Now-now, low as I stooped, thought I,
Walter de la Mare ‘The Snowdrop’
I will see what this snowdrop is:
So shall I put much argument by,
And solve a lifetime’s mysteries.
In our modern world it is hard to escape from the news and social media. The news constantly demands new stories and attention as the news cycle has become increasingly short with the Internet and the massive growth and influence of social media outlets. The big problem is that this 24 hour worldwide cycle of news has an appetite and focus on focus on bad news. The mainstream media and social media make their money by tapping into this negativity bias that exists within us. The more extreme an event or a behaviour is, the more attention and views an item attracts.
The people behind both the main stream and social media, the Rupert Murdoch’s, Mark Zuckerberg’s, Jack Dorsey’s et al, all know this and continue to feed it. Neurologists and psychologists know that our appetite for news and push notifications manifests all the symptoms of addiction. The more clicks that an item attracts the greater the pull for the advertising dollars to follow.
Politicians become successful today by offering spectacle and not substance, witness the most recent and prime examples of Donald Trump in America and Boris Johnson here in the UK. It is a bit like a Punch and Judy show on a beach where the puppets appear on stage whilst everybody knows there is somebody hidden from view making the puppets work and behave the way they do. Attention is drawn to the puppets and what they are doing whilst few tend to focus on the real story; the antics draw in the punters.
In the winter it seems even harder to switch off from this constant stream and the past 12 months of our lives and the news have been dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The first symptoms identified in Patient Zero were on 1st December 2010 and the first related death in Wuhan occurred just over one year ago on 9th January when a 61 year old man died. It seems a lot longer.
The longer nights and cold weather combined with corona in winter have made it much harder to escape outside for any prolonged periods. It also means that any life in the garden is limited and scarce with the lack of sunlight and low temperatures. Plants have either died in the case of annuals, or are waiting for the soil to warm as the days slowly become longer and they begin to start showing themselves to the world above ground like bulbs, seeds and perennials.
Some of the bulbs which would normally only start showing in the spring have been trying to grow in haphazard spurts for a few weeks, confused it would seem by the irregular weather patterns which are increasingly becoming the norm. The winter has seen very few of the normal bird migrants around these parts and whilst it might be tempting to blame Brexit our climate is most probably a key driving factor.
As the snow here disappeared a few days ago, small clumps of the typical harbinger of spring, the snowdrop, Galanthus (Greek for milk flower) are increasingly starting to peep up to reveal their presence. Already it seems as though their numbers will have increased from last year. The toll of the pandemic looks certain to bring vastly increased mental ill health issues to our attention and into our lives, which should serve to highlight the value of the natural world as absolutely essential to our health and wellbeing.
So whilst the delicate white flowers of the snowdrop might seem small and insignificant to many who wander past them, to my mind they offer hope and the possibility of better things to follow which may seem hard to believe if you keep watching the news and plugged into social media. Best plan for the upcoming weeks and months would seem to be, to switch off the bloody news or ration it to as little as possible and search for quality and substance. Let attention be drawn to the natural world outside, surely there can be few things that are not more attractive than many of the figures that fill our screens and waste our attention. A snowdrop has got to provide more pleasure than LED screens with endless coloured graphics of a spiked virus, numerous arms being injected or a toxic orange being in a big white house.
