Four Goshes

Gosh, it’s nearlyy the end of July. And gosh, it is almost ten o’clock and I’ve only just woken, showered and sat down for breakfast! But then we did celebrate with a bottle of excellent wine which was so unusual that we offered some to camping neighbours. And gosh I’m half poisoned by pleasure, for alcohol turns into ethanol inside you.

And let’s break a peculiar English convention and add a fourth gosh, (who knows why we say things in threes)... Gosh it’s hot! Now that was the point I was trying to get to this morning, but do excuse that ethanol, it got in the way. This campsite is packed with people from all over France who are escaping the great heat ravaging most of the country. A dear Parisian friend phoned saying the capital is baking and next door to us there’s a couple who’ve left their southern campsite in the hands of their cleaners because they can’t bear the heat in Provence. Poor cleaners, poor campers. Last night a cyclist with long flowing hair freewheeled past our encampment looking as if the sun had blasted her in from the desert. And even though this is the coolest part of the entire country, it was so hot we went to cool down on a beach, in the shade but boiled so much we had to lie in the water.

The Sahara airmass has struck summer-time Europe and almost everyone is surprised. We who’ve gone on about it since the early 1980s thought this would happen in about ten or fifteen years, but then nobody can be sure what will happen with Climate Change. We are dealing with a creature much bigger than St George’s dragon, with a monster who has been asleep since the age of the dinosaurs when it was rudely woken by either a meteorite or a vast volcanic explosion. This enraged beat so powerful is now stretching its wings and who knows where it will take us. Maybe where the dinosaurs went.

Talking of dinosaurs, the other day when shopping to replenish that we’d used in the delightfully generous B’s house, we came across two Greenpeace activists trying to promote Climate Change. “Nobody is interested. They tell us they dislike Greenpeace for all the fingers which pointed at France when the Rainbow Warrior sank!”

That, readers, is the dinosaur I refer to, not the Rainbow Warrior, but the attitude to it in this country whose people seem never to forget an international embarrassment. I said. “I knew somebody who’d been on the Rainbow Warrior that day.”

The young French activist said, “O la, la, my skin has gone cold! And we French deny it! In the entire country, we’ve less than 3,000 members!”

“Wow, that’s low.” I continued, “Substantial evidence proves it was France.”

“Exactly, but they tell me, ‘The world blames us so we don’t like Greenpeace.’ How crazy!”

But at least the French are honest. Remember the reaction of a woman in my English village towards The Extinction Rebellion two months ago? Yet she puts herself us as a protector of the environment, well, the beauty, if nothing else, of a slice of it in the village. Humanity is in denial. We need to wake up and face the Climate Dragon. My ex-Greenpeace friend referred to in my last post, told me twenty years ago, “It is already too late.” That was why she retired, “Nobody is listening!”

We have to listen... or... gosh.