LEARNING LINES

Somebody said to me the other day about how clever I must be to remember all those lines - what an incredible memory and so on. It’s true I have been in many plays and have memorised some big parts but I have never seen it as something that takes ‘cleverness.’

In fact in my experience actors seem to learn lines at much the same rate regardless of whether they are ‘clever’ (whatever that may mean exactly) or dull. Or, for that matter, what method they use for learning lines. I can only detect two broad trends - but would be most interested to know if my observations chime with those of others - one to do with age and one to do with accuracy.

Young people do seem to learn their lines faster than older people - or maybe they just find it easier to remember them for one can learn a line quite quickly - the real question is that once learned, how long will it be remembered? On the other hand older people have more experience, more memory ‘tricks’ at their disposal. So the actual difference in practice seems to me to be hardly noticeable.

The accuracy question - that is whether you remember a line exactly, down to the last jot and comma, or whether you learn what the line means and therefore find yourself inverting phrases or using synonyms - throws up more differences. Some people can learn lines and deliver them at first rehearsal with pin sharp accuracy. That is something that I personally find very hard to do. I start with something that approximates to the lines - it is all my memory will allow - and then these gradually becoming more accurate and more focused as first night approaches.

You might expect these two effects to be related to the method of learning lines. Some people record the play and then listen to the lines over and over. They then re-record it leaving spaces for themselves to deliver their lines. Indeed this is probably the commonest way of line-learning.

I have done this but in general I prefer simply to go through the text repeating a line over and over until it is remembered and then going through chunks of the play in my head, or while moving a card over the page so that the line I have to deliver is covered up.

For some reason I find walking helps while doing this - a long country walk - is fine to practise the lines out loud though it is not without the occasional embarrassment when someone creeps up on you unseen.

Speaking the lines also helps you to get an idea of how to play the character. I remember Peter O’Toole being interviewed once and being asked the question “What do you do to prepare for the character, apart from learning your lines?” Peter O’Toole rather implied that there wasn’t anything apart from learning the lines; that once the lines were learned well the character would be there. From my experience I would go along with that.

But I cannot detect that the recording method necessarily leads to more accurate learning. Not trying to mimic a recording does however leave you freer to explore how to deliver each speech.

Whatever way you choose, learning a big part is a lot of work, bashing away at the script day after day, even when you ‘know’ the lines, for you can be sure that lines you thought you knew will vanish under the pressure of a performance unless you know them so well that you could say them in your sleep.


Then it no longer seems on stage that you are speaking lines at all - you just slip into character and say things and respond to what others say, quite naturally, without thinking. The character suddenly becomes alive - you are not acting, rather you are being, and the situation on stage determines what you say and how you say it.

That’s when you experience the thrill of the stage, drifting out of your own personality and into someone else’s. Although in real life the play is a play and the action is fiction, on stage the words and actions are real, the only possible actions there can be.

How one remembers lines in a physical sense I haven’t a clue - which part of the brain, which traces. I suppose something somewhere must physically alter, some synapses must become weaker, others stronger. Yet there is redundancy too for sometimes even a well-known line can be forgotten completely, as if there has been a break in the track. But a moment’s pause and you can ‘think your way around’ the broken link establish a new pathway.

Anyway, none of this is ‘clever.’ Anyone, I maintain, can learn lines if they are prepared to work at it.

THE INTREPID EXPLORER LIVES AGAIN

I was always a bit of a tearaway as a child - an adventurer, an explorer. One of my first and favourite books was RM Ballantine’s ‘The Dog Crusoe’ - one of those three men and a dog stories that tells the tale of exploring on horseback the passage from the head waters of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, in the days of the deep frontier. The star was the dog, of course, a great Newfoundland called Crusoe - ever faithful, sage beyond wisdom and trained to accomplish astonishing feats of great persistence and daring.

I was lucky in my tearaway fortunes: when I was still only seven years old we moved to a large ramshackle old house with seven acres of land deep in the Berkshire countryside. This was hardly the badlands of Montana, nor was the homely Thames like the head waters of the Mississippi; and nor did our untrained mongrel, Twiddles, remotely resemble the heroic canine Crusoe.

