Harry Harries Harriers (not)

It seems it's not only Blackmailed Binky in trouble this week. If the cops can stand this up, it will provide a heaven-sent opportunity to use the above headline. I should, however, point out that there is not a jot or scintilla of suspicion that any such unpleasantness has occurred, etc, etc...

Viability - A Thought Experiment

The abortion debate grumbles on, and this time round Viability has become the watchword. But is viability really the point? As this is the Thought Experiments blog, let's try one. Suppose a foetus/embryo was viable at every stage of its existence - and with the development of 'artificial wombs' etc, this might even become a possibility - would that make abortion at any stage impermissible? Or suppose human beings were so consituted as to be viable only after live birth at full term - would that make abortion at any stage short of full-term labour permissible?

A Warning To Us All

Somehow I missed the recent passing of this man, whose bizarre life should stand as a warning to all diarists - and, more especially, bloggers. Just imagine if he'd gone online...
I note that he was a Swedenborgian.

Time to Shrink the BBC

The strange phenomenon that is Nigella Express has also disturbed Jim Shelley. The show is an easy target because it's absurd, grotesque and, not to put to fine a point on it, bad. Somebody at the BBC thought it was a good idea to turn the poor woman into a slurping, slavering clown. Meanwhile, somebody else at the BBC thought it was a good idea to make James May look like an idiot. May made his TV name as the best informed of the Top Gear presenters - he's the one who knows that a certain Cadillac is really a Saab. He has a certain indefinable presence which is not that of the mere lad, but something more inward. He plainly cares about something, though it is not clear what. Ignoring all such nuances, the BBC gave him a show with Oz Clarke in which they drive around California in a big bus drinking wine. It makes no sense, it's desperately unfunny and Clarke and May plainly dislike each other. It doesn't even achieve the grotesque comedy of Nigella.  Such sloppy, ill-conceived shows - there have been many others - have begun to convince me that it is time to rethink my support of the BBC. This strange entity exists because of 'market failure' - a free broadcasting market would not result in certain standards being maintained so we agree to pay for a broadcaster with a special tax. But 'market failure' would only demand one TV channel and one radio station. So the BBC justifies its vast size by saying it exists not just to provide programmes that wouldn't otherwise exist but also to produce high quality versions of programme types that are available elsewhere - game, cooking, car shows, soap operas whatever. Clearly this second argument would place no logical limit on the size of the BBC. I have always gone along with this on the basis that, though the second leg of its justification is pretty wobbly, losing large parts of the BBC would, on the whole, make things worse. But the second leg depends on the BBC's ability consistently to make higher quality shows than the opposition. Increasingly, this isn't happening. Its schedules are heavy with dross. The second leg is buckling and, meanwhile, the corporation seems to be as enmired in phone-in and fakery scandals as everybody else. Is it time to cut the licence fee by 80 per cent and reduce the BBC to one TV channel - BBC2 - one radio station - an amalgam of Radios 3 and 4 - and, perhaps, a web presence? I am beginning to think so.

The Curious Matter of Moist

Amanda, second only to Nigella in the domestic goddess awards, points me in the direction of this. It's all about the way women - mainly - have a deep aversion to the word 'moist'. The lengthy discussion is strange and wonderful. Lots of other hated words appear, but 'moist' is the most consistent. I don't get this. I like 'moist', but then I'm a man. It's curious that the word 'used' seems to go along with 'moist'. But this is a family-friendly blog. I've always loathed the word 'promulgate'. Some sub once wanted to insert this horror in some copy of my and I started screeching. 'Sticky', now that's a bad word. What's brown and sticky? A stick. 

PS Rereading this, I realise I have an aversion to the word 'stakes'. I was going to write 'in the domestic goddess stakes' and I couldn't.

Taking to the Trees

We've all felt like this from time to time. But you'd have thought a half-naked wolfman might have managed a better quote than 'That's a bit inappropriate'.

Joey Chestnut, Burger King

This mind-boggling feat has received much attention. In the world of competitive eating, it is being described as a 'Roger Bannister moment'. Who know where competitive eating will go from here? Poor Joey (nickname Jaws) describes himself as 'drained'. Roger Bannister, had he been able to speak at the time and had anyone had the cheek to ask for a quote, would probably have said much the same. The things we humans do.

