Mayflies

A balmy day, yesterday a host of Mayflies danced on the pond. Today they were gone. Here today, gone tomorrow, so really, it was a privilege to see them.

Next weekend I will be going to the Interpretation Canada annual conference at Manning Park. There will be workshops, there will be campfires, there will be walks and if I'm really lucky there will be snow.
Manning Park, I am told, is extraordinarily beautiful. Since we live in extraordinary beauty here, standards are high, thus so are my expectations. I must make sure the camera is fully charged.
It's like, in Europe, when we say something is old, we don't mean it was built in 18-something. In Europe we do History, we have history, in Canada we do breathtaking landscapes.

Today was rehearsal day. I am still fascinated by the process. We start the day with a script. We walk it through, reading from the script and with the faith that by the end of the day we will be so familiar with it that we'll be playing with the physical humour. It's great not to have a director, we just find what is in the characters and their actions.
Tomorrow will be our first performance.

Here, television is winding up, grinding to a halt. All of the series we watch have been advertising just four more episodes until the season finale. In the summer we get to amuse ourselves or watch repeats. TV summer starts early too. We may not cast our clouts before May is out, but we can do without the telly. We watch too much anyway.

I can't help wondering if the children we are educating have much of a future. George Monbiot in the Guardian once again lays out the figures for us. But he claims that...

"The governments making genuine efforts to tackle global warming are using figures they know to be false."

It is horrifying stuff.
At the moment we worry about people in other countries, do they have enough food? How will we help them to cope with AIDS?
In the future we may be hoping that it is they who die and not us. In the future we may not look to Africa and mourn a dying continent, we may, in the only slightly altered words of St. Bob's Band Aid song,
'Thank God it's them instead of us.'