Thinking about plants, and birds and animals.

It’s a wild and windy day today here. The sun keeps trying to come out but I was rained on when I went out first thing this morning. Yes, I know we need the rain but preferably not on me. 

They’ve been having a flower festival in Manchester this weekend. Very nice. 

And here’s a photo of Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens back in he 197s, before they paved it all over, built a huge wall in the middle of it, ran trams round it and generally made it a really ugly place. 

So it’s great that they have a flower festival and deck a lot of streets with flowers and plants but it’s still a shame that they messed up Piccadilly Gardens. It was a nice place to sit, a bit of a green lung in the city centre and another example of bits of beauty everywhere. Now I can’t imagine anyone wanting to sit there to have a picnic lunch. 

I think I’ve already written about our local heron finding a place where people will feed him fish. We often talk about “bird brains” but it seems they can be pretty savvy. Here’s something I read about intelligent, even crafty, birds: 

“It is a tactic worthy of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt: wait until a beeping pedestrian crossing indicates a traffic queue has formed then use the line of cars as cover to reach your target. But this isn’t a scene from Mission: Impossible – it’s the behaviour of a young hawk.

The discovery is not the first time birds have been found to make use of an urban environment. Crows, for example, are known to drop foods such as walnuts on to roads for cars to crush them open.

However, the researcher behind a new study says it is the most advanced case so far of raptors making use of traffic patterns.

“When I figured out what was going on, I was really impressed. I didn’t expect that,” said Vladimir Dinets, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee and author of the study. “On the other hand, every time I study some animal species it proves smarter than I expect.””

Never underestimate the birds and animals.

That’s all for today. I have a family dinner to organise.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Summer’s end? Puddles and poppies. Notebooks again. Crossbows!

Here is something I read yesterday, or perhaps the day before: 

“Wildfire warning signs normally seen in the parched Australian outback have been installed on English moorland for the first time. In a stark illustration of the worsening impact of the climate emergency, signs have been put up in the Peak District and south Pennines, where there have been more than 30 moorland fires since March. It is part of efforts by rangers and volunteers to prevent discarded cigarettes, campfires and barbecues from sparking more fires during the prolonged warm and dry weather.”

Last night I went to sleep with the rhythm of rain on the roof. Goodbye, Summer! It was nice seeing you.  It wasn’t actually raining when I went out first thing and so far ot hasn’t rained since, but more is forecast. And the puddles are back along the paths where I walk and run. 

It’s very dull day but there are huge poppies, opium poppies I always think they might be, flowering in a garden up the road. 

Phil and I commented the other day that around here the wild poppies are all yellow or orange. My Spanish sister also noticed it once when she was here. Like me she remembers wild poppies in our Southport garden, always red ones. Poppies should be red, she told me. Well, today I saw wild red poppies in the wild flower bed outside our local Tesco. 

I went on, at some length, about notebooks yesterday. In Saturday’s Guardian they have a feature they call Blind Date, where they set a couple up for a blind date in a restaurant and ask them a series of questions. One of these is always: “Best thing about …?” One of today’s participants replied to that question about her date: 

“How full of life and genuinely interesting she is. I also found it really cool that she wrote things down in a notebook instead of her phone – it felt different, in a good way, and made me think I should maybe try that.”

People are often amazed when you make an actual written note, rather than a mobile phone note. Recently at the doctor’s the receptionist expressed astonishment at my possessing, and even using, a paper diary! Of course, you can lose a diary or notebook but they are not going to run out of battery on you at a crucial moment. 

I heard that a young man was arrested on a Glasgow hospital because he went in armed with a crossbow. I wonder what he planned to do. In some countries it would have been a machine gun, I suppose. Maybe crossbows are easier to get hold of here. Here’s a bit of information about crossbows: 

Under the Crossbows Act 1987, it is legal to buy a crossbow in England, Scotland and Wales, and owners are not required to register the weapon or hold a licence. Similar legislation covers Northern Ireland. However, it is illegal for under-18s to own or buy one, for under-21s to shoot one (unless under the supervision of someone older), for owners to rent or lend one to anyone else, or to shoot one in a public space, or in any private place without permission.

Proposals designed to tighten the law around crossbow sales were put forward by the government last month.

Personally, I can’t think why anyone would want to buy a crossbow unless they were involved in some kind of competitive sporting activity … or had some nefarious plans in mind. As a child my brother had one, a rather impressive toy, and we used to play William Tell, but we never shot apples off people!s heads. We were far too sensible. And now people can buy real ones. What a strange world we live in!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Sunshine and roses and such. Some thoughts on the use of AI. And notebooks.

