Fay Young

Category: Green Shots

  • Blowing in the wind

    Blowing in the wind

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    So I tried to tell the BBC how owning a windmill helps you rediscover the wonder of electricity.

  • Blood on the tracks

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    “Many of the smaller ones perched on my hat, and when I carried my gun on my shoulder would sit on the muzzle. During my stay I killed forty-five all of which I skinned carefully.”   I really wish I hadn’t read that extract from David Douglas’s diary describing the birds he killed during his…

  • Are Edinburgh’s Christmas lights sustainable?

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    It’s not much after four in the afternoon and the winter sun has set way to the west of Edinburgh castle. At the end of November the city is ready for a long dark night but birds are singing in East Princes Street Gardens as if dawn was breaking.  And no wonder. The sky is ablaze…

  • Social climbers

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    Suddenly autumn has arrived on my windowsill and dumped a load of red leaves at the back door too.  Hard to believe we once doubted the weedy little Virgian Creeper would rise further than the garden shed.  Now it has not only reached our roof but it is working its way along the houses on…

  • In the eye of the beholder

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    In my minds eye this was a great shot, the outrageous St Edwards church sitting pretty between two farm sheds. A folly framed. Now I come to download it from my new mobile the picture hasn’t turned out quite what I imagined when I was teetering on the wall outside a caravan on Canna in…

  • Live Earth?

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    “The trail of Homo Sapiens, serial killer of the biosphere, reaches to the farthest corners of the earth.” E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life. I took E.O. Wilson with me to the West Coast but I didn’t read a page over the weekend. He is a fantastic writer, he makes science sing, but there is…

  • Flight or fight

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    I’m definitely going to be flying less than Blair this year so I’m feeling smug – but I know I’m hypocritical. Apologies to Jean whose comment on my last Global Gossip newsletter slipped down page and out of sight last month. I wondered if I should be encouraging a communal blog about places people are…

  • Day of the flood

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    It feels strange when your life becomes part of the news. The day after the flood I drove up to Pond Cottage to check for damage. As Ray and I had expected the cottage got off lightly but the landscape looked like a jigsaw puzzle that hadn’t been put together properly. Some familiar pieces were…

  • How does your garden grow?

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    Looking at the sky it’s hard to believe gardeners must start to plan for a scorched earth. Rain is blurring the view from my study window, frogs are hopping by the back door and the cats are settling for a long snooze on the sofa. A Government minister has just suggested I must start preparing…

  • Before Eden

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    They were like images from hell. Bulldozers descended into smoking pits 150 feet deep to demolish mountains of colliery waste. In some cases the ‘bings’ of derelict mines were still burning at temperatures of 1000°C as diggers, chained together for safety, worked their way slowly but surely round six redundant pits in the centre of…