Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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It’s been party conference season and their is all sorts of rhetoric flying around about what is best for the country and what each political party will do (or would if they were in power). I’m not going to link to any of it, however the one bit that did really grate on me was a Tory minister saying that all the promises / statements made during the EU referendum were meaningless and  had no impact on the overall result. Whilst I accept that no one can be held to those promises, to say they had no impact on the result is one of the most naive and stupid things I’ve heard in a long time. This is the minister who is responsible for negotiating our exit from the EU. We’re all screwed.

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Still on the subject of Brexit this article in The Guardian and this one by author Charles Stross talk about some of the potential stark realities if the Government get the negotiations wrong. Both mention potential crisis with food, and the possible future cost of food imports. We currently import 40% of our food, and although I don’t agree completely with the comment in one of the articles about our ability to “grow our own” – and I mean this on a commercial scale, not a domestic self-sufficiency one – I think we could do much better and with the right education about seasonal foods, waste reduction and other areas where we are currently weak and mean that we don’t maximise our current production levels; the picture is a worrying one. I have no confidence in those in charge of this set of negotiations and their ability to deliver the best deal possible.

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Currently Reading

Nigel: my family and other dogs by Monty Don [GoodReads] I finished this just before I posted, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, savouring it.

Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer: 2 (The Journals of Thomas Merton) by Thomas Merton [GoodReads]. Having finished the first volume of journals not that long ago, I started the second volume more or less straight away.

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Wildscreen Witness – In Pictures

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 A Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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Here’s a short piece I wrote somewhere else – mostly to get the thoughts off my chest:

Yesterday it was fracking, a few weeks ago nuclear power. From an energy perspective Theresa May’s government has been the government of missed opportunities so far. Each time an opportunity to respond in a sustainable manner to current and future energy needs, and restart the mistakes made by successive previous governments it’s been passed over for something “easier”.

In truth we know very little about the true economic costs of fracking in the UK. If exploration in Lancashire does go ahead – there are still hurdles to be overcome before it can start – then perhaps the one thing that might come out of it is a proper economic assessment of it. Widely touted as a boon of cheap gas, I think the reality will be somewhat different, unlikely to be cheaper than imported gas and renewables, it may well turn out to be another expensive white elephant.

The same with Hinkley Point and it’s strike price (although perhaps it will take so long to build that this might be cheap?) There are viable renewable solutions here and now that could be deployed for the same cost and produce the same amount of energy.

When Theresa May announced her Cabinet she erased DECC and formed BEIS, many people commented that the loss of “Climate Change” from a department title was a bad thing. At the time I was willing to sit on the fence about this, but it seems that those people were right. Another missed opportunity to put a response to climate change at the heart of government and in doing so push it to the back of Minister’s minds.

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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Currently Reading

I finally finished reading Run To The Mountain by Thomas Merton [GoodReads] at the end of last week! It’s taken me well over a month to get through, but I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s the first of seven (I think) volumes of his journals, of which I have the next one already, so might start reading that soon.

In the meantime I’ve been reading Nigel: my family and other dogs by Monty Don [GoodReads] and also The Coroner by M. R. Hall [GoodReads].

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 The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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I haven’t seen many swifts this year, quite a few swallows and house martins but their high flying cousins have been a little conspicuous in their absence. It goes like that some years – I seem to miss a bird, even though it was probably around. I was pleased to read this article though about the changes planned in Oxford.

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Something else that I haven’t seen in this Country yet, and I hope not too, are Asian Hornets, which have been spotted for the first time. Another article on it here.

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I don’t think I’ve linked to this before, but apologies if I have, however I do often write about white elephants here, e.g. Hinkley Point. Another one is the HS2 or High Speed 2 Railway line. Here’s an interesting (quite long) piece about the land it will cross (if it’s ever built).

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Back in April one of Googles Street View Cars passed me when I was walking the dogs – seems that I’ve now been immortalised on Google Maps! I notice however that although my face has been blurred, unlike these cows the dogs have not had their identities protected!

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Currently Reading

Run To The Mountain by Thomas Merton [GoodReads] – Still on the reading pile and still enjoying it!

Nigel: my family and other dogs by Monty Don [GoodReads] Only recently started so a bit early to pass comment, but am enjoying it so far.

