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As a result of largely Victorian philanthropy, most urban settlements have fairly extensive parks that harbour a surprising array of wildlife! A safari round the mature trees and shrubs will reveal a large number of (admittedly) small beasts, which with...
Cats may not waste much time imagining the future they would prefer and trying to shape it that way. But they are great opportunists, extremely adept at shaping the present how they prefer. There is perhaps a lesson there for us to emulate. Some years...
The problem with outsourcing to a private company, is not the outsourcing per se , but rather the ability and the knowledge of those doing the outsourcing. This is critical, because any company for hire will do only exactly what it has been told to do....
St. Rumon, also known as Ruan, Ronan, and Ruadan, nothing much is known of him beyond that he was probably an Irish missionary and that many churches in England in Devon and Cornwall were named after him. Some authorities believed he is the same as the...
Food for the lockdown Buckwheat groats. You should stock up on buckwheat groats. If you want to survive war, pandemic, brexit or end of the world you should always have plenty of buckwheat stocked up. That's what people cleaned shelves of in spring in...
Culbin is an eerie place at times, wandering through silent lichen-clad pine forest planted over the dunes, some of which are sizeable (the largest about 35m high), and in other places across beach-stones, now a forest floor. You have to keep your directional...
What to wear in the garden In this weather, several layers on top - T shirts under something warmer and a cotton jacket that I found in a charity shop. A pair of synthetic trousers (the kind of fabric that's made from recycled plastic bags) with a fairly...
Some closely related species seem much more accepting of people, up here Greylags will wander away from you, head sideways with a wary eye just in case, Barnacles, at the mere sight of the top of a human head 200 hundred yards away will jump up as one...
I have got so many things to do in the house! But I decided to break things down into smaller tasks .So for example, I collected all the mugs etc and washed them.Then I took a bag and gathered up dirty things that because of poor coordination means I...
The Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge. On the top floor of an unexciting-looking 1980s office building in a part of the city rarely visited by tourists, with very little signage pointing the way there or telling you you've arrived. When you...
From Across the Water Viewing the USA dream It seems to us out here That it seems a divided It seems like two lands A lot of bickering out Lots of bad blood out It would be nice for it To be a great USA United to make it great Lovely to see the dream...
The real problem with remote working driving a rush to the country is the disparity in house prices and incomes. If city dwellers can pay over the odds for a rural house whilst trousering big capital gains and keeping their city income, nobody in a rural...
Beethoven put birdsong into his 6th symphony, 'The Pastoral'. He also included a tavern band suggesting that they had the drink taken. I have heard a few jazz bands, of the trad type, who quite definitely had sampled the local brew, but usually to good...
Poor people wish to be wealthier , they wish to have the consumer lifestyles that the west have and are sold on their TVs and phones.. there isn't a great mass of poor who all wish to live like Brazilian rainforest communities with no impact on their...
Conservationists are to try to save wildflower meadows, rare pinewood plants and arctic alpine flora from dying out in the Cairngorms. Species such as twinflower, which has tiny, pink, bell-shaped flowers, are on the verge of extinction in the area. Wintergreen...
Return to Scotland of the Geese Up here on an island in scotland’s north there arrival for me signals the portent of winter, darker days, wild storms and seas, the sun lower in the sky, each day casting longer fingers of shadows, when they leave they...
The making of cheese on Scottish Islands has long been practised as a way of conserving the rich plentiful milk of spring and early summer, the grass is stimulated into luxuriant growth. The cows then have an abundance of herbage on which to graze. They...
General Washington was in friendship with Tadeusz Kosciuszko, A Polish military enginier who fought on the American side during American war for independence. He was even considered as an architect of several American victories because his field fortifications...
It was on October 13, 1884 that the Greenwich meridian was officially adopted as the prime meridian, the imaginary north-south line where the longitude was 0 degrees. A.S.Ganesh gives you a glimpse of how this came to be and where the true prime meridian...
FROM the nation's fascination with Elon Musk's latest ventures to fevered speculation about military aircraft being spotted soaring above our rooftops, it suddenly seems like many of us are gazing towards the heavens. Three declassified videos newly released...
If you want children to learn to the optimum, then you have to mix formal learning with play. The current, and former, governments believe that if you keep a child's nose to the grindstone hour after hour, then they will learn more than if you have them...
Some people like conspiracy theories because it simplifies everything in what is a very complex world into a neat a straightforward explanation. It also gives people that feeling that they're an insider, privileged to know what's "really happening" nod...
There are about 400 cheeses in France today, so you can easily understand the high importance of cheese in the French culture! In 1962, French President Charles de Gaules, was famously quoted as saying “Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux...
Many places of work have switched canteen machines for food and drink, to card only payments, and immediately found themselves backtracking, and having coin slots added to the new machines, following complaints from high numbers of staff at most levels...
Being committed to identifying and conserving the Scottish native honey bee – Apis mellifera mellifera . In time, we hope this species will be the bee of choice for beekeepers across Scotland. This, however, is a long-term aspiration and in the meantime...
