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Yesterday, I had the need to go into Consett to do some shopping and I was just leaving the village when I spotted one of the Red Kites. As there are roadworks being undertaken, the bus had to halt at the right spot so that I was able to observe the Kite for three minutes as it circled in its search for food. In the low winter sun the Red Kite was beautifully illuminated. A delight that made the job of doing the shopping much more pleasant.
Then today while writing the previous post, I saw a pair of Red Kites on the horizon. I stopped to drink in the spectacle and my delight was increased as further Kites appeared. A small group of five Red Kites were out foraging together. I was able to watch for more than two minutes as they came closer and flew almost overhead in their search for food.
While there are many problems associated with living here, it is the wildlife and the natural history that really makes it worthwhile.
As I started writing this posting I don't know when I will be able to post it. As this morning, Sunday, I was taking my better half to the bus stop so she could catch the bus home. On the route walking to the Bus stop we pass the Telecoms switching box that handles most if not all the telecoms traffic for the village. It had been vandalised and was covered with a protective canvas cover and police tape. As we had approached the location, a telecoms van was just pulling away and obviously all work that could be done to restore service had been carried out, but it still took another couple of hours before I had telephone or Internet.
As an act of mindless vandalism this really does stand out as being particularly stupid, as it disabled the telephone system for a number of people. In my village there are a number of elderly residents who need the telephone for their safety and security. It is not infrequent that I see an ambulance speeding to the locations where the elderly folks live. Therefore this mindless action could have seriously endangered life.
While there are some things that happen in life that I can get into the mind of the people that do stupid things, there are other times when I just really can not. This is one of the latter. Why anyone would want to destroy such a vital part of the infrastructure is just beyond my comprehension. There has to be a serious cancer at the heart of our society for this to happen. At least from the enquires I have made so far, no one was harmed by this, but who knows what hidden harm has happened as a result of this mindless act.
Had it not been for the wonderful, informed and insightful response to my posting on the Tawny Owls and my wish to follow up on that, I would have been posting on this issue yesterday. As the first news story that I found on the BBC news website was this issue of a BBC News Photographer who was stopped from taking pictures.
As I recounted, when watching the Owls I had probably been seen by the police, and they had started to look for me. As they saw the Fox and possibly assumed that was the movement they saw, I did not suffer the interference that can happen. While I have recounted a couple of the instances where I have been stopped by the police while out watching wildlife, I get stopped on a depressingly regular basis.
While I realise that anyone roaming about in unusual places and at strange times could be suspicious and needs to be checked, it has reached the stage were I feel as though I am living in a police state akin to Eastern Europe of twenty years ago. In fact I was considering posting on this very issue for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
There is crime and criminal behaviour that the police need to prevent and detect crime, but police are abusing their powers under the anti terrorist act. If they have no other reasonable excuse they will cite section 44 and stop you anyway. Often the rational for the police stopping me is simply that I am on foot and carrying photographic equipment. It seems that if I had been in a car I would not have been harassed
However, the issue goes far wider than my inconveniences. While I realise that the terrorist threat is real, there is no sense in stopping and harrying people who are going about their lawful business. The most disturbing aspect of the way the government have reacted to the terrorist threat is the way the very freedoms the terrorists want to deprive us of, the government has taken away.
There is a culture that has developed in the police that treats the general public as, if not the enemy, something to be controlled. In interviews with senior police and politicians about policing issues, the answers that the authorities give create images in my minds eye of the footage we see of places like North Korea.
There is a lack of logic behind the police actions in stopping people from taking photographs. As in the press reports of terrorist trials, often one of the supporting aspects of the evidence is the film and photographs of the intended target. Therefore by stopping people from taking pictures the police will reduce the evidence base that can be used to convict these thugs.
Fortunately we don't yet live in a police state. No matter how much the police may think this would solve crime, it did not stop crime in Eastern Europe where there were police states. Also the more the police alienate themselves with the public, the less support and help the police will get. Just yesterday something happened that illustrates this.
My better half and I had been able to spend the day together. As part of this we went into Consett to do a little shopping. I really know how to treat a girl! Just as we were getting ready to get the bus back, I wanted to have a smoke. I was standing around outside the covered shopping market while my better half went back into a shop we had previously been in. While I was waiting I witnessed a child of about 11 or 12 dealing drugs. With the first transaction I was not totally sure that I had really seen what I knew I had seen. But the second one was blatant and clear.
I did consider calling the police but as I was concerned for my safety and that of my GF, I did not. Could I or should I have called the police latter? I don't know, I did not call or inform the police. I can justify this in my own mind as even if I had informed the police latter it was likely that I would have been identified by the dealers as the likely informant.
As much as I detest drugs and the harm they cause, I feel so dissatisfied with the police that I don't want to have contact with them if I can avoid it. It is the way the police are abusing their powers that is creating this situation, and in the past I would have considered it my civic duty to help prevent crime.
A link to the BBC Story
This is where the Inter-Web thing is so amazing, following my posting on the owls I have a real expert responding. Thanks Romillyh.
The behaviour that I witnessed is unusual, not least because Tawny Owls do have a strong pair bond and the normally mate for life and more importantly hunt together as a pair. While out watching Badgers I have seen this in action where if one bird fails to make contact with the hunted prey, the second bird has made the kill. The first time I saw this I thought it was competition for prey, so it shows how careful an observer has to be basing interpretation upon one or a few observations.
This is why I recounted my observations as well as adding my speculations. As the new juvenile is not banded or marked, I can not know for sure that the “new” female is not one of the offspring of the established pair. However, as normally the parent birds do drive off all their brood, it is a reasonable assumption to make.
That said I also voiced some of my speculations as to what is happening. Is the new bird an insurance for a hard winter? The honest answer is I do not know, yet when I was much younger and talking to senior birders in the past this was an observed occurrence. It appeared to decrease as winters in Britain became less severe. Therefore while it may not have been recorded scientifically, older amateur observers recounted this happening. While this may be behaviour that was lost in the populations in the South East of England, it could be that in areas like the North East where winters are harder, this aspect of behaviour is retained. I fully realise that at the moment I am speculating. However based upon anecdotes and others observations and some educated guess work, it could be that I have seen something rare and seen only in populations where conditions create this behaviour.
Also while I have not heard reports of a male mating with more than one female in Tawny Owls, I have heard of Barn Owls. Also there are many species of birds that do this. It would only be likely if there is sufficient resources to keep two families. Again I am speculating and trying to ask questions that could explain the behaviour, but it could be that local conditions have ensured plentiful prey. This in turn may make it possible for the male to support two females.
It is one of the delights of observing wildlife that there is always something new to learn. In time further observations may help answer some of the questions I have. Other peoples observations also help in gaining a clear picture too. It may be that time will show that my speculations are incorrect, but at the very least the observations have sparked my curiosity and I may be able to answer some or all of my questions in time. Equally I may never get to know or understand what was happening. Either way these Owls provided a wonderful night of wildlife watching.
While talking to my neighbour on Saturday, I heard that a Tawny Owl was perched on the roof line a few days before. A couple of days earlier I too had briefly seen a Tawny Owl sitting perched on the crosspiece of my back gate. I had rushed to grab the camera but it was gone when I got back. It appeared to have been hunting a Robin that was hiding in the yard.
Well the Wood Mouse being the adventuresome sort, you can read that as being mad, set out on Saturday night to track where the Tawny Owl was ranging. In the Autumn it is often easier to find them as the young raised this year will be looking for their own territories and while this brings them into conflict with existing territory holders and resident pairs, by tracking the calls it is possible to discover where the residents are as well as track the juveniles as they look for suitable hunting grounds.
So that is what I did, or at least set out to do. It was just that Owls don't like flying in rain and when it really stared raining all three of the owls were caught out away from their perches and roosts. Two were females with one being a juvenile and the male who is the established territory holder. In the natural world it is normally the territory holder that retains a territory. Therefore had the juvenile been a male it would have been driven off. This juvenile female was obviously not one of their offspring as the male appeared to be encouraging her to stay. At one point even bringing her a mouse or a vole. All this in sight of the established female. This feeding of the juvenile female prompted some intense calling by the established female. Was this jealousy? Was the male likely to have been in the owls equivalent of the dog house? To be honest I could not tell. Its far to easy to project human emotions onto this but the behaviour was extraordinary.
The rain may have played its part in calming the situation, as soon after the male had fed the new female and there had been the intense fifteen minutes of calling by the old female, the heavens opened and all the owls hunkered down to escape the torrent. All the while, this Wood Mouse acted like a sponge.
