This week a shot from way back in the archives. I took this on a visit to London Zoo back in 2008. Because it was a nice day the people watching was as good as seeing the animals. I couldn’t decide which were the better “inmates”.
Apologies, everyone, for the sudden and less than desirable change of appearance hereabouts. My previously carefully hand-crafted theme has been well and truly borked by the latest version of one of the standard WordPress plugins. It had been threatening this for a while with various bits of silliness which I couldn’t’ pin down, but today it was total. The site displayed OK but I couldn’t get access at all and had to resort to reloading an old version of the plugins.
I will, I hope be able to fix the appearance and make it more readable, but for all sorts of reasons this isn’t going to happen for a at least a couple of weeks. And during this time posting may also be somewhat more intermittent and erratic than usual. So please bear with us. Normal service will be resumed as soon as we work out which broom-cupboard is the lurking place of sanity.
Thank you!
This is for all my friends who are suffering the school holidays …
Oh, now, come on Evolution! You can’t really create something that looks like this …
Sorry, we’ve not had a photograph for a couple of weeks; there’s just been too much going on and I’ve not been doing any photography.
Over Easter weekend I’ve seen a Jackdaw in our garden on two occasions. We’ve been here nearly 35 years and this is a first for our suburban west London garden, although I have once in a while seen the odd jackdaw around. Whether they are just passing through, or whether there is a colony establishing somewhere near-ish, I have no idea; although as an area we don’t have any significant number of jackdaw-friendly buildings/chimneys for nesting. These aren’t brilliant photos — they’re grab shots taken with my point-and-shoot through the study window — but (at least for me) they are an interesting record.
Following up his Tuesday piece in the Guardian (mentioned here) Simon Jenkins yesterday expanded on his reactions and why current reportage, reaction and policy is so dangerous. As he says in
During the more dangerous and consistent IRA bombing campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, Labour and Conservative governments insisted on treating terrorism as criminal, not political. They relied on the police and security services to guard against a threat that could never be eliminated, only diminished. On the whole it worked, and without undue harm to civil liberties.
All in all I find this rather worrying.
Simon Jenkins, writing for the Guardian website has a properly measured response to yesterday’s horrific events in Brussels: Our response to the Brussels bombings requires patience and restraint.
The wombat is a large, solitary and nocturnal relative of the koala, native to Australia. It has poor eyesight but an excellent sense of smell, which is its main navigation aid.
