ANNOUNCEMENT - WITH A CLUSTER OF CLIMERICKS : 3 - As Of Old a Prophetic Voice

Within the next couple of weeks, we will be offering CLIMERICK CARDS for sale. These cards are intended to provoke Climate concern discussions, provide an impactful vehicle for conveying messages to MPs, Senators and others in power: and to alert your friends and acquaintances of your interest in, or passion for, this critical issue.  

Ahead of the launch, we will be publishing three CLUSTERS of three CLIMERICKS to prepare the way for the opening of our ETSY shop

Here’s the third of the first cluster

Image credit: Amazingly Wonderful free 

AI  image on Pixabay

 As of old, a Prophetic Voice

goes unheeded by many, through choice;

now with prophets arrested

 

our leaders attested

their shocking pro-fossil-fuel ploys.

This CLIMERICK looks back to Mid-October 2023 when Greta Thunberg was arrested for joining a Climate change protest in London.

 

ANNOUNCEMENT with a CLUSTER OF CLIMERICKS: 2 How Can Someone Think on Their Feet?

 Within the couple of weeks, we will be offering CLIMERICK CARDS for sale. These cards are intended to provoke Climate concern discussions, provide an impactful vehicle for conveying messages to MPs, Senators and others in power: and to alert your friends and acquaintances of your interest in, or passion for, this critical issue.  

Ahead of the launch, we will be publishing three CLUSTERS of three CLIMERICKS to prepare the way for the opening of our ETSY shop

Here’s the second of the first cluster

                                            Hot cobbles: Adapted Pixabay free image

How can someone think on their feet,

when pavements store hideous heat

of some fifty* degrees:

they must long for a freeze.

but it seems torrid heats will repeat.

(During 2025, pavement temperatures of 130ºF *(54ºC) have been experienced in India and in the USA)

Island Return (Lindisfarne)

WE are back on the beautiful Island of Lindisfarne in Northumbia, UK. Here, at times when the island is cut off from the mainland is a deep peacefulness which could very reasonably be described as ‘balm for the soul’. We have been coming to Lindisfarne since 2013 when we visited in November and gained personal experience of why Lindisfarne is also known as The Isle of Winds! But that did not deter us. This  ‘thin space’, inhabited by saints and evincing a beauty which can be breathtaking, has called us back again, and again, and we are always delighted to make it safely across the causeway and be welcomed by the deep-throated song of the seals.  This poem emerged within a day of arriving.

Seals on the northern tip of a sandbank

 at low tide on a previous visit to the island.

 

ISLAND RETURN

With an hour of safe-crossing still to go,

we coast across the causeway

in our newly acquired, zero emissions car.

 

We are heading for our oft-visited

Lindisfarne retreat.

 

To our delight, the seals

are once again waiting

to slither off the sandbags

as the wavelets, inexorably wash over them.

 

Is it too fanciful

to imagine,

that the last heads

to bob above the ripples,

might be deniers

of the inevitability

of rising water?

 

September 2025 

ANNOUNCEMENT - WITH A CLUSTER OF CLIMERICKS : 1 - If You Take a Regular Shower

 Within the next couple of weeks, we will be offering CLIMERICK CARDS for sale. These cards are intended to provoke Climate concern discussions, provide an impactful vehicle for conveying messages to MPs, Senators and others in power: and to alert your friends and acquaintances of your interest in, or passion for, this critical issue.  

Ahead of the launch, we will be publishing three CLUSTERS of three CLIMERICKS to prepare the way for the opening of our ETSY shop

Here’s the first of the first cluster

Image credit Public Domain on Pixabay

If you take a regular shower,

please don’t take one sixth of an hour:

turn it off while you soap,

keep it short to build hope:

you’ll be saving both water and power

CLIMERICK (of HOPE): We All Need To Take A NewView,

New Scientist of 5th September 2025 carried three articles which I interpreted as pointing to the inevitable demise of the fossil fuel industries (Hurrah!) - but when?. To believe in the possibility that it will be sooner rather than later, needs huge numbers of investors realising how many ordinary people want this change brought about. So here's - a CLIMERICK of HOPE. Let’s reinforce this idea and do all we can to accelerate progress towards it. (EV or Solar panels anyone?).

