"just pickin' flowers.."?

Johnny Cash used to sing a song called 'Starkville City Jail'.

Neither great lyrics nor a great tune really. But it went down a bomb when he sang it to the prisoners at San Quentin.

And I can see why. Because the song's a complaint about the way he was arrested once himself for .. well, "just pickin' flowers", as he puts it in the song.

A fairly minor, trivial sort of thing that surely wasn't harming really anyone.

Today I understood the feeling all too well.

Not that I got arrested. Not quite.

But it got a bit too close for comfort!

And why? Well, it wasn't 'picking flowers' I was challenged about. It was taking some footage for the DVD I'm making for this 'green' day that we're holding in a week or so.

I hadn't even trespassed onto private ground. I had parked the car at the side of a public road. No harm in that, I thought. And filming a clip of the smoke which was coming from out of a sizeable, well-known industrial plant.

Which anyone passing can see from miles away. And I mean really miles away.

It's hardly exactly a secret or hidden location.

But all of a sudden a guy pitches up. Vulture-like. A security guard sort of thing. Asks me what I'm doing.

Johnny Cash came to mind at the time. This was my "I'm just picking flowers" moment, if ever there was one. I mean, it was fairly obvious what I was doing!

But out of the blue, by one small, fairly common act - taking some film from the side of a public road - I'd become, at least potentially, involved in industrial espionage.

The guy took my details and I explained what it was I was doing. And why. I even let him see the sort of footage that I'd taken. I was tempted as well to suggest that I send him the finished DVD.

But discretion's the better part of valour. And my valour was in its 'better' mode just then.

The end of the story?

Nothing like!

I was out later on in the afternoon, visiting a family I've known over many years, who've recently been bereaved. My mobile phone starts ringing. Persistently. As in again and again and again.

The family say eventually just to answer it. So reluctantly I do.

This is the police. Following through the report they've received. So they take all my details again. Ask all the questions again. What and why and when and where. And anything else you can think of.

And here's me sitting with a family in their grief and I'm thinking Johnny Cash thoughts once again - "I was just pickin' flowers!" Who'd have thought that making a DVD would generate such a fuss?

So the police advise me that the matter having been reported they must follow it all through. So they'll have to pass my name and details on to the Metropolitan Police. Anti-terrorist squad, presumably.

However, I'm really most obliging and I give them all the details that I can. I explain again that all I'm really trying to do is make a DVD about the way we care for the environment. All I really wanted was a visual of some smoke being pumped up by our industry.

And here I am, not quite on their 'Most Wanted' list (I hope), but down on the files at the Met.

Don't start to think the matter ended there, though! Not at all.

I get a further call at nearer 10pm. The police again. They need to see the footage. Smoke coming out of a tower. But they need to see the footage for themselves.

So down they come to the church. And I show them the footage I took.

They want to know just why I have been taking it.

The environment, I say. A film about the environment. For children at the local school. (Maybe that's what they all say, of course!)

But why did I want this footage that I took.

I'm beginning to think this footage is the last thing that I now would want to have taken, the hassle that it's plainly caused!

But I tell him why I wanted it. Explain how it's going to be used. Because he wants to know the detail of it all.

It's a bit about the atmosphere, I say. How much of the script do you want, I'm tempted to say. Because I've got the whole thing here.

But it's the atmosphere, this bit. The thin, protective layer around this planet earth. Just like our skin. And the need we have to take good care of this most fragile atmosphere.

I begin to think I'm starting to preach, presenting the case the DVD is basically trying to make.

I think he's starting to think the same. Since he pretty soon stops me and tells me, Yes, OK, that's enough. I take the hint.

It doesn't feel too comfortable to somehow feel a 'baddie' in this way. Suspected of industrial espionage. When all I was trying to do was to make a simple DVD.

'Picking flowers' can be a perilous enterprise, I realise.

A case of mistaken identity. Actions being misconstrued. Folk reading into the things that we say and we do what simply was not ever there.

I wonder if that's why there is such trouble in our world today. Complete misunderstanding. Viewing folk potentially as enemies when maybe they were actually just friends, whose actions have been misconstrued and quickly then interpreted in just the very worst of possible lights.

Maybe it's fear that does this to folk. Twenty years ago, there wouldn't have been such a fuss.

But there is today. Because today we're afraid.

Fear is a giant predator which stalks the world today. No wonder there are problems right across the globe.

The only genuine antidote is love. I think it's probably that we've largely lost.