The Importance of Diarising

          Having arranged to meet a friend for coffee yesterday morning, I forgot to turn up! And this despite my looking forward to the occasion. I apologised of course and, by way of mitigation, offered the explanation that I am now so unused to having appointments of any kind that my diary has fallen into disuse and I am no longer in the habit of consulting it daily – nor it me, with it’s cheery “ping”.

          For those of us fortunate enough to be locked down in comfortable, leisurely circumstances, life has slipped into an unhurried tempo, a pace at which the sense of urgency arises only in respect of visits to the WC. Anything that interrupts this leisurely flow of non-events is a cause of undue anxiety, especially if it involves a deadline. When it was my turn to put together a presentation for a Zoomed meeting of the Heatons Jazz Appreciation Society, the task dragged on for weeks and I would sometimes wake in the early hours, fretting over the playlist. It makes sense of the saying “If you want something doing, give it to a busy person”. People (like me) with time on their hands will worry it to death. But the pace of life is beginning to pick up: yesterday, I made an entry in the diary – the first since early March. It relates to taking the campervan to Northumberland, where we can get a fix of coast and countryside for a change – and I can regain a sense of momentum.

          Not that Nature has been completely absent from our lives these past few months. Last week, I got a bag of sweet, ripe gooseberries on my urban stroll. The Co-operative Society has planted the gardens around its new HQ building with apples, strawberries and other soft fruit, all of which are available to pick. There will never be enough to feed the city, but it’s a step in the right direction, demonstrating publicly that previously wasted corners of urban land can be given back to cultivation. And there is evidence elsewhere of a rising awareness of the importance of plants in the built environment. A patch of land that has escaped residential development around the canal basin at New Islington has been turned into a park, complete with picnic tables, swan nests, grass and a magnificent swathe of wildflowers. It’s the ideal place to sit with your coffee and croissant (obtained from the canal-side artisan bakery) and evaluate the latest trends in brownfield, inner-city development. These small steps towards reinstating nature’s place in our habitat may well be too little and too late but, by raising awareness, they could help to save the day.

          Of course, micro-interventions alone will not rescue our failing ecosystems. We need concerted, global political action of the kind that is currently out of fashion. A resurgence of liberal democratic governance would be our best hope of tackling the root causes of our self-destruction: rapacious capitalism may yet be tamed; the “finance curse”* inflicted on us by the banking sector may be lifted and the intensive mono-cultivation that is destroying the soil may be replaced by more localised, natural farming. And there is another hope. The latest scientific modelling of the world’s population predicts a peak, followed by a sharp fall in numbers by the end of this century. Of course, the end of the century may never actually come unless we act now. So, to help things along, let’s all make a daily note to save the planet in some way, however small. Especially those of us who don’t have much else in our diaries.

* The Finance Curse by Nicholas Shaxson