Wonderland

I grew up in the country. Ask anybody who has and they'll say it never leaves you. The clean air, the big skies, the silence and the scale. It's different from being in a town. Whenever I have free time I have to get out there;  it's therapy for me. I think less, observe more. I can just be. Many people look at the beauty of creation and they cannot conceive of how it could have come about by chance. And they'd be right; it didn't. Evolution by natural selection is the very opposite of chance,  a process that has been sifting and pruning for approx 4.5 billion years. It's a funny thing; people don't mind being aware that they have a similarity to apes, but when you point out that they are apes this rarely goes down well. For my part, I find it incredible that I'm related to every other living organism that has ever walked, crawled, slithered or swam. I'm connected to every tree, every leaf, every last sprout for that matter. The evidence is right there in my DNA. There's also another error that jars me; we make this assumption that we are more evolved than our fellow creatures, somehow top of the tree. Only that's a mistake, too. We are, like every animal, adapted to our current habitat, but who's to say that this will always be so? Climate change is going to kill some of us without any doubt. It's going to change the way we live and the way we use our natural resources.  Anyway, I was meant to be waxing lyrical about the beauty of nature and encouraging you all to get out into the great outdoors whenever you can. Soak it up, breath it in, surround yourself in the wonder of it all. The pubs will still be open when you're done, and you can put that program on series record.