The lands end peninsula, almost as far south and west as you can go in the uk, a favorite of the second home owner, beautiful, rugged and for most of the year populated only by locals. Day to day life is generally not glamorous, money is tight, life is not easy, especially now and yet today was a day of a strange story unfolding.
The leisure center Penzance, only a few years old, pretty well equipped and possessing both a sauna and a steam room and it was in the sauna that the tale was told to me of a company contracted to provide security to a number of very wealthy families for whom the possibility of kidnap for ransom is very real.
The location of these families was not revealed to me nor was any explanation given for the divulgence of this information. The tale was told by a man of middle years, slack bellied but strong jawed, with an intriguing accent which, in my mind, had brought him from the pacific rim, via north america to our remote and sleepy town. A perfect place to hide?
With remote and isolated properties that do not appear on sat navs and are invisible to all but the most thorough search. Could west penwith become a hideout for the paranoid plutocrats?
I'll keep you posted...

The joys of winter

Lets face it, there aren't many great things about winter. For me it boils down to attitudinal shift, seeing the beauty and positive in a winters day rather than negative and decay or bareness.
Today, late November, cold and crisp with blue skies and sunshine, must rate as one of the easiest of winter days to find easy to like.
For me today was a cycle training day, taking me on an 80km loop down towards the lizzard. I love the feel of the sun on my face, the way the light illuminates the colour of the last few leaves on the trees, the way the land takes on a dormancy that you can sense, laying low and waiting for the (almost) inevitable movement of the earth taking us back towards the light from which all life and everything we have has flowed from.
3 weeks and 6 days to longest night, keeping the vigil.........

Our Present Hope

Present hope, a little paradoxical as hope has the connotation of a future outcome, wished and desired. Present is the continuously unfolding moment often barely acknowledged or fully experienced, so keen are we to be there, in the future where our hopes have all turned into a reality (of sorts)
For how long has humankind nurtured this longed for future where things will be better, easier, without fear, pain, hunger, danger, poverty..........the list could go on and on, you can add your own desires to it, then imagine this on a global scale, 6 billion plus humans, all desiring that there present hopes will become future realities.
Some might argue that for  some those present hopes of the past, have in fact, become the present realities of day to day life, the realities of abundant material wealth, science backed medicine, free education (whose agenda?) security, for some. What is the cost of the realization of all those past present hopes, culminating in a constantly unfolding now, now ,now.
It is the cost of all those present hopes that should concern us all.

We are reliably informed that all there is, is the present moment, the past has gone, committed to an uncertain memory, which will fade and decay with us. The future is not yet here and is in itself unknowable except through the medium of probability.
Seconds tick by with an increasing pressure for action ,movement and activity and once the moment has passed , it can never be reclaimed, rewound, replayed, edited or modified, all that we can do is watch to see where the ripples will spread and what other intertwined moments and actions it will collide with.
Awareness in the moment of action, easily written,incredibly hard to achieve, is, I believe the key to living without regret.