Photo: Brian Garman, PSC North Devon
Our Vigils continue; the world looks away from Gaza. The Guardian published these final words by the Spanish journalist Carlos Hernández de Miguel: ‘I will leave this world without understanding why the international community chose to remain impassive while Israel perpetrated a genocide right before its eyes, broadcast live, minute by minute, massacre by massacre’. Among British newspapers only the Morning Star is paying attention. This was its front page on Wednesday: ‘Outrage as Labour seeks to “unblock” arms ban to Israel’. The BBC can get ministers in front of the microphone to harass them on Mandelson but not, apparently, on Gaza and the endless institutional cruelty of Israel.
Here’s another case of Government suppression or at the least deliberate downplaying. George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian: ‘What a scandal, that the Government is still stopping citizens from knowing what they (we) are up against. But the ultimate scandal is quite simply that citizens have been left not knowing exactly what horrors we are likely to have to endure in the coming years. Every one of us has a right to know the full, unexpurgated version of what is in this security assessment: because otherwise we aren’t informed enough to be able to start to try to adapt to the national-security and local-living implications of these forecasted ecosystem collapses’. His article written with Rupert Read is here: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-01-27/its-ecological-breakdown-that-should-put-us-on-a-war-footing-official/
Some of my readers will know what this structure is but most won’t - it’s by the main road out of Shirwell heading north. The answer, later in this blog, will surprise you.
It’s been a busy week: on Monday the Strategy & Resources committee of North Devon Council (NDC) set out a revised plan for our Trade Waste service. As the plan has been misreported, I’m putting it here:
‘Following further consideration and having listened carefully to feedback from the public and affected businesses, councillors have made a final decision that the council will continue to provide a trade waste refuse collection service but will no longer provide a full, trade recycling service. The council will also continue to collect from some businesses known as ‘schedule 2’ businesses, who pay for both trade refuse and recycling, but whose refuse and recycling are collected on domestic rounds by domestic round crews. Most of these customers are smaller holiday lets, who qualify for small business rate relief. Most importantly, their business waste and recycling is collected in small boxes and bags and are on our normal, domestic collection rounds’. Full details here: https://www.northdevon.gov.uk/news/2026/final-statement-from-north-devon-council-update-trade-waste-collection-services
Apart from settling the Trade Waste issue, the committee also welcomed the new Local Nature Recovery Strategy. At Planning committee on Wednesday I proposed a motion to approve a new Passiv House in the Woolacombe conservation area and was glad to see it accepted 7 votes to 2 with 2 abstentions. We don’t often go against the recommendations of our planning officers but on this occasion we felt the house would have a negligible impact on the landscape and would bring compensatory benefits - Woolacombe parish council and the ward councillor are of the same opinion. I also took part in a meeting of NDC’s Antisocial Behaviour officers; a meeting of interested individuals and groups in the Guildhall to discuss putting forward Barnstaple as England’s Town of Culture for 2028; Landkey parish council - discussing speed signs for the village; Swimbridge Parklands committee - the Poetry in the Park project is moving towards completion; and XR’s Climate Forum on Saturday in Barnstaple Library, focusing on Water Pollution and Biodiversity, at which I gave a short talk on Ted Hughes and the founding of the Westcountry Rivers Trust.
The Green surge continues and now it has important intellectual underpinning thanks to Kate Pickett’s new book. There was a really good discussion last week organised by Compass, involving the author with Ruth Lister, George Monbiot and Caroline Lucas, which I hope you can access here: P.S. If you missed the call, would like to share it, or just watch it again then please click here for the recording!
Caroline Lucas referred to ‘democratising our media’ as a major task. Absolutely. What we have now is rich men buying social media, TV stations and newspapers and subverting or destroying them, as witness the antics of Jeff Bezos: while spending 75 million dollars on a sycophantic documentary about the First Lady, Bezos just laid off more than 300 staff at the Washington Post.
This is the interior of the mystery building at Shirwell: it is a carriage from Queen Victoria’s train, which was moved to this field some 90 years ago and became a skittle alley. It needs to be re-homed. I visited it with fellow-members of the Barnstaple Buildings Preservation Trust. Could it join the Carriage Museum at nearby Arlington Court? I hope so, but substantial funding will be needed to move it safely.
Substack, it was reported in the Guardian yesterday, hosts blogs by Nazi groups so I’m looking into alternative providers.
On Friday afternoon I had a wet walk in Filleigh beside the River Bray. I noticed that the woods above the road from Shallowford to Clatworthy are carpeted with Snowdrops. They are as profuse as Bluebells will be in a month or two. I never saw so many before: is it a mast year for Snowdrops? Thank you for reading.