In February 2008, 2 months after Cyclone Sidr had ravaged the coast of Bangladesh, I participated in a volunteer project organized by Service Civil More
In February 2008, 2 months after Cyclone Sidr had ravaged the coast of Bangladesh, I participated in a volunteer project organized by Service Civil International (www.sciint.org) which consisted of digging latrines in one of the worst-effected villages. It was a month that opened my eyes to what climate change really means, these villages, these people, these kids, have absolutely no chance to survive in their homes as sea levels rise and extreme weather events become more common. When you read about or listen to information regarding climate change, forget about statistics and numbers and try to imagine being one of these kids.
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No sooner than the acclaimed Jugged Rottweiler of the Winter Solstice Feast had ceased to repeat on me, then it was time for the Queen's Great More
No sooner than the acclaimed Jugged Rottweiler of the Winter Solstice Feast had ceased to repeat on me, then it was time for the Queen's Great Gobbler Cobbler that had taken her six weeks to prepare and seventeen visits to the Castle Farm to collect the quinces, rose hips, crab apples and field mice, used in the stuffing. It was while she was preparing this notable mixture with the addition of sweetmeats, breadcrumbs, herbs and said mice. Now dried and now skinned, she was standing at the draining board, carelessly crushing their tiny bones, with a large pair of pliers, when she noticed through the condensation streaked casement window that the ornamental lake was frozen hard. Thinking of the fish and their need to see the stars, she reached for her special pan. On royal instruction I carried the saucepan, used exclusively for Brussels sprouts, half full of boiling water, down the stone path that was a slippery as a fish. Setting the saucepan carefully on the ice, I straightened up and gazed about the white and blue crystaline landscape for the ragged figure of the knave, who I had charged with the act of annoying the moles this crisp and crunchy morning. Bundles of smouldering sackcloth were thrust into new holes that appeared in the hope of giving the mole a nasty coughing fit. Casting about with my proboscis, I caught the faint reek of smoke in the bright air then I heard shouting and cursing from behind the picturesque latrines where the hot house lurked. Taking a short cut through the ravine I came across the knave doing a inexplicable dervish dance inside the tottering dead vine structure of the hot house. The blur of his thrashing arms and kicking feet threw up showers of sparks and much smoke as he appeared to be on fire and was fighting it! This scene from hell galvanised my actions and I seized a rusty bucket of ancient green slime and threw it at the man. Luckily, that although the slime missed him, the bucket hit him hard on the hip that consequently propelled him through the lace like wall of glass and through Fate’s happy hand, into an open drainage gully from the latrines. I’ve have been told the noisome liquid looks like dark stout and makes an ideal liquid fertiliser. Having displaced such a quantity of this acrid slop the knave lay there groaning and fizzing and apart of a head wound he had escaped without a scratch in a remarkable manner. That will teach him not to smoke indoors…. I will have to wait until the knave apparently recovers from this lesson before getting him down to the bed of the lake to retrieve the saucepan. The Queen was terse over the matter of her ‘Sprouts Pan’ I tried to explain why I had to drag the knave to the stable to recover as we manhandled the soot-black cauldron of Gobbler Cobbler to the table for the final addition of the parcels of ‘stuffing’ to the delicious concoction and then straining back to the flames for a another four hours. The film is just the failed attempt to discover if the saucepan had sunk down amongst the fishes. Sparky smoking Dervishes? I wonder if I could persuade the knave to do it again for the camera? The King
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