Category Archives: Environment

Winter

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Had to happen sometime. Been threatening for a few days and now it’s arrived. This morning the temp was 0.3C. That’s pretty cold for us wimps here in the UK. We’ve even got a little bit of snow on the pavements, the roofs and the hedges. It looks pretty, not mucked up yet, but soon the tyre tracks and footprints will steal its virgin beauty.

I like it right now, it’s good to look at, out of the windows. Don’t have to go out in it, luckily, have done my big shop for the week and there are no pressing appointments to keep. So I’m just gonna enjoy the sight and the silence of it.

And add a picture, just for you.

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Is 2021 Gonna Be Awesome?

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Hey, you guys! The New Year is already a month old and will soon be sleeping through the night!

So, what you been up to? I’ve been busy, writing more stories, reading more stories, cleaning the house, cooking, keeping going… it’s all good. Staying home, of course, to save lives.

Last year was a real bummer and the difficulties are not over yet. But things are maybe looking a little better. The Orange Blob has been kicked out of the White House, there’s a couple new public servants in there, fingers crossed for their successful progress in the coming months.

IN the UK, we’re still in Limbo land… out of the EU but not sure of the future. The pandemic has changed everything, eradicating the virus is every country’s number one priority, and so it should be. Until the World is okay, none of us is okay. It’s that simple. So I’m sure you’re doing your bit, and that we are all thinking of others as well as ourselves.

We can make this year awesome, if we want to and we all pull together. So chin up, best foot forward and all that jazz. Let’s give this 2021 a fighting chance. Happy New Year!

A Meaningless Deal? Or Just Madness?

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I don’t want to write this, but I must face the fact that the Maybot has just signed the Brexit withdrawal and draft future trading agreement with the other 27 EU countries. There was no argument from the EU, Unity was preserved, much to the delight of the 27, though they do look rather shell-shocked, reminiscent of Gove and Johnson the morning after the referendum result. Spain in particular was cock-a-hoop, crowing that co-soverignty over Gibraltar was now a clear prospect.

I console myself with the fact that there is little chance of May getting the so-called deal through the Commons. The troops are lining up to shoot her down, or stab her in the back, depending on your pov. It says something when the Scottish Nationalists, the Democratic Unionists, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and even many Conservatives on both sides of the Leave/Remain argument can come together in their condemnation of what Jeremy Corbyn called a ‘miserable failure of a negotiation’ which offers the ‘worst of all worlds’. Good description, JC, though why couldn’t you have spoken up and offered some leadership earlier in the debate?

Now we wait and fret until the ‘meaningful vote’ in the House, in a couple of weeks time, time the PM will spend attempting to buy loyalty from her party and threatening future calamities for the UK if her deal is rejected. I pray the current opposition from all sides to the deal holds and that our politicians, for once, put the interests of the country before personal gain and don’t bottle it.

Heat-addled thoughts…

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It’s the BH weekend and the weather is amazing, really HOT sunshine, really BLUE sky, NO clouds and WIND-FREE. Can this be miserable Brexit Britain, or have I been suddenly transported to a parallel universe? (If only.)

Don’t you just love it when you can venture outdoors without your fleecy jacket and double-thickness leggings? Couple weeks ago we woke up to 10 centimetres of snow. That was AFTER Easter, yes, really. We were visited by what was referred to in the media as the ‘Beast From The East’, i.e., perishing cold temperatures and biting winds from chilly Scandinavia.

Like you, I’ve seen those dark Scandie thrillers, where they all wear wooley jumpers with reindeer and snowflakes on them, a bit like the ones daft Brits wear at Christmas, to show they’re not taking the whole Christian festival thing too seriously. But, in Scandie-land, those jumpers cover up dark secrets like dragon tattoos and multiple body-piercings. Could it be that Brits are slipping down that road too? For all we know, they have already arrived. Could you imagine our – current – PM with ring nipple-piercings? Tastefully done, of course, and linked by an ‘I Heart Brexit’ padlock on heavy duty chain? She could go the whole hog, of course, and have her longshanks tattooed with leopard markings, all the better to adopt the current political craze, the Power Pose.

