Thank you to Notes from Poland Online for the Headline
Scientists from Poland are seeking to solve the mystery of Poland’s ” Crooked Forest”- a set of 90-year old trees with bizarrely curved trunks by developing “tree bending technology” to recreate their unusual growth. Bonsai on a big scale.
The research is being done as the Crooked Forest located near the town of Gryfino in Northwestern Poland has some trees that are getting older, and dying out. They are pine trees and the objective is to understand why they grew their curves and to replicate it to grow a Crooked Forest 2.
Historically the reasons why the trees were grown that way in the first place have been lost, but it will not be an easy feat to replicate and may take many years. Meanwhile the forest which once consisted of about 400 curved trees now only has about 100 left and time is running out.
Thanks to the Standard London Online for the Headline
Just shows what can happen when someone moves on in their job having made a decision that no one at the time thought was very important.
Wandsworth Council apparently paid out £600,000 to redecorate and upgrade two railway bridges at East Putney Tube station including “pigeon proofing the site “. Locals are renaming it the Ikea Bridge in honour of the famous Blue and Yellow of our favourite Swedish Furniture supplier. Nearby residents feel the colours are garish and do not fit in with the area, meanwhile Network Rail and a senior transport planner at the council say that the “negative comments” are relatively few considering the large number of local residents and station users and there are no plans to repaint the bridges.
Thanks to Lisa Young and BBC Online News for the Headline
And here’s a rub everyone should know about. The CQC charges those who need assessments to provide healthcare a £1000 registration fee along with the significant administration commitment to maintain registration and have the required inspections.
Unfortunately due to a change of Law, remote voluntary search and rescue organisations now fall under the remit of requiring a CQC inspection and the organisations themselves being purely voluntary and really being made up of knowledgeable mountaineering enthusiasts and rescue dogs simply do not have the money or the time to achieve this registration and therefore will have to cease operating. This is a ridiculous situation.
I know A & E can be very busy and also they really only want to deal with serious situations.
However my partner and I were subjected to a doctor’s decision to give my partner an arthritis drug which caused him extreme heart palpitations. Not very funny , and he now will be on statins all his life.
It took us about three years to really find out the source of these palpitations and unfortunately when the heart starts beating very fast it is very scary, so each time we had an “episode”, we generally contacted the health service, initially ringing 101, but once we went to A& E at our local hospital and he was seen very quickly and a male nurse began the routine of preparing him for an ECG or whatever they do, it involved sticking needles in him and quite quickly a hospital porter picked him up and we were brought somewhere else within the hospital to be assessed. I was able to go with my partner. Which was fine.
What was even more fine was that it was determined that he was fine, things calmed down all his results were fine. I smiled and said “that’s a relief”. So the hospital porter appeared again and I followed as we were wheeled back to the original cubicle at A&E where we’d been.
I thought we were there to be discharged which I believe we were, but A&E have different priorities. So we waited a while, and I listened to the conversation some poor man was having with a Social/Health Worker telling him that he had to go home and that hospital was not the right place for him and she was there to complete his “assessment so he could go home.
I on the other hand was quite desperate to go home. It was then that the same nurse that had prepped my partner rushed in and began to go through the same procedures my partner had been through when we first arrived.
I had to intervene , ” don’t you remember us , he’s already had the assessment , we’re just waiting to be discharged. No he doesn’t need that.” I pointed at the needles. I said “honestly , no!” It was a tricky situation as I’m not medically trained.
Luckily, there was a look of ” Oh yeah” in the nurse’s eye and he nodded and went away. The next thing someone came and said that we could go.
To be honest, A&E wasn’t that busy that day and the misunderstanding was quite understandable , but when we got home and were sitting down having a cup of tea, we both laughed at the ridiculousness of it all.
All’s well that ends well, but we could have been in a permanent loop and never got out of that place.
Duolingo (the language application) works for me on so many levels I would certainly miss it if I couldn’t access it and also the benefits to me of learning something new, making connections and the potential for endless permutations which on the most basic level help my memory skills and on a broader level introduces new cultures to me.
At the moment the romance languages are my goal. I have a Spanish Copy of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick which I want to read in Spanish, it colours my life to be able to do this. I stumble over actually speaking the language. This is not surprising as in my real life I don’t speak very often, so why indeed would I suddenly be able to speak any language fluently. I do however find, that the saying quite ordinary things in Spanish or Italian lifts my mood and makes light of the day when you find yourself translating some tedious chore. Even if it is just to myself.
So there you are, it’s a lifetime app for me, I can see me in the nursing home contemplating Chinese characters representing specific syllables or a whole word, how wonderful is that? Duolingo even offers Navajo, which I have tried, and will return to, suddenly life is full of things to do. Do I feel bad about it? Why when it colours my life?
