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बाबा रामदेव, पतंजलि और भ्रामक विज्ञापन महिमा ए  भ्रामक विज्ञापन खबर चल रही हो तो बाबा रामदेव का विज्ञापन , विज्ञापन हो तो उनका विज्ञापन , किसी कार्यक्रम को प्रायोजित करना हो तो बाबा जी … अचानक अभी एक online news की एक खबर पर ध्यान गया कि भारतीय विज्ञापन मानक परिषद ने प्राप्त शिकायतों की […]

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Sometimes we’re lucky enough to fleetingly meet a someone who changes us, bursts heart open, adds three feet to your height and shows you where your forgotten wings are buried. And it’s mutual. The following (and the rest of the song which I need to illustrate) are for you Brian Tappin ~ roaring lion, gentle angel, boy I miss you right now, dude! xx

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to fleetingly meet a someone who changes us, bursts heart open, adds three feet to your height and shows you where your forgotten wings are buried. And it’s mutual. The following (and the rest of the song which I need to illustrate) are for you Brian Tappin ~ roaring lion, gentle angel, boy I miss you right now, dude! xx

(written between the 18th and 19th of February, 2015 in one straight sitting (a story written when time crosses midnight, is likely to have a few more strands and maybe bad words, than others)

Title: Sailor’s First Story (that you’ve heard, that is)

There are stories for the telling
and there are those which ain’t
– that’s what I’ve been told,
but I still can’t see no difference.

So I’ll throw a whole
flock of them at you
and you can decide
which is which.

I blows the stories out
as they come
– just as they come,
so sometimes there’s two middles,
or no end,
or even just three beginnings.

And if you want to know more about me
– well that’s definitely the one story
I know’s not worth telling.

All I give is my name
and that’s Sailor.

How dee doo?
Good I hope
and if not so,
spin three times,
blink at the sky
hard and long,
then think on this:

~~~~~

They called her Butterfly,
sometimes Terfly for short.
Not because of some airy, light beauty,
no, more because she’d never stop,
never alight in one damn place longer than a flea bite
(I’m telling of them fleas that bite for nanoseconds,
not thems others that grip on long and not be shaken
even on the brutalest fairground Waltzers).

And this goes for lovers too
– soon as some poor fret
had been dazzled by her shimmery
blizzards of soft words,
she’d be off with their hearts
and on to the next habitation
and over and over again.
Three a month. More.

Some say she’d never been held,
time-stopping slow and gentle,
s’why she’d never stay, get cosy
and ease into her self and surrounds.

Others say her old man’s bark,
– approx. three per minute – startled her so bad,
she couldn’t stop still for longer than
a third of a minute

(you see – now I know that last bit’s
dreadful storytelling for at least three reasons,
but it came out that way,
puffed out crooked.
And now it’s out there,
there it stays.
them’s the rules).

Terfly had more skills and talents than
an army of circuses and every single one in them,
including the animals.

It’s easier to tell
what she couldn’t do.
And that’s cook, sew and clean.

But the others
she’d do so well,
there was always and every
opportunities flowing
wherever she landed.
So that suited
her flit-flight nature.

Now that’s a long beginning.
And we ain’t yet got no middle
and certainly no inkling of an ending.

I’m never sure what’s its shape
when it’s coming out.
This one feels like a two middler,
so hold your horses
(and don’t forgets to give thems a sugar,
or apple, and tell thems they the best.
And anyone else hanging round
as long as them’s deserving.
Respect’s earnt, you know that, right?
There’s no respecting no one who ain’t worthy of that respect, thems like a barking-three-times-per-minute Pa, or a cold-heart Ma with no soft in her arms for snuggling and comfort).

~~~~~

Here’s the two middles.
Them’s short.

1) Terfly falls in love for the first time
with SkyLock, a cloud-tenter
(thems that make the hovering, giant bauble things for circuses – look just like bubbles, but there’s windows and seats so folks can get a good look from all angles – and you have to be trained for hundreds of years, so easy it is to get it wrong and have families flying they won’t have you back, that particular habitation).

