redrise shade by katharine eastman

Don't worry - that ticking sound disappears in the same way that you no longer hear the clocks ticking at home - if anyone has ticking clocks anymore, which they don't but I do. Your biggest gripe will probably be over the picture - bland pic of a New Forest stream. It probably is, but it means a lot to me - when we came across this stream it immediately reminded me of how streams used to be when I was a child - alive !!!! All the places where I used to be young - they have all now become dead and slow and dark and the weed has all gone. I thought everywhere was like that. But no, there are still places that are alive, with shrimps and dragonfly larvae and stone loaches and bullheads and minnows and water stick insects (they were worth triple points) and the fearsome giant water spider as big as a hairy man's hand apparently though no one ever saw one. At the end of the day we'd carry our buckets back home full of small eels and lampreys and put them into our giant plastic aquariums and be lucky if anything was still alive a week later. Yes I'm afraid that we are the reason all the streams died - we dredged away the Canadian Pond Weed in just the same way that those nets tear up the sea-bed in that David Attenborough documentary. We have earned the nickname Generation Death - we killed nearly everything - now the whole country is like one of our old fish tanks, things turning upside-down and gasping and slowing and fading from view and falling or stinking out the house belly-up on the surface - sorry.