We all need to take a new view,

that clean air technology’s tru-

ly a better investment,

by any sane judgement,

than fossil fuels’ oft fatal spews.

Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE  

CLIMERICK: So Reform Wants to Push Foolish Fracking,

Image: Fracking N Dakota - Wikipedia

After the discovery of a gas field in Lincolnshire, Reform’s Greater Lancashire Mayor is demanding we “drill, baby, drill”and with Reform’s big party conference just days away, they’re trying to turn fracking into a rallying cry.

Here’s my response to that folly:

So Reform wants to push foolish fracking,

with little idea of the whacking

risks there might be

from tremors deadly,

and foul fumes spewed out from the cracking.

Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE    

CLIMERICK: Fossil Fuels! O So Dangerous and Dirty

                                     

The image was AI generated, (from Pixabay free images)

but the CLIMERICK comes from the heart

 

Fossil fuels! O so dangerous and dirty,

need be axed by around twenty-thirty,

if the planet’s to live

and its creatures all breathe-

in air, fresh, life-giving and healthy.

Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE   

 

CLIMERICK: Consider How Dangerous Are...

 

This gyre may feature cans, as well,

but it’s the one-trip plastic that is the more pernicious.

Consider how dangerous are,

the fizzy drinks peddled afar:

their plastics pollute

their sweeteners recruit

more obese; and their water use, scars.

Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE   

CLIMERICK: Now Lis’n Up You Politicians

It’s an ongoing and critical theme!

 

Now lis’n up you politicians,

we know that you can’t be magicians.

But hear those who tell,

that we’ll all go to hell

lest you stop coal and oil-based emissions.

Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE   

 

CLIMERICK: On Failure of the Proposed Global Treaty to Cut Plastic Pollution

My response to the recent news that powerful petrochemical states opposed a global treaty to cut plastic pollution aimed at meaningfully reducing the harms to human health and the environment.

Disgusting! Disgraceful! It grates

that greedy petrochemical states,

should block the reduction 

of plastics production,

for profit for them and their mates.

Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE   

CLIMERICK Mums and Dads, Now Let’s Talk it Through

We’ve been away from CLIMERICKS for too long! So now let’s resume the collection of 'Climate Wisdom in five lines’

Pixabay free image

Mums and dads, now let’s talk it through.

What is it that you want to do

to keep your child living

with air that is giving

it life, and not gasps you’ll all rue. 

FOURTH AND FIFTH ENVIRONMENTAL SIDESHOWS (developed in May)

Maybe one bubble can say a lot - but a wild stream of bubbles from the loan bubble-machine is bound to draw attention to this attraction. To hold that attention, once the young children have exhausted the fun of chasing and popping the bubbles, there is equipment for children to blow serious bubbles of various sizes, and, if someone is so disposed, a recipe and equipment to make bubbles large enough to match a child’s height. (This will take some pre-fayre practice).

Going deeper in thought about bubbles, apart from reflecting on the immediate joy they give children (and not a few adults), they are a small wonder of the sciences of physics and light, incorporating the mathematical properties of a sphere, the vital properties of surface tension, the balancing of internal and external air pressure, the iridescence which can show all the colours of the spectrum/ rainbow and at their last, the effect of gravity after each bubble’s brief flight

Children get a timed ‘slot’ to explore the bubble blowing on offer.

And in keeping with the Eco-themes of the sideshows, we can perhaps think of the fragility of each bubble as symbolic of the fragility of our home sphere, our planet, whilst dirty fuels remain.

OILY BEACH

Today’s sideshow derives from an experience many of us will have had, of finding a beach we love sullied by large globs of tarry oil which are quite vile, leaving thick deposits of oil on shoes or clothes or on the skin of a curious child. 