 One of the benefits of the dry and sunny spring that we’ve been having is that the roses in my garden are actually coming properly into flower. As a rule, because of too much rain, they have become so waterlogged by now that they are just a mess.  We’ll see how things go over the next week, when “showers” are forecast. 

In a strange reversal of what usually happens with weather, we have sunshine but I hear that parts of southern Spain are on orange alert for very heavy rain. 

But in the meantime we are enjoying the sunshine and the flowers. Round the corner from our house is a horse chestnut tree with pink blossom.

And we’re starting to see foxgloves as well. 

I’ve commented recently on AI and the arts. Here’s a link to an article by the writer Luke Beesley, who is adamantly in favour of writing in pencil, rather than writing directly on the computer. It was the joy of notebooks that started him writing as a child. (More on notebooks shortly.) Here’s something he wrote that struck me, an example of AI taking over:

“A writer friend recently posted that after updating her version of Microsoft Word, it invited itself to collaborate on her novel in progress, offering to work on 2,000 words at a time.” 

Hmmm! Is it your writing if Microsoft word has “fiddled” with it? 

He also writes about submitting poems to a magazine and fining a box to tick declaring, “I haven’t used AI”. 

My daughter, on the other hand, more or less confessed to me to having used AI to produce a document outlining the pros and cons of certain practices in primary education. She knew what she wanted to say, was pressed for time and used a bit of appropriate AI help, tweaking the wording slightly to match her own style. A bit of time-saving. That’s what AI should do, rather than producing so-called “works of art”.

As regards notebooks, yesterday over a family tea we discussed paper diaries versus diaries on the mobile phone. Phil produced an unused 2024 -2025 academic year diary which he gave to Granddaughter Number One (the oldest grandchild), promising to provide her with a replacement when this one runs out in August. He also gave her an unused notebook and offered one to Granddaughter Number Four (the next to youngest grandchild)  as well. My daughter stepped in at that point with a cry of, “Oh, no!” It turns out that Granddaughter Number Four has a drawer full of as yet unused notebooks. Like both her older sisters, like her mother and like her grandmother, she loves notebooks. Her mother also has a drawer full of notebooks, it seems, a larger drawer than her small daughter’s, at least according to the small daughter. Sometimes it’s almost a shame to start using a notebook; the promise of the as yet unused, pristine page is too great! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Rain! The law of unforeseen consequences or the interconnectedness of everything.

 When I set off to run round the village this morning I discovered that the air was damp. A fine drizzle was falling, not enough to really count as rain but, all the same, damper than we have grown used to over the last few weeks. It didn’t amount to much. The sun has tried, intermittently, to emerge since then. I may, however, need to take an umbrella out with me later when I go to collect the small grandchildren from school. Rain is forecast for Saturday, Sunday, Monday and on into the half term holiday for schools! No doubt farmers will be pleased. 

I used to work with someone who talked a great deal about “the interconnectedness of everything”. He was talking about developing an integrated curriculum in sixth form education, giving students a better-rounded idea of the world, rather than studying subjects in isolation. I’ve thought about “interconnectedness” from time to time since then. For example, when everyone was going slightly fanatical about eating quinoa and in some cases becoming quite evangelical about how good it is for us, I read that communities that relied on quinoa as their staple diet were suffering. As a consequence of the demand for exporting quinoa rising, the price for the people in those communities also rose and they could no longer afford to have a balanced diet. An unexpected consequence! 

And today I read about problems caused by our supermarkets selling sea bass and sea bream. Mostly these fish come from fish farms, neatly packaged and just the right size, and usually labelled “responsibly sourced”. Except that fish farmers are bulk-buying small fish caught off the coast of places in Senegal, small fish that become fishmeal to feed the farmed sea bass and sea bream. This trade has messed up small community lofe in Senegal:

“At the entrance to the fish market in Joal-Fadiouth, a coastal town in central Senegal, a group of women have set up shop under the shade of a small pavilion. A few years ago, they say, the market would have been bustling with ice-cream sellers, salt vendors and horse-drawn carts delivering freshly caught fish to the women, who would set about sun-drying, salting and sorting the catch into affordable portions for local families to buy.

Today, trade is dead, says Aissatou Wade, one of the remaining small-scale fish processors left in the town. “Without fish [to sell], we have no money to send our children to school, buy food or get help if we fall ill,” she says.

So what has happened? Wade and her fellow workers have become victims of the supply chain that feeds aquaculture – the world’s fastest-growing food sector.”

 

The interconnectedness of everything! 

