Beauty and Snacks.

I just read a thing from an expert which talked about how it’s no earthly good doing ‘content without strategy.’

I’m going to risk revealing that I am really thick. But I have no idea what that means. I mean not even a little glimmer.

I’m not entirely sure what content is - words, pictures, videos, ideas? And I have no earthly clue how you put it together with strategy. Strategy to do what? Become F. Scott Fitzgerald? Take over the world? Find inner peace?

My inner Pollyanna, who is tougher than she looks, and can go ten rounds with my inner Mabel, the personification of my shadow self, pipes up and says, ‘The strategy to be happy.’

She laughs and does a cartwheel and says, ‘Be happy.’

I think: I’ll buy tickets for that.

I never told you about the epic drive to the south. It wasn’t really epic, except in my mind. I haven’t left home for a long time so I had to buy new Tupperware, specially, because apparently I can’t go on any trip longer than sixty miles without packing a full picnic in sealable plastic tubs. (The seventies just called. They want their hard-boiled eggs back.)

I kept having to stop in Glenshee, just to look at the mountains and the colours and the new trees growing. Then I stopped in Perthshire, which was forty-seven shades of green, to have a snack. (The picnic was already proving a triumph, and it wasn’t even seven in the morning yet.)

I mourned one of my favourite stretches of open, rolling, blonde hills which had been ravaged by wind turbines. The strange, giant-like structures all stood dolefully still, because there wasn’t a breath of wind. I thought: isn’t anyone protecting the beauty? Can’t they put them offshore or on brownfield sites? Why would you wreck the landscape to save the planet? (I’m afraid my Mabel gets so cross that she starts to suspect half the renewables industry is a cynical boondoggle. There is, truly, money in them there hills, and the people who are after it do not always have pure motives. Do let’s hope she is wrong.)

Then I walked in a bog in the Lake District and felt the reassuring squelch under my feet and looked at the springing heather and the blue hills, where the developers have not yet been, and drove along one of those winding single-track roads and thought of what it would be like to live in an eighteenth century stone house miles from the nearest shop.

I’d like to know Cumbria better, I thought. Every corner has secrets and beauty.

I am starting to wonder whether we humans might be wired for beauty. Homo sapiens has spent almost all of its life in the wild. Three hundred thousand years of the forest and the savannah and the plains and the hills. The ancestors would have seen the big skies and the African sunrises and the impossible scatter of stars in the Antipodes. And then, five minutes ago, everyone got herded into cities, which had a few splendid central bits and quite a lot of non-beautiful bits in the corners and round the edges, and the citizens were persuaded to live in small boxes where the skies and the stars could not be seen very well.

I’m not anti-modern living. I don’t have some Roussean romantic fantasy of life in the past. I love civilisation. I’m very grateful for electricity and contemporary conveniences. I adored the bustle of the city when I was a young woman. But I do sometimes think that we moderns are asking ourselves to go against the grain of our nature.

Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. All I do know is that driving through the Pennines in the dawn, without another car in sight, and with the shimmering greys and blues and pinks and apricots and greens meant that I had to keep stopping again, to stare at the beauty.

And, obviously, to have a snack.