Anthony Clare and the White Coat Effect

More sad news (tho not on a Coren scale) for radio listeners - the death of Anthony Clare. He was a brilliant 'in-depth' interviewer who, with his long-running In The Psychiatrist's Chair series, conducted some of the most revealing and intimate interviews ever broadcast. It was a brilliant exploitation of what I call the 'white coat effect' - the transforming impact of professional mystique, which shrouds common sense (or indeed nonsense) in an oracular aura, ensuring that it is listened to with heightened attention and even acted on. With that inspired title, Clare was able to create a pseudo-clinical atmosphere and, while doing very little himself, come up with revelations that his subjects would never dream of spilling in a mere interview. Not everyone fell for it of course - Geoffrey Boycott gave a characteristic display of straight-batted stonewalling, while Jimmy Savile disarmed Clare by cheerfully owning up to being a psycho. However, when it worked - and most of the time it did - it created some riveting interviews. Interviews is all they were - the psychiatric content was really nothing beyond a vague assumption that early experiences in life have an effect - but Clare was one of the very best. He made some great radio (it never quite worked on TV) and I hope Radio 4 at least devotes an Archive Hour to him.

The Suicide Hotline

Having spent an inordinate amount of time recently on automated phone lines, this made me laugh or rather cackle bitterly.

Lovelock and Nigella

Last night, returning from a superb lecture at the Royal Society by the great James Lovelock, I think I heard Nigella say something like 'I don't know of a time when I don't want to eat a tortilla.' Having been pondering the end of the world as we know it, I suddenly found myself imagining Nigella playing tennis while eating a tortilla, swimming while eating a tortilla, having sex.... No I'd better stop there. Jim was saying the world must go into wartime mode not to stop global warming - we can't - but to adapt to its consequences. He has always said Britain was at her best during the Second World War and he dreams of a world similarly unified against a common enemy. Gaia - our mother - is now our enemy. But a man from Zimbabwe stood up and said people in his country were starving to death while, across the border, there was an obesity problem. People don't, in the end, make sacrifices for their neighbours. Jim nodded sadly.

Poetry and the English Imagination

Months, maybe even a year ago, I wrote an article on poetry and the English imagination for The Liberal magazine. I forgot all about this until today when I saw this article being mentioned on various blogs, notably Frank Wilson's. At last The Liberal has appeared and here's the article. It's like finding a lost child or, perhaps, an article written by somebody else with which I heartily agree.

Binky's Bad Morning

It's been a tough morning for 'Binky', prince of Godalming. First, it turns out there's a defect in the fabric of space time, then - horror! - his distant cousin Charlie Wales was right about organic foods and, finally, the reptiles are going on about his spot of bother with Strachan and McGuigan. Old King Abdullah would have the lot of them beheaded while lecturing the British on their inability to deal with Saudi-backed terrorism. Spot on, in Binky's humble opinion, that's how to run a royal business. 

Remembering Raleigh

On this day in 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh, explorer, adventurer, courtier and great writer, was beheaded at Whitehall. See the Death section of this for the story. Then read his last poem, written, it is believed, on the night before his death. They knew how to die - and live - and write - in those far off times.

For Ming

No, no that Ming - this Ming, the peace-loving clam who gave up his life, all 405 years of it, for science. On the face of it, the secret of long life would seem to be to do nothing. File under useless information.

Will Child Labour End Child Labour?

Anything that dents the massive self-righteous smugness of that odious store chain Gap is to be welcomed (and this is not the first time such discoveries have been made). However, I feel obliged to ask, What is so wrong about child labour? Harsh, yes, and undesirable, but it's an inevitable feature of all societies which haven't achieved the undreamt-of wealth that comes with widespread industrialisation - and, like it or not, it can be one of the routes out of poverty. Aren't these child workers helping to lift their families above the level of dire poverty at which they live and towards the small surplus that will enable them to get on? By this argument child labour is itself ending child labour, and our 'enlightened' intervention is - as in so many areas - serving to keep the really poor really poor, while making us, the really rich, feel good.

