Sea Views

Councillor Mrs Arbuthnot’s lanyard perched prominently on her ample frontage like the mayoral chain to which she clearly aspired. Brandishing the weapon of her clipboard, her gloved hand thrust a disinfected pen into mine to sign her petition.

“You will agree of course that they mustn’t put a wind farm here,” she said. “You know what a premium we have all paid for the sea view from our properties.”

Uncertain, I offered to exchange the now-contaminated pen for her explanatory flyer with its scaled drawing of the proposal for the offending articles, agreeing to think the matter over.

Already focussed on her next respondent, she shouted back to me as she took a shortcut to my neighbour’s door to the detriment of any plants unfortunate enough to lie in her path. “Your choice, but remember those developers won’t be wasting any time, so neither should we.”

I could still hear her strident tones when I rejoined the children in the back garden, leaflet in hand.

“Oh, cool, they’re like big seagulls,” said Maisie, as she careered round the garden with arms outstretched in mock flight.

“I believe they do sometimes design them in the shape of birds,” I said.

“No, they look more like flowerheads when they spin around.” Jake plucked one of the spiky-petalled echinacea flowers from the flowerbed and twirled it in the breeze.

“It would be like a garden in the sea,” he mused, “perhaps painted in bright colours.”

I nodded, unconvinced.

That evening, out on the clifftop path, I sat on a bench opposite a bank of old cow parsley plants, tall and straight, the remnants of their flowers reaching for the sky from their point of attachment. As I looked through them to the sea beyond, I imagined their umbelliferous shape mirrored by synthetic equivalents standing guard out there. Would it be so bad? Not, I supposed, if they were an improvement on the greenhouse gases and carbon emissions that my generation had allowed to form.

Signing that petition vs. cleaner air for my children and theirs? – Decision made, Mrs Arbuthnot!