Must be dehydrated, drink more water…

Drafted the above in May, still hot in Albion now, in August, what a crazy summer. We pathetic Brits are not built to withstand heat. Like the witch in Oz, we’re m-e-l-t-i-n-g…

Here’s a pic of our neighbour, also going nuts!

Sport? Not by any definition.

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Today I am making Paella. I’ve got chicken pieces, prawns and Chorizo sausage. It should be easy – how hard can it be? It’s only a sort of risotto with protein in, instead of my usual mushrooms. I’ll tell you how it turns out.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with my liking for flesh. I won’t lie, I love nothing more than a crispy bacon butty, a nice thick rare steak or a succulent piece of salmon with pasta. But something on Twitter recently stopped me in my tracks. It was a whale hunt, taking place in the ocean around the Faroe Islands. The first post I read, last week, was about a mother and baby pilot whale, a type of dolphin, who’d become separated from their pod and, seemingly, escaped the hunters’ nets. But not for long, as a photo showed all too graphically. Mother and baby, dead, laid out side by side on a blood-soaked beach. That day, the Twitter post informed me, 193 animals had been slaughtered. For sport. I moved on quickly to the next post and put the image out of my mind. It was nothing to do with me, after all.

But a day or two later, there it was again, further news of how the hunt was progressing and the shocking information that nearly 1000 Pilot Whales had been killed by this hunt in just two months. Nearly one thousand dolphins. I had a mental picture of them, rounded up, trailed to shore in the nets thrashing and trying to escape, to save themselves and their young. Then suffocating on the beach, before the ‘sportsmen’ – read ‘killers’ – arrived with their clubs and their lances, the surf turning red. I couldn’t ignore a thousand dead dolphins: I opened the attachment and read further details. It appears that the whale carcasses are used to provide food for farmed salmon, you know, the type I buy, once a week, in the supermarket. I don’t know why this should have affected me so much, killing whales on an industrial scale, for sport and to fatten captive salmon, to feed me and other people like me, just ordinary people, who enjoy a bit of fish once or twice a week. I didn’t know about this annual slaughter: did you?

Why did it trouble me? I thought of the dolphins I’ve seen, off the west coast of Ireland, surfacing, splashing their tails, swimming alongside the tourist boats with their calves. Maybe they were Pilot Whales, dolphins, maybe not, does it matter? They were just alive, happy, splashing along, going somewhere, wherever it is that dolphins go, but not expecting anything like a boatload of hunters – ‘sportsmen’ – to be waiting, planning their deaths on an industrial scale.

I think I’ll cook the mushrooms.

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Is it a viper..?

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The saga of our visiting snake continues. This holiday we have been providing visiting opportunities for some of La France Profunde’s native wild creatures. Some wilder than others.
My innocent – bless – relatives were so fascinated with the snake referred to in an earlier post, Wimps Abroad, that they spent some considerable time – when they could have been lazing about, drinking beer and sunbathing, or even playing boules with the locals or doing a spot of gardening – crouched by a hole in our stone garden wall, poking each other and exclaiming ‘It’s moving!’ ‘I can see its head!’ ‘Watch it! It’s coming out!’ and suchlike excited commentary. It was like listening to giddy children watching a live birth.

Instead of rushing to boil water and warm towels, I poured myself a generous gin-and-tonic and left them to it. It was only later, when the photographs were pored over by us and our neighbours, that the question arose: was it, as we’d anticipated, a harmless grass-snake type of serpent, or was it a venomous viper? Apparently it’s all in the eyes, harmless snakes have harmless-looking round eyes: venomous vipers have snake-eyes vertical slits. But the photographs do not prove anything one way or another. The snake did not come out of its hidey-hole and bat its eyelashes, like Kaa in Disney’s Jungle Book. It stayed put and thereby set us all a-tremble. Would it return later and bite one of us when we weren’t looking where we put our big clumsy feet? Would it shimmy up the back wall and slide into the bedrooms at night where we lay asleep and vulnerable? Probably not. We wittered on about these issues at length. It hadn’t been all that threatening, just lurked in its hiding place, keeping its head down. So we drank some more beer and eventually forgot all about it.

Duck Weather

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Today the wood is calm. We awakened to rolls of mist filling the valley, dark skies and not a hint of sun. It’s now noon and I can make out the foot of our garden and tall trees on the valley’s far side. The sun is making brave attempts to break through, though I think it may be closer to evening before the day brightens, if it does. We must watch and wait.