Eventually in a gap in the rain the new female flew off and while I think I know where she went to roost I could not be sure. Not least because I stayed with the established pair and tracked them back to their roost.
If in the spring the other female is still around will the male be trying to mate with her too, only time will tell. It may be that the male goes off with the new female. It may be that the male is ensuring that he has the choice of two mates should one not make it through the winter. A rather damp night of observations has raised more questions than provided answers. I had set out to discover the roost site and I did find it. But this little interaction has provided a rather unique glimpse into the behaviour of owls.
While watching the owls was the main reason I was out, three times I a fox, I think it was a dog fox, out patrolling and hunting. Because of a knick in his left ear I was sure it was the same one. What ever he had found, he was returning to take more of this food. Each time he would eat some and then carry off some of what ever it was he had scavenged or killed. At the distance and in the dark I could not see what it was, but while I think it was scavenged, each time he dove onto the food as though he was hunting. This is rather typical fox behaviour as they do this as if they are trying to say I am a proper hunter! It was during the foxes last visit that I noticed a police car stop and the officer used a torch to scan the area. I had seen it go past twice and I did wonder if the officer(s) had seen me from the road. I was about one hundred and fifty or so yards from it, and while I was keeping concealed from the wildlife, I had no reason to keep out of the view of people. Well the beam of the torch found the fox and he scampered, but I did wonder if the police officer had seen me and had thought I was up to no good. It would not be the first time that has happened, nor I doubt will it be the last, but the intense beam of the torch did disturb the fox and the owls too. The dominant pair moved from their sheltering spots and I did think I was going to loose contact with them. But fortunately the rain was so intense they returned as soon as the police car moved off.
While it did not happen this time, people with flash lights are a real bane and bug bare of mine. My night vision is quite good and better than most folks, but this can be ruined by the careless use of a torch. Police officers are the worst offenders for this. Instead of directing the beam towards the ground, they will always direct the beam into the face. This the police are trained to do as it destroys the night vision and it will take several hours to regain. While I can understand that it can be a useful tool when dealing with a suspect, the intentional incapacitating of a persons night vision is extremely annoying.
I was rather tired and wet when I got back home, but a warm cat and a hot cup of tea works wonders. It was getting light before I got to bed and I was looking forward to a good few hours sleep. However, at about ten I heard the phone ring, I ignored it. Big mistake as it was my better half and the mobile rang. She must have thought that I was being very lazy still being in bed. I explained that I had been up and out all night. Well I had warned her that I kept odd hours sometimes and it has caused some minor tensions as there are times when I really can not be disturbed. But as we just laugh it off latter, it never really becomes a problem. I need to educate her to avoid calling the cell unless it is essential. While I could turn it off at times, there are occasions when I need it for emergencies.
It is a shame that on three occasions that I have had to call the fire brigade out to fires that people have started in the woods, unlawfully I should point out. Also I have several times needed to call the police to deal with poaching or some other act of stupidity.
In the main though it is nights like this that make all those minor hassles become insignificant and the delights of seeing and discovering new and unusual behaviour of the wildlife that secretly share our space.
Last week when out on a supermarket run, something happened that made me feel that people really do care once they have the information. My better half really loves fish, as do I. However because of issues of sustainability I am really careful about what I buy. Not just the species but how its caught and often the company involved.
Therefore when I was looking at the frozen fish in the supermarket, I was looking carefully at what was there. One of my fellow villagers made a comment along the lines of you wont find any bargains there. Then she said that a particular product from Youngs, the biggest fish processor in Britain, was reasonable. I explained that I would not buy from them as a few years ago they closed a factory in Scotland and started shipping the Scampi (also known as Dublin Bay Prawns or Langenstein's) to Thailand to be peeled then shipped back to the UK. Well her reaction was to put back what she was going to buy and she chose another brand.
A small victory, but once armed with information people will make ethical and environmental choices. While one person will not effect much change, yesterday (Saturday) I learnt that several of the senior shoppers have stopped buying the fish from this brand as well. How many are doing this I don't know, nor how long this will happen I can not tell either, but it shows that people don't like the way that multi national companies operate.
For older folks it must be difficult to realise that brands that you previously trusted are not the ethical or trusted company you thought them to be. Also it is actually quite hard work to source foods that are sustainably sourced or from ethical companies. However, part of this problem of misleading food labels may change. In European Parliament MEPs and the commission will be looking at the problem in the coming week.
While the food labelling rules stem from an European agreement and rules, in Britain, Europe (the EU) is frequently blamed for rules that appear silly or stupid. But the reality is that Britain was at the forefront of getting these rules implemented in the way that the food industry wanted.
The purpose of these rules was supposed to make it simpler, easier and for food producers to use ingredients from across the single market of the European Union without having have a complex country of origin label on the packet. However, food processors and the major retailers realised that they could abuse these rules and mislead the public.
The problem is most prevalent with meat sold in packages in the supermarkets, where meat reared in another country can be imported into Britain and just cutting the carcase into joints in a British processing plant entitles it to be labelled as British. Therefore people think they are buying British but in fact the meat comes from anywhere in the EU.
As frequently Britain has adopted higher welfare standards for the care of livestock, these (deliberately) misleadingly labelled packs fool the public into buying meat (or other products) that is not of the welfare standard or sustainability that the consumer thinks it is. Even I who is aware of the scams the supermarkets are playing, have been fooled on occasion.
In the supermarkets defence, they say that most of their customers buy based upon price and I can understand that and consumers do and should have that choice. However, if they (the supermarkets) were to label the products with the actual country of origin rather than the deliberately hiding this, would they sell as much?
That question is quite important as the supermarkets make a greater margin on meat and other products that are imported, especially where they can obfuscate the real country of origin.
As my regular reader will know, I have been talking about this issue for several years now, and while looking into the matter I had an informal chat with a trading standards officer. I was told that in many examples of misleading labels from all the major supermarkets could well be more than misleading but illegal. The problem is that even if the local authorities were to prosecute, the cost is prohibitive (about a quarter a million pounds) and the fines are so small that it would do little or nothing to stop the supermarkets from repeating the offence.
People do want to support British farming, and often think they are in the choices they make. The supermarkets know this and it is why they do this. Yet this issue is not just a question of allowing people to make ethical choices, deliberately misleading labels are a public health issue.
If there was a problem with meat becoming contaminated in some part of Europe so that it was unsafe to eat, unless people can look at the label and check the country of origin clearly, people could end up consuming that meat unknowingly. I could see this happening and it seriously damaging the business reputation of one or more of the supermarkets.
This is what I don't understand about the shareholders, who are the owners, of the major retailers. As unethical practices like this may increase profits in the short term, whenever these practices emerge they damage the profitability of the business. Add to this potential for a food scare as a result of this particular immorality and the investors, the shareholders, the owners could loose their money.
While it will take a while for the labelling rule to be changed to ensure that this deception ends, the majority of the supermarkets customers want the major retailers to start being honest with them. So why not give the customers what they want as you say you do?
It was revealed this week that during the banking crisis when the banks were collapsing that the Bank of England, the British central bank, secretly loaned two of the worse banks sixty two billion pounds. This was all done in secret and this is what most disturbs me.
At the time, I was reluctantly agreeing and accepting that this had to be done not to save the banks but to save the economy. However, as more details and facts have become disclosed the less in favour of the actions that governments and the central banks took.
As Lloyd's bank took over one of these banks, in what was effectively a shotgun wedding with the government holding the shotgun, if I had been a shareholder (owner) of Lloyd's then I would be very peeved to discover this as HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) was in such a poor state and the shareholders were being asked to buy a “Pig and a Poke”
Taking just an economic prospective, asking shareholders to buy an asset or a business when there has not been full disclosure of the poor financial state of that business is unethical to say the least and may well be unlawful. However, it was the rational behind the governments actions that really needs to be questioned.
In Britain before the collapse of the banking system house prices were on steep upward trajectory. I know that in the US house prices had already started to fall, as was happening in other parts of the world, but here property prices were still rising, even though it was clear that they were already overvalued. Further as the government here in Britain were reaping substantial tax revenues from property sales. As were the estate agents garnering greater and greater fees from sales, plus this over heated housing market was supporting a major part of the retail sector as well as all the builders that were re-refurbishing these homes. Finally it was in the banks interest to keep the illusion that property prices would never fall. As simply all the loans provided would have looked stupid if house prices fell.
