Let's go fly a kite

No really, that's what we did, we flew a kite, and it's all because of Blue Planet II. It is half term, and this is a recent purchase of the DVD to make up for missing it when we didn't have a TV aerial because the builders had thrown it in the skip along with the chimney. Anyway, half term and so the house is crawling with children, so many in fact that we were not all able to sit on one sofa, and so we moved the other one around so it faced the television. Underneath it was a kite....

What do you mean you don't store kites under your sofa? I thought everyone did? We established it was not impossibly tangled up, and after a passing hail shower headed out to a breezy and gusty Wanstead Flats. It was such fun. Such a simple pleasure, but absolutely wonderful. There was no stopping my youngest, who took the first turn, and hared off at a rate of knots not realising that one does not have to move to keep a kite aloft. She soon remembered how to do it though, and for the next hour we had a brilliant time. I even saw a few birds, gulls mainly, sailing serenely above our wheeling and banking kite.

Blue Planet II is fantastic by the way, we are watching an episode a night and are hooked. It seems that as every year passes the technology goes up a gear - compare this to some of the older BBC Nature series from when I was a kid. They were groundbreaking back then, but now look amateurish. Aside from the brilliance of what these teams are now able to do, the seas are fascinating - truly the last great unknown, and yet we continue to ruin them. It seems that this series has finally woken people up to the issue of plastics, I hear people at work and on the commute talking about it, about wanting to make a difference. It is probably too late of course, it is insidious. I look at our weekly shopping delivery and everything is encased in plastic, the price of convenience - options to not buy everything wrapped are slim. We recycle to the max of course, a family of five generates less than 30L of landfill a week, the rest is all washed, sorted and collected, but this likely makes almost no difference in the grand scheme of things when you think about the vast swathes of humanity who either cannot or don't care. Brexit is a mild shade of idiocy when you think about it.