Perceptions of Value.

Today was as fine a day as might be expected of July in rural England. The air was warm, the breeze light, and the sun shone gaily as you please from a near-cloudless sky. And filling several parts of my garden there is a plant – the name of which I’ve never known, but it matters little – which fills the view with countless blooms redolent of small sunflowers.

In years gone by, and in such a situation, these nameless yellow flowers almost sagged beneath the combined weight of countless bees and butterflies. Today I observed three butterflies and two bees. All day. So why should that be?

The declining numbers of our fluttering and humming friends has been increasingly evident over the last two or three years, and I used to think it was a further sign of climate change. Now I have a different theory.

A few years ago the several dairy farmers in this area gave up their milking herds in consequence of the fall in price which the supermarkets were prepared to pay for milk. The supermarkets said they needed to pay the lowest possible price in order to keep the retail price low in order to please the customer. In other words, it made their businesses more profitable. The farmers said they couldn’t afford to live on the low price, and made the change to arable practice instead. Arable practice requires the use of far more chemicals – pesticides, herbicides, fungicides etc – in order to maximise the yield. Could this, I wonder, explain the problem? I have no proof, but the likelihood would appear to seem self-evident.

Well, we all know that money drives the economy, and that economies drive the modern world, so does it matter if Yeats’s bee-loud glade is slowly driven to a paltry place among forgotten history? It does to me.

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And while I’m here, I might just add that I’ve been too busy to make blog posts lately until I’ve finished my jobs and routines and settled down with a cup of coffee and a DVD. At this time of year (the days still being fairly long) that point just about coincides with the change to a different alter-ego. In other words, I become somebody else at that time of night, and posts which took root in my mind during the day suddenly fade like mists on a summer morning. They don’t seem worth making, so I don’t. Maybe that will change when either I run out of DVDs (the present one is the BBC’s 2005 adaptation of Bleak House) or darkness falls a couple of hours earlier. We’ll see.