A Tale Of Two Dogs, Of Life, Death, The 2009 Cumbria Floods, Of Climate Alarmism And Quantum Physics

On November 19th 2009, I said goodbye to my beloved German Shepherd Jade. Unbeknown to me on that dreadful grey, but otherwise unremarkable morning in south Lincolnshire, rain was falling hard on the Lake District in 'biblical amounts' which later that day and on the following day would result in severe flooding and damage to roads, bridges and properties in Cockermouth, Workington, Keswick and surrounding areas. A policeman, Bill Barker, lost his life trying to warn people of the danger as the main road bridge across the River Derwent collapsed in Workington on the morning of the 20th. I passed his memorial on the new bridge the other day as it happens. I moved up this way in 2021, and am only now just starting to read and learn about the devastating floods which affected the area in 2009.

There's a stone plaque on a wall at Seaton Mill, beside the River Derwent which simply says '19.11.2009'. I've got a photo of Alfa sitting in front of it. I snapped it at the time, thinking it was significant because that was the day Jade died. I did not realise at the time I took the photo that it was a flood water level marker showing how high the floods reached on that fateful day in November 2009. As you can see, she would have been underwater!

Alfa left me last year, alone, with a broken heart, when I said my final goodbye to her outside the vets in Cockermouth, looking out across the same River Derwent. Inside the vets waiting room, they have an aerial photo which shows the vets and surrounding area at the height of the floods.

Aerial view of Cockermouth floods

The 'climate crisis' scammers subsequently blamed the floods on 'climate change' of course - just as they have with the Texas floods, just as they always do with any natural weather disaster. Coincidentally, November 19th 2009 was also the day that the 'Climategate' hacked emails went public across the internet, which the media reported on the following day. I would not have noticed at the time. I didn't become involved in 'climate scepticism' until several years later.

Alfa was born in November 2011, exact date unknown, in Romania. I adopted her from a Romanian rescue in January 2013. I loved her dearly all those years until her passing, just like I loved Jade, who came from Battersea Dogs Home and who I adopted in 2000 after mum passed away.

All these 'coincidences' got me thinking. Our lives ('my life') are not singular entities, written as a long line of chronologically ordered personal experiences and events from birth until death. Our lives are more than that, they are a complex interwoven web, part of a larger confluence of souls, a constellation of souls, which comprise the people and animals with whom we connect emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, physically, throughout our brief time on this earth and even beyond that brief time.

In a strange sense, viewed from above, outside of time, our interconnected lives, from birth to death, and beyond, are just one constellated 'moment' in a galaxy of constellated moments, unchanging, infinite, everlasting, not regimentally partitioned by the passing of time. A frozen, permanent structure, where past, present and future merge seamlessly, rather like the constellations visible in the night sky above, which each contain a handful of stars, seemingly permanent, everlasting, which are themselves just part of the hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy, and beyond that, the billions of stars making up other galaxies. Within that 'moment' Jade left me on November 19th 2009, her soul made contact with the very place I was destined to move to 12 years later and it made contact with the dog called Alfa who may indeed have been born exactly two years later on November 19th 2011 and who, only 3 months before her death, sat in front of a stone set in a wall engraved with the date November 19th 2009. I'm not talking about reincarnation, or transmigration of souls here; it's something much more complex, a web of interconnected souls linked by time and place, by lives lived and lives lost, preserved in a single imperishable ‘moment’ which exists outside of time, beyond the endless wheel of birth, life and death.

You may think I'm being fanciful, seeing meaning where there is only random circumstance. But that's what we humans do. It's who we are. We give meaning to the world around us, where, if not for us being here to observe that world, there would be none to speak of and to weave into the fabric of our wondrous tales. In a sense, we create that meaning and we are integral to the 'reality' of the world which we perceive. Even quantum physics tells us that the physical reality of the subatomic world is not independent of our observation of it. Look up the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the quantum Wave Function and Schroedinger's Cat. So maybe I'm not being so fanciful.

Jade - The Wash Saltmarshes looking across to Hunstanton and King’s Lynn