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A Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures (w/e 09/09/16)

The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures (w/e 16/09/16)

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One in 10 UK wildlife species faces extinction, major report shows [The Guardian]

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There are so many articles on the approval of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant that I’m not going to link to any, they’re easy enough to find if you want to read them. There is a running theme though – bad decision. Not necessarily because it’s nuclear power, or the fact that renewable energy could deliver the same for the cost, but that this is an opportunity missed to renegotiate an expensive white elephant, that may actually never come into being anyway, and either way will cost the taxpayer a fortune. I think my views are fairly well known, so I won’t rehash them, but it does seem that yet again the government has made an error in judgement that will have repercussions for generations to come.

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We (the human race – and I am generalising here) seem to care more about having the latest gadget or how much money we can earn than what is going on around us. Currently our health service in this country is in crisis, with hospitals and social care unable to cope; our environment and the planet upon which we are living is being driven to destruction; wars around the world are killing innocent civilians and yet it seems that in general the average person doesn’t care.

Increasingly I feel that we have lost our values about what is actually important, and it most certainly isn’t the latest iPhone.

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 Currently Reading

“Run to the Mountain” by Thomas Merton [GoodReads] – If you’re a regular here, you’ll know this one has been appearing for a while. I was also reading Neal Stephenson’s “Seveneves” but that has now made it to the read pile, so I’ve been able to give “Run to the Mountain” more attention. I’m enjoying it a lot, but I also have a close relative in the hospital at the moment, so my free time has been limited. Mostly I’m reading before bed, and my eyes don’t stay open all that long, so I’m only getting through a few pages each night. I did also come across this piece about reading more productively.

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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I walk in my local park every day, because I own dogs. I don’t take every dog walk there, but I normally walk through it or past it with the dogs. I’ve noticed changes over the last few years, with the rubbish bins being emptied less frequently, and on occasion overflowing, with the frequency of the grass cutting, and hedge trimming. I know it’s because times are tough for the local authority and they’ve had to make savings, and they’ve done this by reducing services. When the last Council tax bill went out it was the first increase in a number of years. The reason given for the increase was to maintain services, those services that have already been reduced significantly since 2010. I can’t help thinking that the logic of my local Council is flawed over how it spends and saves money on what it delivers, and that many of these decisions are driven by political motivations. This article paints an even more depressing picture of our park lands. To be honest none of it surprises me and in a local context I can see there be changes ahead. Whilst it’s not been explicitly stated what the intention is, there was a big consultation last year on “improvements”. Many seemed sensible, although not fully thought through, and there is a history of bad decision making in terms of long leases for parts of the grounds.

One thing for sure however, this is a local amenity that I feel strongly about and take a keen interest in.

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There’s been a lot of movies remade (or rebooted, as I think is the industry parlance) – I’m not sure about this one though:

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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Currently Reading:

Run to the Mountain by Thomas Merton [GoodReads]

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [GoodReads]

I’ve been working my way through both of these books for the last few weeks. I normally read much faster than I have been but I’ve had a few other things going on, so reading time has been a little more constrained than it might otherwise be. Secondly these are both fairly big books, but they are both worth the time. I’m a little further forward with Seveneves than the Thomas Merton, and I’ve also been coming across it in other places. It’s on Barack Obama’s summer reading list, and in addition it is a book that Bill Gates has recently done a review for on his blog (and a very interesting 360° video), you can find these at this link – I can’t embed the video here, as it seems locked to his site, but I have included a video from the authors book tour for Seveneves, that I came across on YouTube.

I’d recommend both of these books even though I haven’t finished either one of them yet.

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The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll know I love my trees. It saddens me each time I read something about a new disease that is affecting a particular species. The weekend before last we were in the car stopped at some traffic lights, and could see a horse chestnut (conker) tree in the grounds of a business park. It was a sad sight, it’s leaves all brown and wilted. As I was driving and the lights changed I didn’t really have a chance to take a proper look, but having read this article, it makes sense that it’s suffering from a leaf miner infection. It looks like a pretty bad case too.

Sadly the tree probably won’t get any attention, as the business park it’s standing in has long been vacant, and in reality the treatment is actually relatively simple.

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It’s rare that I can even see the stars at night, there’s just simply too much light pollution where I live. I did manage to see some of the Perseid meteor shower earlier in the month and some of the more common constellations are visible, but I suspect that I’m missing out on a lot. This article made me wonder just how much.

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The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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Slightly curtailed this week due to a variety of things all converging at once, and leaving little time for anything else.

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Love this:

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The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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Currently Reading – not much progress since last week, so still the same books. I’ve lots on my “to read” pile, but it’s just one book at a time (or two in my case).

