Father’s Day…

The recent Invasive Non Native Specialists Association conference turned into a bit of a family day out. A picture of my dad opened the conference whilst Mr Podmore (Richards Dad from Japanese Knotweed Control) helped on their stand… and Conor’s dad manned the Invasive Weed company display.

It made me think that maybe the world isn’t such a bad place and that maybe there is some hope for the future of mankind…

I’m not having a breakdown don’t worry – but I read the papers (children groomed for sex/ plane crash pilot suffered from depression/ ISIS this ISIS that…)  and I find myself wondering what values people have any more? How can we possibly save the environment when we can’t even save each other?

. I get incredibly p***ed off when I see McDonalds wrappers thrown casually from car windows. The Snake Pass close to my house is littered with thousands of Big Mac wrappers and happy meal bags left by people who have stopped to admire the view …then left all their rubbish behind.

Who the hell do they think will pick this up?

and given that they have presumably stopped because they like the scenery… will they stop next time ….because the view is now ruined by McDonalds wrappers…?

I end up thinking – if the general populace can’t be bothered picking up their fast food wrappers how will we ever get them to be bothered about the bigger picture with environmental issues? I see family values as being one of the core issues at the heart these problems? My dad brought me up to be obsessed with taking my litter home – he hated smoking and he hated drinking* (*NB…. ok I may have let him down on this one item) ….

My dad (a teacher) had a belief that each element of your early life was a pointer in how you would turn out in later life…

If you smoked behind the bike sheds   – you would burn in hell

If you drank alcohol behind the bike shed – ditto

Fornicating behind the bike sheds – you would get venereal disease and ….then burn in hell

Tattoos – unemployable then …burn, burn, burn…

If you didn’t play sport – hell was waiting

He then got a little too focussed on minority groups…

Divorced people, single parent families, ginger people, fat people, thin people, very tall people, very short people….all downward bound…

Now please note –  I’M NOT saying he was in any way correct with his beliefs (….and some of them were down right offensive…)….but he did have some sort of point –

…and if I look back at the tattooed, drinking,  fornicating crowd  from school ….they haven’t been the top achievers – none of them are in parliament and one or two are I am sure being roasted by old Beelzebub as we speak.

So with all this in mind…. I have been thinking about just retiring to my cottage in the Peak District and building a huge wall around the outside – stocking up on tinned food and waiting for the apocalypse to arrive – sod the world, sod the environment I’m looking after number one…

…but after attending the INNSA conference and seeing family values are still alive  – and respect for the older members of our society is still something that others see is as important….im back on track.

A side benefit of the seminar ….which also was a great day for those companies wishing to see better standards and a better world for those companies involved with invasive species management.

Mike C

Ps I miss my dad