One thing leads to another

I know that I have written about this before but to me it is of never ending interest.

 

What started it all? Every effect has a cause. But what? And why? That we can never know – which is why I’m attracted to the Ancient Greek idea of the Fates. Those mysterious "forces" which the Greeks portrayed as three women. Each of the three Fates had a different task, revealed by her name: Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured its allotted length, and Atropos cut the thread with her shears. 

 

Just to go back a few steps – I studied a Bachelor of Commerce degree at university. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had been working in the bush as a surveyor’s assistant when a bloke I met suggested that I could better myself by going to university (he must have seen my potential!). So I did.

 

Science and mathematics were not my strong points so I thought Commerce would give me some scope. My employment history at the beginning was more in the managerial area.

 

I met my first wife, Frances Hunt (born in England), an attractive brunette, on a blind date and we hit it off straight away and were married within 3 or 4 months (not sure exactly, now after nearly 50 years). Seven years later I was working at the (then) Rhodesia Herald newspaper, as an Assistant Manager when our African maid phoned to say that, "something is wrong with the Madam. Please come quickly."

 

That I did, and found her unconscious on the bathroom floor – she had started the process that ended in her death four days later. Leaving me a widower with a 4 year old son.

 

Then about a year later, after I had quit the newspaper and started auditing with a well-known accounting firm, I was helping to audit a large department store in (then) Salisbury in (then) Rhodesia when I saw another, attractive but very small brunette. Anyway after nearly two years of persistence on my part Maria Augusta  (Magucha) Bandeira de Lima agreed to marry me. Now Magucha had some quite grave health issues – glomerulonephritis – a serious kidney disease. She was advised that pregnancy was not a good idea because of the strain it would place on her kidneys and the fetus. She persisted and in the hospital just before she was to give birth I was given a form to sign – given the state of her health, in a life or death situation, did I want the mother to survive or the new baby!! That was the hardest decision I’ve ever made.

 

Very fortunately both survived!

 

Then, after a series of both political and personal events we decided to emigrate to Australia.

 

But then going even further back. My parents left South Africa for Rhodesia, in 1950, because they did not like the way the Apartheid regime introduced by the Nationalist government in 1948, was being implemented. 

 

Also Magucha’s parents were more or less driven out of the then Portuguese colony of Angola because of the 1975 revolution in Portugal and the granting of independence to the colonies. So, after a number of incidents, they ended up in Rhodesia in 1976. 

 

There is a confluence of events developing here. 

 

Even further back in time my maternal grandfather Henry Matson, born in New Zealand, as a young man ended up in Demerara, previously a Dutch colony in what is now Guiana. There he learned about the cultivation of sugar cane and the extraction of sugar. Then through a series of events he ended up in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) in South Africa on a sugar plantation owned by the Acutt family. There he met and married Grace Acutt. My mother, Marjorie Matson was the second of three children.

 

My paternal grandfather (Dugald Campbell Watt) was a Scottish medical doctor who emigrated to South Africa to join his brothers. He became a very well known doctor in Natal. He met and married a girl 19 years younger than he was (he was 38 and she was 19) – Johanna (Annie) Anderson. My father was the younger of two boys born to them.

 

Then naturally, of course, my father, a journalist, met my mother, also a journalist and they married. This is where the "plot thickens". My mother was very ill after the birth of my older brother and very nearly died of septicemia – almost a death sentence in 1936. Dr Campbell Watt’s intervention saved her life. Otherwise I wouldn't be here writing this!!  

 

Then in the natural course of life, Magucha died nearly five years ago from complication brought about by the combination of the significant side effects of the many immunosuppressant drugs she had to take after her kidney transplant. These were too much for her little body to bear.  

 

I know that similar stories abound – everyone has their story. 

 

The Fates played their part (in my case) to perfection. Apparently. 

 

So you see one thing led to another – certainly completely out of my control.

 

Be careful. Be very careful.

Here are a couple of quotes from a book by James Lovelock “Homage to Gaia” (Gaia, for those unfamiliar with the term, in this instance, is not the Greek goddess of the Earth, but refers to the now accepted concept that life on Earth is a self regulating community of organisms interacting with each other and their surroundings. By doing so the Earth controls its surface and atmosphere to keep the environment always benign for life). 

 

However, I thought these quotes quite interesting:-

 

Ø  “If, in caring for people, we fail to care for other forms of life on Earth then our civilization and we will suffer. I wonder if in the 21^St Century, when the grim effects of global warming become apparent, we will regret the humanist bias that led us to continue to burn fossil fuel and plunder the natural world for food.

Ø  I soon found out that salinity greater than five percent damaged almost all cells, whether from animals or plants…… This knowledge stayed with me and when later the idea of Gaia, a self regulating Earth, first came to my mind I began to wonder how the salinity of the sea had always kept below five percent. It has done so for over 3 billion years, otherwise marine life would not have survived. We still do not know what regulates salinity……I still do not know how ocean salinity stays below five percent; it is one of the puzzles posed by the notion of Gaia.”

 

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We dig up huge quantities of minerals leaving massive holes in the earth; we rip up millions of hectares of trees, cleared to plant crops; we use millions of tonnes of chemical fertilizers to try and replenish the soils degraded by over cultivation; we diminish the natural flows of rivers with unfettered irrigation; we poison the rivers and the oceans with chemicals which are the runoff from the degraded soils; we discard millions of tonnes of plastic, which end up in the sea; we overfish certain species of fish causing havoc with the food chain. 

 

We must all recognise that what we do individually or collectively, has consequences. And these are totally out of our control - we might not like them when we see what eventuates.  

 

But that is ok. There is money to be made, you see. And money is paramount. Cash is king.

 

Remember that we humans, all 7.4 billion of us, are like a thin layer of dust on the surface of the Earth. If every human being suddenly disappeared the Earth would quickly recover from our depredations and return to it beneficent state and a natural peace would be restored to that beautiful “blue” planet so evocatively seen from the surface of the moon.