A quick update that I’ve slowly been doing the groundwork for two of my election manifesto pledges, as I promised when campaigning in June: creating a Borders hedgerow economy and improving professional classical music careers in the Borders.
On the classical music front, I’m looking at setting up a small country house opera festival, that would have legs, meaning it could tour around local houses and castles, sensitive to listed building and precious artefact needs. Early days but it’s looking great fun and a practical way to employ our professional creatives across many disciplines close to home, and provide seasonal work and training for our young people and those trying to get back into work. Hoping to start off with Puccini’s awkwardly appropriate one-hour opera, Gianni Schicchi, all about inheriting. 
And here’s Bryn Terfel, one of my favourite opera stars, singing a Christmas carol just because I love this track and arrangement: https://open.spotify.com/track/1P6pCBaf0LugT8EtAdpX0j?si=IQdht6SlQtmy9Ev2PuyEDQ&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A1wEb7IRVAOevagg8WbBsDi
On the hedgerow economy, I’ve had some very generous and kind conversations with many of our local family landowners who are already doing an astonishing amount specifically on hedgerow generation. The Duke of Roxburghe’s detailed vision and work over the last decade, with his specific regeneration foundation for the Tweed, stunned me; and the Earl of Home’s laser focus on grey partridge conservation, as a way to benchmark hedgerow and field margin health, was gripping to learn about.
Next steps are to talk to western Borders regenerative farming network at the D&G sustainable food partnership; have a sit down with key members of the Scottish Borders Climate Action Network; learn from the local skilled hedgerow, woodland, wild animal and bird regeneration specialists; gather top tips from hedgerow and farm margin biodiversity champions in England; and then see what might work here in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk to set up a scheme that builds on existing projects and opens up opportunities particularly for those coming into the world of work or trying to get back into it, or just need the restorative therapy of being part of a scheme that grows life and benefits everyone.
It’s wildly exciting and at the same time I hope to play my part in stuffing it to the awful Keir Starmer who’s trying to decimate the top food producing UK farming families, who keep the profits they generate in the communities that they have served and supported for centuries, paying vast amounts of tax into UK economy as they employ, sow, grow and harvest on the way, instead of offshoring their profits without paying taxes like foreign state compromised, genocidal Starmer’s favoured investment, development and hedge fund firms. 
Meanwhile, things can’t get much worse in the Holy Land, with the Palestinians who incorporate many ancient Jewish, Christian and Muslim families who never left their homes and fields despite generations of persecution, particularly from sadly highly racist, migrant incomers over the last century, decimating Palestinian lives, livelihoods and sustainable land guardianship at a creep, now being slaughtered in a genocide of such horrific scope and proportions, it’s barely comprehensible even to the struggling aid agencies on the ground in Gaza, West Bank, Jerusalem, Lebanon and Syria.
Anywhere Palestinians have been existing, Israel has been eradicating and erasing them at an industrial rate that only Hitler would recognise and approve of. It’s beyond sickening. Israel must be stopped.
And with that, wishing everyone as merry a Christmas as we can make it, and here’s to a much improved 2025 with an end to the awful bloodshed being wrought by repulsive Putin and his grotesque criminal colleague, Netanyahu.