But, nevertheless, who cared? There was still exploring to be done. Trees to climb, houses to build from sticks and corrugated iron, the river in which to swim and fish, cellars and attics in which to hide or treasure hunt the discarded bric à brac of previous owners. There were even ponies in the great field - not ours - but still rideable if you didn’t, like the Red Indians in Ballantine’s book, worry too much about saddles and bridles. You learned fast to grip with your knees or be bucked off into a hideous clumps of painful nettles.

Such a spirit of adventure, of being an intrepid explorer, never really dies. It merely ages, smothered in a thousand practical worries about getting clothes dirty, twisting ankles and other wholly practical concerns about ‘safety.’ Even today when I see a horse in a field I long to lose half a century of age and to go quietly up to it, speak softly while stroking its neck and then, quick as a flash, to leap upon its back and, clinging for my life, go galloping headlong with the wind in my ears. Can ever such fun be had amongst computer games I wonder?

Of course, I doubt today that I could leap easily even upon a donkey, never mind a horse - but still, as I say, the exploring spirit never completely dies and thus it came about that I was idly listening to Rosie one day after lunch during our recent visit to her son’s Auvergne Mill. We were talking about walks, I think, when I heard her say ‘I want a Nature Trail.’

The tea was being made - a few minutes then to go outside in the sun. ‘Nature Trail?’ I found myself wandering up the unmetalled back road that leads up one side of the valley. Rosie’s remark had set me thinking.

Nature Trails should be circular, but the trouble with this is that the river Celé at this point forms a horse shoe, cutting through the high plateau, with the Mill at the end of it. This means that in order to do a circuit of the Mill you not only have to cross the river twice and the leat once but also climb up and climb down again the high valley sides.

I wondered. I had already crossed the river once, by the Mill’s own bridge. Now if I just climbed the first ridge.......? I looked above me. At this point the ridge is a jumbled landslip of grey rocks - big and square - almost as though a giant’s baby had overturned his tray of building bricks. It was covered with heather and moss, but didn’t look too difficult. Seizing an oak sapling I hauled myself up, block by block.

Once at the top I could see over into Cocotte’s field - named after the fat, sad and greedy pony who belongs to the neighbouring farm and who grazes the field occasionally. Having climbed up the ridge I had now to descend. I decided I would not go back the way I came. Onwards and downwards then, towards Cocotte’s field. The ground looked quite smooth, though steep. Fortunately plenty of saplings meant I keep my footing.

At the bottom ran a low retaining wall - about six feet in height. I would have to jump this. What was the ground like underneath? Uneven certainly and with stones. I leapt, hedging my bets, planning to land with one foot on a flat stone, and one on the ground. All well.

Now it was simple to cross the field to the river where I knew that a young oak had been washed down in last winter’s floods and was lying lodged in the tree roots on either side of the bank. The river is not very wide at this point: twelve or fifteen feet perhaps and the tree trunk was maybe six foot above the water. No matter there was little water in the river. If I slipped I should have a nasty fall.

I hesitated. Then I remembered one of the Hornblower stories in which he leads a party of men along a ship’s yard to invade the rigging of an enemy ship. This trunk lying across the stream must be about the thickness of a ship’s yard I thought. Yes, I can do it. In no time I was safely across.

So now I was into the Leat field - through which is dug the leat that carries water from the sluices at the weir to the millpond, running in a trench four metres above the river. No problem to cross this as there’s a concrete bridge so that tractors may pass from one field to the other.

From the weir I had what I thought would be a difficult climb - straight up through a grove of holly trees to the crag that marks the boundary of the Mill’s land on the main drive that leads down to the Mill from the village above. Though steep it was easy enough with plenty of handholds and footholds.

I was reliving my childhood, the pulse racing, grizzly bears about to emerge from the sweet chestnuts that line the roadway. Where was my racoon hat? My deerskin jacket? Had I had enough. I’d gone about three quarters of the way and from the roadway I could simply have walked down the drive to the Mill to collect my ever cooling tea. But I would not have completed the circle.

From a little below the crag, on the other side of the roadway, there leads a forest trail cut to bring timber out of the dense woodland. It climbs sharply up the hillside to meet a confluence of such trails directly above the Mill. That’s where I headed. Here is to be found also the well that provides the Mill with its water, a plastic hose snaking down the mountain.

