francisco where an outreach centre offering help for the homeless, meals, and supervised drug use, the latter probably unofficially, was closed in December. Since then there has been a spike in overdoes deaths, possible because of rushing to inject in a doorway for fear of being caught resulting in taking a higher dose, according to experts. Those experts say such outreach centres take drugs off the streets and out of doorways and lead to more people getting help to stop taking drugs … but it all takes time, more than the eleven months that the San Francisco centre was open before complaints about it attracting drug users to the area led to its being closed. It takes more than simply arresting people to solve the problem!
There’s been quite a lot in the news about another kind of addiction: gambling! We tend to think of addiction as being to something physical, such as drugs, alcohol, tobacco, even food, but the urge to gamble, to play computer games and slot machines is as much of an addiction. Fortunes have been lost. Lives have been ruined. There have been suicides. And yet advertising for gambling continues to be allowed. They banned advertising for cigarettes but gambling advertising goes on, with a warning to ‘gamble responsibly’. If an alcoholic cannot just ‘drink responsibly’, it seems to me unlikely that a gambling addict can just ‘gamble responsibly’.
That’s enough gloomy stuff for today.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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