Bird Watch

This weekend the RSPB are doing a national bird watch. I don't know why I felt interested in joining in. So over the past hour, I have been sitting by my window overlooking the garden and filling in my little full. Believe it or not, it was really peaceful and kind of nice. I got a bit mixed up between my chaffinch and wren, but apart from that I think I did okay.

There has been quite a few television programmes over the past few days, particularly on the history Channel, about our environment. One documentary was about Mount St Helens erupting in 1980 and the other was about the heatwave in August 2006. For such a major event I could not remember the 1980 volcano eruption and an hour-long documentary on the heatwave of last year amazed me. I couldn't remember it being that bad.

I do care about the environment and have tried different ways to be better but on a big scale of things I'm not very good. I drive a diesel van, I do recycle but could do better, I leave nearly all my plugs and appliances on and I don't have a compost heap. With the exception of the compost heap and the recycling the other things are all necessities and limited by my access needs. When it came to my van I did not have the same kind of choices about what type of vehicle I could have and that was 10 years ago and more environmentally friendly vehicles has certainly developed in that time. The reason I leave my electrical appliances on is so that I can be independent and not reliant on my PAs. If the switches are off I need somebody to get them back on. If they are on I can live independently for long periods of time. My chair, hoist bed, front door and other gadgets all require the electricity to be left on. so you can see I feel pretty guilty about my contribution to global warming.

The other thing that I am conscious of is that a lot of the food that I can manage to cook for myself are highly packaged. When I have a PA to cook for me, I usually cook all my fresh vegetables but on my own it tends to be the more easy to cook foods. I am getting better at this by preparing ahead but still, when on my own, I still tend to cook the easier foods I can manage alone.

Apart from my van, electrical consumption and use of packaging material I'm very conscious about our environment. my family has a farming background, Mum and Jerry have small herd of cows. In Abbeyfeale we are surrounded by farmland and my uncle Patsy is a well-educated farmer who knows his stuff. Whilst working at Felbury we were surrounded by hillsides, Woods and beautiful scenery. Whilst working at Orpheus we did one or two projects to develop environmental awareness even taking the group on a day out composting.

For a crazed rock 'n' roller like me you might be surprised that I think or care about the environment, but I do. So perhaps one hours birdwatching is not such madness after all!

Be lucky!

JK