Letters to the Editors
Crier News and Views
Dear Eds
I'd understood that there was no censorship of letters with names at the bottom of them in the Crier but for the record, I did try to reply regarding the bizarre Cambridge bicycle theft figures back in the summer. Further research suggests it is very likely that the figures of 4500 thefts per week were in fact the figures per year. You will have to wonder what I envisioned if there really were six hundred and something thefts per day, every day of the year, because if I say much more this letter might disappear too. Who might have an interest in the suppression of truthful data?
But things bizarre are still out there. I come from the small neighbouring county of Bedfordshire, also a farming one, and not of any great geographical significance. I remember some hill meadows disappearing under the barley when I was about eight but there are some square miles of chalk hills that have not gone under the plough, and some decent woodland between Luton and Bedford. Someone thought it will be good to plonk a Center Parcs in the middle of that, so they haven't ceased trying to take up the remaining uncultivated land with 'facilities'.
When I moved into Cambridgeshire I was struck by how little meadow or woodland there is. What wildlife there is here around Swaffham Prior out towards Ely lives - no, sorry, clings - on the margins: hedgerows and Devil's Ditch/Dyke. (I don't go up there much because of the dog sh** every few yards (Sheep sh** surely? Mark doesn't go up there much... Eds) - evidence of the lack of walking space here) What lives out the back of my garden is ravaged by crows and magpies (does nobody manage their numbers any more?) and cats, of course, including my own. The lengths I have gone to to discourage the evil beast from murdering what's out there are not worth recording but I bet there aren't many cats out there that jingle more than mine. It only gets mice now. Not much point getting rid of it - plenty of others out there to take up the slack. It's a pretty precarious existence, and it's not getting better, or even staying the same. We're not yet at 'Silent Spring', but I'm not exaggerating when I say it's quiet and getting quieter. I can't show you even sparrows in the trees at the end of my garden. There's still collared doves, pigeons, wrens, the odd robin, blue tits and great tits and a few blackbirds, but precious little else. I'm not making it up. It's depressing. I'm not sorry the bikes have gone from the field but that doesn't balance with being probably the last person to see a slow worm out there before the cultivation ended any chance of seeing one again.
Oh yes, and there's Wicken Fen. That fantastic tiny little scrap of once huge wetland, a last small refuge of the amazing small native wildlife of this area. Are there people who wouldn't want to expand it and arrest the decline of Cambridgeshire's native animals and maybe even give them a chance to expand enough to establish numbers and habitat adequate enough to hold out against the global warming that's coming down on us? Well, there are, and I read the views of one of them in the last Crier. 'silliness''severe practical difficulties''loss of thousands of acres of the finest food-growing land'(I was told by someone who farms it that a lot of it is in its last decades of usefulness) 'uncertainty.. fen roads.. properties.. lodes.. midges.. mosquitoes.. travellers.. hare coursing.. thousands of visiting vehicles.. ill-conceived, unnecessary and unwanted'.
Oh, and a poem from Ophir. Best not say anything about that, had I?
You can find reasons to suppress anything if you really try. But if there is to be any wildlife worth seeing left for our children, then it's necessary, I support it and I for one want it.
Oh alright ! The sinisterly suppressing Eds seem to have also censored an interesting May Village Gardeners report (mysteriously entitled WI 2005), which they have just discovered hiding between two telephone books. Many apologies for any copy unintentionally omitted this year.
Eds