The trails haven’t been used for a long time. The forest is overgrown and fallen trees make vehicle access, even with a tractor, impossible. To someone on two legs, however, fallen trees present no problem.

Then, high on the hill I heard a tinkling sound. Like something from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ - He jangled and jangled and jangled his bell. Someone was ringing for me with the old hand bell kept to summon folk in from the fields just as in my growing-up days, my parents would jangle to summon me from the bowels of a hidden cellar or outhouse attic.

I shouted in reply, but the forest simply absorbed my sound. And still the bell rang. Maybe an emergency! No question then of searching out a convenient and happy way to descend the long steep and bramble-thicketed hillside to the walnut trees on the Mill’s lawn that I could see far beneath me. Straight down then.

At least it was impossible to fall for the brambles gripped me like thorned string. I tore and tumbled my way downwards, eventually running out on to the lawn out of breath and adrenalin pumping a few minutes later.

‘What’s the problem?’ I shouted.

‘Your tea’s cold,’ answered Rosie.

But at least I had completed the circuit.

The photograph shows the river Celé in spate; there was rather less water in it when I crossed it via the log bridge just downstream from here.

TILTING AT WINDMILLS AND OTHER THINGS

So would you? A windmill, I mean. Would you install a windmill in your garden? I was asking myself this yesterday as I pondered whether I should be making another short haul flight down to the Auverne.

So I Googled ‘windmills’ - or rather ‘small wind turbines’ and lo! it turns out that there are folk ready to sell me a dainty little model on a 10 metre stalk, set in a block of concrete and connected to my fuse box for the measly sum of £9,000.

With my thoughts still on the Auverne I calculate that once £9,000 would have been about €5,000 - now it’s about €10,000 euros - another illustration of how Britain will quickly have to learn how to become self-sufficient for it is rapidly becoming too expensive to buy anything from abroad - like oil, for instance, or gas.

Now £9,000 doesn’t seem unreasonable for a big concrete block in the windward corner of my garden with a windmill on top. I could even see it finally extinguishing the ever expanding Yucca plant with which I am due another skirmish shortly.

Quite indestructible are Yuccas, except perhaps by large amounts of concrete, though I’m told they are a useful plant if you’re about to become self-sufficient. You can weave the fibres into cloth and use the pointed leaves as skewers or needles. Allegedly.

Besides the demise of the Yucca, my windmill would bring me free energy and in addition £0.12 for every kilowatt hour I returned to the grid. Quite a bargain, except that the tables say I live in a spot less windy than the average and therefore that my windmill would supply only one third of the electricity that I use.

What! less that averagely windy? There are times when the wind howls and I fear for my fences. I have already lost half a fig tree. I see from my window that the trees are tossing merrily. On the other hand yesterday it was quite still and for some days before that. So it seems it would take 60 years to get my money back, by which time I shall be dead, if I haven't succumbed to global warming in the meantime.

Still I would have built a windmill if it had been practical. I don’t object to how they look. The turbines high on the northern hills above my town have a certain ghostly elegance. The I thought that perhaps it would be more sensible to let someone else build the windmill and to buy the electricity from them.

So I emailed my current supplier who tells me that if I cut my consumption by 10 per cent I can move to a green tariff. But I haven’t cut my consumption by 10 per cent! And nor am I likely to. Despite my criticisms of the ban on incandescent light bulbs, virtually all the serious lighting in the house is energy saving. I am not going to sit in the dark, nor give up using the oven. And we already turn off at the wall where we can.

True we could go out and buy a new cooker, fridge and dishwasher - but the energy involved in their new manufacture (all that steel to be smelted and rolled from iron ore brought half way round the world, the paint and plastic made from hydrocarbons, the packaging and the overheated showrooms) mean that I’d be starting with a substantial carbon deficit (let alone a bank account deficit) which would require as long to payback as my windmill.

Why is there no requirement to inform us of the carbon cost of new energy saving appliances? Your new car may have low emissions but the factories that made it and brought it to you certainly don’t.

But a post from kind Woozle tells me of another company - Ecotricity - offering to sell me green electricity. Fine - but then I lose the discounts that I get from being with my existing supplier from whom I buy gas as well.