Usually we will have no idea of the source which could be a major oil-spill, the deliberate discharge of oil from a tanker, to lighten load, or from a leak from an old or damaged tanker. Whichever it is, the mess it leaves on the beach will be s nothing compared to the destruction it will have caused on its journey to the beach. Sea-birds fouled and unable to fly, fish poisoned in the filth of the spill and who knows what damage done in the unseen parts of the sea bed. Yet another by-product of the dirty-fuel industry.

So, we reflect on this with numbered, scoring stones scattered, numbers down amidst large black-painted stones in a sand-tray, representing the disgusting disfiguring globs of useless oil. 

Wait - No! Worse than useless - for who will clear them up? Not the fat-cat shareholders of the extractors of the poisonous lumps, but a local sea-side corporation, obliged to clear up the mess and spend taxpayers’ money to make the beaches we love, safe. 

The concepts behind the sideshows will all be explained in a small pamphlet entitled ‘Our Sideshows: what they mean’, available to borrowers of the equipment. At the time of writing this post, the pamphlet is in embryo form.

For now, to better understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE  

More Eco-themed sideshow ideas ‘KNOCK THE DIRTY FUELS DOWN and THE GOOD, THE BAD and THE SMOG-BOUND

Following my last post,I’ll now give more information about the Eco-themed sideshows at our Children’s Science and Climate Change afternoon. Here’s the second ‘game’. It’s called ‘Knock The Dirty Fuels Down'. The targets are empty  415gm  cans, with a wrap-around showing dirty fuel installations. They have to be knocked off their shelf with beanbags. Clearing 7 or more off the shelf earned winners’ tokens.

The sideshow had an associated placard (not seen in the picture of the sideshow) - but reproduced below the sideshow image.

Simple knock about fun - with a profound message

AND HERE’s THE THIRD ATTRACTION

So here is the third of the sideshows which will shortly be available to churches and schools in the Cambridge area to borrow. The picture is a prototype, and the images on the wine boxes will be renumbered to give a clearer message. The sideshow is called 'The Good, The Bad and the Smoggy’. Playing is very simple: players toss or lob a beanbag at the array of wine boxes (an interesting way of re-using them) which are numbered to reflect that clean air technology is way more superior to dangerous, dirty fuel energy generation.Smog  was that dense and life-threatening form of air pollution that the UK experienced way back in late forties and early fifties, until the introduction of The Clean Air Act in 1956.

Thus, the (revised) highest score of 10, needless to say, furthest from the player, features a Tokamak. A Tokamak is a nuclear Fusion energy generator. It operates at colossal temperatures and pressure, in effect emulating the method by which the stars produce heat and light. Tokamak processing, which leaves no nuclear waste, unlike the present fission power stations, has been under development for decades. The development costs have been so vast that only international collaborative funding has been able to put up the huge amounts that have been necessary for progress to be made. Then, in May 2025, CNN reported that a commercial enterprise was building a Tokamak just outside Boston USA. Amazingly, and encouragingly, funding of US$2billion is backing this enterprise. Clearly, even usually hard-nosed investors believe Tokamak will deliver, and a date of 2030 is slated. It is hard to envision just what this will mean, but with a projected target of producing four times the power input, the enterprise will undoubtedly be a game changer in the energy market. So the incorporation of the Tokamak at the top end of the sideshow scoring is intended to give a message of HOPE to children playing the sideshow. Not that many of them will want to be bothered with such detail, but on the basis that every child is likely to be accompanied by a responsible adult, this message maybe part of a drip-feed of encouragement to be optimistic that Clean Air Technologies will sweep away their dirty and dangerous predecessors in the not-too-distant future.

Scores of 5 - 9 (inclusive) are allocated to various established clean air technologies, wind turbines, solar panels, sub-sea (near surface generators, which operate in races of water and produce three times the energy density of wind turbines) sea-borne booms and tidal lagoons. There are no scores of 2, 3, or 4: the scoring drops to 1 represented by Coal, Oil, Gas and Shale - all dirty and dangerous fuels which also leave scars on the landscape when they are abandoned.