The canicule has departed, leaving us with torrential rain, thunder and lightning. Yesterday we drove to the airport and the journey home was similar to driving in a fishbowl: rivers of water on the autoroute and visibility no more than two metres. Luckily no one was driving in the typical French manner: right up your rear bumper. And today there is no signal to be had on any of our 5 cellphones or the laptop. Such are the joys of summer in South-West France: a feast of delights when the sun shines, dark ages gloom when the storms come. But do we care? Do we ‘eck as like! We can take whatever the weather throws at us, we’re from strong northern stock and used to the unpredictability of UK weather. Just like these two.

Wimps Abroad

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Sitting out on the garden swing seat with partner, something rustled nearby. Partner exclaimed, Holy Shit! and gasped that it was a massive snake and that he had just startled it enough that it fled into our cellar. Spent next several hours trying to (a) ignore it and hope that it would go outside again, (b) make noise to scare it to go outside again, (c) with Aussie neighbour, who ‘knows about snakes‘, try to locate it where it was hiding under the staircase to see if it had buggered off. It hadn’t: its black and white zig-zag scales were clearly visible behind some breeze blocks. We gave up, left the cellar door open and went out for the evening. Much mickey-taking from friends about snakes and wimps. Typical, no respect, these Aussies.

Next morning, strong smell of fox in cellar, no sign of snake. Hmmm. Glad we don’t keep hens.

Back in the Old Country

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Here we are, back home for a week. Too much traffic, too many noisy kids, too many people in the supermarket checkout queue. But still… people say ‘How’re ye?’ They talk to you, in proper sentences, they put you right if you take the wrong road, they’re not too busy to spend five minutes explaining where your old bank has relocated to.
For sure, all the millennials are glued to their mobiles, pavement cyclists still try to kill you, but they apologise, with charm, at the same time. It’s a dangerous world, the Old Country, but friendly: know what I mean?
And did I mention how feckin’ stunning the Old Place is? Just so’s you’ll know you can believe me, I’ll post a photo.

Green Shoots

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Could it be? Is Spring really on the way? The snowdrops have been decapitated in the recent winds, the daffs are nestling in their fat, papery cocoons, waiting for the whistle, and the begonia my sister sent me for Christmas is displaying new leaves. It’s quite an event when I don’t, by default, kill off a plant. I was sure it wouldn’t last, but here it is, Lent’s begun, and it’s still alive, shooting up, as they say of adolescent boys and drug addicts, though not with the same optics.

I love Spring. You can see where you are, for one thing. I could never live in Sweden, even though I worship Agnetha and Anni-Frid. And Bjorn Borg. Can you imagine anything worse, six months of near-total darkness? Or am I thinking of the Arctic circle? Could be, though the thought of cold and ice would probably drum out any worries re darkness. Never mind, here in jolly old Albion we have the proper four seasons, lucky us. Each has its own joys and wonders. Spring can be truly delightful, with crocus fields, bluebell woods and an end to your drippy nose.

Summer often results in the odd sunny day, the occasional butterfly, ladybird and even a bee or two. Not so hot that you have to leave your vest off, or anything, but pleasant, good for attempting a little weeding and washing winter’s smears off the windows. Don’t make the mistake of doing that in Spring, as it’s only too likely that winter hasn’t really gone away.

Autumn is lovely, with chestnuts and mushrooms and crunchy leaves to stamp on and the magnificent colours of tree foliage. That’s if the trees haven’t all been removed from the local avenues by the council, as ours recently were, to keep down the cost of renovating the roads. Such nonsense. Use my council tax to maintain the trees and start subsidising public transport again, you cretins. I will not start a rant about trees combatting air pollution, but I expect you know where I’m coming from.

Winter, I’m afraid, isn’t much fun. We don’t often get ‘proper’ snow, the kind you can build snowmen from, the kind that allows you to stay off school or work because all the roads are blocked by mountainous drifts. We get cold, wet weather in winter these days, with icy roads and pavements in the mornings, just to upset people who are already upset because they have to go to school and work, instead of tobogganing and throwing snowballs at the neighbours.

Still, at least they’re not in Malmo.