My Booze Cruise

I was in Dunkirk - I said I would return after that previous unpleasantness - buying wine yesterday. As I did so, the dream ended, as dreams involving City always do. Never mind, the day produced great consolations. I've never done this booze cruise bulk buying thing before. (The truck, obviously, came in handy.) Now I shall never buy wine in this country again. The festival at Dunkirk demonstrated how ruthlessly we are ripped off by the government and the booze industry. A direct comparison would probably show that the wine was half the price, but really it was much less than that because what appeared to be similar wine to that sold over here was, in fact, much better. We get the dross and we are charged a fortune for it. And, while I am on the subject of the French Way, before getting over-emotional about the rugby in Paris, I went to the Rue Cler, not far from the Eiffel Tower. It was sublime, there is nothing like it in London - decently priced shops and superb service. This is because, I am told, an act was passed in the seventies making it illegal for the big stores to move in on areas like this. Rents fell and real shops thrived. This is a typical Enarque idea - highly intelligent, highly educated bureaucrats, groomed for public service, look out for threats to the French Way and then put a stop to them. It's not Our Way and it can go horribly wrong. But, at Dunkirk and in the Rue Cler, it goes very right indeed. Sarkozy may change all that and make the French more like us. If he succeeds, we may well find them more sympathique, but also much less enviable.

Venter, Sacks and Sex

Today in The Sunday Times I interview Craig Venter,  I review Oliver Sacks and I discuss sex on television. 

This excess explains why I have been a bad blogger this week.

Smile You're On CCTV

Uhoh, looks like Bryan's off on another mission of national, nay planetary importance - and on a Saturday. He works too hard. Slow down, Bryan, say No...
Meanwhile, this is from the Daily Mail, which I know is unlikely to commend it to many of you out there, but it is excerpted from a book, by a good journalist, and it is at least interesting. The growth of surveillance in recent years really has been one of the biggest changes to our national life, and yet it goes largely unremarked, and most people seem to find it reassuring if anything. Are they right no to worry? It does suggest a touching faith in the good intentions of those running these systems. Should we apply Lenin's Who Whom analysis to this? Should we, with the government identity card still looming on the horizon and ever more cards carrying ever more information becoming available and being heavily sold (e.g. the ever-expanding,soon to be compulsory, Oyster phenomenon in London). All this and CCTV everywhere - all but impossible, as Clark's piece demonstrates, to evade. This cannot, surely, be a healthy state of affairs. At the very least it creates the infrastructure for state (in broad terms) oppression. Is it anything more than good luck that the state at present isn't particularly oppressive (tho becoming more so)? We'd be rash to assume this is going to last, wouldn't we?
Don't forget to 'Scroll down for more'!

Fat Felon Caged

Here's a gratifying sight - a grey 'squirrel' behind bars. Naturally the brute was released, and has no doubt set fire to several house by now.

Flamehaired Cavemen

I draw your attention to possibly the least interesting, least story-like 'story' of the day - cop this. Earth-shattering eh? Almost as exciting as Gordo's announcement that he's thinking about cutting the 30-year rule to 20 (to embarrass the Tories) and moving towards, God help us all, a Bill of Rights and Duties. You are feeling sleepy........

Don't Stone the Crows

Crows have been on my mind a lot lately (maybe I do have too much time on my hands after all). This is partly because I'm reading Mark Cocker's rather wonderful book about them, Crow Country, and, in tandem, W.H. Hudson's still more wonderful Birds In London, which is largely about crows in their various forms. I'm trying to love these big black birds, with their slouching posture, ugly gait, preposterous beaks and malicious-seeming eyes - and it's not easy. Rooks are one thing (Cocker points out something I'd never consciously noticed before - that the instant shorthand for a British rural location, on TV, flim or radio, is a background of rookery sounds). But the carrion crows that are invading my corner of Surrey suburbia in ever increasing numbers are another matter. This morning, as I left the house, the racket was amazing - so loud and hideous I thought the local parakeets and jays must be contributing, but no, it was some kind of ferocious territorial battle among the rooftops and chimneys, between crows and magpies. Crows have been known to eat young magpies, and for that they should be applauded. If it was reciprocal, they might even get each other's numbers down, but there's no sign of it - and the crows, now, are definitely in the ascendant. The unfortunate effect of this burgeoning corvid population is a decline in songbird numbers - smaller birds, their young and their eggs are all grist to the corvid mill - but of course that sinister organisation the RSPB won't blame any bird for anything. Still, crows can be loved - as Cocker and Hudson and even this demonstrate. I'm beginning to come round to them already...

The Dolls' House and Pegs Caption

Actually, this is the still too busy to blog anything but a caption caption.

The Airbus A380

An insanely busy day has kept me from the blog, but I am overcome with the need to point out that the Airbus A 380 is a bloody ugly machine. It appears to be suffering from hydrocephalus. It also looks as though it was designed by a child as just a fatter version of any old plane. The 747 is one of the most beautiful machines ever built and almost all Boeing planes show clear signs of the workings of a high aesthetic intelligence. Airbus is just a committee. Flying is hell these days. Making it ugly as well is the last straw.

