Go Green Go!

Long ago and far away my Labour councillor urged me to join his political party, and I just couldn’t. It wasn’t until I had thrown my company out of the window, walked away from London, had a nasty dose of cancer, and found myself doing a boring research job… that I found my way. The job involved studying the core ideas of the main political parties, and reading their unbelievably dreary manifestos. As a result of this journey through treacle and tedium I discovered a gem in the midst of the dross, and promptly joined the Green Party. Because I ate food that grew on plants, or under the ground, or on a tree, and breathed air and drank water, and because I loved nature with a passion, it seemed to be where I belonged. The environment was my thing. The environment is the thing for anyone who thinks about the important things in life. Loving the environment seems to me to be supremely sensible… And children can be reasonable and sensible, as we saw yesterday.

Caring for our world should be part of life, because we can’t live without our world. The wonderful children of the world know this. They know that green is about life itself, and that corporate greed is about death, and I am not talking about death as a beautiful gateway to the next world, but death as in choking ourselves and our birds, fish and animals and the sea and the air with plastic… Killing bees and all the other insect life with pesticides, and throwing toxins and material waste everywhere and destroying clean water, and raising the sea levels, and creating climate havoc, and, and, and… you know the rest.

The last marketing job I did involved the creation of a wonderful exhibition stand with an exquisite design featuring the downs which served as an enchanting backdrop in the midst of many a dreary exhibition hall. My marketing career of a zillion years came to an abrupt halt when the person I reported to said to me “Oh no! There’s far too much green. Green, green should never be seen!” thus repeating the superstitious words said to me by my grandmother a century before. Both believed that green was an unlucky colour. Actually they both got it wrong. The phrase is “Blue and green should never be seen unless there’s something in-between” and as I think lovingly on the glory of the Sussex Downs and the beauty of the blue sky, I can only marvel at the sheer perfection of nature, the harmony of these two most perfect colours – blue and green – and the sheer dottiness of humans, and their capacity to destroy so much that is good and glorious… but hey ho!