'Should these score at all?' one asks - but then, this is only a sideshow game!

The concepts behind the sideshows will all be explained in a small pamphlet entitled ‘Our Sideshows: what they mean’, available to borrowers of the equipment. At the time of writing this post, the pamphlet is in embryo form.

For now, to better understand the purpose of the Eco-Fayre, go to The first Mini Eco Fayre entry that you will find HERE  

 

A Mini Eco-Fayre which may be of interest. Part 1

On my ‘main’ blog, The Cross and The Cosmos, I have been posting about an outcome of a children’s event called ‘Science Faith and Climate Change’ That outcome is that we are building up a collection of sideshows all with an Environmental message to loan out to schools and churches, predominantly - but there could be other uses for the kit.

The set will be known as St Mary’s Fen Ditton, Mini Eco-Fayre collection. I will now repeat those postings over a few days and maybe into a couple of weeks, as, if you are in the Cambridge area, you might be interested in thinking about how you could use such an offering

Here’s a copy of the first post ...

Last Saturday afternoon, 17th May proved a warm, delightful few hours for our experimental Science, Faith and Climate Change event at St Mary’s, Fen Ditton, on the Eastern edge of Cambridge. The Faraday Institute, Schools and education team, provided fascinating insights into Fossils and faith, Our bodies in all their Godly complexity (children could make DNA bracelets and the fascinating nature of non-Newtonian liquids intriguingly demonstrated. The explanations of various sciency things were much appreciated by those who visited.

Meanwhile, outside in the churchyard, a sequence of Eco-themed sideshows provided entertainment and hopefully some education and HOPE for the young people present (and, later, for the older helpers, too)

Here is one of the sideshows entitled post-event, ‘Do You give a Toss?. You can see a beanbag which, having been tossed, didn’t quite make it to score on the right-hand side.

If you look closely, you will see the clean air section at the top earns high points, whereas the dirty fuel disaster section, featuring wildfires, floods and hurricane score consistently low. This message is spelled out more explicitly in a note to accompany the sideshows which is set out here.

Fen Ditton Children’s Science, Faith and Climate Change Afternoon .

The Outcomes by Trevor Thorn

 

Saturday May 17^th was kind to us in weather terms as those who came were able to enjoy an imaginative collection of Eco-themed outdoor sideshows. In the church. Indoors, the Schools and Education team from The Faraday Institute provided a fascinating array of ‘stations’ which included a spectacular collection of fossils, an opportunity to make a DNA bracelet and the wherewithal to make a suet-ball birdfeeder as a tangible expression of encouraging the bird-life in our gardens.

 

It would be dishonest to say that we were besieged by children from the three schools in which we promoted the event but there has been a promising development around the sideshow collection. The picture of the most popular of these, which will now be renamed ‘Do You Care a Toss’ will give a sense of what we might now regard as a prototype for a Mini Eco Fayre which we can offer to schools and other churches as a package. We will put the stalls into a nearby storage facility, so they are readily accessible and seek further support from the Cambridge Schools Trust to finance this second step of our Eco-venture.

 

One of the important elements of the display was to give children HOPE that Climate change need not be the disaster story that is all too constantly in the media. In order to make this message clear, a two sided slip was prepared, one side addressed to children and the other to their parents or carers. Here, for your interest are the two texts

 

Parents & Carers

OUR SIDESHOWS

 

The aim of our sideshows is to give children a sense that Climate Change is not the threat it is sometimes made out to be.

 

New clean technologies are developing all the time and are now attracting big investments, notably the TOKAMAK, a nuclear fusion generator which can generate huge energy output without nuclear waste, and is due to come on-line early 2030s. A TOKAMAK has attracted $2billion in investment (Source CNN) which might otherwise have gone into dirty energy production.