It was this rather cosy system that governments were trying to save. The illusion that the economy was doing well was only made possible by everyone pretending that property prices were reasonable and justified. Even before the recession started, I was pointing out that house prices were extremely overvalued, so I am not jumping on some band wagon here. But while high property values may appear to be a good thing, especially for those that already own their home, but any form of inflation damages the economy.
However, the real problem was and is that the British government via the central bank made massive loans to support two failing and bankrupt banks with the aim of maintaining the over inflated property market. For more than ten years government ministers have made statements that there is a shortage of housing stock. In most cases this has been untrue as there are more than one million empty homes in Britain. So we now have the situation where via government loans to the banks and equity stakes in some banks, the state is now extremely over borrowed.
Had the banks and the government been honest about the true state of the banks and the banking system the global economy would by now have been in a much better condition. This matters as there needs to be a massive investment into de-carbonising the global economy. But the worlds governments have bailed out the very institutions and businesses that created the banking crisis and the recession and whose unethical business practices are destroying the bio-dome of plant earth.
The future needed to change and we have allowed governments to maintain the status quo of allowing and encouraging greed, when we could have used the situation to genuinely save the world and not just save the bankers.
I just wonder what else the government has done in our name without telling us?
There are times when people do stupid things and when the details emerge, you can account for this stupidity because of low intellect. However when a government does it, you are left wondering about the sanity of the people who control our lives. Fortunately we live in a democracy and while democracy has its failings, it means that we have a free press and the ability to call our leaders idiots when they do dumb things.
This case of silliness did not even last a day but if it had been in some act of fiction it would have been rightly seen as beyond belief. But it actually happened. What I can hear you shouting. Well the a report in the medical journal “The Lancet” suggested that if we culled a third of all ruminants in Britain that we would create two main benefits. First that it would reduce methane emissions and slow down Climate Change, and that with less meat available, people would have healthier diets, reducing heart disease and obesity.
Now there are reasons why this is a stupid plan, not least because it is extremely over simplistic. First is the issue of methane emissions. While it is true that methane is a more potent green house gas than Carbon Dioxide, twenty four times to be exact, it also only has an atmospheric life of twenty one years. That means that it only lasts in the atmosphere for twenty one years before it vents into space. That is why it is used by scientists looking for extraterrestrial life as it is short lived and only exists where there is life. Further while it is true that there are now more domesticated livestock, in the past there were vast herd's of wild Bison and other ruminants across the globe and if methane emissions from animals was having an impact upon our climate, it would have been much hotter two centuries ago. Where methane effecting climate is a problem is were it is being released from permafrost as a result of Carbon Dioxide induced warming in the Arctic Tundra .
Equally while eating less animal protein could well have health benefits, and it may well help towards reducing the carbon footprint of the nation if consumption were to fall by a third, this would only be the case if we did not have a free market and international trade. If Britain killed off one in every three of our cattle and sheep all it would do is increase imports of meat from Europe and the rest of the world.
Now how The Lancet were rather silly in not looking at the implications of their report, and I am amazed that it should ever have been published. Yet it really was, but what really amazed and shocked me was that government departments started endorsing the report. I say started as it quickly emerged that no one had spoken to DEFRA The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who incidentally are nominally in charge of cows. That would be the government department responsible for carrying out such a cull, so at the very least should have been consulted before endorsing such a daft report.
When the flaws were pointed out, the government rapidly retreated from endorsing and adopting this as a policy.
Here is the report as it appeared on the BBC.
However, there is a much more serious aspect to this. While frequently adopting good environmental practices will create other benefits, these policies need to be well thought through. But this was never a good environmental model. As a medical journal its focus was on the health benefits of eating less meat. However the knock one benefits would only be there if this was voluntary. Trying to force this to happen would never work. Doctors should know that as people on diets would all loose weight if they only followed the dietary advice. But as all doctors know beating obesity is no simple task. Further, as a medical journal, “The Lancet” lacks the specialist knowledge regarding climate and pollution, thus they should have sought specialist advice regarding the effects of methane upon the climate. Had they done so, they would have realised that it is a myth that Farting and Burping cows are adding to climate change. I can understand politicos jumping upon that popular myth, but Doctors and medical specialists are supposed to be scientists and should have known or been able to find out that, current biological methane has little or no effect upon the climate, while ancient methane that the changing climate is releasing is.
The problem is simply that there is still an assumption that there can be a simple and simplistic solution to climate change. The reality is that as Carbon Dioxide has an atmospheric life of one hundred years and the effects of the increase in carbon dioxide in biosphere earth are the result of the CO2 released fifty years ago. Therefore, it is no longer a question of reducing carbon emissions but reversing them.
The simplistic view that we can continue to pollute, but maybe just a bit less, is a false one. As our whole economic model is based upon growth, expansion, using and consuming more, all the current efforts will fail. While having a laugh at silly ideas can make life interesting, what will happen to our world when someone does something really stupid like pumping sulphur into the atmosphere or seeding the oceans with iron? Both suggested as solutions to climate change.
The effects of a Changing Climate are here as demonstrated in Cumbria last week and it will not be until the global devastation of the seas rising will we finally accept that we have to change the whole nature of human society.
Saturday was an important day for my better half. It was the final night of her performing in the play. Also I would be getting to meet her mother for the first time, it was important for my GF that this went well. Therefore I had to be on my best behaviour. Well the meeting seemed to go well and it was interesting meeting my better half's American Mother.
I got to see where my better half was doing most of her work, as she initially was just doing stuff back stage. However, she then then asked to perform as the original cast member was unable to fulfil the role, so my GF was then acting in the play too. Well as I said in a previous posting regarding the opening night, I was very impressed with the play, the performances and the company. While an Amateur group, there was nothing amateur about their performances or dedication. Even if my GF had not been in the play, I would have been happy to have gone and seen it.
As my Better half was in it though, there is a greater enjoyment especially as the whole show went so well. One unexpected aspect was I was roped in to helping dismantling the set and clearing up after the final performance. It is not often that I have to pay to then do some work! But many hands really do make light work.
Following the play though, was an after show party. As I am still relatively new in my Gfs life and circle of friends, there was no one there that I knew. However as a friendly lot, they made me feel welcome, and I was happy to be able to genuinely compliment folks on their individual performances. It was rather pleasing to be around a real spirit of creativity. I can see how some people can become star struck. But as I used to specialise in doing theatrical photography, I never have been star struck. I can appreciate other peoples talents and respect them for that.
Following the party my better half and I had a long taxi ride home and we both had a wonderfully relaxing day just lazing about.
When I first met my better half, I told her that there are some activities that she enjoys that I would not be sharing with her. Things like going to clubs, even when I was younger I really did not enjoy visiting clubs. But I have no problem with her going out and enjoying herself and this she has done. Although I have been tempted to put up a notice on the door for her, as a joke, saying: What Time do you call this.
Equally there are activities that she is involved in that I am more than willing to share with her. Not least is her interest in theatre. In my distant past I specialised in doing theatrical photography so I do have an interest in culture and arts myself, but it seems that some men will pretend to be interested. Thus, even when I was with her on Tuesday and she needed to go to the theatre to check on some last minute adjustments my better half was concerned I was bored by this, but I was not.
I explain this as last night I went to the opening night performance of The Darling Buds of May that my GF was performing in. I had not told her that I was going, as I was not sure that I could make it to the opening night, also I would not be able to hang around, not least because of the transport connections I needed to make to get back home. But I made it to the theatre and I saw her performing for the first time. Well the first time I have seen her in performance.
While I had to dash off to catch the train back I loved the performance and while at the station she called me and was in tears as previous BFs would not have made the effort or supported her in this way. But as I have constantly said, I am interested in what she is doing and that I would always try and support her in her endeavours. And I think that she has talent too.
While her part was a relatively small part, it was important to the story and I was impressed by her acting. I was equally impressed by the acting of the other participants too and even if my better half had not been in the play I would have enjoyed going to see the play anyway.
I will be going again as I will be meeting her mother. So if I start typing in falsetto you will know why. Next time though I will have the time to stay behind and properly share in her triumph and celebrate with her.
