It started in the Welsh Marches: walking, good pubs (one with a cabaret by refugees from the Hay Festival), and English song in and around Ludlow. Hard to beat.
I missed this, spending most of the day outside, and a large part of it tending my native hedge as it threatened to obscure my neighbours' roadway. UNEP did just fine without me; and I did very well without it.
I also missed all but 5 minutes of the BBC's ludicrously overblown annual focus on wildlife. But it took only 3 minutes to confirm that the thing should be called Personality Watch. It was just as bad as the BBC's coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show. All you need to know can be found in a fine Guardian review.
The clock ticks down to the 7th World Environmental Education Congress in Morocco. I'll not be there. The programme confirms the wisdom of that decision, as there are 26 "keynote speakers", not all of whom it should be said, are worth leaving the village for, let alone the country. If they have 20 minutes each, that's a day taken up. If they don't, what can they say? Looks like another glorious gabfest, but at least the cous cous will be authentic, and there's royalty attending.
Richard and Sylvia Jurin came to stay, en route to WEEC, with Richard pausing to give a seminar in Bath on Sustainable living: what research tells us. We had a good multi-disciplinary turn out for a complex inter-disciplinary question. Detailed discussion continued for some time in the pub.
The week ended in the flowing grasslands between Avebury and Silbury Hill, absorbing the cultural landscape and speculating on the neolithic, with help from the ever-stimulating World heritage Trails. All quite wonderful.
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