Run to the Mountain by Thomas Merton [GoodReads]

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [GoodReads]

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I’ve been publishing these Quick Links on a Tuesday for a while now. I’m going to try to continue to post them each week, but am moving them to a Monday until further notice as it’s a bit easier for me.

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Each week I’ll try and post quick links to things that I’ve seen, read, inspired me or just sparked my interest in the previous week, with a little background and my thoughts and other things that I’ve been up to in the previous week. Mostly gardening, cooking and environmental stuff but not always.

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I wrote last week about the licence to kill buzzards issued by Natural England (the supposed protector of our natural environment), although there has been a response by Natural England, which states that “Natural England will shortly be making documents associated with the assessment and granting of this licence publicly available”, I’m going to reserve judgement on this until I see the details.

In other areas however RSPB has released information about the disappearance of satellite tagged Golden Eagles. (There’s more detail on satellite tagging of birds in this blog post as well). With this and the persecution of other raptors e.g. Hen Harriers, for what seems to be the sport of a privileged few, we seem to be going back to the bad old days of gamekeeper and sporting estates (or maybe we never left). Earlier this year I read “Raptor” by James Macdonald Lockhart [GoodReads], which bought home to me just how persecuted birds of prey used to be. Although things have gotten better, it does seem that there are still a few that are intent on taking the law into their own hands, and committing wildlife crime.

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My Mum has a whole herd of elephants in her house. There are African ones, Indian ones, China ones, wooden ones, glass ones, plastic ones, but they are all ornaments. Many of them run trunk to tail across her mantelpiece. For me the elephant is an iconic symbol of a wild animal, an intelligent giant. It would be a human failure of epic proportions if they became an extinct species in the wild. A bit more on the history, and prehistory of the species here.

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The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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This time of year, when the vast majority of our food is coming from the allotment, we seem to eat very little meat. The arguments for moving to a vegan diet are quite convincing from many standpoints. Could I do it full time? I’m not sure, although my meat intake is quite low anyway, and I can’t eat fish due to allergies, I do eat quite a bit of dairy, particularly cheese, eggs and milk. I know there are alternatives to some of those, so I might give them a try and see if I can reduce at least some of that. We’ll see.

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 Currently Reading – bit of a mix at the moment.

Run to the Mountain by Thomas Merton [GoodReads]

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [GoodReads]

The fact that climate change is real, happening, and having a major impact on the planets weather patterns is an accepted fact by the majority of people, but it does seem that the worlds media does little to highlight the issues as facts, instead tending to focus on the sensational news. Now I know that this is because the sensational stuff is what tends to sell papers or attract airtime or whatever the metric a particular media outlet uses, but I seriously feel that we need to get a grip on truth and facts. Here’s a little round-up which highlights some of this, and here’s a truly shocking piece on some of the effects.

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I loved Swallows & Amazons by Arthur Ransome as a child, and I guess I still do. The film version has been remade and will be in cinemas soon. Looking at the trailer (see below) I think that maybe the new film goes a bit off-script compared to the original and the book, but it may well still be in spirit.

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This piece interested me because of the link to Elm trees, I’ve seen White-letter Hairstreaks locally where there are still some surviving Wych Elm trees. I think that at least for now the ones that I am aware of locally are a little more protected than the ones mentioned in the article.

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Birds of prey were once much more common than they are today. Overtime they were persecuted to dwindling numbers and in some cases for some species in the UK to extinction. Now the governments own watchdog, that is there to supposedly protect wildlife, has issued a licence to shoot buzzards. This is because allegedly the birds prey on pheasant chicks which are being bred to be shot. Not necessarily as you might think for subsistence consumption, but as sport. Some sport. This, and other game bird management practices are driving down numbers of raptors once again. Do  we not learn from the mistakes of our own history? Clearly not. It’s likely that this won’t end here, as now a precedent has been set. Patrick Barkham, writing in The Guardian, also has a take.

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Currently Reading:

Normal Pt. 4 by Warren Ellis [GoodReads] I really enjoyed this four-part novella. I was wondering how it was all going to get tied up in the final part but the author did so incredibly well. I plan to reread all four parts together at some point soon, I suspect I’ll pick up on a few things I missed reading them each a week a part the first time around.

A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins [GoodReads] This still stands up as a good travel read despite being a journey that is over 40 years old.

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The Week In Wildlife – In Pictures

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I remember the original version of this being in cinemas when I was a kid. Looks like a great summer movie, for kids of all ages.