2) SkyLock’s heard her reputation
and builds a special cloud-tent
– sets out backwards to make one
that goes against all the training
– one that will take them away, away,
keeps her with him,
no flit-flighting this one no more.

~~~~

Now here’s the thing.
He’s not liking that there’s no cooking, cleaning, sewing
– he’d made this cloud-tent fixed up to the nines with all the latest a chief chef could desire
but all she does, Terfly, is fret
– fret so loudly, wolves can hear her
twenty one summers away.

SkyLock regrets keeping her
– useless he thinks
and barks for the third time that minute.

Now. He knows well
there’s no ties for her
– no family wanting and wishing and missing her soft heart,
or sweet song, or tip-tap dancing so mesmerising
you can’t do for anything after, just gaze long-lost into nothing.

So he shoves her out
cruel as war,
shoves her out, barking every bad a sailor’s ever heard
and that’s the baddest bad ever of all. And then three times more.

Okay, but here’s the thing
(and I think this might be something of an ending,
or is it another beginning?
Who know, who cares,
I’m puffing hard and fast now,
couldn’t stop if you corked my straw).

Sudden, Terfly discovers
she’s got a skill she never knew:
she can fly! Well, more like a kind of flitty-swooshing
(have you watched a feather fall lately?
If not, do. it gives you the answer to everything.
Everything.
Straight up.
And down).

So she’s flitty-swooshing,
soft and grinning, singing free
and happy-to-bursting.

She scoffs love.
Maybe that’s why Pa barked
and Ma was ice-cold
– maybe that’s what love does.

But no sooner this sad thought’s out there,
almost like it’s visible or something,
there’s this creature – a humale kinda,
but his legs joined like a merman
and fins as well as arms, but ohhhh, so handsome,
just thinking of him I’m getting half-lid dream-eyes.

He catches her
(she ain’t quite mastered all them sky-diving tricks yet).
And holds her long…
And holds her soft…
And holds her gentle…

And slow-by-slow,
her cheek finds his upper arm
– it feels good enough she cries,
fist time ever. And he brushes and strokes
her hairs and head and that little tiny bit
where somes of us can grow bristle-hairs.

And she’s thinking:
no, this is love.
This is DEFINITELY love.
This is something all shades of new,
new as flying,
new as tomorrow’s sunrise,
new as the butterflies
beneath my tum-button
and she stays absolutely mushy-soft-still
in that place
for longer than all the time
she’s been on this god-forsaken land.

That’s the first.

Will you stay for more?
They come plenty.
Long as there’s ears and eyes.

I also like, every now and then,
the odd pat and smile,
or treat, you know
– that little something that says
I’m here and that’s
not too much hell of a thing…

~~~~~

PS: Shhhh. This next bit’s not for sharing:

(“Thanks Sailor!”

That’s me, typing up the words.

I love this little feller that came into my life as a surprise gift from the cafe owner where I sit painting pigeons and other all-kinds-of-odd most days. I think he’s seen me drooling over it every time I get a new napkin to wipe brushes. There’s something just so sweet, funny and compelling about him – can’t put my finger on it, but I’m so glad he’s landed in my life.

I’m to bed now. I pat Sailor, pass him a sugar. Tell him he’s lovely.
He grins. I nod and grins back :-).

