Kite flying
October 9, 2021, 11:30 am , by Newsroom
Richard Lutz looks up
A rare sighting: a special bird of prey soaring in a warm (ish) wind over a crag. You don’t see many red kites, I am told, and the people I am with near St John Dalry in the Scottish Galloway Hills stop and peer. Some take out binoculars. Some try to take a picture. Others, like me, shade our eyes as the wind builds and rain sprays us. We look up as the kite, with its elegant wings and its forked tail, slowly circles for food.
It’s looking for small animals… voles, moles, rabbits on the tough moors and near remote farms above the valleys. I stand patiently as the storm lashes us. But there’s only so much time you can give as you get drenched, so drenched that the inside of your boots becomes a small bathtub. So wet that …well, you become a moving raindrop.
Nearby, in southwest Scotland, there is a feeding station for these birds. So it’s no wonder we caught one having a day out and picking up a quick take away. Time to get off the wet wet hills though.
For 2.7 billion users, their channel to Beingness is on the blink….
Returning to Planet Britain, nursing a sore neck, I enter a world still reeling from A Catastrophe. No, not climate change, nor Afghanistan, nor Covid nor soaring fuel prices, but…wait for it…Facebook (and co-owned Instagram and WhatsApp) has gone walkies. Techies are all over the place explaining something inexplicable and ultimately tedious. But the important news is that for 2.7 billion users, their channel to Beingness is on the blink. A Catastrophe.
Or possibly just a cold bath of serious psyche searching. No more pets with sunglasses, snide barbs, half truths or sheer utter trash. For six hours (and, boy, does that feel like an eternity for many of those 2.7 billion) it is a sterile life without the ability to converse with the universe.
Yes, businesses suffered. Yes, charities were unplugged. Yes, family connections were temporarily broken. But the outage did stop, for a while anyway, those that live a life caked in social media muck and feathers. A psychologist popped up on tv explaining why the stoppage was actually good for domestic life, intellectual life…a life, for god’s sake. Any life.
And what sheer coincidence (or I think it was) that a Facebook whistleblower addressed a Senate committee at the same time to warn that her former workplace harmed kids, harvested social division for profit and yes, wounded democracy. And all in pursuit of dough.
The social media bosses are mealy-mouthed about it all, to say the least. Critics in this weekend’s press point to the fact that 87% of money Facebook spends in combatting misinformation is in English. But…get this…only 9% of users are primary English speakers. Many of the rest are in poor countries where the channel is used to repress and deceive. Where they are victims of half truths and fear.
All this as, like an earthquake’s scary aftershock, Facebook had another nervous breakdown this weekend. Troubling times indeed for the world’s 2.7b who need a digi-rush of infotainment, crazed opinions and puppies that bark in Serbo Croat. Troubling times too, for those that really need an honest decent media lifeline.
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Tim Colgrave
Lots of red kites round the M40 High Wycombe gap promoted and encouraged to thrive by P. Getty years ago from his neaby estate.
Nasreem K
Switch off all computers, I say.
Joel M from NYC
Agree with Facebook comments. What also gets me is people who hike or bicycle glued to their phones and their music and ignore much of the glorious input around them. Oh well, their loss
Bob Prosser
Red Kites are increasingly common sights hereabouts in Herefordshire.
From a release site in central Wales more than a decade ago they have spread eastwards, reaching north Herefordshire around five years ago and now through the rest of the county – a pair regularly quarter the fields around us. They may be of course, part of the diaspora from the original Chilterns release around 30 years ago. A superb bird.
Anita Cooper
The Facebook disaster passed me by because I was transfixed by the Boris one-man comedy act at the Tory conference. Beyond belief! His world view of a mighty Britain is hilarious. In a remake of gun-boat diplomacy, he sends a naval battle fleet to the South China Sea to save the plucky Taiwanese from the Chinese hordes but cannot stop flotillas of unarmed migrants in inflatables from crossing the English Channel.
And of course, Brexit has nothing to do with our current supply chain issues.
Will Scott
Just what I needed!!
Kieron Rogers
Liked the kite photo
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