Arrived at Belvoir Castle at 0810 and left at 1940 - so quite a long day, interspersed with sun and showers and lots of talking. It was a good day.
I was part of a discussion on windfarms where Maria McCaffery from the British Wind Energy Association was given a hard time by a vocal and well-informed group of local campaigners against a windfarm near them. The RSPB's point of view is that we will need more windfarms as part of our response to mitigating climate change but we must put them in the right places and we need to listen to local views to help decide which are the right and wrong places.
After the debate I was at the CLA President's lunch where I was delighted to be sitting next to Charlie Brooks (see my blog post of 17 July) the ex-jockey, ex-racehorse trainer and now novelist and Daily Telegraph columnist. Charlie wrote a piece recently saying how daft the RSPB is - so it was nice to meet him. Did someone have an excellent sense of humour putting us on the same table for lunch or was it one of those happy chance events. Whichever it was, we had a good chat about set-aside, farming, the RSPB, raptors, world population and the day that Suny Bay (a marvellous grey horse trained by Mr Brooks) won the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury.
A little later the RSPB had a reception at our stand and the guest speaker was Richard Benyon, a Shadow Environment minister who signed up to our bird of prey pledge - lots of people were signing up all day which was great! Mr Benyon did say nice things about the RSPB and said that illegal killing of birds of prey must be marginalised.
Later still the Shadow Secretary of State for the environment, Nick Herbert, visited and said that he had posted an article on the Guardian webpage which mentioned his recent visit to the RSPB's Hope Farm and the article that Graham Wynne had contributed to a website that the Conservative Party has set-up for people to put forward their views on the environment. Graham's article is, of course, worth a look. It questions the extent to which we can value nature in monetary terms and points out that the value of a skylark's song is enormous but difficult to quantify.
Also met lots of RSPB members and lost my blackberry!
And how are we doing on Game Fair bingo (see previous blog post)? I have already got 8 out of 20 and there are two more days to go! Off to bed now and back to Belvoir early tomorrow.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.