CASUALTIES AND CAUSALITIES

Causality is often unexpected.

As with Brian Eno's diagram - unintended consequences - desertification, which shows the unexpected and unintended result of digging village wells in the Sahel, as increased desertification and extended human suffering. A sobering view for aid workers.

I can't (yet) find the causality of what must have been a housing boom in the first twenty or thirty years of the 19th Century in rural East Yorkshire, resulting in so many farmhouses (including mine) being built about that time. Work in progress.

Meanwhile, prompted by a similar interest in vernacular architecture, my reading takes me to some new understandings.

Wool churches, across the East of England, were late medieval legacies of the wealth made from wool exports.

The wool exports were a result of increased emphasis on sheep farming rather than other forms of agriculture.

The increase in sheep farming was less labour intensive.

The change in emphasis was the result of decreased agricultural labour.

The decrease in labour was a result of the Black Death.

There's a Swedish detective series, BECK, which currently airs and captures my attention for similar reasons. The motives are unexpected. And often, people doing wrong things for right motives.

There's something humanising about this. If you walked in my shoes you would walk as I do.

Not a bad thought to take forward into daily encounters.