Then there is education. Jenny Chapman, the international development minister, needs to make spending cuts to foreign aid. This will mean schools not being built and projects encouraging the education of girls being reduced, if not disappearing altogether. This will affect health measures. Here are some facts and figures: 

• Women with an education are far more likely to go to a clinic and have their children vaccinated. They are also more likely to get antenatal care and seek early treatment for diarrhoea and pneumonia, both potential killers.
• If all women completed primary education and gained basic literacy, maternal deaths would be reduced by two-thirds. 
• in Makawi, each additional year of maternal education cut infant mortality by 10%. 
• In Uganda, each extra year of schooling cut the risk of infant mortality by more than 16%. 
• Cutting education spending will reduce the effectiveness of spending on health.

There it is again - the interconnectedness of everything. 

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!

Cutting the grass! Cat cafes. More important concerns.

Some people think of our house as one of a terrace. This is not the case. Ours and the next door neighbour’s are semi-detached. Then, beyond an alleyway, known around here as a ginnel,  there are another five houses which might be a terrace but in fact work their way round the corner. Altogether this creates a sort of community with communal gardens. Ours and the immediate neighbours have one joint garden area. The other houses, sightly raised up from ours have another, slightly larger communal garden.

For as long as I can remember Phil has cut the grass in our bit of garden, and the next-door-but-one neighbours has cut the grass in the other garden. She has recently been diagnosed with some kind of heart problems and has been told to ‘take it easy’. Consequently she has been badgering her immediate neighbours to do their bit as regards keeping their grass under control. Meanwhile, our immediate next-door neighbour has acknowledged that he, or perhaps his grown-up son, could cut our grass. 

For a while a kind of war of nerves took place, waiting to see who would give in and cut the grass! Eventually the next-door neighbour capitulated and cut our grass - maybe not quite up to Phil’s meticulous standards but at least it no longer looked as if we needed to buy a goat! And the higher bit of garden was trimmed by one of the round-the-corner neighbours. But that was a couple of weeks ago now and this morning our next-door-but-one neighbour gave in and got her mower out … against doctors’ orders perhaps but she decided to get on with it. Bits of silliness in communal living - well, communal gardening! 

Another bit of silliness in the modern world is the concept of cat cafes. I was reading about them. In Norwich they have The Cat House. According to what I read it’s their only cat cafe. From Wednesday to Sunday, for a cover charge of £10, punters can spend 60 minutes (or £13 for 90 minutes) enjoying feline company over a beverage and a snack.  This strikes me as rather expensive but then, I am known to be rather unenthusiastic about furry animals. Others in our immediate family get more excited than I do at the idea of going to a cat cafe.

There’s a bit of controversy there though. The RSPCA is concerned that the cats are not in their best surroundings, even in cafes that regard themselves as rescue centres as well as cafes. Apparently the big concern is the potential for stress from the confined environment, exacerbated by the presence of other cats as well as customers. “Cats are just not built to live in cafes … There’s only so much space and freedom they can give.” The Cat House, mentioned above, has as many as twenty cats! 

 Cat cafes often draw in punters with exotic breeds, photogenic backdrops – and the promise of a photo op. “While the majority of those who own, work in or visit cat cafes undoubtedly care for the animals, the sad reality is these spaces could be putting people’s enjoyment before the welfare of the cats,” says Elizabeth Mullineaux, president of the British Veterinary Association, which supports regulation. And the argument goes on and on. 

It seems that the first cat cafe opened in 1998 in Taipei, Taiwan, with just five street cats. I am reminded of people I saw in Spain taking cans of cat food to ramshackle parts of town where feral cats loved and bred like … well, like feral cats! In the early years of this century the idea spread to Japan where young professionals prevented by small apartments and strict leases from having pets of their own took to the idea of visiting a cafe to pet cats - all the joy of cat ownership without the responsibility! 79 cat cafes opened across Japan from 2005 to 2010. Wow! And, of course, social media has promoted the idea as well. Now almost everywhere has a cat cafe. 

It seems to me that it’s all part of a modern trend to regard contact with animals as being good for your mental health. Amazingly I seem to have survived all my life without it. But then, I am known for my lack of sentimentality about such things. 

There are more important things to worry about in the modern world. Here’s a link to an article about a young man who lost a leg in an airstrike on Gaza back on 2014. This despite the fact that we are sometimes led to believe such airstrikes have only been going on since October 7th! He was killed in another airstrike this week. His paracyclist team, The Sunbirds, by the way, has distributed $450,000 (£336,000) worth of aid across the Gaza Strip in the past 16 months. 

Small amounts of aid are trickling into Gaza, but still not enough and much of it is sitting just inside Gaza but not being distributed to the people who need it. 

People are more important than cats! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Trying to escape the madness of the modern world.

 Today I am mostly trying to ignore the madness that is going on in the world. Mind you, having said that, here is a link to an article about what someone judges to be Margaret Atwood’s ten best books. 