Besides, if I (and fellow eco-warriors) buy up all the green energy everyone else is left with the brown (non-renewable) stuff. I am not actually helping the poor old planet, however virtuous I may feel to be 100 per cent green. Though in fairness to Ecotricity they do say that they invest only in renewable sources of power.

What about gas on which the central heating runs? I’ve a feeling that you should be able to buy green gas, produced from biomass, though I haven’t seen this advertised anywhere. Why not, I wonder? The technology is available to produce gas from digesters and we do discard a vast potential source of biogas every time we visit the bathroom.

Apparently we expend 80 calories in fuel and fertiliser to produce one calorie’s worth of edible food. As someone said once we spend all this money creating this waste and then we just throw it away.

But I am still scratching my head about how best to atone for my flight down to the Auverne next week. There we are greener than here. Our heat comes from great wood burning stoves, our power from French nuclear electricity.

I have never had much fear of nuclear energy. Indeed I see it as much the best short term solution to providing the large amounts of standby power that the world demands. Britain was once a world leader in this field; a place we have sadly long ceded.

Indeed I read only this week that Areva, the French nuclear giant, hopes to build 60 reactors across the world in the next few years, including some in Britain. Demand is fast picking up, they say.

Maybe I shall get my low-carbon electricity after all. Meanwhile, I comfort myself that even with the Auverne trips our carbon footprint is still respectable. Well, just.

TALES FROM AN ECO-VILLAGE

Monday 21 September: I’m having dinner in the BioMio restaurant in Copenhagen with about 90 other bloggers, mainly from Europe but some from further afield. I’m sitting next to a Brazilian called Charles, for instance, who has just flown in from Sao Paulo. Opposite me there’s Tasha, an editor from the United States, and Radka from the Czech Republic, while Jodi, though an Australian, joins me in representing the UK.

We are here at the invitation of the European Journalism Centre, an NGO based in Maastricht. Our job in the next three months or so will be to blog about climate change in the run-up to the UN summit which takes place in December. To help us we are being given two days of briefing.

Today we have been in the Bella Centre, a strange low rise complex on the outskirts of Copenhagen, that looks like an airport terminal without an airport. Much of it is still under construction but it is where the two week Climate Change Summit will be taking place.

No-one knows how many people will be coming: the Danes guess at about 15,000, made up of government leaders and officials from 192 countries, plus the world’s media, NGOs like Oxfam and WWF, and a whole tail of climate activists there to put pressure on the politicians. All have to be accommodated, fed, transported and most importantly, policed. That’s the unenviable job of the Danish government.

After a day of sitting listening to presentations it is stimulating to have the chance to meet and discuss matters with fellow bloggers. The international atmosphere is stimulating; I am lucky that the common and now universal language is English. Most speak and write it mesmerisingly well. I ask Radka where she learned such perfect idiomatic English. She replies that she worked for a British company for a year in the Yorkshire countryside and went fox-hunting on Saturdays.

The following day we are up early bound for the eco-village of Dyssekilde. This is both a social and environmental experiment - a village into which a dedicated group of ecologically minded folk moved about twenty years ago and generally succeeded in persuading the rest of the inhabitants to follow their environmentally friendly lead.



The two hundred odd people in the village own a wind turbine for electricity (though the grid is available as back-up). They process their own waste water, having created more than an acre of willow beds to absorb the waste. The trees grow rapidly on the nutrients in the waste providing wood for fuel and fencing. For eco-efficiency there’s a communal bakery and a laundry and the one supplies heat to the other. There’s also a car pool to save on car purchase.

Most of the houses are experimental, heated by solar panels or geo-thermal energy - again arranged on a group basis. Some are strange polygons, minimizing surface area; others are built of novel materials, like straw (though lined inside and outside with conventional materials).

Surprisingly, these communal living arrangements seem to work well. No one is forced to do anything. Residents pay a small tax to the village and opt in or out of the communal projects. I have to say that the place looked rather unkempt and generally rundown: a lick of paint, some communal grass cutting might not have gone amiss, but maybe ecologists have other priorities. Mowing grass probably does not help your carbon footprint.