While I knew that her Exs had not been that supportive of her and her dreams, I was a little taken aback by the tearful, all be it happy tears, when I spoke to my better half while at the station. I realise that it may not always be possible for folks to be their to offer support, but I would have thought that if you care about a person you should also take an interest in what they do too. But it seems that is not the way some men think. This was illustrated by the rather crass comments of two young men who were on the platform with me when I was talking to K. As you can imagine we do have our sugary bits in our chat. This was overheard by them and they were taking the mickey out of me for this. Personally I just ignored this. Then while on the train I could here them talking, and their attitude towards women seemed like something from the dark ages.
Had it just been them talking together, I would have just ignored them but they were also calling out and making comments to other women on the train. And it was clear that these were upsetting other passengers as well. On woman even moved her seat to get away from them. It reached a point where I could not tolerate the behaviour any more and I stood up and said firmly but politely “How would they feel if someone spoke to their Sister or Mother in the way they were?”
While the reaction from them was not unexpected, what was that five other men also stood up and in a less than polite way told them to shut up. They did remain quiet for the rest of the journey. When I got off the train a young woman who got off at the same station thanked me for making her feel safe. We chatted as we walked to the bus station, and as she asked what I was doing on the train, I told her that I had been to Hexham to see my better half in a play. Dam, why are all the good ones taken? She said.
Well while its nice to be called a good one, I am just happy that I have found a woman who likes me for who I am and I can support and nurture to be herself. Then to round off a great night when I got off the bus and was walking towards home I heard a female Tawny Owl call. While I could not see her, when she called again the male answered. What a perfect end yo the day, not only have I found love, but the owls have too.
Yesterday as I was meeting my better half for lunch after she finished her shift at work, I had a trip into Hexham. As there was a little rain when I left, I decided to leave the cameras at home. I was not sure the batteries were charged anyway, but the wet and digital don't seem to mix well. However, the weather did clear up, and the journey into Hexham was rather pleasant.
Though the start of the trip was a bit stressful as the first bus from my village was late, as usual, and I was concerned that I had missed the connection to Hexham. But I was there in time to make the connection, just. Had I missed it I would have had a two hour wait. While that would have still got me there in time for meeting my better half on time, I wanted to go wondering before hand.
But going back to the journey, the route the bus takes to Hexham passes by and through some plantation woodlands and with them being a mixture of Spruce and Pines, it looks as though nature has just painted great swathes of the woods with a golden paint brush, just to delight the eye. Also, with some of the fields still in stubble after the harvest and before the plough, there were pheasant and lapwings in them, adding to the visions that lighten the heart of a damp traveller.
While I have explored Hexham before, this was before getting some inside knowledge, and I do think that Hexham is a picturesque place. It is an affluent area and this is reflected in the type of shops, as well as it being a place that tourists visit. However, it was locations that I had identified as being possibly interesting for wildlife that I most wanted to look at. While in one of these places I spotted a Red Squirrel. An all to brief sighting but one that made my heart smile.
I also found a location where I stopped and watched the birds, mainly Blackbirds and Red wings, were feeding off the berries on the trees. As it was now dry, I was wishing that I had brought the cameras, but if I had I would have been late meeting my Girlfriend.
We met up and went for a rather nice lunch. As a tourist destination there are plenty of cafés in the town, and I quite impressed by the food we were served. The only major criticism I would make is that the chicken was clearly imported standard meat as it lacked flavour. For the price, I think a better quality could have been used. Everything else was fine, and I may be seen as being picky, but I think chicken should taste of chicken. Further a local free range bird would be supporting the local economy.
We went for a wander around the town and this time I was able to go into the Abbey. Previously, there had been a service and it would have been disrespectful of the worshippers for me to try and look around. It is an impressive building and awe inspiring. While I have no religious beliefs myself, I respect those who do and buildings like this are a testament to that devotion.
As my better half is playing a part in a play in the local theatre this coming week, I was taken to the theatre as she needed to check on a couple of things. I will post regarding the play soon, but you can only expect a rave review as I am bias.
Then before I had to get the bus back we went for a coffee. It was in a major chain and to be quite honest the coffee was mediocre. It was a pleasant relaxed atmosphere and I can see why she like the place, but the beverage should have been better. However while we sat and the sun set, we could see vast flocks of starlings retiring towards their roost site. While we could not see where that was, nor the morphing displays these vast flocks make, I said I would be returning soon to find and film them. At least I have found someone that understands my passions and will make allowances for them and me.
It was a really nice afternoon, and I am looking forward to seeing my better half strutting her stuff on the stage this weekend.
This year I have pleased to notice that in my local area at least, there have not been the problems with fireworks that can plague communities. While I can understand that fireworks are fun to see, personally I do not understand why they are available to the general public. Organised displays I have no problem with, but every year people are injured by fireworks. Normally at home displays.
Also, there is a significant minority who abuse fireworks and every year the news is full of reports of incidents where fireworks are abused or used as weapons of fear. In fact there has been a case of a woman who has been killed in a house fire started by the misuse of fireworks. As can be imagined the police are treating this as a murder enquiry.
A major part of the problem is that far to many retailers will sell fireworks to people that the law says can not buy them. It is often the same retailers who sell alcohol to children, therefore feeding the problem of anti-social behaviour. However this year the fire brigade who have the duty of inspecting the premisses where fireworks are sold, have objected to all applications because of the real risk of the fireworks causing a forest fire in the local woodlands. Therefore, there has been almost none of the normal problems for the residents and the wildlife.
There were still organised displays, and I have heard of no problems with them. Nor have I seen evidence of illegal bonfires in and around the woods. Over the past couple of nights I have been wandering around to check on fires being lit in the woods. Fortunately the weather aided this by saturating the area.
Therefore while I am a believer and advocate for freedom, it is completely illogical that we could have the right to buy explosives. Following the tragedy of nine eleven, there was a real opportunity for the government to have changed the law and stopped the annual rain of terror by the two legged rats that create fear in communities. But the economic argument won out. So we still have the situation where the brain dead can still buy explosives and fire rockets at peoples homes, stuff them through letter boxes, or throw them at people.
What the fire brigade and the local authorities have been able to do locally has worked. By keeping fireworks out of the hands of individuals has not stopped organised displays, yet it has prevented a lot of nuisance behaviour.
However, I would also question the whole ritual of Guy Fawkes Night. When I was a child the question was always asked what were we celebrating? Was it the attempt to blow up parliament? Or that the attempt to blow up parliament failed? The reality is that it was always an anti catholic celebration. Thus while the “Tradition” endures the true origins of the so called festival are now down played.
As the so called festival is founded on the torture and killing of the catholic perpetrators of a terrorist plot, it makes no sense. It would be as distasteful as celebrating the violent death of someone from a contemporary event. There is enough religious hatred in the world without us celebrating anti catholic feelings today.
I know my view is not a popular one, and most people choose to ignore the origins of the festival and don't care about the way that Fireworks are misused. But I genuinely think that Fireworks really should not be available to the general public.
There are few times when I have genuinely felt a pang of jealousy but there was a television programme that did generate this response in me. As my reader in Britain will know, the BBC have been showing a new Natural History series called Life. It is stunning and matches and supersedes the
high standard of film making that the BBC is justified as being famous for. However it was not the main series that caused my pang of jealousy, but a children's programme that has been made to accompany the main series.
As I could not watch the series at the time of broadcast, I used the internet to watch the programme. While looking for it I found this children's programme, “Inside Life” and downloaded that as well. In this accompanying series, ten different children were chosen and able to go on location with the team making the main Life series. This was not just watching from afar, but there alongside the film makers as they had the close encounters with the wildlife stars of the show. The first was a young lady who got to see and film Polar Bears at close quarters, and it was this that made me feel a touch of jealousy.
Realistically I know that while there must have been hundreds of children who never got to go on these trips, I was jealous that there was just not these opportunities when I was a child. It was purely an emotional response that lasted for a second, and what a great opportunity for the young people selected. I could not help thinking that I wish that was me at their age. But as people that know me will already know, I have a great face for Radio and a voice that is perfect for mime, so I know that I would never have been selected anyway. So while I remain jealous, what an experience these lucky ten young people have had.
My recent posting on accidental and deliberate species introductions generated some interest. I have been contacted by three people who say that they have seen Skunks in the British countryside. All at different locations too, so it is likely that Skunks are here and here to stay, as unofficial estimates are that over one thousand have been released into the environment.
While personally keeping an open mind regarding the impact of this upon the environment, history shows that alien species have a detrimental effect upon the ecosystem. Therefore the Skunks will change the ecology in the countryside. I say that I have an open mind as an introduced species may not be a disaster. In Britain the Little Owl is an introduced species that produces benefits as it often nests and hunts around farmland taking beetles and invertebrates that can be an agricultural pest. While others like the Edible Dormouse are just benign, not causing any problems nor really creating any benefits either.
