[pe2-image src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/-MY6w8huA6Ic/UchQA4uxxhI/AAAAAAAAAbU/Fi8B9PgfMl8/s144-c-o/13%252520-%2525201.jpg” href=”https://picasaweb.google.com/101339256689884186918/62413?authkey=Gv1sRgCN3nl-Dng7iRGw#5893048088573101586″ caption=”Gillespie Park” type=”image” alt=”13 – 1″ ]

I’m now several chapters into George Monbiot’s book Feral, and I’m enjoining it immensely. It is already making me think differently about the ways in which I choose to engage with my surrounding environment. It also makes me realise my vocabulary of flora and fauna is really very limited – it hardly seems to extend further than the words in the picture books I read our daughter (and many of those animals aren’t native to South East England!) This ignorance worries me: if I don’t have the words, then how can I have the ideas?

Inspired, I took a walk down to wonderful Gillespie Park, and wandered round the meadow. The info panel told me I’d find wild lupins, which I did – not a new word, br a moment’s appreciation of a plant I’d never stopped to see growing in that space.

I’ve written previously about participating in conservation weekends at Hazel Hill wood. This week the opportunity has arisen to be involved with helping to shape the educational programme at the wood. It is a place I greatly enjoy visiting, and so I look forward to the chance of getting more involved.

This afternoon we sang two engineering themed songs from Cerys Matthews’s book, Hook, Line and Singer: London Bridge is Falling Down; and The Runaway Train. This week I’ve been listening to Britten arrangements of folk songs, and an idea for a new engineering song, based on one of these tunes, is buzzing round my head – a cross between Boris Vian’s ‘La Java des Bombes Atomiques‘ and the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’. Watch this space.