There’s someone who definitely recognises the madness of the world.  The article puts The Handmaid’s Tale at number one in the list of her best books, and has this to say about it: 

“Atwood’s feminist dystopia has entered the popular imagination as well as the canon. Even if you’ve never read the novel or seen the TV series, you will know that it imagines America in the grip of a theocracy where women are enslaved for their fertility. Atwood wrote the novel in Berlin in 1984 – of course she did – in response to the regressive US Reagan government, but not even she could have predicted its second life post-Trump. Famously, she didn’t include anything that hadn’t happened somewhere in the world already. “If I was to create an imaginary garden, I wanted the toads in it to be real,” she wrote. Today, the pond is even murkier and the toads are bigger and uglier. All together now: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.””

There you go! 

Today I have learnt two new words: Fredagsmys and Gluggaveður. Like “hygge” they’re probably going to become trendy words. No doubt they will feature on cushions and tasteful wooden plaques with which to decorate your home … until you remember that your are supposed to “declutter” and stop buying tat. 

Fredagsmys - frey-dags-mees (noun) A Swedish tradition of spending Friday nights at home with family and friends eating comfort food, playing games or watching TV. The term translates to “Friday coziness” or “cozy Friday”.

Gluggaveður - gloog - ahveh - thoor (noun) An Icelandic word that refers to weather that looks nice from inside but is unpleasant to be outside in, “window weather”. Ideal for describing snowy days around here in the winter. 

Today’s weather looks nice from inside and is rather nice outside as well, much better than yesterday, which turned rather cold! Our window cleaner was around earlier, surprisingly not bringing rain with him, which is something that often happens. 

Here’s a photo of Paris, but not the tourist Paris we are acquainted with. This is Clichy-Batignolles, in north-west Paris, an example of the ‘15 minute city’ approach to urban planing.

According to Wikipedia, “The 15-minute city (FMC or 15mC) is an urban planningconcept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city. This approach aims to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and improve wellbeing and quality of life for city dwellers.

Here’s a link to more photos and a bit of explanation. Another way of escaping the madness of the modern world.

And here’s a link to an article about the artist Niki de Saint Phalle and her partner in art and life Jean Tinguely. I confess to never having heard of Jean Tinguely. I find the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, however, quite splendid and uplifting. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Monday. Free speech. Women’s rights. TV series.

 Another Monday comes around. It’s cooler and cloudier than it has been. Maybe there’s going to be rain after all. The milkman was complaining - well, not really complaining, just saying that his farm needs rain. So it goes.

It seems that Gary Lineker and the BBC are finally to part company. He was supposed to be delaying his departure until after the 2026 World Cup, which he was going to host for the BBC. But now he’s leaving almost immediately. I read that 10,000 people signed a petition calling for his dismissal because of alleged anti-semitism. Did all those people follow him on social media to be aware of things he may or may not have said and done? Goodness!

I’ve always liked Gary Lineker, not that I am particularly a football fan. Quite early in his career I was impressed that he learnt to speak when he played for Barcelona. (I think it’s because I’m something of a linguistic snob!) It’s not as if he expressed opinions on Match of the Day that were to do with anything other than football, but still he managed to put some people’s backs up. Anyway, now he’ll be able to express whatever opinions he likes. He won’t be short of money. No doubt he’ll find something to occupy his time. 

Mind you, much as I like him, I don’t know that he deserves the £1.4 million salary that the BBC is said to pay him. Maybe he earns it more than shareholders in utility companies earn their payments but still … does anyone really merit such a big salary? 

Here’s a link to an article about cuts to public health services, in this case psychotherapy, also known as talk therapy or talking therapy, which seems to be all about getting people to talk about their problems and so improve their wellbeing and mental healthy.

I was interested to read in the article that the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 states that it is the Secretary of State for Health’s duty to “continue the promotion of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement […] in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness”. No doubt cuts to services will help his fulfil that duty.

Thinking about laws, I read recently that even now in 2025 abortion is not actually legal for most of the UK. Women who have met certain conditions are exempt from prosecution but women, some of them just very young girls, are still being investigated and prosecuted for having abortions in England. Here is a link to an article by Stella Creasy on that subject. And here’s a link to an article about MPs backing an amendment to decriminalise abortion.

On the subject of the situation of women, we’ve finally caught up with the transmission of the latest series of The Handmaid’s Tale. We now find ourselves having to wait until next weekend to be able to watch the next episode. The series has caught up with the modern age, the people have mobile phones and so on but we have travelled back in time to an era when you had to wait patiently for the next episode of your series to be broadcast. Such is life! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!