PSS: I’ve found out Sailor likely came from the HMS Warwick Castle, biggest navy ship in both wars – went down in 1944, with Lucky Lady, a small ship, sailing out to help any survivors.

~~~~~~~~

By Charles Sheppard

Coral reefs are the most diverse ecosystem in the sea. In some ways they are very robust marine ecosystems, but in other ways, perhaps because of their huge numbers of species, they are very delicate and susceptible to being damaged or killed. On the one hand, healthy reefs are glorious riots of life, and marine scientists have spent several decades unravelling the complicated ways in which they work. On the other hand, at least one third of the world’s reefs have already died — gone for ever in terms of human lifetimes at least — even when the cause of their demise is lifted.

How coral reefs lived and grew right up to the sea surface remained a mystery for years for several reasons. First, where were all their plants? It was known that plants are the world’s food base, yet there were hardly any visible plants, let alone waving fields of them such as the naturalists knew about from their own (mostly cold) Northern shores. The answer is that the main plant base comes from the symbiotic algae living in the cells of reef building corals. This helped answer the second mystery: how could such vibrant reefs live in the nutrient-poor oceans of the tropics? Nutrients, it was known, were needed for plants to grow. But the waters that bathe oceanic reefs in particular were the poorest on Earth in terms of nutrients. The answer was clear once the symbiosis was discovered; there is a very tight cycling of nutrients between the symbiotic components of the coral-algal symbiosis and little ‘leakage’ from the reef into the sea.

There was a third, long running mystery also, namely, how do reefs form? In particular, why do they invariably grow to the surface of the sea from a wide range of depths and, why do they all have rather similar shapes? This was explained in several ways. Firstly it became clear that the Earth’s crust moves, both across oceanic distances over huge time periods, and they move vertically by hundreds of metres. Corals need light (because of their symbiotic algae) so they only live at the contemporary sea level, and the sea level changed hugely over the millennia that corals have lived and made their limestone skeletons. Darwin was the first to deduce this, in particular the importance of growth on subsiding substrates such as volcanoes.

The numerous shapes and kinds of corals, soft corals, and sponges (and many other forms) live together in what has been called a ‘super-symbiosis’ or a ‘super-organism’, terms which, while strictly not true, do give a sense of the intimate linkages that occur between so many of the component groups of species. This may provide one reason why they are, in so many ways, very susceptible to human impacts today. Raised nutrients (e.g. from sewage and shoreline construction) are hugely damaging. Burial of reefs for building on are also fatal to the reefs of course, and, sadly land made by landfill on a reef foundation (something easy to do because reefs are shallow) has a higher economic price when sold for building than the reef did in the first place. Shallow sea and reefs, we might say, become more valuable when they are no longer sea but are converted to expensive, sea-side building land! Eco-nomics and eco-logy have the same root word and should work hand-in-hand, but clearly they don’t, to the detriment of these complex living systems.

Reefs are valuable – but to whom? Reef and beach based tourism forms over half the foreign exchange earnings for many countries. Without reefs to attract tourists, many states would become impoverished; many already are. More importantly (again to whom?) they provide food for huge numbers of coastal dwellers throughout the poorest parts of the world. Not only do fish form the basis for human existence, but so do molluscs, sea cucumbers, octopus… the list is endless. Too many people extracting food from a reef readily collapses the elaborate ecosystem, with the result that there is nothing left for the next year, or the next generation.

Various aspects of climate change are adding to the mix of stresses for reefs. As CO₂ builds up, it warms the oceans, and this has killed off countless areas of reef already or at least added an additional stress. When that gas dissolves in the ocean, the water becomes more acidic, again causing damaging effects, in this case reducing the ability to lay down their limestone skeletons. These are not predicted effects – something for the future. We measure it and know that we are already well along that path.

Coral reefs are a canary in the environmental coal mine, showing us, before any other system can perhaps, what we are doing to the earth today. We know enough of their science now to understand this and avert the problems. What we don’t have is the will to do so. It is no longer a problem of science but of sociology and politics.

Charles Sheppard is Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. His research focuses mainly on community ecology, particularly on ecosystem responses to climate change. He works for a number of UN, Governmental, and aid agencies to advise on topical marine and costal developmental issues. He is the author or editor of 10 books, including The Biology of Coral Reefs (2009) and Coral Reefs: A Very Short Introduction (2014).

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Image credit: Iolanda reef in Ras Muhammad nature park (Sinai, Egypt), By Mikhail Rogov, CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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