Can we do anything worthwhile as climate change bloggers? Despite starting with a massive imbalance - the result of ninety return flights to Copenhagen - I'd like to think we possibly can. The word needs to be spread; people need to understand what is likely to be required and be prepared to adapt accordingly. Politicians need to understand that there is a willingness for change among the population. We can't do much by ourselves but it's worth remembering that a million ants can move a mountain.

The threat to our planet is both serious and imminent. That’s what the scientists are telling us. Their worst case scenarios made only a few years ago are already being exceeded. In 1990 they predicted the rate of fossil fuel burning would increase annually by 1.1 per cent. That figure looks now more like 3.5 per cent.

The consensus is that the situation could well become irretrievable unless we all act now. Clearly governments have the prime responsibility - the world is not going to be saved by eco-villages, though of course these can help. But ultimately only governments can provide the infrastructure to deliver large amounts of clean energy.

Getting 192 countries - all with different agendas - to agree will be difficult to put it mildly. There is so much disagreement on other matters, trade, development, finance, security and so on. Somehow the politicians will have to find compromises, if not in December, then shortly afterwards. As the Chinese say - we are living in interesting times.

The photos show: a house and turbine at Dyssekilde; the waste water willow groves; and a rooftop solar energy apparatus

LAST NIGHT

Saturday September 5th 7.45pm. It is the last night of ‘Art.’ I am in the dressing room, fiddling with make-up. Fifteen short minutes to curtain. K, a very beautiful eighteen year old who is helping with the props, thinks I use too much. You don’t need any, she chides. Still, I persist.

Beside me, L, an experienced actor who has appeared on the London stage produces an ultra-professional make-up kit, packaged in webbing. I just have to delve in the theatre’s plastic box whose contents are a hopeless jumble; most of this stuff is years old. I’m the only one who dares use it. Except the powder perhaps.

In the show L plays my friend, Serge. I fuss for something to darken my eyebrows. A pencil is nowhere to be found. I haven’t the courage to ask L. So I have to make do with some dark eye-shadow. I manage, just, to avoid looking like a pirate. K snorts her disgust.

I don a dark French blazer - this is a French play after all - Pierre Cardin - and found in a bric à brac shop in St Brieuc twenty-five years ago. I suspect it dates from the sixties. Anyway it has gilt buttons. I put a red spotted handkerchief in the top pocket. It reminds me for some reason of Peter Rabbit and therefore of luck. I straighten myself up, dust down the blazer and tuck my impossible hair behind my ears, all the while creeping slowly into my smug and supercilious character, who for some reason carries a raincoat.

The stage manager’s call comes. I take the raincoat from its peg. A last look in the mirror and then I am drawing the bolts on the back dressing room door, for I have to enter via the auditorium. They are stiff and I have a momentary panic that I shall still be there, unable to open the door, long after the show has started. But suddenly the door is open.

Outside all is deserted. I creep into the empty foyer, patiently watching through a chink for the house lights to go down. I can hear the Chairman’s voice making announcements - “unlike most theatres we encourage you to use your mobile phones during the performance, but please note we charge a £50 fee if you choose to do so.” A titter of laughter.

The laughter subsides, the opening music starts, the house lights dim. I slip into the darkness, looking towards the blackness of the vacant stage, repeating under my breath the word ‘brush,’ which is supposed to compose the features. Routine! Carrying my raincoat I begin to walk up the aisle.

The music fades, the stage lights go up. Now, I am climbing the steps to the stage. A curious feeling this arriving on stage - a private feeling. Of being completely in command. As of entering a railway carriage. All the time in the world.

I hang the raincoat over a chair and out of the corner of the eye catch the red spot stuck to the stage. Stand upon it and the 650w white spot fifteen feet away catches you right between the eyes. I stand just to the side, glancing at the audience. Even so, the spot bores into me, making everything I see black. I can just make out a few shapes, a few faces. Deep breath:

“My friend Serge has bought a painting....
It’s a canvas, about five foot by four, white.
The background is white and if you screw up your eyes you can make out some fine white diagonal lines.
Serge is one of my oldest friends.........”

