Rising from the ashes of good intentions

IT'S EMBARRASSING to realise how long it's been since last I blogged. Good intentions expressed last year, for goodness sake, came to nothing but I'm awash with New Year purpose and 2011 is my year of the blog - so watch this space.

The purpose of this blog is to share my experiences of the countryside and the outdoors and to supplement my other, now, long term blog www.manwithtwodogs.com and hopefully direct other traffic to it. manwithtwodogs is in its ninth year now and appears each Saturday in the Dundee Courier newspaper. Writing my weekly article gives me the greatest pleasure which I believe is shared by a wide readership. I can't claim to be a great expert on all country matters but I know I know a lot more than some and that others know a great deal more than me. That doesn't matter really - what counts is protecting our countryside from our own human depredations so that we leave a legacy for future generations worth having. We humans are the only species on this earth who are capable of doing this and if we don't care about the world we live in we'll all come back in our afterlives as slimy, ugly creatures.

It isn't always necessary to do positive things. As often as not we can be effective by avoiding negative acts - the main thing is to care that whatever we do, or decide not to do, is undertaken with well-informed intentions.