Angela 's Letter

To my granddaughter Jenny ,

Gorgeous Jenny, you are so tiny and funny and wise, I can hardly bear to think of the wretched world that this greedy generation is going to leave you.
I am so very glad that you live in Norway even though it means I see you so seldom. But Norway is still a country where the gap between the richest and poorest is a very small one, where citizens are proud to pay their taxes for the good of everyone, where the health service really is still a service and where children walk home from school together safely without fear.
And I feel so sad that this country that I love seems so far away from that ideal. I wish that we would recognise the dangers of letting the rich get ever richer at the expense of the poor; the dangers of allowing schools to be run down and underfunded so that our children feel undervalued and let down, when they are our most precious resource for a healthy future; the dangers of monoculture farming and intensive animal rearing that ruins our soil and causes untold cruelty.
I want to show you, when you come here, that our tiny garden is organised in a different way, and that our wild orchids are multiplying year on year, foxes and hedgehogs visit and play there and you can pick and eat the strawberries because they are organic and clean.
And I wish that this microcosm might spread and grow throughout the country so that people might have a connection with the physical world they inhabit and feel that they could have a proper say in how it is run for the good of all. In that way we might be able to leave you a future worth living in.
With all my love xxx