 

It does not take a lot of thinking to realise that investors will soon wake up to the idea that the future has to be one of clean, green,  technologies and that money will move from dirty fuel generation into these far more attractive investment areas.  The sideshows imply this message and are, thus, designed to give your children and teenagers HOPE – a vital message for their generation

 

And HOPE is also the greatest message of the Christian church.

 

Thank you for reading this

* * * * *

 

Message for Children about our SIDESHOWS

 

Please have fun on our sideshows.

 

As you try to win tokens for prizes you will be helping to raise money for remote villages in Africa who will be helped to build solar lighting to avoid using dangerous fuels, like kerosene.

 

If you look at the sideshows carefully, you will see that clean, green ways of generating energy score much better than the dangerous dirty fuels that have been part of your mum, dad and grandparent’s history.

 

Clean, green ways of making power are getting better all the time and the world is waking up to that fact.

 

In the not too distant future, lots of people will want to put money into supporting these clean methods rather than the old ways – and then Climate change will not be as bad as some people say.

 

So why not talk to the older people of your family and ask them to consider Solar panels, Heat pumps and electric cars if they haven’t already. That could be YOUR way of helping this change happen

 

Let’s hope this next step proves to be a positive one in our efforts to link the church to concern for the issues of climate change and the effects this is having on some children.

Another sideshow will feature in our next post.

IT IS NOW THE INTENTION THAT THE SIDESHOW EQUIPMENT IS PUT INTO STORAGE IN THE CAMBRIDGE AREA AND CAN BE MADE AVAILABLE TO ANY CHURCH OR SCHOOL THAT WOULD LIKE TO RUN A MINI ECO FAYRE OR INCORPORATE THEM INTO A LARGER EVENT (SUCH AS A VILLAGE FEAST).

WE ALREADY HAVE 2 PROSPECTIVE USERS!

IF YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN THIS POSSIBILITY AND WOULD BE ABLE TO COLLECT AND RETURN UP TO 5 STALLS (BEING SUPPLEMENTED PRESENTLY AND SHORTLY 10 WILL BE AVAILABLE), Email crossandcosmos@gmail.com  Head your enquiry ’Side Show information and start ‘Hello Trevor Thorn’

I hope this might be of interest in raising the profile of the anxiety some young people are experiencing, and help them to find someone to talk to, who will allay their fears with a confident message that dirty dangerous fuels must be abandoned - for the world’s sake. And that they can play a part in bringing this change about.

You can view the original, and more recent posts at The Cross and The Cosmos blog

 

 

                             

Our car is not as small as the one pictured here, but I wonder if we are alone in feeling that our car is shrinking compared to the  many cars that seems to have to straddle a space and a quarter in a supermarket car park. Just this week we were flanked by what felt a colossal beast. As we sat in our car, the driver and his companion returned to the beast: they were an elderly couple - and might have needed it to transport a horde of children, grandchildren and possibly even great grandchildren. But if that isn’t the case, it’s hard to understand just why such a beast is needed in Battersea (where the dealer’s address was)

As I pondered this, the nonsense poem below came to me - at least it relieves my feelings - just a little...  

Your car is too big sir, 

your car is too big,

for just one or two,

your car is too big! 

You may want its status, 

lust after its heft, 

but if many follow you, 

there’ll be no world left.

Nuclear Fusion Means (unlimited) Energy Clean,

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, just outside Boston USA, announce (CNN 6^th May) they hope to have an unlimited power-generator called a Tokamak up and running by 2030. This will totally transform the energy map of the world.

 

Nuclear Fusion means energy clean,

Far more power than ever yet seen.

The Tokamak shape

Will be perfectly safe:

Unlike mining’s dangerous extremes.

A Writers’ Retreat:

A Bovine Quest (with Climerick to finish).

 

We are on an island writing retreat.(Iona)

 

‘Go. Listen to a sound of the island – and reflect it in a written format of your choice’, we are bid.

 

I decide I will go and listen to the sound of cows chewing cud.

 

I walk to the gate that leads to the hill – no sign of any cows.

 

I walk on round two further bends -  not a cow to be seen anywhere.

