It is funny to think back to my childhood and remember so many of the women on the street I grew up on, who would sigh and say, “what is the world coming to?” Most of them back in the seventies were quite elderly and are no longer with us, yet I must admit, I would love to know what they would say if they were alive today.

I grew up in the 1970’s, I was one of four children, all boys being raised alone by my mother, we were not rich, if anything our life was a daily struggle, but we also had no idea that we were poor, daft as that may sound, just about everyone we knew was in the same the boat, so we did not notice those few who had far more than all of us. Maybe its nostalgia, but in my mind, even though life was difficult, it also felt much easier and simpler than that of life today. When you have very little you become adept at improvisation, and to be honest my brothers and myself were very proficient, we had very little money, so if something wore out or broke, or we wanted something and could not buy it, we simply repaired, recycled or built whatever was needed at the time.

It is easy to dismiss those times, especially when you look at the world we live in today, and as I look around at the lives lived by the children of my friends and other children I encounter, I seriously wonder if having so much tech available within the ten foot confines of a child’s room is such a good thing. I still walk in the woodland I grew up in on a regular basis, and I always take my own children with me, compared to many of the surrounding woodlands mine is quite small, although it has expanded a great deal since I was a wild seven year old running around it, as much of the open land around it, today is filled with new trees. If it had been this size when I was a boy it would have been an even bigger paradise than I thought it was back then, and yet as I walk through it showing my children where I played, and telling them the stories of the things I got up to, the one thing that strikes me more than anything else is the lack of children’s laughing voices, as it now sits in total silence devoid of the groups of young happy frolicking friends. My tiny little woodland is being squeezed from every side as the buildings surrounding it grow ever closer, and many of the wide open fields I ran in as a child are gone or fenced off by their new private owners.

It is so sad that the children are at home sat in front of their TV’s, games consoles and computers, living out their lives in the unreal world of cyber space, when here not more than a minutes walk away, is a place so wonderful that it has inspired me for most of my life, and I may add inspired the birth of my own tales of adventure on the printed page, because it is this very special place that is there in my mind with my characters as I write the tales of Heirs to the Kingdom. The crunch of the beech husks, the scent of wild bluebell and honeysuckle, the swish of the bracken are echoes in my mind from the past as I add the words to the pages of my story.

Computer graphics have come a long way, and there is no doubt that the technology is moving so fast that they are almost as real as film, but it is no substitute for the real thing. Sat in front of an LCD screen you will never understand the feel of the fern as you wade waist high through it, you will never quite understand that moment when you move from under the thick heavy cool canopy into the warm brightness of dappled shade, or feel the damp heat of the humidity as you climb into the thick heavy canopy of a fully mature Oak, feeling the roughness of the bark on your hands compared to the cool smoothness of the Beech.

Even today at the age of 47, I cannot be away from it for too long, as the need for the scents and sounds of the deep woodland draw me back with regularity. As I age and learn more I can see and understand more of what our ancestors felt living their lives connected to the world and the land that surrounded them. I feel the mystical sense that surrounds nature and has inspired some of the greatest writers of the past to put pen to paper and preserve their view of the world, as I too have felt motivated to do, and now life has appeared to have come full circle, and I am the one sat out under the trees wondering what is the world coming to?

Life is so different that I find it hard to explain to the younger generation of today. How can I tell my own children that although
everything they see and are taught is now based on the pursuit of money and personal possessions, and that there was actually a time when life was not as complex and things were simpler? They like the rest will be influenced by their peers to buy into the advertising and feel of lesser worth than their friends if they do not posses the same high tech items, and with each passing moment a little of the wilds of this country disappears, as the towns and cities expand to be filled with yet more stores and better housing, and I fear that before their lives are ended, all that I love will be gone forever without them feeling the joys I felt. For now all I can do is try to show them and hope that in some way I can inspire them to understand and feel the same love and affection in the understanding of nature, and then cross my fingers that it will live on their hearts as it has mine, and hopefully my woodland will still be around for them to share with their children.

I have no idea what the world is coming to, but I do think that something has gone horribly wrong, I am not alone in this thinking as there are many who feel we have become blind and misplaced our priorities, and yet we never seem to learn. I fear for the future, because if we have come this far in thirty years and appeared to have lost our way, where the hell will we be in another thirty years?

A few years ago the environment was high on the priorities of government lists, and yet today the whole world is in crisis, lost in the panic of losing money in the failing global economy, and it looks like its going to occupy everyone for some time to come, and so the green world again is secondary to the religion of making back lost money. I wonder if we will ever learn and understand that in order to continue to thrive as a race, we need to address the balance of man against the natural world. I am not sure that money will bring a better world, lets face it, look at the world as it is today filled with killing and suffering. I honestly believe that with the climate shifting and the weather as unstable as it is, we should start to get our priorities straight, and we must educate our children to avoid the mistakes we as adults are now making. Its not money that will determine our survival, its fresh water and enough space for the plant life to balance the numbers of humans on the planet.

We have grown since we first step onto the world as a race living within the land and respecting the land, but over the past one hundred years we have done more damage to our environment than in the all of the two thousand years prior to it and the planet on which we live is feeling the strain. The children of our children will face a life so different from the one we have today, and if we do not begin to wake up and face the responsibility to those children, then sadly the things we took for granted as children ourselves, will not remain for them to enjoy. Money is no substitute for the living breathing world around us, and one can only wonder if man will ever learn that if he destroys any more, all that will be left for him to eat will be his bank statement.