My Basset and Cat
This picture shows my basset hound and my cat.
My Basset and My Cat
As you can see, they are friends. But then the cat is half-Abyssinian.
No Fairy Tale – Poor Tom!
There was no fairy tale and the 59 year old Tom Watson didn’t win the Open.
Horse Chestnuts
Everybody in the UK, is familiar with conker trees.
Horse Chestnut Trees
This is a row that my late wife and myself put up several years ago, when we bought the house. They have done particularly well and you can see some conkers in the picture.
Interestingly, one was planted on top of the grave of one of our English Setters and that is the healthiest and biggest. Perhaps, when I go, I’ll get someone to put a tree on top, so that I can do my big for combating global warmings.
But the trees are suffering from horse chestnut leaf miner damage. This is a moth that is ravaging horse chestnuts all over Europe.
Horse Chestnut Leaf Miner
Note the damage in the leaves. This is only minor, but I couldn’t find a really damaged one to photograph.
The jury is still out on whether the moth will lead to the loss of some or all of our horse chestnuts, with Wikipedia saying no and my tree man saying yes. But at least it appears that some birds are taking a liking to the caterpillars.
Thou Shalt Not Sail on the Sabbath
What poppycock!
There appears to be a bit of a row on the Hebrides, about a ferry to the mainland on a Sunday.
The Hebrides is very much a marginal area of the UK, that needs all of the help it can get. And that includes tourists, who often have jobs to do, to pay for their holidays. They just might want to sail home on a Sunday, to start work on a Monday.
But as Caledonian MacBrayne, the ferry operator, feel it might be a case of human rights, they have to provide the service.
As someone, who believes very much in the rights of people to do what they want within reason, I’m very much behind the ferry company. And what right does a whole load of people, who say they believe in god, have to tell me what to do, provided I don’t break the law? Especially when I don’t hold their views. Although, as I’ve said many times before I stick to the humanist principles of all the world’s major religions.
My late wife originally did believe in god and taught in Sunday School, but in her last twenty years or so, she lost all that belief. As she lay dying, she did not once mention god or religion. That further enforced my personal view, that god is just a figment of those minds that want to control us.
I hope that I’ll die happy, but without help from any supreme being.
RSPB and the A11
It now looks like that the RSPB are trying to stop the dualling of the A11. This was reported in yesterday’s East Anglian Daily Times.
Now I like birds, but they are very adaptable creatures and if we make adequate provision, they will move. But the trouble with a lot of bird groups is that birds come first and people and commerce second. Now, who is it that pays for their little feelgood group?
As I indicated in my post Where Have All the Birds Gone, it could be that some of the beliefs of the bird groups, actually reduce such things as song birds. I only say could be, but endless studies never seem to find a problem as to where have all the sparrows gone.
On the other hand, I’m not in favour of shooting either. In one picture, my late wife is pictured with a racing professional, who was shot because a gun was handy. I just don’t like guns and have banned them from my land, except where say a deer, that has been injured by a car, needs to be humanely put-down. They are just too dangerous to be in the hands of a lot of people who own them.
We just need balance between everything, so that people, commerce, farmers, birds and animals all thrive.
But please let’s have the missing link in the A11! And while we’re at it, let’s make the A47 all dual-carriageway from Yarmouth to Peterborough.
World’s Oldest Mother Dies
This is a sad tale of a lady who gave birth at 66 to twins and then died a couple of years later.
I would never want to be a father at my age of 62, let alone a mother. It’s just too much responsibility.
But you can’t impose laws on maximum ages to give birth as what would be law in say the UK, would be legal in a country that didn’t want to make it illegal. Also, there have been cases of natural conceptions of women in their late fifties. With people getting fitter and healthier, it will not be long before a healthy baby arrives to a woman over sixty, who felt that the need for contraception had passed.
It’s a difficult dilemma and it just goes to show how easy for some it is to get pregnant.
Bacon and Egg Salad – Part 2
I cooked the Bacon and Egg Salad, that I put up yesterday.
It was good and here’s picture to prove it.
Bacon and Egg Salad
Note that I used some Antoinette Saville gluten free bread for the croutons. They were fine, although I left them in the oven for slightly too long.
The salad was very good though!
Goat Finds God
Lord Myners is discussed in this article, titled “Lord Myners attacks bankers’ greed and finds God” in the Sunday Times. The opening paragraph says it all.
Lord Myners, the minister appointed to clean up the City, is so disenchanted by bankers’ greed and self-aggrandisement that he is planning to become a theology student.
He is one of Gordon Brown’s “Government of all the talents” and was Financial Services Secretary. It’s alright for this goat to find god, as he has already amassed a fortune of about £30 million.
I’m no fan of bankers, but by increasing the top rate of tax in the UK, Gordon Brown is actually playing into their and the smart lawyers’ hands. I sold two technology companies in the seventies and eighties, when top tax rates were at eighty percent and the lawyers had a field day and made large amounts of money, so that my hard earned money didn’t go to government schemes of which I do not approve. So we’ll see increased profits for lawyers and bankers again.
A few collective nouns sum up professionals.
- An anarchy of computer programmers
- A wunch of bankers
- A delay of solicitors
- A self-interest of politicians
Feel free to add some more.
Saving Fuel and the Planet
I have two cars; a Jaguar Estate and a Lotus Elan, which I use depending on the weather and who I want to impress or show up. Is that wrong?
But turn up at an engineering company in the Lotus and you get a crowd of people admiring it. I should say that it’s Norfolk Mustard or bright yellow and it does stand out. It’s also a very cheap car to run, as it does over thirty to the gallon, is very simple, has a very good Isuzu engine, so servicing is cheap. As an example, in the seventeen years my late wife and I have owned the car, it’s only had one new exhaust, a couple of of window motors and I think a brake cylinder. To cap it all the insurance is well under £300 a year. Depreciation is probably about zero and the car is still worth about £8-9,000.
You could argue that this is a truly green car (so it’s yellow), in that it’s lifetime carbon emmissions would actually be very low, because the car wouldn’t be scrapped after a few years. How much carbon dioxide is emmitted making a car? Actually not that much according to this report, but others disagree. But because Lotuses use plastic bodies, do they actually capture carbon?
The Jaguar is a workhorse and allows me to move the bits and pieces I need. I don’t really need it now, as it is too big for just me and my basset hound, but I probably won’t change it and just drive it a couple of times round the clock.
Normally, around the UK, I drive the Jaguar within the speed limits and typically would return about 44 miles of so to the gallon. On trips on continental motorways, driving at about 60-70 mph, I regularly return the mythical 10 m iles per litre. Now there’s a really crazy measurement, but it’s a good level for all cars to achieve.
On my last trip to Holland, I got stuck in traffic around Rotterdam and in the first hour, I did just about 25 miles. So to get the ferry with ease, I stepped on the gas (diesel) and drove at about ninety all the way to the ferry. And then on the trip up from Dover, I went with the traffic which was about eighty, rather than a legal seventy.
Now, the interesting thing, is that I returned only 37 miles per gallon. This was a sixteen percent increase in consumption.
So perhaps we should encourage people to drive to the limits to help save the planet.
Real Tennis
I play real tennis and this morning I’m off for a game.
Membership costs me about the same as I would pay at a normal gym, but it is so less boring.
Real tennis sometimes gets the reputation as an elitist game, but if they let me play then that must be far from the truth. You have to remember too, that every player has a handicap, so you can play any other in the world and have a level games with a fair winner. It’s all computerised and on the web too!
The Anonymous Widower 