I am conscious that, somewhere behind me, L has come on and is busy removing the cover from the white painting. I finish my speech and he looks at me in expectation. I look at him and at the painting - forward, backward, chin in hand, scratch the head, pull glasses out of blazer, examine something minutely, turn away, pause: ‘Expensive?’ I ask.

We are off. The lines flow and with them the action, the emotion. On the last night I am always conscious that this is really a ‘last’ - the last time I shall say these lines. I have a mental vision of tearing up the script as I go along. Like that sad, sad film of the Germans retreating from the Russian steppes in a train that draws behind it a great hook that tears up the sleepers in its wake.

One scene flows into another. On stage we are, in more ways than one, in another world. Gone is the normal flotsam and jetsam of the mind hovering around just above or below the level of consciousness; the day to day concerns of work, life, love, money, ageing; out go the infirmities, the pains, the tiredness, the stress of everyday living. On stage one is just a character without a background, uncrippled by age or guilt or a thousand of life’s problems. Play characters are like new born babes - sans baggage. Acting is like sleep, I suppose, or perhaps a dream.

I have the first speech in this play and also the last.

“My friend Serge has bought a painting
It’s a canvas about five feet by four
It represents a man who moves across a space
And disappears.”

The applause clatters away. We line up. Bow, once, twice, thrice and then peel off into the wings and into the dressing room. And soon I am quite alone there. For reasons quite unknown to medical science I am pathologically unable to get changed or unchanged in the same sort of time as anyone else. If they take four minutes I will take eight or even ten. I cannot begin to understand why. The result is I am always being called and have to decant to meet my public with laces still undone and clothing never quite adjusted.

A glass of champagne awaits and armed with this I venture into the bar, where the traditional CADS Saturday night supper is in full swing. Bread, paté and cheese. And wine of course. Never was something quite so simple, quite so tasty. Or made to go so far. If the good Lord ever were to run out of loaves and fishes then paté and cheese would be an acceptable substitute to feed the five thousand.

I am congratulated by different people. The best adulation is both gross and faked. You know it is faked and they know it is faked - but nevertheless it makes you both feel good about yourselves. “Darling you were wonderful, quite wonderful. However, do you do it? All those lines? Entirely believable! Better than the performance at the New Theatre. Just fabulous.”

But something understated, a reserved smile, a pat on the back, a kiss, a ‘well-done’ also charms the soul. It’s when the adulation is not faked that you know you have problems.

Some more champagne, the Chairman congratulates everyone. The Director receives a bunch of white flowers that mimic the painting and then we pack up. The guests go, the lights turn off and I am out again in the darkness of the muddy car park. Both literally and metaphorically my feet turn to clay. Come on K, let’s get you home!

Leprechauns, Mermaids and Copenhagen

We’re gearing up for the Climate Change blogging competition: the Copenhagen programme has arrived and I’m looking forward to it immensely. It seems excellently planned with an interesting mix between technical and information sessions and then there’s the EcoVisit - namely to the Dyssekilde Ecovillage in Torup, North Sealand with, on the way, a photo-opportunity at Middelgrunden Wind park. Can you park wind, I ask? (Note to self: Don’t be facetious): the ecological village has a population of 130 adults and 50 children who share a vision of a socially, economically and ecologically sustainable community.

The village has its own school and kindergarten, and it is divided into five housing areas with very interesting architecture. (I wonder what that means?) We are enjoined to wear sensible shoes as Dyssekilde only has dirt roads, and there will be coffee, tea, fresh fruit and vegetable snacks waiting for us upon arrival.

More prosaically, I am looking forward to seeing the city of Copenhagen and the little Mermaid - though I have in my possession a miniature statue of it sent to me by someone in Finland called Tea Maria with whom, very many years ago, I used to have long and rather sad discussions about Leprechauns, examples of whose enchanting presence have never quite made it, apparently, across the North and Baltic Seas.

Finland, we concluded, would suit Leprechauns very well as the folk there are always in need of mended shoes and, moreover, have a penchant for gold which Leprechauns would surely have no trouble at all in filing away. It is one of the wonders of nature that in all the history of the Scandinavian invasions of Ireland not one of the little green men ever managed to secrete himself and his whiskers aboard a Viking longship and return to the land of Thor. (Or maybe he did - cue for a story here perhaps).

