As seen on screen

TRW has already confessed to lowbrow proclivity so it will come as no surprise to you that she spent a good deal of last weekend watching television.  ‘Groundhog Day’ (brilliant) and  a documentary on Fleetwood Mac.  Confess, you own a copy of ‘Rumours’.  Despite their volatile mix  they feel de-toxed enough/ broke enough/ bored enough for a reunion tour.  Yes really!  The Supergroup who habitually let each other know what was going on in their private lives through the medium of platinum selling discs.  The only other people who can match them for sheer drama are the cast of EastEnders.  I was fascinated to see what Stevie Nicks looked like after all this time.  She was the fantasy girlfriend of the 70’s, the hip West Coast Princess of Whimsy.  Years before Kate Bush and her mimes and twirls and and crazy flights of fancy there was Stevie.   Well, ten years of class A drugs should  take its toll but she looked  eerily smooth of face and immobile of expression. What could possibly cause that do you think?   Disconcertingly, she looked like she had borrowed one of Dolly’s wigs.  I kept waiting to catch a glimpse of the gypsy that she was,  but instead she looked  as though she’s been channelled through ‘Dynasty.’  Baffling.

What a relief to see Lindsey Buckingham looking his age but in a good way.  Having apparently ridden a Tsunami of emotions most of his life, he’s finally free of his demons.  He married someone outside the group and now has three young children.  It seems to have calmed the wild striving of his younger years, the desperate search for something.  At fifty nine he finally seems to have discovered what it means to be happy.

I swear I’m never going to watch another wild life programme.  I’ve wept buckets over  ‘The Elephant Diaries’ (orphaned baby elephants).  I cried over Gizmo the ring tailed lemur ( it makes it ten times worse when they name them!)   Ailing and with a broken leg, Gizmo trailed hopelessly after his group until all he could do was lay down  too exhausted to go on, waiting to die.  I’m feeling tearful just writing this.  And now ‘Bearwalker of the Northwoods’.  During five heart rending minutes a cub, obviously ill, unable to travel with her family, eventually curled up under a tree hollow and died in her sleep.  Lynn Rogers the biologist who practically lives with them tenderly picked her up to try and discover why she died.  Queue the waterworks.

Nature, according to Charles Darwin, is the ultimate fighting machine.  Shaped by evolution and requirement it’s prime motive is survival.  It’s a gunfighter, fingers twitching over its six shooters: if you’re weak it will stare you down the barrel of its gun and it will show no mercy. Darwin states, Divine Intervention is not necessary to this process, it’s self propelling.  So can I just untidy things by asking, if it’s all about survival of the best specimen, why do we care so much for the weak and ailing?  Shouldn’t we see their demise as ‘more for us’, the survivors?  But we don’t.   We don’t neglect infants born before their time though nature would dictate they are too weak to be useful and survive. When my dad was suffering with a heart condition, far from being  seen as  too elderly to bother with  he was treated with care and medication and his life was prolonged for some years because of it.

Haven’t you shouted at the  cold eye of the camera filming a dying animal to put the camera down and GO AND SAVE IT!  Where does the impulse to care come from?   To want to save the lives of people and animals sometimes at great personal cost; for me this is an anomaly of Darwin’s theory.  Nature is unsentimental, it just goes on at all costs.  Yet the orphaned elephants grieved for their lost parents in an identifiable way and even Magpies have rituals for their dead.  Why?  Isn’t that nature taking it’s course?

You have to ask yourself, in the midst of this Unstoppable Machine, where does compassion come from?  Why do we intervene?   Why are we outraged at injustice?  Where does our morality come from?
The Bible tells us, that in the beginning God created everything.  We are made in the image of God which is where these characteristics originate.  Is it any wonder the children reflect the nature of the Father and that creation bears the imprint of Him who made all things?