Travellers on Station Road last week will have observed Haddenham's twin towers – great ricks of newly harvested miscanthus, representing the village's contribution to the world's need for renewable energy resources. But sadly, Bank Holiday evening one of the towers went up in premature smoke. What should have been a small but positive brake on climate change has ended up by accelerating it.
A romp in the hay is, of course, a dream (or memory) of youth. Youths were warned off earlier in the evening – but there you go. A careless match, a post-romp ciggie: one of us knows (or probably two). Come to think of it, miscanthus is pretty bristly stuff. And the hayrick fire, with the farmer impotently cursing his lost cattlefeed and the scythemen their lost labour, is no less vivid in folk memory.
Let us hope the second tower makes it safely to the furnaces and thereafter to the National Grid.
