On a visit to Berwick -upon-Tweed last year my mother visited a pottery and came home with a gift of two little coffee cups - there is a bird cup and a bee cup- a not unsubtle hint to her thirty something year old daughter to get a move on with the provision of grandchildren.
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| Birds and Bees cups from Tweed Mouth- Berwick. |
The birds and the bees coffee cups lesson must have sunk in!
Waddling around at my slower pace, with this growing child on my mind I am more often that not
pre-occupied with the here and now of an aching back, constant need to pee and the unfolding drama of giving birth. On occasion however I manage to get a quick glimpse past all that, to contemplate the sort of world I want my baby to exist in. This is a big picture - small picture kind of contemplation that can take me from pondering disposable v’s washable nappies to the roll technology will play in the unborn ones life and the type of kindergarten they will one day attend.
Then of course there are the really big things - which bring me back to small things like the birds and the bees.
I talked a bit about the bird watching opportunities available in my new flat in my last blog. I did not get around to touching on the bee watching I have been doing.
One of the lovely mirror world aspects of living in the UK is the Bumble Bees - these little fuzzy round flying creatures never fail to set off the cute receptors in my brain - and they are out in force at the moment bumbling away amongst the flowers along the canal. Unfortunately the healthy bee habitat of the canal bank is not the norm.
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| Union Canal - a healthy bee corridor |
Insects tend not to be everyone’s idea of a cute and cuddly animal - they are rather more prone to get squashed than other creatures and more prone to be forgotten about when we think about endangered and vulnerable creatures.
I recently found myself giving little mini lectures to my work colleges as to why it was not OK to kill the bees that came into our workplace - this was received somewhat bemusedly until a few days later one of the girls came in and told me she and her boyfriend had watched a documentary about bees and their currently precarious place in the world - at the end of watching it she apparently turned to her boyfriend and said ‘Sandy already told me all of that.’
I know that stopping a couple of girls from squashing a couple of bees is not going to help much in the larger scheme of things, but with bee’s being the canary down the coal mine when it comes to the health of the world it does seem worthwhile that as many people as possible know we should be guardians rather than executioners of these fuzzy little creatures. The internet has plenty of in-depth information about why this is so if you are on the indifferent or executioner side of things - this Greenpeace blog is a good place to start your re-education.
The difference between how things were ‘in my day’ and how they will be in the tomorrow of our child’s life is mind boggling and I probably have not even begun to imagine most of the differences - but I am pretty sure that no matter what the shape of the world becomes I will always want a world with birdsong out the window and where bees (be they bumble or not) buzz amongst the flowers and crops.
