Inheritance

I just spent the weekend at a friend's Victorian pile in the Scottish Borders.  It was a wonderful and relaxed couple of days of blazing midsummer sunshine - till well past 10 in the evening - conversation, snooker, walks, tours, food, drink. 

The pile sits in the middle of a moderately extensive estate which was once home to a hundred workers, now reduced to just a few. In its heyday, this estate would have been its own self-sustaining ecosystem.  With its livestock and arable farm, its kitchen gardens and greenhouses, lochs and streams, dairy and laundry, water mills and workshops, more or less everything that it needed would have been produced or processed onsite.  Perhaps as many as 500 people would have found employment or sustenance.

My friend has the responsibilty - to her family and indeed the nation - of keeping the great house and its lands and cottages in some kind of working order, and for the first time I realised just how awesome that responsibility is when the inheritance is such an important component of the history and fabric of its surroundings.

I also realised, though, that estates such as this are just a microcosm of our own global ecosystem, and we all bear the responsibility of passing on that inheritance in as good or better order than we received it.  Right now, I'm afraid, we are acting like the claasic wastrel son, gambling and mortgaging the assets away in a haze of gluttony and intoxication.  We all know the end of those stories.  The creditors come knocking ...