Older, but no wiser

I think it was Richard Bach who came up with that phrase in one of his books. You can't explain Life. Life Is.

I was lazy today - I came into work by train. Out of habit I dug out a book and started reading, but it was a beautiful clear sunny morning so after a few minutes I gave in to the beckoning sunshine and just sat and watched the world go by outside the window.

The view is amazingly green (in a figurative sense; actually green-yellow-gold-orange-red at this time of year). Life is everywhere. The unruly tangled masses covering every square centimetre of the trackside verges; a ruined hut engulfed in creepers with trees growing where once there was a roof; the retaining walls with greenery sprouting from every crack; even huge buddleia trees growing out of apparently bare brickwork.

Life, even supposedly simple plant life, has astonishing power. If humankind were to desert London, I wonder how long it would take for the greenery to creep gently millimetre by millimetre until it had quietly strangled the dominance of concrete and steel? So much for mankind's apparent dominance of nature.

Life Is.