While the reality is that when alien species are introduced they most often have a devastating effect upon natural flora and fauna. In Britain the best known case is that of the Grey Squirrel. They displace and out compete the Native Red Squirrel. Also because they carry the “Squirrel Pox” virus, and while the Eastern Grey Squirrel are not effected by the virus, it kills our Native Red. Therefore to save the remaining population of Red squirrels there has to be some form of control. This has to be at the intersections where the greys are kept out of the areas where the reds remain. Unpleasant and distasteful to some, but if this work was not done to conserve the Red, it would be lost, extinct, in ten to fifteen years.
It is likely that something similar will need to be done with the Skunk. Already live trapping is being tried to remove the Skunks from locations where they have been irresponsibly released. It maybe that the Skunk will not become established in the British countryside, but personally I will not be placing a bet on that outcome.
It was also curious that my friends in America were saying that we in Britain really did not want to have Skunks in the wild, but would be happy if our native hedgehog appeared in their environments. What was curious was that just two weeks ago I had seen a Hedgehog out foraging.
I have seen them out before, but normally I would just hear them as they displace the leaves. As they are active at night, they are rarely seen, but as they have the defence mechanism of rolling up into a ball, they seem less bothered about making sounds of movement that do most mammals. While this protection helps them avoid most predictors, I have also seen Badgers eat them, and Badgers can unroll them thus overcoming the Hedgehogs defences.
I would have dashed back out with the cameras at the time, but I was on a mercy mission. My better half had an upset tummy (was it my cooking?), and I had gone out to get something to settle her. While she would have let me go off and be my eccentric self, it would not have been fair on her. So this time I missed the chance to film the Hedgehog. Who knows I may get to film one in the Spring.
Yesterday morning long before the sun was up, I was out hoping to catch the rising mist that carpets the river valley and the woodland rides at this time of year. While out I saw something that I have not seen since I was a child, Glow worms. As I had gone out not expecting to see them, or with any real plans of filming or photographing anything small, I had the wrong equipment with me, but now having discovered where they are, in the future it will be great to film them.
With the rather warm autumn that we have had so far it was unusual to see them at this time of year, but any chance of finding them again has been lost today with torrential rain today.
While talking about the rain, I had to head for the village store for some milk this morning. On the way back I was rather surprised to see a Sparrow Hawk flying in the rain. From what I saw, and normal behaviour I would guess that it was a young inexperienced bird that had either taken advantage of an easy meal, or had been forced to hunt in less than ideal conditions. But the reality is that this is just speculation.
I have been attempting to watch, film and or photograph the local Deer rut. While there are plenty of Deer in the area, there are also plenty of poachers in the woods to. Therefore, the greatest danger is an encounter with a two legged rat rather than the Deer. Even so I am cautious of the encounters with the male Deer, as in an encounter with Wood Mouse V Roe Deer the bookies are not taking bets.
However, while I have seen the Deer briefly, and plenty of signs of the Deer, I have not yet seen anything of the rut. As when I have heard the Deer or seen them, I have also seen and heard dogs. Now while not all the dog owners will be poachers, the majority of the dogs encountered are breeds that are favoured by poachers. And this year the poachers really seem to have been out in force.
While I have not seen a significant fall in the numbers of Deer, I have seen signs that Deer have been taken. But the most significant effect has been the effect upon the behaviour of the Deer. They are clearly much more nervous of humans as a result. Yesterday when spotting one male Deer that I was getting ready to film, I heard a dog bark in the far distance and this startled and spooked the Deer. Normally this would have alerted the Deer but not made him run.
Equally, I have encountered men out with lamps taking rabbits. While I have no real problem with someone taking a couple for the pot, as this is being done at night the use of shotguns in the dark is foolish and dangerous. It is making me very nervous about walking in the woods.
I know that I have a few readers from North America, well both of them, and while in America there is a hunting culture, here in Britain hunting is just not a part of our culture. Further gun laws here mean that it is not easy to obtain firearms. Therefore it is this illegal use that presents the greatest danger. Sooner or latter there will be a serious accident or even a death. I am not the only Naturalist, Birder, or even dog walker that has encountered this problem. In fact I had one person challenge me as they saw my tripod and thought I was carrying a shotgun. Fortunately I just had a good laugh with my fellow wildlife lover about that, but I still got searched by the police.
While the recession has put pressure on folks, as I have said here before, poaching is done by criminals for profit. Often these people if they can not take a couple of Deer will steal from farms, rustle sheep, steal horses etc. They will not baulk at using violence to execute their criminal acts.
The effect upon the Deer population will be devastating. A few years before I moved to my village, poaching had whipped out the Deer in Chopwell Wood, while there numbers have recovered, I don't want to see the Deer lost again.
The other effect of the indiscriminate culling of Deer is that genetic diversity is lost. Poachers don't take the old or the sick, but the fittest animals. In Montana, the state Wildlife Game and Parks service had to change the regulations for hunting Deer, Elk and Big Horn Sheep as hunters were taking the males with the largest antlers leaving only animals with smaller antlers in the gene pool. This effect happens faster and more dramatically in areas where poaching occurs.
In Britain where there are not the large predators, the Wolf, Bear, Links all long extinct, there is a need for control of the Deer populations. But poaching can not be part of this solution. Legal and licensed hunters that can take Game, have to inspect the meat and the carcass for diseases and hygiene rules are implemented. But Venison from poaching does not have these checks and with many Deer with Bovine Tuberculosis eating meat from poached dear is a serious risk to human health too.
I don't have any solutions to this problem other than to make a plea that folks don't buy cheap venison. It is not that I don't want to see the Deer taken for meat, it is just that I don't want to see the woods made a dangerous place for others.
Yesterday I heard via the media a rather strange story that a Skunk had been rescued from the wild in Britain. It appears that because of a change in the law here so that pet owners can no longer get vets to remove the scent glands, people have released them into the countryside. Now while I could go on about the effect of these invaders on the wild, what makes this news rather interesting is that about six months ago I was told that there appears to be one, a Skunk, in the local area.
While I have not seen any sign of it myself, having now discovered that a few irresponsible people have released Skunks into the wild, I realise that the sighting could be credible. I will admit that I was sceptical when I first heard of the sighting, but I always keep an open mind. However I now wish that I had posted about it at the time, I was just not sure if it was someone pulling my leg.
What concerns me is that the skunk will feed on the eggs of ground nesting birds such as Sky Larks and Woodcock, both relatively rare in Britain but thriving here. However, if it is just one individual the threat may be small, but if there have been multiple releases then there could be the core of breeding populations now roaming Britain. Even if the numbers released are small, I have no doubt that animals will link up and given half a chance they will breed.
While the impact of the actions of a few irresponsible people has yet to be discovered on native populations, this is an experiment that should never have been allowed yo happen. It may be that the impact is very small and the Skunks will not compete with or displace native species, but experience says that will not be the case.
I would love to see a Skunk in the wild, but I would go to America to do that (Invitations Welcome), and not here in Britain. All I can do is hope that the numbers that have been released are so small and to dispersed to establish, but I suspect that Skunks are here to stay.
I have long been predicting that we will see a sudden and significant rise in sea levels. Further that this will happen in the next few years, and by this I mean the next three or four years. While the science backs up this prediction, what I have not known was exactly what mechanism would cause this.
One of the difficulties is that Climate science is not simple and with so many conflicting climate models offering different time tables for the effects of human induced climate change, my own research appeared to be at odds with the majority of opinions in the public domain. However when I communicate with scientists carrying out the front line research, they agree that we will see the disastrous effects of climate change in this coming decade rather than in the next half century.
The reason for this is that politicians keep talking about limiting the global average rise in temperature to two degrees C. While the science already shows that the average global rise will be four degrees C. Therefore politicians are lagging well behind what needs to be done. The main reason for this is that politicians are only looking at local effects rather than the global effects. Therefore, they fail to recognise the consequential effects of climate change.
In Europe one of the main preparations has been the way that the EU has effectively closed the boarders to immigration so as to stop the climate refugees that will come. Even without a rise in sea levels, water shortages and drought will force people to flee the affected areas. But it is the impacts on food and agriculture that will be the greatest impact in the short term. The British government has assumed that if we suffer crop failures or even a simple shortage we can just buy what we need from the world markets. But this policy is based upon a false assumption. As if there are crop failures or shortages, then it will not only effect Britain but will be global and other nations will be trying to do the same for their populations.