Comedy With a Point?

A new series of The Armstrong and Miller Show begins tomorrow on BBC1 (a television channel, for those of you who have lost touch). It's sketch comedy - surprisingly funny, much of it - and the recurrent sketch that everyone's going to be talking about features a pair of stereotypical World War II fighter pilots talking over the day's action. The joke is that they do this entirely in present-day pseudo-black teenage street talk - and the result is quite alarmingly funny. This is, of course, comedy with a point - the point being the immense gulf in attitudes, language and world view between those young men, many of whom died in action in their teens, and today's teenagers. The steepness of our national decline could hardly be more eloquently embodied. But is it the point that makes it funny? Picking up from comments after yesterday's Alan Coren post, I think we should always be cautious about finding a point, or a message, in comedy. Real comedy cuts so much deeper than that - which is what Wilde meant when he said that 'Life is too important to be taken seriously'. Serious consideration tends to throw the obvious back at us - comedy, at its best, is an act of oblique reimagination that yields something altogether new, a second creation.

Naked Sleepwalking - A Cause For Concern

Duh - where's Bryan? Probably naked sleepwalking somewhere. Yes, another social menace has been drawn to our attention by the tireless efforts of the media/PR machine. I'm gratified to note that this, like everything else, can be attributed to booze - but also, note, 'not breathing properly' through the night. So best say no to the booze and stay awake all night to check you're breathing properly. You know it makes sense. But why the seven-fold increase? And why Travelodge? I guess the answer to the latter's easy enough - these people are so desperate to check out they're not even bothering to get dressed.

Dog Oil

Browsing just now in Holland & Barretts, I was startled to see little tubs on sale that proudly bore the legend Dog Oil. Have I, I asked myself, strayed into a Korean delicatessen? No, it was H&B all right, and Dog Oil, it seems, is such a well know and well loved (and entirely dog-free) product that it even has a website with Frequently Asked Questions. It sounds lovely (and I bet Big Chip Dale knows of this product)... But that's not all - there is also this far from lovely, but very funny story by Ambrose Bierce. Now there was a fine comic writer, albeit of the blackest hue. If you don't know it, get your hands on The Devil's Dictionary and keep it by your side through life. You won't be sorry.

Satnav Politics?

Lame catchphrase of the day comes courtesy of Lib Dem leadership candidate Nick Clegg/ Satnav politics eh? Dashed clever, that'll surely catch on, that'll inflame the electorate... I thought Chris Huhne was the one on drugs.

For Brian the Gardener

I have been watching, off and on, the new series by the much improved Jamie Oliver, Jamie At Home. Increasingly I find myself intrigued by the mysterious figure of 'Brian', designated only thus and as 'Jamie's gardener'. This man deserves a spin-off series, if he could be bothered to make it, which I doubt. With his soft, languid drawl and damaged air, he gives the impression of a distressed gentleman, or a drug casualty, or quite possibly both. He seems to have stared into the abyss, to have gained some kind of wisdom and repose, and to care little about this sublunary world. He talks very little, and that barely audibly, but always to the point. He also has a formidable capacity for hot chilli peppers... But above all he has, in spades, that quality so rare among TV personages - stillness. Perhaps he is a Buddhist. We have come full circle.

For Bryan the Buddhist

I received an e-fan-mail the other day expressing gratitude that I was such a wonderful writer and a Buddhist to boot - 'Your writing is absolutely delicious, and it's also nice to know that you're a teacher in what makes ultimate sense to me.' This is because I share a name with a great good man, Bryan Appleyard, who is vice-president of the Buddhist Society. Today, I note, he is advocating meditation in schools as a way of producing 'greater concentration, awareness, clarity, equanimity and tranquillity'. Well, I'm all for that. To tell the truth, the more I hear about this Appleyard chap, the more I like the cut of his jib. Lately, I have begun to wonder if we are, in fact, the same person - it's a very rare name after all, there's only one Bryan Appleyard in the whole of the US. Anyway, since Buddhists reincarnate, is it not possible that, through some kharmic cock-up, one of us has reincarnated while still alive? It's the sort of thing that happens all the time on Stargate SG9. I hope Bryan the Buddhist is my reincarnation; he's plainly a better person than me so it would mean I was on an upward path and not destined to be a snail or anything.

