pumpkinstrokemarrow

DT does it again. Now I imagine that 90% of its readership live in urban areas. And 90% of that 90% fancy that they have deep roots in the country and know all about country matters. So the DT translates this into the marketting position that bashing townies in favour of hard-working decent country folk will find favour with its readership and sell newspapers. They are probably quite right about this. (And I believe that the French go for country even more than we do. Perhaps because they have more of it). Now, farmers have decided that badgers are a bad thing and want to thin them out a bit. They too are probably quite right about this. But in their efforts to be supportive of anything that country folk might say, yesterday's DT alleged that the 500,000 or so deaths down to TB in this country from, say, 1850 to 1950 was down to the fact that there was TB in cows which was transmitted to us through their milk. But according to my (admittedly elderly) Chambers, only about 25% of TB was of the bovine variety, the other 75% being of the rather differant human strain. I would not have thought that a fact of this sort would have changed in the last 50 years or so, so the DT stands convicted, yet again, of rather overdoing things. (They might argue that the proportion of bovine TB is now much higher, but don't. And in any event, the fact that there is TB is cows no longer translates into TB in people, given pasteurisation and tubercular testing of milk). Which all goes to show that it is hard to be accurate and concise and that you should not believe everything you read. Chambers also tells me that that the earliest records of TB are Hindu and are maybe 7,000 years old.

Not being able to read everything you read, might push one towards a serious reviewing regime. Nothing gets published without the imprimatur of at least three respectable people. With the government keeping a register of respectable people - known as listed people (in contrast to listed buildings). With a whole agency devoted to its maintenance, with its associated tribe of directors general, directors and IT contractors. But I have seen an allegation that the Wikipedia no-review policy (or at least, review with a very light touch) has actually resulted in a higher standard of accuracy than prevails in the heavy review world of the Britannica. I wonder? It would cost a lot of time and effort to check such an allegation.

On Thursday to Hyde Park for a circumnavigation. First rate place with lots of interest, including lots of interesting plants, including lots of flowering trees. For example, we learn that pidgeons do not eat grapes but blackbirds will have a go. That the park is home to starlings, something we rarely see in our own garden. Also yet another thrush like bird. Fat, dark brown body with paler speckled belly, touch of red about the throat. Maybe a redstart.

We also came across some rather ill trees with rather odd bark, which I had never noticed before, making the base of the tree look as if it had been decorated with flat plaits of bark. And by coincidence I come across another one yesterday in the cemetary on Garratt Lane. Inspection of Polulin suggests that they might have been hornbeams, carpinus betulus, a member of the hazel family.

Various plantings of things which look very like foxgloves, some in flower, but which are not the sort of foxgloves you come across in the wild. Maybe some domesticated mutant.

A very discrete cluster of memorial boulders, dedicated by the Princess D from on high, to the various rocks and boulders in her life. At least that was what we thought, but the cluster was too discrete to be labelled, despite being a composed cluster. Nothing natural about it at all.

That forsythia was invented by one Mr Forsyth, sometime superintendant of the park. One could go on. But I shall hold my water for the next occasion.