However, no matter how much the climate models inform our political leaders that there will be a rise in sea levels, they ignore this as it simply looks like something that will happen to far in the future for them to seize that nettle. But when that effect of human induced climate change does happen, we will loose agricultural land. As this will occur globally all other nations will need to buy in food from the commodity markets too.
The effect on poor nations will be that they will excluded from this, and their populations will starve. This cynical impact of the planning by political leaders is not just inhumane it fails to recognise the reality of our current situation. Britain because of the banking bailout has to borrow money from other nations. Most notably China. When the sea levels rise and they have the need to feed their people from the world market what does the British government think will happen? As nations like China have a culture of saving and have the cash to lend to the financial markets, if they cant buy the wheat or rice they need from Europe or America, do you really think they will lend us the cash we need? Of course not.
The attitude of much of the developed world regarding tackling climate change is analogous to a string of communities along a river. The developed nations are those that live closest to the source of the river where it is clean and pure. Yet each community is also using the river as its sewer and each community suffers from their drinking water getting more polluted. Rather than stopping the pollution small efforts are made to reduce it rather than tackling it properly. Just like pollution in a river, where it will cause outbreaks of collora and the infection will move up river impacting the communities at the start of the chain, Climate change will effect all of us.
The climate is already changing and as the effects are similar to natural cycles, droughts in Africa, Hurricanes in the Atlantic, flooding in Asia, people have been able to dismiss the effects as not having been the result of global warming. However, it is the effects upon the glaciers that can not be dismissed as part of any natural cycle. The receding of these rivers of ice will permanently change the ecology of the mountains and the water courses they feed. But the way that they are melting has shown the mechanism that will create the sudden and dramatic change to sea levels. As behind the wall of ice melt water builds up. In countries like Switzerland the authorities will build drainage tunnels into the ice, often a couple of kilometres long, so that when this water escapes it does not flood the valley and the communities under the glacier. Once the drainage tunnel is dug instruments are located to monitor the liquid water build up as the risk is not just flooding but the whole river of ice speeding up and creating an ice avalanche.
Now if we relocate this to the Greenland ice cap and the same mechanism is at work there. But there is no one digging tunnels in the ice to place instruments to monitor the build up of liquid water. Therefore a sudden breakup of these ice rivers is likely to happen in the next three or four year period. Already there has been a loss of thickness of the Greenland Ice Cap. As well as the ice becoming highly porous over the last decade and the water has drained into the glaciers. In some places it has already escaped into the sea, but the volume of melt water that has already disappeared into the ice is far greater than has been released into the sea. The theory is that some of this melt water has drained into the aquifer, into the ground. While this appears to be good news, it actually means that the glaciers are now flowing over water logged ground rather than the friction of wet rock. This speeds up the flow of the ice, and the faster the ice flows the faster it cracks and brakes up. It is these fractures that allows the sudden release of the glacier lakes.
Add to this the fact that while a global average rise in temperature of even just two degrees, at the poles the local rise will be six to ten degrees and you have enough heat to melt the polar ice, not just on the sea but on land too.
Anyone who has defrosted a freezer will know that while most of the melting is gradual, eventually the melting speeds up. This will be the same in the poles. Already we have seen sudden and dramatic break ups of areas of sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic waters.
None of this I write with pleasure, I would have loved it if the science disproved the reality of human induced climate change, but the reality is that we are stumbling towards a global disaster that will have more impact than the all the wars of the last century.
As can be imagined over the past couple of months there have been numerous programmes on television and the radio marking the banking collapse of a year ago. Most were explaining what happened. Yet with and on the expectation that we can return to normal without the risky games that the banking sector of the economy were playing.
On the day that marks the 1929 wall street crash I would have thought that people would have learned the lesson by now. The 1929 crash was caused by an asset bubble of shares bursting. The damage was caused by the fact that people had borrowed millions to buy these shares. The way it worked was that for $100 you could buy $1000 of stock. So if a share rise of ten percent then you doubled your money. But if that same stock fell by even just five percent you had a debt of nine hundred dollars to pay. Therefore, when the Wall street stock market started to fall on that fateful day everyone tried to sell their shares causing prices to fall further thus creating a perfect financial storm.
It was the need to repay this credit and the loss of capital that created the depression in 1929. The banking collapse of last year was the result of a similar problem except this time the asset bubble that burst was house prices. This in its self should not have ever brought about the banking collapse but while the credit bubble was supported by rises in house prices far to little of the lending was secured. And this was part of the reason for the events that threw the world into financial crisis. The other part was the “Credit Default Swaps”.
These were deemed as being rather clever ways of providing security for property loans when there was no real security in the property asset. Especially where there was no real expectation that the person with the mortgage would ever be able to repay. These only worked while house prices were rising. As soon as property prices levelled off and started to fall, these started to poison the capital reserves of the banks. However, it was not until folks started to default on their loans did even the banks realise that these “Credit Default Swaps”, now regarded as securities, were undermining the values of the banks and especially the reserves of the banks.
The problem was not just the so called sub prime loans though. As house prices rose the banks had been inventive in the way they priced their mortgage products. In fact before the banking crash, it was impossible in Britain to get a straight forward repayment mortgage. Therefore, most mortgages were discounted for the first two years. The logic being that with house prices rising constantly even if the borrower could not afford the repayments once the discounted period ended, the rise in prices would cover this if they needed to sell or they could re-mortgage, getting another two years where you were not paying off any of the capital nor paying the full interest just the discounted rate.
As this all relied upon the housing market continuing to rise, therefore everyone was at risk of loosing their home if they were unable to maintain payments. But the banks failed to see or understand that trying to repossess homes from people was further undermining the banks balance sheets.
The problem was that the Banks along with governments around the world, were manipulating the housing and property markets. The banks knew they were safe as long as property values kept rising. Governments wanted property values to keep rising as all the lending against the values were funding the boom and providing the tax income states need.
Here is the crux of what really went wrong, as if someone earns a thousand per month that is all they have to spend. But if you then add in the spending power of several credit cards and many folks were able to live a much more affluent lifestyle than their income would normally allow. Add to this the ability to use your home as an ATM and you have the illusion that you are richer that you really are.
The banks were making good profits from all this, or I should say they thought they were. But profits from lending are only profits when the loan is paid off. While this is common sense, it was not to the banks. This was where most of the bonuses were generated, with selling more credit. Combined with the credit default swaps, the culture became one of selling more credit no matter what.
However the big difference between the 1929 crash and the 2008 one was the way that governments intervened. While the “New Deal” and similar projects helped lessen the effects of the recession then, the interventions were on the whole to little to late. This time though governments moved much faster, the only trouble was that they helped the wrong people and in the wrong way. By bailing out the banks in the way that Britain and America have done, the governments have allowed the banks to continue with the folly that created the situation in the first place.
By propping up the banks, particularly in Britain, we have created a long slow burn recession. While some tax payers money is involved, the majority of the way the bank bail out has been funded had been with governments borrowing from other governments. But it will be from future tax revenues that this money will have to be repaid. It is this fact that could cause a further crash in the future.
The optimistic view is that the banks recover and governments can sell them back to the private investors for a profit. This will greatly reduce the vast borrowing requirements of governments. However, governments have to expect the unexpected and with the British government borrowing so much from the capital markets, we have no room for manoeuvre when something unexpected happens. This could be a weather event like flooding or the H1N1 flu suddenly taking hold, or a terrorist attack causing a disruption to the economy and the government would become paralysed from this.
But also the problems that first caused the banks to collapse was the banks assuming they could repossess property to recoup losses, will start to happen again when the banks think it is all over. Therefore the way the banks were saved from collapse had built into its structure the means of a further financial failure. Except it will be the banks that are now owned by the government that will take the hit, therefore further undermining the economy.
The notion that an economy can just keep expanding is a false one. In the 1920s it was the assumption that shares could/would only increase in value that showed this was false. In this past decade it was the assumption that house/property prices would only rise that showed this was false. For real economic stability the needs to be a truly fair economic system that ensures that people are paid a fair price for goods and services and that those that gain the most, via taxation, contribute more to the communal need.
On Thursday night, on a programme called question time was an odious man called Nick Griffin MEP, who is the leader of the British National Party. I explain this as I know that my blog has readers from across the planet and while everyone in Britain was aware of this, I don't know if this controversial has been reported around the globe.