Anyway, I have had little to do with Copenhagen in the past. It’s somewhere I have never managed to see much of, though I do have early morning memories of a crossing to Malmo once and seeing Hamlet’s castle - Elsinore - through the mist.

Shakespeare’s full play by lasts for four hours. I have seen a ‘lite’ version done in two, which was fast moving and pacy. Also great fun. But now I have come across a version of Hamlet reduced to a single act of fifteen scenes. Hamlet in 45 minutes! Maybe we shall have some fun with that at Christmas here in our little drama society.

But enough, I must turn my thoughts to climate change. Reading up background material to prepare for the next three months I am becoming ever more depressed. What with glaciers crumbling, deserts growing, forests disappearing, dead zones in the ocean; one group of scientists saying ‘we must,’ while another, equally eminent, says ‘no - that’s too dangerous!’ Just say ‘nuclear power’ and you see what I mean.

And last night I watched a television programme about trawlermen fishing in the North Sea. Scooping up at great expense - or so it seemed to me - quantities of immature fish. Is it any wonder that we find we have problems with the climate when the oceans - representing two thirds of our planet’s surface - are dying?

Still, depressing though it is, I am finding it hard to find coherent explanations of what is happening and what we should do about it. I hope for enlightenment in Copenhagen - though whether from the Mermaid, the non-existent Leprechauns or even Hamlet is unclear.
The earth is shrouded not in mist but in a blanket of excess carbon. Even if all man-made emissions stopped tomorrow I read that this excess blanket of some 250 gigatonnes (Gt) worth of CO2 would take a long time to go away. And in the meantime the earth will continue to heat up - won’t it?

Yet the major part of our effort and the focus of our politicians seems to be in saving relatively small amounts of emissions - and in this context 20 or 30 per cent is small. The blanket will still be getting thicker, the earth hotter.

Something else I find hard to understand is why, when the total annual natural carbon flux between the atmosphere and the land and sea is of the order of 200 Gt in each direction, why the relatively small amount (in proportion) of man-made emissions (say around 6-8 Gt currently) should be causing such a problem.

This is not in any way to deny the realities of climate change or the role of carbon dioxide in exacerbating it - simply to pose the question: is the problem more to do with the environment’s failing capacity to absorb carbon than with our fossil fuel burning habits in particular?

Because you see - and this is what I do find truly depressing - we have been busy despoiling the environment for as long as we have been burning fossil fuels. We have even reached the absurd situation where we engage in deforestation practices to plant oil crops to turn into fossil fuel replacements.

What if the environment becomes so damaged that it cannot even cope with natural emissions of CO2? What then? The atoms of the carbon blanket in the sky are not labelled with where they came from. The carbon dioxide from the compost in my garden, from my breath and your breath and the respiration of cells generally, from evaporation out of the sea, is exactly the same carbon dioxide that comes from a coal-fired power station.

That seems to me the really depressing thought and a compelling reason to lighten, drastically, the environmental load we impose on our fragile planet and to plant trees and grow shellfish (whose shells lock carbon away for a million years) wherever we can.

So for these reasons I am doubly looking forward to my visit to Dyssekilde Ecovillage (not forgetting the coffee, tea, fresh fruit and vegetable snacks will be there upon arrival! And should any Leprechaun be reading this and wishes to hitch a ride then he will be welcome to join me so long as he doesn’t mind travelling as hand luggage.

THE OLD WOMAN OF HVALSEY

I think some of you know I was selected as a blogger to write about climate change for the THINKABOUTIT competition run by the European Journalism Centre. The Competition hasn't started yet and we haven't had our trip to Copenhagen which is later this month, but I wrote this preliminary piece below and as I was quite pleased with it I thought I would crave your indulgence and post it here. It is basically true in all its grander particulars, though I may have elided one or two bits here and there in the interests of the plot. Artistic licence you can call it. Hvalsey is in South-Eastern Greenland. Google maps finds it quite well. (And for Rosie - or rather for Joni if she sees this - this is a story about Norwegians - well Norsemen anyway - that
I hope you will find every bit as compelling as recycling things).


