Anything Can Happen

As this is a Bank Holiday, many will be relaxing and turning their attention to the domestic or entertainment parts of life as we know it. But how long can life as we know it continue given the way the world works?

Kurt Cobb in a recent Energy Bulletin post asks if vested interests would starve the world. In this case he is referring to international companies with major influence on government bodies and organizations.

The questions relate to the products of these companies which in the short term might deliver some added food output but which have the potential to trigger a serious collapse in the production of key crops.

This is apart from the activities of traders with computers playing hide and seek with commodity figures who are alleged to be factoring in much higher prices than real markets would command. Or bankers needing the biggest cut they can get in the shortest possible time.

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-05-15/would-vested-interests-starve-world

Meanwhile in the United Kingdom people will be walking over lands with lost villages, on BBC1 is a programme about how satellites have identified many lost cities in Egypt and MSN, being American, is concentrating on the threat the Yellowstone Caldera poses to civilization. With a major drought risk in the mid west and maybe the sub-continent it may not need anything volcanic to happen.

Personally, we shall be watching our saved item on Hubert Parry with the Prince of Wales. Parry grew up in Gloucestershire, albeit born at Christchurch. In 1851 as a boy his father, a prosperous man, Thomas Gambier Parry employed servants. One was Jane Greening, of a local family.

In 1857 Edward Elgar was born not far away in Worcester, the son of Anne, whose maiden name was Greening and of humble origins. His father was a Man of Kent who moved north. It is difficult to work out but Anne’s family seems to have come from south Herefordshire and Gloucestershire.

Also on this patch was Gustav Holst, from Cheltenham, of German paternal stock but his mother was Clara Liddiard, also a Gloucestershire family, but a quite prosperous farming/minor landed one. Not too far away a little later, at Downe Ampney, we have Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Just a handful of people who were from a very small area yet who had such impact.