It was controversial as the BNP is a racist far right fascist party. However as this party has two elected representatives in the European parliament with nearly a million voters having voted for them, then really the BBC had no real option.
Firstly I think it was brave of the BBC to bite the bullet and have Nick Griffin on as if they had not it would have been beaching its own policy for minority parties. Additionally had the tried to keep him or the BNP off television then they would have been guilty of censorship. Ultimately we can only defeat these racists by hearing what they have to say and challenging them. Also as we live in a free society we can not undermine our own values by oppressing his freedoms.
Many of his lies were challenged and while he tried to refute that he was a racist, his own words trapped him, ensnared him and tripped him up. There was one moment that brought a wry smile to my face as one of the other panellists was Bonny Greer, the American Playwright. At one point Griffin was trying to defend his involvement with David Duke the former leader of the Ku-Klux-Klan. Griffin said that David Duke was the leader of the non Violent KKK! This brought an angry response from Bonny Greer. However in my mind I started to hear the song “Strange Fruit” Also I wanted to ask if Griffin was talking about the KKK members that went around trying to stop lynchings?
It was not a pleasant programme to watch, and while I had been tempted to post on this before the event, I was glad that I waited until after seeing it. If the hostile, but well behaved, audience is a true reflection of the British People then we don't have to much to worry about.
There is an interesting foot note to this as a court recently (within the last week) has ruled that the parties constitution is unlawful as it excludes non white members. So perhaps if all the non whites then join the party they can vote to disband the party.
It is something that I find rather amusing, but my better half cant cook. Or to be more accurate, she never learnt to cook. Therefore, I wonder if she is with me for my looks? Or my erudite wit? Or my ability to delight her pallet? Well while I could play are gargoyle I can not yet do it without make up, and when we are together the air is filled with laughter. But I suspect that my ability to cook is a major bonus.
I explain this as while we had been together on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, she had left and I was not expecting her to return. However her plans were forced to change as the result of others changing their plans and not letting her know until she was already on route. So when she telephoned and asked if she could come back, I was pleased. But as that also meant she needed feeding, we talked about what she could get on the way so we could have dinner together.
The difficulty for her is that as she never learnt to cook she lacks the ability to spot an ingredient that a meal can be built around. I am learning what she likes and enjoys, so I made a couple of suggestions, then the cell signal dropped out. Living in a village, I have a very poor mobile phone signal and while this can be useful when I don't want to talk to someone, here I did. After trying a couple of times I got through. We agreed on some chicken, and I planned the rest my end.
When she arrived I was more or less ready to start cooking, and the Free Range Chicken Breasts were great, but the price was more than I would have been prepared to pay. She had visited the posh supermarket, and while the quality from them is always excellent, they are not cheap. These Chicken breasts from Waitrose cost £5.32 Yet for £5.99 I could have purchased a whole Free Range Chicken from the Granger Market and it would have taken only ten or fifteen minutes to fully joint the fowl.
The incident illustrates for me the problems that so many people face, they lack the kitchen skills to enable them to make cost effective choices. I have no problem with the choice she made, the chicken was succulent, tasty and was of the welfare standard that I would have bought myself. Yet even if I talk to other people who are buying chicken pieces from a cheap (caged) range of birds in another supermarket, they seem not to realise how much they can save by buying a whole chicken and jointing it themselves.
Now I know that people often live busy lives and often cooking from scratch can seem daunting or time consuming, but often it requires a degree of planning or preparation. Taking the example of chicken as an example, when the issue of chicken welfare was in the news, I pointed out to a couple of locals that for the price of the low welfare chicken pieces they had bought, they could have bought two Free Range birds for the same price and have ended up with more portions.
While my better half has come from a more affluent background than me, locally in my village the majority struggle to make ends meet financially. Therefore while I would have made a different choice, it was not as imperative for us than it is for the people who are living on the breadline.
In previous posts I have levelled some of the blame towards the education system and various governments. However as my GF was educated at a private school and also did not get any education in cooking or home economic skills, perhaps the failure is not as much in governments hands as I have been saying. I would love to see all children, Boys and Girls, are taught how to cook at home, but that requires the parents knowing how to cook first. Yet it seems that we are loosing culinary skills with each new generation. So perhaps cooking and home economics should be taught in schools, all schools.
Even before my better half got back from the city with the chicken pieces, I was thinking about making a posting on a very similar topic as a couple of weeks ago, knowing that my FF was going to be visiting, I had bought some fresh Place. I always check that the fish I buy is from sustainable sources and this was. However even I was surprised at the low price, 99 pence per pound. For two pounds cash I had four beautiful whole fish. As A flat fish there is not a great deal of flesh on them, but it is really easy to fillet them and that was exactly what I did. Then latter at the supermarket, I spotted that for the same weight of the fillets frozen Place was four times the price.
Was this simply just another example of up being willing to pay extra, a lot extra for things that we have lost the skills to do? While that is partly true, the answer came in a television programme that I was watching just before my better half turned up. In a visit to Peterhead Fish Market, the largest wholesale fish market in Europe, while there was plenty of fish there, most of the fish was destined for export as in Britain most people will not eat anything but Cod. The presenter even highlighted a box of Place that the fishing boat would only get forty pounds for. Therefore while it means that by going to a reputable and responsible Fishmonger I was able to get a bargain, the processors are the people who make the real money and not the fishermen. Its the same principal with chicken pieces, the retailers and the processors make the money.
Before anyone asks, a box of fish at wholesale will have a stone of fish, that's one hundred and twelve pounds of fish. That's less than thirty six pence per pound. So if we in Britain ate more of other species, caught sustainably, there would not be the problems with over fishing while still retaining the fishing industry. Equally if more people stopped wasting money buying chicken portions especially from low welfare standard birds and started jointing their own from free range, well folks could rapidly make a difference.
And incidentally the way I cooked the chicken pieces was to coat one side with a mixture of red Thai spices mixed with Greek style Yoghurt and slow cook for an hour in a covered casserole. Fragrant, tasty, low fat and it made my better half's tummy happy.
When I was a child I knew that Stanley had found another explorer, who was lost, with the now famous phrase of; “Dr Livingston I presume” However, that was all I knew, and even asking a teacher at school did not enlighten me much. So I had to visit the library to try and discover more. Even then I got a sanitised version of Henry Morton Stanley's adventures in the dark heart of Africa. I had doubts about the veracity of the accounts as in his descriptions of Gorillas they were described as wild fierce beasts, yet images shown on television at the same time as I was on my own voyage of discovery were showing Gorillas as peaceful and gentle.
Apart from discovering that Henry M Stanley had mapped and navigated the Congo River, I was no more enlightened about the man at the time. In some ways I am glad to be living at a time when history was being revised to tell the true story. Even I as a child could have doubts about the history I was being informed then and the truth was far less pleasant than the daring adventurer that was being painted.
The tropical rain forests of central Africa, over two million square miles, were not penetrated by western explorers until the latter half of the nineteenth century where there was an exuberance of species and diversity found. All previously unknown, except to the peoples who had lived there for tens of thousands of years. Yet even before Stanley, in 1859 Paul De Chaillu returned from the Congo basin with hundreds of specimens of species previously unknown to science, and wild tales of the Gorilla as this fiercest near human beast of the jungle. Even exaggerating the the tales by claiming that they would abduct women to fornicate with. His book Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, published in 1861 was the inspiration for King Kong. While not the only one much 19th century literature described African wildlife in terms of myth and fantasy.
However it was Paul De Chaillu's descriptions of the peoples in the forest that had the greatest influence on the men that came latter. Men like Henry Morton Stanley, who on August 9th 1877 reached the mouth of the river Congo having traversed it from its source in the heart of Africa. In his book The Dark Continent, the peoples he encountered, he described as protohumans. This more than anything else triggered the colonial gold rush of the land grab that European countries made for Africa. After all if the land has no human people it was free to be claimed by who ever.
It took Britain, Spain, France, Portugal and Germany only eight years from the publication of The Dark Continent to divide up most of the Equatorial forest between them. However, the largest slice, half the area, was taken not by a country but by an individual, King Leopold II of Belgium Who took the land of the Congo, as his personal pleasure land. He owned every thing, the trees, the animals and the people.
The first resource he exploited in his ironically named “Congo Free State”, was Ivory from the Forest Elephants, so much so that in less than five years the elephants nearly became extinct. The next resource to be exploited was natural latex from the rubber tree. At this point in the nineteenth century rubber was essential for the then new technology of electricity and as insulation on the telegraph wires. As the rubber trees grew wild in the forests, Leopold II (who never set foot on African soil) needed the local knowledge of the various tribes to utilise this resources.