Thanks to Koh Ewe and BBC Online News for the Headline
So no high falutin’ Booker Prize or Melvyn Bragg buttery praise and late night interview for literary achievements in working class China. The main prize approximately worth £11,000 ( about what a unemployed writer here would get in benefits for a year dedicating themselves to research and writing) is awarded each year and is named after Lu Xun who is referred in some quarters as the father of modern Chinese literature.
The winner this year works as a Chinese Delivery man, his name is Wang Jibing and his poem Low Flight is inspired by the everyday challenges delivery riders face. Wang has had a tough life but his love of reading and of using social media in China to post his poetry has resulted in him gaining this prestigious ( in China) prize.
Sensibly Wang has told the media that he does not want to quit his job as it keeps him fit and also he does not want his life to change which in China is probably a very sensible thing to say.
It is his writing that has won and considering the Western view on Chinese censorship, I love the fact that they are celebrating ordinary work and that perhaps that what Wang really is doing is what literature should do , gaining readers by talking about subjects that affect their daily life. No big talk about a book, a film or a T.V. series, just Poetry for the People,read by the people.
Thanks to Katharine Hay and the Scotsman for the Headline
Apparently this is a problem in Scotland , though I think it’s also a Welsh problem too. I’ve got to admit I don’t like seeing Rhododendron’s taking over roadsides or forests, much as their blooms and colours are very beautiful, they are like the bully of the plant world.
Thankfully, the Woodland Trust has taken the stem by the roots and has asked the general public who visit Garden Centres to play detective and to report if they are selling Rhododendron ponticum which is native to Asia and was introduced to Britain as an attractive ornamental plant, however, it’s spread throughout the countryside and out of domestic gardens has had a detrimental effect on the landscape of wildflowers and native species.
The Woodland Trust of Scotland is looking to bring in legislation to stop Garden Centres selling these plants , in the meantime they are trying to gather the information so that they can find out where the plants are coming from. Adds a bit of spice to an otherwise pretty uneventful garden centre visit.
A bit like a game of charades, it’s a book and a film. The book though wins the day, by the late great Ian Fleming, written in 1964.
Ian Fleming probably more well known for his 007 books, in truth Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has a sense of adventure about it , fun adventure and Ian Fleming obviously loved cars and probably was quite handy at fixing them or at least dabbling.
It’s a book that gives you a wanderlust and a sense of adventure. How to avoid traffic jams and how to not get stuck on Goodwin Sands when the tide comes in while you are having a nap. It also has a sense of continuing adventure, so it encourages you to have adventures.
I was intrigued by this headline as when I arrived back from holiday after three weeks away , all my lavender that I had grown in containers and pots had died, literally shrivelled to a woody mass. The main problem was the heat of the sun, and the fact that positioned where it was at the front of the patio that the heat and lack of water destroyed it. Except it is supposed to be a very hardy plant. Although I’ve got to admit mine was very old.
Nice to know that the French have a similar problem, there is a possiblity that the Instagrammers will no longer be able to picture the swathes of purple in acres of fields to the instantaneous delight of their viewers. French growers for many reasons are switching to growing almonds, pistachio and ponengranate. Some are moving to raising laying hens under new French agricultural emergency acts( a shortage of eggs).
There are climatic changes too, so an infinity pool of purple into the distance may no longer be an option while sipping your impeccable dry rosé, but at least you can nibble almonds and pistachios with it.
Chickens wander through blooming lavender rows near a table with rosé wine and nuts.
Humanity like Nature is messy. Much as we’d like progress to be some constant improvement graph , neatly representative of a World that improves every decade and that we can look back and say “My; how far we have come?”.
For many reasons History is not like that. There are times and places where “knowledge” which is for the greater good is ignored and forgotten , some would say erased because of someone else’s idea of their good , whether greater or not. Individual ego sometimes wins the day rightly or not.
Those protected by Ivory Towers can analyse this record, and those of us of us lucky enough to have the time and money can read and learn about how easily the lastest technology in marine development can be ignored by such great progenitors of progress as the Roman Empire, basically they were not good sailors. ( I regularly listen to The Great Sea by the late and great Historian David Abulafia on Audible, it is really a rather good adventure story). Others were better equipped to roam the seas, the Romans were better at conquering land. Just think what might have happened if they had chosen to learn good seafaring techniques.
We have forgotten more than we have learned in many instances. So erasing is not a good habit to practice and certainly not in an historical context.
A mystical blue light fills a ruined ancient library with scattered books and debris
thenotsomightyom 