Its 2024, the Year of the Wood Dragon and time to get this blog started. I have been updated the site with pictures we have taken in and around London and our local Highgate area with a focus on buildings and the natural world. We are going to be adding music and animation and art as we go along. I have only a little idea of what we are going to add and we will see how the site takes shape as we go along.

It’s Sunday Feb 4th and the weather is a little warm for this time of year again reminding me of the climate chaos and the problems of food chains. If that seems a little bit of a leap it’s something that comes up when we’re preparing our seedlings each year for our garden patch. Unseasonal warm weather over winter has caused issues with pests and fungus and late frosts have killed early plantings in recent years and even established plants after a mild winter. If this causes problems for us in our tiny garden how does that work on a larger scale?

Which brings me to an article in the Guardian the other week: “New Brexit checks ‘pose existential threat’ to UK fruit and flower growers”. The issue is interesting not so much re Brexit / Remain debates but that “UK growers are reliant on the EU for young plants that start life in countries such as the Netherlands before being imported into the UK for planting” and issues of bio-security, climate change, and the food chain. Trying to get accurate and meaningful stats for how much food we import is not particularly straight forward when figures are bandied around from 45% to 80% ( figures vary depending as some foodstuffs are imported then process here). As we witness more extreme climate events this brings more problems for growers.

The EU farmers are also up in arms off economic and climate policies I would contend that Heyekian neo-liberal economics are not sustainable and will lead to more war and hunger.