Alan Coren 2

I was lost in France when Alan Coren's death was made public. Nige said it all, of course, but I feel a need to be involved. Here, thanks to a pointer from Frank Wilson, is one of his great late columns. This is a prodigious piece of writing - note, for example, his games with prepositions - that seems utterly effortless. Having read it, you feel you could do it, but you can't. It reminds me of one of his Punch columns about getting up in the middle of the night with a hangover. His description of the head-splitting effect of the fridge light consoles me still. Through such effects, Coren redeemed our ordinary sufferings. He made little things so funny that they seemed to glow with greatness. For me, thanks to Coren, fridge lights have become aspects of a fabulous,though absurd, adventure. He glamorised our incompetence. In the face of this ridiculous world, Coren tells us, just getting by is heroic. Nige says Coren was the funniest man in Britain after the death of Peter Cook. I'd also put Auberon Waugh up there. In fact, Waugh was a greater prose writer but, perhaps, not quite so comically inventive. V.S.Naipaul once told me, that, after considerable thought, he had decided Bron was a better writer than his father, Evelyn. He may well be right. Either way, both Coren and Waugh were funnier than, say, James Thurber and, as writers, they were way ahead of almost all of our currently feted 'literary' authors. But, unlike Thurber and those authors, neither seems destined to enjoy post-mortem literary acceptance. This is absurd. The British tend to over-rate everything about themselves - from football teams to the NHS - but they massively under-rate their comic writers. They just end up being consigned to the least funny shelves in Waterstone's - those labelled 'Humour'. Collected Waughs and Corens in distinguished 'literary' jackets should now be flying off the shelves. Blue plaques should track their lives and academics should write learned texts on their techniques. It's not going to happen. Those of us who know will just have to remain quietly grateful to have been alive when Coren and Waugh were making life seem lighter, better, funnier and so much more bearable.

Britain's Booze Shame

I blush to bring this to your attention. When decoded and deconstructed, it reveals the shocking truth that the UK is 13th in the European drinking league, just barely above the EU average and struggling to drink even two-thirds as much as the doughty Luxembourgeois, Czechs and Estonians. Come on Britain, pull your socks up - you're just not trying!

Britain's Obesity Shame - Plus Trevor Redux

It's almost too much to bear. After a weekend of dashed hopes in the sporting arena, news comes that we don't even head the world rankings in obesity. This is a poor show, in the one league we surely could, with a little more application, win.
But, talking of the decline of TV, there's news that ITV is to wheel the sainted Trevor McDonald back in front of the cameras to front a new-look News At Ten. Why??? Was there ever a more wooden, unresponsive, rabbit-in-the headlights newsreader? Okay, Huw Edwards maybe - but at least he's not revered as some kind of national icon. Except perhaps in Wales...

Eat the Badgers

Of course, killing all the badgers to save the cows is just silly. What we should be doing is releasing the cows into the wild, rounding up the badgers and demanding exciting new badger steak recipes from the sublime but apparently insane Nigella. Last night she gave Alan Yentob salted peanuts in chocolate sauce. He nodded approvingly. Badger, I am given to understand, goes very well with jam.

The Goldfish Check-In

Air Canada is an airline at the cutting edge. Its latest innovation is the goldfish check-in. The brains of its staff are specially programmed to forget everything as soon as they have checked somebody in. So, when a new customer appears before them, something like this goes through their minds:

'An entity in my visual field is occupying space and reflecting light. It moves. It is shaped like me. But what am I? This entity is pushing something towards me. What does it want me to do?'

And so on until they succeed in identifying themselves as people who check in passengers, usually by calling somebody on what they have finally worked out is a phone and then hanging on for half an hour. This, of course, takes a long time. But Air Canada passengers don't mind. In fact, airline passengers in general don't seem to care how badly they are treated. Is there any industry that has so ruthlessly and systematically lowered its standards and got away with it? Well, maybe television.

Apples - Can Things Be Getting Better?

