Tuesday 24 July 2007

God's Little Acre

Climate warning that our lovely planet is about to become a long beach and a deep sea.? Shouldn’t take Him long to sort that out. It only took Him a month to make a wilderness of a garden I once had in Wales
When I lived there, we worked the garden together and in those days it burgeoned with beans, peas proliferated, onions peeped anxiously out of the soil in case there were pigeons about and nascent apples promised a succulent autumn.
Now He has got it on His own and, no disrespect but what a mess.
Bindweed and nettles, docks and dandelions. Long grappling bramble hands pluck at your coat sleeves and valerian leers from every crevice. It is a jungle where cats get mugged by robins
That's the trouble with God. Too softhearted. He can never refuse a bed to a weed and He is a stranger to Weedol.
In a way I am glad. It augurs well for the future of the planet. If God, a good friend but a lousy gardener, can do that to a garden in Wales; removing all trace of the Industrial Revolution is going to be child's play for Him.
A hundred years to Him is no more than a lazy afternoon, an eye blink in the life of a planet. So where I can see how environmentalists have got as much right as I have to make a few bob, I don't think they need worry us all that much.
When we finally blow ourselves up over the next week or so, I expect He will just heave a Heavenly Sigh, scatter a few pocketfuls of seed and wait to see what comes up.
My own journey through time has reached that stage where you start getting your bags together because you sense it is nearly your stop, so I do realise I can be accused of waving cheerfully through the back window of a departing charabanc.
But I think we can all take heart from the fact the salmon is back in the Thames and you cannot see my beetroot in Wales for chickweed.
You have to give God His due.He is a grafter.
Look how he covered the Sumerian, the Greek and the Roman civilisations with sand and wild thyme; World War Two had scarcely ended before he was scattering purple loose strife all over the bomb sites.
About that time I discovered the books of a lady naturalist called Frances Pitt and as a result I decided I wanted to spend the whole of my life in the countryside.
One story she told I remember still. There was a plague of voles in Essex and they were eating everything in sight. No one could think of any way to catch them when suddenly a flock of owls appeared from nowhere.
A Flock.
When did you last see a flock of owls? But they arrived and ate all the voles.
Do you know I derive more comfort from that than I do from the whole of Hymns Ancient and Modern.