It’s been a slightly odd day. I woke very early (even for me) and so had a little snooze mid-morning, listened to the Budget on the radio and then went for a walk at Stanwick Lakes.
As I walked around in the afternoon sunshine I was thinking that, in some ways, I was quite impressed by the Budget and I wished a Sand Martin would fly past.
I don’t warm to George Osborne – the words odious, otiose and oleaginous spring to mind – but he made a very good political speech (I thought). It is a theme of this blog that even the best organisations and individuals have their bad points and even the worst have their good points. Everyone is a mixture of good and bad – it’s just that the goodies have a good dose of good with a smidgeon of bad and the baddies are overloaded with bad but one can still spot the good from time to time. Osborne made his speech very well (even if I didn’t like much of its content) – it was an assured performance.
My walk was a mixture of winter and summer. It was a warm afternoon but the birds were mostly reminders of winter – there were Goldeneyes, Fieldfares and Redwings. The one classically summer species was the Chiffchaff, several of whom have been singing at Stanwick for several days and were belting out their songs this afternoon.
Osborne even had a joke in his speech – a well-aimed barb directed at Ed Miliband – referring to the Magna Carta and King John betraying his elder brother.
The Chiffchaffs were the only summer visitors I saw but the resident species were singing away in the sunshine – Great Tits, Robins, Wrens, Dunnocks, Chaffinches, Reed Buntings and Song Thrushes. A Great Spotted Woodpecker drummed.
I didn’t think it was the greenest Budget ever – with business being let off paying anything like the right price for polluting the atmosphere – Greenpeace thought the same.
I saw 52 bird species on my regular walk – pretty good really, but not as good as the record-making (for me (at Stanwick (in March))) total of 61 on Monday. The value of your bird list can go down as well as up.
The Budget was fairly radical – and I like that – even if I don’t like its overall content. When you are in power you should use it – and Osborne does. He is a man who doesn’t seem to care much for the disadvantaged in our Society and his budget reflects that. It’ll be so useful to be able to stick another £10k into Premium Bonds for the unemployed and low-waged. They must be jumping for joy.
I think that the Budget might leave me a little better off but I’d rather it had been a Budget that increased fairness in Society and had tackled environmental problems rather than ignored them and made them worse. I’d rather have seen a Sand Martin.
I now earn, because it varies, less than half (quite a lot less than half on average) what I earned working at the RSPB. But I am perfectly happy most of the time. I admit, I’m at the ‘kids have left home and the mortgage is paid’ stage of life which means that there isn’t a great need to earn stacks of money except to buy a slightly better bottle of Rioja now and then.
Most of us worry too much about money – we’ve got enough, even if we don’t have quite as much as we used to have. The people without jobs, or with poorly paid jobs, are the ones i really worry about.
The Budget was a well-delivered unfair Budget. I do wish I’d seen a Sand Martin though.
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Thanks for the budget update. I missed it entirely as I was travelling up the East Coast Main Line while it was on, and preferred In The Night Garden to the budget coverage on the news – I’ll get my news from this blog! The species list for the journey was about 45 short of your walk but did include two buzzards, one of which was in Northumberland, and a small flock of lapwings on the approach to York. There was a young elm with flowers at Berwick station and more elms on the outskirts of Edinburgh which was good to see. No sand martins though.
I think I know what you mean about George Osbourne – there seems to be more substance to him than Dave, even if you don’t like the substance. Perhaps people were saying the same about Broon compared to Blair ten to twelve years ago. Suspect the Budget was all about motivating the Tory faithful to come out and vote above anything, so no surprise if it was rubbish for the disadvantaged or for the environment.
Same at Shapwick, Mark – lots of Chiffchaff singing and a nice male Goldeneye but no Sand Martins – and a Great White Egret with a very blue/green bill which I think = breeding condition.
And, thinking about the budget – the ruthless/mindless cutting of the Osborne austerity comes home when you realise that every £ cut from the EA budget is probably now costing the economy £10 – the sharp contrast between cuts and efficiency. Perhaps there is an irony in all this – Somerset is the county council cutting more than any other except Rutland – it doesn’t believe in public services, until something goes wrong – and there are people like Ian Liddell-Grainger MP whingeing about the failure of EA, and organisation he has been complicit in cutting to the point it can’t deliver the safety the citizens of Somerset suddenly find they need from public services.