 

I see a woman feeding sheep. As she turns her car to leave, I knock on the window: it is reluctantly rolled down.

 

'Are there any cows around, or are they all being overwintered?' I ask, with scant idea of whether that is a sensible question in the second half of March.

 

'There’s cows up there', she says, jerking her thumb towards the north, ‘But none down there’. The thumb is jerked in the opposite direction and, feeling my visitor-ness, I set off, at least knowing I am not travelling in vain.

 

I walk to the gate to the North End; no sign of any cows.

 

I ask a young woman ‘Any cows up there?’

 

She looks at me and my walking stick slightly strangely, and says she has seen two or three.

 

I know I am not travelling in vain.

 

I ascend towards the top of the elevation: not a cow to be seen anywhere.

 

Aha! I think. If I climb as high as I can, I will surely see any cows there might be, wherever they may be lurking.

 

And sure enough - there are cows some 100 feet below and they are troughing it. 

 

 

Gone is my notion of putting my voice recorder as close as I dare, to a constantly chewing soft mouth and retreating to transform  the sound into writing.

 

Instead, there is the violent chomping of a bovine tea party, but joyful, I feel a CLIMERICK come upon me.

 

And so it did come to pass, 

that I listened to cows chomping grass. 

Then horror! They’re belching: 

it’s clear they are belting

out methane, a vile greenhouse gas.

 

  

TODAY’S CLIMERICK: RACHEL REEVES, LISTEN - GROWTH IS FOR FOOLS

Edited Pixabay Image

What folly! -More Runways to kill the planet

Rachel Reeves, listen! Growth is for fools,

if it leads to the planet’s downfall.

The Earth’s urgent need

is to swiftly impede

power-making, with foul dirty fuels

Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE  

TODAY’S CLIMERICK - with HOPE: Materials Science is where

 

Materials Science Is Where

You will find a great body of care

For sustainability

At scale capability

Young people, take hope; don’t despair.

 

On the Eco-verses site, we are always on the lookout for reports of activities that can bring some hope into a fraught futurism. In the September 2024 issue of Materials World are articles on bringing colour to solar panels making them more attractive to architects; recycling of critical metals from spent alkaline batteries, improved recycling of solid state lithium batteries; The next generation of smart offshore windfarms; how precise measurement is vital in the race to net zero and 3D printing of natural material flooring panel (to replace steel) and more. This Climerick is a repetition of one posted on 1.10.2024 except for the last line. The earlier version appealed specifically to investors to support as many Eco-businesses as they possibly can. 

TODAY’s SLIMERICK:THANK GOD FOR VERY BRAVE WOMEN

And I do mean THANK GOD...

Thank God for very brave women

Bishops who won’t just, ‘AMEN’;

but speak truth to power

and simply won’t cower

to blust’rers and cowardly men.

For  Bishop Mariann Budde in the US - YAY!

and for

Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley in the UK - YAY!

TODAY’s CLIMERICK: STORM EOWYN BRINGS HAVOC AND FEAR

Cyprus Avenue, Belfast 

in  the wake of Storm Eowyn 

(Guardian Picture)

With so much violence in weather systems worldwide, and so much turbulence in politics, including the disgraceful stopping of the Climate and Nature Bill in the UK parliament today. I will try to bring both a CLIMERICK and a SLIMERICK every day (other than Sundays). Won’t make that aim all the time - but I’ll try, and hope others will take up similar writing. So here’s today’s CLIMERICK, coupled with today’s SLIMERICK ...

STORM EOWYN BRINGS HAVOC AND FEAR,

WITH A STING JET - A RARITY HERE;

IT BROUGHT RECORD GALES,

AND DESTRUCTION AT SCALE.

IT’S CLIMATE CHANGE, BOTH LOUD AND CLEAR.

See today’s BBC Northern Ireland weather news at Northern Ireland | Latest News & Updates | BBC News

Find more about the thinking behind the growing collection of CLIMERICKS HERE