st_ouennais

The change of calendar year inevitably prompts thoughts of what is to come in the New Year. For gardeners and growers this often is the quietest time of the year. The ground is either too frozen or too wet to work and the days are short. There is little to plant except perhaps garlic and shallots. Apart from cleaning and tidying even the greenhouse has little going on. This is the time of year growers and gardeners peruse the catalogues deciding what seeds to order for planting next year. It is naturally the time for planning for us, regardless of the numerology of the calendar.

It used to be the case in England that New Year was the beginning of April- essentially the start of spring. A legacy of this is the UK tax year running from April the 5^th – the historical start of the New Year. In many ways that seems a more natural way to view the calendar, but we are stuck with the somewhat arbitrary January 1^st.

Aside from the crop planning and seed selection, a few other thoughts of the coming 12 months occur to me. We will see an upsurge of activity in the environmental and ecological campaigning in the Island. It probably seems counter-intuitive. You might expect as the recession takes hold that the economy would hold our attention. However as things get progressively harder, people do also start to look more closely at what is really important.  it will become apparent that the sustainability based concerns and solutions put forward by the 'greens' will be the only viable options.

January 27^th will see the inaugural meeting of the Jersey Climate Action Network. There has been one in Guernsey for a while (see http://www.g-can.net). Later in year the Jersey Organic Association celebrates its 21^st birthday. Surely that won’t go unmarked. The end of February will be the first anniversary of the discovery of significant evidence, corroborating victims’ and survivors’ descriptions, of abuse of Haut de le Garenne. I am aware of a couple of putative events to mark that anniversary. Later in the year we should see more trials begin.

I would not be at all surprised to see a local blogger’s conference sometime in the year. It has been worrying to hear rumours of threats and intimidation of bloggers locally. Certainly we have seen a surprisingly high proportion give up in the last couple of months. Those committed to the principle of citizens media may have to band together for mutual protection.

I fully expect 2009 will see the launch of at least one, and quite possibly two new formal political parties. That is the inexorable outcome of having ministerial government.

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