My Island

I’ve been musing on the question of a project to save my soul from financial corruption. My psychotherapist has berated me twice now for not doing anything positive on this front. Go travelling, she says. Learn Arabic. Anything, so long as it’s unrelated to banking or money.
And this is what I’ve come up with.

Adjacent to our house is a small patch of farmland, just six acres, which I bought years ago when the local farmer was in need of a new tractor and offered the land to me cheap. I’ve allowed him to continue using it as before and in return he’s kept our household in fresh lamb and eggs. A happy arrangement, which came to an end this year when he sold up and moved to Florida. The new owner of the farm has no interest in farming, and is busy turning his fields into a sterile parkland complete with non-indigenous deer and the most dreadful uplighting under every newly-installed mature oak. We loathe everything the man, a Norfolk property developer, is doing to our environs (although needless to say, I’ve already been round to enquire discreetly whether he is entirely satisfied with his current banking arrangements).

Anyway, the question is what to do with our six abandoned acres.

I read an article some time ago about the depletion of natural habitat for native British wildlife, and it occurred to me that our little scrap of land could prove a useful refuge for all those birds and hedgehogs and butterflies that are apparently finding the south-east of England an increasingly barren domicile. The theory is that if enough people provide “islands” of pesticide-free, undisturbed wilderness, then all those endangered species can survive even as Mr Prescott’s tarmac and concrete despoil what remains of their one-time home.

My younger daughter loves the idea. She’s six years old and adores anything small and cuddly (which she appears to think hedgehogs are). My son, who’s becoming a science freak at the tender age of thirteen, tells me it will help reduce climate change.

I might have to make a go of it.