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Reflections 17th July
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Reflections 17th July

Richard Merrick's avatar
Richard Merrick
Jul 17, 2022
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Reflections 17th July
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Photo by Kurt Cotoaga on Unsplash

On my Mind

Shifting Sands

As I've taken notice of what is happening around us, the image that kept forcing its way to the front of my mind this week was sand dunes and changing landscapes. Those schoolboy experiments with grains of sand, or rice to demonstrate the idea of "self-organized criticality", where we discover that eventually adding one grain more, or a chance breeze or vibration, causes the whole pile to collapse and change shape.

Those breezes and vibrations are coming at us thick and fast right now. As I write this, we've just been checking up on elderly neighbours as we head into temperatures in the high 30's at the same time as we have scheduled power cuts for maintenance work. I listened to farmers early this morning facing the reality of closing down, stuck as they are between the hard place of aggrressive retailers and the unstoppable force of the consequences of Brexit. The prospect of an Autumn and Winter of high energy prices and restr…

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