A thing of beauty is a joy forever…
One day I read John Humphrys’ column in the Times calling wind turbines ‘ugly’, and I couldn’t understand why he thought wind turbines were damaging Welsh and, generally, British landscape. I sent an email to him. I said I was living in Wales and had been driving past a wind farm above the Dovey valley, near the village of Cemmaes, every other day.
I said I thought wind turbines were a thing of beauty: they ad an eerie feel to the mountains of rural mid-Wales, they look clean and aloof, they serve as a perfect counterpoint to antiquated, white blobs of sheep, pock-marking every Welsh hillside and, in a place where the Centre for Alternative Technologies (CAT) had found a home for itself, they are a proof that Wales and the Welsh, in their contribution to world culture, engineering and technology, far exceed the weight that might have been allocated to them by the size of their land and nation.
All this, obviously, is on top of the simple fact that we need to harness renewable sources of energy and stop relying on fossil fuel or look at nuclear energy as the best choice for the future. Wales, after all, is still suffering from the effects of the Chernobyl fall-out.
My mother once wrote in her diary: It is simply inconceivable that when you love something or someone with all your heart, and put all your passion and strength of feeling in that love, - it is simply inconceivable that your love could not produce an equal feeling in return…
I have long thought that it is somehow inconceivable that intelligent people throughout the world may have antagonistically different tastes and irreconcilingly different views. I have long thought that a naked art critic or a naked translator from Wales, or Japan, or Russia would have more to talk about with a naked art critic or a naked translator from Wales, or Japan, or Russia than with a naked plumber or a naked carpenter from Wales, or Japan, or Russia. I think I may have been wrong.
John Humphrys wrote back to me: ‘as they say: the beauty is in the eye of the beholder…’
© Alexander Anichkin, 2006