THE STORY

Here is a story about climate change - although not about global warming. And if it’s not a story about Danes and Copenhagen, then it’s still a story about Scandinavians. It’s a story that I first heard about long ago, in a bout of childish illness, on the radio. The words climate change were unknown then - at least to the general public, but I remember this tale of an old woman, whose voice seemed to fill my sickroom with a chill.

She spoke of a little colony by the sea, somewhere where once there had been trees, great birches six metres tall and abundant grass with which the farmers made hay to feed their wintering animals in great turf-roofed byres. Indeed, so green was this land that Erik the Red, the Norseman who founded the colony, called it Greenland. Ships came from Iceland and further east and the colony thrived for several hundred years.

The settlers built houses with the flat stones that lay close to the surface and at Hvalsey, one of the biggest settlements, they built a high and wide church and plastered the outside with pulverised mussel shells whose nacre glowed in the low rays of the sun, making the church appear white and sparkling and fluorescent.

The colony thrived until some time around the beginning of the fourteenth century the farmers began to notice how little soil there now seemed to be. The rich loam that had lain under the birch trees had been eroded by the rain and the wind and washed into the sea. The trees had been cut for building and for firewood and to make fields but now the summers seemed to be shorter, the winters longer. The settlers had to go further for timber, the fields were less productive, everyone was poorer.

The church elders sought a dispensation from the Pope; from 1345 and on account of their poverty the settlement was absolved from the payment of tithes. Some settlers began to leave. But the Norse folk are hardy and tenacious. Most clung on. But the old woman, whose words had chilled me, said that the colony was doomed. The colony was doomed because it would be extinguished by the cold and the snow.

She said that on the low hills that rose above the sea, where once the beech trees had grown, snow now lay. Of course the hills had always been snow-covered in winter but the summer sunshine would melt the snow and the cattle would graze on the summer pasture and the wildflowers. But now there were patches of snow that didn’t melt all summer long, even on those hills beside the sea.

So snow began to fall on snow. Each summer the size of the permanent snowfield grew. The farmers marked it out with sticks. Sometimes the snow retreated. Then the farmers were happy for a year, or perhaps two. But the old woman foretold that decade by decade the summer snowfield would grow and keep on growing, faster and faster, until at last it came down the hillside and overwhelmed their crops.

And so it came to pass together with a sad succession of ‘lasts.’ In the year 1408 came the last marriage to be performed in the church with its nacre plaster. We even have the names of the bride and groom. For love flourishes even in the harshest conditions. She was Sigridur Björnsdóttir, high born and originally from Iceland, who had sailed to Greenland as a young woman to marry a man who had many farmsteads at Hvalsey. He died and she was left a widow.

Her groom in this last marriage was Thorsteinn Ólafsson, a sailor, captain of his ship in fact. He had been blown off course and by a happy accident had put in at Hvalsey in 1406. While making repairs he met and fell in love with the grieving Sigridur. And so occurred the last marriage in Hvalsey. The final recorded Norse document to come out of the settlement.

Sigridur and Thorsteinn didn’t stay long. The conditions had become too harsh. The colony was breaking up. His ship seaworthy again, Thorsteinn Ólafsson sailed out of the fjord and turned south before rounding the cape and running before the west wind up to Iceland and home.

That wasn’t the last of the colony, though; ships continued, very occasionally, to call. But the few families left who clung to their homes and to life itself through those chilling, snow-enveloping winters when all was dark, were famine struck and riddled with disease. All were desperately poor.

And in their poverty and misery and the bleakness of their environment they turned upon each other. The colony died a slow and lingering death, killed by the snow.

But before it did those that were left turned upon the old woman, who, years ago now, had foretold what would happen when snow began to fall on snow unmelted from the winter before. They accused her of witchcraft, of poisoning the colony, of bringing insanity and death to its people. She was bundled into the church and there she was condemned to death.

And in a last act, to propitiate the gods of weather, as if fire itself could drive away the snow and the white glow of the earth, the settlers tied her to a stake and used what little firewood remained to burn her to death.

It is said that those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Today, little remains at Hvalsey, though the church, now without its turf roof and fluorescent plaster of ground mussel shells, is well known. Yet the more things change the more they stay the same. The old woman who prayed that the ice would retreat has had her prayer granted. Six hundred years later we would do well to listen to her story.

Picture is courtesy of Wikipedia