Forage

The Minx is in the office, today, so at lunchtime we walked 'round to Asda together, going up Natland Mill Beck Lane. There was an abundance of blackberries to be had and we stopped and picked a few. It made me feel oddly shifty, like we were taking something that didn't belong to us. It's a weird sense that everything must belong to someone.

It reminded me of the book that I'm reading at the moment, which I am enjoying more and more. It's set in Yorkshire around the time of the industrial revolution. It details in passing the grinding poverty in which many people lived, then, scratching their way through the year and particularly the winter. Soon, many of those people would move to a new kind of poverty, working in the mills for a pittance.

I can understand how, historically, without democracy and strong centralised government, the landowners had the power but it seems to me the biggest failure of last 150 years is that the land and wealth, often obtained by force, has not been redistributed. 

I'm not a communist and, in fact, I don't think that's even a socialist argument. If you were designing a society from first principles, you wouldn't put the bulk of the land in the hands of a minority, would you? In fact, probably without even thinking about it, you'd make a pretty even distribution of assets and also opportunities. But just because we don't have that historically or now doesn't provide any argument at all as to why we shouldn't work towards it.

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-10.4 kgs
Reading: 'The Gallows Pole' by Benjamin Myers