(i got the) home town blues

James Lovelock's informative and thought provoking Revenge of Gaia ends with a sober vision of desperate human survival in a hot, post climate change planet. Reading the book it's hard to get a handle on whether he's optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome of this crisis. In a newspaper interview he remarks he's an optimist; he knows climate change is going to happen. Enjoy life while you can is his advice. We may have as little as two decades left.

Enjoying life while you can means to me appreciating our world more. Not just nature, or what passes as the natural world in a man-made environment, but civilization; art, science, literature, and history, especially. I was looking for a site on Cirencester 21 - which I think is a local movement involved in transition, peak oil, energy etc. - and ended up on a BBC film archive watching 28 minutes of A Day Out in Cirencester, part of a series made in 1979. I don't know if there ever was a ''Golden Age of Television'' but programmes certainly looked gentler and more quaint in those days. But less superficial maybe. I can't imagine even the Beeb making a series like this today. It's all ''reality'' now, only it isn't really that real. Whereas A Day Out is.

Anyway, this has been my adopted town for the last eighteen years. Recently, I've been feeling an urge to move on to new pastures - maybe further west, or Wales. This little film has made me feel I belong here. I shall have to give it a little think.