LETTING OFF STEAM

Just when you think that things cannot get any worse, they invariably do. Yesterday Shoshannah my eldest stepdaughter had her car stolen along with her veterinary paraphanalia, and all the searches of the surrounding area have been to no avail. Today Olivia, my youngest stepdaughter has had her car vandalised. I have just gone into the Dining Room from which Corinna works on her laptop, to find her in tears.

Why? Its not just because she is feeling her daughters' hurt, but they are tears of frustration. Frustration because we can do nothing to help them financially. We have run out of money and been screwed by people who seem to have no idea how to act honourably. Even putting aside the fifty thousand quid which is languishing impotently in the business of our erstwhile partners, we are owed thousands of pounds by people who just aren't going to pay up, and the £1200 that should have been paid to us on the 28th March still hasn't arrived.

I am writing this to let off steam, not to appeal for money. I have always disliked the sort of blogger who regularly asks for help - nay publically sulks until he or she gets enough money in donations to pay their telephone bill. Two dear friends have offered to lend me money if necessary, but I really don't want to take them up on their offer.

Tony Shiels always tells me that I have a ridiculously romanticised view of England, brought on by the fact that I didn't live here until I was nearly a teenager, and that my formative images of England came from idealised children's books and people like Kipling. He is probably right (the old bugger usually is), but there does seem to have been a definite change for the worse in our Green and Pleasant Land in the past twelve years - ever since New Labour came to power.

Now don't get me wrong, the government that they replaced were a bloody shower as well, but life has become considerably less civilised since 1997, and I think that the refusal of people who in many cases were supposed to be friends, or at least friendly acquaintainces to pay their bills, and the sad treatment of my two step-daughter's cars, are both facets of the same problem. Civilised values are not what they used to be.

Now, again, don't get me wrong. I would hate to sound like the regrettable Baronness Thatcher some twenty five years ago when talking about a "return to Victorian values" (which I always thought included tuberculosis, child prostitution, public executions, and untreated sewage), but what we are doing at the CFZ is in many ways a return to the values of a less unpleasant era.

Natural History was the leading hobby and interest of British people of all echelons of society from about 1950 for about a hundred years, and it has declined amazingly in the past half century. I do not want to sound like something out of Paley's Natural Theology or something of that ilk, but I do like to quote Bill Shakespeare when he wrote:

"Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything"

Everything, that is except for the bastards who made my three girls cry.