Bluebell cottage

 

This morning, I took the trail through the enchanted forest. The grass was long and the path overgrown, and soon the moisture was creeping up the legs of my jeans. The walk leads past what our family nicknamed the ‘haunted house’, and came back onto a paved drive at the back of ‘bluebell cottage’.

During the pandemic, this old broken croft was on the market, and there was cheerful speculation round our dinner table about buying bluebell cottage as an investment. But nobody had any spare cash to invest.

Well, somebody did, and while I wasn’t looking or walking that way, they have transformed it into two separate structures, their glazed upper floors looking south across the valley. They look idyllic, set in a haven of peace and tranquillity.

Except. If the big business boys get their way, the windows will look across the wooded landscape to the Hill of Fare windfarm, which will be 16 giant wind turbines, the biggest in Europe. And towering above bluebell cottage will be the monster pylon scheme proposed for carrying offshore-generated wind energy south for sale.

‘I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind,’ says Solomon in Ecclesiastes 1. I am reading Glen Scrivener’s Reading Between the Lines daily readings, and his remark is that the word for wind is the same as the word for Spirit in the Bible, and Solomon’s descriptions of the futility of chasing after worldly gain encourage us to chase after the Holy Spirit instead.

The world is full of surprises, not all of them good. Only God is good.