Heritage

At some point yesterday I got to fantasising about an article in some future edition of the Financial Times in which some pundit was promoting doom and gloom over a projected downturn in the heritage industry. A downturn which was particularly affecting the home counties and which would probably result in the National Trust having to lay off volunteers.

A bit of nonsense which has some serious truth in it, in the sense that an increasing proportion of our collective effort is devoted to stuff which is not strictly necessary, which is not to do with the core necessities of food, water, shelter and waste disposal. Things like state of the art hospitals for expensive birds, that is to say for the hawks and falcons of the Saudi side of the Persian Gulf, for which you can try to see reference 1. While, at the same time, we have lots of people who do not have access to adequate supplies of those core necessities.

So we might have been talking for a hundred thousand years, writing (at least after a fashion) for ten thousand years and into modern, peace-loving nation states for hundreds of years - but the way in which we organise ourselves still leaves a lot to be desired. Will we learn that more (for the few) is not necessarily better, before large chunks of the world as we know it get covered by the rising seas?

Perhaps Christmas with its unseemly display of more is getting to me.

PS: Shakespeare, as so often, had his finger on this button. See the speech of Lear which starts 'What need one? / O! reason not the need; our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous...'. For more of which see reference 2.

Reference 1: https://www.falconhospital.com/. Not responding when I tried it.

Reference 2: King Lear - William Shakespeare - 1606. Act II, Scene IV, Line 265.