I can't believe I failed to mention yesterday's Apple Day - especially as I was so recently in Normandy, where strange and wonderful varietals hang from every tree (and people actually bother to pick them and use them). This Day is the work of the excellent Common Ground organisation, and has undoubtedly improved matters in England. Several supermarkets now stock interesting English varieties, at least for a while, and they stick litle union jack stickers on their English apples - of which there are many more than there used to be. This is a great improvement on the situation even ten years ago, and shows that, counter-intuitively, things can, in some small ways, get better rather than worse. On the other hand, the hell-bound handcart trundles ever on - the egregious Alan Johnson is at it again. Why stop at children? Why not send the rest of us letters telling us we're fat? I'd love to know, by the way, what the current definition of 'obese' is. A couple of years ago, I had a medical for insurance purposes and the doc declared, with a straight face, that I was 'just' the right side of obesity. I am 6ft 4in tall and weigh about 12 and a half stone.

Paris, Paranoia and Ed Balls

Sorry, sorry, here I am. Things got a little out of hand in Paris and these old bones and this grizzled head needed some downtime. Having saved the world in Canada, I failed to save English rugby in France in spite of some Mission Impossible heroics in a phone box surrounded by agitated French riot police. (As ever, I thought they were after me. It's my special paranoia. I always think ambulances with their sirens going have been sent for me, and, at the sight of fire engines, I assume flames are spurting of out of my clothes.) Some English guy had declined to pay for a drink and Sarkozy had sent down an executive order to terminate him with extreme prejudice. Great city for a neutron bomb, Paris, take out the people and leave the buildings. And so we lost the cup, the worst football team in the world reverted to type and Lewis Hamilton did not become World Champion. A bereft nation must cling gratefully to Sven's wild ride at Manchester City. Sven rocks - two words that would once have seemed as unlikely as 'Cool Gordon' does today. And speaking of Brown, I note that his 'most trusted' apparatchik Ed Balls has been screaming that his boss is a coward. I've never liked Balls, with his glibly impervious face he looks like the sort of man who does not know what he does not know, a fatal failing and one that is all too common among political courtiers. We have democracy because politicians were finally forced to accept the depths of their ignorance. To forget this is to forget everything. I think Balls and many others, encouraged by our dumb need for simple stories, are showing signs of amnesia.

Morning After

Sacré bleu! Ou est Appleyard? Empty bottles, broken hearts, shattered dreams... Me I took adavantage of last night's rugby madness to dine out, all the restaurants being pleasingly empty. Having been obliged to play rugby at an impressionable age, I'm afraid I am unable to see it as anything more than institutionalised homoerotic sadism. No doubt I'm missing something...
Anyway, two stories have caught my eye this morning. When Lib Dems and Class A drugs collide, the result can only be top comedy - and so it proves here. The 'can't remember' defence has seldom been employed more elegantly and more plausibly. My previously undetectable admiration for Huhne has suddenly rocketed - and I could say much the same for the man who bored a generation into life-threatening stupor with Tubular Bells. That strikes me as a pretty good summing-up of (some of) what's wrong with this benighted country. Maybe Bryan's decided to emigrate too...

Sanity Sensation!

A rare moment of sanity in the ongoing Drink madness, courtesy of The Times. It will make no difference, of course - the wowsers, having made smoking all but impossible, are now hellbent on doing the same for drinking. It's too late for us helpless drunks down in 'leafy' Surrey though - cheers!
I wonder what Bryan's up to in Paris... Is something happening there?

Alan Coren

Really sad news this time - the death of Alan Coren, England's finest humorist by many a mile. After Peter Cook gave up and died, Coren was surely the funniest man in Britain - a superb comic writer, whose style was forged by prodigiously wide reading and an equally prodigious intellect, but was always entirely natural, and often killingly funny. And he kept on being funny - always the hardest part - over four decades and more. I remember reading him in Punch before I was even into my teens and being dazzled and astonished that anyone was writing like this (no one else was, especially in Punch). Later I crossed his path a few times, but knew him mostly at second hand. Anyway, it would make no difference if I'd never known him at all - he was one of those vanishingly rare people of whom you can truly say that his death leaves the world a sadder and a slightly darker place.

Butterflies Again

Sad news - the London Butterfly House at Syon Park is closing down and relocating to Lincolnshire - a fine county in many ways, but a long way from London. I hope someone seizes the opportunity to open another butterfly house elsewhere in London. When I was in Lisbon a couple of weeks ago, I visited the butterfly house in the excellent botanical gardens there and found it full - very full - of Monarch butterflies. They were everywhere, and I even had one on my head briefly - but alas no photograph.
Talking of photographs, with Bryan off on his travels again, I thought bloggers might like so see this sneak pic of a corner of his funkadelic Seventies pad.

James Watson

I am delighted to see