RED PLANET

I feel really faint today, as though I’m sort of transparent and slowly fading out of reality.

I think it’s the heat.

It’s not all bad though: we had some beautiful rain last Friday night, filling the air with the fresh petrichor, and softening the hardened earth. It wasn’t much, but it was great while it lasted.

Since then, it’s been hotter than a baker’s apron. And it looks like the heatwave will continue. Even the Met Office have advised people to stay out of the sun until the end of the week. This temperate isle is temporarily inhospitable, it seems, while the sun burns holes in our greens and our pleasants.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were all suffering from the ‘Beast from the East’! That cold snap froze the country white with Siberian snow. Now here we are. And they say climate change is a hoax... although more quietly during the summer, it seems. Must be the time when all the fossil fuel magnates and lobbyists jet off to their lakeside alpine cottages to smoke cigars in champagne hot-tubs while the world burns. 

Meanwhile in space news, lots of excitement today as they think they’ve finally found an underwater reservoir on Mars! Liquid water, maybe simple life forms, maybe the potential for future human expansion... on the red planet!

Part of me thinks it might be best if we can figure out how to look after this one first, before we start sprawling ourselves like messy teenagers, across the solar system.

Another part of me thinks we should send off those oil-burning, cigar-smoking, fossil-fuel fatcats first, and just let them figure out how to live on a sun-scorched, red planet for a while.

Give me blue and green anytime. Come, gentle rains.