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.

In praise of Spring - from Lorna Doone

"The valley into which I gazed was fair with early promise, having shelter from the wind, and taking all the sunshine.  The willow-bushes over the stream hung as if they were angling, with tasselled floats of gold and silver, bursting like a pea-pod.  Between them came the water laughing, like a maid at her own dancing, and spread with that young blue that never lives beyond April.  And on either bank, the meadow ruffled, as the breeze came by, opening (through new tufts of green) daisy bud or celandine, or a shy glimpse now and then of the love-lorn primrose.

Though I am so blank of wit, or perhaps for that same reason, these little things come and dwell with me; and I am happy about them, and long for nothing better.  I feel with every blade of grass, as if it had a history; and make a child of every bud, as though it knew and loved me.  And being so, they seem to tell me of my own oblivions, how I am no more than they, except in self-importance."

I hope like me, my readers this weekend will get both some sunshine and unspoiled countryside to enjoy!

A good time to re-read Lorna Doone

Cold dark winter evenings provide a brilliant opportunity to re-visit old novels and romances of the past.

As 2010 ends and the increasing uncertainties of the years leading to the centenary of the commencement of the Great War loom, R.D. Blackmore's novel, Lorna Doone,which he denied was historical, came to my mind as an appropriate companion for this year's ending.

Without the failure of the Monmouth Rebellion and the bloodthirsty sentencing of Judge Jeffries would the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution a mere three years later have been possible? How did the unacceptable lawlessness of the West Country described in Blackmore's novel give way and produce over  a very short period such a perfect model of decency, justice and democracy?

Comparing the situation prevailing in the early years of Jan Ridd's story it is possible to identify comparisons with the villains of our own times, less easy to discern from where the remedy might arrive!