Leopold's exploitation of the forest and the lands set a new standard of horror and abuse in Africa, one that remains to this day. People that failed to produce the volumes of rubber the Belgium king wanted would be whipped for being lazy. And if a village failed to produce its quota of rubber then selected people would have their hand chopped off. Those selected were frequently children.
While European people acknowledge the genocide in Germany, in the Congo was the first modern Genocide and between 1885 to 1908 there were at least four million people killed with estimates that ten million people were mascaraed by the Belgium's All this shaped the peoples of the region and is reflected in the brutality of the modern wars and civil wars of today.
Of course the public myth was that western white men were there to civilise the natives. But the reality was that it was making a profit at any cost. While slavery was already abolished in Europe, the African land grab enabled the racist mentality of the people who still thought that slavery was a good thing to fulfil their dreams and those people who were genuinely going to Africa to help the indigenous peoples were soon made to fall into line with the system. The white man had absolute power there, even the most lowly clerk had this power and that power corrupted the colonialists.
While the public face of colonisation was to civilise and educate the native peoples, the education that Africa learnt was one of brutal exploitation of resources and people. It is from this understanding of the past that I can see and understand the problems of modern Africa today.
The regime of Leopold II though started the first Human Rights campaign of the modern age. One that would be mirrored years latter by the Blood Diamond campaign the Red Rubber campaign Slave Rubber was the first to use photographs of the excesses of the Belgium overseers, like Leon Romme who was notorious for decorating his mansion with the heads of the Congolese
The campaign did work as the king was forced to hand over the colony to the Belgium state, and slowly, very slowly the worst excesses of the colonialists diminished. However the myth of the colonial powers being there to civilise prevailed for another half century.
However, it was the exploitation of the wildlife that has been the hardest lesson that we gave the Africans. The native peoples of Africa (along with all indigenous peoples) had learned how to utilise the natural resources of the rain forest in a sustainable manner. The colonialists saw this abundance and harvested it with no thought or regard to its regeneration or conservation.
However with the discovery of the Mountain Gorilla in 1902 in Kivu the rush by naturalists to the region where the Gorillas lived started a change in the western attitude towards the forest and conservation. Conservationists like Carl Akeley brought a new understanding of the nature of the Gorilla to the world. Gorillas were not the wild man beast of myth but gentle shy vegetarians. This started to change the attitude of people towards the jungle, it was no longer seen as primeval and needing to be tamed and controlled but conserved and preserved.
It was as a result of the efforts of Carl Akeley that the first national park was created in Africa, to protect the Mountain Gorilla at Kivu, although it was originally called Albert National Park. The intention was that the park would be free of people. But the area had been inhabited for thousands of years. This brought great resentment from the peoples, and to them it showed that they were of less importance than the wildlife. Further it reflected the old colonial attitude that indigenous populations were irrelevant and unimportant.
While in the 1950s the Belgium Congo was the most developed part of Africa, with the wealth generated from the mineral resources meaning that it had good primary education and more hospital beds than the whole of the rest of Africa, the attitude towards the indigenous peoples was patronising to say the least. With only the people who resulted from mixed birth being treated with any degree of respect, and even then they were refereed to as evolving. Meaning they were evolving into humans. There were even skin colour charts produced that determined where people could live.
It was not until the advent of television that white western peoples could see the poverty that Africa and Africans suffered while the colonialists were living in the lap of luxury did the movements for freedom and independence take hold. Not just in physical form but in the minds of people across the world. By the 1960s most of the African nations gained independence and there was a genuine optimism across the continent. However the western governments that had been the colonial masters and the major industrial nations still wanted to exert their influence and via a form of industrial colonisation particularly by mining and oil companies, African independence was not as free as it should have been.
Frequently be fermenting tribal differences and illegally supplying arms to disaffected groups, American, Canadian, British and oil and mining companies from other countries were able to exploit the unrest to effectively continue stealing the newly formed states resources. Often simply because the mining companies were not allowed to extract the minerals as cheaply as they had previously. Further, these industrial giants via a system of bribes and the use of mercenaries were able to offer to solve the wars they created in return for much more favourable terms on the mineral concessions. Also government carried out similar activities if they disliked the politics of a particular government.
Therefore, potentially wealthy nations were robbed of the income to develop. Not only that but the infrastructure that was left behind from colonial times was left to decay as the wealth was leaving the country rather than being retained to aid development. All the while the corruption of this system was becoming engrained into the business and social culture.
Further the exploitation of timber and other wildlife resources meant that traditional cultures could no longer live in harmony with the land. Following the example set by their former colonial masters this gave rise to the massive poaching problems that beset Africa. With The Rhino and Elephants baring the most well known brunt of this.
However staying with the Congo, when Mobutu emerged as a leader in the Congo and the state became Zaire it was principally his roots as a man of the jungle that gained him his support and respect.
This is where the history of the Congo meets my personal quest for understanding of who people like Stanley were and my growing discovery of the magic of the wildlife in the Congo rain forest. While my primary interest was discovery of regarding the natural fauna of the region, and to protect the rain forest. I was a campaigner at an early age, the more I discovered about the exploitation of the rain forest and other environmental issues, the more I realised that they went hand in hand with the abuses of human rights.
While under Mobutu's rule, Zaire was relatively peaceful, this enabled the wildlife to survive relatively unhindered. There was still poaching and the growing bush meat trade, but there was not the wholesale felling of the rainforest that was occurring in neighbouring states. Further the wildlife was able to live with far less disturbance than was happening in other parts of Africa.
Now I don't want to create the false impression that Zaire was some bastion of good government, the wholesale and corrupt exploitation of the countries mineral wealth was a serious cancer at the heart of this forest state. Mobutu was siphoning off Zaire's wealth into foreign banks and squandered on building lavish palaces while he became more isolated from the people he ruled. In fact Mobutu had become a mirror image Leopold II. While he did not practice genocide himself it was the Genocide in Rwanda that proved to be his down fall.
He fled into exile leaving the country ravaged by civil war and internal slavery. Many of the mines were abandoned by the mining companies to the armies and militia. Who either kidnapped people to work as slaves in the mines. Or would extract a tax from the miners who are trying to secure a scant living from the mines. This form of tax collection though can not be avoided as if you don't pay the men with guns, you die, they kill you and take their form of tax anyway.
Recent investigations by the united nations have highlighted a couple of the mining and mineral companies that are profiting from this, including a British company. But all of them are involved although they work hard to keep this hidden and out of the public eye. We are all complicit in this as some of the rare and exotic metals used in making mobile telephones will have come from this trade.
The history of the Congo basin is littered with racism and exploitation. The plundering of the natural resources and corruption. While Africans themselves can not be excused for their role in this theft of the continents wealth, nor the violence that they inflict upon each other we in the west have to recognise our part in this too.
As a child I became interested in Africa because of the wildlife. I quickly learned of the threats to the habitat of the rainforest and the mass extermination of species that was following in the wake of that loss of habitat. Equally I discovered that the attitudes towards Africa was greatly influenced by the exaggerated writings of Paul De Chaillu and Henry Morton Stanley. This all combined with the lies of colonisation to give us today the situation where there is a level violence, rape and pillage that would put a Viking to shame.
However if you scanned the media for coverage of the current situation then there has been scant coverage. More hours of television and more lines have been given to the plight of the Gorillas than to the five million people that have died in recent years.
This is not Africa problem it is ours as we need to stop the illegal logging and protect the rain forest to deal with climate change. We in the west need to stop the wars that create the refugees that come to Europe and America. Further as war prevents farming being practised, stopping war and violence will reduce the need for the west to provide food aid and alleviate the current food crisis. However, the last aspect is more complicated. If we stopped our obsession with having the latest gizmo's or gadget like the latest mobile telephone every five minutes, we would not only stop the modern form of slavery that is happening in the mines of the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and other places, we would not have suffered the credit induced banking collapse and the recession.
There are important ethics in all the choices we make. I have often spoken about needing a new form of Green Economics. Here are ways that it truly would benefit us all.
Incidentally while it is true that Stanley did meet Dr Livingston on his journey down the Congo River, it was a myth that he was lost. He was at a mission station on the banks of the Congo. It was just that it took so long for letters to reach Europe that Stanley assumed he was lost.
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