Monetary meltdown - John Ridd on Wheat!

This blog has long proposed that the acreage yield of wheat from good farm land in temperate zones would be an ideal standard for fixing monetary trading values either internally and/or internationally. Click here to read some of such posts.

Somehow our unscrupulous politicians must be forced to halt using ever-growing computer power to create ever greater quantities of ever more worthless digital money. The riots now spreading to Syria and Jordan will become ever more difficult to halt when the resulting complete disillusionment reaches Western industrialised societies!

In my slow, steady but  most enjoyable re-read of Lorna Doone, and against the present backdrop of the coming Portugal default and ensuing collapse of the Euro currency, I thought that at the start of this weekend, I would share, with my apparently ever-growing readership, the words of John Ridd,  on the crucial topic of wheat:

"God makes the wheat grow greener,
While farmer be at his dinner"

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   And so, one beautiful spring morning, when all the earth was kissed with scent, and all the air caressed with song, up the lane I stoutly rode, well armed and well provided.

   Now though it is part of my life to heed, it is not part of my tale to tell, how the wheat was coming on.  I reckon that you, who read this story, after I am dead and gone (and before that none shall read it), will say "Tush!  What is this wheat to us?  We are not wheat: we are human beings: and all we care for is human doings."  This may be a very good argument and in the main, I believe that it is so.  Nevertheless, if a man is to tell only what he thought and did, and not what came around him, he must not mention his own clothes, which his father and mother bought for him.  And more than my own clothes to me, ay and as much as my own skin, are the works of nature round about,  whereof a man is the smallest.

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I also blogged last August on the crucial role played by wheat in the development of Europe and quote this paragraph in particular:

In Professor Norman Davies' tour de force 'Europe - A History', he recounts how wheat, being a seasonal crop requires intensive labour only at the spring sowing and autumn harvest, thus leaving early Europeans, whose staple cereal wheat became, "time and freedom to branch out, to grow secondary crops, to reclaim land, to build, to fight, to politicize." Such a conjunction, he continued "may well contain the preconditions for many features of Europe's social and political history, from feudalism and individualism to warmongering and imperialism."

Think a bit on nature, once again, this spring weekend. I wish all a peaceful one.